Rape

Work in progress

In the real-life Middle Ages, rape was considered a horrific crime, though generally defined as when one man raped a woman who "belonged" to another man - "the husband, and no one else, had legal rights to sex with the wife". More generally, rape of a young daughter still living in the household of her father and under his authority was considered an offense against the father (as pater familias and head of the household). The raped woman's consent was not emphasized.

There was a very drastic double standard of male privilege in the Middle Ages, and when it came to sex outside of marriage for men, i.e. with prostitutes, a general "boys will be boys" attitude predominated, while women who had sex outside of marriage were heavily shamed and punished:


 * "Providing an outlet for these men's desires that did not threaten the wives and daughters of respectable men was one of the reasons given for the establishment of municipal brothels. This reasoning privileged the male sex drive as something unstoppable, that could only be channeled into more or less socially acceptable outlets."

Rape was considered one of the most severe crimes, though punishment varied by context. Rape of a child (i.e. a girl below marriageable age) was severely punished. Rape of a married woman was often punished by amputating a hand or foot. Rape of a single woman of marriageable age, however, was often prosecuted quite lightly - and if the woman was a commoner and she was raped by a nobleman, it was hardly ever punished. In cases of slavery, rape in the legal sense did not exist, as a slave-owner had sexual access to his slaves as property.


 * "...as with slaves in the antebellum southern US, the decision to agree to become one's master's mistress might be based on both physical coercion and economic necessity...an element of choice might be involved, and yet coercion remained the basic condition."

Court case records about rape focused on physical violence against women, i.e. being beaten into submission while trying to fight off her attacker. The records never include questions about her consent - "to focus only on the evidence of violence and not on consent could mean that if the means of coercion were merely a threat rather than actual physical force, the crime could not be prosecuted."


 * "There are no statistics as to the prevalence of rape in medieval society. We have some court cases, but we can assume that the crime went unreported even more often than it does today, so the number of cases is not a good indication of the incidence of the offense.  And there were many more instances that were not merely unreported but also unperceived as rape, because the coercion was other than physical."

"Marital rape", as a term or even as a concept, simply did not exist in the Middle Ages. Between husband and wife, "in many kinds of sources, they drew very little distinction between rape and heterosexual intercourse generally.  The woman's consent really did not matter." This is not to say that husbands didn't force their wives to have sex with them, physically or through emotional/economic coercion, but husbands had the legal right to sexual access to their wives' bodies, and married women knew this. Women did not tend to choose their husbands, their parents did, often to secure political alliances through their marriage. Other than overt, physically violent coercion, they didn’t have a legal concept of emotional/economic coercion, threats, etc. If a woman was put into an arranged marriage by her parents, and her husband subsequently forced her to have sex without her consent, under the current legal definition "rape" had not occurred. A woman in this society would not conceptually know that the term "rape" could be applied against her husband. Most would know that they simply had no other viable option but to submit to their husbands' sexual access and coercion - if she tried to fight him off, he had the right to beat her; she couldn't complain to her own father, because he arranged the marriage for political/economic reasons and typically would want to keep this arrangement (though if a husband was violently physically abusive to a very extreme level, the wife's parents might be concerned and seek redress).


 * "The lack of attention paid to whether or not the woman consents is perhaps not surprising given the role of consent (or lack thereof) in other aspects of life. Although according to cannon [ecclesiastical] law a woman had to consent to her own marriage, in practice the choice was often made by her parents."

Attitudes about conception by rape in the Middle Ages were affected by limited understanding of reproductive biology, and absence of knowledge about genetics. The most common understanding of conception in the Middle Ages was the "one seed" theory: semen was thought to be the exclusive genetic material, and it simply incubated inside of a woman's womb to gestate into a fetus, sort of like putting dough into an oven to make bread. They had no knowledge of female gametes (egg cells/oocytes). The fact that children could physically resemble their mother or their mother's parents was explained away with the argument that the shape and size of an oven can shape the bread in its own image (i.e. Lamarckian characteristics). Some medical writers in the Middle Ages, however (who as theologians were celibate priests), developed the "two seeds" theory, which postulated that women as well as men produced some sort of seed/gametes that contributed to conception:


 * The "two-seed" theory of sex and reproduction held that both a male and female seed were necessary for conception. Conception, then, could not take place unless both the man and the woman ejaculated, thus requiring them both to feel pleasure...[this] had a negative effect in terms of rape law. Any woman who conceived was deemed to have consented to intercourse, since she must have received pleasure from it."


 * "This idea that women cannot conceive without orgasm and therefore that any woman who conceives has not really been reaped surfaced in the 1980's in abortion debates in at least two US state legislatures, as legislators argued that no rape exception to a ban on abortion was necessary. Stephen Freind, of Delaware County, Pennslyvania, claimed in 1988 that women could not become pregnant as a result of rape, because when raped a woman has "a certain secretion" that prevents conception.  Henry Aldridge, of Pitt County, North Carolina, claimed in 1985 that women could not become pregnant if truly raped because "the juices don't flow".  The voters could be proud that their legislators were on the cutting edge of fourteenth century science."

More recently, while running for re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012, six-term Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri caused a controversy when during a televised interview he was asked about his opposition to abortion, and if he was at least in favor of exceptions allowing rape in instances of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother was at risk (exceptions which the 2012 Republican presidential ticket itself did not oppose). Akin responded, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." His remarks were heavily criticized as medically false and Akin subsequently lost the election, though later in his 2014 novel, Akin stated that he was unapologetic about his remarks and still believes them to be true.

In truth, while the idea that a woman was not raped if she becomes pregnant (because consent and pleasure are somehow required for conception) has been around since the Middle Ages, even then it was not broadly accepted. Quite a lot of discourse was produced in the Middle Ages on the subject of nocturnal emissions by men - clergymen who had taken vows of celibacy, who thought that any sexual activity was a grave sin and would leave them hellbound, were deeply upset by these involuntary reactions by their unconscious bodies. Thus there was a large amount of medical discourse circulating at the time concluding that the functions of the body were automatic, and the consent of the mind was not necessary for a man to because sexually aroused and ejaculate during unconscious sleep. Seeing a parallel between the two, many medieval medical writers concluded that similarly, the female body is capable of conception even when a woman did not mentally consent to sex and was blatantly raped:


 * Some medical writers, however, argued that a woman could emit seed without consenting to it. The rational will need not play a role; the pleasure is located purely in the body, not the mind.  Nocturnal emissions provide a parallel."

Therefore the view that a woman could not have been raped if she conceived, because pleasure and consent were necessary for conception, even in the Middle Ages was considered quackery found only at the fringes of medical writing.

There is a persistent myth that a right called "First Night" (also called Prima Noctis or droit du seigneur) existed in the Middle Ages. In truth, there is not a shred of evidence that "First Night" or anything like it ever existed. It is purely a stereotype about the Middle Ages that developed in the modern era without any basis in reality. By the late 20th century, the idea that "First Night" ever existed had been debunked for over a century. The popular Oscar-winning 1995 film Braveheart, however, prominently presented First Night as a practice which actually existed. Even when Braveheart came out in theaters, it was met by outright howls of protest from major academic historians for presenting First Night as real, but nonetheless the film singlehandedly impressed into the public consciousness as a whole the view that First Night was ever a real phenomenon.

"A persistent myth holds that medieval custom allowed a lord to deflower his serf women on their wedding nights. This myth still appears, for example in the 1995 film Braveheart, even though historians have demonstrated repeatedly, for more than a century, that such a custom did not exist...each of the medieval texts that have occasionally been interpreted as referring to such a custom has either been misinterpreted or was a fantastic explanation even in medieval times...No doubt many peasant women were raped or coerced by their lords, and there was not a great deal that they or the men in their families could do about it.  But this offense was not institutionalized.  It was never an official or customary right of the lord."