Rape in the Middle Ages

(Trigger warning for rape, obviously.)

(Also warning that I’m totally not a historian and I could be getting everything horribly, horribly wrong in this post. Please forgive me, Dr. MB, if I’m butchering this subject terribly.)

So in this post and in the comments of that post, there was some discussion on how serious of a crime would rape have been in the Middle Ages. I said that I thought it would be a pretty serious crime but that I wasn't sure. So I decided to look it up, and unfortunately, it seems as though I was wrong.

There looks to be  lot of research that has been done on rape in the Middle Ages. just googling "rape in the middle ages" brings up numerous articles and books written on the subject.

I found this post during my search which summarizes the issue pretty well.

In the early Middle Ages, rape was considered theft (nice objectification and dehumanization of women’s bodies, huh?) Women were seen as lesser than men, and so there was not many instances of harsh punishment for rape. Rape was seen as a loss of a woman’s honor and not anything more than that.

Not all rapes were reported (as is still true today.) Rape was a crime that occurred in every social class.

Punishment of rape differed from different classes. Sometimes a man was justly punished with mutilation or death, but sometimes a man would not be punished as justly, often being let off with a mild sentence.

Women could even be imprisoned for the crime of falsely accusing someone. I’m assuming that false accusations occurred a very, very tiny percentage of the time, as it still true today and that women were being accused of false accusations simply for not having enough evidence against their rapist.

The article concludes with the statement that "patriarchal societies tend to 'sweep…under the carpet' instances of rape and sexual violence."

I was really disappointed to discover a lot of this information. For some reason, I assumed that the extreme emphasis on female virginity in this period (which is another sexist idea, by the way) would have made rape a severe crime.

Unfortunately, I guess I overestimated the goodness of men.

Fifteenth Century Problems

 I have read the Wife of Bath story before, and I have to say I did not like it any better after reading it for a second time. I think the problem is that I keep comparing what I would want most as a woman, and what this story claims woman want most; the answers could not be further apart. The bottom line that I gathered from this tale was that woman ultimately desire power over their husbands, just as the Wife herself boasted of having over her five husbands. Maybe I find it so hard to connect with is because it was written in a different time period where woman did not have as much of a choice as they do now? But even so, I would hope that if I had to live during that time period I would have wanted to be equal to my husband, or as equal as I could have been, rather than wanting to outwit and control him.

Also, I wanted to talk about the end of the story and how it was annoying that the guy got to have a beautiful and kind wife just because he gave her a choice. "My lady and my love, and wyf so dere, I put me in youre wyse governance: Cheseth youreself which may be most pleasance." (1236-1238) In the real world you get what you get; we can only change by improving ourselves, or resorting to plastic surgery. We can’t just be beautiful by willing it to happen. I know this is fiction of course; it just annoyed me because that part was not applicable to life today for me.