The most famous literary swoon in insular literature is probably Troilus's, in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Although I do not wish to make this swoon the principal focus of my look at fainting in romances, it is instructive to start with it, because recent reactions to it have been polarised and as a result might perhaps skew our attitudes to other fainting men and women in medieval literature. In my necessarily incomplete investigation of when and why medieval fictional people faint, and who do so, I have primarily used examples from insular romances in Anglo-Norman and English, and have sought to widen their context by referring to medieval medical views on syncope (still the word for fainting today). The latters' objective accounts and explanations of the phenomenon provide a welcome antidote to some of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century approaches adopted in recent studies of Chaucer's masterpiece.

In Book III of Troilus the hero swoons during his first night with Criseyde and has to be revived by his beloved and Pandarus. Many critics of the last twenty years have characterised Troilus's faint in disparaging terms: he is unmanly, even emasculated, impotent, helpless and passive. In other words he is supposedly behaving like a woman, or at least like a stereotypical one. Two important studies by Jill Mann and Gretchen Mieszkowski have rebutted these charges, approaching them from different directions. Mieszkowski has alerted us to the way our outlook has been influenced by attitudes to fainting observable in the narratives of the eighteenth and subsequent centuries, when ‘women became the swooners’ and men rarely faint and are ridiculed if they do.