Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Contemporary and the Contemporaneaus
- 1 Secular Law: Rape and Raptus
- 2 The Church: Canon Law, Theology and Popular Teaching
- 3 The Threat of Rape: Saintly Women
- 4 Legendary History: Lucretia and Helen of Troy
- 5 Middle English Romance: Structures of Possession
- 6 Malory's Morte Darthur: A Romance Retrospective
- 7 ‘A Dede of Men’: Chaucer's Narrative of Rape
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Contemporary and the Contemporaneaus
- 1 Secular Law: Rape and Raptus
- 2 The Church: Canon Law, Theology and Popular Teaching
- 3 The Threat of Rape: Saintly Women
- 4 Legendary History: Lucretia and Helen of Troy
- 5 Middle English Romance: Structures of Possession
- 6 Malory's Morte Darthur: A Romance Retrospective
- 7 ‘A Dede of Men’: Chaucer's Narrative of Rape
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
How, if at all, can the preceding study of rape in the thought and literature of medieval England be related to the contemporary theories of rape discussed at the start of this book? Looking back on the medieval dialogue of rape from a consciously ‘modern’ perspective, it is not difficult to discern the causes, characteristics and effects of rape identified by contemporary thinkers as typical of patriarchal society; medieval society, with its frequently restrictive attitudes to sex and gender, might even be considered to comprise precisely the kind of ‘rape prone’ society discussed by Brownmiller or Griffin. Yet the variety and self-consciousness of medieval writing forbids any easy generalisation, particularly with regard to the issues of misogyny and the woman's voice. Sometimes texts are very obviously biased, but in ways that are almost always explicable in terms of a wider set of cultural assumptions; at other times, the texts themselves question or at least draw attention to these assumptions. They are not the naive works that some of the more radical analyses of patriarchy might lead us to expect. In something of the way that the medieval period was characterised by great violence as well as extraordinary creativity and sophistication in thought and art, so the writing of the time combines constrictive, patriarchal and sometimes misogynist notions with the possibility of sympathetic realisation of the female voice and the issues surrounding rape. The woman can be ventriloquised with striking subtlety, intellectual and emotional power, and creativity.
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- Information
- Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England , pp. 311 - 318Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2001