Chaucer's Lucretia and What Augustine Really Said about Rape: Two Reconsiderations

Saint Augustine "hath gret compassioun / Of this Lucresse," declares a couplet early in Chaucer's retelling of the story of the Roman rape victim and suicide Lucretia—prompting the majority of modern commentators to conclude that the poet either never read Augustine's treatment of the story directly, or subsequently forgot what it says, or speaks here with deliberate irony. How, they ask, could anyone familiar with that text (City of God 1.19) judge it to be compassionate? But a second look reveals that the question has some positive answers, particularly when one attends not merely to the single chapter that names Lucretia but also to the surrounding thirteen-chapter discussion of rape and suicide in general. There Augustine shows compassion in several concrete ways that later summarizers omit and most modern readers overlook; the text even includes "compassion" in the strictest etymological sense of an attempt to feel-and-suffer-with a rape victim by imagining her inner world. Close attention to Chaucer's poem (the fifth in the Legend of Good Women) then uncovers more positive evidence for direct knowledge of Augustine, namely several apparent Chaucerian innovations in the story—most dramatically the fact that his Lucretia swoons just before the rape rather than "yielding"—that are easy to explain if the author was influenced by the City of God but are unnecessary or simply puzzling if not. A brief conclusion suggests points at which Chaucer's direct knowledge of Augustine's text might affect our interpretations of other poems.