>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
In my research on late-medieval and early-modern Spanish women I have found
the same to be true. They are either sexually vulnerable or sexually
voracious and this, I think, is what informs the debate about female
monastic enclosure. I recently came across an interesting quotation in
Joan Cadden's _Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages_ which quoted
the the jealous husband in the _Romance of the Rose_
as saying that all women, even nuns, "are the sworn enemies of Chastity."
I'm convinced that despite secular society's respect for the spirituality
of these women and the important devotional tasks that they performed, it's
also sort of waiting for them to "slip up."
I'm intrigued by your use of the word pornography---not that I would
necessarily disagree, especially since I haven't seen the literature in
question, I just find it a highly charged word.
Liz Lehfeldt
History Department, Cleveland State University
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