In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture. The volume has two purposes: first, to explore the resistance these pervasive representations generate and have generated for readers - especially for the female reader- and second, to explore what these representations tell us about social formations governing the relationships between men and women. More particularly, Rose and Robertson are interested in how representations of rape manifest a given culture's understanding of the female subject in society.

The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. The book concludes by examining the afterlives of body parts, including relics and specimens exhibited for entertainment and education, contextualized by discussion of the resurrection body and its promise of bodily reintegration. Grounded in dramatic works, the study also incorporates a variety of genres from midwifery manuals to broadside ballads.

The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

This book is intended for those in the humanities seeking a legal context for writing about rape in early modern England. It takes the premise that over the past four decades misunderstandings about rape law, and misreadings of rape statutes from medieval to Elizabethan times, have become widely cited in criticism. Helen Barker identifies how this has arisen, and discusses the main sources of confusion – including indissoluble issues around the word ‘ravishment’. Rape law historically encompassed elopement and abduction; this book offers a succinct overview of the law, and draws attention to the wider social context other than gender opposition in which it is often presented. In addition, critics have been tempted to rely on the ostensibly authoritative seventeenth-century treatise, The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, as a legal source. By examining the context of its publication, this book suggests that the treatise is unreliable and can mislead the unwary.

A study of images of rape in medieval and early modern art.

This book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I take this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to another’s suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to the present? In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians and cultural studies scholars such as Angelika Bammer, Doris Bergen, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Priscilla Layne, Mark Roseman, Leo Spitzer, Susan R. Suleiman and Viktor Witkowski explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020 and continued into the next year, this volume proposes strategies for moving forward with hope.

This volume brings together a wide range of original, scholarly essays on key figures and topics in medieval literature by leading academics. The volume examines the major authors such as Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain Poet, and covers key topics in medieval literature, including gender, class, courtly and popular culture, and religion. The volume seeks to provide a fresh and stimulating guide to medieval literature.

Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection explores analogies of erasure and rewriting observed in editorial and literary practices underlying the production of texts from medieval England.

Exploring the relation between sexuality and cosmology in a variety of literary texts from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, the essays reveal that medieval authors, whether lay or religious, Christian or Jewish, were grappling with the same sets of questions about sexuality as people are today.

In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.