The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature

From devotional literature to political narratives, medieval texts propose that sexual violence victims have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. This book explores these discourses of survival in a wide range of medieval English texts, including letters of spiritual advice, legal cases, romances, and legendary histories.

“In The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature, Suzanne M. Edwards explores representations of outliving rape in English saint’s lives, anchoritic texts, romances, and legal statutes from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. … This book is valuable for medieval scholars, feminist scholars, and academics and activists who seek to combat sexual violence, as Afterlives provides important insight into theoretical conversations about gendered subjectivity, survival, and agency.” (Carissa M. Harris, Modern Philology, Vol. 115 (3), February, 2018)
 

  "Our own critical language, Edwards proposes, may supply language for certain experiences in the past that, for those living that past, defied description. Her use of survivor here, in the context of everything that medievals understood by raptus, is one such crucial term. This deeply thoughtful, scholarly, and beautifully written book pays the closest attention to bodies textual and human, medieval and modern." - David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA

 

"In this intelligent and sensitive book, Suzanne M. Edwards moves discussions of representations of rape forward by focusing on the hermeneutically complex role survival of sexual violence plays in medieval literary works as varied as the early Middle English treatise on virginity Hali Meidenhad and Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale. Providing perspicacious readings of representations of gendered violence in the Middle Ages, Edwards also brings to the fore the implications of these readings for our understanding of sexual violence in the present." - Elizabeth Robertson, Professor of English, University of Glasgow, UK 

 

 

Suzanne M. Edwards is Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University, USA.