Not Just (or at least, not only) Bawdy: Pleasure-Seeking in Later Medieval England

This essay applies pleasure as an interpretative category to argue that conversations about sexual pleasure in medical texts constituted a coherent vision of pleasure as related to consent, where successful marital sex culminated in mutual climax through penile-vaginal intercourse, via foreplay that ensured this outcome. Engaging with contemporary consent theory that complicates or is even sceptical of the idea that consent, ethics, and pleasure are easily or un-complexly mutual, I disentangle medieval commentary on marital sex, where consent was the minimum in that it was presupposed through the marital contract, but pleasure functioned as a repeated affirmation of sexual enjoyment within marriage. The first section examines the role of pleasure in medical discourse, and the tensions it raises with canonical views on sexual pleasure. The second section follows the words of medical discourse for specific body parts into their ‘bawdier contexts’, to provide a sense of how people in medieval England described their bodies and how the physical responses of pleasure helped to form these metaphors.