In the last chapter of this study, the focus is on framing the non-condemnatory possibilities concerning same-sex sexuality in later medieval English culture. This aspect of the question comprises the other side of the story of the themes scrutinised at length in previous chapters, the side that escaped and at times even opposed the variegated judgements concerning same-sex acts and desires. After having considered how and why such matters were confronted and condemned, it is now time to add that the later medieval English past may have more to offer. Among the questions yet unasked are those concerning reclaiming possibilities for same-sex desires, relationships, and love that may have survived all the condemnations, whether on the level of ideas and imagination or in the course of the lives of some actual later medieval English individuals. I anchor my arguments in this chapter in various sources ranging from the traces we find in literature to those concerning the possible actual lives of some fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury English men and women.

The deliberately provocative quotation above is again from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In pointing towards varied examples of past marriages, I wish to recall the late John Boswell's criticised claim concerning what he called “same-sex unions” in his last study, The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1995). Here I will try to offer a consideration of the possibilities concerning same-sex relationships in relation to lifelong bonds and vows and praise for the ideal love between members of the same sex taking place in later medieval England. The sources on which I draw are literature and pieces of evidence concerning some actual lives. The arguments in this final chapter swing trapeze-like between the possible and the probable in later medieval culture. A word on the relationship of this chapter to other parts of this book may also be in order: this last part of my work no longer focuses primarily on explicit or silenced same-sex sexuality, but rather on same-sex friendship and love in the terms dictated by the later medieval English themselves.