Chaumpaigne herself has emerged from all this as a representative figure for the understudied women of Chaucer’s England who await future scholarship. Samantha Katz Seal admitted to feeling relieved about what this news turned out to be - relieved for Cecily Chaumpaigne’s sake. A “radically different understanding” was on the way. 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. Hundreds of people logged on to the webinar in suspense. “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. 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. Tweedy old historicism and unapologetically feminist critique shared space historians and literary scholars made common cause. 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. Wikimedia Commons “Chaucer at the Court of Edward III” by Ford Madox BrownĬoverage of this medievalist media event was good, as far as these things go. 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.” The audience lit up Zoom’s chat window as they amplified each of the panelists’ calls to action. Three Chaucer scholars weighed the impact of this evidence for a field that had been energized by feminist responses to the raptus allegation. With these revelatory facts came the first reckonings. Raptus as spiriting away, as hiring someone else’s servant, was now the overwhelmingly probable reading. New facts entered the record: Chaumpaigne had worked for Chaucer someone had summoned them both before the law to answer for Chaumpaigne’s leaving. 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. The discovery of more documents from the Chaumpaigne case became something of a medievalist media event. But its ambiguity left some room to squirm. 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. Generations of Chaucer scholars have grappled with what an allegation of raptus against Chaucer should mean. 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.” These documents are not merely a few more “life records” of Chaucer for the biographers’ collection. National Archives, and Sebastian Sobecki, a professor of English at the University of Toronto. Court documents from 1379 have resurfaced, thanks to the archival digging of Euan C. 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. This anecdote might have been just another exhibit for a social history of late-medieval London. 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. Cecily Chaumpaigne left anyway, moving from one London household to another. English labor law made it difficult for people in service to seek out a new and better situation by working for someone else. Leaving wasn’t going to be easy for Cecily Chaumpaigne, because in 1379 a servant couldn’t just leave.
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