Rereading Medieval Cases of <i>Raptus:</i> Group Rape and Homosociality in England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the long history of medieval group rapes as performative masculinity and as an avenue to publicly display one’s manhood. By studying medieval England’s eyre court cases, it shows how raptus scholars have previously misinterpreted the potential collective experience of rape in the medieval past. This research demonstrates that rape cases in which there is a single perpetrator accused of rape and other individuals accused of aiding in the rape, have frequently been inaccurately read by scholars as lone rape cases. This article presents alternative readings to medieval cases of raptus and ultimately argues that we must reread rape cases in which multiple men are accused, as consisting of a group rape. Incorrectly reading group rapes as individual rapes works to falsely position group rape as a rare occurrence when, in fact, the eyre court and king’s bench archives suggest otherwise. Exploring what medieval scholars can learn from the Hockey Canada allegations about the prevalence of group rape, we can begin to consider the homosocial bonds it may establish between young men. Connections between elite-level hockey players and medieval knights are drawn to demonstrate the collective experiences that group rapes and initiation rituals may have as a team-bonding activity. Drawing on homosociality theory, this research presents new ideas in conceptualizing how group sexual violence could be used as a medieval masculine community-building exercise and how it resonates with present-day issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".