Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (42 page)

Despite their name
, vulgaria:
The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittington
, ed. Beatrice White, EETS 187 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932).

“
Courtesie” was another important part:
For more on medieval education, see Nicholas Orme,
Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), and Nicholas Orme,
Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England
(London: Hambledon Press, 1989). Also
The Babees Book
(a collection of poetical and prose instructions for young children, showing the kinds of things that were thought to be important to learn), ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS 32 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969). And you might look as well at
Chapter 3
of my dissertation, about the similar aims of early sixteenth-century education: “Strong Language: Oaths, Obscenities, and Performative Literature in Early Modern England,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003.

expulsion for “lying, swearing, and filthy speaking”
: The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittington, xv.

“
In women the neck of the bladder”
: Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie,” ed. Robert v. Fleischhacker (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), 173. For other examples of medical texts using unmarked obscene words, see “balocke codde,” “pyntell,” and “ars” in
The Middle English Version of William of Saliceto’s Anatomia
, ed. Christian Heimerl (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 45, 47, 53; “the ersse” in John Arderne’s
Treatises of Fistula in Ano
, ed. D’Arcy Power, EETS 139 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1910), 2; and Juhani Norri,
Names of Body Parts in English, 1400–1550
(Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 1998).

you should anoint him
: Lanfrank’s “Science,” 176.

“
For on thy bed”:
Chaucer, “The Manciple’s Tale,”
The Riverside Chaucer
, 256, 311–12.

“
We! hold thy tongue”
: quoted in Lynne Forest-Hill,
Transgressive Language in Medieval Drama: Signs of Challenge and Change
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 34.

“
Take out that southern”:
“Southerne,”
Middle English Dictionary
, accessed July 25, 2012.

Kekir
and
bobrelle
: Wright,
Anglo-Saxon and English Vocabularies
; Thomas Ross, “Taboo-Words in Fifteenth-Century English,”
Fifteenth Century Studies: Recent Essays
, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 137–60;
Middle English Dictionary
.

Pintel, tarse,
and
yerde
:
Middle English Dictionary
; Ross, “Taboo-Words,” 153; Eve Salisbury, ed., “A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware,” Teams Middle English Texts Series (online), accessed September 27, 2010.

how did people insult each other:
For more on linguistic crimes such as defamation and scolding, see Sandy Bardsley,
Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Edwin Craun,
The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech
, Studies in Medieval Culture XLVII (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007), particularly the essay by Derek Neal, “Husbands and Priests: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Defamation in Late Medieval England”; Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Latin Vocabulary of Illicit Sex in English Ecclesiastical Court Records,”
Journal of Medieval Latin
2 (1992): 1–17; L. R. Poos, “Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
XXV, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 585–607; and J. H. Baker,
An Introduction to English Legal History
, 3rd. ed. (London: Butterworths, 1990).

The Victorian legal scholar:
Frederic William Maitland,
Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seignorial Courts
, vol. 1 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1889).

Late medieval accounts:
The Rokker case is described in Kim Phillips,
Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Elizabeth Whyns’s words are from Poos, “Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts,” 593. Wybard’s attack is found in Derek G. Neal,
The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

“
For harlots and servants”
: Morte Arthure, ed. Edmond Brock, EETS 8 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1871).

“
the moralisation of status words”:
C. S. Lewis,
Studies in Words
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 21–23.

But the court records:
Court rolls provide a valuable record of real-life insults, but they have their limitations. It is likely that
whore
was the most common abuse recorded for women and
false
for men because defamation suits were most often brought about words that had the potential to cause real damage. Being tarred as unchaste could cost an unmarried woman a husband, or could cause a married woman to be hauled up before another court on charges of adultery; having a reputation as a dishonest man could cost a farmer or tradesman business. It is possible that other kinds of insults were rife but that they do not appear in the court rolls because they would have been an unsuccessful basis for a defamation suit. The fact that other linguistic crimes such as scolding and assault with contumelious words also employ the
whore/false
vocabulary would indicate otherwise, however.

Badges like this:
Jos Koldeweij, “‘Shameless and Naked Images:’ Obscene Badges as Parodies of Popular Devotion,” in
Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles
, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 493–510; Susan Signe Morrison, “Waste Space: Pilgrim Badges, Ophelia and Walsingham Remembered,”
Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity
, ed. Dominic Janes and Gary Waller (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010), 49–66; Anthony Weir, “Satan in the Groin,” Beyond-the-Pale.org.uk, accessed July 25, 2012.

“
shameless and naked images”:
Morrison, “Waste Space,” 57.

There was almost no such thing as privacy:
Mark Girouard,
Life in the English Country House
(New York: Penguin, 1978); Diana Webb,
Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages
(London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006); Lena Cowen Orlin,
Locating Privacy in Tudor London
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ian Mortimer,
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Margaret Wade Labarge,
A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965); Maryanne Kowaleski, ed.,
Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); C. M. Woolgar,
The Great Household in Late Medieval England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

“
it is impolite”:
quoted in Elias,
The Civilizing Process
, 110.

“
One should not, like rustics”:
quoted in ibid., 111.

We can reconstruct what a dinner:
Melitta Weiss Adamson,
Food in Medieval Times
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004).

“
If you spit over the table”
: The Boke of Curtasye in Frederick James Furnivall,
Early English Meals and Manners
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1868), 175–205.

“
belch near no man’s face”:
Hugh Rhodes,
The Boke of Nurture for Men, Servants, and Children
(London, 1545), Early English Books Online, accessed July 25, 2012.

“
the floors too are generally spread”:
Erasmus,
The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 153
, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 10:471.

“
Soon then Beowulf”
: Beowulf: An Updated Verse Translation, trans. Frederick Rebsamen (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 1793–99.

“
the sight of total nakedness”:
quoted in Elias,
The Civilizing Process
, 139.

“
Medieval people would be much less likely”:
Ruth Mazo Karras,
Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 153.

In a 1366 case:
P. J. P. Goldberg, ed.,
Women in England c. 1275–1525
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 62.

“
What was lacking”:
Elias,
The Civilizing Process
, 60.

“
a shitten shepherd”:
Chaucer, “General Prologue,”
The Riverside Chaucer
, 504.

A well-known comic set piece:
Chaucer, “The Miller’s Tale,”
The Riverside Chaucer
, 687–743.

There is in fact a famous crux:
Larry D. Benson, “The ‘Queynte’ Punnings of Chaucer’s Critics,” in
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings of the New Chaucer Society, no. 1, 1984: Reconstructing Chaucer
, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 33, 36, 43.

One manuscript of the poem actually does
: The Canterbury Tales, Cambridge Ii.3.26, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge.

what are now called pastoral texts:
For an introduction to these texts, see Edwin Craun’s
Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

When God punished him for eating the fruit:
St. Augustine,
City of God
, trans. P. Levine, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), Book 14, Chapters 23–24.

do not discuss obscenity:
“The terms
obscene
and
obscenity
—although they were part and parcel of the Latin rhetorical tradition from its formation through its transference to modern spoken languages—do not enter the lexica of the vernaculars until after the Middle Ages.” Ziolkowski,
Obscenity
, 16.

“
These are the sins of the mouth”
: Speculum Christiani, ed. Gustaf Holmstedt, EETS 182 (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1933), 58.

the “wose of synne”
: Jacob’s Well, ed. Arthur Brandeis, EETS 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900), 1:53.

“
the seven heads”
: Ayenbite of Inwit or Remorse of Conscience, vol. 1, ed. Pamela Gradon, EETS 23 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

“
The devil tempts of this sin”
: Ayenbite, 46.

The danger of this sort of speech:
R. Howard Bloch, “Modest Maids and Modified Nouns: Obscenity in the Fabliaux,” in
Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages
, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 305.

“
Had we but world enough
”: Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” in
The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900
, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (n.p., 1919), online at
Bartleby.com
, accessed September 27, 2010.