Free Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr Page A

“fool” used in the final phrase. Is Christ making the point that raca and fool are terrible insults and should not be said in anger, or that Christians should not utter even such mild insults as fool ? Scholars also do not know what to make of the scale of punishments Christ sets out. Are “judgment,” “the council,” and “the hell of fire” supposed to be equivalent, different ways for describing the same punishment, or increasingly awful?

Two books on medieval obscenity were very helpful to my thinking about this chapter: Nicola McDonald, ed., Medieval Obscenities (York: York Medieval Press, 2006), and Jan Ziolkowski, ed., Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages , Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions 4 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998). I have modernized the spelling and punctuation of quotations when necessary for clarity.

The place to find obscenity in the Middle Ages is not in English but perhaps in French. The thirteenth-century literary genre called the fabliau contains tales with titles such as Le Chevalier qui fist parler les Cons (“The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk”) and Cele qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari (“The One Who Got Herself Fucked on Her Husband’s Grave”), in which words such as foutre and con do seem to be “obscene” in the modern sense of the word. Several fabliaux , and the c. 1275 The Romance of the Rose , deal explicitly with the question of whether it is immodest of women to use words such as coillons (“balls”), indicating that a taboo was developing against it. For men, though, no such taboo seems to have existed—the injunctions are directed at women. Chaucer scholar Charles Muscatine argues that the concept of obscenity was just starting to develop at this time: “Much of the fabliau diction we might now consider obscene might not have been so obscene in its own time. The fabliau language of sexuality … is much of the time surprisingly free of impudence or self-consciousness. It often sounds like normal usage, the unreflective language of a culture that was relatively free of linguistic taboos, but took pleasure of various kinds in the direct verbal evocation of sexuality. It must have been the contemporaneous emergence of courtly norms of diction … that created, invented, or perhaps reinvented, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a new sense of obscene or vulgar language.” (281) The fabliaux date from the time of the separation between England and Normandy; the development of obscenity, which begins in the thirteenth century in Norman French, starts later in English. See Charles Muscatine, “The Fabliaux, Courtly Culture, and the (Re)Invention of Vulgarity,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages , ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 281–92.

There are several accounts of Southwell’s life, capture, and trial, including Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell: Poet and Martyr (London: Longmans, Green, 1956); Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell: A Study in Religious Inspiration (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935); and F. W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell , Twayne’s English Authors Series 516 (New York: Twayne, 1996).

For more great real-life Renaissance insults, see B. S. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 189.

As we can see from the multiseat privies, however, shame had not advanced to quite to the levels of today. Privacy, and the shame it engendered, was in many cases more notional than actual. Especially for the middling and lower sorts, accommodations in London were often crowded, with nothing but paper walls or a few boards creating the new rooms of the Great Rebuilding. Court records still contain numerous eyewitness accounts of adultery or fornication, such as that of John Morris, whose elderly neighbor was able to observe him in flagrante with a girl (not his wife) by