Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education

in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa Harris (review)

Kersti Francis

Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Volume 50, 2019,

pp. 219-221 (Review)

Published by University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Medieval and

Renaissance Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2019.0022

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734088

[ Access provided at 23 Jul 2020 20:07 GMT from UCLA Library ]

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and all of the illogical or inequitable applications of trust as the philosophical

or legal ones. In doing so, he examines the history of an idea but the history of
an idea as it was conceived of and adhered to by people. The clear prose and
the succinct and pointed introductions and conclusions are also a benefit to any
reader, but especially for those just entering the field. The editing was
impeccable. Trustworthy Men is a magisterial work, nuanced in argument and
detailed in foundation.
J. A. T. SMITH, English, Pepperdine University

Carissa Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual

Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2018)
285 pp.
Whether or not you like this volume will depend on your methodological point-
of-view. Strict historicists will find this book emotional, incendiary, and
subjective, yet Harris’ scholarship is one of the most exciting and poignant
feminist analyses of the Middle Ages published in a decade. If you’re a scholar
who hates the idea of identity politics in the classroom or in one’s
methodology, or the thought that “the personal and political are also historical,”
this book is decidedly not your cup of tea (4). And that’s a shame, because to
miss reading Obscene Pedagogies is to miss what this reviewer hopes will play
a major role in the future of medieval studies: an intersectional critique of
medieval misogyny. Influenced both by Black feminist thought and Harris’
own lived experience as a mixed-race woman, this is a book that tackles
medieval violence against women (whether real or imagined), and exposes the
way obscenity can both create and destroy community. Beyond its investment
in the Middle Ages, Obscene Pedagogies takes on an equally-ambitious task:
“recognizing how the past’s violence lives on in the present” (9). Harris draws
connections between medieval lyrics celebrating sexual violence to modern
displays of rape culture by athletes, presidents, and, in several powerful
moments, examples drawn from both medievalist scholarship and interpersonal
interactions.
Obscene Pedagogies is indebted in particular to the works of Carolyn
Dinshaw, Sara Ahmed’s recent Living a Feminist Life (Raleigh: Duke
University Press, 2017), and Nicole Nolan Sidhu’s Indecent Exposure: Gender,
Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Despite the recent publication of Dr.
Sidhu’s excellent volume on obscenity, Harris’s monograph deftly
distinguishes itself from prior work by arguing for the pedagogical benefit of
obscenity for medieval sexual education and its relationship to modern rape
culture. It is in these connections that Ahmed’s influence is most apparent.
Chapter one, for instance, connects several erotic medieval lyrics voiced by and
for women with the impact of twentieth and twenty-first century iterations of
gender-segregated abstinence-only sexual education on contemporary cultural
consciousness, using examples from Harris’ own upbringing within American
Protestant purity culture to powerfully demonstrate the mental efficacy and
impact, both harmful and helpful, of same-sex sexual pedagogy. Harris’ prose
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is sharp, witty, commanding, and invites debate; excerpts from Obscene

Pedagogies would be extremely generative for an undergraduate course on
medieval sex, gender, lyric, or women’s writing, while its introduction should
be suggested reading for every medievalist in light of our field’s current
cultural crisis.
In five chapters and two appendices, Obscene Pedagogies covers a wide
range of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Middle English and Middle Scots
literature; two appendices, “Songs of Lusty Maidens’ and “Songs of
Wantonness” bring to light several previously-unstudied lyrics. Chapter One,
“‘Felawe Masculinity’: Teaching Rape Culture in Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales,” connects Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale” to the 2016 Ched
Evans rape trial in Wales. This chapter is unique as the sole section to focus on
a canonical medieval text, making it perhaps the most immediately useful for
the medievalist instructor. Focusing on the use of “swyve” in The Canterbury
Tales and the treatment of rape and women’s bodily autonomy in the twenty-
first century, Harris argues that obscenity “creates gendered pedagogical
community and teaches men that sexual aggression is both necessary and
predatory” (24). The second chapter, “‘With a Cunt’: Obscene Misogyny and
Masculine Pedagogical Community in the Middle Scots Flyting,” also
examines the interconnection between masculinity and misogyny in sixteenth-
century Scottish insult poetry. As in chapter one, this section argues that men
use obscenity to build community and teach each other sexual mores, but
whereas the code of masculinity espoused in the Canterbury Tales emphasizes
having as much sex with as many women as possible, Harris demonstrates here
that the literature of the Scottish court nearly two centuries later argued the
opposite. Through close-readings of insult poetry, this chapter reveals that just
as medieval misogyny could prepare men to treat women’s bodies as
expendable, it can also portray sexual intercourse as dangerous, polluting, and
emasculating. This chapter concludes with an examination of the work of MC
Angel Haze, whose hip-hop lyrics call out misogyny in modern hip-hop culture
through obscenity. As with her interrogation of the Ched Evans case, this
analysis reinforces both the timeliness of Harris’ book and the resonances of
the medieval past into the present.
For this reviewer, the most innovative elements of Obscene Pedagogies
appear in chapters three and four, which excavate the under-studied genres of
Middle Scots pastourelles, alewife poems, and singlewomen erotic songs.
Chapter 3, “Pastourelle Encounters: Rape, Consent, and Sexual Negotiation,”
examines the pastourelle tradition in medieval England and Scotland. Like the
first two chapters, this section focuses on same-sex sexual pedagogy through
obscenity, but by turning to woman-voiced lyrics, Harris skillfully
demonstrates that, for women, obscenity can “articulate female desire...shed
light on inequality, and…teach audiences about rape’s harms (103). In both this
and Chapter Four, “Pedagogies of Pleasure: Peer Education in Medieval
Women’s Writing,” Obscene Pedagogies complicates its argument regarding
obscenity and community. While obscenity’s gendered power always builds
homosocial community through the denigration of the opposite sex, Harris
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suggests men denigrate women’s sexual agency to create alliances that

perpetuate rape culture. Women, instead, connect via lyric warnings and
narratives of untrustworthy men to create a quasi-coalition against violent
misogyny. Chapter Four concludes with examples from modern purity culture
to demonstrate the ways in which these systems of homosocial sexual
pedagogy might continue into the twenty-first century.
Finally, Chapter Five, “Songs of Wantonness: Voicing Desire in Two Lyric
Anthologies,” turns to scribal practices in the Rison Manuscript (BL MS
Additional 5665) and MS Ashmole 176, both of which contain Tudor court
song voiced by rape survivors and mediated in their reproduction by male
scribes. This chapter brings a codicological lens to a project that has, until now,
focused primarily on the content, not the materiality, of Middle English and
Scots lyrics. By examining the compilation of and scribal practices within these
manuscripts, Harris provides a new angle through which to examine the
pedagogical impact of obscenity while making explicit her prowess with book
history and manuscript culture that underpins her previous chapters.
Immediately following this chapter are two helpful appendices to Chapters
Four and Five, which provide editions of each of the previously-underknown
lyrics analyzed within, which all scholars, regardless of methodological
background, should find useful for undergraduate teaching and personal study.
The strengths of Obscene Pedagogies far outweigh its weaknesses, which
are few. Despite its avowed indebtedness to Carolyn Dinshaw’s work, for
instance, queer theory remains more of a background actor. While feminist
theory and queer theory are rightfully treated as separate entities in medieval
studies, to discuss women’s speech and community without any mention of
Karma Lochrie’s groundbreaking analysis of gossip or the obvious homoerotic
implications of these lyrics seems a bit of an oversight. Irrespective of these
issues, Harris’s volume poses a strong challenge to both methodological
“purity” and the future of medieval studies by skillfully revealing what comes
from connecting the personal and the political to the historical: a critical new
discussion of rape culture, misogyny, and medieval women’s writing that is at
once both urgently needed for our present moment and timeless.
KERSTI FRANCIS, English, UCLA

Nicholas J. Higham, King Arthur: The Making of the Legend (New Haven:
Yale University Press 2018) xi + 380pp, ill.
Few topics in late antique and medieval history elicit scholarly groans quite like
the idea of a supposedly “factual” King Arthur. Yet historians and other
scholars made cases for Arthur’s existence in historical and literary studies
until the 1980s. For academics today, the question of the realism of King
Arthur has been largely banished to popular books, video games, and movies.
However, Nicholas Higham, in King Arthur: The Making of a Legend revisits
the topic. In this long-overdue work, Higham gathers all the disparate theories
surrounding a factual King Arthur and one by one negates or refutes them,
arguing instead that Arthur was entirely the invention of those who wrote about
him, no more real to the British people than Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Who.