Epilogue

Abstract

This study has investigated two popular genres from the medieval period, romance and fabliau, analyzing the representations of heterosexuality that they contain. The focus has been on the first meetings between putative lovers, and on the sex represented in the texts selected for examination. The depictions of these encounters are illuminating because of the ways in which roles and expectations associated with femininity and masculinity are represented in the medieval period. I suggest that, to a large extent, we are still living with the legacy of these cultural understandings. Commenting on the scholarly reception of the fabliaux, R. Howard Bloch observes that confusion of the comedic text with that which it presents is responsible for the misperception of the fabliaux as a lost paradise (1986: 8). Bloch’s argument about the mapping of the bucolic, licentious universe of the fabliau onto the real world of lower-class medieval England highlights the question of the knowability of the medieval world. It is conventional in one strand of cultural criticism to stress the alterity of the Middle Ages while at the same time excavating all possible historical detail in order to produce information and expertise on this remote period (see, for example, Jauss 1982; Patterson 1987, 1991; Strohm 1992, 2000). This approach has, I think, a vexed relationship with the literary texts (which are often its initial impetus).