Cecily Chaumpaigne: A Microhistorical Biography

ABSTRACT This article affirms that Cecily Chaumpaigne’s life mattered outside her connection to Chaucer. Her story could be told from the perspective of women’s experience of labor and precarity in post-plague England. This article uses two genres of historical writing to allow Chaumpaigne’s life to be told biographically: first, archivally, as particular to her, as known in the historical record via other scholars, particularly Andrew Prescott’s article published in The Chaucer Review in 2022; and second, microhistorically, that is to say, placed into the larger context of urban life and gender relations in late medieval London. This article refocuses the lens of subjecthood away from powerful men like Chaucer and more on the experiences of women like Chaumpaigne in late-fourteenth-century London. This methodological exercise represents a type of reclamation that feminist scholars have done for other historical women.