Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Be My (Obscene) Teenage Dream: Scribal Variants and the Merchant’s Tale

Hello! This is Lucy, and it’s my great pleasure to be writing my first blog post as the new postdoctoral researcher on the COMMode team. I’m joining COMMode having just completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford, where my doctoral work focused on the adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for “young readers”—that is, children, who apparently should read and benefit from Father Chaucer, but must be protected from Chaucer’s obscenity at all costs. This internal contradiction creates challenging conditions for adaptors, especially given that Chaucer’s texts deal with issues that are considered inappropriate for child readers; think farting, swearing, sex, and sexual violence.

How does the youth of a character who’s doing obscene things—or having obscene things done to her—affect how we might interpret that obscenity?

Fresh off making my own mini-adaptation of the Merchant’s Tale with the aid of Kristen’s brilliant guide, today I’m thinking about how tinier, even seemingly minuscule variations in a manuscript can affect the way we read a text. The change in this case is in a single word—or, to be specific, a single number, that crops up in the Merchant’s Tale: the age of May, the notoriously naughty young wife of elderly Januarie.

Age and obscenity intersect in fascinating ways, and perhaps it’s not surprising that questions about those interactions have already surfaced repeatedly throughout the COMMode project. For instance, are outspoken older women somehow inherently socially obscene? How might Chaucer’s fabliaux resonate differently with teenagers than with adults? Or in this case: How does the youth of a character who’s doing obscene things—or having obscene things done to her—affect the way readers of any age interpret that obscenity? This is something I’ve written about recently for New College Notes, and here I’d like to dig a little deeper into how age and obscenity play off one another and even amplify one another’s effects.

The Merchant’s Tale: it’s gross on many levels!

There are various obscene moments in the Merchants Tale, which is structured around a typical fabliau plotline: the marriage between a very old, lusty man (the senex amans) and a very young woman (the malmariée) who prefers her young lover. The latter two eventually consummate their relationship in one of the raunchiest sex scenes in medieval literature, in which young May asks her own (temporarily blind) husband to lift her into a pear tree, where she and her paramour promptly get busy:

And sodeynly anon this Damyan │ And suddenly anon, this Damyan

Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng. │Began to pull up the smock, and in he shoved.

(IV 2352-2353)

While the “throng” is one of the tale’s more famous obscene set-pieces, the tale also features the word swyve, essentially the Middle English equivalent of the verb fuck. And we can’t forget that there are other obscene sex scenes as well, especially the newlyweds’ deeply repulsive wedding night, in which Januarie shakes his flappy…neck-skin (IV 1849). The Merchant is a little obsessed with Januarie’s skin, actually, and not in a good way. The texture of Januarie’s face, rubbing against May’s, is literally likened to “the skyn of a houndfyssh” (IV 1825). (For those not up on their medieval ichthyology, a houndfyssh or dogfish is a small shark, and it looks like this.)

These sex scenes are obscenely humorous precisely because of the age of the participating characters, as their not-coincidental names make very clear. After another jab at Januarie’s ugly, wrinkly neck (seriously!), May “preyseth nat his pleyyng worth a bene” (IV 1854). She’s possibly already planning to “pley” with someone else—someone like Damyan, the young squire.

Some scribes were so keen to emphasize Januarie’s decrepitude and sexual atrophy that they added extra lines to the pear-tree sex scene, in which Damyan’s penis is described as “[a] greet tente, a thrifty [and] a long”:

She saide it was [th]e meriest fit │ She said it was the merriest fit

That ever in her lif she was at yet │ That ever in her life she [had had] yet

Milordis tente she saide servith me not thus │ My lord’s roll [Januarie’s penis], she said, serves me not thus

He foldith twifolde be swete Jhesus… │ He folds in half, by sweet Jesus [1]

Januarie’s elderliness is obviously a source of humor throughout the tale, not least because he loses his sight in old age, enabling May and Damyan to have sex literally in front of him without his knowledge. But let’s think about May’s age, too. If, as Carissa Harris has argued, this moment allows for the “important addition of May’s voice to the coital scene,”[2] that voice also belongs to a character whose youth is consistently sexualized, and in some cases exaggerated.

My research regularly has to engage with what it means to be “young,” and I’m always on the lookout for ways that authors signal age for their characters, not just their readers. In some cases, we have to infer characters’ age from context. We deduce that the Wife of Bath, for instance, is middle-aged, though we’re not sure how much older than forty she might be (III 601). We do know that she’s had five husbands, travelled widely, and declares that “age, allas… / Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith” (WBPro, III 474-75). At the beginning of her Prologue, however, the Wife  uses a number to describe herself at the time of her first marriage: “[L]ordynges,” she says, “sith I twelve yeer was of age, […] / Housbondes at chirche dore I have had five” (III 4-5). Though technically legal within Church statutes, a twelve-year-old bride was scandalous enough for Alexander Pope, in his eighteenth-century version, to discreetly increase her age to fifteen.[3]

Like the Wife of Bath, May is a famously young bride. She’s the spring to Januarie’s winter, ever “fresshe” where he is “oold and hoor” (IV 1269, 1859). As Januarie puts it in one of the tale’s many revolting food metaphors,

[‘]Oold fish and yong flesh wolde I have fayn. │ Old fish and young flesh would I prefer

Bet is,’ quod he, ‘a pyk than a pykerel, │ Better is, quoth he, a pike than a pickerel [an old pike]

And bet than old boef is the tendre veel.[’] │ And better than old beef is the tender veal

(IV 1418-1420)

But Januarie doesn’t simply want a young, “tendir” woman as a wife/meal. He’s pretty specific about how young is young enough:

I wol noon oold wyf han in no manere. │ I will not have an old wife, certainly not

She shal nat passe twenty yeer, certayn; │ She shall not pass twenty years, for certain;

[…]

I wol no woman thritty yeer of age; │ I want no woman thirty years of age;

It is but bene-straw and greet forage.  │ [That would be] but bean-straw and animal fodder.

(IV 1417-1422)

We conclude that May is very likely younger than twenty—though how much younger, we can’t say. All we know is that when Januarie finally finds his perfect wife, she satisfies his conditions (though she has no title, “suffiseth hem hir yowthe and hir beautee” (IV 1625-1626)). If the Wife of Bath is any comparison, she might be as young as twelve.

Yes, that’s right. The female participant in “arguably the most explicit instance of sexual penetration in the entire Middle English literary corpus” [4] might be a twelve-year-old.

Wait, ew…what?

Before we get too weirded out, remember that Chaucer (via the Merchant) isn’t specific about May’s age. Sure, she might be twelve, but she could also be thirteen…or fourteen…or fifteen…or sixteen…or even nineteen![5]

Instead, Januarie’s comments about May’s age—that she’s no more than twenty, and definitely no thirty-year-old bean-straw—seem to invite us to laugh at Januarie’s narrow-mindedness and misogyny. The marriage of twelve-year-olds was technically legal, but hardly ever consummated, and even twenty was still considered quite young.[6] In The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, Katherine Harvey even uses the Merchant’s Tale to point out that large age-gaps were hardly the accepted norm in medieval societies.[7]

But we can’t ignore that weird feeling. Whether we’re meant to laugh at them or not, Januarie’s absurd and arbitrary age requirements irrevocably signal to readers that May is young—tantalizingly young, even, for those readers who gravitate towards the erotic elements of the tale. It’s the equivalent of advertising a porn clip with words like “teen,” “young,” or “girls under18.” That last phrase is one of the keywords highlighted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in his extensive exposé of online porn platforms turning a blind eye to child sex trafficking.

Disability studies and disability advocates have long cautioned against the use of metaphors like this one.[8] I use it here because the Merchant’s Tale, too, exploits the perceived relationship between physical sightedness and other modes of seeing—not only in Januarie’s blindness but also through the reader’s lack of visual clarity about what happens in the pear tree. For centuries, readers of Chaucer have—let’s say—overlooked the fact that May might be much younger than even other Chaucerian heroines/malmariées such as Alisoun in the Miller’s Tale, who is stated to be eighteen (I 3223). Why? Because May is perceived as a scheming shrew, a sex maniac, a shameless adulteress—all of which she might still be. But we’d do well to think about how the metaphor of blindness actually makes us less careful readers, because we too have  “blind spots” – or, in a better and more rigorous formulation, we may have areas where our biases about obscenity, obscene actors, and obscene humor obstruct more nuanced or even more disturbing readings.

One of those areas might surround age. This is something I’m looking forward to exploring more, but there’s already some evidence to support the idea that May’s implied age is more than a throwaway joke about Januarie’s ludicrous womanizing. Of the 84 or so extant manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, twelve actually lower the upper limit for May’s age. Instead of not passing “twenty yeer,” these variant Januaries declare she shouldn’t pass “nineteen” yeer, or even (in eleven of the twelve cases) “sixtene yeer.” In fact, two of the most influential twentieth-century editions of Chaucer’s works use sixteen rather than twenty as the upper limit for May’s age.[9] Even keeping in mind that her actual age might be twelve in both cases, lowering the maximum is still making a statement about Januarie’s ideals and about what readers are expected to find funny, titillating, or distressing about this May-December relationship.

Notably, this age-limit-lowering occurs in one of the same manuscripts that add the spurious lines about May’s pleasure and Damyan’s great, long dong. This is Oxford, New College MS 314 – not coincidentally, a manuscript favoured by scholars of obscenity, including the principal investigator here at COMMode, Mary, who’s written brilliantly about its sense of authorial play. MS 314 raises an important question: regardless of whatever age May “actually” is, what should we make of the fact that her age is malleable? That her youth can be deployed to potentially titillate or disturb in equal measure?

Both of these things have implications for understanding obscenity in the tale, and in particular, for the way that sexuality, age, and morality can give multiple layers of obscenity to certain moments. Among other things, focusing on less-obvious layers of obscenity that lurk in the tale might prompt us to read the Merchant’s Tale along more structural lines. Where is May’s power? Does vocality imply empowerment? What do we see when we look in the pear tree? And what are we unwilling to see?

For more scholarly discussion of these questions (and images of MS 314!) you can read Lucy’s recent piece in New College Notes here.

Notes

[1] Oxford, New College, MS 314, f. 51r.

[2] Carissa Harris, “Inserting “A grete tente, a thrifty, and a long”: Sexual Obscenity and Scribal Innovation in Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales,” Essays in Medieval Studies 27 (2011): 45–60, at 51.

[3] See Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 143.

[4] Geoffrey W. Gust, Chaucerotics: Uncloaking the Language of Sex in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, The New Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 172.

[5] This is also assuming that (a) Januarie did his administrative due diligence and checked her age before he “apoynted hym” [decided] on May (IV 1595), and (b) May or her family actually know her age, something that varied widely in the medieval period. We can’t be sure about (b), and it feels like a lot to expect (a) from a man who is selecting a wife based on who gives him the biggest boner (i.e., who “apoynted hym” the best…).

[6] Sally Dixon-Smith, “Marriage,” in Geoffrey Chaucer in Context, ed. Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 385–392, at 386. The editors of the Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition, also make this point (886, textual note to Merchants Tale line, 1417).

[7] Katherine Harvey, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2021), 43–46.

[8] Liz Bowen offers one way of working in this mode. See “Learning to Read Ecologically: Disability, Animality, and Metaphor in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy,” ELH 88, no. 2 (2021): 525-550.

[9] Those editions are The Tales of Canterbury, Complete, edited by Robert A. Pratt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) and Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, second edition, edited by E. Talbot Donaldson  (New York: Ronald, 1975).


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lucy Fleming (March 4, 2024). Be My (Obscene) Teenage Dream: Scribal Variants and the Merchant’s Tale. COMMode. Retrieved May 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/vy7h


You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.