In his important discussion of Chaucer's Criseyde in Reform and Cultural Revolution, James Simpson offers the aside that provides my title quotation. “However painful it finally turns out to be,” he observes, Troilus possesses a freedom profoundly different from the circumstances that constrain Criseyde. Contrasting Troilus's immediate vision of love with her painful decision-making, he establishes the former's comparative social freedom as a foil to his real focus: the intense psychological narrative of Criseyde's “shrewd appraisal of the conditions in which she finds herself.” I will return to James's account of Criseyde shortly; but despite its brevity, I want to engage with this comment on Troilus's limited and painful freedom, and with James's work elsewhere on the concept of recognition, to propose this observation as a rather unexpected departure point: toward a theory of human love, and a changed understanding of tragedy. By a “theory of human love,” I mean the model of a freely willed, mutually self-constituting bond between individual, non-substitutable human beings; and when I say “toward,” I mean to suggest that lacking such a culturally sanctioned model, Chaucer responded to human reality with a radical experiment. That experiment, rooted in the freedom of the will and the ethical necessity of recognition, performed an act of transformation upon his sources: and so he also, I will argue, created a new form of tragedy.

There were of course many culturally sanctioned theories of love in the Middle Ages. Perfect divine love was idealized for humanity as universal caritas for God and neighbour; Aristotle's highest form of love between persons, philia, a relation between “men who are good, and alike in virtue,” had with Aquinas been Christianized as the necessary inclination of the soul toward the good, a participant in the greater love that leads to God. Responding to Cicero's classic treatise on friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx's On Spiritual Friendship defined love as “quidam animae rationalis affectus” (“a particular affection of the rational soul”), which in its highest form (“spiritual” as opposed to “carnal” and “worldly”) “inter bonos vitae, morum studiorumque similitudo conglutinat” (“is cemented between the good by similitude of life, morals and pursuits”).

Romance was created in twelfth-century England and France for aristocratic patrons and audiences whose courtly lifestyle it idealized and celebrated; as the earliest genre to celebrate love as life’s goal, it was revolutionary. Initially translating Latin sources, romance authors innovatively combined pre-existing genres: classical epic’s historical drive was disrupted by the lyric’s focus on individual emotional experience, creating a new kind of narrative fiction. Where earlier heroes had sacrificed their lives fighting for great causes, the romance hero suffers and fights to prove his worthiness to a beloved, and wins marriage, wealth, and reputation as confirmation of his value. Here the fictional genre betrays its real-world ideological role: to justify the patriarchal, misogynistic, exploitative and exclusionary structures of aristocratic chivalric society, representing – literally romanticizing – its values as morally admirable. Within decades the romance took multiple paths: in the creation of pseudohistorical heroes and legendary pasts; in the limitless proliferation of fictional quests from King Arthur’s court; and in parody and critique, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s helplessly subservient Lancelot, or Marie de France’s assertive female protagonists. Finally, Thomas of Britain’s Tristan transforms the romance into tragedy, another new development in this most capacious and influential genre, forerunner of the novel.

Vernacular literature in English first developed in two separate iterations: the first ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the fifth century, and used (alongside Latin) in writing from as early as the seventh century; the second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, the twelfth-century re-emergence of ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardized rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. This chapter discusses each in turn, arguing that Old English literature, for all its astonishing precocity, variety, and brilliance, provides us with a fascinating study of a centuries-long, and eventually truncated, ‘beginning’: a vernacular literature sustained over time by a particular, and crucially coterminous, audience and patronage context (the royal or aristocratic court; the monastery) without ever reaching the point of being self-sustaining. In contrast, Early Middle English emerged spontaneously in the margins of multilingual manuscripts, and as an act of translation and adaptation without institutional support or aristocratic patronage; but it emerged into a different world, in which growing community literacy gave it an audience – potentially the whole population – that would drive its development ever forward.