8 Gwerful Mechain
W
omen writers don’t get much more transgressive than the Welsh-language poet Gwerful Mechain (1460–1502). Her most infamous piece, ‘Cywydd y Cedor,’ usually translated as ‘Poem of the Vagina,’ exists in several manuscripts, some of which call it ‘Cywydd y Cont,’ ‘Poem of the Cunt.’ Cywydd however means more than simply ‘poem,’ it refers to a specific type of the twenty-four traditional Welsh forms of poetry which emerged in the fourteenth century, with its own formal rhythm and rhyme scheme: seven-syllable rhyming couplets in a work of between forty and eighty lines. This particular 49
