Encounters in the Early Archive
by
Lisa Lampert-Weissig
Medieval archives aren’t frequently the stuff of headlines, but in October 2022 major news outlets breathed sighs of relief over a recently re-discovered document that appeared to “vindicate” fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer from a charge by Cecily Chaumpaigne of “raptus” or rape. This record is one of three early archival recoveries at the center of my graduate Literature seminar, “Encounters in the Archive.”[1] I designed the course to introduce emerging scholars and writers to the transformative potential of the archival encounter, as well as to the enduring significance of early archival records, including through what Carolyn Dinshaw calls history’s “queer touch,” and “a desire for bodies to touch across time” (Dinshaw 1999, 3).
The course also examines a fourteenth-century document of trans history: the interrogation record of sex worker Eleanor Rykener, referenced as John Rykener, “se Elianoram nominans,” [who calls themself Eleanor] and sixteenth-century records from London’s Bridewell prison for “Black Luce,” a sex worker and brothel owner who some believe inspired the “Dark Lady” of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. These cases reveal “the deep alterity of the past,” but also facilitate creation of what Lillian Faderman calls a “usable past” (Faderman 2011). They have inspired not only historical inquiry but also new works of art that both challenge history and reclaim it (LaFleur, Raskolnikov, and Kłosowska 2021, 3).
Archival Encounters
I work in a department of Literature alongside colleagues who research, teach and write literature in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Yiddish and more. I designed my seminar expecting that it might not include any early literature specialists and, indeed, it did not. The enrolled students were emerging specialists in contemporary Korean cultural studies, Latin American literatures, and contemporary Black speculative fiction respectively. Our group also included an accomplished poet working on her MFA. In addition to our three early historical units, we worked with UC San Diego’s Special Collections, focusing especially on the Archive for New Poetry. With the guidance of our talented and dedicated librarians, I was able to direct my students to archives relevant to their planned doctoral foci. Course readings included archival primary texts and literary historical readings, but also theoretical, historical, and creative pieces connected to archival work, including Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, M. NourbeSe Philips’ Zong! and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. We also discussed archivally inspired creative works from visual arts, music and dance.
For the main assignment, students were asked to “adopt” a primary source, ideally one that they could physically access, and to create a portfolio of work, including documenting the item much as an archivist or librarian might, as well as creating a bibliography around the source. Students also had to locate five possible funding sources to support work in a relevant archive or to conduct extended research on their source. Portfolios also included at least one of the following inspired by the archival source: a creative response, a draft syllabus, or a work of “public scholarship.” This assignment produced innovative work inspired by finds from the Archive for New Poetry, the Huntington Library and UCLA Library Special Collections. The archival portfolio and the course’s medieval and early modern “units” could be taken and incorporated into a wide range of courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I will describe below how we explored these units, highlighting their implications for gender and sexuality studies.
The Case of Cecily Chaumpaigne
In October 2022 The New Republic declared: “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” (Noah et al. 2022). Ever since Chaumpaigne’s May 4, 1380 quitclaim releasing Chaucer of “omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo” (all manner of actions related to my raptus) was recovered in 1873, Chaucer scholars had debated whether it documented an accusation of sexual assault (Fein and Raybin 2022, 404; Roger and Sobecki 2022, 408).
Recently rediscovered records, however, reveal that Chaumpaigne and Chaucer were co-defendants in a separate but clearly related case brought by Thomas Staundon, who claimed that Chaucer had hired Chaumpaigne away from his employ. Chaucer, it seems, was being challenged in court for recruiting Chaumpaigne away from her employer to work in Chaucer’s household. Chaumpaigne’s quitclaim concerning “raptus,” which in the legal terminology of the time could mean rape, abduction, carrying away by force, or even robbery, appears to be part of a legal strategy against Staundon’s suit. The situation itself reflects a labor market still experiencing the impact of the Black Death pandemic decades earlier.
That this six-hundred-year-old news merited coverage across the Anglophone world and beyond is quite surprising. At the same time, it is completely unsurprising as it reflects the endurance of gendered dynamics of power over centuries. To better understand the archival discovery, my students watched the British National Archives’ webinar on the recent findings. This presentation glimpses into the specialist knowledge required to read fourteenth-century court records and the material challenges posed by their often quite poorly preserved state. Most interesting to my students were the presentations by feminist scholars. These argued for the continued importance of investigation into medieval exploitation of sexual and other forms of labor and into medieval cultures of sexual violence, which still hold enduring influence even today. These presentations show the stakes of the discovery and how the decades of feminist scholarship on the case and its implications remain valid and vital to understanding rape culture in Chaucer’s time and in our own.
We also read Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” and scholarly and popular articles on the Chaumpaigne/Chaucer records, including early criticism that rehearses “boys will be boys” and “he said-she said” platitudes in order to “clear” Chaucer’s reputation even though the scholars often nevertheless read “raptus” as rape. We also discussed, after reading work by medievalist Carissa Harris, how recently recovered evidence opens new avenues of research on working women during the fourteenth-century post-pandemic labor crisis, holding broader implications for considerations of women’s labor (Harris 2022). Discussion of all these issues, as well as the depiction of rape in Chaucer’s corpus, allowed us to consider how the culture of the “father of English poetry” shapes the power structures of our own world.
The Case of Eleanor Rykener
On 11 December, 18 Richard 11. [1395] were brought in the presence of John Fressh, Mayor, and the Aldermen of the City of London John Brithy of the county of York and John Rykener, calling [herself] Eleanor [se Elianoram nominans], having been detected in women's clothing, who were found last Sunday night between the hours of 8 and 9 by certain officials of the city lying by a certain stall in Soper's Lane committing that detestable, unmentionable, and ignominious vice [illud vitium detestabile, nephandum, et ignominiosum] (Boyd and Karras 1995, 481–2 [with modifications]).
Thus begins the court record containing Eleanor Rykener’s confession of sexual acts both “in the manner of a woman” [modo muliebri] with both laymen and friars and “as a man” with “many nuns” and married and unmarried women, sometimes accepting money for these acts (Boyd and Karras 1995, 482–3). The record states that Rykener had also lived in Oxford as a woman, doing embroidery work, concluding with Rykener confessing to committing “that vice” with too many priests to enumerate, accommodating them “more readily” because they were willing to pay more than others. Other documents about Rykener have not been recovered and this record escaped scholarly scrutiny until 1995, likely because A.H. Thomas, who compiled a guide to the plea rolls in the 1920s and 30s, obscured the record’s contents (Boyd and Karras 1995, 479–80). We considered why Thomas might have obscured the archival record. What could we learn from what seemed to us to be a clear case of prejudice—homophobia and transphobia—shaping the record? How could we make use of this example in ways that would support the inclusive scholarly practices we want to champion? Thomas’s seemingly purposeful obfuscation provides an example of how bibliographies and guides, tools ostensibly designed to facilitate access to archives, can also hinder research.
The Rykener case comes to us in a Latin language account of an interrogation that took place in English. When Boyd and Karras published their transcription and translation of the Ryekener document they referenced Rykener as “John” using masculine pronouns. In work published with Tom Linkinin in 2016, Karras uses “John/Eleanor” and the pronoun “ze.” We discussed these choices, noting that the reflexive pronoun “se” in “se nominens” does not specify masculine or feminine gender. Leveraging our own multilingualism, we explored how language can shape an archival encounter and both enhance and limit the perception of the researcher and the record’s creator. How does terminology shape access and understanding, as in the phrases “se Elianoram nominans,” “illud vitium detestabile, nephandum, et ignominiosum” and the specification of acts in “modo muliebri”? To what extent could we access Rykener’s situation, opaque to us not only because of the disciplining environment of the court, but also because of its temporal alterity?
We also considered how we cannot help but understand Rykener’s experience through our own lived experiences however much we might try to account for our own biases. How did Eleanor Rykener experience her own body? What does it mean to ask that question? What assumptions are we making about how Eleanor’s experience might be similar to lives from our own time? Can we make that leap? What should we try to account for in this archival encounter even as we try to “touch” the past? My students responded most to an essay by M.Y. Bychowski, which not only allows Eleanor to “speak back” to those reading her record, but does so from a trans perspective, including critical readings of earlier scholarship. We also discussed creative responses to the Rykener case, including a puppet performance detailed by Karras and Linkinen, as generative results of archival encounter.
Finally, studying Rykener’s case alongside Chaumpaigne’s opened up avenues of discussion around gendered labor and the records of those who live and labor in dangerous conditions. These include the precarity of Rykener’s living situations and likely also those of Chaumpaigne. Our meditations on their precarity connected them to lives examined in other readings, including those discussed in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives and the destroyed lives of the enslaved commemorated in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. This discussion also set the stage for our investigation of the life of “Black Lewce,” the focus of our third case study.
The Case of Black Lewce
In August 2012 a headline caught the eye of poet Caroline Randall Williams: “'Dark Lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets 'may have been London prostitute called Lucy Negro.’” The story referenced Duncan Salkeld’s research into a December 28, 1594, event at Gray’s Inn attended by Lucy Negro, a sex worker and brothel owner where law students staged a play called “Comedy of Errors” (MacDonald 2021, 66). Lucy Negro, also called Black Lewce or Luce Baynam, ran a series of “floating brothels” in London’s Clerkenwell district (MacDonald 2021, 66). Intrigued by the possibility that this Lucy could have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s famous “Dark Lady,” Williams contacted Salkeld and traveled to England to visit the records herself. Her journey and research led to her poetry volume, Lucy Negro, Redux, which, in turn, inspired a ballet production by the Nashville Ballet with music by Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi. These creative responses to Lucy Negro’s archival presence formed the core of our unit in the seminar. Readings also included Shakespeare’s sonnets and relevant criticism, Salkeld’s findings, and selections from Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677.
One must take heed of Joyce Green MacDonald’s important assertion that “remembering a woman only because of a famous man she might have slept with memorializes patriarchal readings of history more than it memorializes her” (MacDonald 2021, 66). By focusing on the critical and creative speculations born of this possible link to Shakespeare, however, we were able to make connections between our earlier examination of the Chaumpaigne and Rykener records. Our discussions were very much informed by having read Saidiya Hartman’s reconstructive methodology of critical fabulation (Hartman 2008). We also discussed the work of Hartman and Williams as examples of what Susan Howe (2014, 24) evokes as the re-animation that archival encounters can inspire. Reading all of these works together allowed us to consider the limitations of the archive and its possibilities well beyond scholarship.
Conclusion
Each of these three units demonstrates not only the enduring relevance of medieval and early modern records, but also how these materials raise multiple, interconnected concerns around enfranchisement, precarity, embodiment, and labor. Medieval and early archives can allow access to these concerns not only as historical resources, but as sources of creativity, of re-imaginings that delve into pain and loss but also serve as sources of hope. Even if students lack in-person access to early archives, delving into case studies can afford them the opportunity to engage with historical issues in ways that feel material and immediate and that reveal new insights into their continued relevance.
References
Boyd, David Lorenzo, and Ruth Mazo Karras. 1995. “The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London.” GLQ 1 (4): 459–65.
Bychowski, M.W. 2021. “The Transgender Turn: Eleanor Rykener Speaks Back.” In Trans Historical, edited by Anna Kłosowska, Masha Raskolnikov, and Greta LaFleur, 95-113. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press.
Faderman, Lillian. 2011. “A Usable Past?” In The Lesbian Premodern, edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt, 171-78. New York: Palgrave.
Fein, Susanna, and David Raybin. 2022. “The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence.” The Chaucer Review 57 (4): 403–6.
Habib, Imitiaz. 2008. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. New York: Routledge.
Harris, Carissa. 2022. “On Servant Women, Rape Culture, and Endurance.” The Chaucer Review 57 (4): 475-83.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2018. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June): 1-14.
------. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Howe, Susan. 2014. Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. New York: New Directions.
Karras, Ruth Mazo, and Tom Linkinen. 2016. “John/Eleanor Rykener Revisited.” In Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies, edited by Laine E. Doggett and Daniel O’Sullivan, 111–22. New York: Boydell & Brewer.
LaFleur, Greta, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska. 2021. “Introduction: The Benefits of Being Trans Historical.” In Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, edited by Anna Kłosowska, Masha Raskolnikov, and Greta LaFleur, 1-24. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
MacDonald, Joyce Green. 2021. “The Legend of Lucy Negro.” In The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, edited by Janell Hobson, 66-74. New York: Routledge.
Noah, Timothy. 2022. “Chaucer Was Cleared of Rape, but What He May Have Done Instead Remains Illegal Today.” The New Republic, October 18, 2022. https://newrepublic.com/article/168172/chaucer-rape-servant-noncompete-illegal.
Philip, Marlene Nourbese. 2008. Zong! Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Roger, Euan, and Sebastian Sobecki. 2022. “Geoffrey Chaucer, Cecily Chaumpaigne, and the Statute of Laborers: New Records and Old Evidence Reconsidered.” Chaucer Review 57, no. 4: 407–37.
Salkeld, Duncan. 2012. Shakespeare among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500-1650. Burlington: Ashgate.
Williams, Caroline Randall. 2019. Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet, Nashville: Third Man Books.
[1] Course syllabus and further bibliography can be found here.
