"She, This in Blak": Vision, Truth, and Will in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" (review)

As T. E. Hill's title notes, Criseyde wears black, and of course, it is indeed significant that she wears black: she is a widow, wearing her mourning weeds, and the blackness of her dress, within Chaucer's protean characterizations, develops key aspects of her character—her inscrutability, her confusion, and, yes, perhaps her cruelty. Hill considers Criseyde, as well as Troilus and Pandarus, from a philosophical perspective, and his text bears with it traces of philosophical prolixity, such as in his thesis: "In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer addresses difficulties concerning representation and will inherent in the perspectivist model of perception and cognition by couching the activities of scientia within a wider framework of covenantal causality as it is expressed in the theological doctrine of the dialectic of divine power that differentiates between God's absolute omnipotence and his self-delimiting ordained power, or his 'capacity and volition' " (3). By reading Troilus and Criseyde in concert with the insights of philosophers both classical (Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius) and medieval (Holcot, Strode, the Mertonians, Bradwardine, and Wyclif), Hill illuminates the text's participation in scholastic and theological debates on perception and thus enlightens readers' understanding of the very mixed motives of its three primary characters.

The structure of "She, This in Blak" is simple and effective: following Chapter 1, "Introduction and Background," Hill devotes a chapter each to Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde, and then concludes with a brief analysis of Troilus and Criseyde's Epilogue. Hill's readings of the characters are mostly persuasive, if not revolutionary. He sees Troilus as "represent [ing] the traditional perspectivist attitude toward perception and cognition, one in which the proper connection between res and verbum is assumed to be substantial, certain, and causally determined" (3), whereas Pandarus "is portrayed as the practitioner of a more 'modern' calculatory approach to truth, where the relationship between object and concept is only knowable within an estimated latitude" (3). For Hill, Criseyde is a "voluntarist viator who accepts the darkness in which the universe of the knowable is bound, and who is able to act in a context of uncertainty by trusting to the intuited intentionality of her will when the resources of reason have been exhausted" (4). The readings of the characters in their respective chapters expand these initial observations fruitfully, paying close attention to the ways in which perceptions influence their understanding of the cosmos and of their place in it, as well as the manner in which love challenges their ability to perceive. These readings of the characters do not diverge from many such interpretations of Troilus as passively sincere, Pandarus as amorously manipulative, and Criseyde as "slydinge of corage" (5.825), but they succeed in providing another context for understanding the characters' shifting motivations.

Sound in its conception and execution, the argument of "She, This in Blak" nonetheless extends in some clunky ways, especially when Hill's analysis becomes virtually an allegorical framework for reading the characters as representatives of varying philosophical perspectives. Consequently, textual moments are occasionally overinterpreted or ignored when they do not fit neatly into his schema. When Troilus uses an economic metaphor to describe the vagaries of love—"Youre hire is quyt ageyn, ye, God woot how!" (1.334)—Hill sees extraordinary philosophical depth:

That Troilus mixes economic imagery here with that of sacramental theology is notable in view of William Courtenay's observation that scholastic objections to the notion of the ascribed value of the sacraments may have been influenced by traditional Church teaching on the just price of goods and services, which was based on the concept of inherent value (bonitas intrinseca). Surely Troilus's jibe would have had a special resonance in Chaucer's time: a period when rapid monetization combined with devaluating currencies, fluctuating market prices, and widespread counterfeiting destabilized values for goods, land and labor and caused deep anxieties...