I'm distracting myself from the parlous state of adult continuing
education in south Wales by considering an equally depressing subject
- medieval pornographic poetry about religious women. We seem to
have rather a lot of this in our Welsh medieval literary canon: for
details see, e.g., Jane Cartwright's article on medieval Welsh women
in religious communities in Medieval Women in their Communities
(University of Wales Press, 1997). Basically the poetry veers between
regarding religious women as sexually active and regarding their vows
of chastity as a challenge. Jane Cartwright sees it as representative
of more general attitudes to religious women in medieval Welsh
society but I wonder whether this is so.
I also wonder whether this
poetry is really specific to Wales or whether its preservation in
classic literary texts is an accident of survival, possibly because
so much of it was written by our best-known lyric poet, Dafydd ap
Gwilym. Does anyone know of other examples in other literary
traditions, and how representative are these considered to be?
Maddy Gray
Department for Continuing Education
UW Cardiff
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