In this brave and revealing study, Sarah Baechle demonstrates the disenabling assumptions about the rape victim that have shaped the critical and scholarly reception of the notorious 1380 document in which Chaucer is released from a charge of raptus, since the 1873 discovery of the document up to the present. In illuminating close readings of representative treatments of rape in Chaucer’s writings, she shows how such views infuse the poet’s surprisingly plentiful and diverse representations of rape. Baechle brings together an astonishingly varied set of materials from the enigmatic legal fragment in which Cecily Chaumpaigne releases Chaucer from a charge of rape to the subsequent interpretations of that document as they are conditioned by attitudes towards rape victims prevalent in each period and revealed in cultural sources from legal record to newspapers. Woven throughout her revelation of the pervasiveness of these pernicious assumptions in the work of Chaucerian biographers and in Chaucer’s poetry are analyses of medieval pastourelles, often written from the point of view of the rape victim, that clearly demonstrate the harm rape victims undergo, even as the rapists, and sometimes the victim herself, engage such views.
Within this network of past and present materials, Baechle analyses Chaucer’s representations of rape in four of his poems, The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde and The Wife of Bath’s Tale. She asks us to consider how these texts might be understood differently if analysed through accounts by survivors then and now. Despite demonstrating the range and subtlety of Chaucer’s representations of rape, trauma, and the slippery status of consent, Baechle concludes that each of these texts in the end asserts the insignificance of the experience of the rape victim, finally condemning Chaucer for his complicity with the disenabling assumptions about the rape victim that she has demonstrated are rife in his culture and in ours. The book thus describes the biographical critical tradition and the poetry of Chaucer as mutually reinforcing.
Chapter One illuminates how F. J. Furnivall’s 1973 response to his discovery of the rape fragment and Thomas Lounsbury’s subsequent 1892 interpretation are both quick to equate rape with seduction, a conflation made possible in part by the ambiguity of the term raptus in the medieval period, which ranges in meaning from sexual assault to abduction with or without sexual congress, sometimes for the purpose of marriage, and sometimes with the consent of the rape victim. Baechle places Furnivall’s and Lounsbury’s interpretations within the context of Victorian newspaper accounts that similarly rewrite clear occurrences of sexual assault as instances of seduction in which the female victim might have participated. Both critics, she shows, furthermore embrace class-driven assumptions in which the rapist’s behaviour is excused because it is expected of a “gentleman.” She then turns to The Miller’s Tale to show how it, too, is dominated by class-driven assumptions about the meaning of consent. She concludes that the tale presents the difficulties the male characters have in discerning Alisoun’s consent to demonstrate how women, especially those of the lower classes, were perceived to use their sexuality to victimize men.
In Chapter Two, Baechle turns to P. J. Watts’s 1947 interpretation of the Champaigne release as a false accusation (adopting a view that is repeated in Derek Pearsall’s 1992 biography) and T. F. T. Plucknett’s 1948 discussion of the Chaumpaigne document in which he urges us to understand it within the context of legal history. She shows how Watts draws on the eighteenth-century jurist Sir Matthew Hale’s assertion that rape is “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused” in order to bolster his claim that Chaumpaigne was motivated by financial greed to bring a false accusation, a conclusion also drawn by Plucknett. She goes on to argue that Watts was influenced by an influential nineteenth-century case that similarly blames the victim, the 1886 Mount Rennie Outrage. Baechle shows us how the press over time transformed this proven brutal gang rape into one in which the assailants became martyrs to feminine mendacity. She then considers the Reeve’s Tale through the lens of survivor accounts showing how Chaucer’s poem, like the journal account, dismisses the trauma of the rape victims. Drawing on contemporary accounts of the trauma of rape victims, she then deftly illuminates how Malyne’s seeming pleasure and acceptance of her rape is consonant with what we now know as a traumatic response to rape.
In Chapter Three, Baechle shows how three biographers of Chaucer, Derek Brewer (in 1953 and 1978), John Gardner (1977) and Donald Howard (1987), reproduce Victorian rewritings of rape as seduction and then invent stories of Chaucer’s relationship with Cecily Champaigne. Since it was assumed that pregnancy could not occur without consent and therefore would automatically void any claim of rape, they speculate that Chaumpaigne may have abandoned her claim of raptus because she had become pregnant with “Little Lewis.” These fanciful stories emerge, as Baechle shows, from the biographers’ projections of their idea of who Chaucer was, that is, a good-humoured man among men. Turning to Troilus and Criseyde, she then shows how the developing relationship between the two lovers oscillates between rape and seduction. She concludes that even though Chaucerplaces Criseyde’s consent at the center of the poem, he finally dismisses it as insignificant.
In Chapter Four, Baechle discusses a series of late twentieth and early twenty-first century critics, including Christopher Cannon, Jill Mann, and Jennifer Wollock, who seek to exonerate Chaucer because of his humanism and who conclude that Chaucer writes about rape to atone for his personal complicity in rape. Baechle then analyses The Wife of Bath’s Tale as a story that shows the inadequacy of recuperative justice. She examines Chaucer’s reprieve of the rapist, who he clearly presents as a perpetrator of violent sexual assault, within the context of twenty-first century newspaper articles and legal records such as those concerning Brock Turner, the promising Stanford athlete who in 2015 was convicted of raping Chanel Miller while she was unconscious, but who nonetheless was viewed as deserving of a light sentence because of his potential as a talented athlete and a productive citizen. The end of the chapter is devoted to a step-by-step analysis of the progress of the knight-rapist of the tale in the lesson he supposedly undergoes in acknowledging women as subjects rather than objects. Observing the discomfort the reader feels at the undeserved reward the rapist receives of a beautiful and obedient wife, Baechle demonstrates the lack of remorse the knight-rapist repeatedly exhibits for his actions. The chapter as a whole challenges the tale’s assumption that this knight-rapist is capable of reform or deserving of reprieve.
Baechle’s careful close readings of passages of Chaucer’s poetry convincingly illuminate the presence of the disenabling assumptions about the rape victim in each of the four poems she considers. I am not persuaded, however, that Chaucer himself shares these views. Baechle’s conclusions are too closely linked to the misapprehensions about Chaucer’s work manifest in the biographical works she discusses. We were long ago taught the dangers of what used to be called the biographical fallacy which reduces a poem to a reflection of biography alone. While the New Critical stance has come under pressure and we have learned how integral history, including biography, is to our understanding of poetry, New Historicist criticism has taught us that the history manifest in any given poem goes well beyond the biographical circumstances of the author. The critics of the Frankfort school in particular have shown that poetry is inherently engaged with the social (or as Adorno says of lyric poetry, a poem is a “subjective expression of a social antagonism”). The history a poem expresses is not locatable outside the poem, but rather within it. From an Adornian point of view, Chaucer’s poetry expresses the social antagonisms that are rife in his day. Rather than affirm the culture’s debilitating views of women, Chaucer exposes the antagonisms that determine female agency. Chaucer’s varied representations of the constraints and affordances that women experience provide multiple and at times contradictory insights into the ways in which historical forces constrain agency. In doing so, his poetry raises just the urgent questions about the degree to which women can exhibit free will that Baechle has herself shown to be at issue in these poems. Rather than affirm demeaning assumptions about women, then, Chaucer brings the effect of the ideologies that constrain female agency to our critical attention.
Father Chaucer and the Apologists: Cecily Chaumpaigne and 700 Years of Rape Culture is an important study: it persuasively demonstrates that disenabling assumptions about women that originated in the Middle Ages and that should remain firmly in the past nonetheless persist to this day. By making it clear that rape, far from an exceptional and aberrant act, is a crime deeply embedded in patriarchal structures, Baechle’s book teaches us how urgently we need to bring these assumptions to the foreground in our scholarship and in our classrooms.