Scholarly assessments of Chaucer's fabliaux seldom acknowledge that these tales are erotic as well as funny; even less frequently do such investigations delve into why fabliaux are a source of pleasure. As Tom Hanks and W. W. Allman note in their article ‘Rough Love: Notes toward an Erotics of The Canterbury Tales’, scholars seem ‘to have averted their gaze when Chaucer's characters leap into bed’. Allman and Hanks, as their title implies, study an erotics of violence, mostly of men doing violence to women, and they focus in particular on the Merchant's Tale and its ‘erotics of stabbing’. A more positive erotic reading of the Merchant's Tale appears in Andrew Taylor's 1996 essay ‘Reading the Dirty Bits’. Taylor notes the lingering gaze of another scholar, E. Talbot Donaldson, upon a description of young May's body:

Donaldson writes, ‘the Spring of pretty young girls is a permanent thing, and that May in their personas will always warm the masculine heart’. Taylor suggests that pleasure taken in this description and in Donaldson's gloss of it is mimetic: ‘For the young college man to share Donaldson's and Chaucer's pleasure in May is to become, like them, a connoisseur of both good writing and pretty girls, a master of ironic detachment and well-modulated heterosexual desire’.

As Roger Ascham famously observed, Malory's Morte Darthur is primarily concerned with ‘open manslaughter, and bold bawdry’. I would not disagree; in fact, I would say that these themes are not only dominant but are inextricably interwoven. Male sexuality, in Malory, is consistently portrayed as potentially violent and disruptive, dangerous not only to individuals but to the whole structure of society, and therefore in need of controlling measures. The medieval world did not, of course, often portray any form of sexuality positively. Sexual desire leads both men and women to sin: both directly in committing fornication, incest and adultery, and indirectly in committing treason or disregarding their duties. It could easily be assumed that this is a divide between the clergy on the one side, themselves compelled to live in celibacy and thus suspicious of sexual desire, and the more relaxed nobility and commons on the other, cheerfully ignoring the rules when it suited them. However, this is too simple a dichotomy. Malory himself, despite the bold bawdry, shares in the suspicion of unregulated desire, in his nostalgia for a chaster time,

In her seminal 1980 essay Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Julia Kristeva identifies ‘the abject’ as the human reaction to a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between the subject and the object, the interior and the exterior, or the self and the Other. Her classic example of a site of abjection is that of the human corpse, which although a continuation of the dead person's corporeal presence also becomes simultaneously a marker of his or her spiritual absence, and thus must be rejected or repressed, causing the subjective experience of ‘horror’. Kristeva argues that human rationality necessarily involves a series of such repressions, and that the association of the human with the unrepressed thus becomes a site of potential tension. ‘The abject confronts us’, she suggests, ‘with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’. This borderland between the acceptable and the unacceptable thus becomes the site of the carnivalesque, the comedic and the socially transgressive, as attested by post-medieval writers from Rabelais to Bakhtin and beyond.

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, the abject was also a major concern for the poet William Dunbar, writing at the court of King James IV. Dunbar's poems are critically regarded as some of the most brilliant – and, frequently, the most offensive – writings produced in late medieval/ early modern Scotland. Many of his satirical pieces depict the court of James (who would later go on to lose his life at the disastrous Battle of Flodden) at play, simultaneously parodying and affirming the excesses of late medieval/Renaissance aristocratic culture.

George Ripley, in his apostrophic preface to God in the Compound of Alchemy, claims to have ‘renounced … fleshly lust’ and asks God to provide him (and, presumably, other worthy alchemists) with His ‘secret treasure’: ‘Shew us thy secrets and to us be bounteous’ (21.4). Throughout the Compound, Ripley guides readers away from worldly pleasures, urging them instead to focus their desires on God-granted alchemical secrets and ‘our stone of great delight’ (37.2). Likewise, Thomas Norton, in his prologue to the Ordinal of Alchemy, warns of avaricious would-be alchemists who ‘in fyre / Of brennyng couetise haue therto desire’ (27–8). Norton emphatically shuns ‘wordly werkis’ in favour of alchemical ‘connyng’, advising his reader to ‘sett fully his trust’ in God and ‘in connyng be fixid al his lust’ (509, 517, 535–6): ‘For above all erthlye thynge / I mooste desire & love connynge’ (2595–6). Desire or lust, in both the Compound and the Ordinal, is thus redirected from the physical body and material world toward the divinely inspired knowledge of the alchemical corpus. Moreover, as I will illustrate, Norton and Ripley both direct their reader to focus on the text's rhetorical structures in order to achieve desired alchemical objectives.

In her 2007 essay ‘“Wordy vnthur wede”: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain’, Amanda Hopkins examines the interplay of clothing and nudity in creating erotic moments, noting the connection of eroticism with female aggression on the one hand, and the erotic link between female nudity and passivity on the other. Lancelot's encounter with Elaine at Corbyn in Malory's Morte Darthur is marked by erotic moments featuring female nudity that appear emblematic of the latter. The eroticism of the moment when Lancelot rescues the ‘dolerous lady’ (2.791) from the boiling water by taking her by the hand, ‘naked as a nedyll’ (2.792), depends both on her total nudity and her status as victim – that is to say that the moment is erotic not just because she is naked, but because that nudity is not of her own making. Later, when Elaine ‘skypped oute of her bedde all naked’ (2.795) and kneels at Lancelot's feet to beg for her life, both her nudity and her vulnerability work to produce an erotic effect. Certainly Lancelot quickly changes his mind and turns from threatening her to embracing her. Yet to view Elaine as completely passive is a mistake – at the least her passivity is manipulated and Lancelot's presence in her bed is the result of machinations in which Elaine plays a willing part.

Sir Thopas's resolution to forsake human women in order to seek out an elf-queen as his lover satirizes one of the most well-known romance motifs: the fairy mistress who offers herself to the human protagonist of the narrative. It is characteristic of this motif that, with relatively few exceptions, the fairy offers sexual intercourse to the hero without any demand for the commitment of marriage and without stipulating any directly connected negative consequences. The motif's origins are a good deal earlier than those of romance – it features in several early medieval Irish narratives – but it is with romance that the motif is most particularly associated. It is noticeable that this extramarital sex is generally not explicitly condemned in the romances. Of course, romance authors are not prone to sermonizing digressions, so this might be passed over as merely a reflex of the genre; however, condemnation need not be overtly stated to still be clear and, in this respect, romance differs markedly from fabliaux, the other genre which frequently portrays extra-marital sex.

In the late fifteenth-century Squire of Low Degree, the incompetent protagonist woos a Hungarian princess in a way that seems to subject the romance genre to derivative, almost parodic, excess. This excess, however, offers particular insight into the representation of wooing in Middle English romance more broadly. While many romance heroines assume their suitors will display knightly prowess to win their love, this princess seems so aware of the Squire's shortcomings that she explains to him precisely what he must do, focusing on the rather boy-scout-like logistics of riding ‘Over hylles and dales, and hye mountaines, / In wethers wete, both hayle and raynes’, and lodging ‘under a tre, / Among the beastes wyld and tame’. Reminiscent here of how a Sir Thopas might understand chivalry, the text continues its overzealous attempt to ape romance when the princess exhaustively details the accoutrements that she expects from a suitor (203–30), and it is equally unable to find the right register when she offers to bankroll his required adventures (251–5). The envious steward's attempts to ruin the Squire by exposing his amorous inclinations are predictable enough; the results, however, have been seen as uncharacteristic of romance, since the king does not object to the Squire courting his daughter, but rather instructs the steward:

The story of a knight who changes into a wolf and is trapped in wolf form by a perfidious woman, most often the knight's wife, occurs in several medieval texts. Probably the best known of these is Marie de France’s narrative lay, Bisclavret. However, in presenting a ‘natural’ werewolf, that is, a man who by nature periodically changes into wolf form, Marie’s tale differs from the other narratives, except for Biclarel, which is closely modelled on it. The other versions concern a knight whose lycanthropic transformation is not a naturally occurring periodical event, but instead is induced by enchantment, involving a magical item, such as a ring or potion, or a spell, or a combination of these. In Marie's tale, and in Biclarel, it is the theft of the knight's clothes that traps him in his lupine shape.

Three medieval werewolf redactions include Arthurian material. Two of these are in Old French octosyllabic couplets. One is Biclarel, which, while following Bisclavret fairly closely in the details of its plot, recasts the knight's feudal lord as Arthur, so that it is Arthur himself who protects the supplicant wolf and oversees his transformation back into human form. However, the Arthurianization is minimal: Arthur is mentioned by name on only four occasions and no other Arthurian names occur in the text. The other Old French version, the narrative lay Melion, tells of a knight trapped in wolf form by his wife, using a ring with magic stones. Here, the werewolf's tale is fully integrated into the Arthurian world. Melion is Arthur's vassal, and Arthur is the king who protects the wolf and oversees the démorphose. Other Arthurian knights are mentioned, and Gawain has an active role in insisting that the wolf Melion be taken to a chamber to ensure privacy when he changes back into human form. The latter part of the narrative takes place in Ireland, and the text gives a plausible political reason for Arthur to journey to the Irish king's court.

The third werewolf tale set in the Arthurian world is the Latin prose Arthur and Gorlagon. While there are parallels between this text and Bisclavret and Melion, the narrative diverges from these versions in numerous ways.

CLOTHING plays a vital role in many Middle English romances. Dress can ridentify the social rank of the wearer, as it does in various ways in the Middle English redactions of Marie de France's Lanval, or be a public demonstration of social condition, like Criseyde's widow's weeds. It can even aid personal recognition, as when Orfeo discovers his queen in the Otherworld: ‘Be hyr clothys he hyr knew’. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, it is clothing rather than anatomy that is the ‘prime indicator of gender identity’ in medieval texts. It can be a valuable gift, like the cloth studded with gems presented to the emperor in Emaré, later made into a robe for the eponymous heroine, and descriptions of costly clothing and rich materials serve to add an exotic quality to many texts. Allusion to nakedness in romance may refer to poor clothing rather than complete nudity, as at the beginning of Havelock when the author writes: ‘þe tale is of Havelock imaked;/ Wil he was litel, he yede ful naked’. The editor glosses naked as ‘poorly dressed’; in medieval texts, then, nakedness is not necessarily an absolute concept, but can indicate that the social status of the wearer is compromised by garments that do not echo his true social rank. Similarly, references to nudity sometimes evoke the context of largesse, intimately connected with gifts of clothing, for example in the criticism of the late merchant's overspending in Sir Amadace:

The Background: Sexuality in the European Middle Ages

AN INDIVIDUAL'S sexual behaviour in the Middle Ages was not a personal matter. The twin powers of state and Church attempted to control every aspect of people's lives, and sexual behaviour was no exception: as Ruth Mazo Karras observes, ‘One's choice of sexual partner affected one's family and the inheritance of property. One's choice of sexual act affected the social order and therefore was of concern to the entire community’. The Church promoted chastity, and considered virginity to be the superior sexual state for men and women. Women were considered a disruptive influence and sexually predatory by both Church and state; clerical and secular misogyny were widespread; and in noble households the number of female inhabitants was kept to a minimum, their movements restricted: in aristocratic records, ‘courtesy and household books indicate a hostility towards the presence of any unnecessary women’. While the secular patriarchy was obsessed with the purity and continuation of bloodlines and the avoidance of female sexual incontinence, the Church was deeply concerned with the details of sexual behaviour in terms of specific activities and relative morality, the latter usually assessed on the basis of male sexual response.

Acceptable sexual practices were debated by canonists (celibate and, at least hypothetically, chaste men) and defined in canon law as the Church attempted to regulate every aspect of human sexual behaviour.