For advanced undergraduates as for their instructors, medieval literary texts depicting victims and victimization present special interpretive challenges. Medieval texts stereotype and/ or typologize both victims and victimizers in terms of highly symbolic categories, beginning with categories of sex and class. Crimes against women in particular bear the hallmarks of medieval misogynistic discourse; moreover, when these crimes are sex crimes, medieval authors often depict both victimization and resistance to victimization (as in female saints’ lives) as ambiguously and aesthetically pleasing. In teaching undergraduates, there is a strong argument to be made that appreciating textual ambiguity is a skill to be fostered. At the same time, given the pressures already inherent in teaching required earlyperiod literature classes— beginning with the pressure on students to assimilate complex material— texts like those we draw on here may strike a given instructor as being simply more trouble than they are worth.

Yet, as is implicit in what we argue below, it is precisely their characteristic difficulties that may invest certain medieval texts involving rape with concrete utility to the undergraduate literature classroom. Kathryn Gravdal wrote of the pastourelle genre in 1991 that “[i] n two centuries of literary criticism, the sanguine representation of sexual violence in these songs has eluded analysis.” With the rise of internet culture, late twentiethand early twentyfirstcentury students have often encountered qualities similar to those Gravdal outlines for the pastourelle in pop culture, peer culture, and/ or social media. To cite but one example, knowyourmeme.com credits Chicago hip hop artist Twista's 2004 single “So Sexy” dedicated to women “that want to keep the D up inside of ‘em,” with originating the “D meme,” going on to trace the expression “She Wants The D” through porn sites to social media like the “She Wants The D” twitter feeds now popular with undergraduates. Here in a nutshell we have a literary ancestor of Robin Thicke's allegedly “rapey” summer pop hit “Blurred Lines” (2013) whose iterations of “I know you want it, I know you want it” remind us at least faintly of the thirteenthcentury pastourelles which Gravdal studied and categorized in terms of their depictions of rape, many involving stereotyped analogies between riding and sexual behaviour (chevauchant), jaunty trimeter, insistent monorhymes— all in the service of showing sexual victimization: