Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde belongs to the tradition of French courtly romance that we have been exploring in poems by Beroul, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, and the anonymous author of La Chastelaine de Vergi. It too is one of the poems that ‘enquierent autrui amors’, and it pushes the tradition still further, prying in greater depth and more detail than its predecessors into a secret love-affair and into the inner lives of its characters, creating a world that is pervaded with human subjectivity. Yet interwoven with this subtler and more intense curiosity there is also its apparent opposite, a stronger sense of distance. This has two causes. One is Chaucer's habitual self-presentation as a bookish translator, a naïve, non-participant intruder into a world that he knows only in writing, not from personal experience:
Forwhi to every lovere I me excuse,
That of no sentement I this endite,
But out of Latyn in my tonge it write.
(II 12–14)Courtly romances characteristically claim to be based on written sources; to take an especially clear example, Gottfried von Strassburg writes in the prologue to his Tristan (lines 149ff.) that he searched through many Latin and vernacular books till he found the only authentic version of the story, that by Thomas of Britain, which he now offers to his readers.
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- Information
- The Medieval Poet as Voyeur , pp. 120 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993