Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England

by Corinne J. Saunders

An exploration of the development of Middle English portrayals of rape and ravishment in the context of shifting legal, theological and medical attitudes.

This work explores and untangles the theme of rape, and its counterpart ravishment, in Anglo-French cultural tradition between the disintegration of the classical world and the Renaissance. Tracing debate and dialogue across intellectual and literary discourses, Corinne Saunders places Middle English literary portrayals of rape and ravishment in the context of shifting legal, theological and medical attitudes. The treatment of rape and ravishment is considered across a wide range of literary hagiography, where female saints are repeatedly threatened with rape; legendary history, as in the stories of Lucretia and Helen; and romance, where acts of rape and ravishment challenge and shape chivalric order, and romance heroes are conceived through rape. Finally, the ways in which Malory and Chaucer write and rewrite rape and ravishment are examined.Dr CORINNE SAUNDERS is Lecturer in Medieval Studies, Department of English, University of Durham.

Genres: History, British Literature, Nonfiction, Medieval

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 2001

About the author

Corinne Saunders is Professor in the Department of English Studies. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas, and has particular interests in romance writing. She is also interested in gender studies and the history of medicine. She has recently published a monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval Romance (2010), for which she was awarded AHRC-funded additional leave and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She is the author of The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001), and over thirty essays and articles on a wide range of literary and cultural topics. She has edited a Blackwell Critical Guide to Chaucer (2001); A Blackwell Companion to Romance: from Classical to Contemporary (2004); Cultural Encounters in Medieval Romance (2005); A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2006); and (with Françoise le Saux and Neil Thomas) Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses (2004); (with Jane Macnaughton), Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture (2005); (with David Fuller) Pearl: a Modernised Version by Victor Watts (2005); (with Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton), The Body and the Arts (2009). Her edited collection, A Blackwell Companion to Medieval Poetry, was published in March 2010. She is the English editor of the international journal of medieval studies, Medium Ævum; and editor in overall charge of Medieval Studies (1100-1500) for the major online resource, The Literary Encyclopedia. She is the Director of Durham University's Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Associate Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities, funded by the Wellcome Trust. She has also co-organised two Public Lecture Series in the University, ‘Madness and Creativity: The Mind, Medicine and Literature’, and ‘Flesh and Blood: The Body and the Arts’. She teaches across the range of Old and Middle English language and literature, as well as History of the English Language, Old French, and some Renaissance topics, at both BA and MA level. She currently supervises a number of PhD students working on later medieval literary topics, and welcomes enquiries from postgraduate applicants in these areas.

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taking on such a highly charged and contentious subject, Saunders carefully negotiates her way through a mass of information to read her medieval texts on their own terms.

She begins with a critical survey of recent thinking in the field, then moves to a discussion first of the relevant laws, and then of how the issue is presented in an impressive range of Medieval English texts.

Driving in the story is her awareness that, as she points out, one danger of reading the past in terms of the assumptions of the present, is that it's too easy to assume modern assumptions are transhistorical and condemn their absence in the past. Such an approach also leads to an inability or unwillingness to see texts from the past in anything but the simplest of lights.

As she writes in her conclusion; 'They [medieval texts] are not the naive works that some of the more radical analysis of patriarchy might lead us to expect'.

By working her way first through the legal and theological background, she is able to read the medieval texts with a great deal of care. Unsurprisingly, such an approach brings to light how varied and contradictory, sometimes how modern, sometimes how very different, sometimes how ugly, the presentation of Rape and Ravishment is in Medieval Lit.

'Medieval thought and writing, then, are by no means monolithic, systems of thought and particularly approaches to sex and gender differ widely.'

As she also points out, rather than condoning or seeing rape as erotic or pornographic...'The predatory, potential animal or savage nature of men that theorists remark as being portrayed in a disturbingly positive light in pornography or later romance is not sympathetically portrayed in medieval texts, which so universally subscribe to the need to control the body and its desires.'

As a study the work is impressive, as an antidote to simple 'historicising' it's bracing. Fictive texts are simply not written as essays on the topic that interests the historian. They do not always present logical or even coherent approaches to a topic, and Saunders is very good at acknowledging the way the presentation of an incident can slide from the beginning to the end of a text or how a single text can contain contradictory treatments of the same issue.

She's particularly good with this in her discussion of Malory's story world.

My only criticism, and it's really not a criticism, is that in her discussion of Malory, she has a section on 'unnatural conceptions' in which she puts together the conception of Arthur, and the conception of Mordred...the latter bending the definition of 'unnatural' a little, but she leaves out the conception of Galahad, which is a direct echo of the conception of Arthur although the victim is male and the perpetrators female. She raises the issue of the women who prey on Lancelot, so leaving out the most successful of them seems odd.

A thought provoking, carefully argued study. And one that probably needs several visits. The bibliography, which has been reduced to 'works cited' is vast and an obvious source for 'further reading'.