Canterbury revisited

October 15, 2022 5:20 AM

Based on court records, there had been a suspicion that Chaucer had raped Cecily Chaumpaigne in 1380. Newly discovered documents provide a completely new interpretation. Chaucer the Rapist? (New York Times) (no paywall archive) A Special edition of the Chaucer Review includes responses by feminist academics about what this changes... and doesn't change.
posted by thandal (14 comments total)

the greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people --Chaucer
posted by chavenet at 6:52 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I loved my Chaucer class in college. Wonderful professor, very dedicated to exciting his students about the subject.
I find Middle English a delight to work with, and the Tales gave me insight into that time period.

But the author? Those stories skeeved me out.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 7:05 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is a great discovery, though scholars have known for years that the term raptus is complicated and doesn't necessarily mean rape in the modern sense of the word. Here's a thoughtful summary of the issue:

Many of the problems involved in the interpretation of raptus are exemplified in that most celebrated of charges, brought against Geoffrey Chaucer by Cecily Chaumpaigne and subsequently dropped in 1380. This is a pattern entirely typical of charges of raptus, particularly if the crime is not specified as abduction. While legal records normally denote abduction either by giving circumstantial details or by using the term abducere as well as raptus, Cecily's release of Chaucer does not. The use of rapere or raptus alone, however, cannot be read, as it is by Derek Pearsall, as necessarily implying rape. As we have seen, in legal records, appeals of rap or raptus may refer either to rape or abduction, and circumstantial details are essential to interpretation.

The record is complicated by a second release of Chaucer from legal actions given by two citizens of London, Robert Goodchild, cutler, and John Grove, armourer, on 30 June 1380, and their release on the same day by Cecily Chaumpaigne; a sum of £10 is also recorded as paid to Cecilia by Grove. The coincidence of these releases and the payment suggests some complex set of financial transactions and associated legal action rather than a personal act of rape, although no definite conclusions can be drawn.

(Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England, 2001)

'Some complex set of financial transactions and associated legal action': exactly what this new discovery has brought to light. So to call this 'an explosive claim in the world of Chaucer studies' is a bit of journalistic exaggeration, though it's certainly embarrassing for some scholars who have treated the rape claim as established fact.
posted by verstegan at 8:50 AM on October 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

oh my. I have not read the article yet. I guess I feel a bit reluctant. as a medievalist I am of course fond of Chaucer, and had been under the vague impression he was a Good Guy^TM. so this is a bummer. I will dig in later...
posted by supermedusa at 9:19 AM on October 15, 2022

Read the article! Or at least Verstegan's post!

What's being discussed here is that new evidence has come to light that *weakens* the case for Chaucer being a historical rapist.
posted by jellywerker at 9:57 AM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

ah! thanks jellywerker I will delve in this afternoon.
posted by supermedusa at 10:24 AM on October 15, 2022

I took a course on Chaucer's Canterbury tales in the early 1990s as part of completing the requirements for becoming an English major. It was probably the best English course I have ever taken. Even in the early 1990s, the professor discussed the "raptus" issue & told us that it might mean that Chaucer was a rapist, but she also told us about how ambiguous interpreting the word "raptus" could be & how it wasn't 100% certain that "raptus" meant Chaucer raped somebody.

I think the overall consequence of the cloud of suspicion hanging over Chaucer was that it opened a lot of space for feminist critique and analysis of the Canterbury Tales, which is overall a good thing. After all, if you really read the Canterbury Tales, you don't have to read much into it to get mileage out of a feminist reading of the text. Feminist readings of the Wife of Bath's Tale are practically a cottage industry at this point.

On the other hand, even if Chaucer is definitively not a rapist, you can't separate him from the 14th century English version of rape culture that existed at the time. Even if Chaucer was merely a party to a labor dispute, the idea that men under feudalism had an entitlement to a woman's labor & that losing that entitlement could be described by the man who sued Chaucer as similar to a form of rape still feels icky centuries later.
posted by jonp72 at 10:35 AM on October 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

Another fascinating parallel with today about this new finding is that the basis for suing Chaucer was the Statute of Labourers 1351, which was passed after the Black Death to prevent laborers from exploiting the new bargaining power they had after bubonic plague had thinned out the labor pool. This has fascinating parallels with the employer freakout over "the Great Resignation" and "quiet quitting" that occurred after the COVID-19 pandemic had a similar effect in reducing the labor supply.
posted by jonp72 at 10:41 AM on October 15, 2022 [21 favorites]

Since The Canterbury Tales was published in 1387, and the putative rape took place in 1380, might we not expect that one of the tales would allude to the rape and perhaps even attempt to vindicate Chaucer's behavior in whatever went down?

Are there any candidates?
posted by jamjam at 12:22 PM on October 15, 2022

might we not expect that one of the tales would allude to the rape

The point of the presentation was that he wasn't even accused of rape; that the belief that he was may have come from 19th century scholars being unaware of the multiple interpretations of a 14th century legal term.

So even if he were the type to shoehorn some justification into his poetry, why would Chaucer have written something defending himself from charges he never actually faced?
posted by mark k at 12:57 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

I could have said 'the incident which has been described as rape', but I thought the ambiguity of whatever happened was sufficiently established by our discussion.

But if we are confused about what he did, I think at least his enemies woulld have been willing to put the worst possible construction on such a court case, and that would have been a strong motive for defending himself.
posted by jamjam at 1:11 PM on October 15, 2022

And speaking of parallels, the 'Wife of Bath's Tale' is centered upon a rape:

There was a knight in King Arthur's time who raped a fair young maiden. King Arthur issues a decree that the knight must be brought to justice. When the knight is captured, he is condemned to death, but Queen Guinevere intercedes on his behalf and asks the King to allow her to pass judgment upon him. The Queen tells the knight that he will be spared his life if he can discover for her what it is that women most desire, and allots him a year and a day in which to roam wherever he pleases and return with an answer.

Which in turn has a very uncomfortable parallel in certain events surrounding the composition of Chaucers The Legend of Good Women:

The prologue describes how Chaucer is reprimanded by the god of love and his queen, Alceste, for his works—such as Troilus and Criseyde—depicting women in a poor light. Criseyde is made to seem inconstant in love in that earlier work, and Alceste demands a poem of Chaucer extolling the virtues of women and their good deeds.

For thy trespas, and understond hit here:
Thou shalt, whyl that thou livest, yeer by yere,
The moste party of thy tyme spende
In making of a glorious Legende
Of Gode Wommen, maidenes and wyves,
That weren trewe in lovinge al hir lyves;
And telle of false men that hem bitrayen,
That al hir lyf ne doon nat but assayen

The incomplete nature of the poem is suggested by Chaucer's Retraction from The Canterbury Tales which calls the work the xxv. Ladies. Fifteen and nineteen are also numbers used to describe the work. In the prologue several women are mentioned—Esther, Penelope, Marcia Catonis (wife of Cato the younger), Lavinia, Polyxena and Laodamia—whose stories are not recorded and the nineteen ladies in waiting of Alceste mentioned in the prologue might suggest an unfulfilled structure.

The command of queen Alceste is said, by John Lydgate in The Fall of Princes, to be a poetic account of an actual request for a poem by Anne of Bohemia who came to England in 1382 to marry Richard II. If true this would make Chaucer an early poet laureate. Joan of Kent, Richard's mother, is also sometimes considered a model for Alceste.

Here is a somewhat fuller account of Anne's supposed request to Chaucer:

Agnes Strickland, in her history Queens of England, goes so far as to call Anne the first of "the nursing-mothers of the Reformation."3 This influential queen, Anne the Good or Anne the Wise as the chroniclers eventually called her, was also allegedly a patron of Chaucer's and is widely held responsible for im­ posing upon him the task of writing The Legend of Good Women as an amends for his depiction of Criseyde.

I think it’s at least plausible that Anne’s 'request' was meant to assign Chaucer the task of expiating for more than just his depiction of Criseyde.
posted by jamjam at 2:41 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Plausible, maybe, but resting on a series of unproven assertions, many of which are pretty weak: if Chaucer had been accused of rape, and if the Queen knew about it, and if she was his patron, and if she requested this poem, and if she cared enough about the accusation to want him to make amends for it, and if she thought getting paid to write a poem about famous women was somehow reasonable punishment for raping a woman... It's pretty thin. And the desire to link biography and artistic output, especially when there's so little reliable information on the matter, is a circular argument: the possibility that he was accused of rape leads you to look for some coded (or not so coded) reference to rape in the text, and then the presence of anything resembling that all of a sudden becomes support for the idea that he was accused of rape because otherwise why would he write about it, and the newly strengthened accusation strengthens the idea that the reference in the text was autobiographical, which strengthens the accusation, which strengthens the autobiographical interpretation, etc.

And ultimately, it is special pleading. How many authors have written works that include an instance of sexual violence? Are they all autobiographical? How many authors actually have personal experience with sexual violence, as victim and/or perpetrator? Did they all put it in their works? Should we look for evidence of sexual violence in the life of every writer who has written on the topic? Should we look for references to sexual violence in the work of every writer who has some experience with it? Even if 1) Chaucer was accused of (or even committed) sexual assault, and 2) was thinking of his own situation when he wrote the Tales and/or 3) was instructed to write the Legend of Good Women because of the rape accusation, the connection between his life experience and his work is a completely historically contingent one. There's no way to extract causality from the bare details of the legal case and the literary texts. Far more important, as others have suggested, is that they suggest the importance of the cultural context, in which sexual assault, besides being a reality of life, was a frequent and ancient subject in all realms of artistic production.
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:00 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

A quick summary of the new findings for anyone who doesn't have time to read the article:

The original rape interpretation is based on a document where Cecily Chaumpaigne "released Chaucer from 'all manner of actions related to my raptus'", where "raptus" was commonly used to mean rape or abduction.

However, newly discovered court documents related to the same court case show that both Cecily Chaumpaigne and Chaucer were being sued by a third person, who was Chaumpaigne's former employer, Thomas Staundon. She was being charged under the current labor laws with quitting her job without Staundon's permission, and Chaucer was being charged with poaching her illegally and not "returning" her to work for Staundon again.

As a result of which the new reading being proposed is that the original document that the rape interpretation is based on was actually a record of a step that Chaumpaigne took in response to that lawsuit, attesting that Chaucer was not actually responsible for her leaving Staundon's employ; that this was a labor case in which both Chaumpaigne and Chaucer were defendants, and not a rape case between the two.
posted by trig at 9:31 PM on October 15, 2022 [10 favorites]