Pastourelle Encounters

Abstract

This chapter moves from exploring obscenity's role among men to focus on its relationship to sexual violence in pastourelles. It shows how women's obscenity has the potential to disrupt rape narratives and educate audiences about consent and power. By outlining the two poems — All to lufe and not to fenyi in the Bannatyne Manuscript and The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the chapter illustrates two ways that Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts engage with rape. In some texts, women's experiences of violation are not the chief focus, and we rarely hear from the victim herself. Instead, rape functions as a literary trope. The chapter argues that pastourelles are centrally concerned with women's experiences of the threat of sexual violence, and their female speakers articulate resistance, fear, anguish, and anger in response to that threat. Echoing the rape-prevention strategies of female-voiced conduct texts, the chapter reveals how pastourelles show how fictive female voices were imagined as educating young women about how best to navigate life as embodied subjects in a world where assault is an ever-present possibility.