Amy`s Research Poster

Do knights still rescue damsels in distress?
Why is the medieval still so popular in contemporary historical Mills and Boon novels?
Amy Burge Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York [email protected]
Is the medieval just used as a background setting, or is there a deeper meaning behind it?
Swash‐buckling knights, fairytale romances: the medieval is still all around us. Surprisingly, one common places it turns up is in Mills and Boon novels – an enormously popular modern literary genre.
In 2007, Mills and Boon published the Medieval Lords and Ladies Collection, six volumes set in the historical Middle Ages, offering a perfect opportunity to examine how Mills and Boon romances negotiate the medieval.
How are Mills and Boon novels medievalised?
In the Collection, a ‘medieval effect’ is created in several ways. First, by using stereotypical imagery, as seen on the cover, with ‘hennin’ hats, stone architecture, veils and gowns. These Romantic motifs are used throughout the Collection in descriptions of costume, food and customs. A sense of the medieval is also created by exploiting modern perceptions of the contemporary ‘East’ as barbaric, uncivilised and utterly ‘other’. Those stories set in the medieval East were less stereotypically ‘medievalised’, and relied on the evocation of an ‘Eastern’ effect to symbolise their medieval. These stories aren’t overtly ‘medievalised’
because of their association with contemporary discourses of the ‘East’ as primitive (or medieval). Therefore in being ‘Easternised’, these texts are already medieval.
In terms of knights and damsels, almost all sexual activity in the Collection is violent: heroes plunder heroines’ lips and crush their bodies. Although Mills and Boon novels have often included violent sex, more recent authors have moved away from representing sexual violence. This is therefore unique to the medieval Collection.
But do damsels rescue knights right back?
A closer examination of violent sexual encounters reveals it is not violence that heroines find desirous, but rather the relinquishing of control.
‘Secretly, [one heroine] was excited at the idea of being treated as a helpless and fragile creature for once' (A Knight in Waiting, 199).
Discourses of loss of control are common in Mills and Boon novels, suggesting that these sexual encounters are not in themselves medieval, but have been medievalised in their construction. The Collection also shows the intrusion of a distance between
the medieval heroine and contemporary reader via ‘advance retrospection’. Coined by Wolfgang Iser, this is the superiority in knowledge of the romance genre that the contemporary reader has over the medieval heroine; giving her the advantage of interpreting the actions of hero and heroine within a wider knowledge context. Applying this framework allows for a reinterpretation of violent sex as site of female power; as facilitating the growth of love and consequent emergence of female power by bringing the heroine and hero together. What does this mean for future readers and researchers?
That these hugely popular Mills and Boon texts still regularly use the medieval to shape their sexual and gender politics reminds us that the medieval (or at least our interpretations of
what the ‘medieval’ is) provides a fascinating insight into our own contemporality. They indicate a continuing Orientalist perspective in the way we think about the East, and reveal the ways in which medieval sexualities are actually constructed using modern discourses of a lack of control: what does this say about the ‘modernity’ of female sexuality in the 21st century?