Malory's Morte Darthur, written about a hundred years after the seminal Middle English romances of the fourteenth century (c. 1470), presents a compelling retrospective view of romance and of the role of rape within this genre. Although Malory writes considerably later than Chaucer, whose writings will form the subject of the next chapter, the Morte Darthur draws much more directly and unquestioningly on the romance tradition in its use of both French and English Arthurian romances. Whereas Chaucer opens out the medieval treatment of rape in ways that more nearly resemble the emphases of the modern period, Malory offers a recapitulation of the various thematic resonances of rape and ravishment in Arthurian romance, weaving the motifs into a grand summation and celebration of the chivalric ethic. In the Morte Darthur, rape and abduction, both human and otherworldly, hint at the darker forces of lawlessness and violence against which chivalry defines itself and which are inherent in it, forces that threaten and finally overcome the kingdom of Logres.

Sir Thomas Malory

No consideration of rape in the Morte Darthur could ignore the fact that the author, if, as seems fairly certain, he can be identified as Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell, was himself twice accused of raptus in 1450, in conjunction with a number of other crimes. Indeed, it is either a bizarre coincidence or an indication of the frequency with which charges of raptus occurred that of the relatively small number of authors known by name in the later Middle Ages, both Chaucer and Malory should have been charged with raptus.