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’.

Gower's poetry has more often been associated with the moral than the erotic, courtesy of Chaucer's provocative description in Troilus and Criseyde. Studies such as Diane Watt's Amoral Gower have gone some way to counteract this, and open up the range of Gower's discourses on the political, ethical and erotic issues of his time. The Confessio Amantis connects directly and frankly through the persona of Amans with the tensions age brings to lust and love. Venus may tell Amans that ‘Loves lust and lockes hore / In chamber acorden neveremore’, but the Confessio shows us Gower understood the complexities of impulse and behaviour that age and love created. In this essay I shall concentrate on how these complexities are brought out through the exchanges between Amans and Genius, as well as Amans and Venus, showing how the Confessio exploits conventions of courtly and classical literature to examine an essentially human experience with humour, wit and perspicacity.

All of Gower's three largest works look at sexual behaviours, but the Mirour de l'Omme (1376–79) and the Vox Clamantis (begun in 1377) focus on the sinful nature of lechery, rather than looking at love and the more erotic complications that this can bring. The Confessio, written around 1390, chooses to explore this more elusively challenging context, and to do so in English, through the diegetic alter ego of Amans.

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:

Richard II's reign was marked by a particular concern to establish the king as a divinely confirmed ruler. This concern manifested itself in the construction of an image of powerful and authoritative majesty that was to prove ironically vulnerable and insubstantial under pressure. However, the poets who wrote during Richard's reign did not concentrate on portraying kings as possessors of a quasi-divine status, or directly reflect on or engage with Richard's governance; they did, as we have seen, unite instead in their focus on the individual subject's place in a kingdom beset with corrupt practices and unstable leadership. This kingdom is seldom recognisable as Richard's, and yet each poet clearly writes in response to what is happening within their immediate experience. Charles Muscatine, writing at roughly the same time that John Burrow was composing Ricardian Poetry, defined the period as one of ‘culture in crisis’, and his work shows convincingly how Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Langland illustrate that tension in their poems. Burrow also finds common elements between the poets, concluding that