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266 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) Robertson, Elizabeth and Christine M. Rose, eds, Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (The New Middle Ages), Houndsmill , Palgrave, 2001; cloth; pp. 453; RRP £32.50; ISBN 0312236484. Within the last 20 years or so, there have been many studies of medieval and early modern literature from a feminist viewpoint, and this is not the first book to be written about rape and, more generally, sexual violence in the period, but this is a particularly challenging collection of essays. An underlying reason for this is the length of the individual contributions: 30-odd pages of small point text is an average. Part I contains essays of a methodological and theoretical nature involving the understanding of rape in medieval literature. There is a forty-page essay by Christine Rose on reading rape in Chaucer. Part II contains four essays on the Philomel tradition, two of them focusing on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and one on the Old French Philomena. Part III deals with questions involving the legal meaning of rape, focusing on Chaucer in two essays, including a substantial essay by Christopher Cannon on the inevitable question of Chaucer’s ‘release’ from a rape action by Cecily Chaumpaigne. The last two essays of the collection examine some of the representations of rape and chastity in The Faerie Queene. Overall, there is less eclecticism, eccentricity and idiosyncrasy than one normally encounters in the essay collection, although Chaucer gets perhaps too much attention and Renaissance literature perhaps too little. There are one or two unexpected but welcome forays into languages other than English, such as Old French and the treatment of rape in the Latin comedies of the Middle Ages. There are also one or two notable omissions. The story of the savage rape of Philomel, for example, is often discussed, but there is no discussion of Gower’s powerful treatment of it in Confessio Amantis. The editors make the bold claim in their introduction that stories of sexual violence towards women stand at the heart of many of the foundational myths of western culture. Perhaps one of the explanations for this is that Ovid’s Metamorphoses form a kind of ‘hypotext’ for so many medieval stories. A smaller, subsidiary observation, but one that is more troubling in a way, is that sexual violence occupies an inexplicably prominent role in Chaucer’s narratives: actual rapes in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale; threats of sexual violence in the Physician’s Tale, the Merchant’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale. These are not all rapes in the literal sense, of course, and one of the most Reviews 267 Parergon 20.1 (2003) illuminating aspects of the book is the struggle to interpret the meaning of particular words and the connotations of particular acts. The story of Philomel is one thing, but the forced marriage of Emily in the Knight’s Tale is another. To what extent is Criseyde’s fate a kind of abduction against her will? Pandarus does, after all, recommend abducting Criseyde as a solution to all their problems. How seriously should we take Troilus’s boasting to Criseyde in bed that she must now ‘yield’ to him? What do we make of her riposte, that if she hadn’t yielded long before she wouldn’t be there with him at all? A particular crux is the word ‘rape’ itself. It is not a common word in medieval English. Its Latin origin, raptus, seems to be capable of a range of signification, from forced sexual intercourse to abduction for the purposes of marriage, sometimes with the consent of both partners. The most celebrated biographical detail of Chaucer’s own life, that he was released by Cecily Chaumpaigne ‘from all manner of actions such as they relate to my rape’ (de raptu meo), seems no nearer an unequivocal interpretation, although Christopher Cannon argues, here and elsewhere, that ‘rape’ in fourteenth-century English use commonly meant exactly what it said. One of the problems of the study of rape in the Middle Ages, however, especially when mediated in a literary text, is that the act of rape so often becomes...

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