Reconsidering Consent and Coercion

How can contemporary theorisations of consent help us to nuance our understanding of consent and coercion in the Middle Ages? And what can reconsidering medieval attitudes towards consent offer to our own ‘consent culture’? Contemporary feminist approaches have identified consent both as a potent political framework for liberation and as an inherently limited concept that opens out onto other important ethical questions. Proceeding from this moment, this book looks in two directions to understand the varied ways in which structural inequalities impact meaningful consent and facilitate coercion in the Middle Ages and today.

Building upon the momentum of ‘medieval consent studies’ as a newly defined field, this volume expands the focus beyond rape and raptus, assessing more varied representations of consent and coercion through an intersectional consideration of power, inequality, and sexual violence. The contributions bring together different methodologies, cultural contexts, and literary traditions to highlight literature’s capacity to reflect otherwise undocumented forms of sexual vulnerability. Offering a compelling case for integrating critical approaches like trans history, codicology, animal studies, ecocriticism, and disability studies into this field, Reconsidering Consent and Coercion demonstrates the vital necessity of a nuanced and inclusive understanding of the past for our present discourses of consent.

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on the Cover Image
Jane Bonsall and Hannah Piercy, Introduction: Why Reconsider Medieval Consent and Coercion? Why Now?

Coercive Strategies and (Im)Possibilities of Resistance
Carissa M. Harris, ‘Resistence Makyng’: Resisting Rape in Premodern England and Scotland
Lucas Wood, ‘That love should be love’s recompense’: Courtly Seduction, Compulsory Compassion, and Coercive Desire in Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans mercy
Rowan Wilson, ‘You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance’: Nature’s Coercion and Transgender Volition in Le Roman de Silence
Basil Arnould Price, Suicide as Speech: The Antisocial Feminism of Svarfdæla saga

Reframing Gendered Coercion: Men’s Experiences of Vulnerability
Jane Bonsall and Hannah Piercy, Comparative Approaches to Men’s Experiences of Sexual Coercion: Reading across Multi-Text Manuscripts
Bettina Bildhauer, Sexualised Violence by a Woman against a Boy: Upsetting the Binary Gender Hierarchy in Of the Seven Masters
Emmet Taylor, Love Under Threat: Reconsidering the Experiences of Noísiu and Diarmaid

Consent and the Boundaries of the Human
Grace Delmolino, Consent Beyond Language: Disability, Ambiguity, and the Sex Lives of Chickens and Nuns in Decameron 3.1
Maria Zygogianni, Her Garden: Consent and the hortus conclusus in The Knight’s Tale and The Isle of Ladies
Alexander Wilson and Natalie Jayne Goodison, ‘Sa vesteüre ala saisir,

Par tant la cuide retenir’: Clothing and Coercion in the Bathing Scenes of Medieval Romance

Reinscribing Coercion, Rewriting Consent
Mara Schmueckle, Writing Consent: Notaries and Gendered Narratives in Late Medieval Scotland
Debadrita Saha, Women’s (Absent) Consent and (Culturally Sanctioned) Coercion in Medieval Bengali Literature: Chandimangal and SatiMayna
Timi Sgouros, Shades of Coercion in Medieval Exempla: Adaptations of ‘The Nun who Saw the World’
Caitlin G. Watt, ‘Thy Womb Will Avenge Thee’: Olympias, Revenge, and Consent in Medieval Alexander the Great Narratives

Elizabeth Robertson, Afterword: Ambiguities of Consent and Forms of Resistance to Rape
Bibliography
Index