Chaucer studies (10.13.22)

I should be embarrassed to admit this, but until now I was completely unaware of this Chaucer controversy among Medievalists.  To be sure, I majored in Modern English and American literature, but I took enough classes in medieval lit to have been made aware of the status "Chaucer as rapist." But I wasn't made aware.

And this goes to the heart of the NYT story linked above: Medieval Studies, like so many other university disciplines in the humanities, was dominated by male scholars when I attended university. The feminist critique of English literary history, like the social critique and the psychoanalytical critic and any number of other critiques, wasn't given much breathing space in my education. There were NO female faculty that I can recall at my university when I studied the medieval period. And if there were, no one ever brought the critique into any of my classrooms. Nor did any of my fellow students.

Does that exonerate me? Hardly. The feminist critique existed. Had at least since the mid-60s and the feminist second wave. I simply hadn't read those books or took classes with those scholars--hadn't even thought to. That was my loss, and one illustration of that loss was an entire graduate level seminar on Chaucer that failed to mention what, apparently, entire books had been devoted to by then: Chaucer was a rapist.  And besides, this claim had been made based on a discovery of a legal document in the later 19th Century.

Read the NYT story, which is about new research that appears to prove that the original 14th Century legal document on which this rape claim has been based was misinterpreted and did not involve the crime of rape but of poaching labor.  

But what really strikes me about the story is that it actually reinforces the feminist critique about power relations between men and women, gender rules that assume male superiority, and so forth. A critique that remains as vital today as always. It's the assumptions, largely unexamined generation after generation, that are the point, and how they undergird "facts" and narratives of power and powerlessness, how they enable whole groups of people to be classified and defined (and managed accordingly).

And this is what I really missed out on in my entire undergraduate and graduate study programs. I am partly to blame, for being incurious or naive or myopic enough to miss the critique altogether.  I am partly a victim of a pedagogy that was, during my years at university, still driven by those same assumptions.

What's that got to do with this poetry blog? Well, Chaucer was a poet, right? One whom I can not now read in the same way that I read him 40 years ago or even last year. Which raises a whole other kind of literary/social/political issue: how does one absorb and apply new information about writers that may totally undercut one's long held, unexamined assumptions about them? What does the new information say about the writer . . . and about the reader? What does it say about the poetry?