The Fragmentary Poetry of Cecily Chaumpaigne’s De Raptu Meo

ABSTRACT Reading Cecily Chaumpaigne’s infamous release of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer through the lens of legal history alone risks reproducing the conventions of late medieval juridical record-keeping that bolstered patriarchal power. Drawing on methodologies by Marisa J. Fuentes and Saidiya Hartman for reading “against the archival grain,” this essay rereads Chaumpaigne’s quitclaim and the phrase de raptu meo (concerning my ravishment) in the context of the material and social circumstances that shaped her experiences as a singlewoman in late medieval London. Showing how service and sexuality were intertwined for Chaumpaigne, the essay connects Chaumpaigne’s de raptu meo to the literary productions of women like Margery Kempe and the petitioners in The Assembly of Ladies, who manipulate multivalent language to voice the ways in which patriarchal households constrained feminine autonomy.