On Chaucer, Raptus, and the Physician’s Tale

ABSTRACT

This article argues both that the Physician’s Tale explicitly addresses the sexually threatening nature of employment for women, and that it offers a suggestive parallel to the situation as it may have unfolded between Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne, who in 1380 released Chaucer from her raptus: de raptu meo. Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale presents a chance to consider the ways Chaucer envisions both the mind of a rapist and rape culture in general, including especially what feminist philosopher Kate Manne calls “himpathy” and victim-blaming. In this tale, a churl presents a case in which he alleges abduction in order to commit abduction—for the purpose of rape. Chaucer’s many alterations to his sources present Virginia, the victim/protagonist, as what Judith M. Bennett has called a “singlewoman,” a fourteenth-century category of woman especially vulnerable to coercive labor laws under the Statute of Laborers. In this article, then, I show how this tale and its lessons about Chaucer’s own understanding of gendered labor, sexual assault, and discursive power challenge recent conclusions about the legal documents relating to Chaucer and Chaumpaigne.

KEYWORDS:

• Chaucer
• Chaumpaigne
• raptus
• Physician’s Tale
• Clerk’s Tale
• Man of Law’s Tale
• singlewomen

On Wednesday, 12 October, 2022, I opened Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the Physician’s Tale. Like so many, I do not teach this tale every time, even most times, I am lucky enough to teach Chaucer. But that semester, I had assigned it to my graduate students for the following day. As I re-read it, I was stunned: if this tale were a palimpsest, the term raptus would shimmer faintly behind it. In it, a churl presents a case in which he alleges abduction in order to commit abduction, expressly for the purpose of rape. The basis for this fictional case? A legal labor dispute. In the Physician’s Tale, I argue, Chaucer presents a legal case that functions solely as a ruse to enable sexual assault.

His narrative binds servitude with sexual abuse, and intrinsically so. He thought the connection, and the law’s role in facilitating it, so obvious that he did not bother to spell it out. Every alteration he makes to his sources amplifies this point: women’s labor and rape are often part of the same misogynistic package.

On Tuesday, 11 October 2022, as everyone reading this piece probably already knows, scholars released the findings of newly recovered legal documents relating to Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne and delineating a dispute arising from the Statute of Laborers (Roger and Sobecki 2022b).¹ The documents we now have illustrate how Chaucer and Chaumpaigne knew each other, and they reveal that Chaumpaigne left her employment, possibly earlier than she said she would and possibly (though not necessarily) breaking a contract to do so. Her former employer, Thomas Staundon, filed a complaint of trespass under the Statute of Laborers (Bennett 2010, 7–8, 12–13). Chaumpaigne breached her contract (maybe), and Staundon saw Chaucer as helping her do so. She went to work for Chaucer, where she would have been for about six months when, in May 1380, she filed a quitclaim (the “Furnivall quitclaim”) releasing Chaucer from her rape: de raptu meo.² Then, less than two months later, as Mary Flannery and Carissa Harris remind us, “Chaucer’s friend John Grove filed documents promising to pay ten pounds to Chaumpaigne. No reason for the payment was given” (2022).³

In terms of medieval law, raptus generally means rape or abduction, but very often the former, as Christopher Cannon outlines in a groundbreaking article on this issue that came out in 1993 (Cannon 1993; Dunn 2011; Green 2011, 2022; Waymack 2016–2023). Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki claim the documents they located in the National Archives afford a new way to think about raptus in the Furnivall quitclaim: as “representing the physical act of Chaumpaigne leaving [her former] service—using the language of ‘abduction’ to represent a physical transfer from one household to another” (Roger and Sobecki 2022a). They conclude that the 1379 document they have found and the labor dispute it introduces very likely exonerate Chaucer from the charge of rape.⁴ In the special volume of the Chaucer Review in which these findings were published, Samantha Katz Seal and Andrew Prescott both concur: Roger and Sobecki “have absolved Chaucer of raping Chaumpaigne, have cast clarity upon a subject we thought inevitably consigned to uncertainty and to the mists of the historical unknown” (Seal 2022, 487); the “raptus controversy [is] resolved” (Prescott 2022, 453). In an especially unfortunate turn-of-phrase, it was said that “the Western canon dodged a bullet” (Noah 2022). More recently, Eva von Contzen comments, “[w]hile I was revising this essay, the new evidence on Chaucer’s de raptu meo case was released. The accusation, Chaucer scholars have since learned, was not one of rape or sexual assault, but of a violation against the Statute of Laborers” (2023, 597).

But what we have learned about is not a set of new facts, but new documents. The phrase “new evidence” has come to stand in for Roger and Sobecki’s interpretation of these documents, which is up for debate. And Roger and Sobecki’s interpretation hinges at least in part on a false dichotomy: that Chaumpaigne and Chaucer were either involved in a legal labor dispute or a rape case. Chaucer’s own Physician’s Tale—and women’s experience of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace over the centuries—shows that it could very obviously have been both. That is to say: uncertainty remains, and resolution has not come (Bartlett 2023; Green 2022). As Flannery and Harris point out, “[a]lthough a handful of other records connected with this case have since come to light, none have clarified the meaning of raptus in the quitclaim” (emphasis added); Richard Firth Green has made this point time and again (2011, 2022). I agree.

In this article, I will argue that these documents and the “big reveal” in which we learned about them are illuminated by the very lessons the Physician’s Tale imparts about gendered labor, sexual assault, and discursive power—who holds that power, and what happens when that power is challenged. Before turning to the tale, I consider what these new documents can and cannot tell us. Over the course of this article, I draw from other tales in Chaucer’s corpus, mainly the Clerk’s Tale and Man of Law’s Tale, in order to emphasize the extent to which Chaucer himself, perhaps paradoxically, frequently depicts the ways in which the legal and archival record work to coerce and silence women. Whether he was ever guilty of rape, Chaucer was more alert than we have been to women’s vulnerable status, a topic he returns to repeatedly. In the Physician’s Tale— which offers a suggestive parallel to the situation as it may have unfolded between Chaucer and Chaumpaigne—he perhaps makes his most pointed intervention, showing how the judicial system (and the discursive power it marshals) enables and disguises as much as it alleviates women’s abuse.⁵

The Furnivall Quitclaim and De raptu meo

If plaudits followed the Zoom event, Roger and Sobecki nevertheless admitted on Twitter at the time that they did not have any other examples of raptus in legal cases associated with the Statute of Laborers.⁶ The examples Andrew Prescott gives in his essay about Chaumpaigne, of others who found themselves in legal crosshairs under this statute, do not invoke the language of raptus or anything like it (2022). Nevertheless raptus, when it appears as a noun and in this legal context, very often designates rape (Cannon 2000, 82; Green 2011, 2022). “De raptu meo” does in fact suggest rape or assault (though not whether Chaucer was guilty).⁷ As Cannon explains, most cases employing the noun raptus “unequivocally concer[n] forced coitus” (1993, 84). He also attests that he has “never found the noun raptus used in any case where it is explicitly clear that an abduction occurred without forced coitus” (88). More recently, Cannon observes that raptus is “a loaded term” (Schuessler 2022), and its appearance in the Furnivall quitclaim—the document Chaucerians have known about since 1873—remains troubling. It is still true, as Cannon argued in 2000, that we cannot be certain about the events that correspond to the Furnivall and Cannon quitclaims.

This use of raptus is distinct from the verb, rapere, which does often appear in cases of abduction, alongside language such as “vi et armis … rapuit et abduxit” (“with force and arms … he ravished and carried [her] away”). Cases employing the noun do not follow this formula and were usually initiated by the female victim (rather than, as in cases of abduction, by the family). This distinction is crucial: were this a case of abduction, the practice was for the family (or wronged employer, in this case Staundon) to file the rapere complaint. As T. F. T. Plucknett wrote in 1948, “if only abduction had been involved, then the release would have proceeded from the injured party, viz., the feudal lord, parent, husband or employer of Cecilia” (34). Green affirms that there is “nothing in the recent discovery that requires us to revise [Plucknett’s] assessment”; “[a]bduction cannot become the new orthodoxy” (2022, 10). Indeed, as Green makes clear, if the Furnivall and Cannon quitclaims also had to do with the Statute of Laborers dispute, it makes little sense that Staundon (the former employer) does not release Chaucer. Instead, Chaumpaigne herself is the one to release Chaucer of her raptus. This difficulty has not been explained, and it is an important one. After all, the formulation of the Furnivall quitclaim is what we might expect in a case of sexual assault—not in a case of abduction. Chaucer may have raped Chaumpaigne, and he may have not. But there is far more ambiguity here than recent discussions would seem to admit, and far less ambiguity or flexibility about what the term raptus denotes in the context of the Furnivall quitclaim.

These recent discussions are all predicated on the new knowledge that Chaucer and Chaumpaigne’s relationship was based on employment. As Baechle remarks, “[i]f, as Roger and Sobecki show us, the Chaumpaigne release concerns a labor dispute rather than a case of sexual assault, Chaucer the philogynist now appears liberated from the restraints of this accusation of [rape]” (2022, 465; emphasis added). And yet, Baechle’s piece goes on to illustrate the ways in which Roger and Sobecki present us with a false dichotomy. As she argues, women are often confronted with sexual harassment and assault in their working environments, and with respect to the Reeve’s Tale, Baechle invites us to “consider the ways that familiarity and access … make women vulnerable to assault and restrict their ability to seek justice” (470). The same sentence could easily be applied to Chaumpaigne and Chaucer. Harris makes this point even more emphatically: understanding Chaumpaigne in terms of “service,” she argues, requires us to reconsider how the “wenches” and “maydes” of the Canterbury Tales “are subject to assumptions about women’s labor and who owns it, how they embody gendered vulnerability, and how they are expected to subordinate their wills to those of others” (2022, 477); “[s]cholars note the high degree of sexual coercion and abuse inflicted on servant women by their employers, employers’ family members, and fellow servants” (478).

Indeed. To have a woman in your house as a ward, or as a servant, is to have her sexually available, the threat of rape ever present. While the recovered documents certainly allow us to understand more about how Chaucer and Chaumpaigne knew each other, then, they do not offer us the explanatory power that Roger and Sobecki implicitly (and explicitly) allow them. As feminist scholars working on servant culture know only too well, work life hardly protects women from rape and can even facilitate it, leaving women vulnerable to their employers (Baechle 2022, 470–3; Bennett 2010; Harris 2021). The new documents cannot explain away the possibility that, having been in his employ for several months, Chaumpaigne was raped by Chaucer.

Chaucer’s sources and the “Singlewoman”

At the very least, Chaucer himself was aware that legal documents can obfuscate as much as they reveal. Think of the Physician’s Tale as this (admittedly fictional) case might have been revealed in legal records. What if, instead of the story itself, we had only the legal documents to go on? How would we fill in the narrative details, and what would we think to be possible, probable, and impossible? Would we assume—would we take as fact?—that the case was really only about a labor dispute? This tale (among many others) affords a lesson both in victim-blaming and in what Kate Manne has called “himpathy”: “the way powerful and privileged boys and men who commit acts of sexual violence or engage in other misogynistic behavior often receive [more] sympathy and concern [than] their female victims” (2020, 5).⁸ It is difficult to imagine that, whether or not he raped Chaumpaigne, Chaucer would not have had his own history in mind as he engaged with and modified this popular narrative. In diverging from his sources, Chaucer highlights not only the circumstances of Virginia’s plight, but also Apius’s own guilt. The Physician’s Tale illustrates the extent to which men can render what is nefarious, if not innocuous, then legally justified. It also mirrors the coercive aims of the Statute of Laborers.⁹

This tale, and the recent archival revelations, illustrate the incredible discursive power of not only the legal system—a patriarchal system ultimately designed to exculpate men and allow them to retain power—but the archival system, too. It would seem that we still celebrate “masculine conquest in the archives and manly dispassion in historical writing” (Bennett 2006, 28–9). Nevertheless, the Physician’s Tale emphasizes what we should all already know: legal and archival documents do not have, in themselves, explanatory (or exculpatory) power (Dunn 2011, 85; Cannon 2000, 68–9). The stories we tell about them and the interpretative moves we make are therefore all the more critical. As Judith M. Bennett reminds us, historians (whether literary or otherwise) are “more than … reporter[s] of facts newly discovered; [we are] interpreter[s] of the facts as [we] see them” (2006, 14). But in the case of the recent archival discoveries, scholarly arguments about what these documents might mean have been presented as “facts newly discovered.” It has been especially interesting to see the many headlines proclaiming that new “documents” have cleared Chaucer of rape. Statements like this are both erroneous and rhetorically misleading, for the documents themselves have not done anything. According “documents” such a place of privilege both occludes the interpretive work required to exonerate Chaucer, and it has inevitably led to the overwhelming consensus that Chaucer almost certainly did not rape or sexually assault Chaumpaigne.

But in the Physician’s Tale, we find that sometimes, legal documents function as red herrings; sometimes, a labor case is not just a labor case. In fact, this tale makes it absolutely clear that, far from obviating sexual assault, both wardship and servitude can facilitate it. The parallels are imperfect: a one-to-one reading of this tale would put Chaucer in the position of Virginius. Nevertheless, Chaumpaigne releases Chaucer, not Staundon, from her raptus, affirming that Apius is the poet’s better parallel. The analogy need not be exact. Rather, the point I wish to make here is relatively simple: we are being asked to reinterpret raptus for the simple reason that Chaucer and Chaumpaigne were also involved in a labor case under Trespass on the Statute of Laborers. Such a narrative assumes that the context of labor and the particulars of Chaumpaigne’s case are able to explain away this relatively specific legal term (raptus). In short, we are being asked to accept a labor dispute as explaining away sexual assault.

Even apart from the legal evidence to the contrary, the Physician’s Tale demonstrates that we cannot agree with such an easy and even, it seems, appealing explanation.¹⁰ It is a peculiar story, seldom taught or even written about except as an exemplum (Middleton 1973; Allen 2005) or Chaucerian flop.¹¹ Its events are rapid in succession and befuddling. It features a virtuous knight, Virginius, and his daughter, Virginia, who embodies the fundamental meaning of her name: she is virginal, beautiful, virtuous, and temperate, so much so that Chaucer imagines Nature taking pride in this perfect creation. She is only fourteen years old. A local judge, Apius, sees and covets Virginia but knows that she will not submit to him. Spurred on by the devil, he enlists a co-conspirator to orchestrate Virginia’s legal (and labor-related) downfall, so that Apius might claim Virginia as his “warde” (i.e. take guardianship of her), thereby ensuring his easy access to her body. Virginius, her father, abhors the situation, and, to preserve her chastity and protect her from abuse, he kills her, instead.

Chaucer’s many alterations to his sources underscore the sexual threat of Apius’s so-called labor case and Virginia’s uniquely vulnerable status. While Lianna Farber argues that these changes call attention to “the idea of what it is that shapes a person … even to the point of agreeing that she should die” and therefore foreground “the way consent can be created” (2006, 130, 138), I submit that Chaucer’s Virginia is also presented as not-quite-yet able to choose. As has been often discussed, Chaucer’s additions and changes include the long passage on Virginia’s virtue, as well as “admonitions to parents and guardians; and the famous dialogue between father and daughter before her death” (Scala 2021, 255). Importantly, all other renditions of the Apius and Virginia narrative, whichever ones Chaucer was drawing from the most immediately, explicitly contextualize its unfolding action in terms of justice writ (mythically) large, politics, and even empire. Only Chaucer fails to do so. Only Chaucer “offers no such stable framework,” as Elizabeth Scala puts it (2015, 163). Scala argues that Chaucer may well be drawing as much from Gower as from Jean de Meun (and may not have known Livy, the source he cites, at all) (157–8, 162, 165–7, 179–80). The primary concern, both in the Roman de la Rose and in Livy, is with the wide-ranging consequences of judicial misconduct and corrupted power, which can undermine even an empire (Cooper 1989, 250–1). In the Roman, the story immediately follows Reason’s narrative of Saturn’s castration and the end of the Golden Age; she is illustrating to the Lover that justice can never substitute for love, precisely because power corrupts (and Apius has been corrupted). In Gower’s Confessio amantis, the focus is also overtly political: the story appears in Book 7, Gower’s own mirror for princes (1901). But in the Physician’s Tale, sexual assault in the guise of a labor case is not a metaphor for something else. The purported servitude of Virginia, which will facilitate Apius’s sexual access to her, is the point; Apius’s desire to abuse her is the point.

Chaucer also, unique among his sources and, as far as I can tell, overlooked by scholarship, presents Virginia as unambiguously single and unbetrothed. Bennett makes it clear that, under the Statute of Laborers, it was far easier for husbands to protect wives from compulsory service (and other infractions) than it was for parents, and that “singlewomen” were by far the most vulnerable (Bennett 2010, 34). The term “singlewomen,” a new category and word in the fourteenth century, “encompasses both women who would eventually marry and those who never would” (Bennett and Froide 1999, 2). As Bennett argues elsewhere, the “labour of these singlewomen, many of whom were young and strong, might have been particularly valuable, but they also predominated among compelled servants for the simple reason that their labour was more easily prised away from families” (Bennett 2010, 34).

Chaucer, it would seem, highlights and even capitalizes on a singlewoman’s vulnerability to claims of owed service, for in other accounts of the story, Virginia is affianced. Her betrothed, Icilius, assiduously fights on her behalf. In Livy, he “launches a long public protest” (Allen 2005, 58); in Gower, he prevents Apius from easily “fulfill[ing]” his lust (Confessio amantis 1901, 7.5148). There, Apius’s difficulty is not Virginia’s overwhelming virtue and her many friends, but that “sche stod upon Mariage;/A worthi kniht of gret lignage,/Ilicius” (7.5149–51). Gower underscores the problem Virginia’s engagement poses for Apius, repeating the noun “mariage” (7.5149, 5161, 5165, 5239) and emphasizing the circumstances (Virginius is leading a battalion) that have postponed the wedding. Of the other versions of this story, only the Roman fails to mention a fiancé. But Jean de Meun does not clarify that Virginia does not have a fiancé, as does Chaucer. Instead, and perhaps not surprisingly, given Jean’s explicit focus on Apius and on justice, Virginia is hardly mentioned. One imagines there was simply not time in his version to introduce Ilicius. In these sources and analogues, in other words, Virginia’s betrothed plays a critical part in providing some (ultimately ineffectual) protection, and in at least making life more difficult for Apius. More to the point, he exists (or, in Jean’s case, he is not said not to exist.)

The Physician’s Tale, however, takes great pains to illustrate Virginia’s single and unworldly status. The Physician indicates that while she may marry one day—Virginia may “lerne loore/Of booldnesse, whan she woxen is a wyf” (6.70–71)—she is not a wife yet, nor is there any fiancé on the immediate horizon. The tale explicitly juxtaposes the “perilous” knowledge that comes with wifely status (6.69) with Virginia’s “vertu,” “gentillesse” (6.54), and her wisdom in avoiding “feestes, revels, and … daunces” (6.65). Further emphasizing this point, in public, she goes out with her mother, “[a]s is of yonge maydens the manere” (6.120; emphasis added). So, too, the passage addressing childrearing, which is also unique to Chaucer, points back to Virginia’s fragility, her dependence on others for protection:

Ye fadres and ye moodres eek also,

Though ye han children, be it oon or mo,

Youre is the charge of al hir surveiaunce,

Whil that they been under youre governaunce. (6.93–96)

Though the narrator goes on to claim that Virginia herself “neded no maistresse” (6.106), this passage nevertheless stresses that she is still a child; she cannot fully protect herself. In sum, Chaucer alone gives us a Virginia whose youth, arresting beauty, and virtue render her particularly defenseless. Moreover, that Virginia’s person is inimical to counterfeits and counterfeiting only underscores her powerlessness, for the scheme that ends with her murder is entirely subtended by the counterfeiting of truth. I would suggest that all of these additions can be understood in the context of Apius’s threat to Virginia, and that we should consider her exposed status in terms of the “singlewoman,” particularly open to abuse.

Chaucer sets up a scenario, in other words, in which Virginia is ripe for exploitation. Her encomium simultaneously establishes her youth, desirability, virtue, and vulnerability, and, I argue, it accentuates both her coming vulnerability as a ward and her singlewomanhood. I cite this passage in full because all of its details are original to Chaucer, including Virginia’s unmarried status:

This mayde of age twelve yeer was and tweye,

In which that Nature hadde swich delit.

For right as she kan peynte a lilie whit,

And reed a rose, right with swich peynture

She peynted hath this noble creature,

Er she were born, upon hir lymes fre,

Where as by right swiche colours sholde be;

And Phebus dyed hath hire tresses grete

Lyk to the stremes of the burned heete.

And if that excellent was hire beautee,

A thousand foold moore vertuous was she.

In hire ne lakked no condicioun

That is to preyse, as by discrecioun.

As wel in goost as body chast was she,

For which she floured in virginitee

With alle humylitee and abstinence,

With alle attemperaunce and pacience,

With mesure eek of beryng and array.

Discreet she was in answeryng alway;

Though she were wis as Pallas, dar I seyn,

Hir facound eek ful wommanly and pleyn,

No countrefeted termes hadde she

To seme wys, but after hir degree

She spak, and alle hire words, moore and lesse,

Sownynge in vertu and in gentillesse. (6.30–54)

The passage gives us a character who is entirely vulnerable, innocent, and single, and whose characteristics correspond to that of the “singlewoman”: though Virginia is not yet working, her single status leaves her open to Apius’s and Claudius’s duplicity, which hinges on claiming that she owes them labor. Lest Virginia seem too young at fourteen to occupy this category, Roberta Krueger’s observations are imaginatively instructive: in French romance, words like meschine (girl) and pucele (maiden, virgin) correspond to the “singlewoman” (1999, 147–50). Many of these young women are still under the protection of their parents (Krueger 1999). Though Virginia still lives at home with her family, then, she is nonetheless arguably a member of the category “singlewoman”—and she is certainly vulnerable to becoming a ward. Apius, and indeed the entirety of the tale, treat her as though she were on the verge of entering “singlewomanhood,” if she were not there already. Her unmarried, single status is especially important to the tale’s construction of her as, at the least, “singlewoman”-adjacent: in almost every other version of the Apius and Virginia story, as I point out above, she is explicitly betrothed. Only in Chaucer’s version is her virtue and perfection so extreme as to render her especially vulnerable to duplicity, to “counterfeiting,” and only in Chaucer’s version does she lack the implicit protection of a husband-to-be, leaving her open to the abuse of the law in general, and (as Claudius and Apius would have it) labor law in particular.

Not only does Virginia’s near-perfection fail to save her, then, it leaves her even more exposed than she otherwise would be. At the same time, her native virtue also works as an enabling fiction, one that ostensibly gives her more power than Apius. In this way, even as the Physician’s Tale showcases Virginia’s goodness and inability to withstand a concentrated assault on her dignity, it also blames her for what happens. For example, in addition to highlighting Virginia’s wisdom, Chaucer implies that she is free in a way that Apius is not. First, he explicitly calls her “fre”: “Er she were born, upon hir lymes fre” (6.35), the Physician narrates. And second, as Scala has also pointed out, Virginia’s virtue is said to be “unconstreyned”:

Shamefast she was in maydens shamefastnesse,

Constant in herte, and evere in bisynesse

To dryve hire out of ydel slogardye.

…

And of hir owene vertu, unconstreyned,

She hath ful ofte tyme syk hire feyned,

For that she wolde fleen the compaignye

Where likly was to treten of folye,

As is at feestes, revels, and at daunces,

That been occasions of daliaunces.

Swich thynges maken children for to be

To soone rype and boold, as men may se. (55–68; emphasis added)

This passage at once renders Virginia both powerful and powerless. In it, the Physician reminds us that Virginia is young, a child of fourteen; but he also illustrates that Virginia’s goodness is generative. Because of it, she does not need help or guidance. Owing perhaps to the perfection of her making, Virginia’s goodness wells up and overflows without any instruction or impediment whatsoever. Thinking of Holly A. Crocker’s work on women and virtue, I would suggest that Virginia embodies precisely what Crocker argues about virtue throughout The Canterbury Tales: that in Chaucer’s fictional women, virtue is an embodied force, one in which the very characteristics that often leave women vulnerable (the need to be flexible, open, to exhibit endurance rather than active resistance) inspire Virginia’s careful avoidance of public scenes (Crocker 2019). Virginia almost behaves as though she is aware of her own fragility in a patriarchal system that does not admit of the kinds of virtue she displays and even cherishes.

And yet, even Virginia is blamed, in the end. In another passage Chaucer did not find in his sources, she entraps Apius; the corollary is that her unconstrained goodness endows her with freedom and even power over men like Apius, who cannot help himself. Chaucer’s version of the story, also unlike his sources, is almost preoccupied by Apius’s lechery. We learn when he developed it, why, and how Virginia causes this onslaught of evil-feeling. In a move that tracks with himpathy—displacing the blame for a man’s actions anywhere else, including on his victim—Chaucer describes Apius’s lust as inflamed by the devil, leaving Apius with no choice but to act as he does:

And so bifel this juge his eyen caste

Upon this mayde, avysynge hym ful faste,

…

Anon his herte chaunged and his mood,

So was he caught with beautee of this mayde,

And to hymself ful pryvely he sayde,

‘This mayde shal be myn, for any man!’

Anon the feend into his herte ran,

And taughte hym sodeynly that he by slyghte

The mayden to his purpos wynne myghte.

For certes, by no force ne by no meede,

Hym thoughte, he was nat able for to speede;

For she was strong of freendes, and eek she

Confermed was in swich soverayn bountee

That wel he wiste he myghte hire nevere wynne

As for to make hire with hir body synne. (6.123–38; emphasis added)

Chaucer’s Apius is suffused with himpathy, implying that none of what happens is quite his fault. For if this passage convicts Apius of his lecherous and sinful intent, it also manages to exonerate him, displacing Apius’s responsibility both onto Virginia and the devil. Even the beginning of the passage does this exculpatory work: “bifel” is, in the Chaucerian corpus, a word designating what is so far beyond our control that we cannot avoid or help it.

The excuse for his behavior might run something like this: he is not taken with lechery until he sees her, at which point immediately (“anon”) his “heart changed.” In this version of events, as Thomas Prendergast argues, Virginia’s beauty, and not Apius, is to blame (Prendergast 2018). This is in direct contrast to Gower’s Apius, who, upon hearing of Virginia’s “fame” (7.5140), can think only of her, setting his own heart “afyre” (7.5143). There, even the story of Virginia is sufficient to incite his ill-will, and Gower presents neither her nor the devil as indirectly responsible for Apius’s lust or actions. But in Chaucer, both Virginia’s beauty and the devil help Apius along, the devil stoking and facilitating his desire. Transfixed by Virginia, whose very person has altered Apius’s heart, he determines she will be his—and “anon” the devil runs into his heart.

The moment is redolent of the fiend who influences the would-be rapist knight and murderer of Hermengyld in the Man of Law’s Tale. There, too, the narrator displaces the male character’s responsibility. In fact, that stanza even begins with Satan, who is so annoyed by Custance’s “perfeccioun” (2.583) that he:

caste anon how he myghte quite hir while,

And made a yong knyght that dwelte in that toun

Love hire so hoote, of foul affeccioun,

That verraily hym thoughte he sholde spille,

But he of hire myghte ones have his wille. (2.584–88; emphasis added)

In both cases, the threat of sexual violence is Satan’s fault—and in both cases, Satan moves quickly (anon); he is integral to the crimes the young knight and Apius commit (or try to). Apius invokes this immediacy in his ruling, too: “I deeme anon this cherl his servant have” (6.199; emphasis added). So too, Claudius himself hurries to the court to put his false case: he comes at “a ful greet pas” (6.164), or rapidly.

This section works, if not to exculpate Apius, then to suggest that he has lost control of his own actions and is therefore not entirely responsible for them. In this instance, that is, Chaucer gives us a character whose impulse to rape is not precisely his own; the unspoken question almost seems to be, how could it be? Who could or would do such a thing of his own will? Apius is beset by lust quickly; he determines his desire quickly; the fiend enters his heart quickly: he runs. Such speed would seem to leave little room for measured thought. “It all happened so quickly,” one imagines Apius saying. And indeed, the devil’s involvement enables Apius’s scheming (which again happens quickly: “suddenly” [6.131]), almost suggesting by implication that without this evil assistance, Apius would be left hapless, unable to do any harm, as indeed he would also have been had he never seen Virginia in the first place. Instead, he realizes that it will be impossible to succeed in his aims without some kind of duplicity and foments a plan. Virginia is too virtuous, too good—and she has too many friends.

This latter point is an interesting one, acknowledging as it does that in spite of Virginia isolating herself a bit, staying away from parties and so on, she nevertheless has powerful friends who might defend her. Might this correspond to Prescott’s hypothesis that perhaps Cecily Chaumpaigne was of higher status, and better connected, than we had assumed her to be (2022)? Might this correspond to the high-status friends Chaucer himself may have entreated to appear on the quitclaim releasing him from her raptus, or to John Philpot and Richard Morel, whom Green has surmised may have been Chaumpaigne’s friends, not Chaucer’s (Green 2011, 277; Flannery and Harris 2022; Plucknett 1948)? Regardless of whether or not this moment—suggestive, hardly definitive—has any real-life parallels at all, the entire section suggests the extent to which the narrator depicts Apius as out of his depth, unable to ensure his possession of Virginia, who is protected by her circumstances, by her cleaving to virtue. And yet, as I have also been arguing, her virtue and single status leave her particularly exposed, too. Beautiful and virtuous women push men to do things beyond their own human capabilities; these men can hardly be said to be responsible, the reasoning goes. The devil made them do it.

Servitude, sexual assault, and clerkly churls

Chaucer’s alterations to his source material thereby showcase the extent to which women bear the blame for the ills that befall them. His changes also definitively illustrate the intertwined nature of the law, labor, and sexual abuse. And indeed, legal language pervades the false plea that Apius’s churl, Claudius, makes on behalf of a would-be rapist:

This false cherl cam forth a ful greet pas,

And seyde, ‘Lord, if that it be youre wille,

As dooth me right upon this pitous bille,

In which I pleyne upon Virginius;

And if that he wol seyn it is nat thus,

I wol it preeve, and fynde good witnesse,That sooth is that my bille wol expresse.’

…

 Virginius cam to wite the juges wille,

And right anon was rad this cursed bille;

The sentence of it was as ye shul heere:

 ‘To yow, my lord, sire Apius so deere,

Sheweth youre povre servant Claudius

How that a knyght, called Virginius,

Agayns the lawe, agayn al equitee

Holdeth, expres agayn the wyl of me,

My servant, which that is my thral by right,

Which fro myn hous was stole upon a nyght,

Whil that she was ful yong; this wol I preeve

By witnesse, lord, so that it nat yow greeve.

She nys his doghter nat, what so he seye.

Wherfore to yow, my lord the juge, I preye,

Yeld me my thral, if that be youre wille.’

Lo, this was al the sentence of his bille. (6.164–90)

This claim is couched in terms of abduction and labor, suggesting that Apius’s object of desire (Virginia) has in fact been stolen, that she is, in fact, Claudius’s indentured servant. The solution to this dilemma—wardship—is one that underscores Virginia’s powerlessness in a system of hegemonic misogyny. As Custance puts it in the Man of Law’s Tale that “[w]ommen are born to thraldom and penance/And to been under mannes governance” (2.286–7). There, Custance faces the racist, misogynistic, and imperialist dictates of her position as daughter of the Roman Emperor: she will be traded to the Sultan of Syria in exchange for spreading Christianity, whiteness, and, implicitly, the Roman Empire, too (Heng 2003, 181–237). But in the Man of Law’s Tale, Custance does not speak for herself alone, nor does she speak only for women who are traded precisely because they are in positions of power—but for all women. Custance registers that every woman is subjected to and imprisoned by the whims of men. Seen in this light, the “cherl” of the Physician’s Tale only articulates a reality that reverberates throughout the Canterbury Tales. Even women who are not literally in positions of servitude are in positions of servitude, even women who are noble, as the Man of Law’s Tale and Clerk’s Tale outline so clearly. After all, Griselde is a marquess; and yet, she is subjected to Walter’s testing so much so that she is in a sense his “thral.”¹²

Even more importantly for my purposes, however, the passage from the Physician’s Tale delineates how, at least in Chaucer’s fiction, a labor case could underwrite the threat and plan of sexual assault. This churl is the would-be rapist judge’s accomplice, and his claim is that Virginia is his servant, stolen from him against the law and all equity. Claudius leans heavily on the use and misuse of the law, and the passage implicitly invokes the Statute of Laborers, too: Virginius is said to hold Virginia “[a]gayns the lawe, agayn al equitee” (6.181); Virginia is Claudius’s “thral by right”; she “was stole” from him (6.183–84).¹³ But Claudius’s assertion collapses sexual assault and abduction: the churl claims theft in order to commit theft, of a person—with the direct intention of enabling sexual assault. Teasing apart abduction and rape would be, in this case, virtually impossible. As Cannon asks, “[i]f raptus may mean ‘abduction,’ then what does abduction mean?” (2000, 69n6). Even if one were to argue that in the Physician’s Tale, “stole” means specifically and only “abduct,” the wider purpose of the churl’s “bille” is abundantly clear.

And indeed, the term “bille” appears four times in the Physician’s Tale, all in this passage; it appears only four other times in the entirety of the Canterbury Tales. In the Friar’s Tale, “bille” designates the writ of summons the summoner uses when he attempts to threaten and blackmail an elderly widow (3.1586). In the Merchant’s Tale, it describes both Damian’s petition asking for May’s pity (and prompting their bawdy tryst) (4.1937, 1952), and a petition of Venus (1971). In each instance, “bille” designates some kind of written and binding agreement or formal plea.¹⁴ The corollary seems to be that one must respond to a “bille”; it is possessed of more formality and gravity than a request. One is not allowed simply to ignore it. Of course the widow in the Friar’s Tale says no, but nevertheless, in presenting his writ as a “bille,” the summoner clearly intends to foreclose that possibility, to render any decision moot. In this way, “bille” obviates choice, or at least it is meant to obviate choice. It is a bit like chocolate with an unwelcome surprise inside: on the outside is “bille.” Bite in and you discover “submit,” instead, the unwanted center in the middle. The word presumes submission as a matter of course.

In the Physician’s Tale, the word “bille” and its repetition stress this coercive power, even the coercive power of the legal system, which enables Claudius’s illegitimate and mendacious claim to Virginia in the first place. Importantly, this claim does not need to be a violent one: as Cannon argues in general, and is clear in this tale, Chaucer is interested in the totality of what constitutes consent, and in the conditions of an “unfree will” (Cannon 2000, 81). Coercion and subterfuge are key, not violence. As if we could forget, the term “bille” jolts us again and again, highlighting the ways in which the judicial system not only fails to protect the vulnerable, but strips them of the ability to choose or to consent while actively exposing them to harm.¹⁵ What is more, rhymed with “wille” three times, I would suggest that this pairing (“bille/wille”) implies enforced consent and the “unfree will,” recalling the many appearances of “wille” and “stille” in both the Man of Law’s Tale and especially The Clerk’s Tale, wherein this end-rhyme illuminates Griselde’s superhuman self-restraint, the subordination of her own person to Walter’s increasingly unhinged demands and actions. Cannon points out that “canon law on marriage was everywhere alive to the ways ‘force’ and ‘fear’ could make the will unfree” (2000, 81); both are at work in the Clerk’s Tale and in the Physician’s Tale.

That is, “stille” corresponds to “bille” in that these words designate a kind of incapacitating and coerced assent, the necessity of not fighting back because one cannot fight back; one can only agree, or one is only supposed to agree. Griselde is “stille” because Walter’s marriage proposal demands not only her acquiescence to his every desire but her emotional consent, too. She is prohibited from revealing any resistance whatsoever:

“I seye this: be ye redy with good herte

To al my lust, and that I frely may,

As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte,

And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day?

And eek whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne sey nat ‘nay,’

Neither by word ne frownyng contenance?” (4.351–6)

This passage illustrates the extent to which Walter wants to possess her feelings and thoughts as well as her physical person. He does not demand that she simply acquiesce to his will, but that she do so “with good herte”; she is not to complain, but even more so, she is not to reveal her feelings inadvertently by a “frownyng contenance.”

That is, like “wille/bille” in the Physician’s Tale, “wille/stille” in the Clerk’s Tale calls attention to how men capitalize on women’s unfreedom, manipulating and even shaping every available discourse to facilitate their desires, however base. Though she agrees to Walter’s demands, it hardly seems a stretch to imagine that Griselde’s will is unfree from the beginning. She answers Walter “quakynge for drede” and affirms that she will “nevere willyngly,/In werk ne thoght I nyl yow disobeye,/For to be deed, though me were looth to deye’ ” (4.358, 362–4; emphasis added). But does she really have a choice? Later, when her eldest child is taken, Walter’s sergeant confirms Griselde’s pliancy, narrating for Walter both Griselde’s “wordes and hire cheere” (4.576)—that is, focusing both on Griselde’s obedience and on her countenance, the outward manifestation of her inner feeling. Throughout this section, the end-rhyme “stille/wille” designates Griselde’s quiet endurance¹⁶—her choices are radically constrained. The first appearance of the couplet corresponds to the arrival of Walter’s sergeant, who, when he knows “his lordes wille,/Into the chambre he stalked hym ful stille” (4.524–5). These lines imbue “stille” with sinister power: like the “bille” of the Physician’s Tale, “stille” corresponds to an implacable threat, one Griselde cannot keep out. Her own answering stillness, in this context, aligns her with a world in which she does not have the capacity to maneuver: “And as a lamb she sitteth meke and stille,/And leet this crueel sergeant doon his wille” (4.538–39). While these lines confer on Griselde a manner of choice—she “lets” the sergeant take her child—they also reveal her fundamental lack of freedom. She sits “as a lamb,” a small, juvenile animal hardly able to withstand the brute physical force of the sergeant. In this context, what can she really allow, or disallow? In both instances, stillness facilitates Walter’s will, just as Claudius’s bill facilitates Apius’s will.¹⁷

These two issues—women’s low status and men’s abuse of both physical and discursive power—underwrite women’s vulnerability in heterosexist systems of power, systems that also animate the discursive commitment to exculpating Chaucer from rape. The churl’s “bille” demonstrates that it does not matter whether a claim to ownership is legitimate if it is presented that way. Legal documents wield immense discursive power, and the legal system provides the perfect (coercive) cover. As the tale’s ending demonstrates so conclusively, Virginia’s own “wille” is irrelevant to the “bille’s” outcome:

‘I deeme anon this cherl his servant have;

Thou [Virginius] shalt no lenger in thyn hous hir save.

Go brynge hire forth, and put hire in oure warde.

The cherl shal have his thral, this I awarde.’ (6.199–202; emphasis added)

Chaucer designates Claudius a “cherl,” thereby connecting him with the other “cherls” in the Canterbury Tales, characters who in many instances conspire to rape, assault, or otherwise “seduce” women. As Crocker has argued, this behavior amounts to “cherl masculinity” (2007, 2008): a system of toxic brotherhood predicated on the orchestrated and systemic abuse of women. Misogyny is the glue holding these men together. Prendergast has most recently discussed the manuscript variation in this tale—some manuscript copies describe Claudius as a “clerk,” not a “cherl.” Prendergast argues that the “focus in Corpus, Harley, and thirty-two other manuscripts is on a clerkish attempt to rewrite a ‘virginal’ book rather than a churlish attempt to possess Virginia” (2018, 160).

But I would submit that the difference between “clerk” and “churl” is immaterial and that emphasizing it dismisses the threat to Virginia’s person (rape, murder). Both Crocker and Harris have demonstrated the extent to which “churl” and “fellow” masculinity extends to and includes—maybe even emanates from—clerks (Crocker 2007, 2008; Harris 2021, 26–66). As Crocker, Harris, and Baechle point out so clearly, Aleyn and John in the Reeve’s Tale are clerks who act on their “churlish” interest in possessing women (Baechle 2022; Breuer 2008; Crocker 2007, 2008; Harris 2021). It is only too easy to understand the judicial passages in the Physician’s Tale in the context of churl or fellow masculinity, wherein (as Harris outlines in her book) one man helps his friend, his “bro,” commit rape, or at least try to. The same thing is true in the manuscript copies that describe Claudius as a “clerk.” Apius, Claudius, and clearly Virginius all understand this only too well. They know that, in taking possession of Virginia as his “warde,” Apius gains sexual possession of her: she is his “awarde,” as this rhyming couplet suggests. If, as Corinne Saunders comments, “it is precisely safe guardianship … that Appius’s action threatens” (2001, 280), the legal flexibility of guardianship nevertheless disempowered many wards at best, leaving some to be “treated as chattels” (Waugh 1988, 223). And in any case, stealing Virginia (one possible translation of raptus) is so sexually threatening that Virginius murders his own child rather than handing her over. He knows what this all means, and we should, too.

As for Apius, he has already planned the outcome. He is, after all, using a legal document in a labor dispute to orchestrate his sexual access to Virginia, which he knows he otherwise cannot get. Just as suggestive is Apius’s use of the term “warde”: “Go brynge hire forth, and put hire in oure warde” (201; emphasis added). Apius claims that he will bring Virginia into his house and act as her guardian. This is of course both a lie and a euphemism. For Virginia, servitude and guardianship mean vulnerability and powerlessness, rendering her, like other servant women, “uniquely vulnerable to violation” (Harris 2021, 478). According to Chaucer, there is no protection here. Wardship enables rather than shields Virginia from exploitation. The extent to which a labor dispute could be euphemistic for something far more nefarious is abundantly clear.

Misreading the Physician’s Tale?

Unsurprisingly, Chaucer’s Host completely misses the point, lamenting that “[h]ire beautee was hire deth, I dar wel sayn” (VI 297). Scholars have sometimes echoed the Host, blaming Virginia’s near perfection for her downfall. Prendergast makes this argument perhaps the most extensively, casting Virginia as an “aesthetical object” (150), an “image” whose “irresistible” beauty “seduce[s]” Apius (2018, 158). Arguments centering Virginia’s metaphorical significance in this way fail to identify the misogynistic violence at the tale’s center and flirt with the habit of blaming women and girls for their own rapes and murders. Lewd men like Apius are, after all, apt to “misread,” leading to “misunderstandings that can be morally perilous” (157). But characterizing Apius’s desire as misguided or misplaced (Scala 2015, 165)—as fundamentally a misreading, a term both Scala and Prendergast apply to this tale and its fictional environs (Scala 2015, 156, 173)—is implicitly to excuse him, and by extension men who rape, from their behavior, displacing this blame onto the dehumanized “aesthetical objects” who command their attention.

Prendergast’s reading also requires picking and choosing from the contradictory information about the origins of Apius’s lust. On the one hand, we are told that Apius only becomes lecherous after and because he sees Virginia—information Prendergast emphasizes and privileges (2018, 153). On the other, the tale also includes the detail that the people know this about Apius already: he is known to be a lecher. Therefore, everyone in the tale suspects that Apius’s wardship and servitude designate sexual availability and abuse:

For knowen was the false iniquitee.

The peple anon had suspect in this thyng,

By manere of the cherles chalangyng,

That it was by the assent of Apius;

They wisten wel that he was lecherus.

For which unto this Apius they gon

And caste hym in a prisoun right anon,

Ther as he slow himself … (6.262–69)

This passage makes it clear that the people are suspicious because they know, by the churl’s so-called bill, that Apius is the prime mover in this case. They know this partly because “[t]hey wisten wel that he was lecherus”; Apius’s behavior is not unexpected. Prendergast is skeptical of this information, however, which “seems at odds with the earlier assertion in the tale that it was Virginia’s beauty which converted [Apius] to lechery” (2018, 153). Indeed it is.

But why accept the first account of Apius—that he only becomes lecherous after he sees Virginia—as the right one? What if the people’s reading is exactly right? What if we considered the people to be very good readers indeed, rather than misreaders? For presented with a legal case, one turning on labor and a servant’s obligations, they are suspicious: they realize that this case is not about, or only about, a dispute over a “stole[n]” servant. Chaucer clearly realizes this, too. I would submit that these people are far better readers than we have been, in our hasty willingness not to be similarly cautious about what the new legal documents do or do not allow us to say. Of course, unlike these people, we do not have information definitively showing that Chaucer was, like Apius, “lecherus.” Or do we? What is the Furnivall quitclaim if not at the least suggestive of Chaucer’s possible attitude to the women in his life whom he knew? What is his poetry, suffused as it is with rape and jokes at women’s expense? If Chaucer was alive to women’s oppression, he was willing to capitalize on it, too.

Moreover, this is hardly the first time that a Canterbury Tale has presented us with alternative versions of a knowable reality. The Man of Law’s Tale, for instance, consistently allows for the differences between what the Man of Law asserts and what the characters themselves say. There, as but one example, the Sowdanesse herself asserts her desire to cleave to the Islamic faith (2.330–43), for leaving it will result in “thraldom to oure bodies and penance,/And afterward in helle to be drawe” (2.338–9). But the Man of Law convicts her, a “feyned womman” (2.362), of murdering the colonialist Christians “[f]or she hirself wolde al the contree lede” (2.434). According to the Man of Law, she is not concerned about religious fidelity. Instead, she is motivated by unfeminine, even satanic, ambition. Which version are we to believe? Accepting the Man of Law’s gloss on her actions would radically change critical interpretations of the tale. It seems far too easy to understand such moments as “misreading” or sloppy narrative. Instead, the Canterbury Tales consistently illustrates the difficulty of assessing causation, of assessing what is true, and of the extent to which people justify even the most extravagantly cruel judgments and actions. Chaucer’s poetry reminds us of—is even animated by—the notion that intention (entente) is not an easily knowable thing.

If we understand the tale as I am suggesting we should, the earlier passage attempting to account for Apius’s behavior is the more discordant, the more misogynistic, a narrative enabling men’s misbehavior in a world that expects it. Indeed, if we allow that the people are right, that exculpatory passage, in which the devil takes charge and leads the way, becomes another instance of the many things we will (and do) say to exonerate men who rape from taking responsibility for what they have done: “anon his herte chaunged and his mood,/So was he caught with beautee of this mayde”; “Anon the feend into his herte ran” (6.126–7, 130; emphasis added). As I have already suggested above, Apius is represented as having an immediate change wrought by Virginia’s beauty. In the language of hunting and disempowerment, she “catches” him, or at the least her beauty does. The implication is that Apius, not Virginia, is powerless: he is caught, trapped, threatened, even. Indeed, Apius focuses on her strength—in relationships (“strong of freendes”), and in virtue—thereby underscoring his (and Chaucer’s) narrative of helplessness. What is more, the scene preceding this one relays the misogynistic axiom that virtuous women by definition “fleen the compaignye/Where likly was to treten of folye,” or, as Chaucer specifies two lines later, even more ominously, “daliaunces” (6.63–4, 66). It follows that only unvirtuous women fail to do so; they expose themselves to harm. Therefore, when Virginia “upon a day” goes into town with her mother (6.118–20), we may expect events to unfold precisely as they do. She does so “[a]s is of yonge maydens the manere” (6.120), a line suggesting that in failing to stay at home as is her practice, Virginia is behaving as other young women do—and that this behavior invites the ultimately deadly attention she gets. She wore a short skirt. She was out too late. She asked for it. In Apius’s case: she was just too beautiful; I could not help myself; the devil made me do it.

Similarly, Prendergast’s nimble reading of medieval aesthetics participates in absolving men of their abuse: beauty destroys the beautiful. It is not Apius. It is Virginia herself whose incandescent virtue ensures her end. But as Prendergast allows, Chaucer’s tale involves not an “image … but a living girl” (2018, 153). This is precisely the point. Seen from Virginia’s perspective, her death is surely not the result of a “misunderstanding” or “misreading.” If Farber is ultimately after something different, she also treats Virginia as a symbol: “[t]he young woman, whom all recognize as having little power over the fate of her own body, is in this case the proper allegorical embodiment of men, who, Chaucer seems to say, do not have as much power as they think they do” (2006, 139). But Apius’s power ensures Virginia’s end. Though he ultimately dies, too, his power is substantially different.

Of course Apius does not want the right things. But not wanting the right things is, one might argue, one of patriarchy’s primary animating forces: wanting something one should not, that is, and subsequently orchestrating whatever one must, discursively, ideologically, violently, in order to both obtain it and ipso facto justify that conquest, that achievement. Indeed, the idiosyncratic features of Chaucer’s tale of Apius and Virginia illustrate this animating principle in motion. Put more simply, his departures from Jean and Gower (and Livy) underscore what I have been arguing is the tale’s dual focus: first, the ways in which men recast their desires, however depraved or abusive, in exemplary or justified terms; and second, the ways in which even the most virtuous of women cannot protect themselves, no matter how hard they may try.

Exonerating Chaucer and the ending of the Physician’s Tale

The end of the Physician’s Tale allows that Apius (like the murderous “yong knyght” in the Man of Law’s Tale [2.585]) pays the price for his crimes, committing suicide. But Virginia is already dead; local suspicion cannot save her life, and the tale’s moral—“Forsaketh synne, er synne yow forsake” (6.286), has eluded critical interpretation. In the context of Chaucer, Chaumpaigne, the legal suit brought under the Statute of Laborers, and the Furnivall quitclaim, might the seemingly inexplicable ending of the tale obliquely refer to Chaucer’s sense of his own culpability? Scala points out that this ending brings us back to Apius and to his misdirected desire (2015, 164–5, 185–7). But in some ways, the tale was never about anything but Apius in the first place. It is not difficult, in Chaucer’s version of this narrative, to understand the opening encomium to Virginia’s perfection as affirming Apius’s inability to do anything but orchestrate a legally enabled kidnapping. Virginia is, after all, Nature’s very best work and requires no instruction. Who could possibly be expected to resist? Even so, there are consequences:

Heere may men seen how synne hath his merite.

Beth war, for no man woot whom God wol smyte

In no degree, ne in which manere wyse;

The worm of conscience may agryse

Of wikked lyf, though it so pryvee be

That no man woot therof but God and he.

For be he lewed man, or ellis lered,

He noot how soone that he shal been afered.

Therfore I rede yow this conseil take:

Forsaketh synne, er synne yow forsake. (6.277–86; emphasis added)

The passage both applies to Apius and does not, for as I have argued above, even before the spectacularly violent ending, everyone knows about Apius’s disposition and plan. It is hardly “so pryvee … /[t]hat no man woot therof but God and he.” Indeed, it is public, and so is the subsequent reckoning.

Chaucer’s situation with Chaumpaigne was not so public, and whether or not he was guilty, it can be allowed that many men do bad things for which there is never any comeuppance—for which only God, or karma, or the universe, or nothing, keeps the score. Certainly one of these men may have been Chaucer. In fact, the beginning of the tale bears out my suggestion that its ending may offer an implicit commentary on Chaucer’s own experience. There, in the childrearing section, Chaucer includes a passage that might seem discordant at first glance:

A theef of venysoun, that hath forlaft

His likerousnesse and al his olde craft,

Kan kepe a forest best of any man.

Now kepeth wel, for if ye wole, ye kan.

Looke wel that ye unto no vice assente,

Lest ye be dampned for youre wikke entente;

For whoso dooth, a traitour is, certeyn.

And taketh kep of that that I shal seyn:

Of alle tresons sovereyn pestilence

Is whan a wight bitrayseth innocence. (6.83–92)

Linda Lomperis understands this passage as evidence of the “Physician’s own desperate attempt to put an end to … unabashedly bodily behavior” (1993, 25). Taken together with the ostensibly jarring ending of the Physician’s Tale, and with the Second Nun’s Tale—on which more in a moment—we might understand this passage differently, as anticipating the violation that threatens Virginia, and that Chaumpaigne may have suffered, too. The passage directs parents and adults to keep children well, forestalling vice for their protection; its advice tracks broadly with passages in confessional literature on chastising one’s children and servants (Bartlett 2022, 204–8). And yet, its language invokes the theft (“theef”) informing Claudius’s bill; it also employs the language January uses to describe his ideal wife in the Merchant’s Tale: “ ‘Bet is,’ quod he, ‘a pyk than a pykerel,/And bet than old boef is the tendre veel” (4.1419–20; emphasis added). January, to be sure, is “likerous.” I do not wish to make too much of these parallels, but the language of hunting and meat is, surely, suggestive of sexual pursuit and misogynistic innuendo—of the churl or fellow masculinity underwriting moments like these (Crocker 2007, 2008; Harris 2021). If she rebels as she is able, May is also treated, in the Merchant’s Tale, as chattel, as a good that can be passed around. In implicitly presenting Virginia, too, as meat, the passage in the Physician’s Tale foreshadows its end, the harm that can come to women when men like Apius betray innocence.

We will never know whether this ending refers to Chaucer’s own historical situation, in which his own—to coopt Scala’s terms here—misguided desire may nearly have landed him in trouble. Or, to put it more pointedly: Chaumpaigne released Chaucer de raptu meo. What if she had not? Whatever the charge, and whatever happened, perhaps Chaucer sees in Apius a near miss, a warning for others. Here, I find another parallel in the Canterbury Tales to be instructive. John C. Hirsch has argued that we might consider the Physician’s Tale to be “virtually a modern and secular rewriting of the Second Nun’s” (1993, 390); and Cannon hypothesizes the Second Nun’s Tale as “some kind of pious reparation for wrong done to Cecily Chaumpaigne” (2000, 87), in line with others who have discussed the Physician’s Tale as a kind of secular hagiography (Mann 1991, 143–6; Patterson 1991, 368–9; Saunders 2001). If we allow that the Physician’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale are in some ways connected, and if we allow for the possibility that the Second Nun’s Tale is a kind of indirect (and certainly insufficient) reparation, it does not seem like such a stretch to envision the Physician’s Tale as yet another moment in which Chaucer explores the ramifications of a system that protected him from any consequences for whatever he may or may not have done.

Even more important than the possibility of this other parallel, though, is Cannon’s broader point: “[t]he truly general importance of Chaucer’s thinking about the definitional problems posed by the Chaumpaigne release is best approached … through a much more simple connection between the matter of the release and the matter of Chaucer’s writing” (2000, 87).¹⁸ Put another way, the narrative sense we make of the recently recovered legal documents would do well to take a cue from Chaucer’s own poetry, and consider that perhaps in the case of Chaumpaigne, as in many of the Canterbury Tales, we are not meant to excuse Chaucer. Certainly, Apius is not ultimately excused, not in the end, though he is implied not to have been entirely at fault, either.

I am left musing about the field’s conversations in the days and even months following the public revelation of the National Archives find, and the ways in which its gatekeeping mirrors the judicial world Chaucer was commenting on. The orchestration of the “big reveal” was itself exhausting, as was being treated once again to masculine assurances that a long-dead poet cannot have been a rapist; that the legal records show it. That it was unreasonable to be asking questions, or even, as an article in the New Yorker incredibly put it, to be “tut-tutt[ing]” the “new evidence” (Acocella 2023). Misogyny aside, one cannot “tut-tut” evidence, which does not stand on its own but requires interpretation. When I cracked the spine of Jill Mann’s Penguin edition the morning after the 11 October Zoom reveal, I was bone tired. But re-reading the Physician’s Tale helped to remind me that uncertainty is the point; the assumptions we make when we interpret and think through any new piece of evidence is the point. I would hazard to say that Chaucer thought so, too. Arguments are always, themselves, narratives—narratives inevitably based on our own implicit biases and assumptions about what we find. An interpretation of new documents—however astounding those new documents may be—is not the equivalent of a factual account. I opened this article by wondering what we would make of the Physician’s Tale if legal documents were all that survived of it, and it is worth repeating that thought experiment. If nothing else, it reminds us that the narrative underlying a document (imaginary, in this case) might be radically different than we suppose. It is, for us, hidden. As Green recently observed to me about the Plea Rolls of medieval common law, legal documents are often “frustratingly silent about much of the human drama that is generally associated with civil litigation” (private correspondence).

Chaucer knew this axiom applied to more than the law. Interlaced throughout his poetry is an abiding interest in what remains hidden, whether by accident or design—an abiding interest in the operations not only of entente, but also of “fals and soth compouned” (The House of Fame 2109). One might even say that the Chaucerian corpus presents entente as a kind of inevitable “fals and soth compouned”: our own entente often remains a mystery, let alone that of someone else. Prising apart “fals and soth” is not always possible. The distance between us, and between us and those whose medieval documents we read and parse, is sometimes a chasm. In the Squire’s Tale Chaucer envisions a solution, presenting magical gifts that would allow the one who wears or uses the ring and mirror, particularly, to know the hearts and minds of those with whom they interact. Only magic, Chaucer seems to say, could penetrate the frustrating silence of “human drama,” could circumnavigate the otherwise intractable difficulty of knowing the hearts and minds of others.

Without such a gift, the formel eagle herself suffers the acute pain of subterfuge. As she complains—and as could be a hermeneutic for many of Chaucer’s works—“[a]s in a toumbe is al the faire above,/And under is the corps, swich as ye woot” (The Canterbury Tales 5.518–19). Her pain and confusion represent the less-than-magical reality we must all confront: uncertainty is inevitable. It is hard to know whom to trust, what really happened, or what evidence might or might not mean. Chaucer’s attentiveness to these difficulties dovetails with a crucial purpose of scholarship: to stay open to possibilities and to recognize when the certainty we long for cannot be had—to recognize that, as Chaucer explores in the Physician’s Tale, systems (including academic ones) often hide as much as they reveal, and shut down rather than encourage dialogue. Whatever he may or may not have done to Chaumpaigne, Chaucer clearly understood that discourse, in its myriad forms, causes confusion as much as it alleviates it. At a minimum, so should we.

Acknowledgments

My deep thanks to Rebecca Davis and Shannon Gayk, who read through early drafts of this article and were incredibly generous with feedback and support. Richard Firth Green has been unstinting in his willingness to discuss this case and its implications with me, and Elizabeth Robertson gave crucial feedback. Laura Ashe, Christopher Cannon, Lisa H. Cooper, Holly A. Crocker, Andrea Denny-Brown, Alastair Minnis, Dana Oswald, and Manushag Powell were all touchstones at various points during this process, and this article wouldn’t exist without them. Finally, my thanks to the editors of and readers for this journal, whose feedback was vital. I am very lucky in all these interlocutors.

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Robyn A. Bartlett

Robyn A. Bartlett is Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Purdue University and is the author of Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (Toronto, 2013), as well as numerous articles on Chaucer, Hoccleve, and late medieval religious culture. Her teaching and research ask how communities grow and thrive, including especially work on feminism, mindfulness, and subjectivity. Her current book, The Social Lives of Confession in Late Medieval England, argues that the literary tradition surrounding medieval confession both encourages radical vulnerability and offers a new way to think of subjectivity as outward-focused and porous. Her earlier work appears under the name Robyn Malo.

Notes

^1. The Statute of Laborers, first enacted in 1349, was a post-plague attempt to control a volatile and depleted labor market—something that might sound familiar to a post-Covid audience. See Bennett 2010, 20–2, 28–41. The Zoom “big reveal” was sponsored by the National Archives and took place online on October 11, 2022. See https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/archival-research-sheds-new-light-on-chaucer-court-case/

^2. Green calls the May 1380 document the “Furnivall quitclaim,” after its discoverer; he similarly designates the second document discovered by Christopher Cannon the “Cannon quitclaim” (Cannon 1993; Green 2011, 269). I adopt both terms throughout the article. For the quitclaims themselves, see Waymack 2016–20232016–2023.

^3. Chaumpaigne was paid at Michaelmas (29 September) in 1380, on which see Plucknett (1948, 34). On this payment and its relationship to the Furnivall quitclaim, see Green (2011, 273–8).

^4. The issue at hand between Staundon, Chaumpaigne, and Chaucer is, properly speaking, a writ of trespass on the Statute of Laborers. However, this phrase is a bit of a mouthful. I will occasionally refer to it more simply as a “labor dispute,” though strictly speaking, a “labor dispute” would describe lesser disagreements about, for instance, wages, rather than the terms of employment.

^5. For the extent to which contemporary judicial and carceral systems function similarly, see Davis et al. (2022), MacKinnon (1989), Manne (2018) and Srinivasan (2022).

^6. In a July 2023 blog post, Roger and Sobecki claim to have found some in the intervening months since the publication of the Chaucer Review special issue in October 2022 (Roger and Sobecki 2023). While their example, from 1353, does offer the only known instance of raptus in the context of a labor dispute, there are several unanswered questions about its relevance to the Furnivall quitclaim—questions Christopher Cannon raised at a talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (29 September 2023). Most importantly, Roger and Sobecki’s example dates from 1353, almost three decades before Chaumpaigne’s quitclaim. It is also a complaint leveled by a former employer, William de Holbeche, who brought a writ of raptu custodie against his male servant’s father for removing his servant. Were this example to parallel Chaumpaigne’s, Staundon should have been the one in the position to release someone from culpability with respect to raptus—not Chaumpaigne. The fundamental problem of agency remains and has yet to be addressed. And finally, both the kind of legal document and the language are markedly different: it is hard to imagine that de raptu meo (in a document where Chaumpaigne is acting for herself) and raptu custodie (in an action initiated by an employer) mean the same thing, particularly given this latest document’s early date.

^7. Lawrence Warner has suggested that the phrase itself demands our skepticism; why does Chaumpaigne, he queried online, refer to “my rape” rather than “his rape of me”? Recently, in a private conversation with Richard Firth Green, I raised this point, pointing out that I (and others) can and do speak about “my rape” and “my assault.” It would be frankly bizarre to put it otherwise. But Chaumpaigne was not speaking to a friend, and I wondered: was there some legality here I was missing? Does the quitclaim itself preclude the kind of language that anecdata assures me is perfectly common? Green agreed with my assessment that by itself, the grammar of de raptu meo does nothing to take apart the legal consensus that the term, in the Furnivall quitclaim, designates sexual assault.

^8. On Chaucer, rape culture, and rape, see (among many others), Baechle (2022), Dinshaw (1998), Harris (2017, 2019, 2021), Morrison (1999), Rose (2001), Robertson (2001), Seal and Sidhu (2019) and Skalak (2020).

^9. The laws of the Statute “empowered employers, petty as well as grand, in three basic ways: (1) people who were not otherwise occupied were to be compelled into service; (2) wages and prices were to be kept at modest levels; and (3) labour contracts were to be public, long-term and unbreakable” (Bennett 2010, 12–13).

^10. I use the adjective “appealing” deliberately. Unfortunately, the legacy of Chaucer criticism since the discovery of the quitclaim in 1873 all too easily bears out assertions that scholars have not only sought to exonerate Chaucer, but that they have been eager to do so. On this misogynistic legacy see Seal (2022), and Baechle (2022, 464–5). Baechle importantly outlines the ways in which a 2019 article also by Sobecki—which argued that Chaucer may have abducted Chaumpaigne on behalf of Edmund Staplegate, who was Chaucer’s ward until 1382—also led to “jubilan[t]” celebration of the poet’s having been exonerated “from suspicion of rape” (Baechle 2022, 464). For Sobecki’s argument about Staplegate and wardship, and the ways in which that, too, offered us new ways to think about raptus as not being rape, see Sobecki (2019).

^11. On the tale’s reception as a literary failure, see The Riverside Chaucer (1987, 902).

^12. On Griselde’s “endurance” in the face of Walter’s abuse, and the extent to which this endurance informs a different “ethical standard for what it means to be human,” see Crocker (2020, 141), and on the ways women are expected to withstand and tolerate abhorrent circumstances, see Harris (2022). On Griselde and voluntarism, and the extent to which this understanding of the will illuminates how we understand Griselde’s consent, see Elizabeth Robertson (2023), and her current work-in-progress, Chaucerian Consent: Women, Religion, and Subjection in Medieval England.

^13. As Green explained to me in private correspondence, “the so-called contract clause of the Ordinance of Labourers simply states that any worker or servant (operarius vel serviens) who leaves their service without reasonable cause before their time is up shall be imprisoned. And that anyone who presumes [knowingly] to receive or retain them in his service (in servicio suo recipere vel retinere presumat) shall suffer the same penalty” (19 July 2023).

^14. The Middle English Dictionary specifically identifies Damian’s petition as “a formal document” (sv “bille” 1a). The “bille” of the Physician’s Tale is even more specifically legal, comprising “a formal plea or charge (of a plaintiff)” (sv “bille” 2a). Subsequent possible definitions are also legal and formal in some way: a “formal petition” (3), a “contract or written agreement” (4), and a “statement of record (of receipts, expenses, debts, services rendered, etc.)” Only the sixth definition allows for a metaphorical application of the term, as in “a personal letter, message, or note” (6).

^15. On the ways the Statute of Laborers exposed “singlewomen” in particular to these harms, see Bennett (2010, 31–41).

^16. On endurance as a defining feature of Griselde’s humanity and subjectivity, see Crocker (2020).

^17. This couplet also appears in the Clerk’s Tale at lines 293–4, 580–1, and 1077–8. In every instance, the “stille/wille” end-rhyme comments on Griselde’s difficult position and Walter’s power, associating stillness with his implacable attitude (his “wille”), and with Griselde’s endurance of it.