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➡︎ Supplementary Materials (“Felony”)
Felon, Felonesse, President
Jamie Taylor*
Our understanding of what a felony is, how it should be prosecuted, and who should be considered a felon formed in the imaginary world of medieval romances, alliterative poems, and personification allegories. Elise Wang’s The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature forcefully argues for the equal importance of legal documents, official and unofficial procedure, and fictional scenarios in the definition of felony law, showing how stories about criminal acts and justice constructed the felony processes we still follow today. In its heyday a few decades ago, law-and-literature scholarship in Middle English studies went in a certain direction: from law to literature (reading the ways literary texts responded to legal discourse around, for example, complaint, as Wendy Scase argues, or the ways documentary vocabularies found their ways into literary language, as Emily Steiner argues). Or it went from theory to practice, which is how Arvind Thomas thinks through the relationship of canon law and Piers Plowman, to take one example.[1]
But Wang definitively shows that in the history of felony, it isn’t law-and-literature; it’s law-as-literature, and also literature as law. Storytellingis endemic to felony and to justice alike, and Wang shows how legal agents (in the form of pleaders, witnesses, and felons themselves) are literary figures, personifications of procedural types. As personifications, felons exceed the moments of their events, insofar as they retain that identity well beyond any criminal act, prosecution, and even exoneration. Not only does the appellation “felon” attach like a burr, it also prevents other possible identities and activities: For example, in some states in the U.S., once someone is named a felon, they cannot be a psychologist, pawnbroker, dentist, or massage therapist.
However, we now know that in the U.S., a felon can be President. The very designation “Felon President” defies categories that we would assume obviate one another, but as Wang’s book teaches us, it can do so because we never really had distinct categories in the first place. In the particular case of Felon President Trump, it seems like the felony designation hardly matters, since it is unlikely to have any real effect: Judge Merchan sentenced Trump to an “unconditional discharge” in his hush-money case, for example, so he will receive no jail time or fines.[2] And of course, he currently operates with seemingly unchecked power to enact executive orders as though they are laws. But still, the name sticks. Just after the 2024 election, one Politico article put it succinctly: “Nothing much will change for the president-elect now that he is a convicted felon. The sting will be in the title itself.”[3] Trump knows that the story sometimes matters more than the conviction. He is and will always be a felon.
Unsurprisingly, he’s trying to rewrite the narrative. One way Trump has tried to reframe himself as victim rather than felon is by calling his legal cases “witch hunts.” The term is striking, since some of his stickiest legal woes have to do with his treatment of women: the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and the sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll. His strategy in those cases has been less about demonstrating his innocence than turning these women into personifications in the service of his own rehabilitation. A few years ago, Trump called E. Jean Carroll’s claim against him “a fake story, a totally made-up story,” but quickly moved on to calling her “not a believable person” and finally calling the whole thing “the Carroll Hoax.”[4] The trajectory of Trump’s response to Carroll moves from story to personification to legend, which, as Wang traces, was also a path medieval felony procedure often took.
Like Trump’s ugliest felony cases, so too did the toughest medieval felonies center on rape, sexual assault, and the demonization of women. Wang’s book asks us to think deeply about gender, crime, and judgment, focusing particularly on the ways women’s voices are deployed in felony records and trial imaginaries alike. To take one important example, Wang argues that Chaucer carefully depicts Constance’s killing of an almost-rapist as self-defense in his Man of Law’s Tale. This is a change from the French source, which merely notes that Constance kills her attacker; Chaucer’s insistence on Constance’s moral innocence recognizes how felony treats women and rape in specific and peculiar ways, both in legal courts and in the court of public opinion.
In fact, Wang shows that even within the idiosyncrasies of medieval felony process, the treatment of women was particularly idiosyncratic. Middle English differentiates between a “felon” and a “felonesse,” suggesting that female felons should be distinguished from male felons, perhaps because it was so unusual that women were accused of felony crimes. Barbara Hanawalt notes that English legal records from 1300–1348 show one female murderer for every nine male murderers (a ratio that still stands).[5] Courts acquitted women accused of murder at a higher rate because they were thought to be incapable of physically wielding weapons and/or they were thought to be emotionally incapable of summoning the kind of rage and hate required to kill another human being.[6] But different approaches to female criminality circulate, too. The first and most thorough witch hunt manual, the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum, said that felonesses were naturally better at deceit, so they were less likely to be found, or if found, less likely to be found guilty because they can provide convincing false testimony.
So the complicated picture of felonious women coalesces around anxieties about the ways women might be particularly deceptive on one hand and the ways they must be protected on the other. We might trace this contradictory balance by examining the legal and literary life of one of Middle English’s most complicated oft-accused women: Criseyde. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde leaves Criseyde, the Trojan princess, in the hands of the Greek army, having been handed over by her father in exchange for one of his soldiers. Criseyde’s Trojan lover, Troilus, is beset with grief. Criseyde is sad but more resigned: as she tells Troilus, there’s no point in protesting, because “My going is granted by parliament; thus the decision can’t be contradicted, and certainly not by my judgment” (IV.1297-9).[7] All she can do is promise Troilus that she will return in ten days. Inevitably, she cannot leave the Greek camp, and after a while, she falls in love with the leader of the Greek army, Diomede. Troilus, despondent, dies in battle.
When Criseyde is first given to the Greek army, we see that women do not get the opportunity to protest: their fates are determined by a government and set of laws that are not set up to hear their complaints. When Criseyde does not leave the Greek camp as she promised, she is excoriated for betrayal. Early modern readers up to contemporary critics have read Criseyde’s apparent about-face from Troilus to Diomede as Chaucer’s depiction of women’s fickleness. Wang’s work prompted me to check to see how Criseyde voiced her love for Diomede and her rejection of Troilus. It turns out, she didn’t voice it at all. The narrator reports that “the story tells us” that she gave Diomede Troilus’ horse as an expression of her love, and the narrator then says that he “finds in stories elsewhere” that Criseyde really fell for Diomede when he got hurt in battle. As the poem puts it, “Men seyn, I not, that she yaf him hir herte” (IV.1050). Men say, not me, protests the narrator; the truth of Criseyde’s crime is made visible and judge-able by its common knowledge. The narrator goes on to explain, “But trewely, the story telleth us, / Ther made never woman more wo / Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus” (IV.1051-3).
The layering of hearsay and reputation, story and gossip, add up to the final “conviction” that Crseyde is the cause of the most sorrow among all men of all time. The narrator punctuates that conviction with “trewely.”[8] This sexist satisfaction—summing up a very complex story of love, political trafficking, and survival by shrugging one’s shoulders with a “women, am I right?”—renders a social “truth” already forgone as legalistic conviction. Via that condemnation, Criseyde becomes a circulating exemplar: “Hir name, allas! Is publissed so wyde, / That for hir gilt it oughte ynough suffyse” (IV.1905-6). Like E. Jean Carroll’s name, the name “Criseyde” becomes a shorthand for male condemnation of female deceit and by extension, for the exoneration of men’s behavior.
Just as Trump keeps Carroll’s name alive so he can denigrate her, so too do later writers continually revisit Criseyde to ensure the power to chastise her again and again. In the fifteenth century, Robert Henryson sets his Testament of Cresseid many years after the events of Troilus and Criseyde. We encounter Criseyde after she has been dumped by Diomede and left destitute, isolated in her father’s house. She’s upset, and she complains about Venus and Cupid having left her to an awful fate. Henryson imagines his poem as an opportunity to give Criseyde her voice back, and he explicitly says that his purpose is to exonerate her as best he can: “I sall excuse, als far furth as I may, / Thy womanheid, thy wisedome and fairness” (II.87-8).[9] He does so by re-adjudicating her in a new court of law, this time with gods serving as pleaders, witnesses, and judges. Cupid accuses Cresseid of blasphemy and defamation, and Saturn and Cynthia sentence Cresseid “lawfully,” as Henryson puts it, to leprosy and poverty, complete with a formal bill of judgment.Leprosy scabs and vaporizes Cresseid’s body, providing incontrovertible evidence of her treachery and the righteousness of the judgment. Still, Cresseid doesn’t really get a say. She doesn’t testify in this cosmological trial at all, and her only testimony comes later, when she writes her last will and testament and implores all the ladies of Troy and Greece to heed the warning of her life choices. She then dies.
Wang describes an idiosyncratic feature of felony procedure called “standing mute,” in which a defendant was permitted to say nothing when asked if they consent to a trial. Their silence was ostensibly a legal opportunity to resist agreeing to the proceedings. However, because judges and readers alike demand satisfaction, disciplinary responses to standing mute ranged from prison to torture. So women who stood mute were subject to a double bind: they were forced to speak under threat of punishment, but then they were punished for what they said.
Only Cresseid’s death allows her to stand mute in her own condemnation, when the narrator abruptly ends the text: “Since she is dead I speak of her no more” (610-16).
However, even in death Criseyde cannot stand mute. For the next century, male authors continued to articulate her treachery in the service of felonious exemplarity. In the late sixteenth century, someone wrote The Laste Epistle of Creseyd to Troyalus, imagining that the leprous Criseyde writes one last letter to Troilus to express her sorrow for a life misspent with Diomede. There is no narratorial framing here, so the letter is presented as Criseyde’s own words. This Criseyde is angry with Troilus for “standing mute” himself and thereby allowing her to be taken to the Greek camp. “Howe could thy knightly harte consent / Or eyes abyde the sight, / To see me under Diomedes guarde / From Troy to Greikes so stray?” she asks (111-14).[10] The term “consent” pointedly emphasizes that she herself was not granted it, despite the fact that she has been made to take the blame for the aftermath of her political trafficking.As though she recognizes thefutility of testifying once she has already been judged, at the end of the epistle, Criseyde relinquishes her story to Troilus. “On my tombe some epitaphe / Engrave as lykes the beste,” she writes. “So fayre the well: this lipers knight / Can showe of me the rest” (305-8). The repeated demand that we get Criseyde’s side of the story for two centuries after Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde demonstrates an ongoing discomfort with a woman standing mute, using silence in her own defense. In Criseyde’s literary legacy, female silence is reframed as male ventriloquy, such that Criseyde does not deploy legal silence but rather is silenced by a court of male storytellers.
E. Jean Carroll has pushed back against such male ventriloquy. Trump was told to stop his public bloviating about witch hunts and his personal attacks of her character. He didn’t, so Carroll sued for defamation and won. Trump is still appealing both the sexual assault and defamation verdicts, and his argument is that two other female witnesses unfairly offered testimony about their own sexual assaults. If this appeal doesn’t go through, the next step is the Supreme Court. We’ll have to see who gets the last word.
* Bryn Mawr College.
[1] Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272-1553 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007); Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); and Arvind Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: U. Toronto P, 2019).
[2] See People v. Trump, Decision and Order on Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss the Indictment and Vacate the Jury’s Verdict Pursuant to CPL §§ 210.20(1)(h) and 210.40(1) (N.Y. Sup. Ct., Jan. 3., 2025) (Merchan, A.J.S.C.) (https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFs/press/PDFs/People%20v.%20DJT%20Clayton%20Decision.pdf).
[3] Irie Sentner, “Trump Clears Legal Battles Largely Unscathed—Except for the Title ‘Felon,’” Politico, Jan. 10, 2025 (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/10/trump-sentencing-felon-president-00197587).
[4] “E. Jean Carroll, Writer who Accused Trump of Rape, Testifies in Defamation Trial,” PBS, Apr. 26, 2023. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/e-jean-carroll-writer-suing-trump-in-rape-case-takes-the-stand).
[5] Barabara Hanawalt, “The Female Felon in Fourteenth Century England,” in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Susan Stuard (Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania P, 1976), 126.
[6] Hanawalt, 127.
[7] The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. Ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
[8] See Mary C. Flannery, “‘Sum Men Sayis…’: Literary Gossip and Malicious Intent in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.2 (2014): 168–181.
[9] “The Testament of Cresseid,” in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Robert L Kindrick (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1997).
[10] “The Laste Epistle of Creseyd to Troyalus,” in The Poems of Robert Henryson.
Suggested Citation: Jamie Taylor, “Felon, Felonesse, President,” MCLR+ (crimlrev.net) ( June 15, 2025) (https://crimlrev.net/2025/06/15/felon-felonesse-president-jamie-taylor/) [➡︎ pdf]