Whose Chaucer? On Cecily Chaumpaigne, Cancellation, and the English Literary Canon

Abstract

While Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki’s new archival discovery absolves Geoffrey Chaucer of the supposed rape of Cecily Chaumpaigne, it does not offer an absolution for the literary critics and historians who have exploited and appropriated the imagined figure of Cecily Chaumpaigne for the sexual titillation of themselves and their reading public. Briefly recounting the last century and a half of Chaucerian historiography, this article argues that the study of Chaucerian literature remains a place in which sexual violence has been exalted, before concluding that the transformations that feminist scholarship has brought to the field—especially in relation to the Chaumpaigne release—will never be erased.