The Double Bind of Chivalric Sexuality in the Late-Medieval English Romance

Abstract

D iscussions of sexuality in the Middle English chivalric romance are complicated by a generality of terms—sexuality, after all, does not carry signification outside of historical and cultural context, and even within the cultural bounds of a given text, descriptions of sex or sexual references can have a variety of meanings. In the case of reading medieval sexuality especially, these differences in meaning are significant: sexual pairings that indicate procreation and/or the continuation of a hereditary line, for example, would be read as categorically different from sexual pairings based on or resultant from physical enjoyment or erotic or carnal desire. 1 This difference seems equally significant for questions of identity for those involved in the act of sexual intercourse. The notion that virginity might depend on a woman’s state of mind rather than on the physical fact of penetration, for example, 2 or that a couple might maintain chastity even while having sex, 3 indicates that the narrative meaning of erotic desire and sexual activity requires close attention and a good deal of historical contextualization. Examination of the Middle English romances, specifically those dealing with chivalric identity formation, 4 reveals erotic encounters to be problematic for the chivalric identity of the knight protagonist. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.