Overview

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.

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9781137364814

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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

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

The New Middle Ages Series Editor's Report Bonnie Wheeler TITLE: Surviving Raptus: Pedagogies of Sexual Violence in Medieval England TYPE: monograph AUTHOR: Suzanne M. Edwards PROJECT: What a smart and timely book. What is rape? How should women respond to rape if they live in a culture of submission to male authority? Suzanne M. Edwards looks at literary and legal attention to rape in the later Middle Ages and she draws some radical conclusions about the complications caused by the ideas of spiritual 'ravishment.' This gives her book have a new energy compared to others in the field. This a book with capacious claims and it will provoke a lot of response. She writes well. Let's push her to a quick deadline. AUDIENCE: Feminist scholars, legal historians, cultural theorists, postcolonial scholars, literary medievalists, medieval historians. EVALUATION: Great topic, strong writer. I think it is solid and well written. Bonnie Wheeler Series Editor The New Middle Ages

Author Information

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

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