Defacing Troy: From Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece to Medieval Manuscripts

Abstract

Abstract Shakespeare’s 1594 The Rape of Lucrece recounts the eponymous character’s defacement of an image of the Fall of Troy. When reread in light of a widespread medieval practice of defacing images, including those in manuscripts about Troy, Lucrece’s act is not (solely) a metaphor or a literary device, but an indication of how visual matter could be touched in premodern Europe. Reciprocally, Shakespeare’s poem provides a rare glimpse of the complex affective and psychological dynamics behind medieval defacements of Troy (or otherwise), for which very little documentary evidence survives.