As a medievalist, I sometimes find myself encountering the assumption that the issues raised in the texts I study and teach are radically divorced from the concerns of our present day. This is, of course, nonsense, as the controversy surrounding an episode of Game of Thrones illustrated with explosive fervour. In 2014, director Alex Graves adapted a scene from George R. R. Martin's novel A Storm of Swords that enraged many viewers by apparently transforming an act of consensual sex between characters Cersei and Jaime into a rape. The director and other viewers objected to the viral explosion of criticism about the episode, insisting that the scene as filmed was not a rape at all. Some online commenters intervened into this debate with the opinion that the scene as written in Martin's novel depicted a male rape fantasy that the television version showed more explicitly to be rape. The sexual violence inherent to the fictional world of the show claims a kind of authenticity in its selective cultural mimicry of the violence and patriarchy associated with the medieval world. And indeed, for me the controversy resonated with the Chaucer class I was teaching at the time on women's consent.

Was this scene a rape? Such a question, asked of Geoffrey Chaucer's “The Reeve's Tale,” has likewise generated its share of critical controversy. When our texts— literary or visual, ancient or contemporary with us— depict troubling sexual scenes, we have an opportunity to help our students engage the process of making decisions about difficult issues. Rape, as well as other forms of violence against women, is inherently a difficult subject. The question, for example, of what precisely happened between Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne that culminated in the exchange of ten pounds and her official release of him from culpability in the matter of her “raptus”— variously understood in the medieval period as “rape” and “abduction”— has been troubling scholars since the release's discovery. In response to scholars’ attempts to figure out whether the act between Chaucer and Chaumpaigne was or was not a rape, Christopher Cannon cogently argues that it would be difficult for us to make such a determination even if we knew more details. “Sexual violence,” Cannon observes, “is itself a crime where … the very act that might constitute the crime can be variously defined even by those who have identical ‘facts’ in hand.”