In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer accords a unique prominence to prayer. Troilus’s characteristic action throughout the narrative is to pray, and elaborate narratorial prayers mark each transition, including the beginning and ending, such that “the whole poem is bracketed within the act of prayer.” These prayers have received much critical attention, particularly in the “moralizing” interpretation that dominated twentieth-century discussions of Troilus, in which “the love of Troilus and Criseyde is seen to become progressively subject to a moral critique, largely implicitly and ironically conveyed.” For D.W. Robertson, the most influential proponent of this reading, Troilus’s prayers to the God of Love are idolatrous, and all the more flagrantly so when they echo Christian piety; the reader’s task is to perceive this implied critique of the poem’s hero and to reject his misguided devotion to Love in favor of the true Christian faith. The fact that the narrator also prays to Love exposes his excessive sympathy with the pagan hero, which readers should recognize and avoid. This reading excludes imaginative alignment with Troilus in favor of ironic distance and, ultimately, condemnation. Some recent criticism, however, has seen value in sympathizing with Troilus, arguing that readers are meant to enter into the poem’s evocation of love and to feel what the characters are feeling. For these critics, prayers mark affective high points, illustrating the “intensity” and “revelatory power” of this love relationship. Whether the poem’s prayers are taken as parodies of true Christian piety or eloquent celebrations of love as emotional experience, they have been recognized as crucial passages that lay claim to transcendent significance for human love. The debate has revolved around whether their claims should be credited or dismissed.

What has not been considered in these discussions is the unique voicing of prayer. Even recent readings that emphasize imaginative participation in the narrative have not recognized that an invitation to participate is present in a special way in acts of prayer, due to their open and flexible voicing. Both sides of the critical debate read the prayers for their propositional content, assuming that readers proceed first by understanding this content and then by responding with rejection or approbation.