Abstract
To think about love in Chaucer’s poetry, for most readers, is probably to recall first those male lovers—Palamon and Arcite, Troilus—who set eyes on their lady and are struck to the heart by the arrow of the God of Love. Falling in love is initiated by the male gaze, and it is typically followed up by the man’s bewildered and mournful self-analysis as he attempts to understand what has happened to him. The experience is as hard to articulate in words as is the mystic experience of the divine, and medieval authors famously borrowed the language of each to describe the other. The Song of Songs helped to inspire St. Bernard to formulate a language of religious love; on the secular side, Petrarch developed a language of figure and paradox to describe the lover’s state of mind that set the fashion in Europe for the next three hundred years and beyond. The lover’s gaze and its consequences became almost a metonym for lyric poetry. For Chaucer, Petrarch opened up new possibilities that gave him exactly what he needed for his Troilus once the narrative of the smitten lover’s gaze gives way to lyric introspection:
Précis: Chaucer’s adoption of the model of the man’s falling in love as normative has occluded the widespread English romance practice of making the woman central.
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Notes
Reference to Chaucer throughout is to The Riverside Chaucer, general ed. L.D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Petrarch himself denied such an accusation from Giacomo Colonna, though the denial too has been questioned: see Nicholas Mann, “Pétrarque et les Métamorphoses de Daphné,” Bulletin de l’association Guillaume Budé: Lettres d’humanité 53 (1994): 382–403.
For the difficulties of expression encountered by the women poets, the trobairitz, writing within this tradition, see Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 158–179.
For more extensive discussion of both maidens’ and wives’ faithfulness, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 218–307.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210; her argument is a development from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work on the gift in his Elementary Structures of Kinship.
See further Judith Weiss, “The Wooing Woman in Anglo-Norman Romance,” in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Carol Meale and Jennifer Fellows (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 149–161;
and Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 136–137. Weiss notes that women are often allowed to woo in some of the chansons de geste, but they do not do so with this degree of introspection.
See further John Gillingham, “Love, Marriage and Politics in the Twelfth Century,” reprinted in his Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 243–255, for an account of the historical consequences of these changes.
See Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 2.414–418 on the “courtesy of England” (also known as tenancy per legem Angliae), and 2.260–313 and 414–421 on heiresses more generally.
On the French “usurping reappropriation of woman” to remove some of their new economic power, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), pp. 186–196.
Georges Duby, “Youth in Aristocratic Society,” in his The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), pp. 112–122.
For a thoughtful discussion of the various kinds of gazing in Troilus, see Sarah Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 141–158.
For a summary listing of such arguments to 1981, see Lynn King Morris, Chaucer Source and Analogue Criticism: A Cross-Referenced Guide (New York and London: Garland, 1985), pp. 292–293; the list could be now considerably expanded.
See Sigmund Eisner, A Tale of Wonder: A Source Study of the Wife of Bath’s Tale (Wexford: John English, 1957), and (for instance)
J.K. Ballard, “Sovereignty and the Loathly Lady in English, Welsh and Irish,” Leeds Studies in English 17 (1986): 41–59.
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© 2006 Helen Cooney
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Cooper, H. (2006). Love Before Troilus. In: Cooney, H. (eds) Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages. Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983534_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983534_3
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