Chaucer's 'Legend of Lucrece' and the critique of ideology in fourteenth-century England. (Geoffrey Chaucer)

In the context of English literary history, Chaucer's Legend of Lucrece marks the beginning of a long lineage of literary elaborations of this narrative. As a narrative about foundation (that of Republican Rome), Chaucer's poem is itself usually taken as a foundation: characteristically "sympathetic"; Christianizing but not so Christianizing as to obscure its vision of cultural otherness; in one or another of these respects distinctively original.(1) Yet it is within a roughly contemporary intellectual context of commentary and debate about Lucretia rather than a more distant lineage that the originality of Chaucer's work can best be assessed and appreciated. His brief poem is only a part, if in many ways the culmination, of an unexamined group of late-medieval English elaborations of her narrative in which Lucretia's private consciousness and its relation to a context of cultural ideals and assumptions attain a new level of intense exploration. Within a fairly rapid succession of elaborations by these late-medieval English commentators and writers, her story emerges as something more historical than the psychomachic allegory it is in some other medieval hands, and less specific than the narrative of political transformation it is in Titus Livy's history of Rome: it becomes an exemplary occasion for contemplating the relation between culture and individual consciousness--in this case Lucretia's embodiment of and uneasy relation to the institutional and social values of ancient Rome.

The main outlines of medieval interest in the story of Lucretia are well known. From the account in Livy on, Lucretia is a pivotal figure in Roman constitutional history: because of her rape and suicide, the Romans rose up against the royal family of the Tarquini and established a republic (thus Dante's Emperor Justinian, for instance, uses her "dolor" metonymically as a political time-mark).(2) From St. Augustine on, she is also a central figure for defining the secular ethics and ideology of Rome, especially its zeal for honor and fame. Augustine, having determined that Lucretia's suicide made her sinful because she displays the Roman "excessive zeal for praise," in a fit of ironic out-paganing a pagan sent her to Vergil's underworld, to the place where are found those who "guiltless sent themselves to doom" ("qui sibi letum / Insontes peperere").(3) Perhaps in implicit response to Augustine, Dante locates her in a limbo rife with allusions to Vergil's Elysian fields, although in Dante's poem she has a nearly blissful existence, portrayed amidst a chorus of praise for the ethos of "onore" that envelopes her and the other righteous heathens there.(4) Dante thus answers Augustine not only on the matter of Lucretia's values and fate, but also on the entire meaning of the pagan fama for which she died, bringing it near the Christianized ideal of magnanimitas: honor that derives from a person's goodness.(5)

The later Middle Ages interrogated Lucretia with increasing insistence, seeking to reconstruct her point of view by elaborating both her rape and her pre-Christian beliefs and social vision. As Wolfgang P. Muller has recently shown, medieval canonists at first held an approving view of her faithfulness and honor, but this soon turned to a more suspicious consideration of her intentions and choices. Among the "first generation" of canonists in the early twelfth century, Augustine's account in the City of God was only partially quoted, presenting the saints posited defense of her action, a defense that Augustine goes on to dismantle. But even without quoting or, apparently, knowing the rest of Augustine's text, the late twelfth-century canonist Huguccio condemned Lucretia for having made a "conditional choice" to be raped (an argument from negative evidence, since she apparently does not choose to be killed and left with a dead, naked slave next to her, the alternative Tarquinius presents her). This condemnation was taken up by all later canonists, an interpretation with dark implications for medieval victims of rape and perhaps merely the obverse side of the canonists' emphasis on women's "power to choose" in marriage, for which the later Middle Ages are so often praised.(6) In Coluccio Salutati's late fourteenth-century Declamatio Lucretiae, Lucretia's rape and struggle for inner freedom are yet more thoroughly elaborated. Here she is made to describe in fine and lurid detail the danger of future lustful and adulterous emotions which might now overtake her, and to argue that her ideal of honor and her inner intellectual freedom can be sustained only in suicide.(7)

What in this violation and her response to it so fascinated late-medieval intellectuals? To write a history of interest in the story of Lucretia in the late Middle Ages evidently necessitates a larger and denser project than the brief comments accorded this period in Hans Galinsky's early twentieth-century survey of medieval and modern (especially German) references and responses to Lucretia, and more than the passing comments in Ian Donaldson's recent study of English and French versions from the sixteenth century on.(8) As Stephanie Jed argues in her study of Salutati's Declamatio Lucretiae, a full account of even this single, brief, Italian elaboration of Lucretia's story can involve the development of ideals of Florentine liberty, of intellectual privacy, and of a humanist literary criticism which asserts its purity from the mercantilism on which its activities and ideals rested--all varieties of "chaste thinking" appearing simultaneous with Salutati's account of a woman whose privacy was violated but who asserts her freedom and "chastity" of mind and effects a purposeful self-fashioning in the act of suicide.(9)

Jed's account, in my view, rightly insists on the paradox of the ideal of inner freedom advanced by the story of Lucretia's rape and suicide; and in my view Jed rightly resists this ideal, insisting on the necessity of emphasizing the historical connections and communities underpinning the Florentine ideology of freedom, and the material bases repressed by the Renaissance and the modern literary scholar's belief in intellectual objectivity and freedom from ideological distortion. Yet Jed's own work stops short of correcting this situation by tracing in any detail the cultural and intellectual network producing the Florentine account of Lucretia. With breathtaking ambition, Jed leaps between disparate social and intellectual realms by means of analogy, a rhetorical mode whose operations, visible even sentence by sentence, constitute an effort--albeit a historicizing one--to escape from history, at least in its more immediate and intimate interconnections. The paradox of Jed's theme is enacted in the paradox of her methods.

If, then, we are to recover "a series of relations" in order to heal the "violence" by which "literature" is cut off "from . . . other kinds of writing and thinking," specific connections and communities of writers must be intently sought and recovered, while still keeping before us the need to explore the wider social implications of the views they present.(10) One such study of late-medieval interest in Lucretia's story, recuperating more tangible historical connections than does Jed's essay, is possible, surprisingly enough, using fourteenth-century English materials.

I say "surprisingly enough" because we are accustomed--following Jakob Burckhardt, Johan Huizinga, and Piero Boitani--to speak of the new "fame of fame" in fourteenth-century Italian and French literature as the prelude to the values of the Renaissance, but not in fourteenth-century English letters and intellectual activity, with the sole exception of Chaucer. Yet if for Boitani and other scholars, late-medieval English visions of fame apart from those of Chaucer reveal no more than "the theme of 'vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas,' "some English visions of Lucretia exist, although for the most part only in manuscript or early printed editions, which lie directly behind Chaucer's vision of Lucrece and which reveal that, in England as well as Italy, Lucretia's concern with fama is at the center of a continuous and evolving concern with the secular ethics of reputation that Lucretia's story presents, and even more fundamentally with notions of how social ideology impinges on personal intellectual freedom, concerns that this narrative of a pagan woman's violation and self-determination allowed these late-medieval scholars and writers to develop and explore.(11)