Clearly, Malory has remembered the first rule of writing… know your audience. What sets him apart from Chaucer and Shakespeare is that his works were intended for a courtly audience, not the unsophisticated, entertainment-starved masses. Malory’s tales were a good ol’ boy pat on the back to his courtly male readers while also reinforcing the concept of the honorable, chaste lady-in-waiting, waiting to be the perfect subservient wife.
Etymologically, queynte and cunt both derive from an Old Norse word, kunta, which translated to “weak female” and somewhere along the line it became the term assigned to the vagina. We will get to this more in a moment while we indulge in a brief digression.
The term vagina didn’t actually appear until 1682, more than one hundred and fifty years after the Middle Ages unofficially ended, and even this usage was not wide spread. Rather, it appeared a medical book. Ironically, the word vagina is a Latin term that translates to sheath or scabbard. Since we don’t carry around swords anymore, we may not know that both sheath and scabbard are names for the protective carrying case for a blade, knife or sword. The assumption is, of course, that a man’s penis is a sword that fits nicely into the safeguarding and sheltering vagina. The connotation we read into this is that a man and his penis are vulnerable and defenseless without a woman and her vagina. Hmm.
Now back to the cunt…
Kunta, also meaning woman in several languages in the Middle East, Near East and Africa, could also be spelled quna. Quna eventually morphed into the word queen. When the c-word is bandied around as a sexual insult or derogatory cut-down today, we doubt the perpetrators are aware of the royal pedigree of their affront.
The take-away from the chapter is this: the medieval vagina is a misnomer. The word vagina, a Latin borrowing, did not appear until after the end of the Middle Age. When we peruse medieval manuscripts, like the works of Chaucer, Malory, and Thomas of Briton, it is wise to ignore the glossing of translators. The translators are either attempting to assign profanity where it doesn’t exist, or sanitize salacious word choices made eight hundred years ago. Instead, call a cunt a cunt — or to be more accurate, a strange and unfamiliar word — queynte.
Of Porn and Peep Shows
“Should all tricks of female Lewdness fail, They all would be reviv’d in Posture Mall, The Sexes Harlequin or Scaramouon, whose various Scenes of Nakedness are such, As e’en makes Nature blush.”
We think it is fairly safe to say, since the advent of clothing, men have been longing to peek beneath the skirts of women. Since this will, quite often, incur a slap across the face, the lust-filled wandering male eye had to focus elsewhere. The solution then is the same one we see today. Pornography!
Erotic drawings are as old as mankind and, although religious and moral authority figures attempted to repress these images are various points throughout history, they are common across cultures and across time. As this is a study of medieval attitudes, we will start our journey mid-way through the Middle Ages. Drawings and images we would classify at pornography are readily found in numerous illuminated manuscripts, books in which the written word is supplemented with ornate borders, detailed lettering and illustrations in the margins. These images could have been part of the original text, but they could also have been added in later, either to clarify the written message or to add some entertainment value. We would wager a guess that the erotic images fell into the last category.
Prior to Gutenberg’s printing press, books were hand-copied and very expensive. Only the wealthy (and men) could afford books and often, a man owned only one book during his lifetime. So this book had to serve several functions — to provide a scriptural message, to hold important family records like births, deaths and marriages, and to give him something to jack off to. Scholars continue to debate whether the nudie pictures in these medieval books were a warning about elicit behavior or whether they were included for simple sexual stimulation. This debate is complicated because there are many drawings of priests engaging in sexually explicit acts, so perhaps the pictures were not so much a moral warning or pornographic eye-candy, but more of a political statement about the corruption of the hypocritical clergy.
In the latter portion of the Middle Ages, the mid- to late-1500s, printing emerged as a vehicle to get text and images into the hands of the masses. Much like the early days of the internet, the early days of printing were consumed by the printing and distribution of nudes and erotica, but often under the guise of recreating scenes from classic mythology. Because sex was an integral part of many of these stories, pornographic artists could justify their work as informing the audience about classic literature in a medieval version of the still-asked question: is it art or is it porn? One such classic tale, the story of Leda and the Swan, was quite often the inspiration for medieval erotica, partially because of the salacious subject matter. In this story, a god transforms himself into a swan and seduces an earthly maiden, Leda. In most visual renditions from the Middle Ages, Leda is shown completely nude, often in very suggestive positions. The swan is allowed to keep his feathers on.
And in many of these prints, as well as in paintings and sculptures, Leda and the swan are shown in the act of sexual intercourse (swans are one of the few birds with mammal-like external sex organs so this could, technically, be possible). The emphasis, however, is more oft on Leda, with her full frontal nudity and open vagina.
The Italian artist, Giovanni Battista Palumba, was particularly popular during the Middle Ages for his sexually explicit printing plates. One such plate, circa 1475, depicts a naked young woman, legs high in the air, on a bench. A giant penis, with legs and wings and sporting a bell around his ‘nads, is climbing onto the bench. This piece of erotica was so popular that the plate was used over and over again until the engraving was too worn down to see. It was then re-engraved and used again until the engraving faded.
Sadly, while we have textual support that this image existed, neither the plate nor any of the thousands of prints remain today. Guess we will never know what that giant, bell-ringing dick with wings looked like or why this scene was so popular. Our theory is that it had more to do with the detailed spread-eagle vagina than it did the over-blown penis.
The year 1524 technically fell in the Renaissance era, not the Middle Ages, but was so close to the cusp that the medieval mindset was still prevalent. This was the year that an Italian artist by the name of Marcantonio Raimondi released a scandalous book called I Modi, or The Way.
This book contained sixteen provocative illustrations of sexual positions, or as he called them, “postures”. This collection of pornography was so shocking that Pope Clement VII called for Raimondi’s imprisonment and ordered all copies of the book to be destroyed. Raimondi’s pal, Pietro Aretino, arranged for his release from jail, and then composed graphic and highly suggestive sonnets to accompany Raimondi’s visuals.
A new and improved edition was published in 1527 had earned the distinction of being the first text to combine sexually explicit wording with the pornographic images, and giving readers the excuse “I just read it for the articles”. This time Raimondi and Aretino managed to dodge jail time but the church demanded the destruction this new edition of porn. Only one copy survives today, and even it is not an original but a copy of a copy.