Rape and Abduction as Strategies of Domination - A conversation and dinner with Carol Lansing

“Rape and Abduction as Strategies of Domination”

by

Professor Carol Lansing, History Department, University of California, Santa Barbara

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.

This event is open to Stanford Faculy and Graduate Students.