Transgression is the crossing of a boundary or limit. It carries with it a legal implication, and a moral one. In Middle English, transgression is disobedience to God’s law. As Lydgate writes in 1426, the earliest use in English retained by the OED, “transgressyoun ys for to say A goyyng fro the ryht[ë] way.” D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and Georges Bataille (1897-1962) both reconfigure the concept of transgression. Criticizing the traditional conception of transgression as the immoral yieldin...