While the Lais of Marie de France contain no explicit instances of rape, these twelve short AngloNorman poems dating to the later twelfth century abound with episodes of infidelity, indiscretion, sexual compulsion, and sexual violence. Lovers pursue affairs that imperil their lives and often end in their violent deaths together; knights or their gobetweens are frequently dismembered by jealous husbands; and overwhelming passion compels all manner of secret plotting and betrayal. Even the tales with ostensibly happy endings demonstrate how firmly Western conventions of romantic love link desire and suffering, passion and violence, masculinity and aggression, femininity and threat. Kathryn Gradval identifies the medieval romances of Chrétien de Troyes as the source of these “ideological couplings that will become key in Western literature and culture,” but Marie's Breton Lais share the same tendency “to obscure, rationalize, or sentimentalize sexual violence against women.” While key moves like privileging heteronormative desire, celebrating the devotion between lovers, and describing the conquering, indeed overpowering, nature of love all strike familiar chords with modern readers of the Lais, a discussion of these narrative moves ought also to observe the frequent commodification of the female body, the patriarchal regulation of sexuality, and the erotics of suffering, all of which demonstrate the many ways in which rape culture in socalled courtly literature coheres with presentday constructions on sex and gender. Approaching Marie as a foundation for our modern tropes of sexual love is one way to make the Middle Ages accessible to students, and at the same time defamiliarize our own cultural assumptions about sex, love, desire, and power.

Teaching “Lanval” in Brit Lit I

In the early segment of the British Literature survey, I paired the poetic translation of “Lanval” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature along with the excerpt from Malory's Morte Darthur as an introduction to the genre of medieval romance. My introductory lecture typically included a brief illustration of sociohistorical context6 and some sense of critical reception before we proceeded to studentled discussion, which was grounded on textual analysis and designed to address some thematic element with which students could engage.