Everyman or a Monster?: The Rapist in Early Modern England, c.1600–1750

In academic writing about rape in history, the rapist is a polarized figure, appearing to be at some times everyman and at others a monster. The former of these positions – which associated rape with, literally, every man – was made first and most forcefully in feminist scholarship of the 1970s, most notably by Susan Brownmiller, whose Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape gave rape its first history. Brownmiller demonstrated that sexual violence was neither attributable only to the uncivilized inhabitants of past societies nor to be explained in the present in terms of deviant or pathological behaviour. Rather, it resided at the core of modern Western patriarchy. While acknowledging that not all men perpetrate rape, the ‘typical rapist’, she said, was ‘an unextraordinary violence-prone fellow’. Far from being ‘society’s aberrants’, rapists served ‘as front-line masculine shock troops’ in patriarchy’s war against women.¹ This incredibly important work challenged conventional discourses and practices (in, for instance, academic and clinical psychology, criminology, and jurisprudence as well as popular culture) that considered sexual offenders to be different from ‘normal’ men and that assumed the disposition and conduct of victims to have contributed to the sexual violence inflicted upon them. Since then, feminist historians have done much to illuminate women’s experiences of and responses to sexual violence in the past, and to situate historically the prejudices that hold women responsible for it.² Perpetrators of rape have been subject to less systematic analysis.

In much historical writing, a tension between the everyman-rapist and the monstrous one remains unresolved. Research for the early modern period and beyond suggests that many men refuted allegations of rape by claiming that the sexual encounter in question was consensual. In so doing, rape was reconfigured as sex and they as ordinary men rather than brutes. I wish in this article to consider men who were accused of rape from a different perspective. In particular, I explore what may be at stake in such a dichotomous view and its unresolved tensions both for historians and for early modern people. I shall first point to the ways in which academic histories frequently categorize men who raped, before considering how seventeenth and early eighteenth-century people viewed the issue.

Fig. 1.

Charles Perrault, Histories, or Tales of Past Times ... with Morals, London, 1729, p. 1. Perrault purposefully selected this scene – depicting the Wolf and Little Red Riding-Hood in bed together at the moment before he consummates his desire and kills and eats her – as the one that best illustrated the tale’s moral.

© British Library Board, General Reference Collection 12450.r.35.

The Rapist in the Hands of Historians

While historians have illuminated the numerous and huge obstacles that hindered the prosecution of rapists, men who raped have been subject to little interrogation. An important departure in this respect is Joanna Bourke’s Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (2007).³ Bourke wished to place the ‘rapist, not the victim ... at the centre’ of her history. ‘To do otherwise’, she said, would contribute to ‘a long-standing tradition of blaming women for their own violation’ and perpetuate the illusion that rape is something that just happens to women rather than something men do.⁴ Bourke explores a plethora of intersecting, competing, compatible and contradictory discourses, narratives and ideas about sex, violence, women and men – in which the actions and motivations of men who rape were described, explained or justified in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵ Yet even in Bourke’s comprehensive survey the rapist is rather difficult to pin down. There, and elsewhere, the rapist at once eludes and needs no elucidation: we already know him, it seems, though we may not know when or in what guise he will become embodied. He is every man. He is a monster. He is a man whom we know intimately. He is a stranger. He may materialize in our homes, in the streets, or in isolated far-away places.

These ambiguities reflect a perennial...