Sarah Baechle, PH.D.

Assistant Professor of English

Sarah Baechle is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.  Her first book, on the history of the Chaumpaigne release—a 1380 document that appeared to accuse the poet Geoffrey Chaucer of rape—is forthcoming from Penn State University Press.  Her recent and forthcoming work on representations of sexual violence in Middle English literature appears in Exemplaria, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Chaucer Review, including the recent special issue addressing new discoveries on the Chaucer Life Records and the Chaumpaigne release.  She is the co-editrix with Carissa M. Harris of “The Ethical Challenges of Chaucerian Scholarship in the 21st Century,” a special issue of the Chaucer Review published in October 2021, and co-editrix with Harris and Elizaveta Strakhov, of Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (Penn State University Press, 2022).  Professor Baechle’s second book in progress is supported by the generosity of the Isom Center.  It examines the role of sexual violence in medieval explorations of political consent.  

Gender Studies -Related Research Interests:  Medieval representations of sexual violence; rape jurisprudence; consent