Pleasure and Violence: Sex and consent in medieval Europe 1300-1500 - MST00100M

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Module summary

Students should be aware before choosing this module that it will include discussions of sexual violence, which could be upsetting. Such discussions will be handled sensitively in class with built in comfort breaks, and potentially upsetting reading will be flagged in advance.

Though the church sought to impose strict sexual norms and to limit sex to that which took place between married couples, the late European Middle Ages nevertheless saw the rise of municipal brothels across the continent, the growth of a class of single women, new modes of expressing and voicing pleasure, and complicated understandings of sexual consent. At the same time, sexual violence was rampant, and women were often subject to coercion and abuse in their initmate relationships.

Medieval people, rich and poor, married and unmarried, were having sex. Some of it was pleasurable, some of it was coercive or violent, and some of it was had for financial or social gain. This class will disrupt any assumptions you might have about sex in the medieval world, and instead ask the following questions: What ideas about consent, both positive and negative, did medieval people hold and how did this shape their sexual relationships? Were women able to control their own sexuality, and how did they experience and voice pleasure? How heteronormative was medieval society and what space was there for queer identities? Did medieval society constitute a rape culture, and how can we study this as historians?

Our study of sex in the late Middle Ages will be grounded in primary materials from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as court records and legal documents, poetry and songs, religious and intellectual works, and art and material culture.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 1 2026-27

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
• Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
• Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

• Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
• Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
• Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
• Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

1. What is consent?
2. Sex in marriage and negotiating consent
3. ‘Unmarriages’ and sex outside of marriage
4. Voicing women’s pleasure
5. Sexual violence and coercion
6. Queerness
7. Masculinity and rape culture
8. Sex work

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100.0

Module feedback

Students have the opportunity to submit a formative essay of up to 2,000 words and receive written or oral feedback, as appropriate, from a tutor. For the summative essay (3500-4000 words), students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback in line with the University's turnaround policy. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required.

Indicative reading

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

• Carissa Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). (this book includes discussions of sexual violence, see chapter titles)
• Jamie Page, Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
• Ruth Mazo Karras, Unmarriages, Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).