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Benoit De Sainte-Maure's Roman De Tmie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey C Haucer's Tmilus and Criseyde

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Benoit De Sainte-Maure's Roman De Tmie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey C Haucer's Tmilus and Criseyde NOTE TO USERS The original manuscript recelved by UMI contains pages with slanted print. Pages were microfilmed as received. This reproduction is the best copy available UMI Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Tmie, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey C haucer's Tmilus and Criseyde Tamara Faith OtCallaghan A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Centre for Medieval Studies, in the University of Toronto 43 Copyright by Tamara Faith O'Callaghan 1995 National Library Bibliothique nationale of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. me Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant B la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, preter, hstribuer ou copies of thls thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la fonne de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in th~sthesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fhm it Ni la thQe ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation, Contents Introduction Chapter 1 Patterns of Unrequited Love in Benoit's Roman de Tmie Chapter 2 Patterns of Mutual Love in Benoit's Roman de Tmie Chapter 3 Gower Retells the Troy Story Chapter 4 Chaucer Retells the Troy Story Bibliography Love Imagery in Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, John Gower's Confessio Amanfis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 1995 Tamara Faith O'Callaghan Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto This thesis examines the imagery of love as it is depicted in three medieval versions of the story of Troy. The result is an attempt to determine to what extent Benoit, Gower, and Chaucer use love motifs and language to distinguish between the gendered experiences of the passion and to what extent love, as it is expressed by the various characters of both sexes, is considered to be the motivational force behind the events at Troy. A distinctive feature of Benoit's Roman de Troie is the attention it gives to the love stories that comprise it, not only the story of Paris and Helen, but also the stories of Jason and Medea, of Troilus, Briseida, and Diomedes, and of Achilles and Polyxena. A close analysis of the poem reveals a variety of recurring images and vocabulary relating to the experience and expression of erotic love. Benoit clearly views the women in these stories not just as objects of the passions of their male lovers, but as subject to passions of their own. In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower restructures the story of Troy around other tales of love and kingship which exemplify the same sin. By presenting the history of Troy out of sequence, by eliminating some of the traditional imagery and iii language, and by developing his own unique set of images and vocabulary, he effectively disassociates the love episodes from the war narrative. The love stories of Jason and Medea and of Paris and Helen become exempla of the sin of avarice, connected not so much by parallels in plot, but by similarities in the love experience of the main characters. Unlike the other two versions of the story of Troy, Geoffrey Chaucer's Tmilus and Criseyde focusses on a single, self-contained fragment of the story. In contrast to the language and imagery associated with the male characters of the poem, the patterns of vocabulary and images affiliated with Criseyde reveal her to be a figure motivated more by a concern for honour and the passion of fear, than by love. Introduction The Latin West had little, or no, knowledge of Homer's Iliad until the fourteenth century, when in 1354, according to tradition, the Italian writer Petrarch was sent a manuscript of the poem from Constantinople. Consequently, medieval versions of the Troy story were essentially derived from two pseudo-historical accounts of the events. Dares Phrygius' De excidio Troiae historia and Dictys Cretensis' Ephemerides bell; troiani (c. sixth and fourth centuries A. D. respectively, although they claim to antedate Homer as first-hand accounts of the Trojan War). As the distribution of manuscripts attests, both histories enjoyed considerable popularity in northern Europe, especially in France and Britain.' Although each late classical author briefly discusses the love relationships of some of the main characters, namely Paris and Helen and Achilles and Polyxena, neither examines in detail the love experience of the individual and the effects erotic passion have on the events at Troy. It is not until the twelfth century in France that such an examination of the Troy story develops. ' For further details regarding the transmission of Homer's works to Europe and the influence of Dares' and Dictys' chronicles, see John A. Scott's Homer and his Influence (New York: Copper Square Publishers, 1963). -3 Dating from sometime between 1165 and 1170. Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Old Frenck poem, Le Roman de Troie, widely popularized the story of Troy. * A distinctive feature of Benoit's version of the Troy story is the attention it gives to the love stories that comprise it, not only the story of Paris and Helen, but also the stories of Jason and Medea, Troilus and Briseida, Diomedes and Briseida, and Achilles and Polyxena. Like Ovid in the Heroides and in parts of the Metamophoses and like Virgil in Book IV of the Aeneid, Benoit views the women in these stories not just as objects of the passions of their male lovers, but as subject to passions of their own. Moreover, he follows his French contemporaries, like the author of the Roman d'Eneas, in giving these women the opportunity to speak at length about their own passions and about the stories in which they are involved. Although he is undoubtedly influenced by a renewed interest in the twelfth century in the poetry of Ovid, Benoit does not simply retell the Ovidian versions of the love-stories that comprise the story of Troy, but recreates them, particularly in tens of vocabulary and imagery, and makes them entirely his own. The Roman de Troie has drawn little critical attention in comparison to other members of the romans d'antiquite tradition, particularly the Eneas. Few scholars have The dating of the Roman de Troie is discussed by Leopold Constans in the introduction to his edition of the poem (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1904-12): VI, 182; although Constans dates the poem between 1155 and 1160, recent critics, such as Emmanuele Baurngartner rtReperes," Le Roman de Tmie (Paris: Union Generale dlEditions. 1987): 11-13], give a later date of sometime between 1165 and 1170. Throughout this study, I will follow the spelling of names of classical figures as found in The Oxtbrd Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard. 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1970), regardless of whether the character is found in a classical or medieval text. examined the poem as a narrative wholeV4and, until recently, many have preferred to focus on Benoit's text as a source rather than as a literary creation in itself in order to understand how later authors have adapted and altered the material of the Roman de Troie for their own purposes. This tendency to study selected passages and episodes has concentrated exclusively on the major love-narratives, especially the story of Briseida, Diomedes, and Troilus, which has generated the most interest because the tale is wholly original to Benoit and is the ultimate source for Chaucer's Troilus and Cri~eyde.~The individual stories of Jason and Medea and of Paris and Helen have attracted considerably less attention6and that of Achilles and Polyxena almost none at R.M. Lumiansky, "Structural Unity in Benoit's Roman de Troie," Romania 79 (1958): 4 10-24; Alfred Adler, "Militia et Amor in the Roman de Tmie," Romanische Forschungen 72 (1960): 14-29; l nez Hansen, Zwischen Epos und hdfischem Roman: Die Frauengestalten im Trojaroman des Benoit de Sainte-Maure (Munich: Wilhelrn Fink Verlag , 1971 ); Jones, The Theme of Love in the Romans d'Antiquit6, vol. 5 of Disserfation Series (London: Modem Humanities Research Association, 1972); J.L Levenson, "The Narrative Format of Benoit's Roman de Troie," Romania 100 (1979): 54-70; Aime Petit, Naissances du Roman: Les techniques lift&aires dam les romans antiques du XlP siecle (Lille: University of Lille, 1985); Penny Eley, "Author and Audience in the Roman de Tmie," Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: J Benjamins Publishing Co., 1990): 179-90; Udo Schoning, Thebanroman, Eneasmman, Trojaroman: Studien zur Rezeption der Antike in der franzCisischen Literatur des 12. Jahhunderts (Tii bingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag , 199 1); and Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Such studies indude Karl Young's The Origin and Development of the Story of Tmilus and Criseyde (London: Kegan Paul, 1908; rpt. New York, 1968); R.M. Lurniansky's "The Story of Troilus and Briseida According to Benoit and Guido," Speculum 29 (1954): 727-33; Gretchen B. Mieszkowski's "The Reputation of Criseyde 1155-1 500," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of A& and Sdences 43 (1 971): 71-1 53; and the brief introduction to R.K.
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