Perhaps you’ve studied Chaucer in college. I didn’t. I knew he was a poet from medieval England and called the Father of English Literature and really that was about it.  This week I read for the first time that Chaucer scholars everywhere now have to take in the implications of a legal document from 1380 by a young woman called Cecily Chaumpaigne releasing Chaucer from charges of rape. I didn’t feel any sense of deep personal betrayal, the way I would have if I’d found out that George Michael was a horrible man, for instance. But I was fascinated to see that almost the entire screen of results if you google Chaucer and rape are defences of the man.

Here is Wikipedia, for instance, inserting earnest feels where there should be bald and unsatisfying description. “He was mentioned in law papers of 4 May 1380, involved in the raptus of Cecilia Chaumpaigne. What raptus means is unclear, but the incident seems to have been resolved quickly and did not leave a stain on Chaucer’s reputation.”  Here is a sample from a blog dedicated to Chaucer. “It also seems unlikely that a man of Chaucer’s character would commit a crime of sexual violence. Chaucer’s contemporaries recognised his sympathy for women (Gavin Douglas described him as ‘evir […] all womanis frend’), and he is still held as a man before his time by many modern critics.”