Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays exploring medieval rape culture, survivors’ speech, and female subjectivity in a late medieval lyric genre known as the pastourelle as well as in related literary works.
Trade Review“Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature brings a new focus on the sexual violence of the pastourelle genre, which, as the authors note, has often been erased or sidelined in mainstream scholarship. The essays offer a unique contribution by showing how the responses of women to sexual violence in the literature is mirrored by the responses of real women to similar events in our time.”
—Alison Gulley,editor of Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts
“Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature is a timely, cutting-edge collection of essays that contains some of the most forward-thinking work on sexual violence, consent, and agency in the field of medieval literary studies. These essays chart a new, invigorating direction for feminist work that will shape the field for years to come.”
—Holly A. Crocker,author of Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: Recovering the Pastourelle
Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov
Part 1: Essays
1. Reassessing the Pastourelle: Rape Culture, #MeToo, and the Literature of Survival
Sarah Baechle and Carissa M. Harris, with Elizaveta Strakhov
2. “You and Me, Baby, Ain’t Nothin’ But Mammals”: Animal Metaphors and Sexual Consent in the Poetry of William Dunbar
Mary C. Flannery
3. Voicing Violence: Reading Rape Survival in Premodern Lyrics
Carissa M. Harris
4. Gentrifying the Pastourelle in the Visual Arts of the Valois Courts and Christine de Pizan’s Dit de la pastoure
Scott David Miller
5. Dismembered Memories: Philomela in Chaucer and Gower
Lucy M. Allen-Goss
6. The Many Wives of Potiphar: Rape Culture in Medieval Romance
Amy N. Vines
7. Legendary Resistance: Critiquing Rape Culture in Virgin Martyr Passions
Courtney E. Rydel
8. Rape, Rapture, and Writing The Book of Margery Kempe
Suzanne M. Edwards
9. “And sok his fille of þat licour”: Maternity, Sovereignty, and Song in the Marian Lyrics of London, British Library, MS Sloane
Katharine W. Jager
10. Response: A Telling Difference; Sexual Violence, Consent, and Literary Form
Elizabeth Robertson
Part 2: English and Scottish Pastourelles and Rape Songs
Edited by Carissa M. Harris
Throughe a forest as I can ryde
Come over the woodes fair and grene
When that byrdes be brought to rest
Be pes, ye make me spille my ale
Quhy so strat strang go we by youe
Hey troly loly lo
I can be wanton and yf I wyll
Beware my lytyl fynger
All to lufe and nocht to fenyie
Commonyng betuix the Mester and the Heure
I met my lady weil arrayit
I saw me thocht this hindir nycht
In somer quhen flouris will smell
Ane fair sweit may of mony one
Still undir the levis grene
Nay pish, nay pew
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
