Abstract: »A dearth of legal records and a surfeit of propaganda has stymied scholarship on sexual assault in the British Civil wars. As Ann Hughes suggests, however, the archive's opacity does not prove the absence of wartime rape. Using the affordances of literary analysis, alongside readings of newsbooks and military manuals, this paper explores issues of civil war rape by analyzing how Jane Cavendish's poetry and dramatic texts navigate this nexus of real threat and sensationalist propaganda. Jane's manuscript adapts standard metaphors of love and war, both implicitly defending her father from print accusations that he and his "ravenous papist" soldiers had committed widespread sexual assault, and also representing the wartime threats that she and her sisters faced while their male relatives were away. Both vulnerable to and complicit in the defense of wartime rape, Jane Cavendish helps us chart what Sophie Kinsella has called "the binary logics of...Christiainity, barbarism, innocence, guilt, and sex difference" that governed "permissible and impermissible acts of war," then and now.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of England / Stuart period | Literature: English literature / Jane Cavendish | Public opinion: Propaganda / Propaganda in the United Kingdom | Sex and the law: Rape / Wartime sexual violence | War: English Civil War