Gwerful Mechain

8 Gwerful Mechain

Women 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

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form was traditionally used by peripatetic poets, looking to praise the old Welsh landowning nobility (Cywyddwyr) in order to get work as court poet. This use of a form intended to flatter the wealthy makes Gwerful’s poem even more ironic and her exhortation to ‘all you upright poets’ to be ‘prolific in your songs to the vagina’ even more transgressive. Mechain adheres strictly to the traditional forms of poetry but transgresses wildly in terms of content. (Despite what you might think, even Chaucer did not actually use the c-word, he used the old English word queynte, which formally meant ‘a clever or curious device or ornament,’ though it was also used as a slang word for the vagina, and Chaucer did use it as a kind of double entendre: ‘As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte, And prively he caughte hire by the queynte.’)

Only fourteen poems can be definitively attributed to Gwerful, though some of them exist in many manuscript versions – her cywydd to Jesus Christ, ‘Christ’s Passion’ is known in sixty-eight versions; Gwerful wrote devotional works alongside her erotica with no apparent contradiction. Another very secular poem is ‘To Jealous Wives,’ a transgressive meditation on women’s sexuality which forms a counter to the many misogynist poems by men – as we just saw, Christine of Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, was a reaction against the misogyny of The Romance of the Rose.

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The love of respectable wives For good cocks, a bad sign. If you believe me, my angry voice, Every well-hung would-be lover pursues me, But not one virtuous wife will give me, From following a cunt in a field, It would not go one inch from her fist: No would she allow it freely Nor if she were paid handsomely. She would not condone adultery By making a deal with anyone. It is painful to think, delicate art, That the girl is not ashamed That the big cock means more to her Even than her own family now . . . A lovely maiden would prefer, Some say, to give away the houses and land, And mind you, even her own good cunt, Than give away her penis.

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