The Ethical Challenge of Chaucerian Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century

Alone in her tent in the Greek camps outside of Troy, the realization slowly dawns on Criseyde that she will not be able to steal back into Troy as planned. Her newfound understanding is borne from full situational awareness of her environment, that is, her vulnerability and the vast body of foreign soldiers surrounding her:

“And if that I me putte in jupartieTo stele awey by nyght, and it bifalleThat I be kaught, I shal be holde a spie;Or elles—lo, this drede I moost of alle—If in the hondes of som wrecche I falle,I nam but lost, al be myn herte trewe.”

(Tr, V, 701–6)¹

Phrased in circumlocutions, Criseyde’s fears of reprisal if she attempts to escape have been read explicitly as fears of rape.² In refusing (or perhaps not daring) to name the act openly, Criseyde essentializes it to its defining, dichotomous split: the separation of the will (the “herte trewe”) from the body now “lost” should she be captured by a Greek soldier. Criseyde’s unwillingness to name rape in this moment nonetheless clarifies that it is precisely this act that she fears “moost of alle,” drawing on the bodily and spiritual duality of the rape victim enunciated in Augustine’s defense of Lucretia in his City of God.³ The specter of sexual violence looms over Troilus and Criseyde’s narrative as it unfolds, from Helen’s “ravysshyng” (I, 62), which has brought Greek armies to besiege Troy (V, 890–96), to Pandarus’s coercive actions, which draw the protagonists together and culminate in his advice to Troilus to “go ravysshe” his beloved (IV, 530). The concluding moments of the poem re-entrench themselves in its presence, compelling Criseyde—unwillingly sent into the Greek camp in exchange for Antenor—to remain, and constraining her free consent to her eventual relationship with Diomede.⁴ But this implicit, feared rape stands out for its rhetorical embrace of modern-seeming and particularly thorny complexities of cultural responses to sexual violence, namely, to intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. Criseyde fears rape at the hands of a foreign Other, one from whom the text necessitates the invention of categorical difference (for Chaucer repeatedly emphasizes the similarity of the Greeks and Trojans) through their treatment of women. Though not explicitly engaged in acts of race-making, Troilus and Criseyde posits sexual consent and its violation as the fundamental difference between Trojans and Greeks: the former—legendary ancestors of the British—who “usen here no wommen for to selle” (IV, 182) and who raise the possibility of rape only to affirm the necessity of feminine consent (IV, 530–67); the latter who, in the imaginary threat of rape, degenerate into “wrecche[s],” a term of contempt for “vile, contemptible, reprehensible” people.⁵ In these three short lines (V, 704–6), Troilus prefigures the modern myth of the rapist as a bestial Other from the margins of society as well as the rhetorical puissance of the Southern Rape Complex, with its weaponizing of white women’s vulnerability to justify the murder of Black individuals. In portraying its heroine’s fears in the Greek camp, Troilus and Criseyde—for all its markedly fourteenth-century English concerns—nonetheless resonates with the strikingly contemporary topics of racial difference and sexual violence, revealing not-fully-acknowledged complexities about the poet’s work and its relation to subjects of vital importance to audiences today.

Though not always clearly yoked together, these intertwining subjects— the violability of women’s bodies and the act of race-making through arbitrary criteria used to enforce essentializing differences among groups of people— haunt both Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetic corpus and his life-records. His poetry (the legends of Lucrece and Philomela in the Legend of Good Women, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Physician’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale, and, of course, Troilus and Criseyde) repeatedly stages scenes of outright sexual assault and constrained or compelled consent that force...