Although most undergraduate students enter the college classroom with little or no experience reading medieval texts, they are avid consumers of popular culture— and they are confident that rape was more widespread and considered less serious in the Middle Ages than it is the contemporary United States. Because student perspectives on the long history of sexual violence are more likely to have their source in contemporary novels, movies, and television shows like the popular HBO series Game of Thrones than in medieval texts like the Life of St. Agnes, they tend to identify pervasive acts of sexual violence and callous, misogynist attitudes toward rape as signs of historical alterity. At the private university where I have taught English literature and gender studies for the last nine years, I design my courses to complicate this perspective.

The guiding premise of this essay is that medieval representations of rape can be a valuable tool in students’ exploration of contemporary antirape politics and practices, and not only as one more example of misogyny in the long history of rape culture. Over the last twentyfive years, feminist scholars have rightly pointed out that teachers of medieval literature have too often sanitized medieval misogyny by passing over representations of sexual violence without comment or, worse, by glossing rape as seduction. To correct this elision, instructors have increasingly foregrounded medieval representations of rape, such as those endured by Malyne and Symkyn's wife in Chaucer's “The Reeve's Tale.” Yet, an exclusive focus on moments that normalize sexual assault can confirm students’ confidence that there was more rape in the Middle Ages than there is today and that women then did not enjoy as much autonomy (sexual or otherwise) as women do now. While these views are correct to an extent, they miss the complexity of both medieval and modern attitudes toward rape, and they allow students’ own comparatively progressive attitudes to escape critical examination. The Middle Ages can become an emblem of gender inequalities that contemporary culture— particularly on college campuses where much antirape activism has focused over the last few years— has transcended.