Law and Society

Congratulations to Dr. Mariah Cooper, a contributor to the Law and Society Program, on the recent publication of her book, Representations of Rape and Consent in Medieval English Laws and Literature (Arc Humanities Press, 2024).

In her book, Dr. Cooper “explores medieval English understandings of rape, consent, and the assumed mind-body dichotomy of rapists and rape victims. It demonstrates how laws, trial records, popular romance, and ecclesiastic and medical texts defined sexual consent and non-consent, and the consequences of such ideologies. By comparing episodes of rape and consent across diverse primary sources, it considers important medieval English rape myths and victim-blaming stereotypes. Significantly, it also highlights the cultural trepidation associated with believing women’s accusations of rape and questions how much “progress” we have made since then.”

It is the recipient of Arc Humanities Press’s "New Voices - Open Access Award" for "timely and original scholarship" and an open access version of the book is available here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/94121

Dr. Cooper is an expert in medieval gender and sexuality with a focus on medieval English laws and trial documents of sexual violence. She is a much sought after teacher and in the fall 2024 semester is teaching courses in the History of Crime and Deviancy and Gender and Sexuality in Europe to 1789, amongst others.