Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde

This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer’s imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem’s innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem’s symmetrical structure, and the poem’s distinctive variety in style and language, as well as a full commentary on the poem’s concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and human free will. The Guide explores the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, and how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem’s problematic ending. Alongside discussions of theme and structure, there is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem’s early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day.

Barry Windeatt’s contribution to the series is a comprehensive single-volume guide to Troilus and Criseyde, bringing together a wide range of material and providing a readable commentary on all aspects of the work. Combining the informative substance of a reference book with the coherence of a critical reading, the Guide has taken its place as the standard introduction to Troilus and Criseyde since its first publication in 1992.

Author Biography

Barry Windeatt is Fellow and Keeper of Rare Books at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His research focuses largely on Chaucer, the literature of mysticism and contemplation, and the interface between medieval English textual and visual culture. He has both edited and translated Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of Margery Kempe, and, more recently, Julian of Norwich.