Crooked Instruments: Obscene Scribal Creativity in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 416

Abstract

In his didactic poem Instructions to His Son, Peter Idley tells the story of Semiramis, the notoriously lecherous queen of ancient Assyria. He emphasizes her sexual voracity with the rhyme royal refrain, “With hir croked instrument to encrees and multeplie” (2.B.1790–1825), repeating the pejorative female genital term “croked instrument” a total of six times. One late fifteenth-century scribe named Roger Newton, who copied the Instructions in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 416, substituted a compendium of inventive, less-derogatory genital synonyms for “croked instrument.” This essay focuses on Newton’s act of scribal creativity and linguistic experimentation. It analyzes Newton’s unique passage in conversation with popular fifteenth-century discourses of father-son sexual education and medieval renditions of the Semiramis narrative. It closes by exploring the passage’s manuscript context and premodern readership, showing how nuns from Syon Abbey wrote their names in the manuscript in the early sixteenth century and probing the possibilities of nuns reading Newton’s bawdy textual interventions.