Project MUSE®: Florilegium - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Florilegium.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 31 (2014) - vol. 38 (2021)Latest Articles: FlorilegiumTWOProject MUSE®Florilegium2369-71800709-5201Latest articles in Florilegium. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Florilegium's Special Issue on Sexualized and Gendered Violence in the Middle Ages
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968717
<p></p>
So far this century, fantasy stories, both in novels and on television, seem to include a lot of sexualized violence. This seems especially true for fantasies set in "medievalish" times and places. The TV series Game of Thrones is the most obvious of these: its seventy-three episodes (over eight seasons) feature thirty-four rape or attempted rape scenes, almost one every other episode.1 George R. R. Martin, the author of A Game of Thrones, famously defended the frequency of sexualized violence on the grounds of "historical accuracy" and "telling the truth." He told the New York Times: "My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallFlorilegium's Special Issue on Sexualized and Gendered Violence in the Middle Ages2025-09-04text/htmlen-USFlorilegium's Special Issue on Sexualized and Gendered Violence in the Middle Ages2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®137832026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04The Power of Patient Kingship: Supernatural Abduction in Sir Orfeo and the Third Branch of the Mabinogi
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968718
<p></p>
The Middle English poem Sir Orfeo is a Breton lai that reworks the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into the form of a Celtic fairy abduction narrative. Although there are mentions of a lai of Orfeo dating to the third quarter of the twelfth century, there is no written source for the Middle English poem.1 Fairy abduction narratives are a common feature of Celtic literature and myth, so it is not surprising that a number of analogues to Sir Orfeo have been proposed. As Aisling Byrne points out, such narratives are more common in Irish literature than in Welsh literature, so most of the proposed analogues are Irish.2 What is surprising, however, is that a major Welsh text, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, has received
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallThe Power of Patient Kingship: Supernatural Abduction in Sir Orfeo and the Third Branch of the Mabinogi2025-09-04text/htmlen-USThe Power of Patient Kingship: Supernatural Abduction in Sir Orfeo and the Third Branch of the Mabinogi2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®568442026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04"Grab 'em by the Relics": The Elision of Consent and Selling Salvation with Female Virgin Martyrs Post-Sanctification
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968719
<p></p>
In 1231, Elizabeth of Thuringia (eventually known as St. Elizabeth of Hungary) died in the city of Marburg, Germany, at the age of 24. After her death, her body lay unburied for several days, though no smell of decomposition arose from the corpse. The easy access to Elizabeth's body on the funeral bier did, however, prove to be irresistible to devout relic hunters. In the Dicta quator ancillarum, recorded in January 1235 in preparation for her canonization, one of her former handmaidens testified that many people "burning with devotion" came into the church and "cut or tore off pieces of cloth [from her tunic]. Some cut the hair from her head or pieces of her nails. One even cut off her ears and another the nipples
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmall"Grab 'em by the Relics": The Elision of Consent and Selling Salvation with Female Virgin Martyrs Post-Sanctification2025-09-04text/htmlen-US"Grab 'em by the Relics": The Elision of Consent and Selling Salvation with Female Virgin Martyrs Post-Sanctification2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®1042782026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04Rereading Medieval Cases of Raptus: Group Rape and Homosociality in England
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968720
<p></p>
Rape is frequently positioned as a one-on-one scenario in which there is one victim and one perpetrator. It is therefore often discussed as an individual problem, in that a few men are rapists and will commit rape in secluded areas where there are no witnesses. In the medieval context, knightly violence against women is not new or surprising; the group rape of Marguerite de Carrouges by the squire Jacques Le Gris popularized in Ridley Scott's The Last Duel has brought public awareness to such events. However, even this now-popularized case is highly misleading as it elides the frequency at which lone rapes were occurring with the help and facilitation of other men, especially among the knightly class. Instead of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallRereading Medieval Cases of Raptus: Group Rape and Homosociality in England2025-09-04text/htmlen-USRereading Medieval Cases of Raptus: Group Rape and Homosociality in England2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®1620952026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04Philomela's Cloth: Reading Authority Back into a Survivor's Account
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968721
<p></p>
Philomela, more than any other character of the many abused, assaulted, and wronged in the long narrative of the Metamorphoses, refuses to be silenced. Her persistence in communicating her experience reverberates in medieval receptions of her narrative, and in her responses to the violence done to her may be found new possibilities for authority in survivors' accounts of their trauma. Raped by her brother-in-law Tereus, she rebukes him with a promise that justice will be served, if not by their peers, then by the gods; he immediately silences her by cutting out her tongue. However, even isolated in the Thracian wilderness, she weaves a cloth embroidered with her account of the rape and has it sent to her sister
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallPhilomela's Cloth: Reading Authority Back into a Survivor's Account2025-09-04text/htmlen-USPhilomela's Cloth: Reading Authority Back into a Survivor's Account2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®754602026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04The Grammar of Rape in Chaucer and Gower
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968722
<p></p>
It is no longer possible to claim, as Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose did twenty years ago in the first sentence of the introduction to their groundbreaking work Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, that "Feminist analyses of rape [in medieval literature] have only just begun."1 Twenty years, in medieval studies, is often "quite recent"; but in feminist, gender, and queer studies, twenty years is an eternity—especially when those years include the establishment of a federal standing committee on the status of women (2004); the legalization of gay marriage in Canada (2005); the worldwide #MeToo movement (established in 2006 but going viral in 2017); the National Inquiry into Missing
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallThe Grammar of Rape in Chaucer and Gower2025-09-04text/htmlen-USThe Grammar of Rape in Chaucer and Gower2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®866752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04Blaming the Victim: Stalking and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968723
<p></p>
"I love nat to be constrayned to love, for love muste only aryse of the harte selff, and nat by none constraynte."[Lancelot to Arthur and Guenevere, over Elayne of Ascolot's body]The Morte Darthur opens with an instance of stalking, yet stalking has been absent from scholarly discourse about the Morte Darthur. Just six lines into Malory's story, Igrayne appears as the wife of the duke of Cornwall, summoned with him to King Uther's court first because she is "a fair lady," and secondarily because she is "passynge wyse" (MD 1.1–7). Uther makes unwelcome advances toward Igrayne, but she refuses him and goes to her husband to advise that they leave at once: "husband, I counceille yow that we departe from hens sodenly
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallBlaming the Victim: Stalking and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur2025-09-04text/htmlen-USBlaming the Victim: Stalking and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®673632026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04Raptus, Ravishment, and "Self-Divorce": The Heterotopic Space of Malory's Morgan le Fay
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968724
<p></p>
Scholarship on Morgan le Fay is prolific. Her shifting role, from her origins as a healer in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini to an antagonist/villain in Malory's Morte Darthur, has been meticulously analyzed by scholars, including Dorsey Armstrong, Jill M. Hebert, and Siobhan M. Wyatt. Armstrong's reading of Morgan focuses on the "link between masculine violence and the marginal—yet essential—feminine" in the Morte Darthur, and the ways Morgan "transcends categorization as feminine, as that against which the knights may define their masculinity."1 Hebert situates Malory's Morgan as an "Other" character who acts as "the consummate crosser of boundaries" and who "attempts to show Arthur and his knights that
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallRaptus, Ravishment, and "Self-Divorce": The Heterotopic Space of Malory's Morgan le Fay2025-09-04text/htmlen-USRaptus, Ravishment, and "Self-Divorce": The Heterotopic Space of Malory's Morgan le Fay2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®719652026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04Judith, Éowyn, and the Alloying Effects of Sexualized Violence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968725
<p></p>
In his essay "Ofermod," J. R. R. Tolkien defines Old English "northern heroic spirit" as "the heroism of obedience and love, not of pride or wilfulness."1 This, he writes, "is the most heroic and the most moving" form of heroism.2 Significantly, Tolkien defines "northern heroic spirit" only in terms of men, using male figures as examples to supplement his analysis. He considers excessive pride in terms of Byrhtnoth of The Battle of Maldon, Beowulf, and Sir Gawain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and wonders if men who fight subordinate to ruling powers come the closest to exemplifying "unalloyed" heroism given that they are "placed in greater peril [in battle]" than those they bravely serve.3 Yet Tolkien does
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallJudith, Éowyn, and the Alloying Effects of Sexualized Violence2025-09-04text/htmlen-USJudith, Éowyn, and the Alloying Effects of Sexualized Violence2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®610962026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04Misogyny and the BBC: Alisoun's treatment in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and the BBC's modern adaptation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726
<p></p>
In 2003, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) released a six-part television miniseries based on modern adaptations of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. On September 11, the BBC aired the first episode of its miniseries, an adaptation of one of Chaucer's most well-known tales, The Miller's Tale.1 When it aired, this first episode had approximately 8.18 million viewers in the United Kingdom.2 The BBC's version of Chaucer's Miller's Tale was written by Peter Bowker, who changed, or "modernized," the plot, and there is no drunken Miller narrating the tale. In this modern version, Nick Zakian (played by James Nesbitt) is a con man who ends up in a small town when his sports car breaks down. John Crosby (played by
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968726">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/700/image/coversmallMisogyny and the BBC: Alisoun's treatment in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and the BBC's modern adaptation2025-09-04text/htmlen-USMisogyny and the BBC: Alisoun's treatment in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and the BBC's modern adaptation2025-09-042025TWOProject MUSE®581572026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-09-04