What Does Rape Look Like? Textual and Visual Representations of Sexual Assault in the Heptameron (1559)

From the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance, a handful of narratives about sexual assault dominated Western Europe. In the seventeen novellas of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (1559) that feature assault or attempted assault, these different narratives coexist. To date, scholarship has not extensively explored the relationship between the novellas of the Heptameron and the first two sets of engravings to accompany them-those of Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe, in 1698, and those of S. Freuden berger and A. Dunker, in 178O-1781. This article addresses that gap, and, by means of a comparative reading, considers different narratives about sexual assault in the novel-las and frame of the Heptameron alongside these first two sets of visual engravings. It argues that the engravings more closely follow other visual tropes of rape than they do the text. In so doing, these first images of the Heptameron favor more canonical representations of sexual assault that either heroicize, eroticize, or blame the subject of rape. What is lost is the polyvalence of the text; in particular, moments that document the responses and reactions of the women in the novellas and the opinions they put forth in the frame.