Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris Amanda Joan Wetmore carissa m. harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 285. isbn: 1–5017–3040–1. $42.95. Harris analyzes a selection of Middle English and Scots texts in a compelling and relevant monograph. Sexual obscenity’s didactic power to agitate and provoke thought connects her readings of literary sexual encounters. Obscenity reinforces medieval patriarchy by deigning women corporeal, sexually gluttonous objects. Many of Harris’ female speakers, however, adopt the language of their debasers and turn it around on them in a feminine heteroglossia. Harris’ first two chapters explore how men perpetuate rape culture and misogyny in same-sex environments, even as they petition for and against sex with women. In Chapter One, ‘Felawe Masculinity,’ manhood is established through narratives of sexual conquest among the ‘mercantile-artisan’ Canterbury pilgrims. Focusing primarily on the Reeve’s Tale, in which two clerks rape a mother and daughter based on the projected reaction of their peers, obscene talk among men mutually authorizes and encourages sexual aggression toward women. Harris brings in evidence from the North Wales Ched Evans rape trail (2016), showing similar discourses among modern same-sex peers in their justification of rape. Chapter Two, ‘With a Cunt,’ introduces poetry battles of the sixteenth-century Scottish court. In the context of Mary Stuart’s rumored adultery and young James V’s series of illegitimate children, these texts present a misogynist disgust with female bodies as inherently destabilizing for the male body politic. Instead, libidinal energies are turned inward as poetic prowess substitutes for the sexual act. Harris relates this rhetoric to modern freestyling, in which a rapper insults his opponent by degrading the women close to him. The final three chapters focus on women’s fictive voices and examine their ability to teach men about their pain and pleasure, and other women about navigating the sexual world: negotiating desire, obtaining pleasure, and avoiding rape and its effects. Chapter Three’s ‘Pastourelle Encounters’ presents idyllic debate poems between men and women over a typically forced sex act. Although the narrator is usually male and first and last to speak, women voice their non-consent, fear, and pain. Some resist through verbal sparring, some eventually succumb but protest systemic inequality, others are brutally raped and decry their injuries. Chapter Four, ‘Pedagogies of Pleasure,’ focuses on understudied English women’s songs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, helpfully placed in the Appendix. After the Black Death, young single women’s rise to the urban working class left them [End Page 72] especially vulnerable. Women’s objectification in the workplace was often expressed in the language of capital, which women seized upon as a model for negotiation. Harris then compares the same-sex education these sexually explicit lyrics offered to modern abstinence-only education, which, by limiting knowledge, limits the possibility of female agency. Finally, Chapter Five, ‘Songs of Wantonness,’ offers a selection of lyrics from two early Tudor anthologies, MS Ashmole 176 and the Ritson Manuscript. Polite and obscene lyrics about consensual and forced sex acts register meaningfully together as they are juxtaposed, exposing courtly ideology’s violent distortions—especially in the fiction of women’s power and men’s pain. Fictive women’s voices offer narratives that evoke ‘educational empathy’ for sexual victims, portraying the emotional, physical, social, and psychological repercussions of rape. Harris is a delicate close-reader, employing etymology and colloquial usage to bolster her vivid readings of obscene metaphors in mostly understudied texts. She also argues from codicological evidence to consider textual transmission and reader response. Harris ties all of her material to the present day, providing readings of contemporary texts in parallel with her analysis of a ‘usable’ medieval past. She concludes with a reading of Trump’s infamous ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ recording, revealing many of the same long-standing misogynist paradigms. Obscenity authorizes misogynist stereotypes, but it can also be used to challenge systemic violence and inequality. Amanda Joan Wetmore University of Toronto Copyright © 2020 Arthuriana