(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.
