Abstract
Like a matrix, or the warp and weft of a tapestry, or the streets and avenues of a city laid out on a grid, the go-betweens for idealized love and the go-betweens for lust and sexual conquest underlie Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1385–86). As Chaucerians will recognize at once, Chaucer’s Pandarus is an anomalous aberration from this sharply bifurcated Western medieval tradition. Differentiated as these two types of go-betweens had been for nearly three centuries, Pandarus belongs to both types at once. He is as deeply rooted in the rich intertextuality of the go-betweens for idealized love as he is in the equally rich intertextuality of the go-betweens for lust—a virtual contradiction in terms. The Latin comic tale, fabliau, novella, and exemplum, the genres in which the go-betweens for lust are most often found, participate in wholly different views of the world than the romances, and yet Pandarus is the outgrowth of both.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Larry D. Benson, “Courtly Love and Chivalry in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), p. 240 [237–57].
See Mary Hamel, “The Franklin’s Tale and Chrétien de Troyes,” Chaucer Review 17.4 (1983): [316–31].
Eleanor Prescott Hammond, ed., “The Chance of the Dice,” Englische Studien 59 (1925): 9 [1–16],
John Hill, “Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love and Ciceronian Brotherhood in Troy,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 165–82.
Karl Young, The Origin and Development of the Story of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer Society, 2nd Series 40 (London: Kegan Paul, 1908).
William George Dodd, Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower, Harvard Studies in English 1 (Boston: Ginn, 1913), p. 147.
Albert C. Baugh, ed., Chaucer’s Major Poetry (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), p. 80.
Paolo Savj-Lopez, “Il filostrato di G. Boccaccio,” Romania 27 (1898): 468–69 [442–79].
Laura F. Hodges, “Sartorial Signs in Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 35.3 (2001): 231 [223–58].
Richard W. Fehrenbacher, “ ‘Al that which chargeth nought to seye’: The Theme of Incest in Troilus and Criseyde” Exemplaria 9.2 (1997): 344 [341–69].
Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 134–35.
Steven R. Guthrie, “Chivalry and Privacy in Troilus and Criseyde and La Chastelaine de Vergy,” Chaucer Review 34.2 (1999): 150, 154, 167, 172 [150–73].
C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 120.
Peter Christmas, “Troilus and Criseyde: The Problems of Love and Necessity,” Chaucer Review 9.4 (1975): 286 [285–96].
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Readers in/of Troilus and Criseyde,” Yale journal of Criticism 1.2 (1988): 87 [81–105].
John P. Hermann, “Gesture and Seduction in Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985): 107–35,
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 28, 37–38.
Sealy Gilles, “Love and Disease in Chaucer’s Troiius and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003): 191 [157–97].
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 12–13, 20.
James I. Wimsatt, “Medieval and Modern in Chaucer’s Troiius and Criseyde” PMLA 92.2 (1977): 208 [203–16].
Tison Pugh, “Queer Pandarus? Silence and Sexual Ambiguity in Chaucer’s Troiius and Criseyde,” Philological Quarterly 80.1 (2001): 18 [17–35].
T.A. Stroud, “The Palinode, the Narrator, and Pandarus’s Alleged Incest,” Chaucer Review 27.1 (1992): 23 [16–30].
John V. Fleming, “Deiphoebus Betrayed: Virgilian Decorum, Chaucerian Feminism,” Chaucer Review 21.2 (1986): 188 [182–99].
James F. Maybury, “Pandarus and Criseyde: The Motif of Incest in Chaucer’s Troilus,” Xavier Review 2 (1982): 82–89.
Sarah Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 155 [141–58].
Ida L. Gordon, The Double Sorrow of Troilus: A Study of Ambiguities in Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 115–16.
Elizabeth Salter, “Troilus and Criseyde: A Reconsideration,” in Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C.S. Lewis, ed. John Lawlor (London: Arnold, 1966) pp. 99–100 [86–106].
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, ed., “intro.,” Medieval Texts & Contemporary Readers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 9 [1–11].
Barry Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde: Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 148.
Gayle Margherita, “Criseyde’s Remains: Romance and the Question of Justice,” Exemplaria 12.2 (2000): 261 [257–92].
Copyright information
© 2006 Gretchen Mieszkowski
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mieszkowski, G. (2006). Choreographing Lust and Love: Chaucer’s Pandarus. In: Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08519-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08519-1_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73191-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-08519-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)