Dr. Sarah Baechle is Associate Professor of English, specializing in Chaucer and late medieval poetry.
Research Interests
Professor Baechle's research interests range widely, including explorations of consent and sexual violence in Middle English and Middle Scots poetry, medieval theorizations of polity and political formation, intersectional and Black feminist approaches to medieval literature, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval paleography and codicology.
Biography
Sarah Baechle is Associate Professor of English, specializing in Chaucer and Middle English literature. She is the author of Father Chaucer and the Apologists: Cecily Chaumpaigne and 700 Years of Rape Culture (Penn State, 2025), and her work on medieval explorations of consent and sexual violence appears in the Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. She is the co-editrix, with Carissa M. Harris and Elizaveta Strakhov, of Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (Penn State, 2022) and with Harris and Samantha Katz Seal, of Documentary Chaucer: New Readings, a forthcoming special issue of the Chaucer Review. Professor Baechle earned her BA and MA from the University of New Mexico and her PhD from the University of Notre Dame. She teaches courses on Chaucer, Middle English lyric, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, premodern political poetry, and histories of the medieval book. Her second monograph-in-progress, Desire ‘agaynst al right’: Rape, Consent, and Political Subjecthood in Medieval England, examines medieval narratives of sexual violence as a form of political theory, anticipating the individual models of political consent typically ascribed to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and deemed the origins of modern political theory.
Publications
“Rape Myth, Trauma Reality: Reading Survival in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale,” in Chaucer and Trauma, eds. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (Penn State University Press, 2025), 23-41.
“Ventriloquizing Alys of Bath: Liberational Feminism and Chaucer’s Wife as Simulacrum,” Exemplaria 36, no. 3 (2025): 266-74.
“Ars Codicis’”: Reading Marginally in the House of Fame,” in Manuscripts, Readers, and Revelation: A Festschrift in Honor of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ed. Misty Schieberle (Boydell and Brewer, 2024), 54-73.
“Speaking Survival: Chaucer Studies and the Discourses of Sexual Assault,” in “The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence,” edited by Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki, 463-74. Special Issue. Chaucer Review 57, no. 4 (October 2022).
“Denying Consent and Manipulating Victimhood in Come over the woodes fair and grene.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer” for “Colloquium: Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires,” edited by Carissa Harris and Fiona Somerset. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 44 (2022): 317-23.
Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature. Co-edited with Carissa M. Harris and Elizaveta Strakhov (Penn State University Press, 2022).
The Ethical Challenges of Chaucerian Scholarship in the 21st Century. Special Issue of the Chaucer Review 56.4 (2021). Co-edited with Carissa M. Harris.
“Multidimensional Reading Practices in Two Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde.” Chaucer Review 51, no. 2 (2016): 248-68.
“Chaucer and the Continent: Reading Chaucerian Marginalia in their Milieu” in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall’s 80th Birthday. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 384-405.
New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall’s 80th Birthday. Co-edited with Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and John Thompson (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).
Courses Taught
- ENG 221 Survey of World Literature to 1650
- ENG 225 Survey of British Literature to 18th Century
- ENG 317 Chaucer
- ENG 318 Medieval Romance
- ENG 322 Studies in Medieval Literature
- ENG 417 Early Middle English
- ENG 421 Literature of Medieval Europe
- ENG 703 Studies in Early English Literature
- ENG 706 Studies in Chaucer
- ENG 730 Textual Studies and History of the Book
Education
Ph.D. English, University of Notre Dame (2015)