The Western canon dodged a bullet last week when Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was cleared of raping a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne. Suspicion had been cast by a 1380 legal document, discovered in the late nineteenth century, in which Chaumpaigne said (translated here from the original Latin):
Let all know that I, Cecily Chaumpaigne, daughter of the late William Chaumpaigne and his wife Agnes, have remitted, released, and for myself and my heirs in perpetuity wholly quitclaimed to Geoffrey Chaucer, esq., all manner of actions related to my rape.…
In the original Latin, “my rape” is the more ambiguous “de raptu meo,” which can mean rape or, more vaguely, abduction. But the document still caused a stir. Had the man sometimes described as “the father of English poetry” committed sexual assault? Chaumpaigne was not available for comment (she’d been dead five centuries), but it didn’t look good. Chaucer’s reputation grew shakier still after 1993, when Christopher Cannon, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and Classics at Johns Hopkins, disclosed a second copy of Chaumpaigne’s deed of release from which the reference to de raptu meo had been removed. To Sebastian Sobecki, Professor of Later Medieval English literature at the University of Toronto, it was hard not to suspect Chaucer evaded punishment for an act of sexual violence, assisted perhaps by some fourteenth century Roy Cohn. By the 1990s, a biographical detail like that...
As he said he would on Sunday morning, FBI Director Kash Patel filed a defamation case against The Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick this morning over a story that characterizes him as an inc...