Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

‘Go, litel boke’, wrote Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1386). This fourteenth-century masterpiece would become his best known, most adapted, and most frequently cited work until the eighteenth century. Today, Troilus and Criseyde often appears strikingly modern, with its explorations of love and its loss, free will and fortune, the experience of suffering, and the consolations of poetry. In the course of our reading, the seminar will discuss these and other philosophical matters raised by Chaucer’s long and lyrical narrative poem, while also attending to its historical contexts and to its formal and stylistic innovations. We will situate Chaucer's poem in relation to sources including Boccaccio's Il Filostrato and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and will consider the fifteenth-century manuscripts in which the text survives. The seminar will examine Chaucer's distinctive use of the rhyme royal stanza, his stunning development of his characters’ interiority, and the uneasy place of Troilus and Criseyde within the genres of epic, romance, and tragedy.

Course Books

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde with facing-page Il Filostrato: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Stephen A. Barney (Norton, 2006). ISBN 9780393927559. 

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Translation, ed. and trans. Barry Windeatt (Oxford, 2008). ISBN 9780199555079.