Abstract
This thesis examines how the Rape of Lucretia is reimagined in literature from Ancient Rome to late medieval England to identify the changing legal and theological attitudes towards women, sexual violence, and suicide. It will show how Lucretia's characterisation is transformed across these periods in response to evolving judicial and moral frameworks. This project employs a comparative methodology grounded in close textual analysis. It examines Lucretia in the Roman versions in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and Ovid’s Fasti, the theological intervention in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and the Middle English retellings in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, John Gower’s The Lover’s Confession, and John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes. These accounts are situated within legal and theological structures to reveal cultural attitudes towards women. The thesis is organised thematically, following Lucretia as a wife, a victim of rape, a witness testifying, and through to her suicide, tracing her transformations at each stage of the story. The findings demonstrate that Lucretia is an ideologically adaptable figure, engaging with and responding to contemporary law and doctrine.