He said, she said: Rape and gender discourse in early modern Russia

Kritika

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 197-216

  Kaiser, Daniel H ^a  

^a GRINNELL COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0141575190     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: 15385000     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2002.0022     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. Lynn A. Higgens and Brenda R. Silver, "Introduction: Rereading Rape," in Rape and Representation, ed. Higgins and Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1.
2. Colleen A. Ward, Attitudes Toward Rape: Feminist and Social Psychological Perspectives (London: SAGE, 1995), 55, 46.
3. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
4. Nazife Bashar, "Rape in England between 1550 and 1700," in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men's Power, Women's Resistance, ed. The London Feminist History Group (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 28-42;
5. Barbara S. Lindemann, "'To Ravish and Carnally Know': Rape in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," Signs 10: 1 (1984), 63-82.
6. Barbara Hanawalt found that in early 14th-century England rape accounted for only 0.5 percent of all felony cases, in large part because of underreporting. In the second half of the century the incidence of rape prosecutions rose to as many as five percent of all cases (Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979], 105-6).
7. Manon van der Heijden, "Women as Victims of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Criminal Cases of Rape, Incest, and Maltreatment in Rotterdam and Delft," Journal of Social History 33: 3 (2000), 625.
8. See also Maria R. Boes, who found only two cases of rape prosecuted in Frankfurt am Main over a period of more than 130 years ("Women and the Penal System in Frankfurt am Main, 1562-1696," Criminal Justice History 13 [1992], 67).
9. Miranda Chaytor, "Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century," Gender and History 7: 3 (1995), 378.
10. Roy Porter, "Rape - Does It Have a Historical Meaning?" in Rape, ed. Porter and Sylvana Tomaselli (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 217-36.
11. Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 58, 62, 78;
12. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 233;
13. Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The 'Weaker Sex' in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 96.
14. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 83-84.
15. Bashar, "Rape," 34-35, 40-42.
16. Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 157-58, 164;
17. idem, "Violence and Sexuality - Rape," in Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 90.
18. In early modern Leiden, too, rape and assault seem not to have earned severe penalties (Els Kloek, "Criminality and Gender in Leiden's Confessieboeken, 1678-1794," Criminal Justice History 11[1990], 16).
19. Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845 (London: Pandora, 1987), 22, 39, 58.
20. Sharon Block has argued that narratives of rape in early America masculinized the assault by removing women and converting men into the "victims of the rape of their female dependents" ("The Public Uses of Rape in Late Colonial and Early Republic America," unpublished paper delivered at the Newberry Library, Chicago, 29 March 2001, 2).
21. Ekloga: Vizantiiskii zakonodatel'nyi svod VIII veka, ed. and trans. Elena Emanuilovna Lipshits (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 71.
22. s.v. "Rape" in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3: 1722.
23. Mikhail Nikolaevich Tikhomirov, ed., Merilo pravednoe po rukopisi XIV veka (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), 658 (fol. 328v.).
24. See also idem, ed., Zakon sudnyi liudem kratkoi redaktsii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), 106;
25. idem, ed., Zakon sudnyi liudemprostrannoi i svodnoi redaktsii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), 141.
26. For a concise survey of the reception of the Procheiros Nomos in Rus', see Iaroslav Nikolaevich Shchapov, "Prokhiron v vostochnoslavianskoi pis'mennosti," Vizantiiskii vremennik, no. 38 (1977), 48-58.
27. Daniel H. Kaiser, ed. and trans., The Laws of Rus - Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries (Salt Lake City: Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, 1992), 45.2-3, 46.8, 108.7.
28. S. I. Smirnov, Materialy dlia istorii drevnerusskoi pokaiannoi distsipliny (Teksty i Zametki) (Moscow, 1912), 66.12.
29. This text is reproduced in "A se grekhi zlye, smertnye. ": Liubov', erotika i seksual'naia etika v doindustrial'noi Rossis, ed. Natalia LVovna Pushkareva (Moscow: Ladomir, 1999), 55.
30. Eve Levin summarizes South Slavic and Ruś canon law on rape (Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989], 215-22).
31. Aleksandr Ivanovich Almazov, Tainaia ispoved' v pravoslavnoi vostochnoi tserkvi, vol. 3: Prilozheniia (Odessa: Tipo-litografiia Shtaba Odesskogo Voennogo Okruga, 1894), 114.
32. The same distinction held in Dutch courts, indicating that women were not the victims in rape "but merely objects of the crime" (van der Heijden, "Women as Victims," 624-25).
33. Almazov, Tainaia ispoved', 3: 114, 116, 151.
34. The last of these texts is reproduced in "A se grekhi zlye," 30-31.
35. Almazov, Tainaia ispoved', 3:172.
36. See also Eve Levin, "Eastern Orthodox Christianity," in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 340;
37. and Pushkareva, "Seksual'naia etika v chastnoi zhizni drevnikh rusov i moskovitov (X-XVII vv.)," in Seks i erotika v russkoi traditsionnoi kul'ture, ed. A. L. Toporkov (Moscow: Ladomir, 1996), 49.
38. Richard Hellie, ed. and trans., The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, Part 1: Text and Translation (Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, 1988), 17.30.
39. Pamiatniki russkogo prava, 8 vols. (Moscow: Gosiurizdat, 1952-63), 7: 428.102. 25
40. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, 30 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830), 2, no. 1266.
41. Nancy Shields Kollmann summarizes this case in detail, finding special importance in the fact that a low-ranking woman earned compensation from a highly placed Muscovite cavalryman ("Women's Honor in Early Modern Russia," in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements et al. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], 67-68).
42. Rossiiskoe zakonodatel'stvo X-XX vekov, 9 vols. (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1984- ), 4: 359-167-68, 384.
43. For a survey of later imperial legislation on rape, see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 75-81.
44. Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka (RIB), 39 vols. (St. Petersburg-Leningrad, 1872-1927), 25, no. 249;
45. Male clerks recorded, summarized, and reproduced oral depositions from both men and women, and they therefore mediated the surviving record. Similar problems affect the extant evidence on rape cases prosecuted elsewhere. See Marybeth Hamilton Arnold, "'The Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman': Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790 to 1820," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 47;
46. Chaytor, "Husband(ry)," 380;
47. and Laura Gowing Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 47.
48. Several studies have characterized as "remarkable" the credibility that Muscovite courts invested in the charges that rape victims lodged against men (Kollmann, "Women's Honor," 66;
49. idem, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999], 72-73;
50. Eve Levin, Sex, 233, 243).
51. See also Nada Boskovska, Die russische Frau im 17. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 131.
52. This defense, familiar to modern readers, was not unusual in the early modern world either. Daniel Williams summarizes an 18th-century rape case reported in An Account of the Life of Bryan Sheehan. Despite the prosecutor's assertion of the indubitable guilt of the accused, the man "maintained his innocence, claiming that the sexual intercourse 'was done according to an agreement.' His denials, however, did not stop him from confessing and repenting" ("The Gratification of That Corrupt and Lawless Passion: Character Types and Themes in Early New England Rape Narratives," in A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, ed. Frank Shuffelton [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 203).
53. Elsewhere, of course, proof of the victim's resistance was crucial to establishing rape, as opposed to fornication or adultery. See, for example, Ruggiero, Violence, 159-60;
54. Geoffrey Robert Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 172-73.
55. Ward, Attitudes, 44.
56. Walter Preventer reports on a remarkably similar case from medieval Paris ("Violence against Women in a Medieval Metropolis: Paris around 1400," in Law, Custom, and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of Bryce Lyon, ed. Bernard S. Bachrach and David Nicholas [Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1990], 263-84).
57. "Delo vdovy Klimontovoi, 1689 goda," in Petr Ivanovich Shchukin, Sbornik starinnykh bumag, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1896-1902), 4: 56-64.
58. Koehler, Search, 96.
59. Sergei Ivanovich Kotkov et al., eds., Pamiatniki delovoi pis'mennosti XVII veka. Vladimirskii krai (Moscow: Nauka, 1984), no. 194.
60. For example, 13th-century English law provided that four women might examine a maiden rape victim to see if she were still a virgin (Ruth Kittel, "Rape in Thirteenth-Century England: A Study of the Common-Law Courts," in Women and the Law: A Social Historical Perspective, ed. D. Kelly Weisberg [Cambridge: Schenkman, 1982], 2: 104).
61. But in both early modern England and colonial America, women might be expected to confirm by examination whether rape had been attempted (Koehler, A Search, 96;
62. Dayton, Women, 268;
63. Lindemann, "To Ravish," 72).
64. and Eve Levin cites several cases settled out of court, presumably by having the accused pay compensation to the victims (Sex, 234). 46 RIB 12, no. 199.
65. Dayton, Women, 234-35. 48 Akty otnosiashchiesia do iuridicheskogo byta Drevnei Rusi, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia akademii nauk, 1857-84), 3, no. 330. As Nada Boškovska points out, women could be tortured in Muscovy, although I found no evidence of torture being applied in any of the rape cases examined here ("Muscovite Women During the Seventeenth Century: At the Peak of the Deprivation of their Rights or on the Road towards New Freedom?" in Von Moskau nach St. Petersburg: Das russische Reich im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Joachim Torke [Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000], 52).
66. idem, By Honor Bound, 73.
67. For treatment of a similar case, see Levin, Sex, 232-33.
68. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 387.
69. Bernard Capp, "The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England," Past and Present 162 (February 1999), 96, 98-100.
70. Capp's title refers to Keith Thomas, "The Double Standard," Journal of the History of Ideas 20: 2 (1959), 195-216.
71. Arnold, "'The Life of a Citizen,"' 39, 40.
72. Kollmann, "Women's Honor," 69.
73. Higgins and Silver, "Introduction," 1.
74. Dayton, Women, 234. Susan Juster attributes to the "sexual politics of evangelicalism" a similar process that marginalized women (Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994]).
75. Daniel H. Kaiser, "Invading the 'Private': Spousal Violence and the State in Early Modern Russia," Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 58 (forthcoming).
76. On 18th-century developments, see Michelle Marrese, A Woman s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700-1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2002).