#MeToo and the Renaissance | CAS Inquire

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11/19/2021 Added

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Nora Peterson's talk from November 9, 2021. Dr. Peterson is a professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Details about CAS Inquire.

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[00:00:13.240]Important signs of proof that
[00:00:15.120]can be seen in this justice narrative, so you can see here
[00:00:22.200]above, the crime has just taken place
[00:00:25.000]and she is tried out and then here we see also
[00:00:30.080]the battle that comes after this dismemberment scene.
[00:00:33.000]It's very gory, but it does lead to a revenge battle.
[00:00:38.160]So that's the limited justice narrative.
[00:00:40.840]But the end of the 15th and into the 16th centuries,
[00:00:43.560]the narrative changes again away from the justice narrative, placing
[00:00:46.800]assault against women back in line with a narrative wherein women
[00:00:50.240]who were formerly viewed as virtuous heroines were transformed
[00:00:54.000]as art historian Diane Wolfe to write northern European images of rape
[00:00:58.200]undergo a change in tone
[00:00:59.560]and content over the course of the 15th and early 16th century.
[00:01:03.560]Early renderings more clearly condemn the rapist later, once blame the victim.
[00:01:08.920]The social message, too, had changed.
[00:01:11.120]Now, public art should become part of a campaign
[00:01:14.000]that identified rape victims as women of loose morals.
[00:01:17.840]Now, the whole town could see that women were to blame
[00:01:20.400]for their own rape like heroic rape images.
[00:01:24.000]These paintings serve to whitewash a violent sexual crime.
[00:01:28.720]The narrative of victim blaming
[00:01:31.080]took over as dominant narrative in art and literature,
[00:01:34.360]erasing the cultural insistence on severe punishment of the rapist
[00:01:38.040]and highlighting violent sexual crimes.
[00:01:41.040]But what is the relationship between these three concurrent narratives
[00:01:45.120]and the Renaissance?
[00:01:46.040]And I think we could also say today all three of these narratives the heroic
[00:01:51.000]victim blaming and limited justice coexist,
[00:01:54.120]suggesting that even if conversations about violence against women
[00:01:57.720]were not frequently represented in legal trials of the 16th century,
[00:02:01.800]the conversations were in fact taking place.
[00:02:05.400]So with all of that context, we can dove into our case study
[00:02:08.880]using one particular text in which all of the things we've already talked
[00:02:12.800]about come into play, and I have two introductory slides here.
[00:02:18.440]All right, so we're going to be talking about a text by Margaret Geneva,
[00:02:23.120]the quick and family quick and dirty family tree .
[00:02:26.520]She was the sister of French King Francis, the first also the mother
[00:02:32.040]of Jandiroba Ray, who is in turn the mother of another influential
[00:02:38.440]French king and has direct connections to the son King.
[00:02:41.360]So this is a very noble, very well read, very well connected
[00:02:45.360]woman who lived and wrote in the 16th century
[00:02:50.000]she was very important in terms of negotiating.
[00:02:53.680]She did a lot of diplomacy.
[00:02:55.240]She was very politically active,
[00:02:57.040]and she also was a very prolific writer in particular.
[00:03:01.160]Today we will be talking about.
[00:03:05.040]This text they have, Tamron, which is written in 1559.
[00:03:09.600]I've been reading and
[00:03:12.160]and studying this text since 2004 and why?
[00:03:16.040]I'll just give you a couple of points.
[00:03:17.840]It gives me great pleasure and pain. It can be very frustrating.
[00:03:21.000]Text it's very dense, but also very rewarding.
[00:03:24.040]It does fun things with things that look like binaries like pleasure and pain.
[00:03:29.080]As it turns out, the author's very ambitious.
[00:03:31.760]She takes up lots of the hot-button issues of her time, including religion,
[00:03:35.760]gender, philosophy, love, sexual assault, and she does not tell you what to think.
[00:03:40.720]She gives you lots of narratives, lots of opinions,
[00:03:43.560]and then it is up to the reader to decide what they're going to do with it.
[00:03:47.240]And the last thing I like about it is that so we have these 72 novellas
[00:03:51.400]that I'll tell you about, and after each novella,
[00:03:54.080]there's a conversation, and the people
[00:03:55.960]who are giving the conversation often disagree as one does.
[00:04:00.000]But at the end of the day, they go back into the monastery
[00:04:03.520]where they are stranded together and they have dinner together
[00:04:06.160]and they come back the next day and they get along.
[00:04:08.160]And that is a nice thing.
[00:04:09.920]So that is a little bit of an introduction to this text.
[00:04:14.520]It has 72 stories, ten framed characters, five of them are men
[00:04:19.000]and five of them are women.
[00:04:20.720]And of the 17 1772 novellas and they have Tamron, 17 of them.
[00:04:26.040]So over 23% feature rape, attempted rape or physical assault.
[00:04:31.480]And the representations of assault in this text engage deeply with the
[00:04:34.800]historical, social and legal phenomenon that we've already discussed a bit during.
[00:04:39.120]The Renaissance migrates in advance.
[00:04:41.200]An unusually nuanced descriptions suggest familiarity both on her part
[00:04:46.280]and that of her readers with the common narratives of sexual assault
[00:04:50.320]and with a love for pain, pleasure, finery.
[00:04:53.880]But she doesn't do is resolve any of them.
[00:04:56.960]So I'm going to dove into
[00:04:58.320]three examples and there is a little bit of brief silence.
[00:05:01.800]And just just be aware of that as as we dove in the first one
[00:05:07.200]I'm going to show also as I describe these novellas
[00:05:10.440], some of the engravings that accompany them.
[00:05:12.560]So the author herself didn't have anything to do with these images, but
[00:05:16.680]they are frequently printed in the texts that you can you can read and receive.
[00:05:22.520]So this is novella, too.
[00:05:23.920]It's the first assault story as the story of a man who brutally attacks
[00:05:28.000]the woman while her husband is away and the violent rape ends in her death.
[00:05:33.040]We see the juxtaposition of love in force
[00:05:35.920]early in this text and throughout the text.
[00:05:38.960]I'll give a little bit of a quote of how this all comes about.
[00:05:42.040]The man had been desperately in love with the wife for quite a while.
[00:05:45.640]In love one day, unable to stand it any longer, he'd
[00:05:49.200]come out with his declaration for being a very virtuous woman.
[00:05:52.680]She'd given him a very sharp reply.
[00:05:55.000]After that, the man had never dared open his mouth to her in this fashion again
[00:05:58.840]or in any way indicate his feelings, but left himself in the house
[00:06:02.840]and the servant then got it into his head that he would take by force
[00:06:06.160]what he had failed to obtain by supplication and service.
[00:06:10.240]Readers must then witness the extreme viciousness of the attack.
[00:06:14.680]He stabbed, stabbed her violently in the small of the back,
[00:06:17.560]thinking no doubt that the pain
[00:06:19.160]would make her surrender where terror and manhandling had failed.
[00:06:22.960]He stabbed her several times again.
[00:06:25.480]It's a very short novella, only two pages, but the chase
[00:06:28.680]and the attack scene takes up a sizable part of the narrative.
[00:06:32.440]So does the description of the actual rape and aftermath
[00:06:35.960]when the lady can no longer speak or move.
[00:06:38.240]The victim is nevertheless cognizant of what is happening to her
[00:06:42.040]after the attacker flees.
[00:06:43.720]The texts go on goes on to describe her wounds and finally her death quote.
[00:06:48.480]We found 25 fatal wounds.
[00:06:50.880]She lingered on for another hour, unable to speak.
[00:06:54.240]And so with joy on her face
[00:06:56.440]and her eyes turned to heaven, where it's her soul left this chaste body.
[00:07:01.000]At the moment of her death, the victim reverts into an heroic,
[00:07:04.960]virtuous woman happy to meet death after the violent and dishonorable deeds.
[00:07:10.160]While the victim's resistance smacks of the heroic rape narrative.
[00:07:13.680]It is a heroism so deeply grounded
[00:07:15.640]in physical brutality that it verges on the nightmarish.
[00:07:19.440]But the simplicity of the moment is deceiving,
[00:07:22.520]especially if you look at what happens with our dichotomy here.
[00:07:25.640]The text starts off by casually linking love and force.
[00:07:28.840]Love made him do it during the attack, we clearly see violent wrapped pain.
[00:07:34.080]But the lady dies joyfully. Pleasure.
[00:07:37.120]So this novella shows us different kinds of relationships at work at the same time.
[00:07:41.480]Turns wrapped into Ravi and set the tone
[00:07:44.360]of multiplicity and ambivalence when it comes to sexual violence.
[00:07:48.880]The setting of the tone so early on in the collection
[00:07:51.480]suggests that violence against women will be a central theme
[00:07:54.920]when the author and frame characters will debate and negotiate.
[00:08:00.840]The first day of storytelling culminates with Novella ten,
[00:08:03.840]which is one of the longest and most complex in this collection.
[00:08:08.000]Although the two main characters named Amador and Florida love one another.
[00:08:12.880]A series of misunderstandings, disappointments and deception
[00:08:16.480]lead to two failed rape attempts.
[00:08:19.080]In both cases, the male characters reasoning is grounded in the misogynist
[00:08:23.320]narrative that patients in love should be rewarded with sexual favors,
[00:08:27.560]and that when this is not the case, force is warranted and acceptable.
[00:08:32.080]The convergence of vocabulary and action becomes clear
[00:08:35.680]as readers trace armadas reasoning before his first rape attempt.
[00:08:40.080]Quote, He made up his mind to make one last desperate gamble
[00:08:43.880]to risk losing all or to gain everything, and to treat himself
[00:08:48.240]to one short hour of the bliss that he'd considered he had deserved.
[00:08:52.560]He rose from his bed, he said.
[00:08:54.240]Not a word and pretending still that he was at the brink of death
[00:08:58.200]began to pursue the path that leads to the forbidding goal of a lady's honor.
[00:09:03.040]He struggled with all the strength in his body to have his way.
[00:09:06.440]Florida, terrified, called out to a gentleman
[00:09:10.560]within the same passage.
[00:09:11.840]Readers encounter Amador as justification.
[00:09:14.680]I've been so patient now.
[00:09:16.160]I deserve sexual favors as the dominant cultural narrative.
[00:09:20.040]This would have resonated with Renaissance readers.
[00:09:22.880]We see Florida's heroic defense and an echo of the legal context
[00:09:26.880]that demands victims cry out for help.
[00:09:29.800]Amador speech before the second rape attempt echoes the amorphous
[00:09:34.520]pleasure, pain, bigger vocabulary, Amador says.
[00:09:38.520]Almighty God, Florida.
[00:09:39.800]I'm not going to have the just desserts of my efforts frustrated by your scruples.
[00:09:44.600]Seeing that all my love,
[00:09:46.040]all my patient waiting on my begging and praying are useless.
[00:09:49.920]I shall use every ounce of force in my body to get the one thing
[00:09:53.480]that will make my life worth living.
[00:09:56.480]Moments later, after attempting
[00:09:58.320]to defend herself in a variety of ways, Florida calls out for help.
[00:10:03.920]With a heart rendering cry,
[00:10:05.200]she shouted out to her mother with all the strength that was in her
[00:10:09.000]in the discussion, the frame characters are deeply divided.
[00:10:12.640]They alternate between a variety of voices.
[00:10:15.280]There's Parliament who suggest that Florida quote
[00:10:18.080]was tried to the limits of her endurance, and she put up a virtuous resistance.
[00:10:22.720]Her husband and noted misogynist geekcomp, who counters that quote
[00:10:27.080]Screaming is the smallest resistance a woman can offer.
[00:10:31.040]He goes on to accuse Amador for not having completed the rape
[00:10:34.400]and says if he'd been more of a lover and less of a coward,
[00:10:37.840]he wouldn't have been quite so easily put up.
[00:10:41.080]The nod to the legal context in
[00:10:42.760]this exchange is countered by another character's insistence
[00:10:46.160]that men have the right to be rewarded for their patience and the next comment.
[00:10:50.840]Parliament lauds Florida's heroic resistance even in the face of reciprocal
[00:10:55.400]love. And readers must also balance the argument that Florida's resistance
[00:11:00.200]was not enough proof of resistance along her along Florida's
[00:11:04.320]Florida's mother's tepid response to her daughter's cry for help.
[00:11:07.520]So the mother comes in
[00:11:09.280]doesn't know what's going on
[00:11:10.520]and does not immediately believe her daughter, so it's a little bit sketchy.
[00:11:15.560]Marguerite does not
[00:11:16.520]shy away from shedding light on the dominant viewpoints of her own time.
[00:11:20.440]If this is a critique of physical assault, it is heavily negotiated, unresolved
[00:11:25.360]and unwilling to unequivocally favor the voice of victim.
[00:11:30.120]Coexistence of different layers is what makes the Have Tamron
[00:11:33.240]such a rich site for studying early modern interactions
[00:11:36.600]between different kinds of representations of sexual violence
[00:11:41.320]images for the next novella as well.
[00:11:45.440]In Nevada, for all of the narratives we've discussed so far are deeply intertwined.
[00:11:50.640]This reading focuses particularly on the overlap with the legal
[00:11:53.760]narratives of Margaret's time.
[00:11:55.560]The authors time
[00:11:56.920]novella for makes it readily evident that the author is documenting
[00:12:00.320]the coexistence of these narratives, while at the same time showing the extent
[00:12:04.600]to which early modern women might have been aware
[00:12:07.200]of their legal options and their potential consequences.
[00:12:11.320]The lead up to the attack
[00:12:12.480]in this novella begins with the misogynist or heroic narrative
[00:12:16.440]the would be seducer prepares for his conquest, quite evidently
[00:12:20.280]convinced that his advances will be welcomed rather than denied quote,
[00:12:25.160]he put on the most magnificent night shirt he possessed and on his head
[00:12:29.240]he put the most beautifully decorated nightcap you ever saw.
[00:12:34.640]As he admired himself in the mirror,
[00:12:36.480]he was absolutely convinced that there is not a woman in the world
[00:12:39.440]who could possibly resist such a handsome and elegant sight.
[00:12:42.880]And so he turned to the test.
[00:12:45.240]When the lady rejects his advances, he resorts to violence
[00:12:48.320]and attempts to rape her.
[00:12:50.280]What follows is a description of her resistance,
[00:12:52.760]which echoes the legal vocabulary of necessary defense to a T.
[00:12:57.600]Quote, she was a strong woman,
[00:12:59.640]struggling out of his clutches, she demanded to know who he was
[00:13:03.160]and proceeded to lash out, scratching and biting for all she was worth.
[00:13:07.120]He was terrified she would call for help and felt obliged to stuff
[00:13:10.760]the bed clothes in her mouth in a vain attempt to prevent her doing so,
[00:13:14.840]she realized that he would use all his strength to dishonor
[00:13:18.200]her and fought back with all her strength in order to stop him.
[00:13:21.440]She shouted at the top of her lungs for her lady in waiting,
[00:13:24.680]a respectable elderly lady who was sleeping in the next room.
[00:13:28.320]So the victim here fights back by the book
[00:13:30.560]Resisting, leaving marks on her attacker and calling out for help.
[00:13:34.680]She establishes a defense against the assailant
[00:13:37.520]that would have been convincing in an early modern legal trial.
[00:13:41.320]After help arrived, the lady and her handmaid deliberately discussed
[00:13:45.000]whether or not she should accuse the perpetrator in a unique moment,
[00:13:48.880]and they have Tameron.
[00:13:49.760]The ladies explicitly reference legal trials and consider
[00:13:53.040]pursuing a legal case against the attacker.
[00:13:55.440]And I have that whole quote here.
[00:13:58.960]I won't read the whole thing, but I will read the bolded parts here.
[00:14:02.360]So she's basically encouraging the lady not to bring the case to court.
[00:14:07.040]She says it's not easy to accept that a man can carry out such an act
[00:14:12.360]unless she's been given a certain amount of encouragement by the lady.
[00:14:16.000]There isn't a single person at court who hasn't seen the way
[00:14:18.880]you've looked at him, the way you treated this man.
[00:14:21.480]That could make people conclude that if he did indeed do what you say,
[00:14:25.240]it couldn't have been without some blame being due to you as well.
[00:14:29.800]And he and she also mentions the danger
[00:14:32.560]you might you might enjoy being reminded of the pleasures of the flesh.
[00:14:38.040]This passage contains a variety of different narratives.
[00:14:41.440]Readers encounter the misogyny misogyny of the heroic cultural discourse,
[00:14:46.040]the potential for victim blaming if the lady decides to speak out,
[00:14:49.440]and the legal context of bringing an assault case to trial.
[00:14:53.560]While the pretext for the conversation is justice
[00:14:56.320]and the texts consciously references the legal action
[00:14:59.160]to bring a case and provides coexistence of different layers.
[00:15:03.920]That's what makes the Hub Tamron such a rich site for studying early
[00:15:07.120]modern interactions, because, as I said, none of these are resolved.
[00:15:10.280]They all just kind of sit there.
[00:15:14.640]Are you bet? That's right.
[00:15:17.640]The ladies advised against bringing such a case to trial is equally instructional.
[00:15:22.280]She suggests that for the perpetrator that it might be,
[00:15:25.880]that death might be too harsh a punishment for the perpetrator.
[00:15:29.520]It's worth noting here that while it's true
[00:15:31.480]that punishment for convicted rape was indeed death,
[00:15:34.480]it was convicted extremely infrequently, as we talked about in the beginning.
[00:15:38.640]Even when convicted, the actual death sentence was carried out
[00:15:41.680]only infrequently.
[00:15:43.280]In fact, the crime of petty theft was more likely to lead
[00:15:46.280]to an actual death sentence than rape or physical assault.
[00:15:50.400]And so the lady here uses
[00:15:51.840]the threat of punishment to prevent the victim from speaking.
[00:15:55.760]In addition to suggesting that the young man did not deserve
[00:15:58.760]the legal punishment for his attempted attack,
[00:16:01.160]the lady in waiting makes another argument against speaking out.
[00:16:05.040]Notably, she argues that
[00:16:06.160]because her mistress and the perpetrator had been publicly on friendly terms,
[00:16:10.120]others would assume that she had initiated or welcomes the seduction.
[00:16:14.320]Thus, despite the lady's strong defense, her reeducation is grounded
[00:16:18.240]in the same misogyny of many other rape novellas and have Tamron.
[00:16:22.760]We should not ignore the fact that as far as advice goes,
[00:16:25.440]this might not be bad advice for the lady in her own time, as Chrysler Futuro
[00:16:30.120]explains, the liabilities of truth telling are relentlessly detailed here.
[00:16:34.840]Given the real importance of honor and reputation as social currency
[00:16:38.720]and the limitations of the legal system, hoping for any other outcome
[00:16:42.280]seems like nothing less than historically anachronistic.
[00:16:46.120]This is, however, by no means the end of the conversation
[00:16:49.480]after the discussion here between the lady and her made,
[00:16:52.680]the text pivots back to the attacker where in his own room
[00:16:55.720]he appears in his reflection in the mirror and undergoes a reeducation of his own.
[00:17:00.200]Quote, he picked up his mirror from the table and examined himself
[00:17:03.800]in the candlelight his face was streaming with blood from the bites and scratches.
[00:17:07.880]She had inflicted the typical visual representations
[00:17:11.560]of heroic rape victims, with light shining on their faces.
[00:17:14.960]Purifying and glorifying the resistance are subverted in this image.
[00:17:19.520]Looking at the victim's resistance, as manifested on the body of the attacker,
[00:17:23.600]turned to the visual heroic rape trope on its head and leads
[00:17:27.120]to the perpetrators conclusion that quote to win her heart and her love,
[00:17:31.560]I ought not to have tried to take her body by force .
[00:17:34.960]I have devoted myself to her service in humility
[00:17:38.000]and with patience, accepting that I must wait till love to triumph
[00:17:42.280]here. As in the discussion between the lady and her made,
[00:17:45.280]the man uses legal vocabulary to underscore his mistake.
[00:17:49.920]The discussion and the story afterwards adds more complexity. Yes.
[00:17:54.240]Noted Misogynist blames the gentleman for missing an opportunity,
[00:17:58.160]claiming that quote
[00:17:59.080]he never should have been content eat or sleep until he had succeeded.
[00:18:03.440]You even go so far as to suggest that he should have killed
[00:18:06.640]the lady in waiting in order to carry out the assault
[00:18:09.920]while the male characters are quick to criticize the perpetrator
[00:18:12.840]for not going far enough.
[00:18:14.400]The narrator upholds the virtue of victim who's done
[00:18:17.320]everything just as she should in order to protect her honor.
[00:18:20.560]Her defense would have held up in a legal trial,
[00:18:23.440]even if she was explicitly advised against bringing a case.
[00:18:27.400]The storyteller notes the virtue of the lady
[00:18:29.840]and the good sense of the lady in waiting.
[00:18:32.040]Suggesting that women understood the risk involved in speaking out in
[00:18:36.600]the face of sexual assault,
[00:18:38.920]the narrative in the frame
[00:18:40.320]said multiple viewpoints alongside one another.
[00:18:43.920]The author is deliberately including legal and cultural
[00:18:46.760]vocabularies of pain and pleasure, violence and assaults into her text.
[00:18:51.160]These vocabulary stage a literary performance
[00:18:54.120]of the cultural and legal phenomenon of violence against women.
[00:18:58.240]The discussion following the tales reflects perhaps more clearly than in
[00:19:02.160]other cases, the ambivalence surrounding victims of physical assault.
[00:19:07.600]The women who were assaulted in the head, Tamara, do not take their cases to court.
[00:19:11.400]The absence of legal intervention does reflect the cultural reality
[00:19:15.920]of 16th century France.
[00:19:18.200]The author is reproducing the ambivalence, hesitation and silence
[00:19:21.720]that would have been part of the experience in the 16th century.
[00:19:26.160]And finally, I'm going to turn to one more example
[00:19:28.880]that represents the victim blaming narrative.
[00:19:32.160]Quite simply, summarized,
[00:19:33.680]it is the story of a lady who accidentally tells the story of her own rape,
[00:19:37.720]and when I say accidentally, it involves it involves a Freudian slip
[00:19:41.560]where the lady is telling a story about someone she knew.
[00:19:44.440]And then at the end, she steps into the first person.
[00:19:47.160]The tale is deceptively straightforward.
[00:19:50.840]The layers of narration are wrapped tight in this novella and suggests
[00:19:54.640]that the lady is being tried for a crime instead of retelling
[00:19:57.800]a traumatic experience before beginning her tale, she exclaims.
[00:20:01.880]This is a true story.
[00:20:03.040]I vouch for it on my conscience.
[00:20:05.680]The frame characters discuss whether the narrator of Novella, 62,
[00:20:10.040]was really a victim of rape at all, or whether she had somehow
[00:20:13.240]secretly enjoyed or invited the attack.
[00:20:16.400]Well, two of the same characters
[00:20:17.800]praise her for her efforts to fend off the assailant.
[00:20:20.920]three others judge her mercilessly.
[00:20:23.720]Sus Adobe, one of the male frame characters, caused the lady a sinner,
[00:20:27.920]claiming that quote she would have wanted to erase it completely from her memory.
[00:20:31.640]Had the attack then so traumatic.
[00:20:34.480]Another point of contention
[00:20:35.880]is the way that the lady uses her voice to hear the fictional lost
[00:20:39.600]listeners of her tale laugh when she slips into the first person.
[00:20:43.720]But the laughter comes at the expense of her reputation.
[00:20:47.400]Parliament, one of the female frame characters, states that a lady
[00:20:50.560]should never use her experience as an occasion to entertain others
[00:20:54.280]when it contains trauma
[00:20:55.760]and suggest that because she did so, the lady must have enjoyed it.
[00:21:00.120]Though her trial by her peers and the framed characters does not end
[00:21:03.400]particularly favorably for her, this does not discredit the fact
[00:21:07.160]that she uses the space of narrative to come to terms with trauma.
[00:21:12.120]Her, speaking of the tale, is complicated by her silence during the rape attempts.
[00:21:17.160]The lady recalls that although she tried to cry out for help,
[00:21:20.520]a move that would have been essential to proving an attack in a court of law
[00:21:24.920]she stocks when the perpetrator threatens her, saying that quote.
[00:21:28.480]If she told anyone about it, he would say that she had sent for him
[00:21:32.920]standing in direct tension with one
[00:21:34.520]another are the telling of her story to claim ownership of her trauma.
[00:21:38.320]On the one hand,
[00:21:39.240]and the legal implications of not crying out during the actual experience
[00:21:43.800]and the narrative of victim blaming that emerges from this initial silence.
[00:21:48.080]The lady here says both too little and too much, depending
[00:21:51.680]on who is doing the reading.
[00:21:53.800]As you may by now have an inkling readings of sexual
[00:21:56.680]assaults in the Tameron are rarely straightforward.
[00:22:00.880]So to conclude, throughout the time on and the 16th century bodies
[00:22:05.880]and female bodies in particular are a space of resistance,
[00:22:10.160]they're also a space of complexity and visual clarity
[00:22:12.920]that helps to renegotiate the way we think
[00:22:15.120]about the narratives of rape in the 16th century.
[00:22:18.520]The author gives the underrepresented and underreported stories
[00:22:22.280]a physical assault against women, a place alongside the dominant positions of her
[00:22:27.040]time, thereby creating a space for status quo to be renegotiated.
[00:22:32.080]The multiplicity of interpretations cannot be resolved into any conclusive reading.
[00:22:37.440]Rather, the gap between them remains a bit like the gap
[00:22:40.360]between the two meanings of the word wrapped pleasure and pain.
[00:22:44.920]These wide ranging viewpoints
[00:22:46.600]and the often conflicting narratives reflect the ambivalence
[00:22:50.040]surrounding victims of physical assault in the Renaissance.
[00:22:53.600]In particular, the opinions put forth by the men
[00:22:56.800]underscore the prevalent attitudes of the time at issue.
[00:23:00.760]Here are contemporary issues of consent and violence,
[00:23:04.040]all of which suggests that women in the 16th century were thinking
[00:23:07.720]and talking and to a lesser extent, writing about these issues,
[00:23:12.120]even if they are not reflected in legal documents.
[00:23:15.920]By setting a variety of often irreconcilable
[00:23:19.080]narratives about sexual violence alongside one another,
[00:23:22.560]they have Tamron represents the wider spectrum of sexual assault,
[00:23:26.840]considering many ways of speaking and writing about it.
[00:23:30.720]The author here gives textual proof of the etymological contradiction
[00:23:35.040]that lives within the very word of Wrapped.
[00:23:38.040]She dissects love and force pleasure and pain and shows ways in which bodies
[00:23:43.240]and female bodies in particular become a space of resistance,
[00:23:47.400]a visual clarity that can renegotiate rape in the 16th century,
[00:23:51.760]thereby creating a textual space for pleasure of a certain kind.
[00:23:56.480]And so just to come back to a topic explicitly close,
[00:23:59.840]well, it might not change the pain of sexual assault.
[00:24:02.840]Speaking this story, putting them out there, talking about them,
[00:24:06.320]even in their ambiguity, rendering
[00:24:08.160]them real did and does participate in the kind of comfort,
[00:24:12.120]if not pleasure, that comes from speaking the truth in a community. Thank you.
[00:24:40.720]I saw a really interesting last year,
[00:24:44.160]so when talking about,
[00:24:46.360]I guess, the history of kind of sexual assaults
[00:24:50.680]with the reticence specifically within France.
[00:24:54.720]Do you think it was for the women, at least more kind of.
[00:25:00.800]Don't tell anyone at all or just and.
[00:25:06.400]Ignore it, or was it
[00:25:08.240]more of kind of tell people in immediate family and then but
[00:25:12.400]don't take it to the authorities at all to make it harder for it to report?
[00:25:16.800]Yeah, that's a really good question.
[00:25:18.480]And of course, we don't know, right?
[00:25:21.160]Because everyone is dead,
[00:25:23.400]which is one of the frustrations of working with historical documents.
[00:25:27.640]But I think that when we read texts like the have Tameron, we see that
[00:25:32.000]we're looking at kind of a yes and situation and not an either or.
[00:25:36.680]I think that, yes, there was pressure to keep silent about these things
[00:25:41.320]because there are consequences for reputation and for relationships
[00:25:46.040]and for marriage and for politics.
[00:25:49.080]I think that there also was a strong community
[00:25:51.600]in which people found outlets to talk about it,
[00:25:53.880]and that's why we see these traces in different documents.
[00:25:56.920]We don't see where we don't see is a lot of evidence in the courts
[00:26:01.200]that these are stories
[00:26:02.400]that we're being told and tried and punished and brought to justice.
[00:26:05.600]We don't do that.
[00:26:07.560]So, yes, I think there is pressure to remain silent,
[00:26:10.520]but I also think that people found ways to speak about. Good question.
[00:26:22.720]one more so when talking about when rape was sexual,
[00:26:28.000]assault was discussed about and kind of going out,
[00:26:31.800]was it more of a was the reaction more of a kind of a vengeful
[00:26:37.120]reaction like let's as like a painting
[00:26:40.200]or it was a painting or tapestry, whatever it was
[00:26:44.640]dismembering the
[00:26:46.840]rapist, wasn't it kind of was that more of a common reaction?
[00:26:50.280]It's all within literature?
[00:26:51.680]Or is it more of a kind of laugh it off like the people like
[00:26:55.440]the three characters did in the Tameron?
[00:26:59.280]I think that in terms of the dominant cultural narrative,
[00:27:04.320]there was kind of a suggestion to shrug things off.
[00:27:07.880]This is normal, you know?
[00:27:09.920]But at the same time, and I think it kind of depends on who you ask and when
[00:27:13.280]as well, right? We see.
[00:27:15.560]What I what I find so
[00:27:16.560]fascinating in the case study that I use this text
[00:27:19.600]is that all three of those things are true, right people.
[00:27:23.120]People kept silent about it because they felt ashamed.
[00:27:25.600]People also tried to seek justice in certain situations.
[00:27:29.640]And and all of these things kind of coexisted.
[00:27:33.360]I would say that
[00:27:34.400]the dominant cultural narrative would have been to try to remain silent.
[00:27:38.920]And that's how it kept perpetuating itself. Right.
[00:27:44.280]Because and I don't want to emphasize this.
[00:27:47.480]Either too much or too little, you know, I think
[00:27:50.240]in the Renaissance, the crime was often seen differently.
[00:27:53.440]You know, this is seen,
[00:27:55.000]especially if the woman was married as a crime against the man's property.
[00:27:59.040]Right. And so we think of sexual assault.
[00:28:01.160]I think today is a crime against an individual.
[00:28:04.560]And so that already
[00:28:06.280]changes the way we frame the questions that we're asking, right?
[00:28:09.840]When that doesn't change the fact that this was, of course, still traumatic.
[00:28:13.760]And, you know, clearly was written about and thought about a great deal
[00:28:17.600]with the crime in and of itself was not
[00:28:20.360]seen as a crime against a person, a woman.
[00:28:24.480]It was seen against the man, really, because his property had been,
[00:28:29.920]to put it, bluntly tampered with.
[00:28:31.680]Right. And so that is a difference in in how we think about
[00:28:36.040]how these things got framed.
[00:28:48.800]All right. Thank you so much, Norah, for this absolutely fascinating talk.
[00:28:53.080]And I probably have a question which other people might have.
[00:28:55.960]You know, this was obviously, you know, preceded by the cameras near
[00:28:59.360]the camera and the Bible was 14th century.
[00:29:02.520]And you know, when I read it, they were similar knotty details,
[00:29:05.360]but they were more innocent and more for entertainment.
[00:29:09.120]So if I understand right in here, we have a shift in women's agency.
[00:29:14.440]It's more sort of serious.
[00:29:15.920]They are more sort of messages
[00:29:18.080]and more sort of moral tale and more of a critique of a rape, right?
[00:29:22.200]That's a really good question.
[00:29:23.520]And I did not mention that
[00:29:25.280]that piece of context, which is really important,
[00:29:27.280]these stories were based on the day Cameron, which is written by Boccaccio
[00:29:31.320]in Italy and and Hannah, you're exactly right.
[00:29:35.120]I think that one big difference between these stories and the earlier ones,
[00:29:39.320]I like to say that these tales and the discussions have teeth. Right?
[00:29:43.000]The first set, of course, you know the Cameron scholars who disagree with me
[00:29:47.440]here. But you're right, they are entertaining, you know, and
[00:29:51.480]the discussions afterwards are largely, Oh, what a great story.
[00:29:54.720]Let's move on to the next one.
[00:29:56.600]These stories have teeth in the sense that people really disagree,
[00:30:01.880]and often the discussions after the stories are longer,
[00:30:05.960]richer, more complex than the stories themselves.
[00:30:09.280]And so I think that's absolutely right.
[00:30:11.760]The fact that we also have a woman writer who is invested in female communities
[00:30:16.880]in women's agency in in women's writing.
[00:30:21.200]She often appears as a character in these stories.
[00:30:23.920]She kind of historically appears
[00:30:25.760]and solves a problem in one of these fictional stories.
[00:30:28.240]And so she's clearly invested in in the kinds of issues that women are facing.
[00:30:32.600]I think that's a major difference between this text and its predecessor. Thank you.
[00:30:55.720]So how important
[00:30:56.880]was the social and political power of the woman involved
[00:31:00.720]in determining the level of victim blaming and her believability?
[00:31:05.400]That's a really good question.
[00:31:06.680]Thank you for that.
[00:31:08.320]I think first, it's worth noting that most of the stories that get written down
[00:31:12.760]and that we have here are stories of noble women and their stories of assault.
[00:31:18.600]I think that it was equally and more common, even for women
[00:31:22.480]who didn't even have that level of privilege.
[00:31:25.000]Their stories to go completely unheard any race.
[00:31:27.160]So it's important to note that privilege there in a sense
[00:31:30.880]that only certain kind of women even get to write their trauma.
[00:31:35.440]I think that it's incredibly important
[00:31:38.680]that the power status and the class of the women
[00:31:42.360]in terms of determining how she gets to tell her story.
[00:31:45.760]At the same time, I think what we see here, like in one of the examples
[00:31:49.600]I showed where her lady in waiting told her, Don't talk about this, you know,
[00:31:53.400]you don't have any hope of bringing this to court.
[00:31:55.800]You're just going to cause more attention being drawn to yourself
[00:31:58.680]and people will blame you for it.
[00:32:00.440]That was the lady who was very noble and had a great deal of power,
[00:32:03.640]and a lot of people actually say, that's the author
[00:32:05.560]writing her own story because she she herself was raped, the author.
[00:32:09.760]And so I think it goes to show that this is also universal.
[00:32:13.200]So at the same time, as only certain women get to write their trauma,
[00:32:18.200]clearly, even these certain
[00:32:19.960]women didn't get to always shape the direction that they wanted there.
[00:32:24.160]They didn't always get to seek the justice
[00:32:26.160]or seek the outcome that maybe would have been most helpful.
[00:32:30.280]Does that answer your question a little bit? Thank you.
[00:32:40.960]Norah, I'm really interested
[00:32:42.480]that you've been studying this text for nearly two decades. Yes.
[00:32:46.520]And I'm wondering how
[00:32:49.320]maybe the the changes in public discourse around rape and trauma
[00:32:54.480]in that time span might have changed your reading of this text? Thank you.
[00:33:00.360]I thought a lot about this actually recently, because when I first
[00:33:03.120]started reading this text, this is the furthest thing from my mind.
[00:33:07.240]And, you know, I initially
[00:33:09.360]was focused on storytelling and how the stories were told.
[00:33:12.960]And then I was focused on the body broadly, but certainly nothing
[00:33:16.560]to do with sexual assault or violence.
[00:33:20.400]And then that's exactly right,
[00:33:22.200]as I kind of saw my own moment being shaped by these conversations.
[00:33:26.040]I kind of fell into this topic by first.
[00:33:29.120]Looking at the engravings actually is what pulled me into this topic
[00:33:31.960]and saying there's some interesting stuff going on here.
[00:33:35.080]How does Marguerite, the author, write about these questions and then
[00:33:39.040]just continue to see all of these different narratives
[00:33:41.880]that were coexisting and that I kind of saw in my own moment, too?
[00:33:45.720]And so my decision to pursue this is actually very, very much informed
[00:33:50.080]by, you know, I've thought about different things about this text,
[00:33:52.200]but now I'm being kind of colored
[00:33:55.520]by this pulled into this conversation
[00:33:58.920]that I see marriage often in and in our current day. Yeah.
[00:34:06.840]Kelly. So I'm wondering about
[00:34:19.120]part of the typical kind of way that women's writing
[00:34:22.600]ends up being framed and forgive me if this is if I'm simplifying too much,
[00:34:28.040]but if I'm thinking about sort of like Christine, the person saying that
[00:34:34.840]her counter to report to you
[00:34:37.280]and to male writers is to say that, you know , they're
[00:34:41.840]they're telling their representatives, authorities and women
[00:34:45.240]getting to tell the story differently.
[00:34:48.560]When we see Christine, though, she is
[00:34:52.600]not always as feminist as we want her to be now.
[00:34:55.200]Especially in her narrative on things like rape and that it's always
[00:34:58.360]the virtuous woman who's the only one who has any chance of being recovered.
[00:35:01.640]The idea of the non virtuous woman.
[00:35:05.320]You know, that doesn't even exist, Christine.
[00:35:08.120]Although she does have a full throated, he has a couple.
[00:35:11.000]She's a couple. You know, she
[00:35:13.520]and she just doesn't mention that media does bad things too, right?
[00:35:17.240]But she does have a full throated defense at the end of her narrative about rape,
[00:35:22.040]sort of saying that men should be put to death for this crime.
[00:35:25.560]She finally kind of steps up, says this right?
[00:35:28.960]But the examples that she offers
[00:35:31.200]are largely heroes or heroines or people for.
[00:35:35.560]For Marguerite, we have, yes, noble women, but real people, right?
[00:35:40.640]Or kind of, you know, real enough people.
[00:35:44.040]So I'm wondering how this is this itself,
[00:35:47.280]even if we're talking about noble women or women of privilege,
[00:35:50.400]a moment of the community of women embracing this story
[00:35:54.240]in a way that is more personal and allowing experience
[00:35:57.320]and authority to kind of cross into a new balance, right?
[00:36:01.360]I'm sorry, I'm going through this in a long way.
[00:36:03.440]I'm trying to think through the question.
[00:36:05.720]Through my question,
[00:36:07.640]so that we no longer are even talking about things
[00:36:11.000]like the anti-feminist narratives of
[00:36:14.080]the oppressed us or something, but rather talk me about
[00:36:17.040]these narratives of justice that are that are a part of the real way.
[00:36:20.880]And so now we're we pushing against the authority
[00:36:22.640]that is at least contemporary when we're talking about Mercury
[00:36:26.040]and is the community of women actually capable of setting a tone?
[00:36:30.360]Is that why it comes back so many times, the hip Tamron?
[00:36:34.080]Because it just hasn't been settled?
[00:36:36.280]What do you do with that recursion when you're studying this whole?
[00:36:39.520]Yeah, that's a really good question.
[00:36:41.800]And it kind of gets to why I just can't look at the text
[00:36:45.040]because I can't solve any of those problems.
[00:36:47.120]They're so complex.
[00:36:49.000]But I think you're right, and that's another important thing about this.
[00:36:52.120]This text is that when they start telling these stories, they at least claim
[00:36:55.920]that all of them will be true.
[00:36:57.720]Of course, they're not all true, but they say that they will be.
[00:37:00.360]And so I think that that's an important piece of why it feels more real, right?
[00:37:04.680]And there's supposed to be true and also fairly recent.
[00:37:07.400]And so now, instead of using as as Dr.
[00:37:10.560]Stage mentioned,
[00:37:11.280]kind of classical examples, virtuous women from mythology, we're talking about
[00:37:17.400]a queen. Sure, maybe you are a noble lady,
[00:37:19.320]but someone that you would know who they were
[00:37:21.680]and maybe you would know a little bit about their story.
[00:37:24.040]And so I do think there's something is changed in terms of the tone here,
[00:37:27.920]not just because of the kind of precious and contemporary nature of the people
[00:37:33.280]being talked about, but the fact that the people discussing
[00:37:36.960]how to read, how to interpret they're all bringing contemporary views
[00:37:41.240]to the table and and discussing them and kind of having it out.
[00:37:45.440]And and nothing gets solved, though.
[00:37:48.240]And so I think that's the message to to, well, readers in the 16th century.
[00:37:53.120]But also to us is, you know, this is messy,
[00:37:58.040]this is complicated and you're going to have to think about it. Not.
[00:38:02.960]These are heroes.
[00:38:04.080]Men should be tortured and punished for these crimes, right?
[00:38:07.200]She's drawing attention to the fact that this is more complicated
[00:38:10.240]and these narratives exist and should be dissected and called attention to.
[00:38:15.120]It's not a very good answer to your question, but.
[00:38:17.640]They asked enough of a question, but
[00:38:20.080]one other thing, though, that did occur to me was this is
[00:38:24.880]the sense of authority.
[00:38:25.800]In the end, the conversation is going on and justice, as you talked about,
[00:38:28.880]it goes back to the legal system and the legal narrative.
[00:38:31.680]What about the church narrative?
[00:38:33.040]As you mentioned,
[00:38:33.600]there is these competing sense of where is it a crime or is it not?
[00:38:37.800]Do they? Ever since I'm not familiar enough with Margaret.
[00:38:40.440]Do they do they push against the church at all?
[00:38:42.760]Or is that just like, No, we're not going to do the opposite?
[00:38:45.760]Actually, that's a really good question.
[00:38:47.880]I would say that of the the sexual violence and assaults committed
[00:38:52.600]actually don't. I'm not going to give a proportion,
[00:38:54.360]but a good chunk of them are committed by men of the church.
[00:38:57.880]And there's a really interesting distinction.
[00:39:00.640]Men of the church are almost always punished when this happened,
[00:39:03.680]so they're brought to justice really brutally.
[00:39:05.800]Sometimes their arms and legs are cut off, the entire monasteries burned down
[00:39:09.600]like there is a vicious sense of OK, this is corrupt in the church.
[00:39:14.040]It was this a whole another hot-button issue, you know, and a whole other talk.
[00:39:18.560]So when when men of the church commit sexual assault, they're punished
[00:39:23.160]and they're punished and really memorable ways
[00:39:25.760]when it's men of nobility, you know, contemporaries to these noble ladies.
[00:39:31.040]It's a little bit more.
[00:39:34.720]Ambivalent in terms of how these men are brought to justice are usually not,
[00:39:39.760]which in and of itself is an interesting distinction. Good question.
[00:39:58.520]How much of a difference did it make if the lady was married or not?
[00:40:03.480]The difference in terms of punishment or in terms of whether it got talked about?
[00:40:11.840]Probably punishment, like how the man was seen. Mm hmm.
[00:40:15.680]That's a really good question.
[00:40:21.560]Often this was where punishment became more possible, because now
[00:40:27.760]to come back to that sense of rape being a crime against property,
[00:40:32.880]you know, if the wife is the property of the husband,
[00:40:35.680]then there could be a legal reason to pursue punishment for a crime.
[00:40:40.240]That said, it wasn't again often brought to trial.
[00:40:44.760]So at the end of the day, was it that different?
[00:40:48.880]Theoretically, yes.
[00:40:50.120]In practice, not much.
[00:41:02.120]Well, I don't want to say
[00:41:04.920]thank you all. Actually, I think you're.

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#MeToo and the Renaissance | CAS Inquire

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