Chaucerian guilt and the Treatise on the Astrolabe

Rather than question Chaucer's guilt in relation to the facts referred to in Cecily Chaumpaigne's 1380 quitclaim, this article considers the ways in which his potential guilt matters to readers. The metaphor of “Father Chaucer” grounds an affective inquiry into the materiality of sexual assault, alongside the meaning of identification and trauma. Ambivalence towards Chaucer's life records pertaining to raptus is a result of affinity for Chaucer, but this affective critical engagement represents itself as objective and historical rather than subjective and selective. Pursuant to the way that trauma, like the medieval device of the astrolabe, compresses the experience of space and time, this article measures twenty-first-century critical and material proximity to the raptus record through heuristic engagement with the Treatise on the Astrolabe.