For Chaucer, With Rage
by Carissa Harris
CN: This piece contains many references to sexual violence.
In an unprecedented turn of events, the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer trended on Twitter in October 2022. Why was everyone suddenly very interested in a very old and very dead poet whom students love to hate for his difficult-to-understand Middle English and his penchant for telling rapey stories?
On October 11, 2022, several hundred medieval literature nerds had gathered for a bombshell Zoom announcement from Euan Roger, principal medieval records specialist at the UK’s National Archives, and Sebastian Sobecki, a medieval literature professor at the University of Toronto. To a rapt online audience, Roger and Sobecki announced their discovery of two previously-unknown legal documents about Chaucer and a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne. These new documents revealed that Chaucer had hired Chaumpaigne as his servant while she was still contracted to work for a man named Thomas Staundon. Angry at Chaucer for hiring Chaumpaigne away from him and at Chaumpaigne for leaving his employment, Staundon sued them both for breaking labor laws.
The Chaucerian scholars lost their shit; the Zoom chat went wild. “WOW,” typed several men so we could all see how profoundly shocked they were. Others expressed “relief” that such “uncomfortable questions” about their beloved poet had finally been resolved.
Before this announcement, Cecily Chaumpaigne’s uncomfortable presence had haunted the niche subfield of Chaucer studies for generations, ever since the founder of the Chaucer Society (of course) discovered a suggestive legal document dated May 4, 1380. In it, Chaumpaigne, a London baker’s daughter, officially released the forty-year-old poet from all charges “related to my raptus.” The Latin word raptus is critical here: it could mean rape, abduction (usually accompanied by sexual assault or coercion), robbery, or carrying off by force. But nobody could find any documents about the original raptus charge, just the document releasing Chaucer from the charge. This absence of documentation led to endless speculation about what, precisely, had happened between Chaucer and Chaumpaigne.
Deepening the mystery in 1993, medieval scholar Christopher Cannon discovered another legal document filed by Cecily Chaumpaigne on May 7, 1380. Chaumpaigne’s second document was nearly identical to the first — except that the troubling word “raptus” had been replaced with the vaguer, and far less incriminating, “felonies, trespasses, accounts, debts, or whatever other actions.” Chaucer’s influential friend John Grove then paid Chaumpaigne ten pounds later that year. This was a substantial amount of money; in 1380, ten pounds could purchase seven horses, or pay 500 days of wages for a skilled tradesman. This transaction was made even more suspicious by the fact that private financial payment was the most common way of handling credible rape charges in medieval England. By having the money routed through Grove, Chaucer could keep his hands relatively clean.
None of this looked good for our boy Chaucer. The story these documents tell — the original raptus release in May, the re-filed release without the word raptus in it a few days later, the documents outlining Grove’s significant debt to Chaumpaigne later that year — was especially damning when read together in sequence, which Anna Waymack helpfully provided on her website chaumpaigne.org that was active from 2017 to early in 2023.
Chaucer wrote about sexual violence repeatedly and in incredibly fucked-up ways during the years following his dropped raptus charge and subsequent payment. In writing The Canterbury Tales, he seemed singularly invested in exploring issues of women’s sexual consent and violation, telling tales from perpetrators’ perspectives, minimizing rape’s harms, and silencing victim-survivors. He wrote tales about women raped in their own beds while they are passed out, about a woman nearly raped on a boat in front of her five-year-old child, about a young woman whose father beheads her before a powerful official can rape her, about nameless women who are raped and then never heard from again.
His Wife of Bath’s Tale tells the story of a knight who attacks a young woman on his way home from a hunting excursion. He is swiftly sentenced to death by beheading, only to be saved by women who give him a second chance and perform emotional labor to educate him about female desire. In the end, he marries a young, hot, and faithful wife who “obeyed him in everything that might give him pleasure” “until their lives’ end.” The tale is told through the rapist’s eyes and focuses on his feelings of unfair victimization when he has to (temporarily) suffer the consequences of his own choice to be an unrepentant rapist. Chaucer gives the knight’s victim, an unnamed “maid” who is attacked while walking alone, just three lines summing up her trauma. She is never mentioned again.
Chaucer not only tells a tale of rape from a rapist’s perspective; he also weaves the language of rape law throughout the tale. He refers to the great “pursute” (the process of bringing legal charges) after the assault and states that “the statute in those days” decreed beheading as punishment for rapists. After a trial, the knight is “condemned to death by course of law.” I teach The Wife of Bath’s Tale every semester, and students are always furious that the tale gives a happy ending to a rapist who is given a second chance and yet doesn’t seem to have learned anything after his crime. When read in light of Chaucer’s own legal association with the crime of raptus, which seemed very plausibly to mean “rape,” the tale’s narrative arc and heavy use of the language of rape law were simply enraging. What kind of person rapes someone and settles out of court, escaping all criminal accountability, only to devote himself to writing stories filled with rape legalese about unrepentant rapists who escape legal accountability and are rewarded in the end?
After the Chaumpaigne case was resolved through the ten-pound payment, Chaucer didn’t just write tales about rapists rewarded after escaping legal penalties. He also wrote extended rape jokes in which sexual assault is a hilarious punchline, a source of male laughter, a way for men to entertain each other and one-up one another. In The Reeve’s Tale, a devious miller cheats two naïve Cambridge University students, Aleyn and John, out of two sacks of grain. As revenge, the students rape the miller’s passed-out and intoxicated twenty-year-old daughter Malyne as well as his disoriented wife. In the morning, Chaucer has Malyne tell Aleyn how much she enjoyed it, calling him “lover.” When I was a TA in graduate school, over six hundred years after Chaucer was dead and gone, a male student the same age as Aleyn and John confidently told me that it wasn’t rape because she consented afterward.
It’s always been hard for me to pick the moment in The Reeve’s Tale that enrages me most, but a strong contender is the moment when the Reeve, Chaucer’s fictional storyteller, urges his tale’s student-rapist character, “Now pley, Aleyn,” just before he assaults Malyne. Chaucer has created a dynamic in which a storyteller encourages his tale’s protagonist to rape a passed-out drunk girl and laughingly rewrites sexual violence as “pley,” as something that “wenches” enjoy when it is over. Every time I read that line, I have always wanted to reach back through the centuries to wring Chaucer’s neck. That has not changed.
One of Chaucer’s distinguishing characteristics as a poet is that he is clever, deft, sly, slippery as an eel. By putting his Canterbury Tales into the mouths of his vividly-drawn characters, he can escape accountability for the things contained in them: it is the opinionated Wife of Bath who gives the rapist knight his happy ending. She is the one who silences his victim, telling the bare facts of her rape in the space of three lines before never mentioning her again. It is the dirty old Reeve who names rape as “pley,” never Chaucer. And in London in the summer of 1380, it is John Grove who pays ten pounds to Cecily Chaumpaigne, not Chaucer.
Now, we know that Chaumpaigne was Chaucer’s servant and co-defendant in a labor lawsuit. With that, there is the new possibility that the term “raptus” that troubled scholars for generations refers to Chaucer’s unlawful seizure of Chaumpaigne’s labor from her previous employer. But with this new evidence, my Chaucerian rage is not replaced by relief, as it was for some of my fellow scholars. Displaced slightly, it still burns just as fiercely.
For now it seems that perhaps we are not dealing with someone with his own individual brush with rape law, then writing The Wife of Bath’s Tale centered on rape law and its inability to account for rape’s harms and punish perpetrators. And perhaps we don’t have an avowed rapist writing, “Now pley, Aleyn,” framing rape as “pley,” which was so audacious that it made the rage rise up in me every time I read it. We don’t have a neat dynamic of a rapist writing rape jokes — which, at the time, I found to be so infuriating because it felt so smug: I paid my reparations, I kept my hands clean, now I can joke about the harm I caused because I’ve “accounted” for it, look at how clever I am, now I can write poetry about women being raped or threatened with rape. It felt simply outrageous that someone who dodged the law’s full consequences for rape would then turn around and write poetry that blatantly and repeatedly excused, normalized, and laughed at sexual violence.
The rage is still there. These newly discovered legal documents enable me to redirect my rage a bit from Chaucer-as-rapist-poet-writing-rapey-poetry to Chaucer-as-regular-medieval-dude-poet-writing-rapey-poetry. We can read him as just a guy, one who directs his extraordinary poetic talents towards the enterprise of eliding and minimizing the harms of rape on those who survive it, of making victim-survivors into a joke. This new documentary discovery makes Chaucer less obvious and gross: he isn’t someone charged with rape who then fixated on rape and consent in his poetry as a way of working out those concepts for himself. Rather, he was someone who wasn’t necessarily charged with rape who still fixated on it in his poetry, which is less bold and singular and rather more illustrative of the way that attitudes about sexual violence operate, as a way for male poets to show off their talent and to tell a good joke or story.
In other words, we don’t necessarily need a monster, or a rapist, to write poetry that perpetuates rape culture — and make no mistake, regardless of what raptus means in Chaumpaigne’s release, Chaucer’s poetry still perpetuates rape culture. It repeats and reinforces imbalances of power that render some bodies more vulnerable to violence than others, that designate some (namely “wenches”) as available for the taking. It makes sexual assault into a tool for men to dominate other men while refusing to acknowledge the harm it causes to victim-survivors. Chaucer’s characters insist that rape is a “joke” or “pley,” that trashy, lower-class “wenches” are asking for it.
I am not suggesting that we cancel Chaucer. I regularly teach classes on Chaucer. I’m intrigued by his remarkable facility with language, with his capacity to inflect it just right when he talks about sexual violation so that it doesn’t seem like a violation at all. These types of narratives, fictions though they may be, indelibly impact the victim-survivors who read them: these texts insist that maybe they were asking for it, maybe they enjoyed it, that maybe it didn’t hurt very much at all, that their trauma is nothing more than a “joke” that will inevitably be “told another day” to a group of laughing young men in a university dorm. So I am compelled to use my rage as a guiding light for these texts carefully, to think about the rhetorical moves Chaucer makes and the harms they elide and erase, as well as the harms they inflict themselves.
Carissa Harris teaches medieval English literature at Temple University, including a course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. She is the author of Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell, 2018) and co-editor, with Sarah Baechle and Elizaveta Strakhov, of Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (Penn State, 2022).
