What Does Rape Look Like?

Abstract

From the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance, a handful of narratives about sexual assault dominated Western Europe. In the seventeen novellas of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1559) that feature assault or attempted assault, these different narratives coexist. To date, scholarship has not extensively explored the relationship between the novellas of the Heptaméron and the first two sets of engravings to accompany them—those of Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe, in 1698, and those of S. Freudenberger and A. Dunker, in 1780–1781. This article addresses that gap, and, by means of a comparative reading, considers different narratives about sexual assault in the novellas and frame of the Heptaméron alongside these first two sets of visual engravings. It argues that the engravings more closely follow other visual tropes of rape than they do the text. In so doing, these first images of the Heptaméron favor more canonical representations of sexual assault that either heroicize, eroticize, or blame the subject of rape. What is lost is the polyvalence of the text; in particular, moments that document the responses and reactions of the women in the novellas and the opinions they put forth in the frame.