Medieval Consent and The Lucretia Complex

In the 1100s, as medieval lawyers in the western Christian Church developed a legal theory of consent and sexual violence, they turned to the case of Lucretia. The Roman historian Livy (59 BC – 17 AD) provides the canonical account of the rape and suicide of Lucretia, writing about 500 years after Lucretia supposedly lived. In Livy’s telling, the son of the Roman king rapes Lucretia, a noble wife of supreme virtue. In response to the rape, Lucretia kills herself and the outrage of her death sparks a rebellion against the tyrannical monarchy. By the Middle Ages, countless writers and artists across Europe had retold this tale of political, sexual, and self-inflicted violence. Why did medieval canon lawyers pick this story—a story about a pagan woman from a past so distant it might as well be fiction—to define the jurisprudence of rape and consent in Christian law? And why does Giovanni Boccaccio, a 14th-century Italian author and scholar of canon law, retell the Lucretia story over a dozen times in his fictional works?