Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature. With an Edition of Middle English and Middle Scots Pastourelles, ed. Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022, x, 269 pp.

Abstract

Abstract: One of the most (in)famous pastourelles from medieval literature, “Ich was ain chint so wolgetan” in the Carmina Burana (ca. 1220), composed in Middle High German with some Latin mixed in, pretends to be sung by a female who laments her sexual seduction, if not rather rape, at the hand of a young man. She curses the linden trees that marked the way toward the meadow where the sexual act took place, but the refrain and much of the wording insinuates in a rather odd way the sweetness of the event, as if the woman actually had welcomed the seduction. A close reading, however, rips away any of such false illusion, although countless modern female performers have sung that song and recorded it, as if the sexual violence alluded to did not matter so much. Of course, rape is the result, and there are no ifs and buts as to her desperate attempts to resist the male violator. Nevertheless, we cannot take this amazing poem as a literary reflection of women’s suffering at men’s hands, although the condemnation of the rape is obvious, at least through the satirical lens. Instead, this was a lyrical composition along with musical notes produced by a male student, professor, or a member of a monastic school through which famous Walther von der Vogelweide’s pastourelle “Under the linden” was to be parodied. There is no real sympathy for the maiden’s destiny, instead, her sexual violation is describ­ed in terms of hunting (her own words), which the male audience must have enjoy­ed, considering the musical setting, the erotic language, and the metaphorical expression (cf. reviewer, “‘Artes amatorie iam non instruuntur’: Learned and Erotic Discourse in the Carmina Burana,” Revisiting the Codex Buranus: Contents, Contexts, Composition, ed. Tristan E. Franklinos and Henry Hope. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, 21 [Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2020], 97–118).