Recent scholarship has been preoccupied with questions of rape and consent in late medieval literature, partly influenced by the MeToo movement while we continue to grapple with Geoffrey Chaucer’s allegation of raptus. In such a climate, medieval texts that likewise challenge the normalization of rape in literature and society require renewed attention and critical interest. The three fifteenth-century poems I examine in this article, The Assembly of Ladies, The Floure and the Leafe, and The Isle of Ladies, push Chaucer’s dream vision tradition in a new direction, presenting us with female-centered models of cooperation, care, and governance. They show what the world would look like if women
could move freely through public spaces; they highlight the value of mutual aid and collaboration; and they even give us a taste of revenge. Just as we should identify a spectrum of sexual violence within rape culture, ranging from harassment to assault, we should learn to identify a variety of types of resistance to rape culture, ranging from complaints to silent defiance to full-scale revolt.