ABSTRACT
Sarah Lambert was thirteen-years-old when she was raped by Peter Croy in 1673. Her case met all the criteria for a capital conviction. She called out, there were two witnesses, her sister and the youth who provided the account above; and a committee of goodwives deposed, after a physical examination, that she had been penetrated. Yet Peter Croy was not convicted of rape. After an equivocal verdict, he was sentenced to wear a noose. Nor was any other unmarried Puritan man convicted of the rape of a single woman in seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay. There are constants in the female experience of rape. The typical rape victim in the seventeenth-century, as today, was unmarried, employed, knew her attacker, and was unlikely to report the assault. Her assailant, in the unlikely event of prosecution, offered a defense as effective in the early modern world as today: The sexual activity had been consensual; there had been no struggle; and, he would assert, her sexual reputation was such that no reasonable man could have expected to meet with a refusal.
