Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties

Abstract

Gone are the days when conjoining Chaucer’s name to the crime of rape seemed repugnant even to those scholars who would address its possibility. In place of Plucknett’s insistence that the gravity of such a crime converts uncertain guilt into certain innocence—where the documents that raise the issue provide “no evidence”—we now have Carolyn Dinshaw’s demonstration that the conjunction makes us better readers: as it “invites us to consider causal relationships between gendered representation and actual social relations between men and women,” we may acknowledge that there are “real rapes” as well as “fictional rapes” and thereby learn to see what is and is not “figurative” in Chaucer’s “sexual poetics.”² That on May 4, 1380 Cecily Chaumpaigne had enrolled in Chancery a document that released Chaucer of “all manner of actions such as they relate to my rape or any other thing or cause” [“omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo tam de aliqua alia re vel causa”] is a fact that few now would try to put by: it is, as Dinshaw also says, “perhaps the one biographical fact everyone remembers about Chaucer.”³ And the resilience of that memory, we have also learned to recognize, is not simply due to the gravity of the released crime. As Jill Mann has shown, the subject is one that Chaucer does not himself shrink from: throughout his writing “rape remains a constant touchstone for determining justice between the sexes.”⁴

The role Geoffrey Chaucer played in the “raptus” of Cecily Chaumpaigne can be specified, not through any history of terminology but, as this essay argues, through consideration of the grounds on which a particular act of sex can be described as nonconsensual, both now and in the Middle Ages.

Rape is a brutal crime and implies a degree of depravity which should make us cautious infixing such a charge. There is really no evidence for it. That he seduced Cecilia we may well believe; that she was angry with him, and still more with herself, is extremely probable. She may have honestly thought that because it all happened against her better judgement, that therefore it was without her consent. Her scandalized family would naturally treat that as an irrebuttable presumption. But there is nothing to suggest that Cecilia could have convicted Chaucer of felony.

—T.F.T. Plucknett (1948)¹