Corinne J. Saunders
The concept of rape presented a literary subject of debate and interest in the Middle Ages, in that it impinged on complex legal, theological and cultural notions, particularly those of gender. Legal concern regarding abduction of women, religious anxiety over loss of virginity, and preconceptions regarding female sexuality, all rendered rape a topic of contemporary interest, but also one towards which attitudes might be ambivalent. Classical literature offered medieval writers a number of examples of tales of rape, from the rapes committed by the gods in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the dynastic story of the rape of Virginia. Two of the most formative classical tales in the literary history of rape were those of Lucretia and Philomela, both offering memorable and authoritative paradigms of sexual violation and its consequences. The tales were on the one hand authorised by their classical context; on the other, they underwent notable transformations in order that their central emphases might be aligned with medieval thought. Medieval authors both develop and rephrase the questions asked in their sources regarding the crime of rape. Differences in legal and religious emphasis, as well as the formative influence of the new literary genre of romance, lead to innovative rewritings, even while the central figures of the stories retain the authority of the classical past. While this study focuses on the writings of Chaucer and his place in the English tradition, the stories of Lucretia and Philomela are also told by numerous Continental authors, such as Chrétien de Troyes, Jean de Meun, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pisan, with a corresponding diversity of emphasis and approach, from feminist to anti-feminist.
Intrinsic to any consideration of literary attitudes to rape is the delineation of the contemporaneous legal treatment of rape. Like the literature, the law of the medieval period makes evident but reshapes its classical antecedents; thus the influence of Roman law on the development of the medieval law of rape is immediately apparent. Medieval rape law followed Roman law in that it was constructed around the notion of theft rather than that of violation of the woman’s body and rights. The medieval legal term raptus cannot be directly equated with the modern concept of rape, but instead incorporates two concepts, first, noncontractual marriage by abduction, which could be with or without the woman’s consent, and, second, forced coitus.1
Immediately following the Conquest, English law had attempted to address rape and abduction as separate issues, probably reflecting the construction of Anglo-Saxon laws. Something of the specific concern of the Anglo-Saxon laws which treated sexual violation of women as a crime demanding serious compensation seems to have been retained in the English legal attitudes of the twelfth century. The legal treatise of Bracton, for example, advocates castration in cases of rape of virgins:
...si convincatur, sequitur prena, scilicet amissio membrorum, ut sit membrum pro membro, quia virgo cum corrumpitur membrum amittit. Et ideo corruptor puniatur in eo in quo deliquit. Oculos igitur amittat propter aspectum decoris quo virginem concupivit. Amittat etiam testiculos qui calorem stupri induxerunt.
If he is convicted.[this] punishment follows: the loss of members, that there be member for member, for when a virgin is defiled she loses her member and therefore let her defiler be punished in the parts in which he offended. Let him thus lose his eyes which gave him sight of the maiden’s beauty for which he coveted her. And let him lose as well the testicles which excited his hot lust.2
Bracton’s emphasis reflects both the earlier English legal tradition and a more universal condemnation of the rape of virgins on moral grounds. Bracton offers only one example, however, of the enactment of this severe penalty for rape, thus indicating the gap between legal theory and practice. Indeed, this is made explicit in the thirteenth-century statutes of Westminster. These make no distinction between rape and abduction, employing instead the Latin term raptus and the French ‘ravysement’ to imply either crime:
E le roy defend qe nul ravyse ne prengne damysele de deinze age, par soun gre ne sanz soun gre, ne dame ne damisele de age, ne autre femme maugre soun
And the king prohibits that anyone ravish, or take away by force, any maiden within age, either with her consent, or without, nor matron or maiden over age, or any other woman, without her consent.3
Not only are rape and abduction blurred here in the French term ‘ravyse’, but also, in cases where the woman was under age, forcible abduction and elopement were both considered to be ravishment. King and, later, family had the right to sue those accused of ravishment or raptus, regardless of the will of the woman. Case evidence illustrates that simple rape attracted significantly less legal interest than did abduction, a crime which raised questions of property and inheritance. The subsequent legal history of rape became ‘even less distinguished than before’.4 Yet despite the fact that cases of raptus largely focused on abduction, some concern over rape per se does seem to have been retained. Women did keep the right of appeal, and the shock value of rape was often used to dramatise cases of abduction.
That Chaucer himself would have been familiar with the various nuances of raptus is suggested by the celebrated record of a charge of raptus brought against him by one Cecily Chaumpaigne and subsequently dropped in 1380. This is a pattern entirely typical of charges of raptus, particularly if the crime is not specified as abduction. While legal records often denote abduction either by giving circumstantial details or by using the term abducere as well as rapere, Cecily’s release of Chaucer does not.5 At the same time, the use of the terms rapere or raptus alone does not necessarily imply rape; the circumstantial details which would elaborate appeals of rap or raptus in case records would not appear in a release. Without more information, the blurred semantic field of raptus makes it impossible to be certain that the phrase used by Cecily, ‘de meo raptu’, is to be read as rape.6 At the same time, it is noteworthy that a memorandum of Chaucer’s release, recently discovered by Christopher Cannon, does not use this phrase. Cannon suggests that at the very least the charge of raptus was an inflammatory one in Chaucer’s time, with some of the connotations of a charge of rape today, and that Chaucer’s friends and associates may also have found it problematic.7 If final conclusions cannot be drawn, the charge at least points to the fact that rape would have been a topic of some personal interest and concern for Chaucer, a fact which is borne out by the recurring thematic emphasis on rape in Chaucer’s writings, and by his apparent familiarity with the legal treatment of rape. The enigmatic nature of the release exemplifies the difficulty of legal interpretation in a period where rape and abduction are blurred in legal terms.
Yet at the same time, as a result of the dual meaning of raptus and the retention of an appeal of rape, awareness of the crime of rape was maintained. This awareness was reinforced, as the legal treatise of Bracton suggests, by the religious concern of the period regarding virginity; rape of a virgin was a heinous crime which received the attention of theologians and canon lawyers. At the same time, crimes of simple rape, without abduction, were not classed as raptus in canon law. Gratian, in the twelfth century, drew on the laws of Justinian to define raptus in his Decretum. Although Gratian conceded that unlawful coition was one aspect of the crime, ‘raptus est illicitus coitus’, he also noted that a charge of raptus could only be brought if the victim were unmarried and abducted from her father’s house, ‘id est a domo patris ducta’.8 ‘Simple’ rape fell under other categories of fornication: stuprum (defloration of virgins) or adultery. Rape of a virgin raised critical questions for thinkers like Aquinas and Bonaventure, since such a violation resulted in the loss of physical virginity, yet not necessarily of spiritual virginity. The issue was a complex one, for while the accepted view of the Church was that the rewards of virginity and indeed the quality of virginity could not be lost through force, in practice the will of the woman was impossible to discern. Thus while secular literature treats the tragic rape of virgins such as Philomela, hagiographic literature repeatedly instances the threat of rape to holy virgins, but never the act of rape itself. While similar questions of will were raised with regard to rape of a married woman, here the loss was the less concrete one of chastity; as a result, theological writing was weighted towards the consideration of rape of virgins, as was secular law. Literary examples which focus on the violation of chastity committed in the rape of a married woman occur less frequently, and thus the tale of Lucretia, with its consistent emphasis on Lucretia’s virtue, becomes an important example.
Legal and theological attitudes to rape appear to have been further complicated by medieval beliefs regarding sexuality and conception. Both theological and medical treatises presented the nature of women as inherently sexual; women were thus likely to incline towards desire in rape. Such ideas may be traced back to the earliest discussions of the role of woman in the Fall, and her association with nature over intellect.9 Female desire in rape becomes a powerful image of female sexuality; William of Conches, for example, writes, ‘Etsi raptis, in principio opus displiceat, in fine tamen, ex carnis fragilitate, placet,’ ‘And if in rape the act is at first distressing, in the end, however, as a result of the weakness of the flesh, it is pleasing.’10 William’s argument was clearly popular among medieval thinkers; it is repeated in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Naturale, as well as in the English medical text edited as The Prose Salernitan Questions (c. 1200).11 According to this argument, pregnancy would be considered a proof of the woman’s pleasure, since conception could only occur through the emission of her seed in orgasm. While it is difficult to estimate just how widely known such scientific and medical ideas of sexuality and pregnancy were at this time, it appears that at least some justices were influenced by them. A case recorded for the Eyre of Kent (1313) dismisses the charge of raptus due to the victim’s pregnancy.12 The late thirteenth-century legal treatises of Britton, Fleta, and the Mirror of Justices, which expand on Bracton and Glanvill, record the same ruling when describing the appeal of raptus, suggesting an established legal view.13 In addition, those familiar with scholastic literature would almost certainly have read Vincent of Beauvais.
It is clear that in legal, medical and theological thought, notions of the female predilection for desire and sexual pleasure rendered the question of the innocence of raped women a problematic one. In addition, despite theological arguments, the concept of retention of virginity after rape was a difficult one. While we cannot assume that all readers and all authors of secular literature were familiar with the detail of such arguments, the recurring nature of them suggests that they would have been familiar to clerical and highly informed literary circles, while a general sense of the problematic nature of rape may have been quite widespread. Popular literature, both devotional and secular, represented one means of their dissemination; thus, for example, hagiographic texts such as the lives of the virgin martyrs, widely read in the Middle Ages, conveyed clerical thought to their readers. In such texts, the recurring motif of threat and escape from rape points to the status of the virgin as an icon, and to the difficulty of conveying spiritual chastity after rape. While more secular romance texts may present rape without comment, simply as part of an ethic of male possession of the woman, other works, and particularly those of writers steeped in the scholastic thought of the period, such as Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower, address many of the issues suggested by medical, legal and theological treatises. The complex questions of the legal treatment of rape, of the status of virginity and chastity, and of the interplay of female will and desire with force, rendered rape a controversial and ambiguous subject for such writers, but also one of sustained interest.
Classical paradigms of the rape of secular women, and particularly the dramatic examples of Lucretia and Philomela, then, retained a particular force in the Middle Ages. The tales offered the potential for the exploration of a complex and controversial issue within the authoritative framework of the past; they did not require the invention but rather the explication of rape. While the story of Lucretia was the cause of much debate in the Middle Ages, that of Philomela provides a less difficult but extraordinarily resonant and disturbing example. Lucretia’s married status, the lack of abduction or even physical force suffered by her, and her suicide, render her story highly problematic, even while it retains its drama and emotive power. By contrast Philomela, her tongue cut out after abduction and rape, offers a graphic and powerful image of the silencing of women through rape. Rather ironically, for medieval writers it is the action of Lucretia that causes her innocence to be questioned, whereas Philomela, in being literally silenced, is reclaimed as an example of the oppression of women by men.
Chaucer treats the stories of Lucretia and Philomela at some length in his Legend of Good Women, the subject of which is the faithfulness of women and their betrayal by men.14 Following the model of Ovid’s Heroides and Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, Chaucer retells the stories of nine classical women, including Lucretia and Philomela. The tales of both offer highly resonant examples of female victimisation; both are, in differing ways, radical rewritings, that of Lucretia in its defence of her suicide, that of Philomela in its emphasis on pity rather than revenge. The tales clearly engage with the attitudes of Chaucer’s time, an engagement which is particularly evident in Chaucer’s telling of the story of Lucretia.
In its evocation of an alien morality, based on the visible attributes of shame and honour, Lucretia’s suicide presented profound difficulties for Christian philosophers and theologians, most notably for Augustine. By bringing a Christian philosophical perspective to Lucretia’s story, Augustine calls into question her innocence, opening a debate which is to endure for several centuries. Augustine’s interpretation of the story of Lucretia draws upon a complex Christian philosophy of chastity. In this the definition of chastity as a virtue is central, for, as a virtue, chastity must be situated within the mind; Augustine is thus able to distinguish between will and intentions, and deed. In his treatise De mendacio, Augustine emphasises the distinction between physical and spiritual purity, in order to demonstrate the need for inner as well as outer integrity. In De Civitate Dei,15 Augustine explores the distinction between physical and spiritual, action and will, at some length, employing the central example of rape. His discussion refers specifically to the women of his own period who have been raped by pagan invaders, ‘sanctas feminas et pie castas, in quibus ab hoste aliquid perpetratum est quod intulit verecundiae dolorem, etsi non abstulit pudicitiae firmitatem...’ ‘...the holy and religiously chaste women who were criminally attacked by an enemy in such a way as to grieve their modesty, although they lost nothing of their unshaken chastity.’16 Augustine restates his philosophy of chastity, employing the powerful argument of the mind’s control over the body:
...sanctumque corpus usu fieri sanctae voluntatis, qua inconcussa ac stabili permanente, quidquid alius de corpore vel in corpore fecerit quod sine peccato proprio non valeat evitari praeter culpam esse patientis.
...the body becomes holy through the exercise of a holy will, and while such a will remains unshaken and steadfast, no matter what anyone else does with the body or in the body that a person has no power to avoid without sin on his own part, no blame attaches to the one who suffers it.
(I, xvi, 74-6)
Not only pain but lust, Augustine argues, can be inflicted on a body by force; shamefastness or ‘pudicitiam’ is not thrust out, but shame, ‘pudorem’, literally thrust in through the sexual act:
Sed quia non solum quod ad dolorem, verum etiam quod ad libidinem pertinet, in corpore alieno perpetrari potest, quidquid tale factum fuerit, etsi retentam constantissimo animo pudicitiam non excutit, tamen pudorem incutit, ne credatur factum cum mentis etiam voluntate, quod fieri fortasse sine carnis aliqua voluptate non potuit.
But since it is not only the occasion of pain, but also the occasion of lust that can be inflicted on another’s body by force, in the latter case, though shamefastness, to which a superlatively steadfast mind holds fast, is not thrust out, yet shame is thrust in, shame for fear that the mind too may be thought to have consented to an act that could perhaps not have taken place without some carnal pleasure.
(I, xvi, 75-7)
This shame is manifest in fear, both of consent and of pleasure in the act itself; for Augustine, women who commit suicide as a result of shame yield to the wrong emotion and ought rather to defend their consistent purity of mind. The central tenet of Augustine’s argument is that suicide is sinful; killing the self equates to murder, and to do evil in this way does not eradicate shame but instead asserts and increases it. Suicide is in itself an intentional evil act, while to suffer rape is not; why, therefore, should a woman who has done no evil subsequently choose to commit so evil a deed? Augustine reiterates the fact that while victims of rape are traditionally viewed as polluted, ‘aliena polluat libido’, ‘another’s lust may pollute’ (I, xviii, 78-9), this is not in fact the case, ‘...quis...putaverit perdere se pudicitiam, si forte in adprehensa et oppressa carne sua exerceatur et expleatur libido non sua?’, ‘...who...will hold that he loses his shamefastness if by chance his flesh is seized and held down and a lust not his own is put in play and sated on it?’ (I, xviii, 78–9). He instances parallel cases in which the body is wounded or a midwife accidentally destroys the ‘integritatem’ of the virgin (I, xviii, 80–), emphasising the paradox that the integrity of the body is rooted in the mind, and that therefore neither the raped woman nor the woman threatened with rape should be encouraged to commit suicide.
Lucretia, then, presents a grave problem, in that her suicide is upheld by classical writers as supremely honourable, countering the pollution and shame of rape. Augustine quotes the comment of a listener sympathetic to Lucretia, ‘...duo fuerunt, et adulterium unus admisit’, ‘There were two and only one committed adultery’, contrasting ‘inquinatissimam cupiditatem’ with ‘castissimam voluntatem’ (I, xix, 84). Yet, Augustine argues in response, in this case she who is innocent is more severely punished than the adulterer. Instead of attributing this paradox as Livy does to the attitudes to shame and honour held in Lucretia’s society and reflected in Roman law, Augustine suggests that Roman law would in fact have punished Sextus Tarquinius: ‘...nonne eum, qui id fecisset, severitate congrua plecteretis?’, ‘...would you not punish the one who had done this with fitting severity?’ (I, xix, 84–5). He thus asks his audience to judge the suicide of Lucretia, ‘Proferte sententiam’ (I, xix, 86): why did she add death to her sufferings? Perhaps, Augustine suggests finally, she did not die in innocence but in guilt:
An forte ideo ibi non est quia non insontem, sed male sibi consciam, se peremit? Quid si enim (quod ipsa tantummodo nosse poterat) quamvis iuveni violenter inruenti etiam sua libidine inlecta consentit idque in se puniens ita doluit ut morte putaret expiandum?
Perhaps, however, she is not there because she slew herself, not innocently, but conscious of her guilt? What if – but she herself alone could know–she was seduced by her own lust and, though the youth violently attacked her, consented, and in punishing that act of hers was so remorseful that death seemed to be due expiation?
(I, xix, 86–7)
Augustine is certain that in suicide Lucretia has committed the worst of crimes, murder, and that her innocence is therefore called into question. Her behaviour is to be contrasted negatively with that of the Christian women who, having suffered rape, still live. Augustine notes that to commit suicide in order to avoid rape would have been equally wrong, suggesting that such action is motivated by fear of consent or pleasure, ‘.forte consentiant, vim sibi, qua moriantur, inferendam putant’, ‘They are afraid, if they are subjected to another’s lust, that their own will be awakened and they consent to it’ (I, xxv, 108-9). According to this viewpoint, examples of early saints who committed suicide to avoid rape must be explained as stories of divine command (I, xxvi, 108–11).
The question remains as to why God should allow rape to occur. While Augustine assures women that savage lust perpetrated against them will be punished (I, xxviii, 118–21), he also argues that rape may fulfil a positive divine purpose. Raped women are to question their souls, asking whether previously they were arrogant with regard to their virginity and over-fond of praise, or whether they would have become proud had they not suffered violation: ‘illarum tumori succursum est immanenti, istarum occursum est inminenti’, ‘The former were treated for a tumour already swollen; the latter for a tumour all ready to swell’ (I, xxviii, 120–1). Rape counters both existing and potential pride, and, in addition, illustrates the spiritual nature of chastity. By emphasising the sinfulness of suicide, the divine justification of rape, and the notion of chastity as a quality of the mind, Augustine renders defence of Lucretia difficult; he condemns her for following exactly the path which he wishes to forbid the Christian women of his own society.
The link between Augustine’s discussion and recurring theological and medical notions of female sexuality and frailty is, of course, immediately obvious. Yet while Augustine’s philosophical condemnation of Lucretia was persuasive and highly influential, questions remained regarding the possibility of her innocence. Her story retained an enormous appeal in the Middle Ages, due in part to the influence of Ovid, whose telling was highly sympathetic, but also to the uncertainty, finally, over the motivation for Lucretia’s suicide. The basic narrative structure of the tale allowed for a wide variety of interpretations, as well as for philosophical debate. That debate over Lucretia’s guilt continued throughout the Middle Ages is most strikingly conveyed by a much later account, that of the fifteenth-century writer John Lydgate. Lydgate, in his Fall of Princes (c. 1438–9), offers two perspectives on the Lucretia story, thus presenting both sides of the intellectual debate. The first draws directly on an Italian treatise by Coluccio Salutati, a Declamatio in which Lucretia states her guilt in acquiescing in the rape. Salutati’s treatment of the tale illustrates the manner in which theories of female sexuality interweave with Augustine’s philosophical argument. In Lydgate’s version, Collatinus carefully summarises Augustine’s argument on will in defence of Lucretia:
Thouh off force this bodi corrupt be,
Thi soule inward and thyn entencioun
Fraunchised been from al corrupcioun.
Offens is noon, considre in thyn entent,
But will and herte yive therto ful consent.17
Lucretia, he imagines, is ‘More lik an ymage korue out off a stone | Than lik a woman flesshli off plesaunce’ (II, 1179–80). The text, however, reflects the uncertainty of the Middle Ages regarding female sexuality; Lucretia argues finally that although the body may be forced into intercourse unwillingly, it may, despite the intent of the mind, experience an instinctive reaction of pleasure:
Lust afforcid hath a fals appetit,
Of freelte includid in Nature;
Maugre the will, ther folweth a delit,
As summe folk seyn, in eueri creature.
Good fame lost, ful hard is to recure;
And sithe I may myn harmys nat redresse,
To you in open my gilt I will confesse.
Al-be I was ageyn my will oppressid,
Ther was a maner constreyned lust in deede,
Which for noun power myht nat be redressid,
For febilnesse I stood in so gret dreede.
(II, 1275–85)
Here Lucretia stands as a tragic example of the condemnation of women implicit in popular medieval theories of female nature and sexuality. Despite herself, she experiences a ‘fals appetit’ or ‘delit’, and her only means of escape is death, the final relinquishing of a frail feminine nature. Her suicide reflects not individual failure so much as the failure of all women to separate body and soul, will and instinct. Thus even Lucretia, presented by Lydgate as the most virtuous of women, experiences pleasure in the act of rape. Hers is the tragedy of the female sex.
Tellingly, however, Lydgate places the responsibility for this telling on his patron, Duke Humphrey, who has presented him with Salutati’s text for translation. Lydgate then goes on to exculpate Lucretia by offering a rendition of Boccaccio’s much more sympathetic version of her story in Book III of the Fall of Princes. Here, he states Lucretia’s innocence:
Hir bodi corupt, she cleene off herte & thouht,
Be force assailed was hir innocence,
Oppressid hir beute, but hir sperit nouht,
Hir chaast[e] will dede non offence...
(III, 967–70)
In this account Lucretia’s death is the result of the ‘gret remors’ which she experiences even as she continues to represent an example of ‘wifli trouthe’ (III, 972); the subsequent lines of the narrative focus on the sadness of her death, ‘rehearsing’ her lament. The story, intended to illustrate Tarquin’s abuse of power, becomes that of Lucretia’s personal tragedy, and the account is rendered more poignant by the first-person narrative:
...whan a-bedde alone I lay slepyng,
Lik a leoun, ful sterne off look and face,
With his lefft hand my throte he ded enbrace,
And in his other heeld ageyn al lawe
Me for toppresse a naked suerd idrawe.
(III, 1095–9)
The threats employed by Tarquin are purely physical, and, finally, it is the sword which forces Lucretia to submit, ‘Thus I stood sool atwen deth & diffame, | Mi bodi corupt, my sperit abood[e] cleene... (III, 1104–8). Rape is suffered to avoid death, yet, ironically, once raped, Lucretia discovers that life is synonymous with defamation; by losing her physical chastity, she has lost her good name, and thus her worthiness to be called Collatinus’ wife. While her audience excuses her unconditionally, she cannot excuse herself, and her suicide is presented as an example to adulterers of the permanent horror of sexual corruption. Society, but also Lucretia herself, judges not the intent but the deed. In both Lydgate’s versions, Lucretia is, finally, a victim of societal and cultural attitudes, both external and internalised, as much as of Sextus Tarquinius’ personal tyranny. This is the ultimate tragedy of the story. The two conflicting portrayals, however, reflect the diversity as well as the strength of the beliefs and precepts which informed medieval thought and writing on rape.
Chaucer’s treatment of Lucretia in his Legend of Good Women seems to reflect a determined effort to reclaim her from her adverse reputation, although critical assessments of his aims have been various.18 While he cites Ovid and Livy as sources, he draws mainly on Ovid, but adopts neither Livy’s political perspective nor Ovid’s purely sentimental one. Instead, Chaucer’s Lucrece becomes an icon of ‘stedefastnesse’, ‘clennesse’ and ‘trouthe’ (loyalty).19 Chaucer illustrates his knowledge of the debate over Lucrece’s innocence at the start by referring to Augustine, but, strikingly, names Augustine as a sympathetic source, ‘The grete Austyn hath gret compassioun | Of this Lucresse’ (1690–1). It is possible that here Chaucer draws on the Gesta Romanorum, which refers to Augustine as a source for the story of Lucretia, or, equally, that he rewrites his source to suit his intent, that of saving Lucretia’s name and portraying her as a saint-like martyr.
Chaucer follows Ovid in emphasising Tarquin’s irrational desire, employing Ovid’s images of fire and madness, but also using an image more central to much of his own writing, that of ‘blynde lust’ (1756). Chaucer makes it clear from the start that Tarquin’s intent is to rape Lucretia rather than to seduce her, ‘maugre hyre, she shal my leman be!’ (1772). As Tarquinius enters Lucrece’s room with ‘sword drawn’, the scene moves from grotesque comedy to tragedy:
There...she lay, this noble wif Lucresse.
And as she wok, hire bed she felte presse.
‘What beste is that,’ quod she, ‘that weyeth thus?’
‘I am the kynges sone, Tarquinius,’
Quod he, ‘but, and thow crye or noyse make,
Or if there any creature awake,
By thilke God that formed man alyve,
This swerd thourghout thyn herte shal I ryve.’
And therwithal unto hire throte he sterte,
And sette the poynt al sharp upon hire herte.
No word she spak, she hath no myght therto.
What shal she seyn? Hire wit is al ago.
Ryght as a wolf that fynt a lomb alone,
To whom shal she compleyne or make mone?
What, shal she fyghte with an hardy knyght?
Wel wot men that a woman hath no myght.
What, shal she crye, or how shal she asterte
That hath hire by the throte with swerd at herte?
(1786–1803)
Chaucer’s recognition of the woman’s lack of power is striking; while Ovid comments objectively that women must always lose in a struggle, Chaucer points directly to the way that men consciously play on female weakness, ‘Wel wot men that a woman hath no myght.’
It is at this point that we are made acutely aware of Chaucer’s engagement with the debate over Lucrece’s suicide and her potential guilt. While Augustine places a Christian construction on suicide, Chaucer returns to an interpretation which emphasises the nature of Roman values and their basis in shame and honour. We are offered an image of a past, pagan but noble society, the ethics of which may be aligned with those of Christianity and the chivalric code. Behaviour is differently configured but is still to be estimated in terms of universal (Christian) virtue. Thus having demonstrated Lucrece’s nobility, industry, chastity, tenderness and beauty, Chaucer draws on Livy’s account to explain the importance of reputation to Roman women, ‘These Romeyns wyves lovede so here name | At thilke tyme, and dredde so the shame.’ (1812–13). This statement clearly opposes Augustine’s interpretation of concern for name and reputation as pride: Chaucer’s Lucrece simply reflects the mores of her own time in her anxiety to retain her good name. Tarquinius’ threat, that he will accuse Lucrece of adultery with a stableboy, inspires in her an extreme fear of public shame, a fear which not only explains her submission to the rape, but also removes any question of guilt, for this emotion causes Lucrece to swoon:
. . what for fer of sclaunder and drede of deth,
She loste bothe at ones wit and breth,
And in a swogh she lay, and wex so ded
Men myghte smyten of hire arm or hed;
She feleth no thyng, neyther foul ne fayr.
(1814–18)
For Carolyn Dinshaw, Lucrece’s unconsciousness is a defeat, rendering her still more one of the Legend’s ‘enervated, passive heroines’, in that she is even unable to control her body.20 Yet this comment seems to ignore the way in which Lucrece’s unconsciousness offers an unshakeable objection to Augustine’s assertion of her potential guilt. Paradoxically, Lucrece’s swoon effects a strong statement of her innocence, pointing to the forcible violation of her ‘trouthe’: her passivity offers a stark contrast to the violent and negative action of Tarquinius. While Lucrece’s behaviour is justified in terms of classical attitudes, however, Chaucer draws not on Roman but medieval ethics in his portrayal of Tarquinius. The narrator’s condemnation of Tarquinius points to his contravention of the chivalric code: ‘Whi hastow don dispit to chivalrye? | Whi hastow don this lady vilanye? | Allas, of the this was a vileyns dede!’ (1822–4). The comment on unknightliness suggests a nexus of class assumptions: Tarquinius has betrayed the natural expectation of honour in one of noble birth; rape might be the action of a ‘vileyn’, a peasant, but not of a knight. It is equally significant that the victim is a lady: Andreas Capellanus, for example, in his treatise on the art of courtly love, condones the rape of peasant women while firmly condemning the violation of upper-class women.21 By contrast to the careful use of historical realism in Chaucer’s portrayal of Lucrece’s rationale, here it is the resonance of Tarquinius’ actions in terms of the chivalric values of the medieval period which allows for a moral conclusion. Rather than providing a foundation myth for the Republic, as for Livy, the tale advocates the chivalric ideal, becoming an account of betrayal and of the way in which accepted codes of behaviour may be overturned to take advantage of a woman’s inherent frailty. The narrative casts into relief the destructive quality of lust when detached from the chivalric virtues of honour and service. Once desire is separated from service, protection is rewritten as aggression, and the balance required by the chivalric code becomes sexual tyranny.
While Chaucer draws on Ovid’s account of Lucrece’s difficulty in narrating the rape afterwards, in this version she succeeds, finally, in doing so, and Chaucer returns to Livy’s version in recounting the assurances of forgiveness offered by Lucrece’s audience, ‘It was no gilt, it lay not in hir myght’ (1849). In their words we seem to hear the echoes of Augustine’s argument. Here, however, the reader is aware that the question of will does not even arise, for Lucrece has not been conscious during the rape; her narrative cannot incorporate the moment of the actual rape, but only the fact of its accomplishment. This certainty ensures that the reason for Lucrece’s suicide is placed squarely on her shame, her concern for her husband’s name, and her refusal to be ‘forgiven’ for a crime that she has not committed – all concerns vastly increased in Chaucer’s account by his portrayal of Roman society. Andrew Galloway, comparing Chaucer’s account to those of his contemporaries – Nicholas Trevet, Thomas Waleys, John Ridevall, and Ranulph Higden – suggests that Chaucer’s account forms part of a popular move to define ideology, here that of Rome, and to address the question of ‘freedom from such ideology’:
In a complete reversal of Augustine’s and the decretists’ positions, Chaucer claims that the Roman ethos in which she is steeped is what produces and shapes Lucrece’s moral purity.22
For Galloway, Lucrece’s suicide, instigated by the forgiveness of those around her for a crime she has not committed and implying an assumption of guilt, defines Lucrece as ‘a kind of humanist, aware of the power of ideology and operating within its structures’.23 Again, however, it is essential to emphasise the contemporaneity as well as the historicism of Chaucer’s account. Although placed within the structures of her own society, Lucrece is also an emblem of perfect ‘clennesse’ and ‘trouthe’, two of the central attributes of the medieval spiritual and chivalric code. Her tragedy becomes precisely the fact that she is caught within a society which constructs rape as pollution, even while the reader sees it from a Christian perspective. In Chaucer’s narrative, Lucretia’s virtue, like Tarquinius’ villainy, functions on a level of absolute Christian morality beyond the constraints of time, while her suicide is explained by these constraints.
To express this tragedy Chaucer draws overtly on the genre of the saint’s life, describing what is in effect the martyrdom of a chaste, faithful, and highly virtuous woman. Lucrece, like the virgin martyrs of the Golden Legend, becomes the victim of the forces of evil, symbolised, as frequently in the saints’ lives, by the threat of rape. Unlike the saints, however, Lucrece is not saved by a miracle; instead her martyrdom is self-effected and follows her rape. Donald Rowe has argued that the narrator’s defence of Lucretia reflects her story, in that his interpretation of true chastity is misplaced in the same way as hers:
...his celebration of her goodness is grounded in the same misapprehension of the good and in the same overvaluing of appearances as her deed; it constitutes a similar, unwitting betrayal of the good.24
Ultimately, Rowe argues, she can only be a ‘dark mirror’ of the good.25 Yet this conclusion ignores the care which Chaucer has taken to place Lucrece within a society governed by different laws, in which suicide is the most tragic but also the most effective response. Chaucer’s Lucrece in fact becomes the classical version of the saint, her innocence beyond question, and her action an eternal defence of it. God cannot save Lucrece from rape, but she is aligned with the saints even within a world cruelly ordered on public shame and honour rather than personal guilt and good. By rendering Lucretia an absolutely passive victim of rape, Chaucer allows us to believe in Lucrece’s martyrdom, despite the fact that her death, finally, is effected by her own hand.
An additional resonance is suggested by Jill Mann, who points to the particular function of suicide here, not as romantic or cathartic, but rather as a recapitulation of the rape:
There is nothing of willed surrender here, as Lucretia’s swoon during the rape symbolically underlines; what her death mimetically repeats is the simple obliteration of the female by male ‘tirannye’. Her suicide realises in public and demonstrable form the brutal extinction of personality that constitutes the invisible horror of rape.26
At the same time, analogies with scenes of attempted rape in tales of the virgin martyrs cause Lucrece to appear as more than simply an obliterated victim; her death becomes saintly as well as tragic. In this story, however, evil is not attributed to pagan or demonic forces, as it is in the early saints’ lives, but to men, and Lucrece becomes an emblem of female ‘trouthe’, forced through the perfidy of men into a situation in which death is the only response. Robert R. Edwards suggests that Lucrece in fact suffers two violations:
In the action that follows from Tarquin’s obsessive rumination on her beauty, Lucrece in fact suffers a double rape. Violence against her person leads to violence against her name, when Brutus ‘openly’ (1865) tells her tale to the Romans and displays her corpse as proof of the deed. His object is to overthrow tyranny and establish a political system that properly regulates the relations beween free males.27
Lucrece offers a saintly model for women, a proof of their virtue, but also a tragic example of the way in which men have betrayed women in the past, and of the silencing of women, first in rape, then in death, in order to make way for male structures of power, both lawful and unlawful. For Chaucer, Mann suggests, rape is ‘a constant touchstone for determining justice between the sexes.the definitive form of male tyranny, representing a fundamental imbalance between the sexes which human relationships must seek to redress.’28
The tale of Lucrece told by Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower in his Confessio Amantis offers a striking parallel to that of Chaucer, in that Gower employs a similar tactic of describing Lucrece’s unconsciousness at the time of the rape; together the texts imply the compassion and engagement which the story of Lucrece could provoke among later medieval writers. Gower tells the story as an example of tyranny in Book VII of the Confessio Amantis, the section of the work which treats the theme of kingship by recounting the education of Alexander. By contrast to good kings, the Tarquins are portrayed as perpetrators of extreme tyranny, one example of which is rape. Gower’s Lucrece, like Chaucer’s, offers an example of perfect womanhood; Gower, however, ignores the part of the story which is most problematic for the reader. While his Lucrece retains her innocence as a result of her unconsciousness during the rape, this is occasioned not by Tarquin’s verbal threat to accuse Lucrece of adultery with the stableboy, but by her fear of physical violence. Terrified at the threat of the sword, she loses her voice and, unable to cry out, swoons, remaining immobile while the rape is committed:
...lich a Lomb whanne it is sesed
In wolves mouth, so was desesed
Lucrece, which he naked fond:
Wherof sche swounede in his hond,
And, as who seith, lay ded oppressed.
And he, which al him hadde adresced
To lust, tok thanne what him liste...29
As in Livy’s and Chaucer’s accounts, the saintly quality of Lucrece’s behaviour is highlighted, and the ensuing discussion emphasises the fact that the crime was committed ‘ayein her will’. Lucrece does not wish to receive forgiveness for a crime she has not committed, and Gower takes from Livy’s account an image of the evil slander which will follow her. The righteousness of Gower’s Lucrece becomes the antidote to slander and lechery, and even in dying, she virtuously covers herself with her clothing. Again, in contrast to later writers such as Lydgate and Salutati as well as to Augustine, it is the martyr-like quality of Lucrece which Gower emphasises, her goodness pointing to the perfidy of men. The narrative strategies of Chaucer and Gower thus defend Lucrece from the possibility that, ‘Lust afforcid hath a fals appetit.’
A comparable yet contrasting paradigm of female vulnerability and male aggression is offered by the story of Philomela, the seventh in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, and of all his examples the most disturbing. In a passage which has occasioned much critical comment, the narrator states his unease in its telling, commenting first, ‘so grisely was his [Tereus’] dede | That, whan that I his foule storye rede | Myne eyen wexe foule and sore also’ (2238–40), and then more strongly, ‘Yit last the venym of so longe ago | That it enfecteth hym that wol beholde’ (2241–2). Despite his claim, ‘But shortly of this story for to passe, | For I am wery of hym for to telle’ (2258–9), Chaucer’s account is a highly emotional, detailed one which draws heavily on Chretien de Troyes’ story of Philomela, as well as that of Ovid in the Metamorphoses. While the central theme is again that of women’s virtue, Chaucer has no need to reclaim Philomela for women as he does Lucrece. Yet his account again dramatically rewrites the classical version of the tale.
While the first part of the narrative follows that of Ovid closely, from the start Chaucer places a particular emphasis on the wickedness of men, asking why Tereus should have been born, and recounting his kinship with Mars, thus establishing the image of man as predatory warrior. Here again the classical context is interwoven with Christian interpretation; Chaucer also adds to his protagonists’ speeches an apparently Christian element: Procne requests Tereus, for example, that Philomela visit her ‘for Godes love’ (2264). Tereus, by contrast, makes no reference to God, so that, as in the case of Tarquinius, his lack of Christian virtue is emphasised. In Tereus’ request to Pandion that he be permitted to take Philomela to visit her sister, Chaucer plays on his audience’s knowledge that Tereus will betray his promise to create dramatic irony, as he couches his account of Tereus’ speech in the legal language of oaths and promises, using terms such as ‘vouchesauf (2273). Thus the subsequent betrayal becomes a societal and legal offence as well as a personal one; ‘trouthe’ is apparently authorised through legal language, only to be subseqently overturned. As in the story of Lucrece, the irrationality of male desire is emphasised. The image of fire predominates in Chaucer’s description of Tereus: ‘He cast his fyry herte upon hyre so | That he wol have hir, how so that it go.’ (2292–3).
While in Ovid’s account the rape itself takes place in a hut in the forest, Chaucer replaces this with an evocative image of the deserted cave in the forest, an image which contrasts with the idyllic locus of the cave where Dido and Aeneas consummate their love, described earlier in the Legend; in its wildness this setting is also highly appropriate for a scene which overturns the sacred order of marriage. Again, as in the tale of Lucrece, Chaucer employs the familiar oppositions of passive and active, lamb and wolf, culver and eagle to poignant purpose:
...therwithal she wepte tenderly
And quok for fere, pale and pitously,
Ryght as the lamb that of the wolf is biten;
Or as the culver that of the egle is smiten,
And is out of his clawes forth escaped,
Yit it is afered and awhaped,
Lest it be hent eft-sones; so sat she.
But utterly it may non other be.
By force hath this traytour don a dede,
That he hath reft hire of hire maydenhede,
Maugre hire hed, by strengthe and by his myght.
Lo! here a dede of men, and that a ryght!
(2316–27)
What is most striking is Chaucer’s qualification of rape as the ‘dede of men’, and his portrayal of the predicament of women rendered passive as a result of the greater strength of men. We recall again the emphasis placed on Lucrece’s helplessness, ‘Wel wot men that a woman hath no myght’ (1801). Whereas the action of the rape is answered in Ovid’s account by Philomela’s long speech of accusation, Chaucer’s Philomela simply cries out for help to her sister, father and God. It is only Tereus’ fear of accusation and his knowledge of his own guilt which cause him to cut out Philomela’s tongue in a terrible recapitulation of the silencing quality of rape, ‘ yit this false thef | Hath don this lady yit a more myschef, | For fere lest she shulde his shame crye | And don hym openly a vilenye’ (2330–3). For Chaucer, the silencing of Philomela has already occurred in Tereus’ action, which, like that of Tarquinius, contravenes the chivalric code and thus betrays women; Philomela’s loss of her tongue becomes an emblem of the silencing of the woman effected in the rape. Carolyn Dinshaw points out that Tereus enacts the type of deed suggested earlier in Chaucer’s description of Lucrece’s unconsciousness as a state in which ‘Men myghte smyten of hire arm or hed’ (1817). Men, Dinshaw writes, ‘literally do divide up women’s bodies and separate their bodies from their spirits.’30 The story of Philomela illustrates masculinity taken to a violent extreme, without the governing strictures of law and reason, so that rape replaces the traditional chivalric act of protection of women.
What is most striking about Chaucer’s telling is that it ignores the second part of the story, the account of the revenge of Procne and Philomela on Tereus. The final episode becomes that of Philomela’s revelation of the crime to her sister. Literally and metaphorically silenced by a man’s action, she gains a new, specifically feminine voice. Chaucer notes that Philomela has been instructed in her youth to read and ‘endite’, compose, but cannot write with a pen, a traditionally male accomplishment. She can, however, weave letters ‘to and fro’ (2358), and thus she weaves for her sister a tapestry of her story: ‘al the thyng that Tereus hath wrought, | She waf it wel, and wrot the storye above, | How she was served for hire systers love’ (2363–5). Notably, Chaucer does not conclude with the traditional metamorphosis of Philomela into a bird, but rather bases the narrative in the human world, giving his heroine an alternative, ‘feminine’ mode of speech with which to counter her silencing in a male world.
Philomela’s weaving has become a powerful symbol for feminist theorists, representing a new and feminine mode of power and creativity, and placing the woman as the artist figure;31 here, however, while Chaucer’s narrative seems to embody something of this notion, it is a form of letters rather than pictures which Philomela weaves, so that the cloth literally becomes her speech. In a rendition which corresponds strikingly with the modern feminist emphasis on female creativity, Chaucer removes the extreme and graphic violence of the revenge from the tale; his Philomela thus remains the victim figure rather than the image of vengeful woman once wronged. Instead of following the male example of violence in order to seek revenge, Chaucer’s Philomela lives out her womanhood and its traits of truth, cleanness and steadfastness, finding a new and alternative language. Woman, silenced by man, discovers a voice in the discovery of a new and creative language and art. Chaucer ends the story with the image of Procne and Philomela mourning in each others’ arms, and with a warning, ‘Ye may be war of men, if that yow liste...’ (2387). Jill Mann suggests that the pathos of this scene and of Philomela’s writing of her story acts against the threat of infection by the tale’s ‘venym’ suggested earlier by the narrator:
Participating in their grief, the tale itself falls silent... When woman is thus silenced, to speak on her behalf seems like another kind of violation.32
This aspect of the tale also points to a ‘revaluation of women’ which has sometimes been denied the Legend, for example by Elaine Tuttle Hansen: ‘it does not revalue the feminine... nor celebrate woman as a sign or subject; its author does not refuse to traffic in stories about women but simply insists on doing so on his own terms.’33 In fact, Chaucer seems to offer a new voice to women in his rewriting of a tale in which, traditionally, the silencing of women has only been replaced by the subsequent violence and destruction of revenge.
Again, Chaucer’s account in the Legend of Good Women finds a parallel in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The tellings, however, differ significantly. Gower’s narrative follows that of Ovid closely in its account of the revenge and the metamorphosis. Gower focuses his rendition on the loss of virginity, and the story offers an example of physical avarice. His images are particularly gruesome as he aligns Philomela’s silencing with her later metamorphosis; with the loss of her tongue, she could only ‘chitre and as a brid jargoune’ (V, 5700). Poignantly, the reader hears the words uttered by Philomela’s heart, as she speaks after her tongue is lost: ‘Thogh sche be mouthe nothing preide, | Withinne hir herte thus sche seide...’ (V, 5739). The revenge and metamorphosis, however, are never presented as returning speech to Philomela, despite Gower’s striking description of the purple letters and images on white silk which tell of her rape, for the achievement of this tapestry is not envisaged as a process of learning to communicate. Rather Philomela’s weaving, like the subsequent metamorphosis, ritualises and formalises the offence against her. For Gower, the emphasis falls on the condemnation of the crime of ravishment and the punish-ment of the ravisher. R.F. Yeager notes that Gower only condemns Tereus once he has expressed his lust aboard the ship, using the term ‘tyrant raviner’ to signify ‘a transformation of Tereus’s personality, a complete shift of shape’.34 Tereus loses his reason, the ‘faculty that separates man from brute beasts’, and thus reduces Philomela to prey.35 The subsequent tale of revenge becomes an illustration of further evil resulting from such a betrayal of power and self-government.
Chaucer, by contrast to Gower, seems to view revenge as a male prerogative and to present a new, more fluid means of escaping the silencing effected on women by men. His Philomela cannot write but learns to weave, taking the power of communication into her own domain, and thus becoming in many ways a more active figure than his classical model. Chaucer’s narrative of Philomela, like that of Lucrece, not only condemns faithless men, but also the way in which women are silenced in a patriarchal world, pointing to their need for a means of expression.
We may view the tales of Lucretia and Philomela as complex responses to the range and ambiguity of attitudes to rape in the Middle Ages, each tale treating a very different situation. The story of Philomela becomes the archetypal instance of the offence most condemned by secular and canon law, that of rape and abduction of a virgin. Correspondingly, the terms used by Tereus point to his contravention of the law, as well as of the chivalric ethic. There is no doubt as to Philomela’s innocence; rather, her tale allows Chaucer to emphasise the ways in which women are deprived of a voice through male violence, and to offer the possibility of a new voice both in Philomela’s weaving and in the tale’s rewriting of its classical source.
The tale of Lucretia presents Chaucer with a less clear-cut instance of rape, in terms of Lucretia’s married status and the lack of abduction or physical coercion in her rape, and in terms of the long-standing debate over her innocence. Here, Chaucer employs legal and social realism to point to the differences in construction between classical attitudes to rape and those of his own time. These differences allow him to excuse Lucretia’s suicide, while his description of her unconsciousness at the time of rape counters notions of her guilt. Again, the tale offers its heroine a new voice, both in her speech and in the rewriting of its classical source. The classical paradigms have become legendary instances of the perfidy of men, and of female truth, loyalty and creativity in the face of this betrayal.
1 This difference has not been adequately noted in some modern analyses of the subject. See for example B. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) Ch. 3, ‘The Crimes: Rape’, pp. 104–10, and J.L. Carter, Rape in Medieval England: An Historical and Sociological Study (Lanham, New York and London, 1985). The most useful study is that of J.B. Post, ‘Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster’, in Legal Records and the Historian: Papers Presented to the Cambridge Legal History Conference, 7–10 July, and in Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall on 3 July 1974, ed. J.H. Baker, Royal Historical Society Studies in History (London, 1978) 150–64. Post continues his discussion in ‘Sir Thomas West and the Statute of Rapes, 1382’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53 (1980) 24–30. I have discussed the notion of raptus and the history of the English law of rape in some detail in ‘Woman Displaced: Rape and Romance in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale’, Arthurian Literature XIII, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (Cambridge, 1995, pp. 115–31).
2 Bracton de legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae: Bracton on the laws and customs of England, ed. G.E. Woodbine, trans. S.E. Thorne, II (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) ‘De placitis coronae’, f. 147, pp. 414–15.
3 The laws of Alfred address both niedhamed, ‘forcible coition’, and abduction, for which verbs such as (nid)niman and onfengan are used. See F. Liebermann, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I (Halle, 1903), Alfred: VIII, p. 54; XI, p. 56; XVI, p. 58; XXIII, p. 62; XXVII, p. 64. Early post-Conquest laws of William and Henry I distinguish between raptus and violentus concubitus. See Liebermann, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I, Leis Willelme: XVIII, p. 504; Leges Henrici: X, p. 556; XIII, p. 558. For the the best edition of the statutes of Westminster I and II, see Post, ‘Ravishment of Women’, Appendix, 162–4.
4 Post, ‘Ravishment of Women’, 157; for Bracton’s comment see De legibus, f. 143, p. 402–3.
5 The case of Chaucer is most cogently analysed by C. Cannon, ‘Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a newly discovered document concerning the life of Geoffrey Chaucer’, Speculum 68 (1993), 74–94.
6 The lack of specification of abduction in the case of Cecily Chaumpaigne has been used in some studies as an argument for the definition of raptus as rape here. See for example D. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, Blackwell Critical Biographies 1 (Oxford, 1992) pp. 135–8. For a more cautious overview of the blurred semantic field, see Cannon, ‘Raptus’, 82–9.
7 Cannon, 93–4.
8 Gratian, Decretum magistri Gratiani, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. ^E. Friedberg, I (Leipzig, 1879) part II, causa XXVII, quest. ii, c. 48, p. 1077, and causa XXXVI, quest. i, c. 2, p. 1288. For discussion of punishment, see part II, causa XXVII, quest. ii, c. 48, p. 1077.
9 For a comprehensive discussion of the development of these ideas in theological texts, see Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1993); for a more medical and scientific emphasis, see Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture, Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1993).
10 William of Conches, Dialogus de substantiis physicis: ante annos ducentos confectus, a Vuilhelmo Aneponymo philosopho (Frankfurt/Main, 1967, reprinted from 1567 edn) Bk. VI, 241.
11 See Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Naturale, in Speculum Quadruplex sive Speculum Maius: Naturale/Doctrinale/Morale/Historiale, vol. 1 (Graz, 1964, reprinted from 1624 edn) Bk. 31, ch. xxvi, p. 2313. Vincent cites William of Conches. See also ‘Queritur quare quedam sine omni semine ac delectatione concipiunt?’, in Brian Lawn (ed.) The Prose Salernitan Questions, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi. V (London, 1979) B 11, p. 6.
12 See The Eyre of Kent: 6 and 7 Edward II, AD 1313–14, vol. 1, Year Books Series 5, ed. F.W. Maitland, W.V. Harcourt and W.C. Bolland (London, 1910) 111. What seems to be the same case is also recorded for the Cornwall Eyre and in the Year Books of Edward I for 1302: see The Eyre of Kent, 111n1 and 30 and 31 Edward I, Year Books of the Reign of Edward the First, ed. and trans. Alfred J. Horwood, Rolls Series, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages (London, 1863) Appendix 1, 1302, 520–1. Hanawalt, 105n166 and Carter, 124, both refer to this case.
13 See Francis M. Nichols, ed. and trans., Britton, vol. 1 of 2 (Oxford, 1865) I, xxiv, 114; H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, ed. and trans., Fleta, vol. 2 of 4, Selden Society 72 (London, 1955) I, xxiv, 89; Mirror of Justices, ch. xxi, 103; no. 118, 172.
14 This paper focuses on English thought in the Middle Ages, and on Chaucer as the writer who treats issues relating to rape in the tales of Lucretia and Philomela at the most length; many other interesting tellings, both English and Continental, exist, in particular those of Boccaccio and Christine de Pisan.
15 Augustine, De Mendacio, ed. Joseph Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 41 (Prague, Leipzig, 1900) VII, 10, 427–8. This philosophy is restated in Augustine’s treatise On Free Choice of the Will.
16 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. George E. McCracken, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1957) II, ii, 148–9. All subsequent references to The City of God will be from this edition and will be cited by book and line number.
17 John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, parts 1 and 2, Early English Text Society, OS 121 and 122 (London, 1924) II, 1151–5. All subsequent references to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes will be from this edition and will be cited by book and line number.
18 For an analysis which places the Legend in terms of its defence of narrative art, emphasising Chaucer’s use of comedy and irony, see Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca and London, 1983). Perhaps the most influential feminist analysis of the Legend of Good Women has been that of Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘The naked text in english to declare’, in her study Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison) 65–88. Dinshaw places emphasis on the silencing of both Lucretia and Philomela. See also the more recent study by Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley, 1994).
19 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1987) 588–630, ll. 1680, 1687. All subsequent references to Chaucer’s Legend will be from this edition and will be cited by line number.
20 Dinshaw, 75.
21 See Andreas Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh, (London, 1982) Bk. I, cap. xi, pp. 222–3.
22 Andrew Galloway, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England’, English Literary History 60 (1993) 827; Galloway discusses the fourteenth-century commentators on Lucrece earlier in the article, see 813 ff.
23 Galloway, 827.
24 Donald Rowe, Through Nature to Eternity: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Lincoln and London) 66.
25 Rowe, 67.
26 Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, Feminist Readings (Hemel Hempstead, 1991) 44.
27 Robert R. Edwards, ‘Faithful Translations: Love and the Question of Poetry in Chaucer’, in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Specter (Albany, 1991) 153.
28 Mann, 45.
29 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, in The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford, 1901) vol. 3, VII, 4983–9. All subsequent references to Gower’s Confessio will be from this edition and volume, and will be cited by book and line number.
30 Dinshaw, 75.
31 See especially Patricia Klindienst Joplin, ‘The voice of the shuttle is ours’, Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984) 25–53.
32 Mann, 47.
33 Elaine Tuttle Hansen, ‘The Feminization of Men in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women , in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville, 1989) 66. See also Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, 1992) 1–10.
34 R.F.Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion, Publications of the John Gower Society 2 (Cambridge, 1990) 153. Yeager, 153.
35Yeager, 153.