Abstract
In Book IV of Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century poem Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus and Troilus debate whether or not Troilus should “rape” Criseyde, using the word “rape” for nearly the first time in English literature. As Henry Ansgar Kelly and Christopher Cannon have shown, this discussion, as it unfolds, captures the ambiguous meanings of rape in the legal language of fourteenth-century England where rape (as it appears in medieval legal terminology in various forms of rapire in Latin or in its Old French forms) can refer to various events including abduction, forced coitus, or both.1 Although a host of critics (as various as John Fleming, Carolyn Dinshaw, David Aers, Jill Mann, and Louise Fradenburg) have established the significance of at least the threat of rape in the poem, what has yet to be explored fully are the ways in which the cultural formations determining how rape was understood in fourteenth-century England are foundational to the elusive and ambiguous character for which Criseyde is famous.2
Using two classical literary heroines as models, the essay explores how rape, in its various historical meanings, shapes the indeterminate subjectivity of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Criseyde.
“Now be ye kaught; now is there but we tweyne!
Now yeldeth yow, for other bote is ther non!” …
“Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte deere,
Ben yolde, ywis, I were now nought heere!”
—Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (Book III, 1207–8; 1210–11)
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Notes
See John Fleming, “Deiphoebus Betrayed: Virgilian Decorum, Chaucerian Feminism” Chaucer Review 21, no. 2 (1986): 182–99; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 28–64; David Aers, “Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society” (1979), in Critical Essays in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and His Major Early Poems, ed. C. David Benson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 128–48; Jill Mann, “Troilus’ Swoon,” (1980) in Benson, 149–63; Louise Fradenburg, ‘“Our owen wo to drynke’: Loss, Gender and Chivalry in Troilus and Criseyde” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, “Subgit to alle Poesye:” Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 88–106.
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 2; pp. 14–15.
Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989).
Mieke Bal analyzes the Book of Judges to show how patriarchy co-opts the meaning of the violated woman’s body for its own militaristic purposes. The body of the Levite’s concubine is cut into 12 pieces, which then become the motivation of the Israelite assault on the Benjamites. See Mieke Bal, Death and Dyssymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986) p. 127.
See Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy of Sex,’” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210. This review is a response to Levi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structure of Kinship. For a recent excellent discussion of both of these, see Dinshaw, 56–64.
The Greek text is taken from Anton Weihar’s Heimeran edition. The translation is by Richard Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper Collins, 1965). Line numbers are the same in each text and will be given in the body of the essay.
R. D. Williams, ed. The Aeneid of Virgil: Books 1–6 (London: Macmillan, 1972). The Latin text is taken from this edition and line numbers are given in the body of my text.
Grant Showerman, ed. and trans. Ovid: Heroides and Amores (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). The Latin text is taken from this edition and page numbers are given within the body of my text. Letter XVII, “Helen to Paris,” in Ovid’s Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell (London: Penguin Books, 1990). All quotations from this letter are taken from this edition and page numbers will be given in parentheses in the body of my text.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), Book IV, 547–49. All further quotations from this poem will be taken from this edition and book and line numbers will be cited within parentheses in the body of the text.
For preliminary discussions of the importance of the debates about clandestine marriage in this period, see R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); H.A. Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); J.B. Post, “Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster” in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 150–64; Charles Donahue, “The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Family History (1983) 8:144–58; Michael Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). For a discussion of the complexity of these issues in fourteenth-century England, see Christopher Cannon, “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release.”
For examples of these contradictory views of women see Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). For a general summary of commentaries on women, see my chapter “Medieval Views of Female Spirituality,” in Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). For a summary of positive theological views on marriage, see Kelly’s book, Love and Marriage.
St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God: Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1972), Book I, Chapter 16, p. 26.
Ibid., Book I, Chapter 19, p. 28.
For a discussion of the ways in which the legal principle of coverture shaped female subjectivity in late medieval England, see Elizabeth Fowler, “Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70 (1995): 760–92. For a discussion of “coverture” as a doctrine that becomes finalized only after the Middle Ages and that underestimates the complexity of the legal rights women did in fact enjoy in the Middle Ages, see Christopher Cannon “The Rights of Medieval English women: Crime and the Issue of Representation,” in Medieval Crime and Social Control, ed. David Wallace and Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 156–85.
For an overview of Renaissance debates about marriage, see Valerie Wayne’s introduction to her edition of Edmund Tilney’s The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
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© 2001 Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose
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Robertson, E. (2001). Public Bodies and Psychic Domains: Rape, Consent, and Female Subjectivity in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. In: Robertson, E., Rose, C.M. (eds) Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10448-9_11
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