Sexual violence, and rape in particular, was a locus of conflicting ideas in the eighteenth century. These conflicting ideas concerned everything from the minutiae of individual acts of sexual violence – for example, how a particular act should be evaluated in a court setting – to foundational questions regarding the definition of rape, how seriously society should view this crime, or even if rape was possible at all. For instance, there was a clear discrepancy between how the crime of rape was viewed in theory by legal writers and how it was dealt with in practice in a courtroom setting. According to English law at the time, rape was a felony, punishable by death and without the benefit of clergy, and it is often described in legal texts as a ‘heinous’, ‘atrocious’ and ‘detestable’ crime. Simultaneously, however, the same texts tend to undermine the seriousness of rape by emphasizing its rare occurrence and the difficulties of securing reliable proof, as well as advancing a view on sexual assault as a venial offence, an understandable failure to control ‘what nature on all sides promotes’. In addition, juries tended to remain unconvinced by women's testimonies, even when the crime resulted in bad injuries, making rape the crime that had by far the lowest conviction rate of all prosecuted crimes in the eighteenth century.