Criseyde's Remains : Romance and the Question of Justice

Author / Editor
Margherita, Gayle.

Title
Criseyde's Remains : Romance and the Question of Justice

Published
Exemplaria 12: 257-92, 2000.

Description
Considers how "history becomes the unconscious of romance" in TC. Criseyde is pronounced dead at the opening of the work (1.56) but does not die in the story; as a "symptom of the poem's disavowal of history and materiality, she also marks its radical undecidability." She does die in Henryson's anti-romance, "Testament of Cresseid"--in a fantasy of justice that depends on time, a promise "that it is never yet what it will have been."

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