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Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle - Geoffrey Chaucer
Style, Fall, 1997 by Judith A. Weise
Troilus and Criseyde and the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, also associated with the first part of the Cecilia poem because of similar Romance percentages, seem to be thematically linked to the Cecilia poem. Is the aim of the project of writing poems about good women a penance for his sins against them, echoed in Chaucer's translation of the life of Saint Cecilia? And why does he choose St. Cecilia? Out of the hundreds of saints' legends, hundreds of saints' lives and hundreds of saints' passions, why does Chaucer choose to translate the life of a virgin martyr, Saint Cecilia? Is it just a stunning coincidence that the one saint's life Chaucer writes concerns a virgin martyr with the same name as the woman who undoubtedly caused him great personal and financial pain when she released him from all charges "in respect of her raptus as well as of any other matter" (Benson xxi)?
Could the lyf of Seynt Cecile be a self-imposed literary penance resembling that assigned to Chaucer the poet by Alceste in the prologue to the Legend? Could this penance be undertaken in a truly remorseful spirit? Or could Chaucer's praise of Cecilie's virtue be consciously or unconsciously less than genuine? If so, it is similar to what Robert Frank called "Chaucer's mock role as a sinful penitent performing an act of penance" (210). Nothing in the entire Prologue and Tale is offensive or even disrespectful except, perhaps, for the line describing Cecilie's wedding night: "The nyght cam, and to bedde most she gon / With hire housbonde, as ofte is the manere" (VIII.141-42).(2) Literary penance for crimes against women was not exactly the rage, but as Derek Pearsall points out, "the pretext for writing a poem is itself a court game of a kind that Machaut had provided a precedent for in his Jugement dou Roy de Navarre; there too the poet is accused of defaming women, is arraigned before a lord sympathetic to ladies, offers his defense, submits to his literary penance" (191). Clearly influenced by Machaut's work in his other poems, Chaucer embraces this courtly position in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, and might have seen its usefulness earlier in his situation with Cecilia.
The conventions of Ricardian poetry might also explain why Chaucer would translate a poem about the namesake of the woman who caused him real harm. Indirection and/or the art of obliqueness abound in conventional Ricardian poetry, and a pattern of avoidance behavior has been found in Chaucer's life and works by R. T. Lenaghan, especially in "Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse" (45-46) and Envoy to Scogan (46-61), and by John Scattergood in Lak of Stedfastnesse (469-75). Scattergood concludes that conventional genres sometimes serve Chaucer as covers for personal concerns: "It seems to me that many of Chaucer's shorter poems are genre pieces in which personal statement emerges by way of a treatment of conventional matters[;] a traditional poem is invested with particular significance" (470).
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