A Medieval Poet for Contemporary Times: Gwerful Mechain

Lauren Cocking introduces Literary Hub's readers to the bawdy, medieval Welsh poet, Gwerful Mechain, best known for her poem that is sometimes translated in English to "Cunt," and/or "Poem to the cunt." (And also, "The Female Genitals.") Have you never heard of Gwerful Mechain? Cocking remarks that "Mechain, the title of whose most infamous poem is sometimes translated to 'Cunt,' was a name I’d never come across. Perhaps it was because she was a woman; perhaps because she wrote in Welsh; perhaps because she was alive in the 15th century. Medieval literature is so dreary, right?" Taking it from there: 

Or, perhaps it was because, according to Katie Gramich, the editor and translator of The Works of Gwerful Mechain, a recently released collection of her extant (and a handful of assumed) poems, “Her work has, I believe, been deliberately suppressed by male Welsh scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries because it contains erotic and indecent poetry.”

Suppression of women’s voices? Feels relevant.

But Mechain’s relevance goes beyond a legacy of patriarchal repression. In fact, her body of work not only eschews the idea of Wales being a country of male poets, it’s dominated by what Gramich calls “playfully erotic poems about the female body and sexual desire,” as well as sharp retorts to male contemporaries, such as Dafydd Llwyd (presumed by some to be her lover). As such, her joyful, bawdy, whip-sharp poetry means Mechain strikes me, and others, as a medieval poet for the modern age.

Little is known about Gwerful Mechain’s life (roughly 1460 to 1502), although her poetic output places her as a contemporary of both her aforementioned likely-lover Dafydd Llwyd and Llewyln ap Gutyn, with whom she volleyed verses. Meanwhile, her family tree is only tenuously fleshed out. According to Gramich’s introduction, she was “the daughter of Hywel Fychan from Mechain in Powys”—a region in northeast Wales—and a woman named Gwenhwyfar; had at least four siblings; and, with her husband John ap Llewelyn Fychan, had a daughter called Mawd. Luckily, her personal life is the least interesting thing about Gwerful Mechain, a poet whose work is strikingly current.

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