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A summary of ecclesiastical views on sex introduces the observation that medieval doctrine on the ‘sexual debt’ of marriage was covertly asymmetrical — an asymmetry based on an active/passive gender binary that is reflected in Chaucer’s writings, though with exceptions including Criseyde. Chaucer represents the most outrageous proactive voluptuary fantasy as male, since it is January in the Merchant’s Tale who combines Epicurean sensuality with an idea repellent to medieval ethics: that there is ultimate ‘security’ in marital sensuality. A different doctrine is manipulated in the Reeve’s Tale. There a narrative of the theft of flour is deftly constructed around the concept that sex with the daughter or wife of another man also constitutes a category of ‘theft’. Overall, the chapter suggests that Chaucer’s representations of sex view it as much under the emotional perspective of its melancholy transience as under a formally coherent ethical perspective.

This discussion links the odd-seeming ‘glad cheer’ ascribed to Arveragus at the crux of the Franklin’s Tale with strenuous Stoic aspiration to tolerant equanimity. Arveragus attempts an equanimity that contrasts provocatively with the heroine’s (and Aurelius’s) surging emotionalism. Chaucer’s interest in the ambivalent attraction of equanimity — never comfortably embraced within the Christian virtue of patience because equanimity seemed insensitive to a religion of zealous love — emerges again in Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale. Her robust patience is in creative tension with a gendered Christian virtue of humility. Since the converse of equanimity — which is fear — is another conflicted and gendered concept, its embodiment in Troilus and Criseyde and in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, is explored.

This chapter investigates the language of diplomacy in more detail, looking at evidence from Froissart's Chroniques of his views on language and language use, and at the role language played in the battles for supremacy between English and French diplomats, lords, and kings. We see from a broad range of writing how potential linguistic misunderstandings are used as a subtle means of exerting diplomatic leverage on both sides of the Channel. The literary form of the envoy, revived by poets working in diplomatic roles, records a sensitivity to the role of language in cross‐cultural exchange. Two of Chaucer's major narratives, the Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, are saturated with this language of negotiation and represent subtle accounts of the tensions involved in fraternal relationships caught up in war.

This chapter compares some letters written in 1382 accusing London aldermen of betraying the city to the rebels in 1381, with Geoffrey Chaucer's poem about urban betrayal, Troilus and Criseyde. The deployment of the language of truth and treason is a particular focus. Both the accusations of the aldermen (namely John Horn, Walter Sibyl, and Adam Carlisle) and Troilus and Criseyde serve to illustrate the changing allegiances and betrayals that dominated London politics in the 1380s. By reading these texts side by side, Troilus and Criseyde can be situated within contemporary discourses of treason and urban fragmentation, discourses that were under particular pressure in the closing decades of the 14th century. The chapter also explores the differing ways in which both texts deal with ideas of social antagonism, betrayal, and stasis. Ultimately, the chapter offers a reading of Troilus and Criseyde as a poem about the inevitability and omnipresence of social fragmentation and betrayal.

This chapter shows how Geoffrey Chaucer's relationship to literary tradition can be explored through his study, translation, and adaptation of one Italian poem—Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato. Chaucer used Boccaccio's youthful experiment Il Filostrato (1335) to create Troilus and Criseyde (1385), an enduring masterpiece and unquestionably his greatest completed work. Here, the chapter examines twelve aspects of Il Filostrato which prompt Chaucer at times to straightforward imitation, at times to considerable amplification of an idea, and at times to a corrective reaction. It shows how many of these aspects—which represent Chaucer in different ways learning from and being stimulated by Boccaccio—also came to seem like key characteristics of Chaucer's mature work. After all, Chaucer became the poet he was partly through intense reflection on Boccaccio's ideas and techniques.

Elizabeth Robertson brings together Keats’s ‘snail-horn perception’ with medieval theory of the senses, especially optics, and medieval theology, to analyse the first tenuous encounters between Troilus and Criseyde. During their sensually-charged optical exchanges, both physiological and psychological processes are at work to create great emotional force in the text and impact on the text’s readers.

Ruth Evans explores the under-recognised but striking use of rhyme-breaking in Chaucer’s poetry, present in the Canterbury Tales, the Book of the Duchess, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde. Evans draws upon a recent resurgence of critical interest in the politics of form to argue that Chaucerian rhyme-breaking warrants closer attention not only for its ironic effect, but also for its potential to illuminate Chaucer’s position within the multilingual context of late-medieval England.

James Simpson’s central hermeneutic perception for knowledge in the Humanities is that cognition is re-cognition. Before we can know, we must already have known. He examines this paradox with reference to literary examples of facial recognition from, in particular, Chaucer and his reception in the early modern period. Linking literary face to textual face – the whole text as a kind of face – he applies the lessons learnt from facial recognition to textual recognition; and answers some possible objections to the paradox of knowing being dependent on having already known.

This chapter discusses two parallels that require special notice, due to Chaucer's handling, having matured very noticeably by the time he began his poem of love in Troy, which may escape notice. First, mathematics has an important function in Troilus and Criseyde, yet it draws such casual attention that its importance has been overlooked. Second, the reliance on earlier literature, from which Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, and House of Fame select a central theme to emphasize, appears in Troilus and Criseyde as a subject unto itself, elevated for special scrutiny throughout the whole poem.

By the end of the fourteenth century, a sizeable audience for poetry in English among the gentry and the commercial classes had emerged. Chaucer wrote for this readership, and his poetry shows a successful absorption of French and Italian models. This chapter scrutinizes his work for evidence of the manner in which it was performed and received. Throughout his oeuvre, Chaucer appeals to both hearers and readers, using images both of books and of oral performers. His invention of the English iambic pentameter made possible a fuller embodiment in verse of the speaking voice, unlike Gower, who chose to write his major work, Confessio Amantis, in strict tetrameters. In the fifteenth century, the changing pronunciation of English made writing in metre a challenge, as is evident in the work of Hoccleve and Lydgate. The chapter ends with a consideration of the Scottish poets Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas.

This chapter proposes that the ‘vther quair’ read by the narrator of Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is John Lydgate’s Troy Book. Henryson uses this device and the matter of Troy to respond thoughtfully to Lydgate’s poetics. As authors centrally interested in the lessons of good governance of the self and public, Lydgate and Henryson explore the degree to which their characters and their readers can learn lessons about behaviour. Lydgate pessimistically discourages moralization and subverts didactic poetics because he does not believe contemporary readers can learn from the errors of pagan history. Henryson, by contrast, embraces moralization to encourage readers to question and learn from his characters’ actions.

Comparative source studies of Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde have often used Troilus’ formation to explicate its form. Such reading practices have an analogue in Dante’s Vita nova, which frames reading as a way of getting back to composition. But when does the creation of a poem begin and end? This chapter tracks how Dante bounds composition within time and how the Filostrato, drawing on the Vita nova, breaks those same boundaries down. This interaction establishes a prehistory for Troilus. For although Chaucer likely did not know the Vita nova, his poem inherits the problem of setting limits to formation in time. The ideas that inform Troilus thus take shape before Chaucer begins to write. The chain of influences explored here suggests that the ways in which we bound literary formation and bring it to bear upon form are, themselves, only provisional.