Love and Disease in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Love and Disease in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Sealy Gilles Long Island University In Book 4 of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde, beset by her impending transfer to the Greek camp, draws our gaze upon herself and cries out: Whoso me seeth, he seeth sorwe al atonys— Peyne, torment, pleynte, wo, distresse! Out of my woful body harm ther noon is, As angwissh, languor, cruel bitternesse, Anoy, smert, drede, fury, and ek siknesse. (4.841–45)1 In giving this doleful catalogue to the heroine, Chaucer inverts Boccaccio ’s more straightforward, even comic, account of a world transfigured by lovers’ grief. In Il Filostrato, Pandaro, having just come from the distraught Troilo, looks upon the weeping Criseida and complains: ‘‘wherever I go today, it seems to me I hear everywhere sorrow, torments , weeping, anguish, and loud woes, sighs, pain, and bitter lamentation ’’ [che dovunque oggi vo, doglia sentire, / tormenti, pianti, angoscie ed alti guai, / sospiri, noia ed amaro languire].2 In dramatic contrast to the hyperbolic panorama of Pandaro’s complaint, Criseyde’s claustrophobic lament turns inward to situate the world’s torments 1 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). All Chaucer quotations will be taken from this edition. I wish to take this opportunity to thank the NY Meds for challenging my anachronisms, Erica Gilles for introducing me to the plague tractate, and Sylvia Tomasch for being, as always, the ideal reader. 2 Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, ed. Vincenzo Pernicone, trans. Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis (N.Y.: Garland, 1986), pp. 236–37. 157 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER within her own ‘‘woful body.’’ Apart from that body, she tells us, there are no evils—no pain, no fear, no illness. The stanza surrounds the body with a catalogue of woes that, paradoxically, that same body contains, or at least that are contained nowhere else. The awkward construction, ‘‘out of . . . there noon is,’’ and Chaucer’s final addendum to Boccaccio’s catalogue of woes, ‘‘ek siknesse,’’ coalesce in linguistic and bodily unease . This discomfort, moreover, is distilled within the body of the woman, voicing itself as the object of our indiscriminate gaze: ‘‘whoso me seeth, he seeth sorwe al atonys.’’ Within her corpus, public danger and private suffering lie entangled, only to be sorted out, eventually, by the translation of one body and the transcending of another. Troilus will shake free of ‘‘feynede loves’’ (5.1848), but at a price, for his transcendence rests upon the construction of the woman as pathogenic, as source of ‘‘siknesse.’’ Shaped by the insidious configurations of amor hereos and by a sea change in late medieval pathology, Criseyde’s body first infects her lover, then cures him, only to sicken and kill through absence and betrayal when that remedy is withdrawn. Readers have long noted the emphasis on death and illness in Chaucer ’s version of Boccaccio’s romance.3 Several critics, moreover, have remarked upon the intervening cataclysm that struck Europe in the midfourteenth century.4 Troilus and Criseyde and Il Filostrato, although only a half-century apart, emerge from very different worlds in terms of disease and contagion. Whereas the young Boccaccio completes Il Filostrato in 1335, twelve years before the plague enters Italy, Chaucer writes in an England devastated first by the pandemic of the Black Death in 1348–49 and then by a series of lesser epidemics, or ‘‘grey deaths,’’ in 1361, 1369, 1374–79, and 1390–93. While Chaucer’s hero suffers from one type of affliction, he and his beloved are forged in a world shaped by another, far more lethal disease. At first glance, lovesickness and plague inhabit radically different realms. Even as, by the mid-fourteenth century, the diagnosis and treatment of lovesickness had become as much game as earnest, the brutal 3 See, for example, Mary Wack, ‘‘Pandarus, Poetry, and Healing,’’ SAC 2 (1986): 127–33, for Pandarus’s use of medical language; Wack, ‘‘Lovesickness in Troilus,’’ Pacific Coast Philology 19 (1984): 55–61; Richard Firth Green, ‘‘Troilus and the Game of Love,’’ ChauR 13 (1979), pp. 201–20; Karen Arthur...