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Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom

Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts

Edited by ALISON GULLEY
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvkrkk5h
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  • Book Info
    Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom
    Book Description:

    Teachers of medieval literature help students bridge thetemporal, contextual, and linguistic gulfs between the Middle Ages and thetwenty-first century. When episodes involving rape are thrown into the mix,that task becomes even more difficult. Students and teachers bring a variety ofexperiences to the classroom. This volume proposes ways educators can helpstudents navigate the divide between in- and out-of-class experiences and offerssuggestions for classroom activities and assignments for a range of medievaltexts, as well as insight into the concerns of students in various settings.

    eISBN: 978-1-64189-033-5
    Subjects: Language & Literature

Table of Contents

  1. Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: TEACHING RAPE AND MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CLASSROOM
    (pp. 1-11)
    ALISON GULLEY

    This volume was conceived and written at a time of unprecedented attention in the United States to rape and rape prevention on college campuses and more specifically grows out of a panel that I organized for the May 2014 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, in which I and two other presenters explored the problem of how to approach medieval texts that feature sexual violence, in ways that are both academically sound and ethically appropriate for our students. The panel itself resulted from an interaction with a student in a sophomore-level British Literature class. During a discussion of Geoffrey...

  2. Chapter 2 MEDIEVAL SAINTS AND MISOGYNIST TIMES: TRANSHISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THE UNDERGRADUATE CLASSROOM
    (pp. 12-28)
    SUZANNE M. EDWARDS

    Although most undergraduate students enter the college classroom with little or no experience reading medieval texts, they are avid consumers of popular culture—and they are confident that rape was more widespread and considered less serious in the Middle Ages than it is the contemporary United States. Because student perspectives on the long history of sexual violence are more likely to have their source in contemporary novels, movies, and television shows like the popular HBO series Game of Thrones than in medieval texts like the Life of St. Agnes, they tend to identify pervasive acts of sexual violence and callous,...

  3. Chapter 3 TEACHING MEDIEVAL RAPE CULTURE ACROSS GENRE: INSIGHTS FROM VICTIMOLOGY
    (pp. 29-46)
    WENDY PERKINS and CHRISTINA DI GANGI

    For advanced undergraduates as for their instructors, medieval literary texts depicting victims and victimization present special interpretive challenges. Medieval texts stereotype and/or typologize both victims and victimizers in terms of highly symbolic categories, beginning with categories of sex and class. Crimes against women in particular bear the hallmarks of medieval misogynistic discourse; moreover, when these crimes are sex crimes, medieval authors often depict both victimization and resistance to victimization (as in female saints’ lives) as ambiguously and aesthetically pleasing. In teaching undergraduates, there is a strong argument to be made that appreciating textual ambiguity is a skill to be fostered....

  4. Chapter 4 BRINGING THE BYSTANDER INTO THE HUMANITIES CLASSROOM: READING ANCIENT, PATRISTIC, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTS ON THE CONTINUUM OF VIOLENCE
    (pp. 47-62)
    ELIZABETH A. HUBBLE

    Every spring semester at The University of Montana-Missoula (UM), I teach a first-year Women’s and Gender Studies course entitled WGSS 163L Historical and Literary Perspectives on Women with an average enrollment of thirty-five students.¹ The “L” in the title indicates that the course fulfils a general education requirement as a Literary Studies course, and thus it always attracts a fair number of students (50 per cent) who are not necessarily seeking a degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, but who have at least a passing interest in women’s history and literature. In general, the class demographics are fairly typical of...

  5. Chapter 5 FROM BYSTANDER TO UPSTANDER: READING THE NIBELUNGENLIED TO RESIST RAPE CULTURE
    (pp. 63-76)
    ALEXANDRA STERLING-HELLENBRAND

    The concept of rape culture in higher education has come under increasingly close media scrutiny at local, state, and national levels. In this chapter, against a background of heightened awareness and of renewed conversation about campus sexual assault, I would like to frame a discussion of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. I argue that this frame offers an unexpected perspective for reading the Nibelungenlied in the context of teaching rape and medieval literature, providing a unique opportunity to create dialogue between thirteenth-century texts and twenty-first-century students/readers. The Nibelungenlied is, of course, a wonder-fully complex work with an equally complicated reception...

  6. Chapter 6 SPEECH, SILENCE, AND TEACHING CHAUCER’S RAPES
    (pp. 77-90)
    TISON PUGH

    He said/she said: the invariable shorthand for the challenges of deciphering occluded events of violence and violation, in which the question of which story we believe—that of the accused or of the accuser—bears out innumerable consequences related to our conceptions of justice, gender, and sexuality, both in the past and continuing into the present. Chaucer depicts rape and scenes suggestive of rape in several of his Canterbury Tales, most notably “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Reeve’s Tale,” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and in his Legend of Good Women as well, particularly in the Legend of Lucrece and...

  7. Chapter 7 CLASSROOM PSA: VALUES, LAW, AND ETHICS IN “THE REEVE’S TALE”
    (pp. 91-112)
    EMILY HOULIK-RITCHEY

    As a medievalist, I sometimes find myself encountering the assumption that the issues raised in the texts I study and teach are radically divorced from the concerns of our present day. This is, of course, nonsense, as the controversy surrounding an episode of Game of Thrones illustrated with explosive fervour. In 2014, director Alex Graves adapted a scene from George R. R. Martin’s novel A Storm of Swords that enraged many viewers by apparently transforming an act of consensual sex between characters Cersei and Jaime into a rape.¹ The director and other viewers objected to the viral explosion of criticism...

  8. Chapter 8 “HOW DO WE KNOW HE REALLY RAPED HER?”: USING THE BBC CANTERBURY TALES TO CONFRONT STUDENT SKEPTICISM TOWARDS THE WIFE OF BATH
    (pp. 113-127)
    ALISON GULLEY

    I teach Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” to a variety of students, including sophomores meeting their general education requirements, English majors at both the introductory and advanced levels, and graduate students in a seminar focused on Chaucer’s works.¹ For each of my classes I have different pedagogical goals ranging from introducing non-majors and new majors to the greatest hits of medieval and Renaissance British literature and to the pleasures and methodologies of engaging with literary texts, to, with my senior English majors and master’s level students in specialized courses, being able to read Middle English with ease...

  9. Chapter 9 TEACHING THE POTIPHAR’S WIFE MOTIF IN MARIE DE FRANCE’S LANVAL
    (pp. 128-137)
    ELIZABETH HARPER

    The mid-twentieth-century folklore scholar Stith Thompson lists motif K2111 as “Potiphar’s Wife” and describes it as follows: “A woman makes vain overtures to a man and then accuses him of attempting to force her.”¹ This motif is very widely known, appearing not just in Genesis and the Koran (where it derives its name), but in ancient texts from across the world. It remains a mainstay of Western storytelling, appearing in narratives as disparate as Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Less entertainingly, it also appears whenever the subject of acquaintance...

  10. Chapter 10 SEXUAL COMPULSION AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THE LAIS OF MARIE DE FRANCE
    (pp. 138-150)
    MISTY URBAN

    While the Lais of Marie de France contain no explicit instances of rape, these twelve short Anglo-Norman poems dating to the later twelfth century abound with episodes of infidelity, indiscretion, sexual compulsion, and sexual violence. Lovers pursue affairs that imperil their lives and often end in their violent deaths together; knights or their go-betweens are frequently dismembered by jealous husbands; and overwhelming passion compels all manner of secret plotting and betrayal. Even the tales with ostensibly happy endings demonstrate how firmly Western conventions of romantic love link desire and suffering, passion and violence, masculinity and aggression, femininity and threat.¹ Kathryn...

  11. Chapter 11 TROUBADOUR LYRIC, FIN’AMORS, AND RAPE CULTURE
    (pp. 151-163)
    DANIEL E. O’SULLIVAN

    The term “rape culture” was coined relatively recently, but its salient features are perceptible throughout history. Definitions vary, but most critics describe it as a culture in which people consider rape a “fact of life,” a society that implicitly or explicitly promotes sexual violence. First applied to all of American society by second-wave feminists in the 1970s, the notion has many detractors. Men’s rights organizations believe feminism and political correctness have wrongfully transformed traditional forms of romance into excuses for man-bashing; furthermore, they allege the judicial system overrides due process by favouring victims’ rights over those of the accused.¹ others...

  12. Chapter 12 THE KNIGHT COERCED: TWO CASES OF RAPED MEN IN CHIVALRIC ROMANCE
    (pp. 164-182)
    DAVID GRUBBS

    A major shift has occurred in how higher education understands and confronts rape. This shift is seen most practically in campus life as colleges and universities adopt policies that define rape according to the positive consent (“yes means yes”) model: that is, without the explicit assent of both parties, any sex-related activity constitutes sexual assault, and any sexual intercourse constitutes rape. It is natural that this shift should be engaged in departments of languages and literature, often a haven for ignored voices, and so enter medieval literature classrooms. Not that talk of rape has even been alien in that environment:...

  13. Chapter 13 TEACHING RAPE TO THE HE-MAN WOMAN HATERS CLUB: CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES AT A MILITARY SCHOOL
    (pp. 183-198)
    ALAN BARAGONA

    Medieval literature professors have probably always been uneasy about their authors’ sometimes ambivalent attitude towards rape and often uncomfortable addressing it in the classroom. But frequently, context and current events conspire to make medieval literature an especially vivid and useful distant mirror of the present. At a time when the country has reached a crisis point of rape awareness both in the military and in schools, the treatment of rape in medieval literature becomes, not a problem for teachers, but a nearly perfect vehicle for addressing the issue with students at a military college.

    At the end of 2014, the...

  14. Chapter 14 RAPE, IDENTITY, AND REDEMPTION: TEACHING “SIR GOWTHER” IN THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE CLASSROOM
    (pp. 199-207)
    WILLIAM H. SMITH

    It’s tempting to begin this essay with a discussion of the challenges involved in teaching medieval literature at the community college level. The problem, of course, is that any notion of “the community college level” is, by necessity, fragmentary. The defining characteristic of community college students is their diversity—demographically, economically, and intellectually—and that diversity makes it virtually impossible to talk about any single characteristic approach to teaching in the community college environment. My own institution, Weatherford College, attracts mainly “traditional” students, i.e., students aged eighteen to twenty-four who have recently graduated high school. As a result, the average...