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Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle - Geoffrey Chaucer
Style, Fall, 1997 by Judith A. Weise
It should be noted that this venereal pleasure (delectatio Veneris), of which the males of these families were so proud, was only given free rein either before marriage, during their "youth" and in the prolonged state of celibacy that was the lot of most of the canons, or after marriage, when the head of the family had become widowed. . . . Throughout a man's married life, such dissolute behavior may have occurred, but we do not hear about it, for it was not considered seemly to mention it. (95-96)
Chaucer was not a twelfth-century French nobleman, but such ideal patterns of behavior often linger for centuries, and Chaucer's behavior as shown in the surviving records suggests his strenuous attempts to contain the legal traces of the accusation of rape. Fourteenth-century London was a small town of perhaps only 60,000 inhabitants (Robertson 89); Chaucer was surely known by everyone of any consequence, if only by hearsay. In such a small city, public opinion is certainly powerful, and Chaucer's attempt to hide the accusation of rape is thus understandable.
The document recently discovered in the coram rege rolls by Christopher Cannon concerning this case "was meant to withhold the very information that the original release was designed to disclose," that is, the word raptus (92). The rolls of the Court of King's Bench "were well produced, in a careful hand, and they were frequently and easily consulted," compared to the close rolls - where raptus appears - "which were seldom (if ever) read" (93). It seems very much like a cover-up, although Cannon argues that the revision
need not have been part of any subterfuge, since the substitutions . . . did not really change the legal function of the document in any way. For the same reason these changes would not necessarily lay either the clerk who made them or the person or persons who arranged for them open to the serious charge of tampering with official documents. They may well have been made with Cecilia Champaigne's full complicity. (93)
If not cover-up, subterfuge and obfuscation immediately come to mind; however, none of them seem attributable to Cecilia. This new document is a reminder of the seriousness of the offense and the heavy financial burden Chaucer entailed, but, more importantly, it points to Chaucer's need to avoid scandal, to obfuscate every trace of the charge.
Another reason for Chaucer's urgent desire to erase all vestiges of the charge is suggested by Sedgwick's conclusions about homosocial desire. In order to continue his homosocial relationships - relationships which, considering his ambiguous social situation, would be of great importance - Chaucer needed to contain the possible notoriety the case would cause. Sedgwick's work helps explain Chaucer's motives in the writing of the poem about St. Cecilia. To reassure his friends, associates, and colleagues of his standing as a male respectable enough to be desired as a male bonding partner, he needed to adopt a persona simultaneously responsible and blase toward the whole situation. And if he couldn't contain all the consequences (his mother and wife were still living), he might deflect some negative ones by making an apparently genuinely penitential translation of the Latin life of St. Cecilia, with undertones of the comic implicit in the situation. A similar deflecting strategy can be seen in his handling, or non-handling, of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Sheila Delany complains that "Chaucer is notoriously silent about the important social movements of his day, and most conspicuously silent about the great rebellion in 1381" (90). The only time he possibly refers to it is in the widow's safe farmyard in the Nun's Priest's Tale, in an allusion to the noise of the mockepic attempted rescue of Chanticleer:
