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The presence of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Spenser’s Amoretti , as well as in The Faerie Queene , and the kind of presence it is in both are my major concerns in this chapter, but I will start by summoning what we already know about the relationship of this particular poem by Chaucer to Spenser’s poems more generally. The few references in the Spenser canon that indubitably involve Troilus and Criseyde include, first, the phrase ‘Uncouthe unkiste’, in E.K.’s epistle to The Shepheardes Calender , which
For the last three decades or so, literary studies, especially those dealing with premodern texts, have been dominated by the New Historicist paradigm. This book is a collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. The book argues that by emphasizing Troilus's and Cressida's hopes and fears, Shakespeare sets in motion a triangle of narrative, emotion and temporality. It is a spectacle of which tells something about the play but also about the relation between anticipatory emotion and temporality. The sense of multiple literary futures is shaped by Shakespeare's Chaucer, and in particular by Troilus and Criseyde. The book argues that the play's attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives. Criseyde's beauty is described many times. The characters' predilection for sententiousness unfolds gradually. Through Criseyde, Chaucer's Poet displaces authorial humility as arrogance. The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The poem appears to be linking an awareness of history and its continuing influence and impact on the present to hermeneutical acts conspicuously gendered female. The main late medieval Troy tradition does two things: it represents ferocious military combat, and also practises ferocious literary combat against other, competing traditions of Troy.
In purely structural terms, Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde erects a narrative edifice impressive for its classical austerity. In fact, the text seizes every opportunity of showcasing its highly artificial symmetry: for example, each of the five books begins with an invocation of the Muses or a similar rhetorical topos – the first instances of such invocations in
, Troilus and Criseyde and their avatars (Henryson’s version, etc.), are exemplary in this respect because they lay bare the centrality of affect within history and historiography. Upon the back of the primary love story between Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida all the other affect-driven relationships and causalities in the narrative are thrown into stark contrast. Not only this, affect proves to be the main
2 First encounter: ‘snail-horn perception’ in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Elizabeth Robertson ‘There are two visions, one of perception, one of thought.’ (St Augustine)1 Why does Geoffrey Chaucer, in his great love poem, Troilus and Criseyde, describe Troilus – when he first sees Criseyde – as a startled snail withdrawing into its shell? And why does he recall this same image in his description of Criseyde’s first sight of Troilus after which she, too, retreats from what she has seen as she pulls her head quickly inside the window? The image of the snail, I
course, knew the separate, inset traditions of the Troilus and Criseyde narrative, represented by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385), 9 and by Henryson’s corrosive sequel to that poem, The Testament of Cresseid (c. 1475). 10 This text, written in Middle Scots, was placed immediately after Troilus and Criseyde , as part of the works of Chaucer, in all the printed editions of Chaucer
The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga is a perfect vehicle for tracing the history of the emotions, in that it offers an unparalleled darkening of mood over time. This saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The conceit of the work, as laid out in its prose prologue, is that
textualization of what is commonly known as ‘love’. This emergence seems to have found one of its most prominent first monuments in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Therefore, this chapter will explore the different discursive conceptualizations of ‘love’ equally prevalent both in the late Middle Ages and in the early Renaissance. It will then discuss Chaucer
. This chapter encounters two poems by Geoffrey Chaucer which reflect on these questions and relationships. They are both romance treatments of Classical narratives, both drawing on Boccaccio for their major narrative sources, and both focused on human relations in a time of war: The Knight's Tale , and Troilus and Criseyde . 1 Both have received extensive commentary in the context of gendered relations and the status of women in exchange. In this chapter I will connect those ideas to Chaucer's interest in people as
settings in their tales of suffering lovers and doomed relationships, as with the quasi-Trojan setting of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Troilus and Criseyde . These texts depict erotic suffering as both endemic to and generated by the depravities of a historical past that was considered part of medieval society’s origin story and yet disturbing for their contemporary system of sexual morality. Centuries later, the connection between the painful pleasures of historically remote societies and their