Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus And Criseyde
...The Age of Chaucer...............................2
Troilus and Criseyde.............................5
Characterization in Boccaccio and in Chaucer.....6
The Tenour of Medieval Life......................7
Courtly Love.....................................9
(I,69,3-5)
Introduction
This present work is based on one of Chaucer's great poems, Troilus and Criseyde. It deals with its origin, its characteristics and the idea of courtly love in it. Everything is considered from a historical and literary point of view. It includes some information about the author himself and his art which I consider essential to the understanding of the poem.
The Age of Chaucer
Historical Background
Throughout the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the early Renaissance, we can trace, in the rise and fall of national literatures, the successions of war and peace which made the development of Europe so difficult and so uneven. Besides wars and crusades, there were other convulsions quite as grievous: for instance, the Black Death, which killed hundreds of people. The Danish conquest, first, and then the Norman conquest had virtually taken Britain out of the current of European literature while French, and Provençal, and Italian literature were building up.
Now, in the fourteenth century, French literature almost died away because France was caught in the Hundred Year War. Italian literature had begun its mighty ascent, and continued with Petrarch and Boccaccio . Provençal culture was almost totally destroyed in the crusade preached against the Albigensian heretics by the Roman Catholic Church. Although England too had its plages and troubles in this same century, it developed a character which it has never yet lost, and which was best exemplified, for this time, in Geoffrey...
View Full Essay
