Teaching rape in the medieval literature classroom: approaches to
difficult texts
Alison
Gulley (ed.)
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press/ Leeds, UK : ARC
Humanities Press, 2018, vi, 218 p. : illustrations
ISBN:9781641890328
Teachers of medieval literature help students bridge the temporal,
contextual, and linguistic gulfs between the Middle Ages and the twenty-first
century. When episodes involving rape are thrown into the mix, that task
becomes even more difficult. The essays in this volume approach these difficult
texts in ways that are both academically and ethically sound, recognising that
students and teachers bring a variety of experiences to the classroom that
necessarily colour the reception of a given work.
1.
Introduction: Teaching rape and meeting the challenges of the
twenty-first-century classroom / Alison Gulley
2. Medieval
saints and misogynist times : transhistorical perspectives on sexual violence
in the undergraduate classroom / Suzanne M. Edwards
3. Teaching
medieval rape culture across genre : insights from victimology / Wendy Perkins
and Christina Di Gangi
4. Bringing
the bystander into the humanities classroom : reading ancient, patristic, and
medieval texts on the continuum of violence / Elizabeth A. Hubble
5. From
bystander to upstander : reading the ‘Nibelungenleid’ to resist rape culture /
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand
6. Speech,
silence, and teaching Chaucer’s rapes / Tison Pugh
7. Classroom
PSA : values, law, and ethics in ‘The Reeve’s tale’ / Emily Houlik-Ritchey 8.
«How do we know he really raped her?» : using the BBC ‘Canterbury
tales’ to confront student skepticism towards the Wife of Bath / Alison Gulley
9. Teaching
the Potiphar’s wife motif in Marie de France’s ‘Lanval’ / Elizabeth Harper —
10. Sexual compulsion and sexual violence in the ‘Lais’ of Marie de France /
Misty Urban 11. Troubadour lyric, ‘Fin’amors’, and rape culture / Daniel E.
O’Sullivan
12. The
knight coerced : two cases of raped men in chivalric romance / David Grubbs
13. Teaching
rape to the he-man Woman Haters Club : Chrétien de Troyes at a military school
/ Alan Baragona
14. Rape,
identity, and redemption : teaching «Sir Gowther» in the community
college classroom / William H. Smith
Alison Gulleyis associate professor of English at Appalachian
State University in Boone, North Carolina. She is the author of The
Displacement of the Body in Ælfric’s Virgin Martyr Lives
