Consent and/to gender in the Roman de Silence

Abstract This article is about representations of consent in the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence . It first looks to three underexamined parts of the text to establish how they engage with issues of marital, sexual, and political consent. It then shows how the romance relates its interrogation of these different forms of consent to the underlying problem of whether Silence consents to being male. Indeed, the romance persistently returns to this messy issue, problematizing without resolving it. Attending to the difficult question of Silence’s ‘gender consent’ in turn offers a novel means of negotiating a binary opposition often invoked in critical discussion of this premodern text (and others): that between gender nonconformity motivated by pragmatism or contingencies in the past, on the one hand, and that driven by ‘inner forces’ and identity today, on the other. In fact, while the concept of consent has not figured prominently in Trans* Studies, the medieval romance suggests that consent may help reconcile, in important ways, the opposition of ‘identitarian’ and ‘contingent’ conceptions of gender identity, by both recognizing the importance of the agency of the subject and situating that agency in response to circumstances beyond the subject’s control.