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CHAUCER'S LUCRETIA AND WHAT AUGUSTINE REALLY SAID ABOUT RAPE: TWO RECONSIDERATIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2019

JOHN BUGBEE Open the ORCID record for JOHN BUGBEE [Opens in a new window]
JOHN BUGBEE*
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Abstract

Saint Augustine “hath gret compassioun / Of this Lucresse,” declares a couplet early in Chaucer's retelling of the story of the Roman rape victim and suicide Lucretia — prompting the majority of modern commentators to conclude that the poet either never read Augustine's treatment of the story directly, or subsequently forgot what it says, or speaks here with deliberate irony. How, they ask, could anyone familiar with that text (City of God 1.19) judge it to be compassionate? But a second look reveals that the question has some positive answers, particularly when one attends not merely to the single chapter that names Lucretia but also to the surrounding thirteen-chapter discussion of rape and suicide in general. There Augustine shows compassion in several concrete ways that later summarizers omit and most modern readers overlook; the text even includes “compassion” in the strictest etymological sense of an attempt to feel-and-suffer-with a rape victim by imagining her inner world. Close attention to Chaucer's poem (the fifth in the Legend of Good Women) then uncovers more positive evidence for direct knowledge of Augustine, namely several apparent Chaucerian innovations in the story — most dramatically the fact that his Lucretia swoons just before the rape rather than “yielding” — that are easy to explain if the author was influenced by the City of God but are unnecessary or simply puzzling if not. A brief conclusion suggests points at which Chaucer's direct knowledge of Augustine's text might affect our interpretations of other poems.

Keywords

rapeconsentcompassionCity of God (book)Legend of Good Women (poem)chastityshame
Type
Research Article
Information
Traditio , Volume 74 , 2019 , pp. 335 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Fordham University, 2019 

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References

1 Given the history of critical writing about Chaucer over the last seventy years, a paper concerned with the poet's relation to Augustine can hardly help mentioning the controversies over “patristic” or “exegetical” criticism. Here, however, I will for the most part avoid engaging those debates directly, keeping them instead in mind primarily as a background that may still affect the reception in some quarters of an article that pairs the two writers. It seems to me legitimate to proceed in that fashion both because much of the field has, I think, turned away from “those old battle lines,” in the words of a hope expressed by Alcuin Blamires already over a decade ago (Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender [Oxford, 2006], 231); and, more importantly, because the goals and scope of this paper simply do not carry it into realms where a direct engagement would be required. Its goals are, in the end, fairly simple: to set the record straight about a comparatively brief stretch of Augustine's writing that is very frequently misread, and then to show that once the correction is made, there is good evidence that Chaucer knew that particular stretch of writing, interpreted it more accurately than many modern readers have done, and shaped one of his poems in response. There is no reason in such a context to worry over larger claims about the features of style (allegory) and content (cupidity and charity) that exegetical criticism found pervasive in medieval literature and largely traced to Augustine, especially to his De doctrina christiana; nor is there need, or space, for a judicious consideration of the uses and abuses of “historicism” in general, fascinating and worthwhile as such questions are.

2 Quotations from Chaucer rely on the Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). For Augustine's text (abbreviated DCD hereafter) I have translated from the critical Latin edition De civitate Dei, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alfonsus Kalb, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1981) and have attempted to value precision over grace. Two useful recent Englishings are The City of God (De civitate Dei), trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, NY, 2012), and The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, UK, 1998). By way of verifying the absence of any reference to Lucretia in those parts of Augustine's writings beyond my direct experience, I searched works attributed to him in the Patrologia Latina Database (http://pld.chadwyck.com/) for all forms of her name; the only instances were from the City of God, which, besides the discussion in book one, briefly refers to her in books two and three.

3 DCD 1.19. “Of all people” renders Augustine's use of the emphatic reflexive se ipsam: in context the implication seems to be that Tarquin, the “adulterer,” was the one who should have been killed. Earlier in the chapter Augustine has remarked how unjust it is that the innocent Lucretia died while the guilty Tarquin was merely exiled; Roman law after Constantine (thus at the time of Augustine's authorship) did in fact make rape a capital offense. For a quick survey of different meanings of raptus and some of the various punishments accorded it in Europe across the centuries, see Gravdal, Kathryn, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia, 1991), 2–11Google Scholar; further detail about late-medieval England is available in Hornsby, Joseph Allen, Chaucer and the Law (Norman, OK, 1988), 115–21Google Scholar. The phrase pudoris infirmitas can of course be translated as the “weakness,” rather than the “inconstancy,” of shame, but that rendering risks implying that Augustine thinks shame per se a weakness, which statements earlier in book one will not allow; and the connection here with Lucretia's sudden and inappropriate action suggests that he means to point out an instability inspired by an excessively strong transport of shame. The Latin reads: “Quod ergo se ipsam, quoniam adulterum pertulit, etiam non adultera occidit, non est pudicitiae caritas, sed pudoris infirmitas. Puduit enim eam turpitudinis alienae in se commissae, etiamsi non secum, et Romana mulier, laudes avida nimium, verita est ne putaretur, quod violenter est passa cum viveret, libenter passa si viveret. Unde ad oculos hominum testem mentis suae illam poenam adhibendam putavit, quibus conscientiam demonstrare non potuit.”

4 Tatlock, J. S. P., “Chaucer and the Legenda Aurea,” Modern Language Notes 45 (1930): 296–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 296 n. 1.

5 The earliest examples I have seen of these suggestions appear respectively in Frank, Robert Worth Jr., Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar nn. 7, 8; and McCall, John P., Chaucer among the Gods: The Poetics of Classical Myth (University Park, PA, 1979), 178Google Scholar n. 35. Only the second explicitly suggests that his alternative source would better explain Chaucer's attribution of compassioun to Augustine. Frank, to the contrary, argues that the word could describe what City of God 1.19 actually contains; but he relies on a single phrase to do so, and one that could easily be attributed to the Roman admirers of Lucretia whom Augustine is attempting to best in argument. Nonetheless some later writers (see following note) have taken up his suggestion that Chaucer “may have remembered Augustine's connection with Lucretia's story from the Gesta” in their efforts to explain what seems to them, as to most recent critics, an unbelievable description.

As for the ancient Roman sources, it is clear that Chaucer follows primarily not the long account in Livy but that in book two of Ovid's Fasti, lines 721–852. Though he also (line 1683) refers to Livy, it is difficult to tell whether he actually drew on that source; for discussion, see the Riverside Chaucer, 1070A. I have used the texts in Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita libri, ed. W. Weissenborn and H. J. Müller (Zurich, 2000), 1:257–62, and P. Ovidius Naso, Die Fasten, ed. Franz Bömer (Heidelberg, 1957), 1:128–35. For Lucretia in the Gesta, see Die Gesta Romanorum, ed. Wilhelm Dick (Erlangen, 1890, repr. Amsterdam, 1970), 69–70, or the somewhat different version in Gesta Romanorum, ed. Hermann Oesterley (1892, repr. Hildesheim, 1980), 489–90. A recent English translation, primarily from Oesterley, is Gesta Romanorum, trans. Christopher Stace (Manchester, UK, 2016), 343–44; the earlier translation Gesta Romanorum: Or, Entertaining Moral Stories, trans. Charles Swan, rev. Wynnard Hooper (New York, 1894 [repr. 1970]), 239–41, matches neither of these Latin editions precisely. Simon de Hesdin's translation of Valerius has not been edited in modern times; I have used an early printing of Valerius Maximus, Les neuf livres de Valère le Grant, translatez du latin en françois par très-révérend maistre Simon de Hesdin, … et achevez par Nicolas de Gonesse (Paris, 1500). At this writing its text is available, along with roughly ten still earlier printings, through the Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. For the 1500 printing, see http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1106657; Simon's summary of Augustine is near the end of book 6, chapter 1 (“vue 446” of the unpaginated manuscript). It is not entirely clear whether Simon's text circulated widely in time for Chaucer to use it for his Legend. We do not know the exact date of the latter, but it almost certainly falls within a few years on either side of 1386, a likely estimate of the year of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women; see the Riverside Chaucer, 1059A, 1060A–B. Simon had translated the story of Lucretia (along with the rest of Valerius down to book 7, chapter 4) by the time of his death in 1383, but most of the extant manuscripts of his translation include Valerian's entire work, indicating that they were produced only after Nicholas de Gonesse finished the translation in 1401. Here I have adopted the working hypothesis that Chaucer could have known Simon's translation, but only in order to demonstrate that even if he did, his acquaintance with it would not explain what we see in the “Legend of Lucrece.” See Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Âge, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (n.p., 1992), s.vv. Simon de Hesdin, Nicolas de Gonesse.

6 This last suggestion comes from Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, NY, 1983), 105. Without supposing an implied narrator, Corrine Saunders similarly suggests that Chaucer had an accurate grasp of Augustine's ideas about Lucretia, cannot have found them compassionate, and deliberately misstated Augustine's views (Chaucer “ironically describes Augustine as sympathetic,” she writes, and “may … simply [have rewritten] his auctor according to his own perspective”). Saunders also leaves open, however, the possibility of combining that explanation for Chaucer's puzzling remark with one based on intermediate sources, notably the Gesta Romanorum. See her Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, UK, 2001), 268. Sheila Delany is equally willing to combine these two types of explanation, though instead of the Gesta she suggests the influence of Ralph Higden's Polychronicon, on which more in a moment; see The Naked Text: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (Berkeley, 1994), 205.

7 Translation mine. The first part of Simon's précis is true enough as a simple propositional statement, though the proposition's appearance out of the rich context of Augustine's discussion renders its tone more dismissive and final here than there. In the second part, beginning with “and that she preferred,” more serious difficulties arise. Simon seems to imagine a point at which Lucretia was faced with a choice between being defamed without rape and being raped but ensuring that everyone would know the attack was against her will — a point at which she chose the latter but perhaps should have chosen the former. Of the many problems with that account of things, the simplest is that Augustine, despite Simon's direct attribution, does not say it. As we will see below, his presentation of the story in no way suggests that Lucretia has any choice in the rape: indeed, almost uniquely among retellers of the tale, he removes that possibility altogether and simply declares the rape an act of violence. Simon seems to be conflating Augustine's version with some elements in Livy and Ovid that could be interpreted (though those two authors themselves appear to disavow the possibility) as leaving open the question of whether Lucretia should be blamed for giving in; see further nn. 43 and 46 below and associated text. For the passage, see Valerius Maximus, Les neuf livres, trans. S. de Hesdin (n. 5 above); the original reads: “De ceste lucresse parle saint augustin: & dit au premier livre de la cite de dieu au dixneufviesme chapitre q[ue]lle se tua plus pour appetit de louenge que pour amour de chastete: & ayma mieulx quil apparust quelle eust este violee contre sa voulente quelle fust difammee sans estre violee.”

8 Andrew Galloway, “Chaucer's Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England,” ELH 60 (1993): 813–32.

9 Galloway, “Chaucer's Legend,” 815–16, 825–26.

10 Galloway, “Chaucer's Legend,” 828.

11 Galloway, “Chaucer's Legend,” 832 n. 47.

12 Galloway's transcription (“Chaucer's Legend,” 824) from British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius D VII (fol. 89). The text is also edited in Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translations of John of Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores (“Rolls Series”) vol. 41 (1871, repr. Wiesbaden, 1964), vol. 3 [of the Polychronicon], pp. 161, 163. In this passage the edition differs from the British Library manuscript only in spelling.

13 Galloway, “Chaucer's Legend,” 824.

14 Higden's Latin, according to Lumby's Rolls Series edition, reads as follows (italics added): “Hic dicunt docti quod Lucretia non ex virtute, sed propter verecundiam humanam, et ex passionis infirmitate seipsam occidit, cum nulla lege debeat innocens puniri, nec etiam nocens sine judice plecti. Sed quia gens Romana maxime erat avida laudis humanae et famae mundanae, timuit ista Lucretia quod si superviverit post adulterium crederetur a populo consensisse adulterio. Idcirco in signum displicentiae, ne famam amitteret aut improperium sustineret, noluit supervivere.” To see how close Higden and his predecessors are staying to Augustine's ideas (and sometimes to his diction), compare the six italicized phrases with these excerpts from the passage cited in n. 3 above: “non est pudicitiae caritas”; “pudoris infirmitas”; “Romana mulier laudis avida nimium”; “si viverit”; “putaretur … libenter passa”; and perhaps “testem mentis suae.” Ridevall's Latin, unpublished but partly transcribed in Galloway's article (“Chaucer's Legend,” 831 n. 34), includes phrases corresponding to at least five of these six matches, and offers two further possible matches besides: it refers to the rape as “tante turpitudini” (cf. Augustine's “turpitudinis alienae”) and as something inflicted violently (“violenter illato”; Augustine has “quod violenter est passa”).

15 For example, Galloway notes Ridevall's statement that “Roman law asserts that those killing others ‘by their own authority’ must be punished” and calls that Roman assertion “a point of legal history that Augustine does not mention” (“Chaucer's Legend,” 820). But in fact Augustine mentions it twice, though not in the chapter that explicitly discusses Lucretia: the principle appears in chapters 17 and 26, with reference to Roman law in both cases. Again, the article remarks on the same page Ridevall's observation that it is unjust that Lucretia dies while Tarquin is merely exiled, without noting that the observation merely duplicates a thought from Augustine's chapter 19 (also mentioned at n. 3 above and described, in the course of explicating Augustine's “dilemma,” in the main text below).

16 This is not to say that theodicy and consolation are the main content of the entire treatise; see Peter Brown's observations that “it is particularly superficial to regard [the City of God] as a book about the sack of Rome,” and that Augustine might well have written a book contrasting God's “city” with the “human city” even had the sack never happened (Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new edition, London, 2000 [orig. publ. 1987], 311). But the great theme of the two cities only begins in earnest with book 11; the earlier books do seem strongly motivated by questions of theodicy, even if not reducible to them.

17 Cf. the judgment of H.-I. Marrou, “La division en chapitres des livres de La Cité de Dieu,” Mélanges Joseph de Ghellinck, S.J. (Gembloux, 1951), 1: 235–49: “Augustine's text is difficult to summarize; its exposition presents itself to the reader as a continuous flow that does not easily allow itself to be cut up into sections, installments or duly labeled chapters” (249, translation mine). See further n. 32 below.

18 DCD 1.15. The actual unfolding of the argument there is, as usual, more complicated. Augustine first constructs roughly the dilemma described above between the expectation of rewards in this present life and that of rewards arriving only in an afterlife, then introduces as a hypothetical way out of the dilemma the notion of goods other than external ones: perhaps Regulus's superlative virtue allowed him to be happy (beatus) even under torture — a position that requires Augustine to entertain at least for the sake of argument something like the Stoic position that real happiness can be attained in this life, but that it is a matter of personal virtue rather than external goods and hence cannot be lost by ill fortune. But he then concludes that he need not resolve the question of whether Regulus was in fact virtuous in that way, since claiming that right worship is rewarded in this present life, but by virtue rather than by external goods, would block the inference from the suffering of Christians to the “unrightness” of Christian worship just as effectively as would the deferral of all rewards to an afterlife. As he puts it, “it suffices for now that they [the imagined pagan interlocutors] are driven by that very well-known [or extremely noble] example to say that the gods are not to be worshiped for the sake of goods of the body or of those things that befall a person from without” (sufficit nunc, quod isto nobilissimo exemplo coguntur fateri non propter corporis bona vel earum rerum, quae extrinsecus homini accidunt, colendos deos).

19 See, for example, chapter 10, where such external goods are compared unfavorably to “the riches of Christians,” which are faith, piety, and the goods of the interior person. There are, to be sure, differences between Augustine and his non-Christian sources (likewise his imagined non-Christian interlocutors) on the question of what exactly is most important in human life. The tradition of Stoic consolation would point to personal wisdom or virtue, whereas for Augustine virtues are in general valuable but limited aids along one's path to a greater goal, namely “eternal life.” For a useful introduction to the difference, see John Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Princeton, 2015), 35–36. But in the case of rape victims as in that of Regulus (see previous note), Augustine finds a minimal common ground with his interlocutors that allows him to advance his argument without settling a finer point: whatever the ultimate goal of human life, all those he imagines as parties to the discussion agree that the goal cannot be lost by suffering something inflicted by another human.

20 “Sit igitur in primis positum atque firmatum virtutem, qua recte vivitur, ab animi sede membris corporis imperare sanctumque corpus usu fieri sanctae voluntatis, qua inconcussa ac stabili permanente, quidquid alius de corpore vel in corpore fecerit, quod sine peccato proprio non valeat evitari, praeter culpam esse patientis.”

21 The qualification about the “earthly plane” is necessary because, as already hinted, if the question were put to him directly Augustine would surely affirm that the most important thing that can happen in a person's life is the reception of “eternal life” as a “grace” or “gift” from God — a process which, though clearly involving acts of the human will in Augustine's mature treatments of it, must be initiated on God's side, and at least to that extent should be reckoned as “passive” from the point of view of the human. But here we can bracket that all-important passivity and consider only passivities imposed by creatures, including physical attacks and other kinds of suffering; Augustine's point is that these do not determine guilt or innocence, nor shape a person as deeply as do his or her acts of will.

22 The first two sentences of chapter 19 read in full: “An forte huic perspicuae rationi, qua dicimus corpore oppresso nequaquam proposito castitatis ulla in malum consensione mutato illius tantum esse flagitium, qui opprimens concuberit, non illius, quae oppressa concumbenti nulla voluntate consenserit, contradicere audebunt hi, contra quos feminarum Christianarum in captivitate oppressarum non tantum mentes, verum etiam corpora sancta defendimus? Lucretiam certe, matronam nobilem veteremque Romanam, pudicitiae magnis efferunt laudibus.”

23 DCD 1.19, beginning from the block quotation: “Huius corpore cum violenter oppresso Tarquinii regis filius libidinose potitus esset, illa scelus improbissimi iuvenis marito Collatino et propinquo Bruto, viris clarissimis et fortissimis, indicavit eosque ad vindictam constrinxit. Deinde foedi in se commissi aegra atque inpatiens se peremit. Quid dicemus? Adultera haec an casta iudicanda sit? Quis in hac controversia laborandum putaverit? Egregie quidam ex hoc veraciterque declamans ait: ‘Mirabile dictu, duo fuerunt et adulterium unus admisit.’ Splendide atque verissime.” The second pair of laudatory adverbs could perhaps (despite the editor's punctuation) modify the following word, intuens, rather than ait, but that change would not affect the conclusions here.

24 In truth the introduction of Lucretia's story also serves Augustine for yet a fourth purpose: it gives him occasion for an eight-chapter exposition of the immorality of suicide. Those chapters (20–27) do fit with his intent to show the superiority of Christian morals, since suicide was for him a point of sharp disagreement with the pagans. But the chapters are surely directed to Christians as well. There was, first of all, the Donatist movement against which several of Augustine's early works were written; its members, adherents of strict moral codes in many realms, sometimes escaped the threat of various profanations by suicide, and venerated as saints those of their number who had done so. But there are also occasional suggestions in writers Augustine and the subsequent tradition rated more highly (notably Jerome, Ambrose, and perhaps Tertullian) of an attitude toward suicide more permissive, under the right circumstances, than Augustine's own — the “right circumstances” sometimes being an attempt to escape from threatened rape. It is worth noting that Christianity after Augustine's time tended to side with his absolute ban on suicide except where a direct divine command is involved, but that at least in Augustine himself, as will be manifest here, condemnation of the sin need not preclude either praise of the sinner in other matters or the thinkability of forgiveness. Further discussion appears in Alexander Murray, The Curse on Self-Murder, vol. 2 of Suicide in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2000); for the motivations behind Augustine's writings on the topic, see especially 105–7, 110, 113. More on Jerome's attitude, including the possibility that the City of God responds directly to Jerome's treatment of Lucretia in his Adversus Jovinianum, appears in my God's Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws (Notre Dame, IN, 2019), 227–28. The suggestions in Ambrose (and perhaps Jerome as well) seem largely motivated by the need to take account of early Christians who killed themselves to avoid rape and were later honored as martyrs; for the case of St. Pelagia, see Ambrose, De virginibus / Über die Jungfrauen, trans. Peter Dückers, Fontes Christiani 81 (Turnhout, 2009), 3.7.32–38, 224–35. A useful account of these complications, including also good introductory information on the Donatists, appears in La cité de Dieu, Livres I–V, trans. G. Combès, Ouevres de Saint Augustin 5th series, vol. 33 (Paris, 2014 [orig. publ. 1959]), 775–77. Finally, for an introduction to Tertullian's brief positive invocation of Lucretia, see Robert J. Goar, The Legend of Cato Uticensis from the First Century B.C. to the Fifth Century A.D., Collection Latomus 197 (Brussels, 1987), 78–79; a slightly fuller summary with references appears in Eleanor Glendinning, “Reinventing Lucretia: Rape, Suicide and Redemption from Classical Antiquity to the Medieval Era,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 20 (2013): 61–82, at 68–69.

25 DCD 1.19: “An forte [ideo ibi non est, quia] non insontem, sed male sibi consciam se peremit? Quid si enim (quod ipsa tantummodo nosse poterat) quamvis iuveni violenter inruenti etiam sua libidine inlecta consensit idque in se puniens ita doluit, ut morte putaret expiandum?” Augustine's statement of the dilemma does not support, it seems to me, Peter Brown's remark that he “piles on innuendoes against the chastity of Lucretia” (Augustine, 308). The accusation of “piling on” is misplaced, for one thing, as it is only in these two sentences and the passage cited in the following note that Augustine says anything all that could be construed as impugning her chastity. And it is difficult to take these sentences as containing a serious suggestion, or even innuendo, given the hypothetical context in which they arise and the repeated declarations of chastity that precede and follow. (Further consideration of exactly what kind of consent Augustine may have had in mind here appears in n. 49 below.)

26 It is important to notice that, though the two recent English translations (n. 2 above) are incorrect on the point, for Augustine the crime of suicide would be lessened (“extenuatur”) by preceding unchastity, but not excused. Killing the guilty is, for him, a crime less monstrous than killing the innocent, but it does not cease to be a crime (compare n. 35 below). The relevant sentence concludes the second and final passage (this one also two sentences long) in which Augustine makes any mention of the possibility of unchastity. It reads: “This case is hemmed in from both sides, so that, if the homicide is diminished, the adultery is established; if the adultery is cleansed away, the homicide is increased; and no way out at all will be found when it is said: ‘if she was defiled, why has she been praised? If she was chaste, why was she killed?’” The Latin reads: “Sed ita haec causa ex utroque latere coartatur, ut, si extenuatur homicidium, adulterium confirmatur; si purgatur adulterium, homicidium cumuletur; nec omnino invenitur exitus, ubi dicitur: ‘Si adulterata, cur laudata; si pudica, cur occisa?’” (DCD 1.19).

27 “Nobis tamen in hoc tam nobili feminae huius exemplo ad istos refutandos, qui Christianis feminis in captivitate compressis alieni ab omni cogitatione sanctitatis insultant, sufficit quod in praeclaris eius laudibus dictum est: ‘Duo fuerunt et adulterium unus admisit.’ Talis enim ab eis Lucretia magis credita est, quae se nullo adulterino potuerit maculare consensu.”

28 DCD 1.16. The two quotations are continuous, reading: “Sed quia non solum quod ad dolorem, verum etiam quod ad libidinem pertinet, in corpore alieno perpetrari potest: quidquid tale factum fuerit, etsi retentam constantissimo animo pudicitiam non excutit, tamen pudorem incutit, ne credatur factum cum mentis etiam voluntate, quod fieri fortasse sine carnis aliqua voluptate non potuit.”

29 For comparing Augustine's work with the lived experience of rape victims as understood in recent decades, a helpful, challenging, and even appropriately painful starting point is Mary Pellauer, “Augustine on Rape: One Chapter in the Theological Tradition,” Violence against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook, ed. Carol J. Adams and Marie J. Fortune (New York, 1995), 207–41. The anger (her word) Pellauer experienced at reading Augustine against the background of reports from people who work with rape victims gives the essay an ethical urgency rare in academic writing: it demands, and deserves, to be heard. Nonetheless there are some limitations and inaccuracies in its reading of Augustine that also demand recognition: a few are remarked in n. 33 below.

30 “Ac per hoc et quae se occiderunt ne quicquam huius modi paterentur, quis humanus adfectus eis nolit ignosci? Et quae se occidere noluerunt, ne suo facinore alienum flagitium deuitarent, quisquis eis hoc crimine dederit, ipse crimen insipientiae non cauebit” (1.17). The verb nolle, which Augustine uses twice here, can mean “to wish not to,” “not to wish to,” or “to refuse or decline to.” Clearly the second or third meaning is operative in each case; the choice does not affect the argument above. Humanus, for its part, might be translated with the English word humane rather than human.

31 Readers may be tempted to object that the particular instance of sympathy described in the preceding paragraph does not self-evidently apply to Lucretia's case, because at least at first reading it seems focused on women who commit suicide to avoid being raped, not after rape happens. But two pages later, at the end of his longest argument that a woman who in no way consents to rape remains holy in mind and body and has nothing that she is “punishing in herself” or “avenging against herself” by “voluntary death” (“non habet quod in se morte spontanea puniat,” DCD 1.18), Augustine adds, “quanto minus antequam hoc fiat!” — how much less before [the rape] happens! If it is a mistake and a sin for rape victims to commit suicide, in other words, it is still more so for those who have not yet suffered rape. But in that case it is women in the latter situation who have less claim to Augustine's sympathy, while actual victims like Lucretia have more: it seems, at least in this passage, to be one step more understandable that an actual victim would make the mistake of taking her own life. Victims, after all, can be expected to suffer after the fact in the way that Augustine has described, namely from a natural reaction of shame that he believes is based in a fear of being suspected of secret assent. (The fact that he finds this shame not only an understandable but a natural, which is to say an involuntary and passive, reaction is attested by his remark that an assault “inspires shame,” or even “strikes shame into” the victim; the Latin is pudorem incutit [n. 28 above]. Thus Lucretia's error is not that she experiences shame, but that she responds wrongly to it.) Given all this, and given Augustine's clearly conscious distinction between the two types of case (cf. also chap. 24 ad fin.), it is even possible that the sentences quoted in the preceding paragraph have been intentionally left vague enough to cover both types. Grammatically the “something of this sort” (quicquam huius modi) that women who are tempted toward self-murder seek to avoid could refer either to rape itself or to the shame that follows it.

32 As already hinted, critics who have come to the City of God to investigate Chaucer's remark about it have often made the mistake of thinking the question can be decided merely by a reading of chapter 19: the twentieth-century writers discussed here only rarely refer to any other chapter. In this connection it is worth bearing in mind that each of the “books” of Augustine's text was through most of its history presented as a continuous stream, punctuated at most by line breaks and numbers (generally marginal if present at all) for the individual chapters. The short descriptions of each chapter now commonly used as chapter headings were, in most manuscripts and the earliest editions, either absent or collected at the beginning of the treatise or of a group of several “books”; the practice of breaking up the textual flow by inserting them into the main text dates only from the sixteenth century. See Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 302 nn. 3–4, and again Marrou, “La division en chapitres” (n. 17 above). Marrou's judgment of the implications for reading nicely matches those suggested here: “One must read [Augustine] as he wished to be read…. Each book presents itself as a totality, and it is certain that in Augustine's own thinking the book is the literary unit … one must read each of them as a whole, as an enormous symphonic piece whose development no fermata comes to interrupt, and which, in truth, it would be barbarous to split up” (249, translation mine).

33 Sample reports of Augustine as noncompassionate appear in nn. 4–6 and 8 above and nn. 46 and 48 below; a standout instance is Delany's characterization in The Naked Text (p. 204; see n. 6 above) of Augustine's retelling of the story as a “diatribe” against Lucretia. To reach that conclusion, however, Delaney's treatment goes beyond even the frequent practice of discussing chapter 19 in isolation from the twelve surrounding relevant chapters; it also handles the evidence of chapter 19 itself selectively. For example, its reproduction of nearly a full page of text from the chapter, which gives the impression of offering a sufficient survey of Augustine's account, in fact omits both the crucial line “there were two [present] and one became guilty of adultery” (even though it appears four times in the three-page chapter and is introduced with the strong approval noted above) and the sentences near the beginning that declare Lucretia's chastity in Augustine's own voice, thus making clear that his “dilemma” is merely a kind of thought experiment.

Two more pieces that return on the whole a negative verdict about the ideas in DCD 1 deserve special mention for the unusual complexity of their readings. One is Amy Greenstadt's “Rapt from Himself: Rape and the Poetics of Corporeality in Sidney's Old Arcadia,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York, 2001), 311–49, which refreshingly attributes to Augustine's views troubles different from those most frequently found there. However, many of the article's striking claims about theology and the history of European thought are advanced with insufficient evidence. Occasionally the result seems flatly incorrect, as when the article attributes to Jerome and Ambrose, without any more specific reference, the position that virgins could commit suicide “in order to resist the threat of rape, since once virginity was lost the status of sexual and spiritual purity it offered could never be regained” (344 n. 25). In fact the reasons these two writers had for entertaining exceptions to the ban on self-murder appear to have been otherwise (n. 24 above); neither makes any mention, at least in the most obviously relevant passages, of the idea that follows Greenstadt's “since.” At other points the sparseness of evidence leaves us with a claim that is nearly impossible to evaluate, as with the complex assertion that, while Augustine's emphasis on the difference between chastity and physical virginity eventually allowed for a focus on women's consent that “seemed to constitute a public acknowledgment of women's rights to self-determination” (316), he also harbored “notions of female subjectivity and virtue” that were “no less limited than” that of previous theologians who allegedly took “purity,” physical virginity, and the “lack of all erotic thoughts” as conditions inseparably bound together (316, 314). But no evidence is offered for the earlier theologians’ view, and to support its account of Augustine's own ideas the article –– constrained, to be sure, by the fact that its primary goal is an argument about Sir Philip Sidney –– brings forward data that seem to me sufficient to start a discussion, but not to establish the stated claim.

The second article is Pellauer's “Augustine on Rape,” which has come closer than any other treatment to stopping my own reading in its tracks; its criticisms (occasionally paired with appreciations) will make anyone think carefully about whether to judge Augustine's stance as a whole compassionate, even once the instances of sympathy remarked in the main text above are recognized. Ideally the article should be brought into extended dialogue with a more exact reading of Augustine than it itself provides, an exercise that would likely alter positions on both sides. As a compact approximation to that work, I would like to note, first, a certain selectivity: when discussing the “dilemma,” for example, the article mentions neither Augustine's previous declaration of Lucretia's chastity nor his observation that anyone of human feeling will desire to forgive a rape victim who kills herself. Second are a number of overstatements and simple inaccuracies. There is a blanket declaration, presumably based on the above-mentioned passages in Jerome and Ambrose but surely too strong, that “early Christian ethics favored suicide in the face of rape” (207). There is a repeated conflation (220, 230, 232) of the possibility of pleasure with consent, as if Augustine believed that the experience of pleasure, if it should happen in a rape victim, inevitably implied consent and thus guilt; in fact his whole mechanism of enjoyment and consent (n. 49 below) is meant to demonstrate the opposite, since enjoyment is often passive but consent must be active. And there is an emphatic castigation of Augustine for another thing he does not say: “Worst was the statement that rape could not be suffered without some pleasure” (216, emphasis original; the problem seems to arise externally, from Pellauer's reliance on the translation of Marcus Dods [Edinburg, 1872, repr. New York, 1950], which unaccountably omits Augustine's “perhaps” from the passage given at n. 28 above; Pellauer's citation reintroduces the word, in brackets, but in a place where it modifies the wrong phrase). Correcting these and some similar misreadings might ease, at least to some extent, Pellauer's overall reaction to the text, while leaving some of her important objections intact.

34 An exception is Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford, 1982); while Donaldson's presentation requires adjustment in some other areas, he seems to me correct in observing a “central, humane tendency of Augustine's argument” that various modern-period writers have disregarded. Warren S. Smith, “Dorigen's Lament and the Resolution of the Franklin's Tale,” Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 374–90, also finds genuine sympathy in Augustine's treatment (388), but the article's focus elsewhere does not allow it space to weigh evidence for and against the finding. As already remarked, Robert Worth Frank's older Chaucer and the Legend (n. 5 above) likewise argues for a compassionate Augustine, but draws on evidence unlikely to convince the skeptical. Rachel Warburton, “Reading Rape in Chaucer: Or Are Cecily, Lucretia, and Philomela Good Women?” in Diversifying the Discourse: The Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, 1990–2004 (New York, 2006), 270–88, rightly observes that Augustine “sympathizes at least partially with [Lucretia's] plight” (276–77); but she also reads back onto Augustine ideas about rape that do not appear in Augustine himself (see n. 49 below). Elizabeth Robertson's “Public Bodies and Psychic Domains: Rape, Consent, and Female Subjectivity in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,” Representing Rape (see Greenstadt in preceding note), 281–310, while not speaking directly to the question of Augustine's compassion for Lucretia, does credit him with a generally positive impact on how women were seen in cases of rape (283, 296–97); she attributes to him, however, a greater degree of originality in asserting women's autonomy than was likely the case, given the generally high view of women in, for example, ancient Stoicism. (She also incorrectly asserts that Augustine believes that rape “by necessity involves carnal satisfaction” [297]; likely the source of the error is Marcus Dods's translation, as is the case with Pellauer's “Augustine on Rape.”) Finally, Melanie Webb, “On Lucretia Who Slew Herself: Rape and Consolation in Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 44 (2013): 37–58, attempts a thoroughgoing defense of Augustine's attitude toward Lucretia, among other things helpfully noting the importance of the parallel with Regulus and raising worthwhile questions about the relations among voluptas, libido, and voluntas. But the article's answers to those questions are occasionally skewed, it seems to me, by its failure even to mention the much-discussed “dilemma” (n. 26 above). Doing so would have required it to come to terms with Augustine's belief in at least the logical possibility — for all that he never says that it has happened in any particular case and denies it in Lucretia's — that libido could arise in a rape victim and that voluptas might tempt a victim into some form of voluntary consent (on which see also DCD 1.25 ad fin.). In the absence of those recognitions, the article's portrait of Augustine seems a bit more in line with a version of modern feminist sensibilities than the historical bishop actually was.

35 At 1.17; see also 1.21 and 1.26 ad fin.; for the previous “remark” here, see n. 26, which notes some mistranslations that likely contribute to confusion on this point. Galloway's article is one of those that ascribe the logical inverse: “Augustine and many other medieval writers persistently maintained the possibility of [Lucretia's] ‘secret consent’ to the rape as the one justifiable reason they could imagine for her consigning herself to death” (“Chaucer's Legend” [n. 8 above], 817–18). I have not located any medieval writers who make such a statement. Augustine himself certainly denies it — with greatest force in the discussion of suicide that occupies chapters 20–27. The passage quoted from DCD 1.18 reads: “Non habet quod in se morte spontanea puniat femina sine ulla sua consensione violenter oppressa et alieno conpressa peccato.”

36 Again Galloway's article makes the declaration clearly, if only in passing. Augustine, it asserts, had “determined that Lucretia's suicide made her sinful because she displays the Roman ‘excessive zeal for praise’” (“Chaucer's Legend,” 814). The two clauses involved are correct and faithful to Augustine's text — he does think the suicide makes her sinful, and that she is too interested in praise — but the because that connects them is not: there is no suggestion in the treatise that Lucretia's “zeal” causes either the sinfulness of the act or Augustine's judgment about it.

37 To borrow Galloway's already-quoted phrase (while reversing his conclusion), Augustine then seems as much a “sympathetic historicist” as are his later commentators. Certainly a capacity for historicism appears strong elsewhere in his work, as when, in commenting on Psalm 64, he remarks: “Every human being, wherever he or she is born, learns the language of that land, or region, or city, and no other; he or she is steeped in those ways of conduct and that life. What should a child born among pagans do, in order not to worship a stone, when the parents have placed that worship deep within [quando illum cultum insinuaverunt parentes]?” (My trans. from Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 51–100, CCL 39 [Turnhout, 1956], 64.6, pp. 827–28.) There are instances of historicist thinking in book one of the City of God as well, as when Augustine writes of the Romans (thinking again of his admired Regulus) that although the gods they defend are false, “nonetheless they are not false worshipers, but are in fact very faithful swearers of oaths” (1.24). See further Brown, Augustine (n. 16 above), 309 n. 6.

38 The major exception is the presence in the Polychronicon (and in Trevisa's translation) of Augustine's quotation of the summary line “there were two and one committed adultery.” But even in that text we find none of Augustine's other affirmations of Lucretia's chastity, none of his imagination of the inner world of victims, and no statement that we should desire to forgive the suicide. Higden, after all, is about other business — writing the history of the world — and is interested in Lucretia's story primarily because of the ensuing downfall of the Roman monarchy; it is no surprise that he, like so many other readers, passes over the more subtle ethical work that appears outside the nineteenth chapter of Augustine's treatment. See the Rolls Series Polychronicon (n. 12 above), 162–63.

39 Ovid, Livy, Simon de Hesdin, and the Gesta Romanorum all indisputably have Lucretia conscious during the rape; Higden gives no information one way or the other, but as he mentions no swoon there are no grounds for inferring one. There is, however, one version of the story other than Chaucer's in which Lucretia passes out: that in John Gower's Confessio Amantis (7.4754–5123; the rape itself occupies lines 4959–93). One immediately wants to know whether one English poet's version was a source for the other's. Chronology is of little help, as Gower seems to have started work on the Confessio in 1386, the very year in which many scholars believe Chaucer to have written the F-Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, and it is virtually impossible to know whether any particular “legend” was written before or after the Prologue. The fact that Gower not only includes the swoon but entirely omits the unsuccessful threats, bribes, and pleadings that elsewhere precede it might suggest that he is moving further down a trail Chaucer had already blazed, making the rape still more completely a matter of brute force rather than of insidious persuasion, though one cannot be certain. But I have seen no evidence suggesting the reverse possibility that Gower's story was the inspiration for the swoon in Chaucer's; and even if things did proceed that way, it would be fair to ask why Chaucer chose to buck both the source he drew on most (Ovid) and, if he actually used it, the other source he names (Livy) in order to follow Gower in this one particular. One other possibility is that a few lines in Ovid could have suggested the swoon to Chaucer: on Tarquin's announcement of his arrival in the bedroom, Ovid tells us that Lucretia says “nothing, for she has neither voice and the powers to speak nor anything of mind in her entire breast (illa nihil, neque enim vocem viresque loquendi / aut aliquid toto pectore mentis habet)” (2.797–98). But it is amply clear from what follows in Ovid that she has remained conscious, and in any case Chaucer has already translated this momentary incapacity to speak at lines 1796–97. Thus if it suggested the later swoon, it did no more than that, so that here too it is appropriate to seek further reasons for Chaucer's acceptance of the suggestion. For information relevant to the dating of Chaucer's and Gower's versions see, besides the columns already named from the Riverside Chaucer (n. 5 above), John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York, 1964), 8–11, 116–120; for Gower's text, see Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo, MI, 2004), 3.372–80.

40 Kiser, Telling Tales (n. 6 above), 105–6.

41 Not to speak of the poem's explicit, formed in parallel with those Chaucer gives his other legends of good women: “Explicit Legenda Lucrecie Rome, martiris.” The exaltation of Lucretia and the others to a kind of pagan sainthood, however, is not quite the astonishing exercise in poetic force majeure that it first seems. In writing his own Legend Chaucer surely thought of the most famous such compilation, the calendrically arranged Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, not to mention liturgical lectionaries that similarly provided narratives for a saint celebrated on each day; and in that context it is remarkable that Chaucer's main source for the Lucretia legend in particular, Ovid's Fasti, is also a series of stories associated with days of the calendar. Thus the notion that Lucretia had a day “hallowed” to her, and was at least to that extent like a Christian saint, seems to be partly inheritance rather than invention.

42 Edgar Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets (Cambridge, MA, 1929), 224.

43 Another possible ancestor that features eyebrow-raising language is Waleys's commentary on the City of God, where the word is assensit (assented); but the surrounding sentences stress that there is external force involved in the “assent,” and moreover seem to be close derivatives of the descriptions in Livy and Ovid, where similar language for the event apparently implies no guilt on Lucretia's part. Waleys's clause, quoted in Galloway (“Chaucer's Legend,” 819), reads “quo timore victa Lucretia assensit” (conquered by that fear, Lucretia assented); Ovid's, “succubit famae victa puella metu” (conquered by the fear of reputation, the girl succumbed), 2.810; and Livy's, “quo terrore cum vincisset obstinatam pudicitiam” (when [Tarquin's lust] had conquered [her] steadfast sense of shame by that terror), 1.58.5 (though see the notes in the edition of Weissenborn and Müller for a relevant textual crux in Livy; full references for Livy, Ovid, and the following three texts are in n. 5 above). The passage in the Gesta Romanorum is “illa vero timens de tali infamia coacta consensit ei” (but, fearing such an infamy, she who had been compelled consented to him — see Dick, Die Gesta Romanorum, 70), or simply “coacta concessit” (she who had been compelled yielded — Oesterley, Gesta Romanorum, 489). If the phrase in the Gesta is intended to imply guilt, it is probably because of the unique function given the story in at least some of its manuscripts: that of a moral allegory in which Lucretia represents the soul “violated” by the devil when it consents to sin, after which it has need of a self-inflicted wound from the “sword” of penitence (see Oesterley, Gesta Romanorum, 490, or Stace, trans., 344).

44 See n. 23 above. It should be remarked that the very brief first-century recounting of Lucretia's story in Valerius Maximus, like that of Augustine, omits Tarquin's threats and bribes and simply declares that the act was unambiguously a violation: in Valerius's words, Lucretia was “compelled by force to suffer defilement (per vim stuprum pati coacta)” (book 6, chap. 1). But I have seen no suggestion that Chaucer followed Valerius directly — though one wonders whether Augustine might have. Simon de Hesdin's translation reproduces Valerius's words faithfully, but they are entirely overshadowed by the preceding “supplement” from Livy, nearly twenty times as long, which includes the threats and the yielding, and consequently leaves open the possibility of the peculiar kind of accusation against Lucretia under discussion here. For Simon, see nn. 5 and 7 above; for Valerius, Valerius Maximus: Memorable Doings and Sayings, ed. D. R. Shackleton-Bailey (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

45 Thus the swoon in Chaucer serves somewhat the same function as does the aforementioned “bold move” with which Augustine begins his telling of the tale — though the swoon also does more, as we will see below. Augustine's alterations may have been prompted by his own remark in chapter 18 that the virtue of pudicitia “has as its companion fortitude, by which it determines rather to endure any evil whatsoever than to consent to evil.” A direct application of that idea to Lucretia's story as it appears in Livy and Ovid could lead an interpreter to make the accusation just mentioned of “consent to conditional compulsion,” although such an accusation would need to take account of the argument that by refusing to consent to being raped Lucretia would effectively be consenting to the murder of an innocent slave, not to mention to her own violent death, whether juridically or at Tarquin's hands (some versions of the story are ambiguous on that last point). It is interesting to speculate whether Augustine may have included the qualification “without a sin of one's own” in his opening remarks (n. 20 above) precisely in order to head off this second kind of accusation against Lucretia, who could only have avoided rape by the sin of approving murder; in that case his later “bold move” amounts to a declaration, regrettably missed by some of his readers, that the sham offer of choice under such duress is a kind of violence no less violent than the physical variety. For details about the canonists’ accusations, see Wolfgang P. Müller, “Lucretia and the Medieval Canonists,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, n.s. 19 (1989): 13–32, an article helpfully flagged in Galloway, “Chaucer's Legend,” 829 n. 6; Müller discusses the high-medieval use of Augustine's remark about fortitude at 23 n. 33.

46 Müller's article (previous note), notwithstanding its useful provision of a pathway into canon-law materials that many of us would otherwise easily overlook, also serves as a good example of the ease with which the two accusations may be conflated and the damage that results when they are. One result in Müller's case is a serious misrepresentation of the relationship between Augustine and the late-twelfth-century canon lawyer Hugoccio. The latter's strong statement that because Tarquin's coercion was merely “conditional,” Lucretia “sinned in that coitus and committed adultery” (quoted in Müller, 22 n. 31) is characterized as strengthening something that Augustine had already “insinuated.” But that is not at all the case: in fact Hugoccio is making an accusation of the second type, the type that Augustine's presentation of the story renders impossible from the outset. It should also be said that Müller's article misrepresents Augustine's telling itself, as far as I can tell, in more general ways. One example comes just after it correctly points out (19–21) that Yvo of Chartres and Gratian, the immediate sources for most subsequent medieval writings on canon law, reproduce Augustine's initial laudatory comments on Lucretia but omit his one-guilt-or-the-other dilemma, with the result that these early canonists’ selections from his account leave their reader with an impression quite the opposite of that issuing from the very different selections chosen by many modern readers of Augustine (cf. n. 33 above and associated text). However, Müller then concludes that by that piece of editing the canonists “accomplished no less than the complete reversal of Augustine's [actual] standpoint” (20). This seems to me simply incorrect, a misstatement made possible only by Müller's understanding of that standpoint as a “final condemnation of Lucretia's morality” — as if Augustine had been primarily pursuing a summative thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgment on the defendant's worldview, rather than the complicated consideration of sin, circumstance, and forgiveness that we have been exploring.

47 The Polychronicon does, it is true, mention the fear of being thought to have secretly assented, because it paraphrases the sentence from chapter 19 in which Lucretia is said to have felt that fear (see n. 14 above). But the mention is brief, in a single phrase, with nothing like the impact of Augustine's repeated reversions to the idea.

48 Thus while I cannot agree with Isabelle Mast's remark that Augustine “clearly casts doubt on [Lucretia's] innocence” (if it is meant, as its context suggests, to refer to innocence as regards the rape rather than the suicide), the way in which he treats the case does encourage the notion that there will always be doubters among us. Since that dissemination of a kind of second-order doubt will very likely affect how Augustine's readers expect others to hear the tale, it does “cast doubt” in a looser and more associative sense, even though the readers themselves should become more, not less, likely to affirm Lucretia's chastity. See Mast, “Rape in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Other Related Works,” in Young Medieval Women, ed. Katherine J. Lewis et al. (Thrupp, Stroud, UK, 1999), 131 n. 90.

49 The question of how Augustine thinks it possible (even if merely logically possible) that there could be consent involved in an act that nonetheless remains violent is potentially a deep one, opening on fundamental beliefs about the nature of human will, its relationship with “external” forces, and the conditions under which we attribute “freedom” and “responsibility” to it. It is presumably this sort of question (rather than the question of a summary thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdict about Lucretia's particular case) that the canonists who invoked Lucretia's story as an aid to thought about “conditional coercion” were trying to explore. In this particular case, however, there may be a relatively simple answer: Augustine may mean that while the rape was an act of unqualified violence to which Lucretia gave no sort of advance consent, it is still logically possible that a rape victim could make an internal act of consent in the course of the attack, because of the pleasure that could be involved. He seems to have that possibility in mind at the beginning of chapter 25, when he imagines other women threatened by rape considering suicide before the fact “lest the body subjected to [another's] desire draw, by a most seductive pleasure, the mind to consent to sin.” The possibility would also fit with a three-part structure of sin (or temptation) that appears frequently in Augustine's writings, including works written long before and long after the beginning of the City of God: sin, he says in such places, consists of suggestion, enjoyment, and consent, in that order, and the middle phase shares with the first some element of passivity, of coming to the subject involuntarily and from outside. (Cf. Greenstadt, “Rapt from Himself” [n. 33 above], 314–19, for similar distinctions in late-medieval and early modern law, though caution is needed with respect to her account of the complex relations between these later writers and Augustine's own text. For Augustine himself, see especially his De sermone Domini in monte 1.12.33–36, but also De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2.14.20–21; the entirety of Sermo 98; and the brief mention at Confessions 10.30.41.) Such ideas would provide a clear interpretation of the otherwise difficult passage quoted at n. 25 above.

Besides the observations that it overcomes “consent-to-conditional-compulsion” (or type-B) accusations and that it overcomes Augustine's worry about “hidden consent” (type A), there is yet a third effort to explain Lucretia's swoon in Warburton, “Reading Rape” (n. 34 above), 284 n. 12. The treatment there, however, might mislead readers about some of the details of Augustine's stance: whatever later medieval ideas about rape may have been, Augustine himself seems clear that pleasure, if it should occur in such a context, need not imply guilt (or, in the later terms that Warburton tracks, the loss of one's status as a “good woman”). The judgment is clear from the threefold structure of sin just described; it is also reflected in the simple fact that the City of God never says that pleasure implies consent. Instead it says, as we have seen, only that some may suspect that it has led there in a particular case.

50 This is, of course, one sentence of the key passage from chapter 1.19 translated near the beginning of this essay, with its phrases slightly rearranged to clarify the point at hand.

51 I insert the qualification widely known because I have not managed to see either of the two extant manuscripts of Ridevall's commentary, and the selections in Galloway's “Chaucer's Legend” do not include the relevant passage. Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon, for its part, is faithful to Higden's altered version, declaring only that “þe Romayns” desired human praise (Rolls series, 163). It should be noted that Chaucer's couplet (1812–13) likely contains a double echo of Augustine, as the dredde of schame adduced in its second line could easily descend from phrases that occur within about a dozen words of Augustine's reference to the “Romana mulier”: “pudoris infirmitas” (the inconstancy of shame), “puduit” (she was ashamed), and “verita est ne putaretur” (she feared that it would be supposed). But since the paraphrase of Augustine's text that appears, through Ridevall, in Higden and Trevisa (n. 14, and text to n. 12, above) contains near-equivalents of the first and third phrases, this second echo cannot be claimed as independent evidence for Chaucer's direct knowledge of Augustine.

52 The question of what Chaucer's attention to the City of God in writing his story of Lucrece might mean for the Legend as a whole is, of course, outside this paper's scope. For the suggestion of narratorial boredom, see Dinshaw, Carolyn, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI, 1989), 84–87Google Scholar. It is worth acknowledging that Chaucer's invention of Lucretia's swoon, for all that it suggests a thoughtful and creative engagement with Augustine's text, does push Lucretia in the passive direction that Dinshaw finds regrettably emphasized for all the “saints” in the Legend, even though she seems to me to overplay the sameness of those tales and of saints’ lives generally.

53 We have already seen that Trevet, author of the Anglo-Norman Chronicle that underlies the Man of Law's Tale, began a flurry of fourteenth-century commentaries on the City of God. Petrarch of course also counts as one of Chaucer's major literary ancestors, having written one of the Clerk's Tale's two most important sources; he includes De civitate Dei on a short list of his favorite books, where it is the only one by a Christian author. Such connections do not guarantee that Chaucer knew of his sources’ interest, but they do indicate that De civitate was widely and enthusiastically circulated in intellectual circles that he frequented. For more on the fourteenth century's enthusiasm for the book, see Kent, Bonnie, “Reinventing Augustine's Ethics: The Afterlife of the City of God,” in Augustine's City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. Wetzel, James (Cambridge, UK, 2012), 225–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 242–44. For the idea of a late-medieval renaissance of interest in Augustine more generally, a locus classicus is Heiko Oberman, “Headwaters of the Reformation: Initia Lutheri — Initia Reformationis,” in Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era: Papers for the Fourth International Congress for Luther Research, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 8 (Leiden, 1974), 40–88; and see further the criticism of Oberman's theological argument in Saak's, Erik Creating Augustine: Interpreting Augustine and Augustinianism in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 1.

54 Initial approaches to several of the questions mentioned in the last two paragraphs appear, with more background details provided, in my God's Patients (n. 24 above). For the morality of suicide in the Franklin's Tale, see 226–28; for Griselda on death without burial, 342 n. 50; for the new weight Chaucer puts on Griselda's Christianity, 68–72 and 334 n. 30; and for a fuller methodological discussion about interpretation, hypothesis, and historicism, see chap. 2 and the index, s.v. “hypothetico-deductive argument.” David Aers took up the third of these points some time ago but drew quite different conclusions from it; see the first chapter of his Faith, Ethics, and Church: Writing in England, 1360–1409 (Cambridge, UK, 2000).