Interpreting the occurrence of sexual violation in seventeenth-century Spanish literary works necessitates for modem scholars the difficult task of understanding prevailing contemporary attitudes toward rape. Studies by Higgins and Silver, Casas, and Welles discuss how literary texts with rape scenes as narrative material often use the act or its victim as a pretext for treating other themes. Juan de Moncayo y Gurrea, a little-studied Aragonese poet of the seventeenth century, breaks the pattern and attempts to give voice to the victim and retain her and her suffering as the central focus of the narrative.