Chapter 6 - Rape, the Pastourelle, and the Female Voice in CB 185

Summary

The pastourelle is a difficult genre for a modern audience: these songs tell, usually in the first person, of the encounter of a knight with a woman, typically a shepherdess, alone in the woods or fields. The knight will attempt to seduce the shepherdess: occasionally, he is successful; sometimes, the shepherdess drives him away. In a significant minority of songs, the knight rapes an unwilling shepherdess. The pastourelles in which rape occurs tend to trivialise this sexual violence by portraying the victim as one who receives sexual gratification and blaming her for being alone and vulnerable. At the same time, they glory in the sexual prowess of the aggressor, while also parodying his courtly words and contrasting them with his violent actions. Even if rape does not occur, the threat of sexual violence is constantly present in the pastourelle. Underlying these poems is the view, expressed by Andreas Capellanus in his De amore, that peasants make love like beasts and that a noble can thus merely ‘take’ their love. The similarities of these sentiments to what is described as ‘rape culture’ on American college campuses today are obvious and have been described by Carissa Harris. Scholarly responses to these poems often repeat tropes from modern debates, with many arguments revolving around whether the female victim really wanted to be raped. As Geri Smith notes, many scholars are all too eager to take the portrayal of the shepherdess in the pastourelle as happy or impressed after her rape at face value, ignoring the fact that anything the shepherdess says or does is mediated through the male rapist's voice: ‘even if simultaneous or after-thefact consent were not self-contradictory concepts, the pastourelle's privileging of masculine perspective and voice strongly problematises any depiction of the woman's acquiescence’. The entire pastourelle genre is deeply entwined with rape, and the attempts of some medieval authors to soften the blow of the rapes by turning the girl's resistance into a show may indicate that some of the poems’ original audiences were also uncomfortable with this situation. At the same time, the poems are infused with a misogyny that should not be downplayed.