'Raptus' and the Poetics of Married Love in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and James I's 'Kingis Quair'

Author / Editor
Robertson, Elizabeth.

Title
'Raptus' and the Poetics of Married Love in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and James I's 'Kingis Quair'

Published
Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, eds. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 302-23.

Description
The representations of rape (sexual assault and abduction) in WBT and "Kingis Quair" invite consideration of free will and agency as part of a critique of late medieval social formulations of male/female relationships. In WBT, Chaucer indicts contemporary social structures; James I locates the problem in poetics.

Alternative Title
Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning.

Chaucer Subjects
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations