Rape and Abduction as Strategies of Domination

A conversation and dinner with Professor Carol Lansing, History Department, University of California, Santa Barbara.

“Rape and Abduction as Strategies of Domination”

This paper derives from Lansing's conviction that the recent horrors in Bosnia, the Congo, Syria, have a deep history in Christian Europe as well.  While medieval sources for rape and abduction are terse at best, fourteenth-century legal inquiries into noble violence do contain accounts of noble use of rape and abduction to humiliate and dominate.  This pattern is echoed in fascinating ways in contemporary literature, including Dante and Boccaccio.

Carol Lansing is a historian of late medieval Italy, with archival studies of urban nobles, the politics of heresy and also shifting understandings of grief for the dead.  She is currently working on strategies of lordship in the Mezzogiorno.

October 22,2015  |  6:00pm  |  Lane History Corner, room 302

The Reading and RSVP link to be available soon.