Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England

In the early modern period, the inapplicability of certain discourses of sex and violence impeded allegations of rape whilst facilitating denials of rape. Women who asserted rape (and men who spoke out in support) engendered those same discourses which incriminated them with their own semantic and expressive intent. Male violence was stressed and feminine agency discursively denied in these accounts. Sex was largely occluded, except when it appeared in particular forms: when rape was conceptualised as the tragic antithesis of healthy, procreational sex; through metaphors which implied the violation of a woman's most private boundaries; and as a brutal expression of unrelenting, and often obsessive, masculine love. Rape narratives produced in legal contexts cannot provide evidence of repressed memory. But they can demonstrate how, from a position of weakness, women nevertheless attempted to negotiate their way through a web of cultural restrictions.