After a content warning that the event would "discuss sensitive and potentially triggering topics including sexual assault," the National Archives of the United Kingdom posted the following announcement of and registration for a virtual launch of a special issue of the Chaucer Review, entitled Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: Rethinking the Record:
Few medieval records have received as much attention from literary scholars as a group of documents dating from May to July 1380 that involve Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne, the daughter of a London baker. At the heart of this group of records is a quitclaim of May 4, enrolled in the Close Rolls of the English Chancery, releasing Chaucer from “all manner of actions related to my raptus”. The word raptus, which in legal contexts can denote “rape,” “abduction,” and much of the spectrum lying between these terms, has challenged Chaucer scholars ever since Frederick J. Furnivall announced this find in 1873. The matter was given significant new impetus in 1993, when Christopher Cannon discovered a second quitclaim by Chaumpaigne – with the word raptus removed – enrolled in the plea rolls of the Court of King’s Bench a few days after the first. Cannon’s discovery has energised foundational strands of Chaucer studies, in particular feminist scholarship, over the last thirty years, but in this time no new documentary evidence has come to light.
NYPL
Now, new research into the medieval legal collections at The National Archives has uncovered two new life-records relating to the dispute of 1380 – including evidence of the original legal accusations brought against the poet – which offer a radically different understanding of the documentary evidence
More.
--Dan Ernst
