Love, pity and reason in the Troilus Chaucer's debt to Dante

Abstract

With the Book of the Duchess Chaucer establishes himself as the poet of Courtly Love at the court of Edward. In the Book Chaucer does not consider any other kind of love. Courtly Love is the pure love, the noble love, and perfectly attuned to the 'lawe of kinde' (BD 56). This certainly makes his ambivalent attitude to Courtly Love in his succeeding works, the House of Fame, The Parlement of Fowles, The Knights' Tale, and the Troilus and Criseyde, the more surprising. His reputation made with the Book, a work in no way inferior to any of his French contemporaries, and in many respects richer and fresher, Chaucer goes to Italy, and, he comes face to face with a more complex and variegated vision of love. Petrarch was for ever struggling to define love, and his 'S'amor none, che dunque e quel ch'i sento' (In Vita 165) is symptomatic of his inconclusiveness. Chaucer immediately spotted this sonnet for his Canticus Troili. For Petrarch, love is a passion which swells and consumes itself in 'rethorike sweete' (Ck'sT 32), and Laura remains a distant goddess. For his friend Boccaccio, love is a yearning which finds satisfaction only in the triumph of the flesh. In Dante's Convivio alone, Chaucer discovers the maturest and most congenial treatise on love of the time. The contrasting features of the Italian scene bring home to Chaucer the torpor of French literature which still sought inspiration and nourishment from the Roman de la Rose, the book which until then had largely determined his own cultural luggage as well as that of his French models.