Christopher Cannon

Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties

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 Art of Rereading

The rote learning of texts has been a common practice in elementary education in many periods and places, but literacy training so generally consisted of memorization in the Middle Ages that those who could read and write tended to carry the contents of the same set of basic texts with them through life. Poets trained in this manner involved those texts in their writing, not as quotations, but as a technique of art whereby the recognition that what one had first learned in school was true constituted, not a form of knowledge, but a kind of comfort.