Songs of Wantonness

Abstract

This chapter investigates how scribal practices in sixteenth-century lyric miscellanies can incite audiences' empathy for educational purposes. It focuses on the potential for educative empathy in two sixteenth-century manuscript anthologies of early Tudor court songs, the Ritson Manuscript and MS Ashmole 176. The chapter argues that we can claim these lyrics as part of an “affective inheritance” of gendered struggle that persists to this day. They depict the first-person experiences of rape survivors and victims of exploitation in vivid, unflinching detail, encouraging audiences to identify with their perspectives, acknowledge them as sexual subjects, and understand how structural inequalities manifest in individual harms. Like the pastourelles in the Welles Anthology, these “songs of wantonness” both illuminate and are inflected by the courtly complaints surrounding them. By staging these contrasting perspectives and mobilizing obscenity's educative potential, the anthologies in the chapter explore the power dynamics in erotic relationships and probe how those dynamics are shaped by physical space, bodily difference, and intersectional disadvantage.