Father Chaucer and the Apologists: Cecily Chaumpaigne and 700 Years of Rape Culture

On May 4, 1380, Cecily Chaumpaigne filed a quitclaim with the Chancery in Westminster, releasing the poet Geoffrey Chaucer from any prosecution de raptu meo (on account of my rape). This legal document, lost for centuries, has haunted Chaucer studies since its rediscovery in 1873.

Over the past 150 years since it reemerged, many Chaucer scholars have sought to discount, sanitize, or excuse the release. Through a careful examination of the long Chaucer historiography, Sarah Baechle shows how critics have read the question of Chaucer’s potential culpability for rape through prevailing attitudes toward sexual violence. They did so, moreover, in ways that will be very familiar to contemporary readers versed in rape culture--practices that dismiss sexual violence by centering and promoting accused perpetrators, erasing or attacking the victim-survivor, and minimizing the violence of the crime. Baechle pairs the necessary excavation of this critical history with reparative readings of the poet’s narratives of sexual violence, including the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde, and she theorizes ＂assailant speech＂ as a counterpart to survivor speech, proposing it as a new means of understanding Chaucer’s place in feminist studies of the Middle Ages.

Father Chaucer and the Apologists is an urgently needed examination of the discourse surrounding Chaumpaigne’s quitclaim that reveals the ties between Chaucer studies and the persistence of rape culture. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Chaucer and of gender and sexual violence more broadly.

Sarah Baechle is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the coeditor of Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, also published by Penn State University Press.