Dr Natalie Goodison: Salvation Narratives for the Sexually Active: Women’s Souls and Abnormal Offspring in the Middle Ages (1300-1550)
Medieval texts are well-known for their concern about the status of a person’s soul. Medieval daily life revolved around routines of feasting and fasting, of the celebration of mass and penance, all to help increase the health of the soul. Yet daily routine embodiment could threaten salvation just as much as it could harm it. Sex especially was thought to jeopardise the soul’s salvation and medieval texts are littered with indictments to abstain from sexual gratification, even going so far as to determine on which days of the week sex was permissible.
However this reticence against intercourse was also followed by a lively textual discourse, particularly evidenced in the Canterbury Tales, where sexual activity, especially illicit sexual activity, is not only present, but is comical as often as it is mocked. In medieval romance amorous paramours are prevalent, but at times romance shows great interest for the status of woman’s soul and her amorous activity. In fact, her spiritual status may even be evidenced upon her offspring, particularly when her children are abnormal. Romance features these offspring as septuplets, as a lump of flesh, as cyclops, and as sons of devils. In a society where the sins of parents may literally be visited upon their offspring, what do these abnormal children signify? Such abnormalities draw on wider medieval ideologies, particularly that a woman must orgasm in order to produce offspring, arousing disquieting notions of enjoyment in illicit sexual activity with non-humans. This work in progress talk discusses women’s sexual lives, their souls, and their abnormal offspring in medieval romance.
[IASH Work in Progress talk]