Medieval literature professors have probably always been uneasy about their authors’ sometimes ambivalent attitude towards rape and often uncomfortable addressing it in the classroom. But frequently, context and current events conspire to make medieval literature an especially vivid and useful distant mirror of the present. At a time when the country has reached a crisis point of rape awareness both in the military and in schools, the treatment of rape in medieval literature becomes, not a problem for teachers, but a nearly perfect vehicle for addressing the issue with students at a military college.

At the end of 2014, the U.S. Education Department's Office of Civil Rights had cases pending at ninetytwo colleges and universities for possible violations of the law in regards to the way they handle alleged sexual harassment and sexual assaults. It was the culmination of a year in which the issue was frequently in the news. Barely two years before, in January 2012, the documentary film The Invisible War, about the frequency of rape in the U.S. military and how military authorities dealt with it, was released. By the middle of that year, the Department of Defense began to change policies on how rapes were investigated, and by 2013, there were Senate hearings. Besides the government and media attention they have drawn in backtoback years, colleges and the military have much in common when it comes to the traumatic aftermath of rape, and in most respects, the military is a more intensified mirror image of college.

In both cases, the sense of betrayal is strong. At college, if you are raped by a schoolmate, you have been violated by someone with whom you have developed an institutional bond. It is abstract and artificial, and it may not be very strong depending on the individual, but some part of every college milieu, from the freshman year on, is devoted to uniting the students in “school spirit,” a sense of loyalty to the place. Part of that bond is a tacit expectation of trust and safety among peers. If the rapist is not a student but a staff member, the betrayal can be even greater. People have entrusted their children to school officials. For those who still consider faculty and staff to be in loco parentis, an assault by one of them is abuse by a parental figure.