Miðaldastofa: Reading Sources for Women's Sexuality in Later Medieval England

Alice Raw flytur fyrirlestur á vegum Miðaldastofu Háskóla Íslands sem nefnist Pleasure-as-Method. Reading Sources for Women's Sexuality in Later Medieval England. Fyrirlesturinn fer fram í fyrirlestrasal Eddu, þriðjudaginn 15. október kl. 16:30. Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn.

Um fyrirlesturinn

It was received wisdom in medieval society that once women were sexually active, they had no capacity to control their sexuality. And yet, women were also responsible for policing their movement through the world so as not to invite extramarital sexual contact. In other words, their sexuality was uncontrollable, but they should control it, and were to blame if they did not. In this landscape, where sex was learned through embodied experience without social protection, how could women reach a sense of their body being their own?

This talk is an exploration of female sexual pleasure and subjectivity from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It challenges long-standing historiographical and theoretical paradigms that define medieval women’s sexuality primarily through passivity or transgression. My central methodology involves ‘reading for pleasure’ — an ethical feminist lens, applied to a diverse range of sources. These include medical treatises that recognized the health benefits of female orgasm, legal witness testimonies, didactic literature, and most importantly, ‘Women’s songs’ — vernacular women-voiced lyrics. A sophisticated Middle English lexicon for pleasure emerges, where women’s sexual agency was speakable, recognised, and integrated into the social and discursive fabric of late medieval England.

Alongside depictions of pleasure, we do too find non-consent. These expressions are powerful, sometimes painful, but tell us that medieval women were imagined to have the subjectivity, capacity, and language to consent, or not consent, or consent to one sexual partner and not another. That there was danger in sexual negotiation, but also opportunities for meaningful and pleasurable sexual encounters.

Medieval texts could teach women that their consent and pleasure were important. This is not to elide or disappear the oppressive forces that dictated women’s relationships to their bodies and their sexuality, but to hold and speak that violence while also choosing to centre subjectivity. I offer an analytical framework that more precisely describes the operations of medieval patriarchy, while insisting on space for the expression of joy and fulfilment.

Um fyrirlesarann

Alice Raw is a historian of late medieval gender and sexuality. She is the Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and one of the 2026 Snorri Sturluson Visiting Fellows at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Alice’s first book, Reading for Pleasure: Women’s Sexuality in Later Medieval England is coming out in 2027 with Cambridge University Press.