Author: Sarah Baechle, Department of English, University of Mississippi - ResaerchGate

Contents:

	Preface | viii
	Acknowledgments | ix
	Introduction | 1
	1. Class Coercions: Victorian Sexuality, Epistemologies of Consent, and the Miller’s Tale | 29
	2. Letters of the Law: Cautionary Directives, Discourses of Trauma, and the Reeve’s Tale | 64
	3. Reasonable Rapists: Myths of Consent, the Mistake of Fact Defense, and Troilus and Criseyde | 100
	4. Rapists with Potential: Philogynist Chaucer, the Wife of Bath, and the Work of Reparation | 134
	Notes | 171
	Bibliography | 201
	Index | 219

Description: »On May 4, 1380, Cecily Chaumpaigne filed a quitclaim with the Chancery in Westminster, releasing the poet Geoffrey Chaucer from any prosecution de raptu meo (on account of my rape). This legal document, lost for centuries, has haunted Chaucer studies since its rediscovery in 1873.
Over the past 150 years since it reemerged, many Chaucer scholars have sought to discount, sanitize, or excuse the release. Through a careful examination of the long Chaucer historiography, Sarah Baechle shows how critics have read the question of Chaucer’s potential culpability for rape through prevailing attitudes toward sexual violence. They did so, moreover, in ways that will be very familiar to contemporary readers versed in rape culture—practices that dismiss sexual violence by centering and promoting accused perpetrators, erasing or attacking the victim-survivor, and minimizing the violence of the crime. Baechle pairs the necessary excavation of this critical history with reparative readings of the poet’s narratives of sexual violence, including the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde, and she theorizes “assailant speech” as a counterpart to survivor speech, proposing it as a new means of understanding Chaucer’s place in feminist studies of the Middle Ages.
Father Chaucer and the Apologists is an urgently needed examination of the discourse surrounding Chaumpaigne’s quitclaim that reveals the ties between Chaucer studies and the persistence of rape culture. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Chaucer and of gender and sexual violence more broadly. « (Source: Pennsylvania State University Press)

Reviews:
- Janega, Eleanor. »Character lessons: How the charge of rape against Chaucer has been explained.« TLS: Times Literary Supplement No. 6390 (October 17, 2025). - Full Text: Times Literary Supplement (Restricted Access)

- Robertson, Elizabeth. The Medieval Review (July 26, 2026). - Full Text: IUScholarWorks Journals (Free Access)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of England / England in the Late Middle Ages | Feminism: Feminist terminology / Rape culture | Literature: English literature / Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde | Sex and the law: Rape