He said/ she said: the invariable shorthand for the challenges of deciphering occluded events of violence and violation, in which the question of which story we believe— that of the accused or of the accuser— bears out innumerable consequences related to our conceptions of justice, gender, and sexuality, both in the past and continuing into the present. Chaucer depicts rape and scenes suggestive of rape in several of his Canterbury Tales, most notably “The Miller's Tale,” “The Reeve's Tale,” and “The Wife of Bath's Tale,” and in his Legend of Good Women as well, particularly in the Legend of Lucrece and the Legend of Philomela, with these encounters highlighting the ways in which speech and silence formulate readers’ reactions to sexual violence. Various medieval theologians and exegetes extol silence as a woman's defining virtue, yet Chaucer's narratives both reinforce this prevailing view and allow readers to consider how male speech either excuses or condemns violent enactments of male sexuality.

By foregrounding in our classrooms the ways in which Chaucer depicts speech and silence as gendered reactions to sexual violence, instructors can illuminate the various ways that literary depictions of rape simultaneously reinforce and undermine medieval constructions of gender. Such a perspective also allows scholars and students to consider the ways in which we choose— or choose not— to speak of Chaucer's vexing identity as a potential rapist in his interactions with Cecily Champaigne— a biographical event in which textuality, speech, and silence converge to haunt our understanding of Chaucer's benevolently paternal image as the “Father of English Literature.” In the pages that follow I discuss converging teaching strategies for addressing Chaucer's depictions of rape that I employ in my classes at the University of Central Florida— a large, metropolitan, public institution with students from a diverse range of backgrounds, with varying previous exposure to medieval literature, to gender theory, and to literary theory.

Speech and silence play constitutive roles in both gender theory and literary theory, and clarifying this confluence for students opens new avenues for their mutual exploration in various texts.