Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle - Geoffrey Chaucer

Now wol I seyn what penaunce thow shalt do For thy trespas, and understond it here: Thow shalt, while that thow lyvest, yet by yere, The moste partye of thy tyme spende In makynge of a gloryous legende Of goode women, maydenes and wyves, That were trewe in lovynge al here lyres . . . (Prologue G 469-75)

As if in answer to a similar request, the speaker in the Prologue to The Second Nun's Tale begins, "I have heer doon my feithful bisynesse / After the legende in translacioun / Right of thy glorious lif and passioun" (VIII. 24-26). These poems are also connected by Alceste's defense of Chaucer - that he had written a lyf of Seynt Cecile - against the God of Love's charges in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women.

Further light is shed on the history of Chaucer's writing of the lyf of Seynt Cecile in V. A. Kolve's discussion of the iconography of St. Cecilia in works of art dating to Chaucer's day (132-51). Important to this poem is the early-fourteenth-century Tuscan altarpiece which Chaucer could have seen on his trip to Florence in 1373. It is typical of the representations of St. Cecilia in showing her martyrdom in a bathtub rather than the historically correct hypocaust, a room in a Roman villa with a space under the floor warmed by a furnace. An image of the saint in majesty in a large central panel dominates the Tuscan altarpiece, flanked by a sequence of narrative, sexually suggestive images. The marriage banquet is followed by the scene in the bridal chamber where Cecilia explains to her husband that her angel forbids that her body be touched in a carnal way. The huge but empty marriage bed significantly dominates this scene. In the final scene, her martyrdom, Cecilia stands in profile, naked in a tub heated by a fierce fire, raising her arms in prayer. Her executioner is about to strike. Kolve claims that most of the depictions of the Cecilia story show her death in a similar fashion, which he describes as erotic:

[T]he martyrdom in a bath is given to [Chaucer] by his sources. All versions known to me imply the symbolic identity of lechery with heat and fire. . . . Saint Cecilia . . . remained in that bath as if in a cold place . . . . But Chaucer takes this one step further, to internalize and psychologize the cold. in saying that she "sat al coolde and feelede no wo" he focuses not on the place as it seemed to her, but on how she felt within herself. . . . The coolness of Cecilia's chastity protects her from the fire of the bath as absolutely as it protected her from Valerian's demands on the night of their wedding. Saint Cecilia in a bath "al coold" represents a condition beyond the reach of carnal heat or physical fire. (143-49)

In this context, it is important to remember that Chaucer writes the lines about Cecilia's coldness many years after he first begins translating the Vita of Saint Cecilia. The erotic appeal of the Tuscan altarpiece might have served as one of the first connections Chaucer saw between Cecilia the saint and Cecilia the London baker's daughter. In a wryly playful spirit, and perhaps with a wink to his fellow civil servants, Chaucer probably begins the lyf as a spoof of a literary penance for his sins against Cecilia, celebrating her purity. Other work intervenes and, as with several other poems, including The Legend of Good Women, he never finishes it. Later in the 1390s, he takes a second look at the unfinished poem when he is adapting other earlier works for positions in the Tales. Since he no longer has his first source, he uses what is short and easily available: the Franciscan version Reames recently found. By the time he begins finishing it, the percentage of his Romance vocabulary has nearly doubled, he needs, as Russell Peck has noted (17), a counterpoint to the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, and he sees the possibilities of the other kind of flame, the fire of charity ("And brennynge evere in charite ful brighte" [VIII.18]). Finally, this identification of Cecilia de Chaumpaigne as the "inspiration" for the Cecilia poem explains why the one and only time Chaucer writes a saint's life, he chooses one about a celibate martyr with erotic associations, St. Cecilia.