Criseyde, Consent, and the #MeToo Reader

Abstract

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde features prankish sexual humour wrapped into a romantic comedy love-plot, in which sexual misconduct is coded as harmless fun. Generations of readers have interpreted book three’s consummation scene as a delightfully humorous, entertaining escapade. But in order for the episode to be interpreted as comedic, the reader must be willing to accept certain premises about gender norms and sexual violence. The cultural misconception of rape as an attack perpetrated by a stranger as well as social norms giving license to male aggression with “certain kinds” of women have resulted in benign interpretations of the sexual encounter in book three. Our students, the #MeToo readers of the 2020s, will be attuned to the assumptions of rape culture expressed in Troilus and Criseyde. The #MeToo movement offers instructors a contemporary repertoire of narratives for discussing gender biases of past and present and for considering how the persistence of those biases fueled a cultural reckoning in 2018.