Much has been written about Malorian women's agency, or lack thereof, when it comes to sexual encounters. However, I think our readings of male sexuality could be more nuanced. From this perspective, I would like to suggest different readings of men, particularly Launcelot, as victims of attempted or successful coercion. Sexual agency in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur is – as always – more complex than it first appears, and the text does, in fact, contain numerous male characters who suffer attempts to coerce them into sex. This is a genuine threat to those knights: to their salvation, to their fidelity to their ladies, and sometimes to their physical health and even lives. The knights respond with fear, revulsion, and anger.

In Malory's text, we find several cases of sexual violence perpetrated against knights in general and against Launcelot specifically, yet the sexual coercion of men is not always recognised as such, and there is a certain reluctance to use the term ‘rape’ even in what appear to be obvious cases. Launcelot is the most common target of this kind of violence, which is often triggered by his prowess and his widely known love for Guinevere. I will focus here mainly on his interaction with Elaine of Corbyn and Elaine of Ascolat, as cases of rape and sexual coercion. Furthermore, those cases of sexual violence cause Launcelot deep distress and loss of identity.

As concerns terminology, I will be using both the term ‘rape’ and ‘sexual coercion’ here: not to differentiate between the gravity of the situations, but because ‘sexual coercion’ covers both successful and unsuccessful attempts, without my having to distinguish those using the unwieldy ‘attempted rape’. ‘Sexual coercion’ is generally applied to sexual assault that does not rely on physical force, but I am not primarily concerned with this legal usage. Nevertheless, the women of Malory's text do not generally use physical force. Exceptions do exist, but to achieve the sexual contact they desire, women in Malory generally rely on other means than violence: magic, threats, drugs, and deception. Yet, if we term Uther's deception of Igraine rape (3.32–4.4), as Corinne J. Saunders does, surely so are these cases.

Scholarly assessments of Chaucer's fabliaux seldom acknowledge that these tales are erotic as well as funny; even less frequently do such investigations delve into why fabliaux are a source of pleasure. As Tom Hanks and W. W. Allman note in their article ‘Rough Love: Notes toward an Erotics of The Canterbury Tales’, scholars seem ‘to have averted their gaze when Chaucer's characters leap into bed’. Allman and Hanks, as their title implies, study an erotics of violence, mostly of men doing violence to women, and they focus in particular on the Merchant's Tale and its ‘erotics of stabbing’. A more positive erotic reading of the Merchant's Tale appears in Andrew Taylor's 1996 essay ‘Reading the Dirty Bits’. Taylor notes the lingering gaze of another scholar, E. Talbot Donaldson, upon a description of young May's body:

Donaldson writes, ‘the Spring of pretty young girls is a permanent thing, and that May in their personas will always warm the masculine heart’. Taylor suggests that pleasure taken in this description and in Donaldson's gloss of it is mimetic: ‘For the young college man to share Donaldson's and Chaucer's pleasure in May is to become, like them, a connoisseur of both good writing and pretty girls, a master of ironic detachment and well-modulated heterosexual desire’.

As Roger Ascham famously observed, Malory's Morte Darthur is primarily concerned with ‘open manslaughter, and bold bawdry’. I would not disagree; in fact, I would say that these themes are not only dominant but are inextricably interwoven. Male sexuality, in Malory, is consistently portrayed as potentially violent and disruptive, dangerous not only to individuals but to the whole structure of society, and therefore in need of controlling measures. The medieval world did not, of course, often portray any form of sexuality positively. Sexual desire leads both men and women to sin: both directly in committing fornication, incest and adultery, and indirectly in committing treason or disregarding their duties. It could easily be assumed that this is a divide between the clergy on the one side, themselves compelled to live in celibacy and thus suspicious of sexual desire, and the more relaxed nobility and commons on the other, cheerfully ignoring the rules when it suited them. However, this is too simple a dichotomy. Malory himself, despite the bold bawdry, shares in the suspicion of unregulated desire, in his nostalgia for a chaster time,

In her seminal 1980 essay Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Julia Kristeva identifies ‘the abject’ as the human reaction to a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between the subject and the object, the interior and the exterior, or the self and the Other. Her classic example of a site of abjection is that of the human corpse, which although a continuation of the dead person's corporeal presence also becomes simultaneously a marker of his or her spiritual absence, and thus must be rejected or repressed, causing the subjective experience of ‘horror’. Kristeva argues that human rationality necessarily involves a series of such repressions, and that the association of the human with the unrepressed thus becomes a site of potential tension. ‘The abject confronts us’, she suggests, ‘with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’. This borderland between the acceptable and the unacceptable thus becomes the site of the carnivalesque, the comedic and the socially transgressive, as attested by post-medieval writers from Rabelais to Bakhtin and beyond.

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, the abject was also a major concern for the poet William Dunbar, writing at the court of King James IV. Dunbar's poems are critically regarded as some of the most brilliant – and, frequently, the most offensive – writings produced in late medieval/ early modern Scotland. Many of his satirical pieces depict the court of James (who would later go on to lose his life at the disastrous Battle of Flodden) at play, simultaneously parodying and affirming the excesses of late medieval/Renaissance aristocratic culture.

George Ripley, in his apostrophic preface to God in the Compound of Alchemy, claims to have ‘renounced … fleshly lust’ and asks God to provide him (and, presumably, other worthy alchemists) with His ‘secret treasure’: ‘Shew us thy secrets and to us be bounteous’ (21.4). Throughout the Compound, Ripley guides readers away from worldly pleasures, urging them instead to focus their desires on God-granted alchemical secrets and ‘our stone of great delight’ (37.2). Likewise, Thomas Norton, in his prologue to the Ordinal of Alchemy, warns of avaricious would-be alchemists who ‘in fyre / Of brennyng couetise haue therto desire’ (27–8). Norton emphatically shuns ‘wordly werkis’ in favour of alchemical ‘connyng’, advising his reader to ‘sett fully his trust’ in God and ‘in connyng be fixid al his lust’ (509, 517, 535–6): ‘For above all erthlye thynge / I mooste desire & love connynge’ (2595–6). Desire or lust, in both the Compound and the Ordinal, is thus redirected from the physical body and material world toward the divinely inspired knowledge of the alchemical corpus. Moreover, as I will illustrate, Norton and Ripley both direct their reader to focus on the text's rhetorical structures in order to achieve desired alchemical objectives.

In her 2007 essay ‘“Wordy vnthur wede”: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain’, Amanda Hopkins examines the interplay of clothing and nudity in creating erotic moments, noting the connection of eroticism with female aggression on the one hand, and the erotic link between female nudity and passivity on the other. Lancelot's encounter with Elaine at Corbyn in Malory's Morte Darthur is marked by erotic moments featuring female nudity that appear emblematic of the latter. The eroticism of the moment when Lancelot rescues the ‘dolerous lady’ (2.791) from the boiling water by taking her by the hand, ‘naked as a nedyll’ (2.792), depends both on her total nudity and her status as victim – that is to say that the moment is erotic not just because she is naked, but because that nudity is not of her own making. Later, when Elaine ‘skypped oute of her bedde all naked’ (2.795) and kneels at Lancelot's feet to beg for her life, both her nudity and her vulnerability work to produce an erotic effect. Certainly Lancelot quickly changes his mind and turns from threatening her to embracing her. Yet to view Elaine as completely passive is a mistake – at the least her passivity is manipulated and Lancelot's presence in her bed is the result of machinations in which Elaine plays a willing part.

Sir Thopas's resolution to forsake human women in order to seek out an elf-queen as his lover satirizes one of the most well-known romance motifs: the fairy mistress who offers herself to the human protagonist of the narrative. It is characteristic of this motif that, with relatively few exceptions, the fairy offers sexual intercourse to the hero without any demand for the commitment of marriage and without stipulating any directly connected negative consequences. The motif's origins are a good deal earlier than those of romance – it features in several early medieval Irish narratives – but it is with romance that the motif is most particularly associated. It is noticeable that this extramarital sex is generally not explicitly condemned in the romances. Of course, romance authors are not prone to sermonizing digressions, so this might be passed over as merely a reflex of the genre; however, condemnation need not be overtly stated to still be clear and, in this respect, romance differs markedly from fabliaux, the other genre which frequently portrays extra-marital sex.

In the late fifteenth-century Squire of Low Degree, the incompetent protagonist woos a Hungarian princess in a way that seems to subject the romance genre to derivative, almost parodic, excess. This excess, however, offers particular insight into the representation of wooing in Middle English romance more broadly. While many romance heroines assume their suitors will display knightly prowess to win their love, this princess seems so aware of the Squire's shortcomings that she explains to him precisely what he must do, focusing on the rather boy-scout-like logistics of riding ‘Over hylles and dales, and hye mountaines, / In wethers wete, both hayle and raynes’, and lodging ‘under a tre, / Among the beastes wyld and tame’. Reminiscent here of how a Sir Thopas might understand chivalry, the text continues its overzealous attempt to ape romance when the princess exhaustively details the accoutrements that she expects from a suitor (203–30), and it is equally unable to find the right register when she offers to bankroll his required adventures (251–5). The envious steward's attempts to ruin the Squire by exposing his amorous inclinations are predictable enough; the results, however, have been seen as uncharacteristic of romance, since the king does not object to the Squire courting his daughter, but rather instructs the steward:

THE FIFTEENTH century contains many examples of expressions of erotic desire, in genres ranging from romances to hagiographies. Whether the texts aim at sexual arousal or pious horror in the reader, these genres were intended for publication. Even the most explicit depiction of private life in the fifteenth century available to us, Margery Kempe's Life, was intended for the public. However, this is not the case with the private letters in collections such as the Paston, Stonor and Plumpton papers. In these letters, we encounter men and women expressing erotic desire in what they perceived as private communications – as evinced by the occasionally stated request that the recipient burn the letter. This essay investigates the gendered voices of desire in fifteenth-century letters between spouses or prospective spouses, and suggests a new reading of the discourse of dominance/ submission.

Reading these letters today, we encounter a number of limitations. Firstly, the preserved letters of the fifteenth century spring from a small social group, mainly from the strata of clerical and upper-class correspondents. Although the clerical letters may well contain comments on erotic love, for letters between spouses, where erotic love was permitted and practised, we must turn to the nobility, gentry and merchant classes. Thus, the understanding of erotic love inside marriage we draw from the letters is limited to those social strata, to which the writers of the three collections all belong.