This chapter considers medieval attitudes towards female sexual pleasure and its lack in the light of contemporary knowledge concerning female anatomy, especially the function of the clitoris. It was brought to life by the questions asked by students when studying the Arthurian canon and the role of women in it. These questions, best exemplified by the one in the title, are notoriously hard to answer, and despite their seeming simplicity they raise many uncomfortable issues still plaguing our society today. The chapter first addresses the legitimacy of a student’s question about Queen Guinevere’s frigidity and discusses how popular culture, both medieval and modern, often gives a distorted or harmful impression of female pleasure. The chapter goes on to consider how society remained very much ‘icliterate’ until relatively modern times, and how this resulted in a considerable amount of grief and suffering particularly for women. This suffering, when understood as conformity to the widespread cultural norm, could be turned into some sort of moral pleasure.

This chapter explores the joy of losing as a central aspect of the masochistic potential in Beowulf. It begins by exploring the centrality of death in the poem and how it appeared in all aspects of early medieval English life. It contextualises the eros around dying through works by Georges Bataille, Lyn Cowan, and Gilles Deleuze. The chapter examines the eroticisation of power and, specifically, a pleasure called cratolagnia, a pleasure derived from the strength and power of another. It follows this with an analysis of the sadomasochistic aspects of three grappling scenes: Grendel, Grendel’s Mother, and Dæghrefn. The chapter ultimately explores reading Beowulf as a masochist and interpreting the slaying of the character Dæghrefn by Beowulf’s bare hands as the epitome of a homoerotic masochistic jouissance.

This chapter argues that the plot of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s tale depicts a decades-long engagement in queer sadomasochism, with Griselda affirmatively consenting to all that Walter wills. Rather than depicting ‘actual’ wrongs done in their brutally unequal marriage, the tale offers a fantasy: the fantasy being that the ‘assay’ is mere play, game not earnest, and that, as a BDSM scene, it has a beginning, middle, and end: ultimately, a sort of consolation for its readers. The story highlights its status as story, composed in part by Walter as its enactor, and then by the Clerk, by the Host who demands to be told a story, by Chaucer, by Petrarch, by Boccaccio. It is not ‘real life’ and it highlights the ways in which it is not. Indeed, in its concluding lines, it warns readers away from the sort of powerful masochism displayed by Griselda, a masochism far too queer to be sustained within the confines of normativity. The chapter examines how the hyperbolic heterosexuality of the tale’s violent marriage is marked as impossible and forbidden, arguing that its excesses ultimately work to queer Griselda’s wifely submission.

Richard of St Victor’s On the four degrees of violent love explores the pleasure of divine domination and the pains of submission that echoes modern sadomasochistic practice but also suggests a very different kind of S/M, one that challenges the soul to go beyond its capabilities and explore a new kind of love born out of a disciplinary intensity that is unavailable to other lovers of the Divine. God becomes the great discipliner and the devotee must trust and submit in order to experience greater love and transcendence. An S/M reading of Richard’s On the four degrees of violent love explores his text as a sadomasochistic manual for the soul. Richard sets down the rules of submission while withholding determinacy, exploring the relationship between lover and God and servant and master within new spiritual-erotic pathways.

This chapter examines power and violence in the Livre de la cité des dames (Book of the city of ladies), Book 3, by Christine de Pizan through the lens of sadism/masochism. The figures in this text notably include women of colour and proto-non-binary people. The Cité depicts a distinctive paradigm of martyrdom that maintains a gendered economy of violence where male-on-female seduction is inextricably linked with torture. However, Christine desexualises her authorial persona, the martyrdom, and the female body. This desexualisation seeks to remedy all misogynistic texts, including the Roman de la rose. This chapter examines an instance of Christine undoing sexual assault in the Rose. While Christine would not have consciously written the martyrial episodes from an S/M perspective, the way she deftly manages the problematic theme of sexuality nonetheless reveals failed attempts at sadism from the tyrants and a desexualised, masochistic martyrdom directed by the saints. In voiding the sadism and desexualising the masochism, Christine’s Cité offers a rare instance of S/M scenes that do not allow the reader a vicarious thrill. It further reconfigures the hagiographic body-as-text: the bodies of the martyr-masochists reject and overwrite any marks from the martyrdom, reflecting the saints’ inviolate body, like Mary’s.

The disciplinary divide between classics and modern literary studies sets up an artificial boundary, which can obscure our view both of what poets are doing and of how they perceive their role. Such compartmentalisation is alien to the bilingual cultures of Renaissance Europe, where Latin was still a medium for prolific literary composition, and where ancient texts rediscovered and edited by humanist scholars appeared in print with the shock of the new. Though acutely aware of the historical distance between themselves and the ancients, educated readers and writers also experienced a sense of paradoxical contemporaneity with classical authors, often expressed through the common trope whereby an ancient poet is imagined as raised from the dead through imitation or translation, or present as friend and teacher in the pages of their books. The trope may seem naively ahistoricist, but the ‘revival’ of Anacreon in the verse of Herrick and Stanley’s royalist coterie during the English Civil War illustrates how central it can be to the poet’s engagement with contemporary politics, and thus to a fully responsive historicist reading. Petrarch, with his letters to the ancients, is often seen as the origin of the period’s uncanny sense of intimacy with classical ghosts, but he was joining a conversation consciously begun by Seneca. Senecan intertextuality also pervades the ‘Ascent of Mont Ventoux’ more deeply than has been recognised, suggesting that the extent even of Petrarch’s engagement with classical writers has been underestimated.

This chapter offers access to the kinds of conversation with antiquity made possible by instances of parallel Latin and vernacular composition in certain early modern poets. A substantial subset of Marvell’s poetry is in Latin; and of particular interest are instances in which the poet writes Latin and English versions of the same poem. Ros and Hortus now ask to be considered alongside ‘On a Drop of Dew’ and ‘The Garden’ as parallel and cross-referential compositions in which Marvell plays with, and thematises, his dual literary competence in English and in Latin. These are special cases; but the idea of ‘diptych’ composition offers a distinctive way of getting a purchase on literary bilingualism at large. In Marvell’s time, the matter is rendered most fully tangible in Milton’s double book of Poems English and Latin. However, the chapter’s midsection takes the idea of the cross-linguistic diptych in a different and hypothetical direction: what if one were to imagine a Latin ‘twin’ for every vernacular poem in the classical tradition, even in the 99% of cases in which no such twin exists? Such a thought-experiment finds traction in the case of the famously Latinate English of Paradise Lost; with an added twist in that translators were not lacking who took it upon themselves to do what Milton did not do, and to render the epic’s Latinate and Virgilian verse into post-virgilian Latin. The final pages briefly extend the conversation to the poetry of Ronsard and Du Bellay a century earlier in France.

In the minor tradition of lament for a fellow poet which springs from the influential yet neglected Lament for Bion, the theme of literary immortality is closely bound up with the self-conscious, and self-reflexively foregrounded, practice of poetic imitation. Beginning with the Lament for Bion itself, we trace an intricate pattern of allusion to Bion’s Lament for Adonis and Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll, which infuses the grief-laden poem with an underlying optimism by evoking the resurrection of Adonis, celebrated annually in the Adonia festival, and implying that Bion will enjoy a similar immortality. The Lament presents its own imitative poetics as the channel of this ongoing life. Later poets working in this tradition not only imitate the Lament for Bion and follow the conventions it sets, but also understand the significance of its intertextual methods, and use similar means to the same end. This is shown through close readings of three examples: Statius’ Silvae 2.7 (celebrating the birthday of the dead Lucan); Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’ (on the death of Sir Philip Sidney); and Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (on the death of John Keats). The subtextual presence of the Adonia in ‘Astrophel’ forges a link to the Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene, perhaps reflecting that episode’s relation to Mary Sidney’s mourning for her brother. In ‘Adonais’, meanwhile, Adonis’ resurrection is a fundamental subtext throughout, functioning as a symbol of nature’s seasonal renewal and of poetic immortality conferred through imitation, and necessitating reconsideration of Shelley’s supposed ‘Platonic turn’ at the end of the poem.

This chapter investigates the nature of sexual sins within the lay and clerical communities and details how social and physical pain of offenders, through fasting, exile, and service, healed the community and repaired the soul. It provides critical evidence of a penitential creed: ‘contraries are cured by contraries’. Humiliation plays important and sometimes implicitly defined roles in the early penitentials. As the fundamental basis of contrition, shame occupies an important place in repentance. As such, displays of humiliation and debasement manifest contrition and are integral to the penitential discipline that early penitentials sought to facilitate. Humiliation also had specific social functions geared towards the restoration of honour damaged by that behaviour. Whether through visible abstinence, personal abasement, or exile, it both publicly lowered the status of the sinner while elevating that of their victims. In this way, humiliation as penance provided an outlet for those damaged by another’s sin, an indirect form of vengeance that would ideally satisfy the injured party in part by providing a social form of sadistic pleasure at the offender’s social and, at times, physical pain.

This chapter examines the revivification of the figure of Julius Caesar in three early modern responses to Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, avoiding an overtly political reading of Lucan to trace instead an intimate conversation between classical poet, early modern translators and imitators. Starting with Lucans First Booke – a translation that presents as blood-transfusion – I show how Marlowe’s reanimation of Caesar as a Roman Tamburlaine enables the anti-hero to escape the bounds of Lucan’s censoriously moralising and fractured poem. Turning next to the anonymously authored academic drama The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, or Caesar’s Revenge, we find the full articulation of a Caesar who fulfils and exceeds this Marlovian potential, and an author who runs the attractions to negative repetition in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile to their natural endpoint: dissolution of the cosmos and the complete confusion of its moral eschatology. The chapter concludes by analysing the destabilising effects of such a revivification of Caesar for both poem and author, via close reading of Thomas May’s 1627 Pharsalia; and in the same author’s attempts both to kill Caesar and ‘end’ Lucan in his 1630 Continuation. The multiple iterations of May’s translation and supplement enact the struggle to resist the super-charged early modern Caesar and Lucan’s unresolved, repetitive poetics alike: and May can accomplish his task in the end only by succumbing to Lucan’s regressive poetics of repetition, adopting early modern tragedy's politics of personal vengeance, and appropriating for his own authorial self the blood-transfusion metaphor of Lucans First Booke.