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

Style, Fall, 1997 by Judith A. Weise

With strategies similar to those in Scogan, "The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse" baffles expectations when the persona addresses his purse as his lady, "dere" (2), but "light" (3), which is, according to Lenaghan, "a condition as deplorable in ladies as in purses, and with probably more than a knowing wink at the poetic meaning of 'purse' as vagina - which he wishes, again and again in the refrain, would be 'hevy agen, or elles moot I dye'" (46). The proximity of "purse" and "dye" suggests that Chaucer is unable to resist making that time-honored misogynistic reference, even when it only tangentially serves his financial purpose. In such ways, Chaucer's unorthodox uses of genre and convention in these two poems disguise his true purpose: dealing with conflict via strategies of deflection and indirection.

Evasion, deflection and oblique exploration, Chaucer's characteristic strategies for facing a conflict, certainly can be found in the ways - legal and literary - he deals with the repercussions of Cecilia's release. The original purpose of the lyf of Seynt Cecile may echo that of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women as an oblique petition poem requesting relief, albeit a mock petition for an historically documented release, from charges of a crime in case his offer to settle out of court fails. T. F. T. Plucknett's article about the legal meaning of "raptus" and the evidence in the two 1380 documents referring to Cecilia explain that "raptus" almost certainly meant rape (34). As Plucknett reconstructs the events (some not documented), Cecilia threatened to charge Chaucer with rape, but they quickly came to terms - settled out of court; in the earlier document, she released Chaucer from actions pertaining to rape. Chaucer, however, did not have the agreed-upon amount at hand, and since she refused his personal bond, he had to find friends to put up bond for him (the amount of which is not in the two documents). The second document shows that the amount was so heavy that the three men had to refinance; Cecilia gave releases to Chaucer's friends, Goodchild and Grove, and they to Chaucer. Grove alone became bound for [pounds]10; at Michaelmas he paid. Chaucer must have given Grove a bond, which was paid when he sold his father's house the next year. He probably also gave Cecilia the balance at that time. No record exists of criminal action against Chaucer. We thus have records of the injured party relinquishing her right to make criminal charges - she accepted settlement out of court for a cash payment. Chaucer's settlement offer was apparently acceptable, explaining why no records of criminal action against Chaucer survive.

Why Chaucer would - even in a wryly playful spirit - translate a poem celebrating a virgin saint whose name is the same as the woman who threatened him with charges of rape is perhaps not immediately apparent, but the answer might be suggested by Chaucer's position in fourteenth-century England. Paul Strohm points out that,

As an esquire, he was situated at a particularly volatile and ambiguous point in the social structure of his day. . . . Chaucer's social grouping was . . . an uneasy amalgam of aristocratic and mercantile elements. . . . The social documents we have just considered can help us to understand the particular senses in which Chaucer's contradictory experiences of his role were inherent in the role itself. . . . Given the transversal of this group of knights and esquires by conflicting vertical and horizontal allegiances, Chaucer nevertheless was situated at a more than ordinarily ambiguous place in this group. (10-11)