Chaucer's Knight's Tale, like Troilus and Criseyde, is set in classical antiquity – ‘the pagan past at its most noble and dignified, imagined from within’. It was a remarkable feat for a fourteenth-century English poet to construct in words, within the limits of his historical knowledge, a culture systematically different from his own and intended to represent that of pagan antiquity, and it seems unlikely that Chaucer could have succeeded in something that none of his contemporaries even thought of attempting had he not had both the opportunity to encounter the Italian trecento and the imagination to respond to that opportunity. Chaucer grasped something of the attempt by trecento poets and thinkers to re-enter a pagan past envisaged as constituting an autonomous sphere of values, and to restore it to life in a modern vernacular. Like Troilus and Criseyde, The Knight's Tale is translated from a poem of some classical learning by Boccaccio – in this case the Teseida, ‘in many ways … an archaeological reconstruction of the world of classical antiquity’. But in their imaginative reworkings of the past, these two Chaucerian narratives differ significantly, especially in their representations of the roles of the sexes.