This essay focuses on Middle English pastourelles, a popular but understudied medieval lyric genre centrally concerned with women's experiences of the threat of sexual violence. This genre offers contemporary audiences a rich and valuable resource for understanding medieval ideas about rape and resistance. The pastourelles closely echo the language of courtly love lyrics and thus function as a critique of courtly ideology, for they expose its violent denial of women's erotic subjectivity. Some pastourelles feature antirape pedagogical methods familiar to modern educators, including peer education models and the use of risk avoidance discourse. The genre's narrative diversity and pedagogical possibilities are particularly evident in a unit of three pastourelles copied in the early sixteenth-century Welles Anthology along with male-voiced poems of courtly love and misogynist vitriol and female-voiced erotic lyrics, demonstrating how the pastourelle can reinforce certain rape myths, authorize women's desire, and challenge courtly paradigms.
This article examines women's rage in response to rape, arguing that Chaucer depicts the possibilities of female rage and collective action in his Legend of Philomela. This article situates Chaucer's portrayal of sisterly anger in the context of the Philomela narrative in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Ovid's Metamorphoses. It links this discussion of sisterhood, anger, and survival in medieval texts to contemporary examples of victim-survivors who use similar tactics to respond to their assaults and to challenge the cultural conditions that made them possible.
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This article explores the gendered models of turpiloquium-illicit sexual language or ''spekyng rybawdy''-in two late Middle English didactic texts, John Mirk's Festial and Peter Idley's Instructions to His Son. Whereas the most popular pastoral model of turpiloquium is between a man and a woman and leads to heterosexual intercourse, Mirk and Idley examine the vice as an exclusively intra-gender phenomenon, fully illuminating the unique problems and unexpected possibilities accorded to turpiloquium in late medieval England.
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