Grace Delmolino (UC Davis) presents “Unwilling Consent: Lucretia's Rape, Saint Lucy's Martyrdom, and Violence of the Mind from Canon Law to Boccaccio”

Gratian’s Decretum, the foundational textbook of medieval canon law, illustrates its paradigm of sexual consent with the twin examples of Lucretia and Saint Lucy. Lucretia was a lodestone for discussions of consent and complicity in sexual violence during the Middle Ages; the story of her rape and suicide has been told and retold from Livy to Augustine. The legend of Saint Lucy recounts her absolute resistance to rape and her unbending refusal of consent. This talk will analyze the role of these women’s stories in the canon law of sexual violence, examining how medieval canon law deployed consent in its definition of sex crimes and reflecting on how the medieval crime of “raptus” morphed into the etymologically connected (but conceptually divergent) “rape” of the 21st century.