The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature

From devotional literature that idealizes wives' submission to unwanted sex to political narratives that frame women's survival of sexual violence as a model for a just monarch, medieval texts propose that survivors of sexual violence have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature explores these discourses of survival in a wide range of medieval English texts, including letters of spiritual advice, legal statutes and cases, saints' lives, romances, theological summae, and legendary histories. In these eleventh- through fourteenth-century texts, the ethical and epistemological dilemmas that survival poses capture the difficulty of reconciling spiritual and civic ideals with an unjust, fallen world. Edwards argues that understanding the literary history of survival as distinct from the history of rape, can help us to weigh the ethical importance of attending to violence against women against the costs of reifying gender difference and its traumatic identifications - both in our study of the past and in contemporary feminist politics.

Suzanne M. Edwards is Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University, USA.