SOURCE: “Replaying Rape: Feudal Law on Trial in Le Roman de Renart,” in Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 72-103.

In the following excerpt, Gravdal argues that by allowing legal procedures to dominate the rape trial episodes of the Roman de Renart, its authors challenged societal respect for feudal court practices.

The archeology of feudal rape law discloses itself in a group of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Old French texts entitled Le Roman de Renart, a cycle of narratives in which the characters are humanized animals.¹ The genre draws its sources from universal folklore. In the French medieval avatar, the hero is the trickster fox Renart. Composed between approximately 1171 and 1250, the collection is made up of elements, of varying length and homogeneity, called “branches.”A great number of poets participated in the cycle, but we know nothing of them and...