Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Revel, the Melodye and the Bisynesse of Solas
- ‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch
- The Lady's Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature
- Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance
- ‘wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain
- ‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
- How's Your Father? Sex and the Adolescent Girl in Sir Degarré
- The Female ‘Jewish’ Libido in Medieval Culture
- Eros and Error: Gross Sexual Transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi
- Perverse and Contrary Deeds: The Giant of Mont Saint Michel and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
- Her Desire and His: Letters between Fifteenth-century Lovers
- Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois' ‘Grates ago veneri’
- A Fine and Private Place
- Erotic Historiography: Writing the Self and History in Twelfth-century Romance and the Renaissance
- Index
Perverse and Contrary Deeds: The Giant of Mont Saint Michel and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Revel, the Melodye and the Bisynesse of Solas
- ‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch
- The Lady's Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature
- Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance
- ‘wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain
- ‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
- How's Your Father? Sex and the Adolescent Girl in Sir Degarré
- The Female ‘Jewish’ Libido in Medieval Culture
- Eros and Error: Gross Sexual Transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi
- Perverse and Contrary Deeds: The Giant of Mont Saint Michel and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
- Her Desire and His: Letters between Fifteenth-century Lovers
- Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois' ‘Grates ago veneri’
- A Fine and Private Place
- Erotic Historiography: Writing the Self and History in Twelfth-century Romance and the Renaissance
- Index
Summary
BY WAY OF introduction, I would like to look again at one of the most well-known words in the alliterative Morte Arthure. In the proem, just when the poet turns from the Almighty to his earthly listeners, he gives this indication of his subject matter:
Ʒe that liste has to lyth or luffes for to here
Off elders of alde tym and of theire awke dedys,
How they were lele in theire lawe, and louede God Almyghty.
In apposition to the ‘elders’ are their deeds, which the poet calls ‘awke’, in Edmund Brock's gloss ‘perverse and contrary’, in Krishna's ‘strange, perverse’. It is a rare usage, but Malory's employment of the word in his ‘Tristram’ section is instructive: ‘And therewithal sir Trystrames strode unto hym and toke his lady from him, and with an awke stroke he smote of hir hede clene’. In his glossary to Vinaver's edition, G. L. Brooke supplies ‘back-handed’ for awke, and for awkewarde (at 230:10, also describing a sword-stroke) ‘with a backward stroke’. ‘Awke dedys’, then, according to the alliterative poem's argument, play out over the total genealogy of the elders in question, which genealogy, we should recall, is not only Arthurian, but, as indicated in the poem's concluding lines, also Trojan:
Thus endis kyng Arthure, as auctors allegges,
That was of Ectores blude, the kynge sone of Troye,
And of sir Pryamous, the prynce, praysed in erthe;
ffro thethene broghte the Bretons alle his bolde eldyrs
In-to Bretayne the brode, as the Bruytte tellys. (4342–6)
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- The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain , pp. 116 - 131Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007