Abstract
The Introduction to Gust’s book addresses the age-old scholarly debate concerning the meaning and significance of bawdy elements in Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poetry. Gust contends that the provocative potential of Chaucer’s ribald passages has consistently been undersold by scholars, and that the Middle English poet presents readers with various features of medieval erotica and considerable voyeuristic, quasi-pornographic imagery. Hence, the chapter works to historicize and theorize the topic of medieval pornography, offering extensive commentary on premodern obscenity, erotica, and early forms of pornography. It illustrates that there are distinct strands of historical connection between pre- and post-modern pornographic artistry, and introduces the concept of Chaucerotics as a way of understanding the salacious sexual material found in Chaucer’s verse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
These are the words of Jesus Christ as represented in Matthew 5.28–30. I cite the Douay-Rheims Bible version of this passage from the following website: http://www.drbo.org/index.htm.
- 2.
I am inspired to cite these particular passages from Saint Augustine’s Confessions as a result of reading John Bowers’ fascinating essay “Augustine as Addict: Sex and Texts in the Confessions,” Exemplaria 2.2 (1990): 403–448. I have taken these translations directly from pages 412, 414, and 430 of Bowers’ rendering of Augustine-as-sex-addict. In full, the original passages read (in Latin): “quippe ex voluntate perversa facta est libido, et dum servitur libidini, facta est consuetudo, et dum consuetudini non resistitur, facta est necessitas” (Confessions 8.5.10) and “circumcide ab omni temeritate omnique mendacio interiora et exteriora labia mea. sint castae deliciae meae scripturae tuae, nec fallar in eis nec fallam ex eis” (Confessions 11.2.3).
- 3.
Jean Gerson is the speaker of this passage, who was involved at the time in the famous querelle de la Rose debates with Christine de Pizan and others over certain controversial passages found in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose. I discuss this ongoing debate more fully in section 1 below. On this particular reference from Gerson’s Expostulatio adversus corruptionem juventutis, see Michael Camille’s brief discussion in “Obscenity and Alterity: Images that Shock and Offend Us/Them, Now/Then?,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 153 [139–154].
- 4.
The diarist in question is Samuel Pepys, whose famously provocative entry from February 9, 1668, is discussed in Lynn Hunt’s “Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), p. 20 [9–45].
- 5.
The reference is from Jakob Burckhardt’s famous study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), which is discussed by Paula Findlen in “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), p. 52 [49–108].
- 6.
This comment comes from D.H. Lawrence—whose novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover faced widespread censorship and a legal trial for obscenity—in his essay “Pornography and Obscenity,” originally published in 1930 and later republished in Sex, Literature, and Censorship, ed. Henry T. Moore (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1953), p. 69 [69–88].
- 7.
W. Somerset Maughan offered this declaration in Gentlemen in Parlour (1930), p. xii, as mentioned by Joan Hoff in her essay “Why Is There No History of Pornography?,” in For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, ed. Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 22 [17–46].
- 8.
See Michael Camille, “The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 60 [57–86].
- 9.
See Bert Veldhoen, “Reason Versus Nature in Dunbar’s ‘Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’,” in “And Never Know the Joy”: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry, ed. C.C. Barfoot (New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 53 [49–62].
- 10.
For example, a comprehensive and influential study of ancient pornographic forms is Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). In the introduction, Richlin comments that “we can demonstrate pretty clearly that our [research] material was pornographic within its society in the same way that current material is pornographic within ours” (p. xxi).
- 11.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 69.
- 12.
Melissa M. Mowry likewise stresses the importance of considering function when assessing pornographic possibility in her book The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), p. 3.
- 13.
Cf. Ian Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 11.
- 14.
I borrow this phrasing from Lisa Perfetti’s essay “The Lewd and the Ludic: Female Pleasure in the Fabliaux,” in Comic Provocations, ed. Crocker, p. 28 [pp. 17–31].
- 15.
Michelson, Speaking the Unspeakable, pp. xii, 64, 67.
- 16.
For these points of clarification, I borrow from Nicola McDonald’s words on obscenity in her Introduction to Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald (York, UK: York Medieval Press, 2006), p. 12 [1–16].
- 17.
I cite from the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, accessible at http://www.oed.com/.
- 18.
This is the view, for example, of Joan Hoff, who I will quote on this matter more fully below. See Joan Hoff, “Why Is There No History of Pornography?,” in For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, ed. Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 23 [17–46]. In my phrasing on erotica, I also borrow here from Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 5.
- 19.
Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988), p. 7. Wagner’s study is specifically interested in eighteenth-century modes of erotica, but his conceptualization is more broadly applicable to divergent premodern forms of pornography.
- 20.
I draw here upon two important studies: Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1989), p. 277; and Douglas J. Stewart, “Pornography, Obscenity, and Capitalism,” The Antioch Review 35.4 (1977): 397 [389–398].
- 21.
In this case, I am using phrasing from A Dictionary of Film Studies, which (like Wagner) notably does not presume a particular end result—or ejaculation—as a requirement for the viewer of porn.
- 22.
John Baldwin, “The Many Loves of Philip Augustus,” in The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy, ed. Sherry Roush and Cristelle L. Baskins (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), p. 67 [67–80].
- 23.
Haldeen Braddy, “Chaucer’s Bawdy Tongue,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 30 (1966): 216 [214–222].
- 24.
Haldeen Braddy, “Chaucer—Realism or Obscenity?,” The Arlington Quarterly 2.1 (1969): 131, 133 [121–138].
- 25.
Braddy, “Chaucer—Realism or Obscenity?,” pp. 136, 137.
- 26.
Richard Rex, “In Search of Chaucer’s Bawdy,” Massachusetts Studies in English 8.4 (1982): 20 [20–32].
- 27.
Two recent studies are especially worth noting here: Tison Pugh’s Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2014) and Elizabeth Scala’s Desire in the Canterbury Tales (Ohio State University Press, 2015). These studies by well-regarded scholars are effective in their own way, but take on different tales than I do in this book and also choose to focus on the more popular notions of “desire” and “erotics” rather than the far more controversial notion of “pornography.” As a result, their view(s) differs considerably from my own, and I will have little to say about these studies in the pages below.
- 28.
George Shuffelton, “Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion,” The Chaucer Review 47.1 (2012): 1 [1–24].
- 29.
Shuffelton, “Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion,” pp. 7, 8, 18.
- 30.
See George Shuffelton, “‘Sorry Chaucer’: Mixed Feelings and Hypatia Lee’s Ribald Tales of Canterbury,” in Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 149–166. Because Shuffelton is more interested in Lee’s film than Chaucer’s Tales in this essay it is mostly irrelevant to my discussion. However, the very fact that this film was made is an obvious sign that some readers unquestionably have found considerable pornographic potential in Chaucer’s works; and Shuffelton’s welcome acknowledgement and analysis of this bawdy film also, in turn, tacitly lends support to some of the main ideas in the current book.
- 31.
G.R. Simes, “Chaucer and Bawdy,” in Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H.L. Rogers, ed. Geraldine Barnes (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1989), pp. 91, 98 [91–112].
- 32.
Simes, “Chaucer and Bawdy,” p. 112.
- 33.
On these points, see Gerald Morgan, “Obscenity and Fastidiousness in The Miller’s Tale,” English Studies 91.5 (2010): 497, 499, 516 [492–518]. In making these observations, Morgan is especially interested in the crass use of the term “swyve” in The Miller’s Tale.
- 34.
R.W. Hanning, “Telling the Private Parts: ‘Pryvetee’ and Poetry in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James Dean and Christian Zacher (Newark: U of Delaware Press, 1992), p. 112 [108–124].
- 35.
R. Jacob McDonie, “‘Ye get namoore of me’: Narrative, Textual, and Linguistic Desires in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,” Exemplaria 24.4 (2012): 315, 316, 330, 332 [313–341].
- 36.
Evan Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” PMLA 94.1 (1979): 48, 49, 53 [47–61]. In making these comments, Carton is specifically interested in the relationship between author, audience, and narrator in Troilus and Criseyde.
- 37.
Karma Lochrie, “Women’s ‘Pryvetees’ and Fabliau Politics in the Miller’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6.2 (1994): 294, 295, 299 [287–304].
- 38.
Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 21.
- 39.
John Hines, The Fabliau in English (New York: Longman, 1993), pp. 36, 37. Hines later summarizes “the spirit of the fabliau in English” by describing these tales as “concurrently comic and reflexively critical of comedy. Contrasted with romance, fabliau offers an attractive comic myth in which the fulfillment of a simple desire, usually sexual pleasure, is relatively uninhibitedly sought by both sexes, and often easily achieved in circumstances that are both entertaining for the reader and reassuringly fairly harmless even for those who are ‘injured’ by the events” (277).
- 40.
Larry Scanlon, “Cultural Studies and Carnal Speech: The Long, Profane Shadow of the Fabliau,” in Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, ed. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton, and David Matthews (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), p. 36 [23–38]. Scanlon makes this statement in a discussion of the medieval French fabliau known as Le chevalier qui fist les cons parler.
- 41.
To illustrate, there are no entries provided for “pornography” in the Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham (2011), the Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia Ray (2006), and A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms by Edwin Barton and Glenda Hudson (2011). The concept is even omitted in the comprehensive online resource The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. A quick search of the databases at Temple University did, however, quickly locate a short critical discussion within the aegis of film/media studies—and, in this case, specifically in A Dictionary of Film Studies (2012, edited by Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell)—the academic realm within which such content is most often found.
- 42.
See Wagner, Eros Revived, pp. 5–6.
- 43.
Again, I borrow from Nicola McDonald’s Introduction to Medieval Obscenities, p. 11.
- 44.
On these points, see the etymological discussion in the OED.
- 45.
Christopher Morris makes some interesting observations about this Greek etymology in “Derrida on Pornography: Putting (it) Up for Sale,” Derrida Today 6.1 (2013): 98–100 [97–114].
- 46.
References to and additional discussion of the “obscene” as viewed by Isidore, Giovanni, and others are found in Alastair Minnis’s “From Coilles to Bel Chose: Discourses of Obscenity in Jean de Meun and Chaucer,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 156 [156–178].
- 47.
I am inspired here by phrasing from Michael Camille’s essay “Dr. Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals and the Obscene in Medieval Church Art,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 37 [17–38].
- 48.
See Emma Dillon, “Representing Obscene Sound,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, pp. 61–63 [55–84]. As the previous string of references might suggest, Medieval Obscenities offers some of the best available historical commentary on the many varieties of medieval obscenity, with perhaps the most helpful discussion of the concept itself being found in Dillon’s essay. On the subject of medieval sexual “norms,” Karma Lochrie’s Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality when Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) is invaluable.
- 49.
Jan Ziolkowski offers a similar view in his Introduction to Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 3, 4, 10–11 [3–18]. As the primary predecessor to Medieval Obscenities, this collection edited by Ziolkowski has played an important role in facilitating recent (re)considerations of “obscene” artistic forms from the Middle Ages.
- 50.
See Camille, “Dr. Witkowski’s Anus,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 36. I have taken the liberty of “Americanizing” Camille’s spelling in this passage.
- 51.
This is the view of Leslie Dunton-Downer, for example, in her discussion of “Poetic Language and the Obscene,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Ziolkowski, p. 21 [19–37].
- 52.
See Simon Gaunt, “Obscene Hermeneutics in Troubadour Lyric,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 92 [85–104].
- 53.
See McDonald, “Introduction,” in Medieval Obscenities, pp. 11–12.
- 54.
On these various points and references, see my book Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 21–25. See also Alastair Minnis’s comprehensive discussion of the “querelle de la Rose” in Chapter 5 of Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 209–256. The original documents of the querelle de la Rose can be found in the edition by Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane (trans.) titled “La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents,” North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 199 (1978): 11–170.
- 55.
I borrow here from R. Howard Bloch’s discussion of erotic elements of the fabliaux in “Modest Maids and Modified Nouns: Obscenity in the Fabliaux,” in Obscenity, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski, p. 297.
- 56.
For a useful, succinct overview of the feminist discourse about pornography, see the online version of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/). Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott also offer a helpful overview in Chapter 7 of The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What it Means, and Where We Go From Here (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).
- 57.
For example, Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978) is an important and influential account that offers a re-appraisal of pervasive feminist views about porn’s objectification of women by suggesting that such artistry can and sometimes does offer possible forms of female empowerment. I will have more to say in later chapters about this “pro sex” perspective, which deliberately counters the “anti-pornography” beliefs of many feminists.
- 58.
See Williams, Hard Core, p. 156.
- 59.
Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 5.
- 60.
Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 3, 13.
- 61.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 79–117 [82, 84].
- 62.
Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” pp. 87, 88. In her essay, Bynum responds to Steinberg by calling attention to “artistic depictions that suggest another sex for Christ’s body—depictions that suggest that Christ’s flesh was sometimes seen as female” (p. 82).
- 63.
In Michael Camille’s highly influential study Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1992), he observes that “it was because sex was marginalized in medieval experience that it so often became an image on the edge” (p. 40).
- 64.
Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 95.
- 65.
Camille, “Dr. Witkowski’s Anus,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 23.
- 66.
Camille, The Gothic Idol, p. 84.
- 67.
Camille, The Gothic Idol, pp. 211, 219.
- 68.
The following essays by no means represent an exhaustive list of the types of work mentioned, but are useful examples and good places to start reading on the subject of medieval obscenity: Jeremy Goldberg, “John Skathelok’s Dick: Voyeurism and ‘Pornography’ in Late Medieval England,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, pp. 105–123; Michael Camille, “Obscenity under Erasure: Censorship in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Ziolkowski, pp. 139–154; Patrick Ford, “The Which on the Wall: Obscenity Exposed in Early Ireland,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski, pp. 176–190; Eckehard Simon, “Carnival Obscenities in German Towns,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski, pp. 193–213; Ruth Mazo Karras, “Leccherous Songys: Medieval Sexuality in Word and Deed,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski, pp. 233–245; Andrew Taylor, “Reading the Dirty Bits,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 280–295; Paul Saenger, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society,” Viator 13 (1982): 367–414; and Kristina Hildebrand, “Her Desire and His: Letters Between Fifteenth-Century Lovers,” in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 132–141.
- 69.
In this case, the essays that follow serve as a solid starting point for considering some of these “obscene” subjects relative to medieval literatures in particular: Gaunt, “Obscene Hermeneutics in Troubadour Lyric,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, pp. 85–104; Danuta Shanzer, “Latin Literature, Christianity and Obscenity in the Later Roman West,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, pp. 179–202; Sarah Stanbury, “The Virgin’s Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion,” PMLA 106.5 (1991): 1083–1093; Corinne Saunders, “Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance,” in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Hopkins and Rushton, pp. 38–52; Simon Meecham-Jones, “Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois’ ‘Grates ago veneri’,” in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Hopkins and Rushton, pp. 142–154; Barbara Nolan, “Promiscuous Fictions: Medieval Bawdy Tales and Their Textual Liaisons,” in The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 79–105; Martine Van Elk, “‘When Female Weakness Triumphs’: Torture and Perversion in Four Plays by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim,” in Gender Reconstructions: Pornography and Perversions in Literature and Culture, ed. Cindy L. Carlson, Robert L. Mazzola, and Susan M. Bernardo (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–24; Janine Rogers, “Riddling Erotic Identity in Early English Lyrics,” in “And Never Know the Joy”: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry, ed. C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 1–12; and Lisa Perfetti, “Crusader as Lover: The Eroticized Poetics of Crusading in Medieval France,” Speculum 88.4 (2013): 932–957.
- 70.
Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies, p. xviii. It is worth noting that Lochrie makes this observation while discussing the infamous Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair, when the former president boldly declared to the public that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
- 71.
The Parson’s Tale, X.851–856. All quotations from Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
- 72.
David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England 1660–1745 (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1965), p. 50.
- 73.
On these points, see Moulton, Before Pornography, pp. 120, 124.
- 74.
Again, see Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 5.
- 75.
Michelson, Speaking the Unspeakable, pp. 59, 64, 104. As Michelson explains, in contrast to hard core porn “there is another and higher form of pornography. Rather than being only an exploitation of orgasm stimuli, it is rather an exploration of human sexuality. It may exploit its subject, but it does more than exploit.”
- 76.
Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 4.
- 77.
Findlen, “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Hunt, p. 63.
- 78.
Both quotations in the paragraph are from Findlen, “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Hunt, pp. 53–54. It is worth noting that Findlen is specifically interested in and focusing upon Aretino and the pornography of the Early Modern period in these statements, but it is clear that her observations may stretch beyond the narrow confines of Renaissance Italy and be applied to Chaucer’s late medieval England.
- 79.
Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 31.
- 80.
Kendrick, The Secret Museum, p. 2.
- 81.
In this instance, I have used the definition given by Webster’s Dictionary, rather than the more unwieldy definition provided by the OED. For reference, see the online version of the dictionary at http://www.merriam-webster.com/.
- 82.
Hoff, “Why Is There No History of Pornography?,” p. 23. The italics here are Hoff’s. Hoff adds that “the different definitions of pornography in this century are directly related to evolving definitions of erotica” as the two words have become intertwined in modern discussions and debates over sexuality.
- 83.
Wagner, Eros Revived, p. 7.
- 84.
See Corine Schleif’s “Afterword: Making Sense of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—During and After,” The Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 161 [160–164].
- 85.
See Findlen, “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Hunt, pp. 101, 107.
- 86.
See Williams, Hard Core, p. x.
- 87.
As Moulton notes, pornography is “a relative term referring to a subjective category” and the fact is that “there is no necessary connection between the genre of pornography and the subjective experience of the pornographic… It is subjective because the ultimate arbiter is the personal response of the individual.” See Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 4.
- 88.
Wagner offers some helpful comments on the public vs. private significance of early erotica in Eros Revived, pp. 199–200.
- 89.
On these points, I am drawing from Hunt’s “Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800,” in The Invention of Pornography, pp. 42, 43.
- 90.
Phrasing borrowed from Williams, Hard Core, p. 72.
- 91.
Williams, Hard Core, p. 91.
- 92.
Williams, Hard Core, pp. 30, 49.
- 93.
Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham: Duke U P, 2008), p. 300.
- 94.
See Susanna Paasonen, Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 74.
- 95.
The idea of “erotic daydreams” is discussed in Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots (London: Karnac Books, 2009), a previously unpublished work by Robert Stoller, the influential psychiatrist known for his theories about human sexuality and “sexual excitement.” The other quotations in this section are taken from Paasonen’s extensive discussion of the constituent generic elements that define amateur porn today, which are connected to “classic” ideas and models; see especially Chapter 3 in Carnal Resonance, pp. 73, 77, 78, 83, 97, 98, 107. I also have drawn on the useful overview of major “Heterosexual hard-core conventions” discussed on filmreference.com (see http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Pornography-HETEROSEXUAL-HARD-CORE-CONVENTIONS.html). For a more varied approach, see Chapter 2 on “Sexual Techniques” from Pornography and Difference by Berkeley Kaite, which compares and contrasts the typical uses and perspectives of/on the “fragmented body”—especially breasts and genitals—in soft core vs. hard core pornographic films.
- 96.
Cf. Goldberg, “John Skathelok’s Dick,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 106.
- 97.
In these two paragraphs, I am returning to the definitions offered early in the chapter, and thus the quote marks designate material already referenced above.
- 98.
See Scanlon, “Cultural Studies and Carnal Speech,” p. 26. This is an important point, and Amy Richlin makes a similar point in reference to classical pornographic forms and their connection to post-modern ideals, saying in the Introduction to Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome that “The Greeks and Romans certainly had their differences from us and from each other, but not so much so that modern paradigms are inapplicable, and this collection should correct some current ideas about ancient societies (where, obviously, sexual norms also varied from class to class and region to region.” (xviii).
Works Cited
Baird, Joseph L., and John R. Kane, trans. 1978. La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 199: 11–170.
Baldwin, John. 2005. The Many Loves of Philip Augustus. In The Medieval Marriage Scene: Prudence, Passion, Policy, ed. Sherry Roush and Cristelle L. Baskins, 67–80. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Bloch, R. Howard. 1998. Modest Maids and Modified Nouns: Obscenity in the Fabliaux. In Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski, 293–307. Leiden: Brill.
Bowers, John M. 1990. Augustine as Addict: Sex and Texts in the Confessions. Exemplaria 2 (2): 403–448.
Braddy, Haldeen. 1966. Chaucer’s Bawdy Tongue. Southern Folklore Quarterly 30: 214–222.
———. 1969. Chaucer—Realism or Obscenity? The Arlington Quarterly 2 (1): 121–138.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1991. The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg. In Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, 79–117. New York: Zone Books.
Camille, Michael. 1989. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art. Cambridge University Press.
———. 1992. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.
———. 1998. Obscenity and Alterity: Images that Shock and Offend Us/Them, Now/Then? In Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski . Brill: Leiden.153, 139–154
———. 2001. The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body. In Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, 57–86. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2006. Dr. Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals and the Obscene in Medieval Church Art. In Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald, 17–38. York, UK: York Medieval Press.
Carter, Angela. 1978. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. London: Virago Press.
Carton, Evan. 1979. Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art. PMLA 94 (1): 47–61.
Dillon, Emma. 2006. Representing Obscene Sound. In Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald, 55–84. York, UK: York Medieval Press.
Dunton-Downer, Leslie. 1998. Poetic Language and the Obscene. In Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski, 19–37. Leiden: Brill.
Findlen, Paula. 1993. Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy. In The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt, 49–108. New York: Zone Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Originally published in France in 1976. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foxon, David. 1965. Libertine Literature in England 1660–1745. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books.
Gaunt, Simon. 2006. Obscene Hermeneutics in Troubadour Lyric. In Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald, 85–104. York, UK: York Medieval Press.
Goldberg, Jeremy. 2006. John Skathelok’s Dick: Voyeurism and “Pornography” in Late Medieval England. In Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald, 105–123. York, UK: York Medieval Press.
Gust, Geoffrey W. 2009. Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hanning, R.W. 1992. Telling the Private Parts: “Pryvetee” and Poetry in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher, 108–124. Newark: U of Delaware Press.
Hildebrand, Kristina. 2007. Her Desire and His: Letters Between Fifteenth-Century Lovers. In The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton, 132–141. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Hines, John. 1993. The Fabliau in English. London and New York: Longman.
Hoff, Joan. 1989. Why Is There No History of Pornography? In For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, ed. Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff, 17–46. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hunt, Lynn. 1993. Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800. In The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt, 9–45. New York: Zone Books.
Kendrick, Laura. 1988. Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kendrick, Walter. 1987. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. New York: Viking.
Lawrence, D.H. 1953. Pornography and Obscenity. Originally published in 1930. In Sex, Literature, and Censorship, ed. Henry T. Moore, 69–88. New York: Twayne Publishers.
Lochrie, Karma. 1994. Women’s “Pryvetees” and Fabliau Politics in the Miller’s Tale. Exemplaria 6 (2): 287–304.
———. 2005. Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality when Normal Wasn’t. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McDonie, R. Jacob. 2012. “Ye get namoore of me”: Narrative, Textual, and Linguistic Desires in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale. Exemplaria 24 (4): 313–341.
McDonald, Nicola, ed. 2006. Medieval Obscenities. York, UK: York Medieval Press.
Meecham-Jones, Simon. 2007. Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois’ “Grates ago veneri”. In The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton, 142–154. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Michelson, Peter. 1993. Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity. New York: State University of New York Press.
Minnis, Alastair. 2001. Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2006. From Coilles to Bel Chose: Discourses of Obscenity in Jean de Meun and Chaucer. In Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald, 156–178. York, UK: York Medieval Press.
Morgan, Gerald. 2010. Obscenity and Fastidiousness in The Miller’s Tale. English Studies 91 (5): 492–518.
Morris, Christopher. 2013. Derrida on Pornography: Putting (it) Up for Sale. Derrida Today 6 (1): 97–114.
Moulton, Ian Frederick. 2000. Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mowry, Melissa M. 2004. The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Nolan, Barbara. 1999. Promiscuous Fictions: Medieval Bawdy Tales and Their Textual Liaisons. In The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, 79–105. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer.
Ziolkowski, Jan M., ed. 1998. Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill.
Oxford English Dictionary. Available online at http://www.oed.com/.
Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Perfetti, Lisa. 2006. The Lewd and the Ludic: Female Pleasure in the Fabliaux. In Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux, ed. Holly A. Crocker, 17–31. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2013. Crusader as Lover: The Eroticized Poetics of Crusading in Medieval France. Speculum 88 (4): 932–957.
Richlin, Amy, ed. 1992. Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pugh, Tison. 2014. Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages. Ohio State University Press.
Rex, Richard. 1982. In Search of Chaucer’s Bawdy. Massachusetts Studies in English 8 (4): 20–32.
Benson, Larry D., ed. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Rogers, Janine. 2006. Riddling Erotic Identity in Early English Lyrics. In “And Never Know the Joy”: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry, ed. C.C. Barfoot, 1–12. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Saenger, Paul. 1982. Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society. Viator 13: 367–414.
Sarracino, Carmine, and Kevin M. Scott. 2008. The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What it Means, and Where We Go From Here. Boston: Beacon Press.
Saunders, Corinne. 2007. Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance. In The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton, 38–52. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Scala, Elizabeth. 2015. Desire in the Canterbury Tales. Ohio State University Press.
Scanlon, Larry. 2006. Cultural Studies and Carnal Speech: The Long, Profane Shadow of the Fabliau. In Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, ed. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton, and David Matthews, 23–38. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Schleif, Corine. 2010. Afterword: Making Sense of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—During and After. The Senses and Society 5 (1): 160–164.
Shuffelton, George G. 2012. Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion. The Chaucer Review 47 (1): 1–24.
Shuffelton, George. 2016. “Sorry Chaucer”: Mixed Feelings and Hypatia Lee’s Ribald Tales of Canterbury. In Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, 149–166. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Simes, G.R. 1989. Chaucer and Bawdy. In Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H.L. Rogers, ed. Geraldine Barnes, 91–112. Sydney: University of Sydney, Dept. of English.
Stanbury, Sarah. 1991. The Virgin’s Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion. PMLA 106 (5): 1083–1093.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online at https://plato.stanford.edu/.
Steinberg, Leo. 1996. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. 2nd, rev. ed. (first published 1983). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stewart, Douglas J. 1977. Pornography, Obscenity, and Capitalism. The Antioch Review 35 (4): 389–398.
Stoller, Robert. 2009. Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots. London: Karnac Books.
Taylor, Andrew. 1996. Reading the Dirty Bits. In Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, 280–295. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Van Elk, Martine. 2002. “When Female Weakness Triumphs”: Torture and Perversion in Four Plays by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. In Gender Reconstructions: Pornography and Perversions in Literature and Culture, ed. Cindy L. Carlson, Robert L. Mazzola, and Susan M. Bernardo, 1–24. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Veldhoen, Bert. 2006. Reason Versus Nature in Dunbar’s “Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo”. In “And Never Know the Joy”: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry, ed. C.C. Barfoot, 49–62. New York: Rodopi.
Wagner, Peter. 1988. Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America. London: Secker & Warburg.
Webster’s Dictionary. Available online at http://www.merriam-webster.com/.
Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Berkeley: U of California Press.
———. 2008. Screening Sex. Durham: Duke University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gust, G.W. (2018). Introduction: Chaucerotics and the Problem of Medieval Pornography. In: Chaucerotics. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89745-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89746-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)