Much to my never-ending delight, a large part of my course involves studying texts about sex.

The following is a verbatim copy of my lecturer’s summary of one of the texts we are studying. It is a short, French text (a fabliau, i.e. the medieval equivalent of Viz) first written between 1190 & 1340.

A young girl is desperate to know what the word is which describes the male genitals, but her mother refuses to divulge this illicit knowledge. Only after serious pestering does the mother reveal that the word is vit, which revelation causes the overjoyed girl to repeat the word over and over again. She then encounters a young man who has his hand pressed inside his clothes, stroking his ‘squirrel’; intrigued, she feels it, and, finding it hard and warm, expresses concern for its health. The man explains that it needs to eat some nuts, and the girl laments having consumed them the night before; however, the man suggests and implements a solution whereby the squirrel searches the nuts inside the girl’s stomach. After frantic searching, the squirrel becomes unwell and starts ‘vomiting’, and, to the girl’s disappointment, is unable to continue the search.

I may just translate the text for all modern-day readers to enjoy…

Kerry

22/10/01