| This dissertation offers a history of sexual violence in late-medieval England by tracking the associative patterns that structure the experience and production of sexual violence in contexts as varied as the legal regulation of marriage and raptus, the erotics of hagiography, the ethicizing work of instructional treatises, and the gendering of political communities and ecstatic experience. In attending to this associative network, this project unsettles the weight of raptus, a medieval legal term that includes rape but also encompasses non-sexual abduction and consensual elopement, as the paradigmatic framework for a historical understanding of sexual violence. Attributing definitional clarity to raptus and treating the law as an index of cultural understandings of sexual violence obfuscates the crises in law, intimate life, rhetoric, and experience that sexual violence produces. This project attends to these crises and the legal, religious, moral, and fundamentally epistemological questions that they raised.; Because sexual violence serves as a pedagogical scene in which individuals come to know themselves as sexed, gendered, violated, and/or intact, an expansive account of sexual violence in late-medieval England also examines how competing notions of sexual violence shaped medieval constructions of sexual and gender difference, bodily integrity, and the will. This project explores how sexual violence came to serve as an example of sexual difference and gendered oppression and also explores the other exemplary functions that sexual violence serves. Texts considered range from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries and include Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale and the Tale of Melibee, Gower's Tale of Florent, Margery Kempe's The Book of Margery Kempe, the anchoritic text Holy Maidenhood, Reginald Pecock's Folewer to the Donet , Richard Rolle's Form of Perfect Living, and the Life of St. Elisabeth of Spalbeck. |
