ABSTRACT This article examines the intersection of bodily sovereignty and reproductive justice as seen in the figure of the Clerk’s Tale’s Griselda. Griselda’s embodied, reproductive sovereignty, the very “wombe of here / That was youre wyf” (IV 887–88), is repeatedly tested by her husband’s tyrannous cruelty. Yet Griselda’s womb is also the site where Chaucer offers a more enduring and positive vision of sovereign generosity in a married woman’s non-free capacity to suffer and to give.
ABSTRACT This article explores the medieval history of the quitclaim instrument to better understand its significance in the case of Staundon v. Chaucer and Chaumpaigne. From its early uses in property conveyancing to its later adaptations in legal arbitration, the quitclaim proved a flexible instrument for negotiating within and outside formal litigation processes, making it an especially valuable strategic tool for unmarried female property holders. Characterized by its paradoxical action—to declare oneself “quit” or “quiet”—the quitclaim could signal satisfaction or acquiescence, recompense or relinquishment. It crystallizes, in this way, the complex historical legacy of Cecily Chaumpaigne, whose voice asserts itself in the Chaucer life-records precisely to promise its future silence on the subject of raptus. The Chaumpaigne quitclaim, this article argues, challenges modern scholars to understand such compromises as form of gendered legal agency, with implications for a variety of Chaucer’s works, including the Franklin’s Tale.
ABSTRACT This article invites scholars and teachers of Chaucer to consider trauma related to intimate violence in the context of teaching and learning about Chaucer’s life, literature, and critical legacy. It develops best practices for teaching documents related to Chaucer, including the records of Staundon v. Chaucer–Chaumpaigne, in light of a liberative teaching ethos that integrates trauma-informed approaches. Four principle-guided strategies that apply the transformative work of trauma-informed pedagogy are developed: safety, transparency, particularity, and engagement. These strategies, along with related classroom activities and assignments, aim to create a learning environment that welcomes students to engage with Chaucer’s literature, biography, cultural contexts, and critical legacy while acknowledging the presence of intimate violence and providing supportive ways of managing its varied effects on readers.
ABSTRACT Rather than leave behind the uncertainties produced by the raptus charge, we need to linger in the discomfiting feelings it has occasioned, and also to recognize how similar negative feelings around male (sexual) violence circulate in the Canterbury Tales. Its emphasis on masculine misrule means that “What kind of man are you?” becomes a question asked with increasing urgency as the tales progress. Chaucer’s focus on the “matter of woman” thus toggles back and forth between the “happy” affects of a poet prized for his genial humanity and the disruptive feelings produced when male/female interactions are represented as weirdly deformed by the violence inhering in late medieval sexual politics. This complex push-pull of affect is crucial to recognizing how the Canterbury Tales develops a specifically Chaucerian ethics by providing its own archive of feeling, one we need to bring alongside any documentary archive of Chaucer the man.
ABSTRACT The recent discovery that Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer for culpability in her raptus as part of labor dispute that did not involve sexual violence, salutary as that has been, still occludes Chaumpaigne’s agency. Attention to the way both Sophocles’s Antigone and Chaucer’s Criseyde suffer the same fate illuminates the ways that even the most careful attention to English laws (and more than one kind is crucially at issue here) can blur what Chaumpaigne tried to mobilize these laws to say. Close reading of the newly discovered documents alongside the ones long known takes the measure of just how much is now made clear while isolating what about Chaumpaigne’s actions and wishes in these matters remains ambiguous.
