Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties

Abstract

Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty's Certainties Christopher Cannon St. Edmund Hall, Oxford Rape is a brutal crime and implies a degree ofdepravity which should make us cautious in fixing 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 judgment, that therefore it was with­ out her consent. Her scandalized family would naturally treat that as an irrebut­ table presumption. But there is nothing to suggest that Cecilia could have con­ victed Chaucer of felony. -T. F. T. Plucknett (1948)1 GONE ARE THE DAYS when conjoining Chaum's n,m, ,o ch, crime of rape seemed repugnant even to those scholars who would ad­ dress its possibility. In place ofPlucknett's insistence that the very grav­ ity of such a crime converts uncertain guilt into certain innocence­ where the very 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 Elizabeth Scala and Elizabeth Robertson created the different, but simultaneous, op­ portunities that occasioned this piece, and I thank them for these invitations as well as for their helpful responses to my earliest attempts. I would also like to thank all my interlocutors at the University of Texas at Austin and, for careful and extremely useful readings, Juliet Fleming, H. A. Kelly, Jill Mann, and James Simpson. 1 T. F. T. Plucknett, "Chaucer's Escapade," Law Quarterly Review 64 (1948): 35. This epigraph has more than incidental status in framing an exploration ofthe Chaumpaigne release. With the exception of the first sentence I quote, these words are also repeated for their authority in the standard source for the Chaumpaigne release, the Chaucer Life­ Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). For the release, see p. 343 in this volume; for Plucknett's words, see pp. 345�46. 67 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER well as "fictional rapes" and thereby learn to see what is and is not "fig­ urative" in Chaucer's "sexual poetics."2 That on May 4, 1380, Cecily Chaumpaigne had enrolled in Chancery a document releasing 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 remem­ bers 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 himself does not shrink from: throughout his writing, "rape remains a constant touchstone for determining justice between the sexes."4 But if we have arrived at a stage where considering Chaucer and rape together no longer seems dangerous, if we are even able to make that consideration critically enabling, we are not yet at a stage where the Chaumpaigne release seems able to teach us anything more than we are willing to presume. Clearer understanding of the role rape may play in Chaucer's poetics has not resulted from any clearer understanding of what precisely the Chaumpaigne release refers to, largelybecause the re­ lease is so parsimonious ofdescription and the language and procedure of medieval English law so frequently ambiguous as they pertain to raptus. Although I have argued elsewhere that this word in the Chaumpaigne release must refer to forced coitus, central to that earlier argument was the claim that mention of a raptus in fourteenth-century law was itself an attempt to achieve clarity in the face of a legal tradition that had become hopelessly confused about the naming of sexual violence and its punishment.5 That confusion will always make it...