This is a book about rape, but not about that alone. It is a book written for specialists in medieval English literature, but not for them alone. It stands at the convergence of two streams of scholarly discourse. The first is represented by my previous work on the Forest, which illustrated how a ‘place’, actual and idealised, can be understood only in relation to cultural, literary and imaginative contexts, and as an integral part of a view of the world distinct from that of the modern mind. This book sustains such an approach and is in this important sense the natural successor of the earlier work. The current study, however, presents an elaborated interpretation not of a place but of an act: what precisely was the ‘act’ of rape during the Middle Ages; how was it informed by the notions of ‘sin’ and ‘crime’; and how did the understanding of it change over time? Why was rape inseparable from more general ideas of ravishment, not all of them sexual? How did rape relate to abduction, the crime consistently linked to it in medieval law? Did, for example, the ‘said Besecher’ of 1436, whose charge is cited above, object primarily to being horribly ravished or to being carried off unwillingly to the wild and desolate places of Wales?