Reconsidering Consent and Coercion: Power, Vulnerability, and Sexual Violence in Medieval Literature

How can contemporary theorisations of consent help us to nuance our understanding of consent and coercion in the Middle Ages? And what can reconsidering medieval attitudes towards consent offer to our own ‘consent culture’? Contemporary feminist approaches have identified consent both as a potent political framework for liberation and as an inherently limited concept that opens out onto other important ethical questions. Proceeding from this moment, this book looks in two directions to understand the varied ways in which structural inequalities impact meaningful consent and facilitate coercion in the Middle Ages and today.

Building upon the momentum of ‘medieval consent studies’ as a newly defined field, this volume expands the focus beyond rape and raptus, assessing more varied representations of consent and coercion through an intersectional consideration of power, inequality, and sexual violence. The contributions bring together different methodologies, cultural contexts, and literary traditions to highlight literature’s capacity to reflect otherwise undocumented forms of sexual vulnerability. Offering a compelling case for integrating critical approaches like trans history, codicology, animal studies, ecocriticism, and disability studies into this field, Reconsidering Consent and Coercion demonstrates the vital necessity of a nuanced and inclusive understanding of the past for our present discourses of consent.