Dante, Chaucer, and the Ending of 'Troilus and Criseyde'

Author / Editor
Wheeler, Bonnie.

Title
Dante, Chaucer, and the Ending of 'Troilus and Criseyde'

Published
Philological Quarterly 61 (1982): 105-23

Description
The last eighteen stanzas are doomed attempts to forge a fixed moral for the tale--the reader must do it himself. The "contemptus mundi" theme is tried unsuccessfully to unify it. The last nine stanzas are compared to "Paradiso's" cantos 13 and 14 as a source for the conclusion. Chaucer and Dante recognized that the poet maker is not perfect--everything human is inferior to the Divine.

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.