Global Response: Consent in the Long View

Abstract

Global Response:Consent in the Long View Elizabeth Fowler These rich essays offer us a glimpse of how fervently medieval western Europe was obsessed with the theme of consent in romance, lyric, fabliau, hagiography, and so many other genres—as well as in legal records, charters, deeds, and all the documentary evidence of signature, property, and contract. Long before Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, the topic of consent saturated culture: in Sarah Baechle's phrase, it has "hypersignifying potency" (318). These essays reveal the explosive combination of outrage, wit, pleasure, shame, laughter, and distress evoked by staging medieval consent and its disabilities, infelicities, and misfires. In these centuries sexual relations became a template for the assessment of all political relations. Just as liberty could not have been a central ideological driver of the Enlightenment and all the eighteenth-century revolutions without slavery threatening formulations of justice, issues of consent could not have been a central theme of contract theory itself without medieval writers making rape and its correlates a central plot event. Topics of consent have an uncanny ability to throw us back into the staunch crouch of individualism and even essentialism, a stance that on other topics might seem distasteful, because we tend to confirm the slipperiness and fragility of gender, the ecological diffusion of consciousness, the interpersonal nature of the will, and the polymorphous way that these kinds of constructions are mapped by language. Yet characters in medieval fictions of consent are anything but individuals: they veer toward allegory, distribute agency across a circuit of relationships (Torres, 331), represent social markers rather than individual bodies. As these scholars show collectively, medieval texts like to pitch bodies against social positions, to pressure us to acknowledge injury (Goodrich, Raw) even when they push us to embrace it and reconceive it as grace (Schwebel, Torres). They [End Page 361] understand it as the defining relation between the sexes, mark it by class (Alberghini, Akard), worry about it (all), stage the harms that cluster around consent in the topoi of religious or "racial" conversion or in the relations among incipient nations or peoples. In sum, medieval stories unfailingly ask us to compare consent in sexual acts to consent in other social interactions (Baechle, 318). And so the stories these scholars illuminate show us the political ideals of western democracies under construction. They give us consent as one of the primary instigators of narrative, a launching of the chess game of social stress and struggle. I think this is why such texts speak to us now, because the seventeenth-century scene of social contract that ushered in the Enlightenment is impossible to see without its exclusions of women, children, the unpropertied, the racialized, the alien, though loud voices unashamedly call for the disenfranchisement of their consent. How do we make visible medieval literature's investigation of what is at stake in the construction of modernity? Start here: these scholars bring us vibrant, probing assessments of materials that have lain dormant, though often in plain sight, for centuries—waiting to help us develop sorely needed new approaches to consent. [End Page 362] Elizabeth Fowler University of Virginia Copyright © 2022 The New Chaucer Society, University of Miami