Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England by Corinne Saunders (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Corinne Saunders. Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Pp. vii, 343. $90.00. This is an extensive and ambitious book which will be useful to literary scholars. As Saunders says, ‘‘its purpose is . . . the exploration of a single, particularly suggestive and controversial act across a range of discourses, and thus the presentation of one cross-section of women’s history’’ (p. 3). ‘‘Discourse’’ is her central organizing principle, allowing her to investigate a variety of texts, from legal texts to canon law to confessional manuals to hagiography, romance, and legendary history, ending with separate chapters on Malory and Chaucer. Through her investigation of different discourses she is able to track developments in the legal definition of rape, of debates about female chastity and pollution, of the cultural construction of chivalry and sanctity—a remarkably rich range of cultural attitudes evoked by the representation of the violation of women. At the same time, her use of the term ‘‘discourse’’ is somewhat problematic, since she never fully considers the relationship of ‘‘discourse ’’ as a concept to structures of power, despite the history of the term’s use in modern literary theory. Thus, although she does consider the relationship between patriarchal power and rape, she never calls into question the very discourses she is using—the way, for example, canon law reinforces religious and gender hierarchies. Within her chosen texts, however, she is able to interpret rape ‘‘in the dense context of contemporaneous (rather than contemporary) beliefs —implicit or explicit—about cosmology, the creation of the world, the relation of human and supernatural, about will and consent, morality , virtue, purity, ownership, authority, property, evil and forgiveness’’ (p. 3). The thoroughness and clarity of her approach is demonstrated in her first chapter, an investigation of secular law which, she argues, shows a distinctively English tradition which develops out of the interaction of Anglo-Saxon and Norman law. Here she begins to develop the case for her contention that the Middle Ages rape must be examined within the context of abduction, and that the medieval term raptus, with its ambiguous meanings, indicates the complex intersection of the two forms of violence. Because rape is tied to ravishment it becomes a public issue, and personal freedom is not always a central concern in legal or even theological works, sometimes making the victim herself a marginal figure. Indeed, despite the complexity of the legal discourses generated by rape, very often in practice charges were dropped. (Although here, I 430 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:31 PS REVIEWS think, the spottiness of records from earlier periods makes uncertain absolute statements about real-life outcomes.) In her second chapter, on the church’s statements about rape, she shows us a canon law less concerned with women’s victimization, or their right to control of their own bodies, than with their status and value in society. At the same time theologians, following primarily the example of Augustine, argued that since free will was central to any act of sin, the virgin who did not assent was not spiritually polluted. Unfortunately, the generosity of this view was undermined by the medieval belief that conception required female sexual pleasure, so that pregnancy was a sign that the woman had in fact assented. In general, she sees vernacular and secular writers as more sympathetic to women, both as potential victims and as individuals with rights. This does not seem surprising, given the nature and origins of the materials she is using. Here I think analyses of the discourses themselves would prove illuminating. The next four chapters, each building on earlier themes, deal with literary texts, and the last three are the strongest in terms of literary and cultural insight. Hagiography has received a great deal of sophisticated attention, especially from feminist critics; Saunders does not always draw on their work. In particular, given the existence of known female authors and audiences for hagiographic texts, it is odd that she does not investigate the possibility of differently gendered views about rape. In canon law and theology (with the exception of a very few figures like Hildegard of Bingen...