A Literary Cold Case Heats Up

Leaving wasn’t going to be easy for Cecily Chaumpaigne, because in 1379 a servant couldn’t just leave. English labor law made it difficult for people in service to seek out a new and better situation by working for someone else. Cecily Chaumpaigne left anyway, moving from one London household to another. Her former employer went to court to coerce her back into his service, dragging her and her new employer before the law for a months-long legal tangle.

This anecdote might have been just another exhibit for a social history of late-medieval London. Yet Chaumpaigne’s crosstown move is now getting wide attention because she left to enter the service of Geoffrey Chaucer, a midlevel bureaucrat and medieval England’s most celebrated poet. Court documents from 1379 have resurfaced, thanks to the archival digging of Euan C. Roger, a historian at the U.K. National Archives, and Sebastian Sobecki, a professor of English at the University of Toronto. These documents are not merely a few more “life records” of Chaucer for the biographers’ collection. They provide a backstory for the collection’s most scrutinized specimen: Cecily Chaumpaigne’s 1380 release of Chaucer from “all of manner of actions related to my raptus.”

Generations of Chaucer scholars have grappled with what an allegation of raptus against Chaucer should mean. It all hinged on the word: Was the alleged raptus a sexual assault? Could raptus maybe mean an abduction, a spiriting away (as it only sometimes did)? And if it meant an abduction, what kind of abduction was meant? The 1380 life record was so nearly incriminating. But its ambiguity left some room to squirm.

The discovery of more documents from the Chaumpaigne case became something of a medievalist media event. Roger and Sobecki presented their findings in a Zoom webinar, and a special issue of the journal The Chaucer Review was to go live at the event’s end. New facts entered the record: Chaumpaigne had worked for Chaucer; someone had summoned them both before the law to answer for Chaumpaigne’s leaving. Raptus as spiriting away, as hiring someone else’s servant, was now the overwhelmingly probable reading.

With these revelatory facts came the first reckonings. Three Chaucer scholars weighed the impact of this evidence for a field that had been energized by feminist responses to the raptus allegation. The audience lit up Zoom’s chat window as they amplified each of the panelists’ calls to action. Carissa Harris called for more study of women’s labor in the age of Chaucer; Sarah Baechle for paying attention to the complicity of Chaucer’s poetry in a broader culture of sexual assault with the same sifting scrutiny applied to the life record; Samantha Katz Seal asked scholars to remember how easily Anglo American criticism wrote off Chaumpaigne, how eagerly they dreamed up “mitigating circumstances” to pardon “father Chaucer.”

There was no talk of proven innocence or settled questions from the panel. Media coverage was not so circumspect, publishing headlines like “Chaucer Wrongly Accused of Rape for 150 years, Newly Unearthed Documents Show” (The Telegraph) and “Discovery by Chaucer Scholars Scrubs Stain From His Legacy” (The New York Times). Specialists in this shrinking subfield voiced concerns that an exonerating narrative was taking hold. Suddenly, there was a new and imminent threat to Chaucer studies: that a headline-grabbing archival discovery would lead colleagues, students, and the general public to pay attention to Chaucer and think too well of him. This is a good problem to have.

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Coverage of this medievalist media event was good, as far as these things go. It was good in the sense that it cast medieval studies, for once, as a functional, out-of-the-way corner of academe in which fresh discoveries still happen. Tweedy old historicism and unapologetically feminist critique shared space; historians and literary scholars made common cause. Studying the Middle Ages can even seem a little glamorous when its practitioners venture down a massive salt-mine-turned-archival-storage facility and come back with answers on a grubby scrap of parchment. “Chaucer news” like this — the kind newsworthy enough to make a therapist ask a client about the “Chaucer news” — has only come along once in my experience, and its rollout was savvily managed. Hundreds of people logged on to the webinar in suspense. An email in early September informed them that something big was to be revealed about Chaumpaigne and Chaucer, but it was evasive about the specifics. A “radically different understanding” was on the way. Just wait and see.

Samantha Katz Seal admitted to feeling relieved about what this news turned out to be — relieved for Cecily Chaumpaigne’s sake. Chaumpaigne herself has emerged from all this as a representative figure for the understudied women of Chaucer’s England who await future scholarship. Andrew Prescott ends his sketch of her life, “Who was Cecily Chaumpaigne?”, by posing more questions, such as “what was the life of a single woman in London at that time like?” He then runs up a debt: “We owe it to Cecily Chaumpaigne’s memory to try to explore them.”

This is a nice thought, surely expressed here in the hopes that now the life of Chaumpaigne will be unbound from Chaucer’s, understood on its own terms. But who is supposed to owe this debt to the dead? “We” are put in an awkward position. “We,” after all, are literary scholars — readers of the Chaucer Review — while the questions posed about gender and social history more broadly have been explored expertly by historians for a long time now. I wouldn’t blame readers of Past & Present if they regarded the field of Chaucer studies like a personality cult that, every once in a while, sends its explorers to discover social-historical context again at the next table over in the National Archives. To their credit, they generally don’t. Social historians have instead indulged the fixations of literary history on a few names; pointed the way toward more life records; generously lent their expertise to the strange project of historicism as it came and went and came back again new.

This interdisciplinary dynamic has been in place since the curious enterprise of collecting the documentary fragments of Chaucer’s life began. When Chaucer Life-Records appeared in 1966, Martin Crow and Clair Olson — professors of English both — claimed credit as its editors. But much of the work was already done before they edited anything. It had begun in 1927, in London, by a team guided by archival whiz Mabel Mills and the self-taught Lilian Redstone, who submitted a complete preliminary manuscript of the Life-Records to the Chaucer Research Project at the University of Chicago in 1941. Redstone gets some credit for “assistance” on the book, but it’s Crow and Olson whose names fill the footnotes of The Chaucer Review. And now, more archival exploration is called for. Go explore, in search of more life records or of lives like Cecily Chaumpaigne’s. Harris exhorts her field to no longer ignore women’s labor in the archives of Chaucer’s England; hear, hear.

Chaucer’s England: There is that shorthand again. It expresses perfectly how Chaucer has been allowed to govern the understanding of his society, including the lives of women in it, like no one else. Even the social historians can’t resist it sometimes. Look at the index to Maurice Keen’s staple English Society in the Later Middle Ages: twenty-six mentions of Chaucer, a coup compared to the eleven each of runners-up Richard II and Henry V. (Margery Kempe gets three.) Eileen Power, in her extraordinary and popular Medieval People, profiles one “Madame Eglentyne” to illuminate life in a medieval nunnery. This was no historical person, but the fictional prioress of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer has presided over the modern understanding of his age in part because the poetry of the Canterbury Tales asks to be read like a transcript of life as observed: Here is what people are really like, and here is how they talk (and forget about me, just a bumbling poet).

Chaucer has dictated what was seen of the life lived around him for another somewhat obvious reason. People used to read his poetry, and they still know his name. I was never required to memorize the first few lines of Chaucer’s General Prologue, but many people older than me remember them well from high school (and often want to prove it). American universities of the last century were lousy with English majors and medievalists to teach them in the required Chaucer course. Professors of Chaucer were accustomed to living in a world where his name had the magnetic magic of a canonical point of reference, a familiar center of gravity, around which everything else in Chaucer’s universe spins.

That magical pull has faded. Conjuring with Chaucer’s name now will not summon up anything close to the scholarly interest or funding or prestige that it used to. English departments, too long under his spell, are thoroughly disenchanted, finally free to redistribute tenure lines elsewhere. Many make do with no medievalists at all. This broad divestment from reading Chaucer has funded so much reading, and so many discoveries, in literature written in English by everyone else. I’m not lamenting that. Rather, I’ll lament how that divestment has swung a scythe through the field’s youngest fringe. Chaucer, though no one seems to have noticed, has disappeared completely from the MLA Job List.

When jobs for medievalists do appear, the advertisements imagine a field that has little time for Chaucer when there is a world to win. Under the banner of the “global Middle Ages,” they stake out a vastly expanded territory for the medievalist in an English department that stretches far beyond English, beyond Britain, and beyond discipline. (Ask a medievalist already working in that recently annexed territory and you’ll hear far less enthusiasm for this kind of expansion, which looks more like colonization.)

It’s one thing to believe this sidelining is what the study of Chaucer, and his poetry, has deserved. Perhaps the field of medieval English literature has been bound to Chaucer long enough. It’s another thing to carry on like that field hasn’t fundamentally reoriented itself around new priorities and questions — other stars — whenever its case must be made to colleagues and deans for its continued existence. Whether out of embarrassment or irrelevance, Chaucer has been hustled into the periphery of any picture of what the medievalist in an English department will do.

Is it OK to be a Chaucerian? I will admit to feeling some measure of relief when I heard the Chaucer news, too. I was relieved to discover I wouldn’t have to watch a subfield’s extinction event in a Zoom webinar of all places. But surviving another day is not the same thing as having a future. Will a next generation of Chaucerians manage to answer the call and follow Sobecki, Prescott, and Harris down into the salt mine, where the stories of other medieval people are? I hope so. But the call is coming at a bad time for graduate students and adjuncts watching from the wings, with expiring appointments and funding packages. They’ve been given every material reason to imagine a scholarly future spent in the wide-open spaces of the global Middle Ages, not the cramped quarters of the English archive, if they are to have one at all. Meantime, hardly anyone becomes a Chaucerian anymore, and hiring departments won’t say that they’re looking for one. Now — Chaucer news made, extinction event dodged — those watching from the old endowed chairs and permanent gigs in this shrinking subfield have a chance to wonder how that happened, and if they’re OK with that. Something new to squirm about.