Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde

Abstract

This is a comprehensive critical guide to all aspects of reading Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, his most ambitious single achievement and his masterpiece. It includes the fullest and most convenient account of Chaucer’s imaginative deployment of his sources, and the only extended survey of this narrative poem’s innovative combination of a range of generic identities. There are also chapters on the architectonics of how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem’s symmetrical structure, and on the poem’s distinctive variety in style and language. A further chapter provides a full commentary on the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, with sub- sections on how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. Also reviewed are the poem’s concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and of human free will. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem’s problematic ending, in its bravura attempt to still the plenitude of questions that all the aspirations of the lovers’ story have raised. There is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem’s early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day.