"Gentilesse" in Chaucer's "Troilus."

Description: Analyzes the lexical and thematic nuances of "gentilesse" in TC, exploring how subtle changes in meaning and usage help to characterize Troilus and the other main characters. tracing the "evaporation of the ideal of 'gentilesse'" as "moral vertu," and arguing that the poem is a "tragedy of [Toilus's] 'gentilesse'," even though he is recurrently comic and pathetic as well as tragic in his distortions and misunderstandings of the ideal.