Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature

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

"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

• Introduction: Discourses of Survival 1. Rape Survivors and Living Martyrs in the Lives of Holy Women2. Looking at 'Strange Women': Pedagogies of Sexual Violence in Anchoritic Literature3. Outrage Against Rape and the Battle Over Survival in Fourteenth-Century Legal Discourse and the Wife of Bath's Tale4. Ravished Wives, Sovereignty, and Political Reform Afterword: Afterlives in the Twenty-First Century