Baines, Barbara J.

About the author: Barbara J. Baines is a professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, where she teaches courses primarily in Renaissance drama. Her PhD is from Ohio University. She has published monographs on Thomas Middleton and Thomas Heywood, in addition to numerous articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Representing Rape in the English Early Modern Period

2003 0-7734-6861-7
This study makes an important contribution with its interdisciplinary scope, with chapters on Old Testament rape narratives, medieval and early modern English law and legal practices pertaining to rape, elitist poetry concerning rape as well as popular prose narratives, and pictorial representations of Lucrece, as well as chapters on the drama of the period. It delineates a congruence between rape and pornography, and traces the ways rape becomes effaced as a brutal crime to become an occasion in the service of men, as the context for heroic rivalry among men, or as an act that women secretly desire.