As anyone who has read The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron knows, sex appears frequently in medieval literature, usually in the form of bawdy tales featuring stock characters who find themselves in humorous situations. Women like her are found throughout medieval literature, especially in the shockingly explicit fabliaux a group of verses which were composed in France between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries , and other lesser-known collections.
At this point, the husband emerges from his hiding place to dismiss the servant and beat his wife. If some medieval authors favored matter-of-fact descriptions and explicit language, others delighted in constructing elaborate euphemisms for sex and the genitals.
Many of these extended metaphors involve animals. In The Squirrel , an extremely innocent year-old girl meets a young man named Robin, who approaches her with his erect penis in his hand. She asks what he is holding; he claims that it is a squirrel and invites her to stroke it. He tells her that the squirrel likes to eat walnuts, which saddens her because she ate some yesterday, but has none left. Others employ the language of construction. It takes several goes, but eventually he finds it.
In a fabliau called The Girl Who Wanted to Fly , a student takes advantage of a foolish girl, telling her that he is grafting on the beak and tail she will need to achieve her ambition.
Only when she falls pregnant does she realize she has been deceived; her seducer says that it serves her right for being too proud, and the narrator agrees. Elsewhere, sex is described in medical terms, as in the story of a monk who wants to have sex with a young wife and realizes that he will only achieve this by deception.
