Document Type
Article
Peer Reviewed
1
Access Restrictions
Full text restricted to subscribers.
Abstract
This essay uses Emily A. Owens’s monograph Consent in the Presence of Force (2023) as a theoretical lens through which to trace complicated portrayals of sexual consent in three Middle Scots pastourelles from the National Library of Scotland’s Bannatyne Manuscript (1568) and Robert Mannyng’s penitential treatise Handlyng Synne (1303-17). It identifies a shared vocabulary of sexual consent across disparate English and Scottish texts between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries to explore how authors used these words to capture the intractable messiness of how consent functions in practice. It argues that these disparate texts lay bare the implicit violence of viewing sexual consent as a contract in which one party seeks to secure another’s yes through any means necessary to lock them into obligation to have sex.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lucia Akard and Alice Raw for being such fantastic editors and interlocutors in the field of medieval consent studies; to Rebbeca Tesfai and Kinohi Nishikawa for sharing feedback on early drafts of this essay; and to Sonia Tycko and the Radcliffe seminar titled “Historicizing Consent: What Did It Mean to Agree in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World?” for giving me the opportunity to workshop the material on consent in Handlyng Synne. I saw me thocht this hindir nycht (copied 1568), in Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, ed. Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 223–26.
Keywords
Consent, Coercion, Middle Scots, Pastourelle, Handlyng Synne, Bannatyne, Robert Mannyng, Emily A. Owens
Recommended Citation
Harris, Carissa M. "“Sey what ye wyll”: Complicating Consent in Premodern England and Scotland." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 61, No. 1 (2026)
