¹ Two recent works survey the voluminous literature on abduction and ravishment: Caroline S. Dunn's recent thesis, now the most complete study of abduction, “Damsels in Distress or Partners in Crime? The Abduction of Women in Medieval England” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 2007); and Goldberg, Jeremy, Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 2008), 161–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² See the Middle English Dictionary (MED; http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/), s.vv. “ravish(e)ment” (n.) and “ravishen” (v.; with the illustrative quotations); the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “ravish” (v.), esp. 2a and 2b; and for a few further examples associating ravishment and sexual violation, Given-Wilson, Chris, ed., The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME) (Leicester, 2005), 5:15, 5:462, 6:240Google Scholar. Henry Ansgar Kelly has argued that ravishment and raptus were confined to nonsexual meanings in the late Middle Ages; see Kelly, “Meanings and Uses of Raptus in Chaucer's Time,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 101–65, and “Statutes of Rape and Alleged Ravishers of Wives: A Context for the Charges against Thomas Malory, Knight,” Viator 28 (1997): 361–419. While clearly the words did not always connote sexual violation, in other instances they also clearly did (as in the citations above, esp. the quotations in the MED, and in the scholarship referenced in nn. 1 and 3).

³ Gravdal, Kathryn, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saunders, Corinne, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar, and “A Matter of Consent: Middle English Romance and the Law of Raptus,” in Medieval Women and the Law, ed. Noël James Menuge (Woodbridge, 2003), 105–24; Sylvester, Louise M., Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kim M. Phillips, “Written on the Body: Reading Rape from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries,” in Menuge, ed., 125–44. Other scholars have also noted the constructed nature of legal narratives of rape: see Hanawalt, Barbara A., “Whose Story Was This? Rape Narratives in Medieval English Courts,” in her “Of Good and Ill Repute”: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (New York, 1998), 124–41Google Scholar; and Phillips, Kim M., “Four Virgins’ Tales: Sex and Power in Medieval Law,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Bernau, Anke, Evans, Ruth, and Salih, Sarah (Cardiff, 2003), 80–101, esp. 81–86Google Scholar.

⁴ On the importance of the law in the framing of the narratives, see Musson, Anthony, “Crossing Boundaries: Attitudes to Rape in Late Medieval England,” in Boundaries of the Law: Geography, Gender and Jurisdiction in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Musson, Anthony (Aldershot, 2005), 84–101Google Scholar; Dunn, “Damsels,” 9, 32–33; Goldberg, Communal Discord, 35–42, 44.

⁵ Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Note critique: Les conteurs de Montaillou,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 34, no. 1 (1979): 61–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA, 1987).

⁶ The King's Bench records are at Coram Rege Roll, Michaelmas 1451, the National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) Court of King's Bench (KB) 27/762, rex mm. 1, 5, 19d; Coram Rege Roll, Easter 1452, TNA: PRO KB 27/764, rex m. 6, plea m. 28d; TNA: PRO KB 27/765, plea m. 48; Coram Rege Roll, Trinity 1452, TNA: PRO KB 27/766, rex m. 32d. The bill drafted by Paston is in Norman Davis, ed., The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971, 1976), 1:69–71.

⁷ Virgoe's, Roger article “The Ravishment of Jane Boys,” in East Anglian Society and the Political Community of Late Medieval England (Norwich, 1997), 151–58Google Scholar, has been tremendously helpful for us and may be consulted for further details on the legal processes. Caroline Dunn's discussion, although short, is sure-footed, if less skeptical about the records than we are (“Damsels,” 229–32, 246–47). Helen Castor's recent book briefly retells the story as in Paston's letter and the King's Bench records (Blood and Roses: One Family's Struggle and Triumph during the Tumultuous Wars of the Roses [New York, 2007], 124–25). A number of other scholars have drawn their accounts of the case from John Paston's letter alone. John Bellamy discusses the abduction in his Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England: Felony before the Courts from Edward I to the Sixteenth Century (Toronto, 1998), 173; Maddern, Philippa discusses it in Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford, 1992), 101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emma Hawkes uses Paston's letter to lead into a broader discussion of issues of consent in abduction in “‘She was ravished against her will, what so ever she say’: Female Consent in Rape and Ravishment in Late-Medieval England,” Limina: Journal of History and Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (1995): 47–54. Richmond's, ColinThe Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase (Cambridge, 1990) mentions the letter only briefly (on 142) and does not subject it to any analysis. Our reading of the letter differs in various ways from these previous interpretations of the caseCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Bellamy, Criminal Trial, 173; Maddern, Violence, 101. Castor, Blood and Roses, 124, illustrates how easily the fifteenth-century narrative translates into twenty-first-century bodice-ripper clichés: “Whether he was driven by love for Jane or lust for her riches, Langstrother knew that he had missed his chance as a suitor, but could not bring himself to take no for an answer.”

⁹ For a similar point regarding church court depositions, see Goldberg, Communal Discord, 37.

¹⁰ Gaskill, Malcolm, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Coram Rege Roll, Michaelmas 1451, TNA: PRO KB 27/762, rex mm. 1, 5, 19d.

¹² The 1285 Second Statute of Westminster (Statutes of the Realm, 10 vols. [London, 1963], 1:87–88) governed felony prosecutions of ravishment; on prosecutions under the statute, see Dunn, “Damsels,” chap. 1; Kelly, “Statutes,” and “Meanings.”

¹³ Statutes of the Realm, 1:87–88; Dunn, “Damsels,” chap. 1, esp. 51–53, 66–67.

¹⁴ A number of scholars have asserted that the consent of the victim was largely irrelevant in the prosecution of fourteenth- or fifteenth-century ravishment cases (e.g., Saunders, “Matter of Consent,” 105–6, 124; Goldberg, Communal Discord, 164–66; Hawkes, “She was ravished,” 48, 51; Musson, “Crossing Boundaries,” 97 n. 8). The focus on the (lack of) consent of the victim in the case under consideration here suggests that at least in the mid-fifteenth century those who framed the legal submissions were very attentive to this aspect of the statutory definition of ravishment.

¹⁵ Coram Rege Roll, Michaelmas 1451, TNA: PRO KB 27/762, rex m. 1.

¹⁶ Coram Rege Roll, Michaelmas 1451, TNA: PRO KB 27/762, rex mm. 1, 5, 19d.; Coram Rege Roll, Easter 1452, TNA: PRO KB 27/764, plea m. 28d.

¹⁷ Statutes of the Realm, 2:27; Dunn, “Damsels,” 54–55; Post, J. B., “Sir Thomas West and the Statute of Rapes, 1382,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53, no. 127 (1980): 24–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The 1382 Statute also allowed for cases to be tried as felonies. We have emphasized the sequential nature of the consent more than Post, who underplays the word “post” in the 1382 Statute clause “post huiusmodi raptum huiusmodi Raptoribus consenserint” (Statutes of the Realm, 2:27; our emphasis)—stating instead that the statute applied to women “regardless of the woman's consent” rather than only to those who consented subsequently (Post, “Sir Thomas West,” 27). This, however, is not our reading of the statute or its application in the case under consideration here. The 1285 Statute had also allowed for prosecution “although the woman consent after” but only at the suit of the king (Statutes of the Realm, 1:87). See also Kelly, “Statutes,” 371–73.

¹⁸ “Post quem quidem raptum sic perpetratum videlicet die mercurii proximo post festum predictum eadem Johanna eidem Roberto apud Wygenhale beate Marie Magdalene in comitatu Norff’ predicto de perpetracione eiusdem raptus consentiret, eundem Robertum pro eodem raptu secundum iuris exigenciam punire omnino recusando” (Coram Rege Roll, Easter 1452, TNA: PRO KB 27/764, plea m. 28d).

¹⁹ We broadly accept Norman Davis's dating of the letter to July 1452, with the small correction to the specific date (which he gives as 20 July). Davis's assignment of the year to 1452, based on intertextual evidence in the letter collection, also fits the chronology we can establish from the King's Bench records. By reference to the King's Bench records, however, we prefer the date 2 July 1452. The letter is dated “þe Soneday nex before þe fest of Sent Margare[t].” There were two feasts of (two different) St. Margarets, 8 July and 20 July. In the first case, the prior Sunday in 1452 was 2 July; in the second case, it was 16 July. Given that the jury had been summoned to hear the trespass case on 4 July, it appears more probable that the letter was written just before that, on 2 July. Davis, Paston Letters, 1:69–71.

²⁰ Virgoe understands “the Lords” to be the King's Council (Virgoe, “Ravishment,” 155), and this is certainly plausible. In another alleged abduction, the victim appeared before the king's council “in the chamber of the parliament” requesting assistance against her abductor. Anne Curry, “Henry VI: Parliament of January 1437, Introduction,” in PROME, citing TNA: PRO Records of the Exchequer (E) 28/58/60; a petition regarding the case was later presented by the commons: PROME, 4:497.

²¹ Davis, Paston Letters, 1:70. On Paston's legal training, see Helen Castor, “Paston, John (I) (1421–1466),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21511. For his experience working as Sir John Fastolf 's right-hand man, see Richmond, Paston Family: First Phase, chap. 7; Richmond, Colin, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Fastolf's Will (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 3, and The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Endings (Manchester, 2001), 4–5. Edmund Wichingham himself was also an active lawyer; Virgoe, “Ravishment,” 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Davis, Paston Letters, 1:70.

²³ ibid.

²⁴ ibid.

²⁵ ibid.

²⁶ ibid.

²⁷ Deposition of Isabel Umfrey, ca. 1432–43, TNA: PRO Early Chancery Proceedings (C) 1/9/199.

²⁸ Coram Rege Roll, Michaelmas 1451, TNA: PRO KB 27/762, rex m. 1d.

²⁹ They were still married in 1463 when Robert died (will of Robert Langstrother, 1463, TNA: PRO Prerogative Court of Canterbury [PCC], Prob. 11/5, fol. 10r).

³⁰ See esp. Edmund Wychyngham, esq., feoffee of Robert Boys v. Edmund Blake, esq., ca. 1455–56, TNA: PRO C 1/25/204, a Chancery bill dated 1455–56 but which indicates that Wichingham was already involved in litigation over the Boys inheritance in 1453–54. Slightly complicating this picture is Robert Langstrother, esq., Joan his wife, and Katherine Boys v. Robert Ingelous, esq., John Heydon, and Edmund Wychyngham, feoffees of Robert Boys, esq., ca. 1455–56, TNA: PRO C 1/25/157, in which Robert and Jane Langstrother and Jane's daughter Katherine Boys sue Robert Boys's feofees, including Edmund Wichingham, to get access to the Boys lands. The answer (TNA: PRO C 1/25/157b) of John Heydon, one of those feoffees, to the Langstrothers’ bill, however, indicates that the delay in handing over the lands is due to Edmund Blake's claim that he holds the lands in question, which the feoffees themselves dispute. TNA: PRO C 1/25/204, brought by Edmund Wichingham, is directed against Blake. Behind this set of Chancery bills—and not strictly relevant to our argument here—lie the actions of Robert Boys's mother, Dame Sybil Boys, who appears to have seized the opportunity that her son's death presented to manipulate his will, seize his lands, and sell them off to Edmund Blake. On the interesting Sybil Boys, see Richmond, Paston Family: Fastolf 's Will, 9–11.

³¹ As Dunn remarks, discussing the Boys case specifically, she has found no such examples of disinheritance following the 1382 Statute (“Damsels,” 231).

³² Richmond, Paston Family: First Phase, n. 142.

³³ Although the indictments in King's Bench in the fall of 1451 regarding the ravishment several times identify Richard's Hospitaller relative William Langstrother as “the confrère of Robert Langstrother's brother, the prior of St. John of Jerusalem in England” (“Willelmus Langstrother confrater fratris Roberti prioris sancti Johannis de Jerusalem in Anglia in London,” Coram Rege Roll, Michaelmas 1451, TNA: PRO KB 27/762, rex m. 5; see also mm. 1, 19d), other sources indicate that Sir John Langstrother became prior only in 1469 (although he held a number of key positions, including receiver of the treasury of the order, from the 1440s). Griffiths, R. A., “Langstrother, Sir John (d. 1471),” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Gregory O’Malley, The Knights Hospitaller of the English Langue, 1460–1565 (Oxford, 2005), 127–31, 351Google Scholar. At the time of the ravishment, William Langstrother was preceptor of Eagle (Lincolnshire; O’Malley, Knights Hospitaller, 351), and the King's Bench indictments suggest that he was also preceptor of Carbrook, another Hospitaller preceptory. Sir John Langstrother and Jane are named as the executors of Robert Langstrother's will (TNA: PRO PCC, Prob. 11/5, fol. 10r).

³⁴ See Richmond, Paston Family: Endings, 6–8.

³⁵ Virgoe, “Ravishment,” 151.

³⁶ Maddern, Violence, 101; Castor, Blood and Roses, 125.

³⁷ Dunn, “Damsels,” 229–32, 246–47.

³⁸ “Johannam filiam et vnam heredum predicti Edmundi,” Michaelmas 1451, TNA: PRO KB 27/762, rex m. 1.

³⁹ See Phillips, “Written on the Body,” 131–33, regarding the rhetorical power of allegations of violating the virginal body in rape pleas.

⁴⁰ The 1285 Statute explicitly included married women and widows as well as maidens under its purview (Statutes of the Realm, 1:87–88). Dunn, however, notes that the forcible abduction of widows was an issue causing concern in the mid-fifteenth century (“Damsels,” 148–57).

⁴¹ See Harris, Barbara J., English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford, 2002), 165–66Google Scholar.

⁴² Davis, Paston Letters, 1:70.

⁴³ ibid.; Goldberg, Communal Discord, 166.

⁴⁴ Goldberg, Communal Discord, 137–38.

⁴⁵ PROME, 5:269–71.

⁴⁶ Our attention to the Beaumont case was first drawn by the early editor of the Paston Letters, James Gairdner, who also notes the similarity between the allegations in the Beaumont and Boys cases but goes no further with this observation than suggesting, then rejecting as impossible, that they could be the same women and the same case. Gairdner, James, ed., The Paston Letters, 6 vols. (repr., Gloucester, 1986), 4:260Google Scholar. Also similar, but not identical, is the role of the priest who is being pressured to marry the couple (in Jane Boys's case, the priest withstands the pressure; in Joan Beaumont's case, he gives in to it).

⁴⁷ Goldberg, Communal Discord, 137–38.

⁴⁸ Elizabeth, late the wife of Richard Wakehurst, the elder, and Thomas Echyngham, Thomas Hoo, and John and William Gaynesford, esqrs., his feoffees v. John, Richard, and Nicholas Colepepir and Alexander Clyfford, ca. 1456–60, TNA: PRO C 1/26/304. The family relationship is not mentioned in the primary Chancery petition; it is, however, included in Richard Wakehurst's entry in Roskell, J. S., Clark, Linda, and Rawcliffe, Carole, The House of Commons, 1386–1421 (Stroud, 1992), 732Google Scholar. Mate, Mavis, Daughters, Wives, and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge, 1998), 23, presents the alternate theory that Sir John Colepepir was married to the girls’ aunt by marriageGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ Elizabeth, the late wife of Richard Wakehurst, the elder, and Thomas Echyngham, Thomas Hoo, and John and William Gaynesford, esqrs., his feoffees v. John, Richard, and Nicholas Colepepir and Alexander Clyfford, ca. 1456–60, TNA: PRO C 1/26/304; Burke, John, Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 2nd ed. (London, 1844), 145Google Scholar; “Ardingly, West Sussex,” Culpepper Connections! The Culpepper Family History Site, http://gen.culpepper.com/archives/uk/places/ardingly.htm.

⁵⁰ Karras, Ruth Mazo, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003), 20–66, esp. 47–57Google Scholar; Kaeuper, Richard W., Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), 209–15, 225–30Google Scholar; Hughes, Jonathan, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV (Stroud, 2002), 174–89Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 67, also 43–44; Saunders, “Matter of Consent,” 105–24.

⁵² Davis, Paston Letters, 1:516–18; Lester, G. A., Sir John Paston's “Grete Boke”: A Descriptive Catalogue, with an Introduction, of British Library MS Lansdowne 285 (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar. The account of a tournament between Lord Scales and the Bastard of Burgundy in Paston's Boke (see Lester, Grete Boke, 103–10) is included in Bentley, Samuel, ed., Excerpta Historica; or, Illustrations of English History (London, 1831), 176–96Google Scholar.

⁵³ Lester, Grete Boke, 150–52.

⁵⁴ See Sammond, Nicholas, ed., Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Durham, NC, 2005), esp. the classic essay by Roland Barthes (originally published in 1957), “The World of Wrestling,” 23–32Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ See Barber, Richard and Barker, Juliet, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (New York, 1989), 4, 8, 38–39, 46, 49–50, 108–25Google Scholar; Karras, From Boys, 30–31, 55.

⁵⁶ On rescued damsel as prize, see Saunders, “Matter of Consent,” 114–15.

⁵⁷ On the association between the Hospitaller Order and chivalric culture, see Hughes, Arthurian Myths, 186–87.

⁵⁸ As Barbara Harris has commented, “unlike first-time aristocratic brides, peers’ and knights’ widows were able to marry for love. Most of them had, after all, been exposed to the culture of the court and romance literature that idealized such marriages” (English Aristocratic Women, 165).

⁵⁹ Richmond describes John II in particular as a “romantic” to whom the “heroic-chivalric” greatly appealed (Paston Family: Endings, 67).

⁶⁰ Davis, Paston Letters, 1:396, 535, 538–39.

⁶¹ For an inventory of his books, see ibid., 1:516–18. He may have owned the Ellesmere Chaucer; see Richmond, Paston Family: Fastolf 's Will, 29. Richmond discusses the reading tastes of John II and John III in Paston Family: Endings, 63–67.

⁶² Davis, Paston Letters, 1:478–79.

⁶³ On Agnes's father Thomas Stoughton, see Josiah C. Wedgwood, History of Parliament, 1439–1509, 2 vols. (London, 1936–38), 2:817–18.

⁶⁴ Skern's death was dated 1 October 1485 in his inquisition postmortem. See TNA: PRO E 150/1065/5, calendared in Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem … Henry VII, 3 vols. (London, 1898–1955), 3:571.

⁶⁵ Davis, Paston Letters, 1:590–92.

⁶⁶ Apart from the coincidence of the name Agnes (admittedly one of the most common female names of the period), John III calls his correspondent “the wedow of the Blak Freiris” (ibid., 1:592), while Agnes's parents’ house in the parish of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey was near Blackfriars, and Thomas Stoughton, Agnes's father, judging by the bequests in his will (Thomas Stoughton, will, 1478, TNA: PRO PCC, Prob. 11/7, fols. 23r–23v), had a particular relationship with the Dominican friary. Colin Richmond provides an illuminating discussion of John Paston III's marital adventures, although he misidentifies “Stocton's daughter.” Richmond, Paston Family: Endings, 41–55, esp. 45–48.

⁶⁷ Skern came into his lands in Kingston and elsewhere in Surrey upon his father's death in 1464, at which time he was a law student at the Inns (William Skern Sr., will, 1464, TNA: PRO PCC, Prob. 11/ 5, fols. 31rv). Despite his youth, Skern evidently soon after this became a trusted member of the equally young Earl of Oxford's household, as by 1467 the Paston letters record him acting as Oxford's agent in discussions with the archbishop of York (Davis, Paston Letters, 2:383). While he served Edward IV in the later years of his reign, he fought for Henry Tudor at Bosworth, for which he was rewarded. He died, however, within weeks of Bosworth, . Calendar of the Patent Rolls … 1467–77 (London, 1900), 246, 248Google Scholar; Calendar of the Patent Rolls … 1476–85 (London, 1901), 23, 24, 144; Calendar of the Patent Rolls … 1485–94 (London, 1914), 36–37; TNA: PRO E 150/1065/5, calendared in Calendar of Inqusitions Post Mortem … Henry VII, 3:571.

⁶⁸ In comparison, e.g., Agnes's sister Appoline married John Devet, a fishmonger, who did not reach higher than middling status as a London merchant. Thomas Stoughton, will, 1478, TNA: PRO PCC Prob. 11/7, fols. 23r–23v; John Devet, will, 1483, London, Guildhall Library, MS 9171/6, fol. 373v.

⁶⁹ See Sylvester, Medieval Romance, 49, 63–65.

⁷⁰ Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 140.

⁷¹ Ginzburg, Carlo, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1983)Google Scholar; Roper, Lyndal, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany(New Haven, CT, 2004)Google Scholar; Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, esp. 222–41; and Gaskill, Malcolm, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁷² Roper, Witch Craze, x–xi.

⁷³ Kelly, “Statutes,” 361–419, esp. 398–400.

⁷⁴ On this point see Goldberg, Communal Discord, 122–25.

⁷⁵ Sylvester, Medieval Romance, chap. 1 (quotation at 38).

⁷⁶ Walker, Garthine, “Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England,” Gender and History 10, no. 1 (1998): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “‘Strange Kind of Stealing’: Abduction in Early Modern Wales,” in Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales, ed. Michael Roberts and Simon Clarke (Cardiff, 2000), 51, 63–64.

⁷⁷ This argument for the shaping of desire owes much to the large literature on the history of sexualities in its understanding of how desires are understood and shaped (even sometimes generated) by culture; e.g. (but by no means exhaustively), Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Halperin, David M., “Forgetting Foucault,” Representations, no. 63 (Summer 1998): 93–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Howard, John, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar; Fausto-Sterling, Anne, Sexing the Body: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of Sexuality (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Williams, Craig A., Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ See esp. Sylvester, Medieval Romance, 39–41, 43.