Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance

I t has long been a commonplace in criticism of medieval romances that acts of masculine prowess in chivalric situations, such as jousts, tournaments, and battles, are often enacted across the ‘terrain’ of women's bodies. Whether fighting other men for the rights to a woman's body (and potentially the dowry and lands that accompany it), or actually performing or threatening acts of violence in the form of rape or abduction, the movement and exchange of women and the male physical aggression that surrounds and often penetrates their bodies are fundamental aspects of the socialization that solidifies individual knightly identity in the Middle Ages. These acts of prowess, centralized around women's bodies, afford men the right to participate in the systems of chivalric and cultural exchange necessary for social advancement. Although the act or threat of rape is often the narrative hub around which knightly action rotates in medieval romances, in many of these texts this aggression takes place outside the main plot of the story and is committed by men other than the romance hero. In her well-known and indispensable study on rape in medieval literature and law, Katherine Gravdal writes that rape – either attempted or enacted – comprises ‘one of the episodic units used in the construction of a romance’; it is a narrative building block, part of the romance genre's very DNA.