Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Revel, the Melodye and the Bisynesse of Solas
- ‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch
- The Lady's Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature
- Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance
- ‘wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain
- ‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
- How's Your Father? Sex and the Adolescent Girl in Sir Degarré
- The Female ‘Jewish’ Libido in Medieval Culture
- Eros and Error: Gross Sexual Transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi
- Perverse and Contrary Deeds: The Giant of Mont Saint Michel and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
- Her Desire and His: Letters between Fifteenth-century Lovers
- Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois' ‘Grates ago veneri’
- A Fine and Private Place
- Erotic Historiography: Writing the Self and History in Twelfth-century Romance and the Renaissance
- Index
‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Revel, the Melodye and the Bisynesse of Solas
- ‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch
- The Lady's Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature
- Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance
- ‘wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain
- ‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
- How's Your Father? Sex and the Adolescent Girl in Sir Degarré
- The Female ‘Jewish’ Libido in Medieval Culture
- Eros and Error: Gross Sexual Transgression in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi
- Perverse and Contrary Deeds: The Giant of Mont Saint Michel and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
- Her Desire and His: Letters between Fifteenth-century Lovers
- Sex in the Sight of God: Theology and the Erotic in Peter of Blois' ‘Grates ago veneri’
- A Fine and Private Place
- Erotic Historiography: Writing the Self and History in Twelfth-century Romance and the Renaissance
- Index
Summary
THE LATE fourteenth-century romance Sir Launfal narrates the financial, martial and erotic adventures of one of the lesser-known knights of the Arthurian court. In Thomas Chestre's popularised version of Marie de France's Breton Lai (Lanval), our hero's woes begin when he is excluded from the Arthurian court's largesse after he refuses the predatory Guinevere's sexual advances. Shamed by his resulting poverty, which is only amplified by the financial demands of his role as Arthur's royal steward, Launfal takes his leave of the court and departs for Caerleon, where he vainly seeks succour at the hands of the city's mayor, who has benefited in the past from Launfal's own generosity. However, a knight out of favour in the royal court is of no current use to the mayor, who begrudgingly offers only meagre lodgings, and this is only forthcoming after Launfal sarcastically rebukes him regarding the value of past loyalties. Denied not only the company of men owing to his poverty, but also access to the Church, as he lacks clean clothing in which to visit it, Launfal is approaching the depths of despair. After a final humiliation of being excluded from the invitations to a Trinity feast hosted by the mayor, Launfal rides out into the forest to seek refuge both from the ridicule of the townsfolk and from his own sense of shame.
It is in this moment of extreme financial deprivation and social exclusion, the pathos of which is further intensified by his fall into a fen while riding to the forest, that Launfal encounters what turns out to be the unsought answer to his social and pecuniary predicament.
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- The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain , pp. 71 - 81Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007