The Lesson of the 'Troilus': Chastisement and Correction

Published: Mary Salu, ed. Essays on Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979), pp. 1-22.

Description: Modernist critics reduce Troilus' experience to sentimentality. They encourage us to pity the hero because he could not do otherwise. The lesson of TC is, on the contrary, that the characters in the tale (and we the audience) do indeed have choices to make, and that we can assert ourselves and our reason through action.; Despite his prolonged and gnarled disquisition on free will in Book IV, Troilus abandons himself to passivity, as does Criseyde. The "chastisement" of which Chaucer speaks is a learning process, as the word used in medieval thought had as its root instruction. Thus while the modernists devise complex, balancing structures of dichotomies, they inevitably demean Chaucer's medieval humanism, which was based on an uncomplicated belief in the freedom of the will and the splendor of reason.