“In The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature, Suzanne M. Edwards explores representations of outliving rape in English saint’s lives, anchoritic texts, romances, and legal statutes from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. … This book is valuable for medieval scholars, feminist scholars, and academics and activists who seek to combat sexual violence, as Afterlives provides important insight into theoretical conversations about gendered subjectivity, survival, and agency.” (Carissa M. Harris, Modern Philology, Vol. 115 (3), February, 2018)
"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
From the Back Cover
From devotional literature to political narratives, medieval texts propose that survivors of sexual violence have privileged moral, ethical, and spiritual insight. The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature explores these discourses of survival in a wide range of texts, including letters of spiritual advice, legal statutes and cases, saints' lives, romances, theological summae, and legendary histories. Edwards argues that understanding the literary history of survival as distinct from the history of rape highlights the ethical importance of attending to violence against women as well as the costs of reifying gender difference and its traumatic identifications - both in our study of the past and in contemporary feminist politics.
About the Author
Suzanne M. Edwards is Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University, USA.