SELVES AND NATIONS

THE TROY STORY FROM SICILY TO ENGLAND IN

THE MIDDLE AGES

INAUGURAL-DISSERTATION

zur
Erlangung des Dr. phil.

dem
Fachbereich Fremdsprachliche Philologien
der
Philipps-Universität Marburg

vorgelegt von
Wolfram R. Keller
aus Hamburg

Marburg 2006
Vom Fachbereich Fremdsprachliche Philologien
der Philipps-Universität Marburg als Dissertation
angenommen am: 8. Dezember 2006

Gutacher: Prof. em. Dr. Claus Uhlig (Marburg)

Prof. Dr. Robert R. Edwards (University Park, U.S.A.)
Prof. Dr. Sonja Fielitz (Marburg)
 For

Jocelyn and Lena Luise

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

On Organization, Texts, and Translations .................................................................. ix

General Introduction ................................................................................................... 1

PART ONE
MASKING IDENTITIES:
SELVES AND NATIONS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Introduction............................................................................................................... 19

I. Medieval Selfhood: Toward the Universal.................................................... 23

II. (Post)Modern Selfhood: Toward Singularities and Multiplicities.................. 35

1. The Biological Self................................................................................... 37

2. The Narrative Self .................................................................................... 41
3. The Prosopagraphical Self ........................................................................ 46

III. Prosopagraphical Selfhood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages ...................... 59

1. Classical Prosopagraphical Selfhood ........................................................ 59

2. Medieval Personae and Masks ................................................................. 64
3. Medieval Prosopagraphical Selfhood........................................................ 71

IV. Medieval Metaphors of Self: Toward Conceptual Allegory .......................... 83

1. The Subject of Allegory ........................................................................... 85

2. The Rule of Metaphor .............................................................................. 89
3. The Archetype versus the Mytheme.......................................................... 94
4. The Mythologies We Live By................................................................... 98

V. Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectivities: Toward Medieval Nations......... 104

1. Person and Nation .................................................................................. 104

2. Modern and Medieval Nations................................................................ 108
3. Medieval Nations and Myths of Troy ..................................................... 119

Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 128

vi

PART TWO
MASKING TROY:
MAKING PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES IN GUIDO DELLE COLONNE’S
HISTORIA DESTRUCTIONIS TROIAE

Introduction............................................................................................................. 133

VI. Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie: French Romance versus

Latin Prose ................................................................................................. 140

VII. Creating Opacity and Transparency: Heart versus Mind ............................. 152

1. Jason’s Heart versus Peleus’s Mind ........................................................ 153

2. Ovidian Medea versus Virgilian Jason.................................................... 156

VIII. Masking Rule: Trojan Transparency versus Greek Opacity......................... 167

1. Transparent Intersection versus Opaque Imposition................................ 168

2. Trojan Femininity versus Attempted (Greek) Rationality ....................... 170
3. Natural Empire versus Aberrant Antagonists .......................................... 178

IX. Transgressing Borders: Benoît’s Roman versus Guido’s Historia .............. 192

1. Trojan Helen: Hybridity and Muted Flexibility....................................... 192

2. Trojan Briseida: Negotiating Transparency ............................................ 195
3. Greek Briseida: Negotiating Opacity ...................................................... 200
4. Hybrid Briseida: New Self (Denial)........................................................ 204

X. Writing Selves and Nations: Myth versus Mythology ................................. 210

1. Metaphorical Collectives: Hector versus Achilles................................... 210

2. Ulyssean Collectives: Ulysses versus Circe ............................................ 221
3. Guidoan Collectives: Virgil versus Ovid ................................................ 229

XI. Making Sicily: Imperial versus National Bricolage..................................... 238

1. Sicilian Politics: Angevins versus Hohenstaufen .................................... 239

2. Sicilian Poetics: Trojan Nation versus Greek Empire.............................. 246
3. Sicilian Men: Aeneas versus Troy .......................................................... 254

Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 261

XII. Interchapter One: Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book ... 264

1. From History to Romance: Genre ........................................................... 268

2. From Writing Romance to Writing Selves: Masks.................................. 273
 vii

3. From Greek Opacity to Trojan Transparency: Hector ............................. 279

4. From Individual to Genealogy: Hector to Penthesilea............................. 285
5. From Romance Self to Romance (Counter-)Nation: The Poet................. 303

PART THREE
DECONSTRUCTING TROY:
OVID, VIRGIL, AND CHAUCERIAN COUNTER-NATIONHOOD

Introduction............................................................................................................. 321

XIII. “And how he loste hys sterisman”: Historiographical Gaps in the

House of Fame............................................................................................ 328

1. Ovidian Dreams, Virgilian Realities: Changing Dido ............................. 329

2. Steerless Aeneas, Steerless Geffrey: Filling Ontological Blanks............. 335
3. Historiographical Diversity, Ontological Multiplicity: Rewriting Nation 339

XIV. “We wil medle us ech with other”: Mythologizing Allegory....................... 346

1. Ovidian Changeability, Virgilian Stasis: Rethinking Dichotomies .......... 348

2. Geffrey’s Aeneid, Chaucer’s Remedia: Steering the Troilus.................... 355
3. “L’antiche storie [...] cui io potessi fare scudo”: Veiling in Il Filostrato. 360
4. Boccaccio’s Veils, Chaucer’s Unveiling: Conceptualizing Allegory....... 366

XV. “Êat Ile is bycompassed al with êe se”: Chaucerian Nationhood ................. 374

1. Chaucer’s Canterbury, Chaucer’s Troy: Representing Collectivity ......... 375

2. Cicero’s Rome, Troilus’s Troy: Rewarding Statecraft ............................ 380
3. Italian Scipio, Galfridan Brutus: Prophesizing Insularity ........................ 385

XVI. “Whi nyl I helpen to myn owen cure”: Transparent Troilus ........................ 392

1. “What may I nat stonden here?”: From Virgilian Epic to Ovidian Elegy 395
2. “Wol ye be my steere”: From Troilus to His Praeceptores Amoris ......... 403
3. “It nedeth naught this matere ofte stere”: From Ars to Tristia ................. 412

XVII. “Here bygynneth game”: Opaque Pandarus ................................................ 427

1. “A fool may ek a wis-man ofte gide”: From Personal to Public Voice .... 430
2. “Thow shalt the bettre pleyne”: From Perception to Mask Making ......... 440

XVIII. “It nedeth me ful sleighly for to pleie”: Changeable Criseyde ..................... 450

1. “I am myn owene womman”: Making an Ars of the Heroides ................ 452

viii

2. “Ye shal namore han sovereignete”: Metamorphosing the Ars................ 458

3. “For thise bokes wol me shende”: Abandoning Abandonment................ 466

XIX. “Hym thoughte it lik a kalendes of chaunge”: Chaucerian

Counter-Nationhood ................................................................................... 476

1. From “Shady Narrator” to Chaucerian Masks......................................... 479

2. The “sorwful instrument”: Sailing between Virgil and Ovid................... 484
3. The “cloude of errour”: Erroneous Juvenalia .......................................... 491
4. “I fynde ek in stories elleswhere”: Toward Exilic Translucence ............. 497
5. The “gret diversite / In English”: Counter-National Hermeneutics.......... 503

Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 512

XX. Interchapter Two: Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in

Lydgate’s Troy Book................................................................................... 515

1. The “Ethik of false couetise”: Troy Book’s Masked Men........................ 518

2. “I, [...] my silf allone”: Medea, Helen, and Criseyde............................... 532
3. “Disfigurid her facis with viseris”: Lydgate’s Translucence ................... 549

XXI. Conclusions: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy & Beyond ................ 569

1. Selves and Nations from Guido delle Colonne to John Lydgate.............. 569
2. Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy .................................................. 575
3. Beyond ................................................................................................... 590

APPENDIX

Works Cited............................................................................................................. 597

1. Primary Sources..................................................................................... 597

2. Secondary Sources ................................................................................. 601

Index ....................................................................................................................... 636

 ORGANIZATION, TEXTS, AND ABBREVIATIONS

This study is divided into three parts: the first part discusses theories of self and
nationhood while developing the prosopagraphical model; the second part dis-
cusses Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae; the third part,
framed by two interchapters, discusses Chaucer’s House of Fame and his Troi-
lus. The notes are renumbered with the beginning of a new part or an interchap-
ter. I use short titles throughout the entire study so readers can easily locate ref-
erences in the Works Cited. This similarly applies to primary texts and transla-
tions.
I provide full bibliographic references with the first citation of any edition or
critical work, with the exception of the following frequently-cited authors and
works. Citations from Guido delle Colonne’s Historia follow Nathaniel Edward
Griffin’s edition, Historia destructionis Troiae, Mediaeval Academy of America
Publication 26 (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936), by
book and page number. I use Mary Elizabeth Meek’s translation, Historia de-
structionis Troiae (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1974), occasionally with
minor modifications. References to Le Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-
Maure are to Léopold Constans’s edition for the Société des Anciens Textes
Français (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1904-12); translations are from N. R. Havely, ed.
and trans., Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for the Study of “Troilus” and the
“Knight’s” and “Franklin’s Tales”; Translations from the “Filostrato,” “Te-
seida” and “Filocolo” (1980; Cambridge: Brewer, 1992) 167-83. Unless other-
wise specified, translations are mine.
For the anonymous Laud Troy Book and for Lydgate’s Troy Book, I use the
Laud Troy Book: A Romance of About 1400 A.D., ed. J. Ernst Wülfing, 2 vols.,
EETS, o.s. 121, 122 (1902; Milwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1972) and Troy Book, ed.
Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS, e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trübner, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1935), whereby I frequently refer to the
notes in Robert Edwards’s edition, Troy Book: Selections, TEAMS: Middle
English Texts (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). Chau-
cer’s works are generally cited from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D.
Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), in the case of the Troilus
with frequent consultation of B. A. Windeatt’s edition, Troilus & Criseyde: A
New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’ (1984; London: Longman, 1990). Refer-
ences to notes in any of these editions are by the name of the editor of the re-
spective works. The following abbreviations are used throughout:
ABBAW Berichte und Abhandlungen der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Aka-
demie der Wissenschaften
ChauR Chaucer Review
x

DNP Der Neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike, gen. ed. Hubert Can-
cik, Helmuth Schneider, and Manfred Landfester, 16 vols. (Stutt-
gart: Metzler, 1996-2003).
EETS Early English Text Society (os = original series; es = extra series)
GRM Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology
LCL Loeb Classical Library
LexMA Lexikon des Mittelalters, 9 vols. (1999; München: Deutscher Ta-
schenbuch Verlag, 2002)
MED Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn,
and Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press,
1956-2002)
MLN Modern Language Notes
MLQ Modern Language Quarterly
MLR Modern Language Review
MP Modern Philology
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
PQ Philological Quarterly
SAC Studies in the Age of Chaucer
SP Studies in Philology
SSL Studies in Scottish Literature
WBG Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft
YFS Yale French Studies
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Troy haunted the medieval imagination. Although “the Iliad and Odyssey were
virtually unknown in western Europe during the Middle Ages,”1 the Troy story
was unquestionably the most popular secular narrative of the era. Obviously,
Troy still haunts the modern imagination, as it appears in a plethora of novels,
paintings, and movies dealing with aspects of the Trojan War. Troy likewise
haunts the scholarly imagination,2 with countless publications in different disci-
plines, which may well weary readers in advance of another book about Troy.
Yet, much remains to be discussed. The present study investigates the nexus be-
tween selves and nations as it is depicted within the late medieval transmission
of the Troy story, particularly in England. It also examines how various Troy
stories themselves construct individuals and nations, which requires a history of
the medieval self and the nation that has thus far been lacking in the critical lit-
erature.3 The theoretical lens developed in order to adequately assess the interre-
lationship between personal and collective narratives, a model I refer to as pro-
sopagraphical selfhood, is further used as an epistemological tool for examina-
tions of medieval identity formation that may indicate possible alternatives to
Lacanian interpellation, Foucauldian discourse analysis, or Greenblattian self-
fashioning. Beyond the twin questions pursued in this study, this model offers
fresh perspectives on and challenges received notions about Guido delle Col-
onne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, the anonymous Laud Troy Book, Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and John Lydgate’s Troy Book, even as it ges-
tures toward new readings of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Gio-
vanni Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid.
The deceptively short answer that a prosopagraphical reading of the Troy story
provides to the main questions posed throughout this study – the nexus between
personal and national identities within the Troy story – is that it constructs indi-

1
Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (1932; New
York: Pageant Book Company, 1957) 7.
2
For the latest ‘battle’ about Troy, see Christoph Ulf, ed., Der neue Streit um Troia: Eine
Bilanz (München: Beck, 2003); Joachim Latacz, Troia und Homer: Der Weg zur Lösung
eines alten Rätsels, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 2005) 15; Martin Zimmer-
mann, “Troia – eine unendliche Geschichte?” Der Traum von Troia: Geschichte und My-
thos einer ewigen Stadt, ed. Martin Zimmermann (München: Beck, 2006) 17-24.
3
This is surprising given the recent interest in both selfhood and nationhood in the humani-
ties. For this lacuna in Troy research, see Kerstin Pistorius, “Troia II. Trojaner-Geschichte
als Gründungsmythos,” DNP 15: 616. The exception to the rule is Sylvia Federico’s New
Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 2003). I discuss this and other studies engaging with either individuality or nation-
hood in the Troy story in Chapter Five.
2 General Introduction

viduals and nations as allegories of change by means of changing allegories. The

correlative for processes of collective identity formation is that late medieval
English nationhood is more likely to be a counter-nationhood.
Medieval individualism – or rather the question of whether the medieval pe-
riod knew such a concept – has concerned medievalists and early modernists for
a long time. Beginning with Jacob Burckhardt’s pronouncement in 1860 that the
Renaissance marks the birth of individuality (rather, individualism), scholars
have increasingly revisited this claim. An ensuing interest in medieval selfhood
would come in several waves, peaking roughly after the two world wars, first
when scholars such as Ernst Troeltsch, Alfons Dopsch, and J. Huizinga engaged
critically with Burckhardt’s thesis,4 and later in studies by Walter Ullmann, Pe-
ter Dronke, Colin Morris, and Robert Hanning, to name only the most prominent
proponents. Structuralist and poststructuralist theories in the social sciences,
psychology, and literary scholarship – here primarily the revaluation of early
modern individuality by new historicists and cultural materialists, such as Ste-
phen Greenblatt, Catherine Belsey, and Jonathan Dollimore – have prompted
many medievalists to revisit Burckhardt’s argument yet again. H. Marshall
Leicester’s The Disenchanted Self (1990) and Lee Patterson’s Chaucer and the
Subject of History come to mind immediately, as do studies by European schol-
ars such as Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, Aaron Gurevich as well as Rich-
ard van Dülmen. The upsurge of interest in medieval individuality continues, as
is evident in recent work on medieval selfhood, for example, Timothy Reiss’s
Mirages of the Selfe (2003), Peter Haidu’s The Subject Medieval / Modern
(2004), and A. C. Spearing’s Textual Subjectivity (2005). These recent studies
notwithstanding, interest in medieval individuality appears to be slowly giving
way to a related area of inquiry – medieval nationhood.
As Derek Pearsall observes, “The history of English nationhood is a major
current preoccupation of English scholars, a result perhaps of the changes in the
landscape of perception that are taking place as a result of both Europeanization
and devolution.”5 Related factors in work concerning nation formation are the
recent conflicts in Eastern Europe, the general phenomenon of globalization, the
formation of supra-state trade zones like NAFTA, as well as the latest debates
about (an allegedly threatened) American cultural identity, and, of course, the
specter of imperialism. Work on modern nationhood has brought onto the scene
a controversial discussion about the history of the nation – and, inevitably, the
‘backdating game.’ The nation, one is assured, is an eighteenth-century concept,

4
It is impossible to situate all of the theses argued in this study in their respective critical
context within the scope of this introduction. The relevant scholarly debates are integrated
in the individual parts and chapters of this study. For an in-depth discussion of scholar-
ship concerned with medieval individuality that is referred to here in passing only, see
Chapter One.
5
Derek Pearsall, “The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century,” Nation, Court and
Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2001) 15.
 General Introduction 3

a tenet most persuasively maintained by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Com-

munities (1983), Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983), and E. J.
Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990). Subsequent scholars
have only begun to speak of the early modern origins of the nation – for in-
stance, Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism (1992), Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Na-
tionhood (1992), Andrew Hadfield’s Literature, Politics and National Identity
(1994), and Claus Uhlig’s Klio und Natio (1995) – making the Renaissance a
more likely period of the twin birth of individual and nation.
Few medievalists have suffered serious pangs of conscience in applying the
term nation to medieval England or France. Only with the publication of Thor-
lac Turville-Petre’s England the Nation (1996) and Adrian Hastings’s The Con-
struction of Nationhood (1997), however, has medieval nationhood been more
widely debated in literary and historical scholarship, renewing the debate be-
tween modernists and ‘perennialists’ – a terminological debate that attests per-
haps more to contemporary institutional realpolitik than to medieval actualities.
Despite these terminological border skirmishes, one is in good company when
arguing for both medieval individuality and medieval nationhood. While the
emphasis in recent work seems to fall more on medieval nationhood, one won-
ders if questions of medieval selfhood have not been too quickly set aside. I
question whether it is possible to discuss one without the other. In quest of a
methodology that takes adequate account of the interrelationship between per-
sonal and national identities within the Troy story, this study has recourse both
to Burckhardt’s metaphor of the veil and cognitive narratological theories, the
combination of which, it is argued, yields important insights into the history of
self and nation making in the ‘pre-modern’ period. Thus, this study contends
that selfhood is necessarily a matter of narratively (that is, mythologically) con-
structed masks, corresponding to the roles in vogue in older psychological and
sociological theories. This prosopagraphical approach aims to shed light not
only on past discussions of selfhood and nationhood but previews what so-called
postmodern and post-national conceptions of self and nation could have in
common with a past that is too infrequently considered in such contexts.
In order to address the nexus between selves and nations, this study draws on
a theory that ultimately revisits a quintessential Burckhardtian metaphor. In the
Renaissance, Burckhardt argues, the medieval veil covering modern subjectivity
was lifted and the individual could finally emerge.6 My survey of research con-

6
Jacob Burckhardt writes, “Im Mittelalter lagen die beiden Seiten des Bewußtseins – nach
der Welt hin und nach dem Innern des Menschen selbst – wie unter einem gemeinsamen
Schleier träumend oder halbwach. Der Schleier war gewoben aus Glauben, Kindesbefan-
genheit und Wahn; durch ihn hindurch gesehen erschienen Welt und Geschichte wunder-
sam gefärbt, der Mensch aber erkannte sich nur als Rasse, Volk, Partei, Korporation, Fa-
milie oder sonst in irgendeiner Form des Allgemeinen. In Italien zuerst verweht dieser
Schleier in die Lüfte; es erwacht die objektive Betrachtung und Behandlung des Staates
und der sämtlichen Dinge dieser Welt überhaupt; daneben aber erhebt sich mit voller
Macht das Subjektive, der Mensch wird geistiges Individuum und erkennt sich als sol-
4 General Introduction

cerned with medieval personhood in Chapter One testifies to the longevity of

Burckhardt’s reductive, and yet potentially productive view, which implicitly
informs many discussions of selfhood regarding the Middle Ages and the Ren-
aissance. Unlike other studies that tacitly confirm Burckhardt’s thesis, this study
attempts to show how a powerful metaphor can have an unexpected, and unac-
knowledged, significance. Burckhardt’s ‘veil’ correlates with older role theories,
wherein individuality may be veiled by collective, public roles that suppress in-
dividuality by means of rendering it a matter of the universal. In other words,
individuality is masked. This relates in interesting ways to axioms recurrently
employed in discussions of medieval selfhood: it is assumed that medieval
selves adopt specific roles circulated in a given culture, that these roles are nar-
ratively constructed, and that these processes of identification are informed by
wider social values. An overlap between Burckhardt’s envisioned emergence of
the enlightened individual and the postmodern critique of ‘modern individuality’
is too suggestive to be ignored altogether. I therefore turn to contemporary iden-
tity theories which throw more sharply into relief the issue of veiled individual-
ity and its narrative construction.
Recent work in the cognitive and social sciences emphasizes the primary on-
tological need to locate the self – physically in terms of one’s whereabouts,
mentally in terms of one’s stance (opinion) vis-à-vis the world. Since location
always implies a narrative, the locative self becomes a narrative self. Given that
narratives are not created ab ovo, the central question is how the self organizes
and maintains available narratives in the light of contradiction. I suggest that the
Burckhardtian veil, reinterpreted as a mask, overlaps with structuralist theories
that can be applied profitably to the workings of cultural narratives. Here,
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of mythology is particularly useful. As a heuristic
lens for discussing personal and national identities (see Chapter Two), the narra-
tives of selfhood lay bare a collection of masks (myths) that are ‘vertically’ lay-
ered, one in front of another. On this view, much like Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur,
individuals can choose either to adopt complete role narratives circulated in any
given culture, as these are informed by central values (goods), or they can
choose alternatively to restructure cultural narratives and recombine the avail-
able mythemes into a new myth, a new mask. Recombining mythemes allows
single motifs to appear on several of the layered masks, thus creating ‘horizontal
axes’ of commonality, centers or cores for the individual which prevent the
postmodern fallacy of a decentered self. A different way of visualizing this
model is as opaque masks that occlude the view of other masks (much as Burck-
hardt believed was the case in the Middle Ages). Then again, there is a risk that
selfhood falls prey entirely to collectivism, namely, when one good becomes
central and when all masks intersect maximally, rendering them alike. Meta-
phorically speaking, the masks become transparent. Between these extremes lies

ches.” Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [1860], 15th ed. (Leipzig: Kröner, 1926)
119.
 General Introduction 5

a punctual transparency or translucence, a nodal centering of selfhood that al-

lows some aspects of the personae to remain opaque. My theoretical discussion
as well as my analyses of the texts will show how this model of prosopagraphi-
cal selfhood is able to demonstrate that numerous medieval writers negotiate ex-
actly this middle ground and achieve the inscription of selfhood into public dis-
course without sacrificing their individuality. This is to say, they are no less in-
dividuals than their ‘enlightened’ (or even post-enlightened) counterparts.
Although this prosopagraphical model emerges from the oscillation of me-
dieval and contemporary theories of the self, Chapter Three illustrates that the
chosen method is not ahistorical. The visualization of identity in terms of rhet-
orically fabricated masks is, for example, discernible in Cicero’s De officiis, a
widely studied text in the Middle Ages. Cicero’s four-personae theory builds on
combinations of several masks, allowing a degree of individuality not usually
posited for classical or medieval conceptions of personhood. While his perso-
nae-theory may be an isolated, if obvious, example, a similar case can be made
for medieval identity formation as well. Although the meaning of the term per-
sona changes from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and although there are
few theoretical treatises on masks and masking, masks were widely popular –
often in explicitly ontological contexts, as Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter
show in their Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (2002).
If medieval selfhood, as it appears in most accounts, is a matter of narrative
masks, this argument is supported further by the fact that selfhood throughout
the Middle Ages was often metaphorically represented in terms of the book of
the self. Whereas this promotes literature as a particularly promising realm of
investigation, research concerned with medieval autobiography more often
points to a severe limitation: allegory. Here, research in medieval selfhood and
medieval autobiography coalesces in arguing that the medieval self, the individ-
ual soul, as Hans Robert Jauss once put it, is an ‘allegory of the universal.’7
If the notion of medieval individuality/autobiography as a mere allegory of
the universal is informed by a misunderstanding of allegory as an epistemologi-
cal model (and thus in itself the result of the present day aesthetic predilection
for metaphor), this misconception is highly productive. The prosopagraphical
model provides a means to map the epistemological underpinnings of selfhood.
The reductive description of medieval individuality as an allegorical mode en-
tails, as I argue in Chapter Four, that there is no distinction between the several
domains involved in allegoresis. As in the transparent prosopagraphical mode
(that is, transparent prosopagraphy), all-informing goods override any separate
domains. All domains (masks) collapse into one another and result in an onto-
logically problematic transparency. From another perspective, however, medie-
val allegory is hardly a transparent mode at all; rather, allegory employs a modus

7
Hans Robert Jauss, “Vom plurale tantum der Charaktere zum singulare tantum des Indi-
viduums,” Individualität, ed. Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp (München: Fink,
1988) 244-45.
6 General Introduction

operandi comparable to what I describe as translucent prosopagraphy: allegory

allows domain intersection at various points while maintaining a certain degree
of opacity. The system itself, however, can only be centered by positing inter-
sections in the first place; a degree of both horizontality and verticality is neces-
sary. From this angle, medieval selves indeed appear to be allegories of the uni-
versal; however, they are allegories of the universal no less so than contempo-
rary selves.
What Jauss’s phrase encapsulates so well is that selfhood and individuality
are hardly thinkable without universals. If the self is contingent on the availabil-
ity of cultural narratives provided by those individuals or institutions that have
the means to recirculate stereotypical or newly deconstructed masks, and if his-
tories of a collective are mythical in structure and disseminate not only symbols
and values but also particularly potent role models,8 it follows that the narratives
of person and nations are heavily interdependent. If this view, developed in
Chapter Five, is correct, then those accounts maintaining that universal Christi-
anity overrides national concerns likely occlude the possibility that individuals
and writers within vernacular cultures could rectify and disseminate changed
stories of nationhood, at once inscribing individuality into public discourse and
thereby modifying public discourse itself. Provided that late medieval England
meets Anthony D. Smith’s criteria for being a nation,9 the one discourse that
merits particular attention – since it circulates a common myth of descent and
national masks for wide adoption – is the Troy story, to which I turn in the sec-
ond part of this study.
The most widely circulated Troy story in the Middle Ages was Guido delle
Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, a Latin prose redaction of Benoît de
Sainte-Maure’s Old French Roman de Troie (c. 1160). Probably due to its
stronger claims to historical veracity and because it was penned in Latin, it was
the Historia, and not the Roman, which was widely translated into European
vernacular languages. It was translated three times into English in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries: in the anonymous Laud Troy Book, in John Clerk’s De-
struction of Troy, and in John Lydgate’s Troy Book. It is odd, to say the least,
that the Historia has so rarely received critical attention despite its popularity.10
As an analysis by means of the prosopagraphical model will show, the Historia
extrapolates from Benoît’s Roman several dichotomies revolving around onto-
logical questions. These dichotomies lie at the heart not only of the English

8
See Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1999).
9
Medieval England boasts common myths and symbols, a shared political, socio-economic
culture, a historic territory, as well as common codes and institutions. It also possesses a
common vernacular literature capable of disseminating national culture.
10
Criticism engaging with the Historia is acknowledged throughout the second part of this
study. By far the most thorough treatment is C. David Benson, The History of Troy in
Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s “Historia destructionis Troiae” in
Medieval England (Woodbridge: Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980).
 General Introduction 7

transmission of the Troy story, but also at the centre of the history of medieval
nationhood. Since scholarship has hitherto failed to engage with these dichoto-
mies, much less with Guido’s interest in personal and collective identity, a com-
plete revaluation of the Historia is necessary.
What has mainly impeded a proper appreciation of Guido’s Historia, I con-
tend in Chapter Six, is one of its biggest virtues: it redacts a vivacious French
romance into a Latin chronicle. This not only allowed for a wider dissemination
of the work, it further enabled Guido to clarify the ontological dimensions of
Benoît’s longish Roman – the opposition of transparency and opacity. Moreover,
the translation of a French text into Latin is, at least for Guido, a translation into
the language of empire. Empire, territorial expansion, and fama indeed play a
major role in Guido’s supposedly pro-Trojan version of events, which turns out
to be a Fürstenspiegel that encourages Virgilian empire making instead. Valu-
able lessons in the scope of the Historia can be learned primarily from the
Greeks. Guido sets up from the outset a dichotomy between vertical prosopagra-
phy (that is, opacity, Greece, mind, empire) and horizontal prosopagraphy
(transparency, Troy, heart, city/nation), as is shown in Chapter Seven. The quest
for the Golden Fleece, which forms the prologue to the Trojan War, enables
Guido to portray two Thessalian mask makers, Peleus and Jason, who learn to
veil their intentions rhetorically, to separate between personal desires and public
necessities. Opposed to this Greek strategy stands Medea, who, unwilling to
mask her intentions, emerges in the Historia as transparent, as incapable of sepa-
rating private and public domains. The encounter of Medea and Jason further
allows Guido, unlike his sources, to advance another dichotomy, bearing the nu-
cleus for later poetological negotiations for Chaucer and Lydgate: Jason’s quest
for imperial fame by means of opacity, which is associated with Virgil, stands
opposed to Medea’s transparent, changeable cupiditas, associated with Ovid;
Guido, that is, juxtaposes an Ovidian with a Virgilian track.
The ontological models exemplified by Peleus, Jason, and Medea as indi-
viduals are transposed onto the Greek and Trojan collectives, respectively, as I
demonstrate in Chapter Eight. Medean changeability is problematically charac-
teristic of Laomedon’s and Priam’s rules as well. Both rulers betray an un-
healthy tendency to make changing personal desires and collective actions
equivalent; both also act upon uncontrollable personal desires which Guido
codes as Ovidian. In contrast to Ovidian changeability, the Greeks, chiefly
Agamemnon, are able not only to distinguish between personal desires and im-
perial concern, but the Greek emperor shows how personal issues can be masked
by adopting the opaque imperial mask. What is true of Agamemnon and Priam
is consistently true also of the minor players on the battlefield. For example,
Guido – normally prone to rationalizing any strangeness included in his source –
even expands on Benoît’s marvels, such as centaurs and Amazons, in order to
illustrate the threatening metamorphoses to be witnessed in Troy. While Guido
can use Benoît’s ‘Ovidianism’ to his own advantage here, the women of Be-
noît’s Roman pose somewhat more of a problem for the Sicilian. In Chapter
8 General Introduction

Nine, I submit that in the French romance, Medea, Helen, and Briseis offer an
alternative to the ontological models otherwise reinforced in the Roman. They
engage in potentially very productive (and progressive) prosopagraphical prac-
tices. Both Helen and Briseis, for instance, are able to maintain multiple per-
sonal and collective masks, without either suppressing individuality or collaps-
ing all personae into a non-identity. Guido mutes this productivity by at once
emphasizing the undesirable Ovidian changeability of women in the Roman de
Troie, and by contrasting their changeability with Calchas’s reinforcement of the
Virgilian model, whereby individuality is subsumed in the imperial mask.
Guido’s Historia argues from several vantage points that selfhood is a matter
of adopting narrative masks. Guido’s examination of rhetorical models then de-
velops in several stages, from cognitive concepts implicit in the depiction of
Greeks and Trojans to the narrative’s eventual recognition that Ulyssean rhetoric
represents the Historia’s own rhetorical underpinning, processes delineated in
Chapter Ten. Guido’s Trojans illustrate the dangers of metaphor inasmuch as
this rhetorical mode, as elaborated in Chapter Four, aims at collapsing domains.
On the battlefield, where Hector is Troy, this has fatal consequences for Troy
since its destiny is irrevocably linked to that of its best knight. His Greek coun-
terpart, Achilles, dangerously dallies with Trojan ontological models when fal-
ling in love with Polyxena. This is of little consequence to the Greeks since their
vertical prosopagraphy represents mapping processes from one domain onto an-
other, processes that are, in Roman Jakobson’s terminology, metonymic – sepa-
rate domains can thus be maintained without collapsing. The longevity of the
Greek empire could never be bound up with the destiny of a single individual.
The Historia is fascinated by opacity and concurrently investigates the workings
of vertical prosopagraphy. It engages explicitly with this question by portraying
in detail the efficiency of Ulyssean rhetoric. Ulysses’s rhetorical strategy can
best be grasped as mythical bricolage (rather than mythological bricolage) in
that he is a professional manufacturer of opaque masks, transforming a malle-
able mythology into a fixed myth. His opacity further becomes an aesthetic ana-
logue of Guido’s own translation strategies. Guido’s artistic problem lies in the
combination of several sources in order to manufacture an opaque mask under
which his source can literally disappear. At no point does Guido mention Be-
noît’s Roman. The narrative processes necessary to veil his source, however, are
the same narrative strategies that Guido associates with pagan idolatry and
shape-shifting. Although Guido’s artistic program is not as seamless as he him-
self would likely have preferred it to be, his mythical bricolage, his general ten-
dency to idolize opacity and indict transparency, and his pitting of Virgilian sta-
bility against disastrous Ovidian changeability, all serve an ideological goal that
fits awkwardly with the dominant critical conception of the Historia as a non-
nationalist, anti-imperialist, pro-Trojan work. A brief look at the historical
circumstance under which Guido, a Sicilian judge, undertook the translation of
the Roman clearly evinces his problems with the story of Trojan origins.
 General Introduction 9

Guido’s frequent references to issues of Sicilian ancestry, customs, or politics

have not instigated systematic study; the most that is possible within the scope
of this study is to gesture to the relevance of Guido’s excessive interest in Sicil-
ian history. Although in the standard version of the translatio imperii, Sicily is a
Trojan foundation, Guido’s study of sources regarding Sicilian history reveals
that many Sicilian and Italian accomplishments and foundations are Greek rather
than Trojan. By using Benoît’s narrative strategies, which Guido allegedly dis-
likes, he constructs a hybrid Greco-Trojan genealogy for Sicily, inviting his Si-
cilian audience to read the Troy story allegorically. Indeed, few texts would
have been more relevant for late thirteenth-century Sicily. Having grown up in
the heyday of Frederick II’s Hohenstaufen empire, with Sicily as a key player on
the European political scene, the takeover of Sicily by Anjou, culminating vio-
lently in the Sicilian Vespers (and the expelling of the Angevin army), followed
by the loss of political clout in European politics and the attendant political tur-
moil in Sicily, must have been deeply dissatisfying for Guido. It is only natural,
then, that the Historia opposes the formation of small-scale collectives: Sicily
itself, a decade after the Sicilian Vespers, became a Trojan city-state under
siege. By enriching Sicily’s Trojan origins with a successful Greek ontological
model – that is, the opaque masks of empire – Guido offers an account of the
Trojan War that expresses the hope for a reversal of the translatio imperii, en-
capsulated literally in re-translating a French vernacular text back into the impe-
rial language.
A revaluation of the Historia is necessary to obtain interpretive purchase on
the astounding modifications occurring in the medieval English transmission of
the Troy story. Troy’s noble origins were omnipresent in late medieval England,
as they were in many other European nations. The most widely known, albeit
allusive account of the Troy story was the Brut tradition based on Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1130s). In many versions of the Brut,
it seems that the dominating characterization of both the Trojan ancestry and the
physical descriptions of the second Troy is that of purity and transparency – a
characteristic condemned by Guido. My analysis of the anonymous Laud Troy
Book (between 1343 and 1383), the earliest translation of Guido’s Historia,
quickly substantiates this impression. In Chapter Twelve, an interchapter that
takes the reader from thirteenth-century Italy to one of the most sustained ex-
aminations of the nexus between person and nation in fourteenth-century Eng-
land – Chaucer’s Troilus – it will be seen that the little-studied Laud stands
Guido’s Historia on its head in multiple ways. Generically, the author of the
Laud not only chooses poetry instead of prose, but also romance instead of
chronicle. This underlines the poet’s interest in issues of personal and national
identity, which are foregrounded from the beginning by an invocation of the
trinity as three personae that is repeated in a crucial speech by Hector, added by
the poet, emphasizing, commending, and excusing Hector’s emotional transpar-
ency. Not only is Hector glorified as a transparent hero, he is the first in a distin-
guished genealogy of equally transparent heroes (and a heroine): Troilus, Achil-
10 General Introduction

les, and Penthesilea. The last transparent hero of the narrative is the Laud-poet
himself. The narrator’s transparency becomes obvious in his changes, most im-
portantly the excessively pro-Trojan stance which, in the light of references to
the Hundred Years War, invites the audience explicitly to allegorize England as
Troy. By frequently associating himself with Hector and by regularly modifying
Guido’s story, the poet legitimizes his own emotional transparency. This sug-
gests implicitly that national historiography is subject to change, that Trojan his-
tory may not be deterministic. These implications are tested to a much greater
extent, however, in Chaucer’s Troy stories, examined in Part Three.
Where Guido errs on the side of opacity, the Laud errs on the side of trans-
parency. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde errs, if err it does, on both
sides of the question for he tests several ontological models in the poem. In the
end, he argues for the necessity of both opacity and transparency; he argues for
translucence. In the Troilus, Chaucer tests horizontal prosopagraphy (transpar-
ency) and vertical prosopagraphy (opacity) in the world of his ‘characters,’ ana-
lyzing how much individuality can be preserved in the light of collective, na-
tional pressures. On the level of discourse, he further extrapolates – much more
than does the Laud-poet – the Historia’s poetological dimension. Chaucer, like
Guido, aligns opacity with a Virgilian mode and transparency with an Ovidian
one. If translucence – that is transparency and opacity – is needed for maintain-
ing both collective and individual personae, then Virgilian and Ovidian narra-
tive strategies are equally required. For Chaucer, the mythological (rather than
mythical) bricolage necessary to continually deconstruct national discourse is
indeed a matter of Virgilianism and Ovidianism. However, in carefully revisit-
ing the Ovidian cursus, Chaucer discovers an Ovidianism enriched by Virgilian
veiling in the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto – texts that yield insights into
steering ontologically through perilous political seas. Chaucer’s Ovidianism is a
counter-national Ovidianism which has hitherto escaped critical recognition, as
has Chaucer’s general extrapolation (chiefly from Virgil, Ovid, Guido, and Boc-
caccio) of the dichotomies that are ontologically relevant for making selves and
nations.
To chart Chaucer’s Ovidian counter-nationhood, it is also important to con-
sider Chaucer’s other Troy story, the House of Fame. Here, ontological ques-
tions are intricately bound up with poetological questions. While this has been
generally acknowledged, Geffrey’s mythological bricolage within a Chaucerian
hermeneutics of the blank requires explication – undertaken in Chapter Thirteen.
Structurally, the House of Fame operates on two related blanks linked to matters
of authority. Geffrey encounters the first blank after the hybrid Virgilian-
Ovidian account of Dido witnessed on the walls of Venus’s temple. Confused,
Geffrey steps out of Venus’s temple in quest of a “sterisman” (replicating
Aeneas’s predicament of losing his pilot Palinurus) and finding an empty desert
instead. This situation is replicated on another level as well. After the audience
has witnessed the arbitrary workings of Fama and the hybrid construction of ru-
mors in the House of Rumor, instead of the promised authority needed to make
 General Introduction 11

sense of all this, one encounters a blank. What is prompted by the blank is a
hermeneutical process inviting a continual, hybrid mythological bricolage, the
recombination of all available mythemes into new narratives, whereby the Troy
stories, central toward the end of the House of Fame, assume a prominent posi-
tion.
The blank on which the House of Fame ends points both backward and for-
ward. It suggests a continuous rereading of the poem itself, but also propels the
reader forward into the Troilus, which also reshuffles the available mythemes of
the Troy story into a new narrative. Chaucer’s mythological bricolage in the
translucent prosopagraphy of the Troilus builds on a plethora on narratives. In
Chapter Fourteen, I focus on those sources that are of particular relevance: Vir-
gil and Ovid, often seen through the lens of Guido’s Historia and, most of all,
Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. The question of the right balance of domains (martial
and Venerean), illustrated by the search for ‘steerspersons’ within the Troilus, is
a problem already emphasized in the Filostrato. Boccaccio’s narrator overcomes
the problem in a way not entirely dissimilar to the strategy adopted by Chaucer’s
poet. Despite Filostrato’s alleged desire to make transparent his emotional tur-
moil to his lover by means of telling the story of Troiolo and Criseida, this alle-
gorization is conceptually allegorical at best. After all, Filostrato’s situation is
comparable to Troiolo’s only in limited ways – and the addressee of Filostrato’s
comparison should indeed be little flattered by a comparison with duplicitous
Criseida.
Against the critical grain, I suggest in Chapter Fifteen that the Troilus also of-
fers itself for allegorical interpretation. Moreover, this allegorization of the
poem ensues in a national context not generally assumed for the Troilus. First of
all, and as criticism noted long ago, much of the setting of the poem is reminis-
cent of fourteenth-century London rather than ancient Troy. Second, Troilus’s
view from the eighth sphere is intertextually related to sources that have impe-
rial and national subtexts, chiefly Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Macrobius’s
commentary on it. When further comparing the ending of the Troilus to other
texts that afford a lofty view from the eighth sphere, Chaucer’s particular stress
on an island in the sea is what stands out. That the island is none other than Bru-
tus’s Albion is clear from an intertextual allusion to the Brut tradition, until now
completely overlooked. Brutus’s vision of his future home bears a striking ver-
bal resemblance to Chaucer’s island in the sea, thereby suggesting that the vain
world Troilus beholds is England. What is further striking about the passage and
provides an important clue as to how to construct an allegorical relationship be-
tween Britain and Troy, is that in contrast to the scene in Boccaccio’s Teseida –
Chaucer’s immediate source – Troilus’s body disappears in the Troilus, leaving
a blank and thereby a hermeneutical structure discerned already in the House of
Fame. If the poem is indeed offered as an allegory, the removal of Troilus from
the poem can be seen as the removal of one ontological Trojan model, leaving
the audience with two other ontological models for constructing Trojan identity,
which requires further examination.
12 General Introduction

Troilus’s name already signals his exemplarity for Trojan identity – the onto-
logical model of transparency. While the Historia’s and the Laud Troy Book’s
versions of Troilus are clearly transparent, Chaucer does complicate Troilus’s
transparency in introducing the issue of steering. After his conversion from a
Virgilian knight to an Ovidian lover, Troilus’s predicament lies in the aporia of
balancing two roles that seem to be mutually exclusive. Venerean love, how-
ever, is always close to gaining the upper hand. Since Troilus can only be one
persona at a time – thus becoming appropriately mono-mythological – he needs
help to maintain his sanity, finding it in his praeceptor amoris Pandarus, who
becomes his “sterisman.” While Pandarus, with the help of Criseyde, can steer
Troilus safely through the Ars amatoria, Troilus proves to be unable to follow
Pandarus into the realm of the Remedia amoris once Criseyde appears to be
gone for good. Troilus chooses instead a deterministic Ovidian model to fashion
his Venerean self and settles for the Heroides – a lament that will not effect
change. Since he is unable to combine several mythical discourses, he finally
occupies a subject position comparable to the persona of the Tristia, with the
difference that Troilus recognizes his ‘error’ only posthumously. Therefore, he
exemplifies precisely the historical determinism characteristic of Guido’s Tro-
jans and of a consequently literal understanding of Trojan historiography.
Troilus’s inability to deploy Virgilian opacity in order to keep his emotional-
ity in check is mirrored in reverse in Pandarus. That Pandarus is an Ovidian
character is a commonplace in criticism. What the prosopagraphical model sug-
gests, however, is that Pandarus uses Ovidianism chiefly for the creation of
opacity. In Chapter Seventeen, I contend that Pandarus, whose entire existence
is ‘proverbial,’ represents public discourse itself in that he circulates unrelated,
often contradictory masks for Troilus to adopt. Pandarus can veil contradictions,
of course, but only at a cost. The price he pays is that of selfhood. Much like the
postmodern view of a decentered self, Pandarus represents a collection of
opaque masks that do not intersect, rendering his selfhood a matter of non-
identity. At a pivotal moment after Criseyde has left for the Greek camp, Panda-
rus’s narrative strategies even veil ontological knowledge that might have of-
fered a solution for Troilus: Criseydan translucence. Where Troilus illustrates
the pitfalls of horizontal prosopagraphy, of transparency itself, Pandarus illus-
trates the perils of vertical prosopagraphy, of opacity. If neither opacity nor
transparency can work alone as an ontological model, Criseyde literally occu-
pies the middle ground and advances a translucent prosopagraphical paradigm
capable of upholding both transparency and opacity.
Chaucer’s Criseyde unveils the potential of her ‘predecessors’ in the Troy
story, particularly of Benoît’s Briseis, which Guido and others are at pains to
confine. From the beginning of the poem, Criseyde, as I propose in Chapter
Eighteen, appears as a hybrid character capable of maintaining various, contra-
dictory masks without either entirely suppressing individuality or collapsing in-
dividuality on account of one overriding good. Her ability to differentiate be-
tween private and public roles makes her literally a luminous individual, and es-
 General Introduction 13

tablishes her translucence. Like the other protagonists, she also moves progres-
sively forward within the Ovidian cursus – an argument made forcefully by Mi-
chael Calabrese in his Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love (1994). As an abandoned
woman, however, she enters at a different point. In contrast to Troilus, who
lacks self-control and requires Pandarian and Criseydan assistance, Criseyde is
able to negotiate the several predicaments which historical necessity forces upon
her by subjecting available narratives to processes of mythological bricolage,
drawing initially on the Heroides and the Metamorphoses. She then moves be-
yond these narratives into the realm of Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, appropri-
ating a position between two worlds, much like the Ovidian persona on his way
to Tomis. Her liminal existence, linked to her ‘sliding,’ prompts a self-analytical
speech that encourages her to abandon the topos of abandonment, and to face the
challenges of exile. Criseyde realizes, in a manner similar to the persona of the
Tristia and Ex Ponto, that her reputation is lost even before accepting Diomede
as a lover, not by an actual deed but by the public misconception of a potential
deed. All she can do, again mirroring Ovid’s exiled persona, is to acknowledge
her ‘error’ and raise her friends’ awareness for her behavior. Criseyde thereby
recognizes that ontological processes do require Virgilian opacity and stability
as well as what Guido’s Historia renders as Ovidian transparency and change-
ability. In order to safeguard her individuality from overbearing public pres-
sures, the exilic individual needs to ‘write back to empire.’
Writing back to empire is exactly what Chaucer’s poet does, as I argue in
Chapter Nineteen. Like Criseyde, the poet is a mythological bricoleur, which
puts him in a perilous position from the beginning. If the characters of the Troi-
lus are on a journey through tumultuous seas, the narrator begins the journey
with Troilus, facing a similar predicament in that he is poised between stories of
glorious Martial deeds and Venerean love. Unlike Troilus, however, he remains
in control, steers himself through the textual worlds by using a Virgilian frame
for an Ovidian plot – an issue touched upon already in Chapter Fourteen. This
deployment of both opacity and transparency increasingly becomes a matter of
translucence. Metamorphosis and changeability within the processes of mytho-
logical bricolage enable individuals to abandon abandonment, allowing the nar-
rator, in this case, to leave behind a deterministic tale of Trojan origins. Like
Criseyde, the poet is worried about this changeability, sending his book out into
the world in an Ovidian fashion. Like the House of Fame, however, allegorizing
Britain’s Trojan origins is a process subject to the hermeneutics of Criseydan
changeability. The poet thus manages to inscribe himself into a national dis-
course he himself has been deconstructing all along. But he also recirculates his
national myth as a national mythology for other individuals to repeat. The dis-
course of nationhood becomes a discourse of counter-nationhood.
In his Troy Book (1412-20), a translation of Guido’s Historia, John Lydgate
carefully extrapolates the Criseydan prosopagraphical model and re-embeds
Chaucerian translucence in its original Guidoan framework, as I argue in a sec-
ond interchapter, framing my interpretation of Chaucer’s Troilus with two trans-
14 General Introduction

lations of Guido that predate and postdate it, respectively. To say that Lydgate
understood Chaucer very well would have raised eyebrows a decade ago – after
all, Lydgate was primarily seen as a dull (reminiscent of fifteenth-century dull-
ness in general) Lancastrian propagandist. Recent criticism, primarily the work
of James Simpson, assumes a more nuanced view and locates in Lydgate’s work
anti-imperialist tendencies. In the context of the current, wholesale revaluation
of Lydgate’s works, the prosopagraphical paradigm enables one to see
Lydgate’s sustained engagement with Chaucerian counter-nationhood in a work
that, unlike Chaucer’s Troilus, was written for a powerful patron. Lydgate thus
becomes a national myth-maker, disseminating, in English, a myth of origin al-
ready available in Latin and French. The central concern of Troy Book, as a pro-
sopagraphical reading demonstrates, is also the nexus between personal and na-
tional identities, an interest most evident in Lydgate’s emphasis on prudence
which, in turn, is a matter of ontological veiling. Veiling, however, is deeply
problematic since it can be employed to reach both honorable and dishonorable
ends. Most fascinating for Lydgate, in several much-expanded anti-feminist pas-
sages, is the capacity of the Troy Book women, particularly Criseyde, to veil
their changeability by means of a mask that seems to be transparent. Criseyde’s
ability to be transparent and opaque without sacrificing her individuality (while
still foregrounding her exilic plight) becomes an artistic analogue of Lydgate’s
poetology, of Lydgatean changeability. Contending to transparently translate
Guido (from point to point), Lydgate frequently modifies his source, usually
while inviting readers to verify his account by double-checking his purported
source. In keeping with his professed one-to-one translation and his emphasis on
veiling, Lydgate presents a Guidoan, imperial Virgilianism continually chal-
lenged by an Ovidian changeability that lurks just beneath the surface. Only
Criseydan translucence, Troy Book suggests, is capable of bridging the dichoto-
mies inherent in the Troy story. Like Chaucer, Lydgate therefore reinforces the
importance of a changeability that ultimately supports a Chaucerian, Ovidian
counter-nationhood.
In sum, the application of the prosopagraphical model suggests how these
Middle English Troy stories (and their sources) dramatize a sustained commit-
ment to questions of individuality and collective identities. All of the examined
works – Benoît’s Roman, Guido’s Historia, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, the Laud
Troy Book, Chaucer’s Troilus, and Lydgate’s Troy Book – can be shown to pose
ontological questions by means of dichotomies that become visible through the
lens of the prosopagraphical model: opacity vs. transparency, verticality vs.
horizontality, Virgil vs. Ovid, and so on. Furthermore, the model allows for a
mapping of differences, unveiling cultural and ideological trajectories hitherto
hidden from view. These trajectories are less important, to rephrase Timothy Re-
iss, for showing how ‘modern’ selves and nations are made, than for pointing up
 General Introduction 15

alternative paradigms.11 In offering themselves for allegorical interpretation, the

Troy stories investigated here suggest, albeit in different ways, an ontological
difference necessitating change: they are allegories of change necessitating
changing allegories. I no less offer this account as an allegory of change. Per-
haps the least (and the most) such a study can hope to achieve is to make the
texts and its readings of them “relevant” to a new understanding of the processes
of personal and collective identity formation in the Middle Ages, and perhaps
beyond – the important caveat being, as Morton Bloomfield further puts it, “The
age that does not need, or thinks it does not need, the past does not need this
kind of allegory.”12

11
“To show that other personhoods have existed historically in western culture is equally
urgent; less to show how its modern identity was made [...] than what others there were.”
Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early
Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003) 16.
12
“One of the basic functions of allegory is to make literary documents relevant.” Morton
W. Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” New Literary History 3.2 (1972): 301, 302.
 PART ONE

Masking Identities:
Selves and Nations in the Middle Ages
 Introduction

Selfhood in its various guises of identity, individuality, the subject, and subjec-
tivity has received much attention in the last couple of decades, most noticeably,
perhaps, in an increase of autobiographies, self-portraits and of autobiographical
statements on television, the radio, and the Internet. The flood of publications on
the subject cannot be surveyed anymore, especially when one considers the
various disciplines concerned with the self. The same applies to the concept of
nationhood which does not fare much differently in terms of critical and popular
attention. This study hopes to shed some light on the history of both the self and
the nation in the Middle Ages. In contrast to existing studies of personal and na-
tional identity in the Middle Ages, I argue that person and nation are categories
that cannot be discussed separately. I further submit that selfhood, past and pre-
sent, is a matter of narratively constructed masks operating along the lines of
mythological processes – a concept I refer to as prosopagraphical selfhood. It is
the aim of the first part of this study to outline the prosopagraphical model and
contextualize it within the respective critical frameworks. Since it is hoped that
the model will provide a heuristic tool for diachronic studies of selfhood and na-
tionhood in general, the sketch of my model is developed more extensively.
In Chapter One, I engage with the present discussion of medieval identity,
which despite many medievalists’ accounts suggesting the contrary, is still very
much dominated by Jacob Burckhardt’s ‘veil,’ that is, his thesis of the birth of
the individual in the Italian Renaissance. Although medievalists have frequently
acknowledged signals of emerging selfhood, particularly in the twelfth-century
renaissance, many of these accounts still remain doubtful about medieval indi-
viduality. After all, the Middle Ages were presumably permeated by a God-
given, universal order limiting the possibility of unique selfhood. My summary
of such scholarship in Chapter One evinces, however, that recurrent axioms of
the debates about medieval selfhood are not too distinct from those found in dis-
cussions about contemporary selfhood. It is frequently observed that a) medieval
identification unfolds in front of the backdrop of general values; b) medieval
identification is a matter of adopting specific roles circulated within the univer-
sal culture; and c) such roles are a matter of narratives. If the medieval self is a
matter of role narratives that are circulated in the respective cultures, it might be
useful to compare such a view of identification with the discussion concerning
modern and postmodern individuals frequently described in terms of the ‘narra-
tive self.’
Like (the debates about) medieval individuality, the contemporary self is per-
ceived of as caught in a fundamental crisis due to its increasing fragmentation.
In order to elucidate differences and similarities of the medieval self and its
20 Part One: Masking Identities

modern counterpart, and in order to develop the prosopagraphical model, Chap-

ter Two considers recent work in the cognitive sciences and cultural psychology,
the multidisciplinary approach of the latter being highly suitable to approach the
complexities of identity formation processes. Location has become one of the
key concepts within recent studies. These argue that location is the primary on-
tological category not only on the levels of the proto-self or core-consciousness,
but also in the autobiographical self and memory, the realm that corresponds to
what I refer to as self throughout this study. In turn, location becomes a matter
of narrative; the self becomes a narrative self. While the crucial role of narrative
has been widely recognized, the remaining question is how various contradic-
tory narratives, which potentially lead to a fragmentation of the self into several
different, sometimes exclusive roles, can be reconciled with one another in order
to center selfhood. Taking its cue from studies of narrative selfhood in various
disciplines, the theory of prosopagraphical selfhood proposes to visualize the
self as a collection of narrative masks. These masks correspond to the roles of
older psychological and sociological theories: the self becomes a collection of
layered masks. Like the bricoleur of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologies, indi-
viduals can choose to adopt complete role narratives or myths which can be
visualized as opaque, ‘vertical’ masks. Alternatively, individuals can choose to
deconstruct the narratives constitutive of a mythology (that is, engage in mytho-
logical bricolage) in order to combine the smallest meaning-carrying elements,
the mythemes, into new narratives. While the first track – opacity – risks self-
fragmentation since the masks are ‘vertically’ layered without intersection, the
other extreme, often postulated for medieval selfhood, lies in the complete
transparency that occurs when one all-informing good is repeated across all
masks, ultimately collapsing the self from within. The second track, however,
entails the possibility of determining mask intersection at the mytheme level,
creating nodal transparency. If the masks are visualized as ‘vertically’ layered,
nodal transparency can be seen as constituting ‘horizontal’ axes (or cores) which
center the self while maintaining contradiction. Within the extremes of opacity
and transparency, this third track, that allows both opacity and transparency, is
referred to as translucent prosopagraphy. Needless to say, these are tropological
ideals (or rather extremes), and yet, they are the problematic extremes negoti-
ated within the Troy story. Since theories of contemporary selfhood stress that
individuals generally tend to adopt complete narratives (and provided that what
constitutes individuality may lie in the combination of narratives and combina-
tory abilities of a self), it seems odd to assume that a) there was no such thing as
medieval individuality and that b) medieval processes of identity formation were
structurally radically different from present-day strategies.
In fact, as I demonstrate in Chapter Three, the narrative self as a collection of
mythically constructed masks can be substantiated also for periods preceding the
Middle Ages and for the Middle Ages themselves. Thus, I offer a short reading
of Cicero’s De officiis as an example of how roles are envisioned in terms of
various interrelated masks. What seemingly complicates a prosopagraphical ap-
 Introduction 21

proach to medieval processes of identity formation is the absence of persona as

a (theorized) performative (that is, theatrical) concept. And yet, as recent studies
of medieval drama evince, masks were not only highly popular throughout the
medieval period, masks were furthermore often discussed in explicitly ontologi-
cal contexts. In addition to such scripted performances, the medieval self was
generally seen in terms of narrative – one of the most frequently used metaphors
to discuss identity in the Middle Ages is the book (of the self). If both assump-
tions are correct, medieval literary discourse becomes the primary arena for in-
vestigating the medieval self. And yet, when one turns to scholarly work on me-
dieval autobiography, one limitation that is almost always invoked is that me-
dieval narratives are allegorical. The medieval autobiographical self turns into
an allegory of a universal Christian order. In terms of the prosopagraphical
model, the medieval self becomes completely transparent since all masks, prede-
termined by this order, intersect maximally. The self dissolves as self and soci-
ety become one organic entity, becoming indistinguishable from one another.
Metaphors, such as the medieval self as an allegory of the universal, are dan-
gerous. In the context of my study, the most dangerous metaphor is that which
renders allegory an inferior epistemological mode. In Chapter Four, I show that
allegory as a conceptual framework is illustrative of the mapping processes be-
tween several domains, be they epistemological or ontological domains; allegory
presents an analogue to the mapping processes within prosopagraphical self-
hood. Recent studies in conceptual metaphor theory have demonstrated that in
metaphor, understood as a mapping process from a source domain onto a target
domain, the source domain ultimately disappears. Allegory, understood as a
mapping process akin to metaphor, enables mappings without collapsing do-
mains since allegorical mapping processes operate on the principle of contiguity,
a process Roman Jakobson ascribed to metonymy rather than metaphor. Alle-
gory, that is, can render domains alike without making them identical, which
overlaps with prosopagraphical processes in that both can maintain transparency
and opacity, accommodating contradiction without fragmenting the unity of the
concept (self). This allegorical translucence is consistent with medieval ideas of
allegory and luminosity, and yet, much of the scholarly discourse concerned
with medieval allegory discusses it in terms of transparency. This overlooks the
degree to which allegory’s ambivalence produces new meanings qua processes
that are not unlike those prevalent in deconstruction, in the mythological brico-
lage that enables the creation of new roles from widely circulated narratives in a
specific culture.
What is instructive in the misleading metaphor of the self as an allegory of
the universal, however, is that it brings into focus the fact that narratives are
constitutive of selfhood in the first place. Collective or national narratives can-
not be discussed separately from personal narratives. The nation is a mythical,
autobiographical narrative, incorporating common stories, symbols, and values.
As mythological concepts, person and nation are of one piece. Collective narra-
tives are often intelligible as opaque masks aiming to be adopted by most mem-
22 Part One: Masking Identities

bers of a collectivity in order to form an ‘imagined community.’ This applies to

eighteenth-century France as much as to fourteenth-century England. Drawing
on recent theories of nationhood that emphasize the importance of myths and
memories in nation building, it quickly emerges that late medieval England cer-
tainly can be seen as a nation, since it could boast a set of common myths and
symbols, a shared public culture, a historic territory, a single socio-economic
culture as well as common codes and institutions – the five axioms constitutive
of an ideal nation. The existence of a common vernacular literature is a crucial
element in medieval processes of nation formation. Thus, the Troy story, the
most popular secular narrative throughout the Middle Ages, becomes a central
medieval discourse for the circulation of models for making personal and na-
tional identities: it circulates a common myth of descent and disseminates na-
tional masks for wide adoption. The prosopagraphical model developed in the
first part of my study aims to illustrate exactly how the nexus between individ-
ual and collective identities is conceptualized in Guido delle Colonne’s Historia
destructionis Troiae and its English ‘adaptations’ – the Laud Troy Book, Geof-
frey Chaucer’s House of Fame, his Troilus and Criseyde, and John Lydgate’s
Troy Book.
 CHAPTER ONE
Medieval Selfhood: Toward the Universal

Questions about the origin of the self, the modern self, or modern subjectivity
have turned into a controversial debate within the framework of distinctions be-
tween the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The debate about the New Philol-
ogy has exposed, unfortunately mainly to medievalists, the limitations of Burck-
hardt’s project of the Renaissance which defines the Middle Ages as the ‘primi-
tive’ period between antiquity and the Renaissance. Burckhardt’s Renaissance is
synonymous with the birth of nations and, as Lee Patterson muses further, “per-
haps above all, the emergence of the idea of the individual.”1 Corroborating the
relevance of medieval studies for the discipline of English in particular and the
humanities in general, Patterson exposes the problematic logic of the argument
for the Renaissance birth of the individual in detailing some influential studies
and their anti-medieval bias. All too many of the studies he analyzes take for
granted Burckhardt’s claim that throughout the Middle Ages, persons could only
conceive of themselves as members of overarching organizational forms, in
terms of the universal. Only with the Italian Renaissance was the veil covering
(modern) subjectivity lifted and only then could the individual emerge center-
stage.2 Surprisingly, despite medievalists’ arguments against such simplistic di-
chotomies of medieval/modern, particularly Renaissance scholarship clings to
such beliefs. Among his examples, Patterson lists such illustrious scholars as
Thomas Greene, Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Francis Barker, Terry
Eagleton, and Joel Fineman.3 More recently, an even more prominent, highly
acclaimed scholar makes similar claims about the Invention of the Human qua
literary characterization. “Literary character before Shakespeare,” the reader
learns, “is relatively unchanging.” Men and women age and die, but they are not
represented “as changing because their relationship to themselves, rather than to
the gods or God, has changed.” Only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom argues
further, does one behold individuals; no writer “before or since Shakespeare, has
accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-

1
Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,”
Speculum 65.1 (1990): 92.
2
Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [1860], 15th ed. (Leipzig: Krö-
ner, 1926) 119, cited above.
3
Patterson, “On the Margin” 96-99. For a similar view, see David Aers, “A Whisper in the
Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the
Subject,’” Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and
Writing, ed. David Aers (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) 182-85.
24 Part One: Masking Identities

consistent voices.”4 The corollary of this position, when seen in connection with
the title of his study, is that individuality before Shakespeare is unthinkable, in-
deed, impossible. Bloom’s stress on “self-consistent” is perhaps indicative of the
idea of completely transparent characters, which is closer to received notions of
medieval identities than the modernity that he bespeaks here, whereas medieval
practice, as indicated by theories of allegory, is very different.
Not all Renaissance scholars refer so bluntly to a lack of individuality in the
Middle Ages, however. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, is much more toler-
antly disposed toward “pre-modern” individuality. He argues that there may
even have been more room for the individual to indulge in subjectivity, since
“there are always selves – a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of ad-
dress to the world, a structure of bounded desires – and always some elements of
deliberate shaping in the formation and expression of identity,” emphasizing
“Chaucer’s extraordinarily subtle and wry manipulations of persona.” He sug-
gests that “there is considerable empirical evidence that there may well have
been less autonomy in self-fashioning in the sixteenth century than before, that
family, state, and religious institutions impose a more rigid and far-reaching dis-
cipline upon their middle-class and aristocratic subjects.”5 Many medievalists
agree with such claims.6 It is notable, however, that even in such tolerant ac-
counts as Greenblatt’s, one detects a recreation of Burckhardt’s views since
Greenblatt’s is an “ur-gesture to a terra incognita whose existence is acknowl-
edged but whose terrain can be allowed to remain unexplored.”7 This is similarly
true for studies that locate the birth of the individual in later periods.
It is easy to see eighteenth-century scholars protesting that the Renaissance
should have produced individual agency which, in terms of often assumed peri-
odic distinctions (in this field), is an eighteenth-century invention – tied to the
philosophy of John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The present,
‘postmodern’ debates suggest that truly autonomous individuals are yet to be
‘brought about.’ At the other ‘end’ of history, scholars have similar insights to
offer. Classicists have already cast their ballot in favor of a birth of the individ-
ual in antiquity. Orientalists, no doubt, would be quick to offer Gilgamesh as a
tenable source for demonstrating an even earlier emergence of individuality.8
4
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998; New York: Riverhead,
1999) xix.
5
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980; Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984) 1.
6
Needless to say, not all medievalists do. Some cases will be mentioned in what follows. In
terms of Chaucer studies, A. C. Spearing briefly summarizes the medievalization of Chau-
cer at the hands of two prominent medievalists, C. S. Lewis and D. W. Roberson, Jr., in
his Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985)
19-21.
7
Lee Patterson, “On the Margin” 99.
8
See, for example, Bernd Seidensticker, “‘Ich bin Odysseus’: Zur Entstehung der Indivi-
dualität bei den Griechen,” ABBAW 8 (2000): 184. Arbogast Schmitt’s analyses suggest
 Chapter One: Medieval Selfhood 25

Locating the birth of the individual as well as the (related) birth of the nation has
indeed become a game, the “prize of which is modernity.”9 The present proposi-
tion of a mythologized prosopagraphical selfhood is not meant as a contribution
to this contest. Rather, I would like to advance a model that can map changes in
conceptions and perceptions of individuality in their relationship to the forma-
tion of collective identities – changes which undoubtedly have taken place. In
order to explain the model of mythologized prosopagraphical identity, it is use-
ful to first give voice to numerous critics who have engaged with the history of
the medieval individual,10 which in turn prompts terminological musings when
compared with theories of contemporary modes of identification.
In the early twentieth century, Ernst Troeltsch, Alfons Dopsch, and J. Huiz-
inga challenge Burckhardt’s belief that the individual did not emerge prior to the
Italian Renaissance.11 Tracing early rural agricultural community life, it indeed
seems as though individual agency is muted within the community. Dopsch,
however, observes that this is no less true for the sixteenth century.12 The tenth-

that the Homeric epics depict individuals. Accordingly, individuality has not been in-
vented, it has been conceptualized differently in the periods following the Middle Ages.
Schmitt locates the differences in the conception of individuality, which in its modern
guise is primarily interested in self-awareness and self-consciousness whereas the
(post)classical notion of individuality is interested in the most efficient realization of one’s
given traits in the sense of ergon. Schmitt, “Individualität als Faktum menschlicher Exi-
stenz oder als sittliche Aufgabe? Über eine Grunddifferenz im Individualitätsverständnis
von Antike und Vormoderne,” Die Aktualität der Antike: Das ethische Gedächtnis des
Abendlandes, ed. Christof Gestrich (Berlin: Wichern, 2002) 105-28.
9
As Robert Edwards poignantly put it in a personal communication.
10
Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (1966; London: Methuen,
1967); Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry,
1000-1150 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in
Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); Alan Macfar-
lane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); Aaron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism,
trans. Katharine Judelson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Richard van Dülmen, Die Entdek-
kung des Individuums: 1500-1800 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1997). See further Manfred
Frank and Anselm Haverkamp, eds., Individualität (München: Fink, 1988); Jan A. Aertsen
and Andreas Speer, eds., Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1996); Richard van Dülmen, ed., Entdeckung des Ich: Die Geschichte der Individualisie-
rung vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Köln: Böhlau; Darmstadt: WBG, 2001).
11
Ernst Troeltsch opines that the Reformation, not the Renaissance, is the period of indi-
viduality. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 3rd. ed.
(1912; Tübingen: Mohr, 1923) 357; Troeltsch, “Renaissance und Reformation” [1913],
Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, ed. Hans Baron (Tübingen: Mohr,
1925) 267. J. Huizinga similarly criticizes Burckhardt’s thesis in “Das Problem der Re-
naissance” [1920], Wege der Kulturgeschichte: Studien von J. Huizinga, trans. Werner
Kaegi (München: Drei Masken, 1930) 130.
12
Alfons Dopsch, “Wirtschaftsgeist und Individualismus im Frühmittelalter,” Beiträge zur
Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Gesammelte Aufsätze / Zweite Reihe, ed. Erna Patzelt
(Wien: Seidel, 1938) 154-56.
26 Part One: Masking Identities

century politician and historian Liudprand of Cremona not only displays a quest
for modern fame, which according to Burckhardt is important for the emergence
of individuality, but Dopsch further enables one to glimpse the split conscious-
ness of modern man, the differentiation between outside appearance and inner
worlds.13 Dopsch also testifies to developments toward individuality throughout
the tenth and eleventh centuries, in portraiture as well as legal discourse, the
emergent sovereignty of the people in the Investiturstreit during the eleventh
century being his key political example.14 Finally, Dopsch considers his own
field, economic history, for which he believes that early medieval agriculture
and economy were not only traditional and conservative but forward-looking
and ‘profit-oriented,’ the orientation toward gain stemming from an individual-
ism attested by the other discourses mentioned.15
Later scholars were able to expand on Dopsch’s findings. Walter Ullmann
dates the change from subject to individual to the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
arguing “that the European Middle Ages constitute the period in which the basic
doctrines affecting the relations between the individual, society, and its govern-
ment were formulated and applied to an extent which is certainly remarkable.”16
He stresses the doctrinal embedding of the inferior individual who is subjected
to the superior, a dichotomy well visualized by the law-abiding versus the law-
making agency. The literate upper-class, therefore, may have had some sense of
individual autonomy since they, after all, wrote law. On the whole, however,
Ullmann’s Middle Ages is as much an ‘in-between period’ as it was for Burck-
hardt, promoting the eventual (that is, post-medieval) emancipation of the sub-
ject as citizen: “In a rough sense one may well say that for a larger part of the
Middle Ages it was the individual as a subject that dominated the scene, while in
the later Middle Ages and in the modern period the subject was gradually sup-
planted by the citizen.” In answering the question how this emancipation could
emerge, Ullmann advances the feudal system which was able to transform the
rigid dichotomy of superior versus inferior without necessitating revolution:
“Feudalism was indubitably the most important bridge between the rarefied doc-
trine of the individual as an inferior and the gradually emerging new thesis of
the individual as a full member of state.”17 Feudalism was not the only perpetra-
tor of this development. Ullmann emphasizes thirteenth-century “naturalism,”
especially in the visual arts, as another important development which fostered an

13
Dopsch, “Wirtschaftsgeist und Individualismus” 164-65.
14
Dopsch, “Wirtschaftsgeist und Individualismus” 168-70, 174-75, with reference to M.
Kemmerich, Die frühmittelalterliche Porträtmalerei in Deutschland (1907) and P. E.
Schramm’s Die zeitgenössischen Bildnisse Karl d. Gr. (1928), respectively.
15
Dopsch, “Wirtschaftsgeist und Individualismus” 178-86.
16
Ullmann, Individual and Society 4. Ullmann’s history of individuality is ultimately a
teleological narrative, however, with the Renaissance providing “the release of the indi-
vidual from the tutelage in which he had been kept for so long a time” (6).
17
Ullmann, Individual and Society 11-13, 103-04, quotations at 5, 104.
 Chapter One: Medieval Selfhood 27

interest in the individual. Again, sculpture and portraiture are provided as exam-
ples of representing individuality.18 Further motors for individuality, along
Dopsch’s lines, are vernacular literatures, legal documents, the emergence of a
new kind of historiography emphasizing individual agency (Otto of Freising),
the emergence of “natural sciences” in the thirteenth century, the advancement
of natural rights embedded within the reception of Aristotelian thought with its
distinction between individual as man or citizen, between ethics and politics.19
In the late 1960s and 1970s, literary critics became increasingly interested in
individuality and the role of vernacular literatures – which will concern me be-
low in the context of medieval narrative identity. These studies were followed
by Colin Morris’s much-cited Discovery of the Individual, which corroborates
Ullmann’s claim that individuality is intrinsically related to what is known as the
twelfth-century renaissance.20 Morris believes in a “rapid rise in individualism
and humanism in the years from about 1080 to 1150,” which is followed by a
decline. Toward the Renaissance, individuality resurfaces. Thus, the twelfth cen-
tury is a “peculiarly creative age” concerning “the development of self-
awareness and self-expression, [...] the freedom of a man to declare himself
without paying excessive demands to the convention or the dictates of author-
ity.” According to Morris, the discovery of the individual – and this applies to
most accounts – is “a concern with self-discovery; an interest in the relations be-
tween people, and in the role of the individual within society; an assessment of
people by their inner intentions rather than by their external acts. These concerns
were, moreover, conscious and deliberate.” Christianity thus plays an important
role in creating individuality, since it emphasizes the value of the individual. A
concept of individualism that sees Jesus and the individual believer in a relation-

18
Ullmann, Individual and Society 105.
19
Ullmann, Individual and Society 106-22. Ullmann voices similar concerns as does Patter-
son almost twenty five years later: “As a medievalist I am inclined to think that as a his-
torical phenomenon Renaissance humanism should not be isolated from its historical con-
text: isolation of its purely cultural and literary aspects leads to a one-sided and, hence, an
unhistoric picture full of schöngeistige reflexions” (141-42).
20
For the twelfth-century renaissance, see Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the
Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927); Robert L. Benson, Giles
Constable, and Carol D. Lanham, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), particularly
John F. Benton’s essay “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality” (163-95).
C. Stephen Jaeger argues that contrary to the contemporary perspective of a renaissance,
the self-image of the age was primarily pessimistic. Jaeger, “Pessimism in the Twelfth-
Century ‘Renaissance,’” Speculum 78.4 (2003): 1151-83. His analysis of self-conceptions
of the age is indicative of “a large discrepancy between the Zeitgeist and the Zeitghost.
The self-conception of the age was very much at odds with the tendency of modern schol-
ars to make it into a ‘renaissance’” (1153). Hence, “‘Renaissance’ was in the past century
a useful term. It served the purpose of calling attention to the energy and productivity of
the twelfth century. It was never historically accurate, but it was powerfully heuristic”
(1183).
28 Part One: Masking Identities

ship of identity, however, confers a sense of community on the individual with

which the twelfth century could break: “The Church of the twelfth century thus
saw a revival of personal piety [...]; but it failed to recover a sense of community
for the faithful as a whole. The individual for the future was to be restricted, not
by the mind of the local church, but by the authority of the hierarchy.”21 Re-
cently, criticism has questioned such views, advancing the opposite claim in-
stead, namely, that the community was too strong for the individual to emerge.
Caroline Walker Bynum’s historical account of the development of the indi-
vidual places twelfth-century individuality in the context of a (re)new(ed) inter-
est in group belonging as testified in religious writing – a new sense of commu-
nity which Morris deems lost. The emphasis on the individual has not made the
interest in group affiliation dated nor has it promoted “a new sense of spiritual
and psychological change, of intention, and of personal responsibility by escap-
ing from an earlier concern with types, patterns, and examples. Rather twelfth-
century religious writing and behavior show a great concern with how groups
are formed and differentiated from each other, how roles are defined and evalu-
ated, how behavior is conformed to models.”22 Bynum does not believe that
what was discovered were individuals so much as selves, denying that twelfth-
century accounts would define “a self unique and unlike other selves.”23 She fur-
ther maintains that the discovery of the self is not the complete story because of
the concomitant proliferations of groups and their definitions, perpetuated with
an unusual urgency. This differentiation of social life into more and more com-
plementary roles combined with the possibility to choose from these roles,24 is
an important realization for the theoretical framework of prosopagraphical self-
hood, a role conception of identity that overlaps with (post)modern accounts
which I believe to speak in interesting ways to the discussion of medieval iden-
tity – and vice versa.

21
Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (1972; Toronto: Univ. of To-
ronto Press, 1987) 7, 158, 13.
22
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle
Ages (1982; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984) 85. Susan Reynolds also attests to
the multiplicities of role narratives available for individuals: “Some modern scholars [...]
have believed that medieval people can have felt no loyalty except to their lord or local
community. Anyone who belongs at the same time to a family, a town, a university, and a
nation-state – and may even support a football team into the bargain – ought to find this
idea implausible. It makes even less sense when it is applied to a period in which there
was no idea that sovereignty should be single and precisely located: government consisted
of layers of authority, and loyalties were attracted to each layer accordingly.” Reynolds,
Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984) 330-31. See further Erich Köhler, Ideal und Wirklichkeit in der höfischen Epik: Stu-
dien zur Form der frühen Artus- und Graldichtung, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970).
23
Bynum, Jesus as Mother 87. Bynum’s study sees individuality less in the sense of a
unique essence than as a unique combination of characteristics.
24
Bynum, Jesus as Mother 89-95.
 Chapter One: Medieval Selfhood 29

Of central importance to the model of prosopagraphical selfhood is Bynum’s

perception of how the custom of veiling came into play in the twelfth century,
when identities could be masked, although ideally the exterior should corre-
spond with what lies beneath. Although religious writers were in disagreement
with such practices (see below), they generally “assumed that, in reform and
moral improvement, exterior and interior will and should go together” in terms
of holy orders. “That is what a saint is: one in whom extraordinary life (without)
reflects extraordinary virtue and grace (within).” This correspondence of outside
and inside later evolves as completely transparent selfhood where no opaque
mask is imposed. It results in the complete loss of self which merges with the
universal that is often believed to permeate medieval identities. Bynum contrasts
the idea of the unique self with the modern screen: “Indeed it is probably our
modern sense that a person’s exterior may be a screen that keeps us from getting
at his true personality – our idea that each personality is unique and therefore
seeking a unique expression – that has led us to concentrate in twelfth-century
writing on quest and development, inwardness and sense of self.” Bynum’s
“new sense of self, of inner change and inner choice, is precipitated by the ne-
cessity to choose among roles, among groups. A new sense of becoming part of
a group by conforming one’s behavior to an external standard is necessitated by
a new awareness of a choosing and interior self.”25 Brian Stock comes to similar
conclusions with regard to what he calls ‘textual communities,’ the formation of
which is one of the Implications of Literacy. Not only was symbolism trans-
formed by reformers and dissenters, but rituals were also transformed as “Ar-
chaic ritualism [...] was replaced by a complex set of interactions between mem-
bers of groups which were in large part structured by texts, or at the very least,
by individuals’ interpretations of them. They were rituals of everyday life, that
is, the acting out of specific roles.”26 What matters is not the question of the ori-
gin of individuality but the question of when the truly modern (read: unique) in-
dividual emerges. Since Bynum’s argument bears immediately on my own the-
ory, let me briefly summarize her central claims. The assertion of an increasing
circulation of role models available for people to adopt implies that a) establish-
ing personal identities is embedded within communities,27 b) identity is a matter
of narrative, articulated in monastic, scripted role models, and c) identity is a
25
Bynum, Jesus as Mother 99, 102, 104, 107.
26
Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation
in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983) 91.
27
For the relationship between self and community in England, see David Aers, Community,
Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430 (London: Routledge, 1988).
For the interaction of self and community in the Middle Ages and beyond, see Reynolds,
Kingdoms and Communities; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.:
Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Keith Stringer, “Social and Political Communities in
European History: Some Reflections on Recent Studies,” Nations, Nationalism and Patri-
otism in the European Past, ed. Claus Bjørn, Alexander Grant, and Keith J. Stringer (Co-
penhagen: Academic Press, 1994) 9-34.
30 Part One: Masking Identities

matter of adopting role narratives. At the same time, however, these practices, in
the eyes of many critics, attest to an individuality that differs from modern indi-
vidualism and that specifically denies individuals their uniqueness.
Many contemporary critics have consequently attended to the question of the
uniqueness of the medieval individual. In his book, which takes issue with Mor-
ris’s (and other scholars’) focus on the ruling elites, Aaron Gurevich suggests
that the study of the history of individuality has to proceed along two distinct,
but related tracks. On the one hand, scholars investigate individuality in literary
texts, an endeavor Gurevich dismisses as overlooking the fact that books are not
people.28 The more promising track, pursued by Ullmann and Le Goff as well as
others, is to trace the history of personhood or personality. Gurevich defines per-
sonality as a site or entity, as the link between society and culture, and as consti-
tuted by elements shared by the individual and the community. Both tracks are
important, he argues, since one is informed by examining the dignity of the hu-
man being, while the other focuses on the uniqueness of the individual. While
individual identities could unfold in less restricted ways on the margins of Chris-
tianity, where means of ethical control were not rigorously implemented, proc-
esses of identity formation are generally driven by a search for (proto)types as a
necessary framework for identification.29 Gurevich concludes that concepts of
medieval selfhood and medieval identity itself are unfocused. Medieval people
identified with prototypes and blended in with their environment, confirming
that the medieval ‘individual’ is “comparatively ill-defined and still had a long
way to go.” The most sophisticated ‘medieval’ instance of self-expression, he
believes, is Augustine’s autobiographical self in the Confessions. Only Petrarch
appears to be similarly ingenious in creating a written record of himself. The
thousand years between Augustine and Petrarch “had their fair share of talent,
creativity and profound thinkers, but these geniuses and these creative artists did
not have the scope for full revelation of their individuality.”30 The implicit ques-
tion posed by Gurevich’s study of individuality, then, is yet again the difference
between medieval, “ill-defined” individuals and their ‘enlightened’ counterparts,

28
Gurevich, Origins 13; but cf. my discussion of medieval prosopagraphical selfhood below.
29
Gurevich, Origins 13-16, 244-45, 83. This tendency does not suddenly stop with the ad-
vent of the Renaissance, though. Natalie Zemon Davis argues that “in a century in which
the boundary around the conceptual self and the bodily self was not always firm and
closed, men and women could nevertheless work out strategies for self-expression and
autonomy; and that the greatest obstacle to self-definition was not embeddedness but
powerlessness and poverty.” After all, “embeddedness did not preclude self-discovery, but
rather prompted it – common experience may feed the sense of one’s own distinctive his-
tory – and that women and young men, grounding themselves in experience, sometimes
turned cultural categories and images to their own independent uses.” Davis, “Boundaries
of and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France,” Reconstructing Individualism:
Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton
Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986) 53, 63.
30
Gurevich, Origins 249, 250.
 Chapter One: Medieval Selfhood 31

ultimately (and mistakenly) assuming a teleological development toward the

modern individual.
In order to address the question of the difference between medieval and mod-
ern identities, it is pertinent to engage with definitions of modern theories of
identity. Peter Fuchs rightly wonders ‘what is modern about modern identity’? 31
In terms of systems theory, identity is a matter of addresses within a communi-
cative situation. In the Middle Ages, Fuchs thinks, the ‘addresses’ of individuals
are of a general kind, not singular but collective. The individual’s ambition to
move from one social stratum to another, thereby questing a new address, was
construed as a threat to the social organization as such. Moreover, if an individ-
ual was not addressable, this resulted in the ‘deletion’ of an address, that is,
complete exclusion from social life. In this context, Fuchs notes a progressively
diversified classificatory system to distinguish between honorable and despised
classes of people, which parallels Bynum’s observation regarding role models
qua diversification of social groups in the twelfth century. Although these role
models indicate the attempt to stabilize identities, the processes of identification
become inherently more complex. Hence, postulating a stable classification over
long periods of time becomes enormously difficult, which leads Fuchs to see
threatened the idea of the ‘categorizable’ medieval person.32 This obscures the
dichotomy of medieval and modern identities as much as it also complicates the
assertion that medieval individuals were not unique. Modern social processes,
Fuchs contends, strive for the maintenance of identities over time. The differ-
ence lies in the fact that present-day addresses are singular since the individuals
included can be addressed from different social (sub)systems that are accessible
to everyone: religion, education, sports, and so on. Moreover, the deletion of an
address from one such subsystem is not akin to the complete exclusion from so-
cial processes as such, since modern social addresses are poly-contextual in the
sense that every address only constitutes an imaginary unit diversified into
fragments that individuals can ‘simplify’ into coherent narratives oriented on
different role models: fundamentalist religion, fragmentation, multiple personal-
ity, body, sexuality, and so on.33
Fuchs’s argument admits that medieval individuals were unique to a certain
extent; it also implicitly suggests that individuals whose social addresses were
‘deleted’ were still individuals, even though they did not necessarily participate
in documented social processes. His argument reinforces the notion of medieval

31
Peter Fuchs, “Moderne Identität – im Blick auf das europäische Mittelalter,” Identität und
Moderne, ed. Herbert Willems and Alois Hahn (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999) 274.
For a brief systems theory account of individuality, albeit with scant reference to medieval
identities, see Niklas Luhmann, “The Individuality of the Individual: Historic Meanings
and Contemporary Problems,” Reconstructing Individualism, ed. Heller, Sosna, and Well-
bery 313-25.
32
Fuchs, “Moderne Identität” 278-84.
33
Fuchs, “Moderne Identität” 285-89.
32 Part One: Masking Identities

selves constructed along the unalterable, universal God-given order with its at-
tendant hierarchical structure. This universal order is often envisioned as medi-
ated by the likewise ‘universal’ church, as an instrument limiting the processes
of personal identity formation. An exemplary practice of such a universal church
in creating patterns of being and ensuring their upkeep was that of penitential
rituals, that is, confession. On the one hand, confession, especially after it be-
came mandatory in the course of the thirteenth century, marks a means of con-
trol, perhaps even prompted by the less restricted twelfth-century possibilities of
self-expression. On the other hand, the confession itself is, as Peter Dinzelbacher
argues, a highly individualized discourse which allows individuals to express
their innermost needs and desires. Dinzelbacher further notices that modern
mentalities are likewise beset by a need for confession, for purging one’s bad
conscience, which may well be reminiscent of such medieval practices.34 How-
ever the case may be, confessional discourse invites a reconsideration of what is
and is not modern about (post)modern identities and individuals.
The preceding survey of scholarship concerned with the medieval self illus-
trates that it is commonly assumed that medieval individuals existed per se.
They are not, however, individuals in the modern sense of the word; they are
‘depersonalized’ subjects of one common, ‘public mythology.’35 The Renais-
sance, despite the time-honored attempts of Dopsch, Troeltsch, and many others
following in their footsteps, remains the period – no longer as rigidly dated to
150036 – in which unique individuals discover within themselves something
more than merely a providential order. The absence of unique individuals before
the Renaissance has many reasons, but most scholars would probably agree with
the estimation that the Reformation accompanied by the beginnings of print-
capitalism and wide-spread literacy enabled individuals to discover their
uniqueness.37 Such a teleological narrative of the increasing liberation of the in-
dividual from the yoke of a collective Christianity is not very convincing, how-

34
Peter Dinzelbacher, “Das erzwungene Individuum: Sündenbewußtsein und Pflichtbeich-
te,” Entdeckung des Ich, ed. Dülmen 41-60. See further Michel Foucault, Histoire de la
sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976) 76-98; Katherine C.
Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre
Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
35
The terms are borrowed from Russell A. Peck, “Public Dreams and Private Myths: Per-
spective in Middle English Literature,” PMLA 90.3 (1975): 461-68.
36
Whereas Renaissance scholarship and English literary studies post-dating the 1500s, rec-
ognize the need to discuss medieval identities, the medieval period is still remarkably un-
der-represented in general accounts of individualism. Although there are exceptions, such
as Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), many philosophical and literary accounts of (narrative)
selfhood only pay scant attention to the medieval periods, and many essay collections (at
best) include one or two essays on the Middle Ages, thus reinforcing the myth of the Ren-
aissance birth of the individual.
37
Dülmen, Entdeckung des Individuums 15-16.
 Chapter One: Medieval Selfhood 33

ever. Rather, I submit that medieval individuals were no more or less ‘unique’
than ‘postmodernly’ liberated subjects. Along Greenblatt’s above cited hypothe-
sis, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (and possibly preceding centuries) –
admittedly in the same elite circles, in which concepts of identity are debated to-
day (that is, in ‘academic’ discourse and fiction) – are periods in which indi-
viduality was potentially more ‘unique’ than in later decades. Moreover, this de-
bate is in many ways not unlike the recent debates about the possibility of creat-
ing truly postmodern selves – a discussion that could be more fruitful if theorists
delved slightly deeper into their historical closets. Naturally, I am not the first to
argue these points. Horst Bredekamp, for example, demonstrates for the realm of
the visual arts that the sheer abundance of self-portraits in the early Renaissance
are not signs of the discovery of the individual; rather, the obsession with self-
portraiture can also be seen as the realization that individuality was threatened,
its loss immanent.38 Perhaps the medieval situation for individuals, then, shares
many a similarity with the contemporary flood of autobiographical statements
and the attendant suspicion that selfhood is in a state of crisis.
So as to engage with questions of the individual’s uniqueness and the limita-
tions set by universal types and role models, I shall now turn to the model of
prosopagraphical selfhood which is capable of conceptualizing the differences
between modern and medieval identities. For the development of this model, I
assume the following axioms that emerged from the preceding survey: a) indi-
vidual identity is formed against the backdrop of the universal (Christianity); b)
identity is a matter of roles that are being circulated (particularly from the
twelfth century onward) with an increasing differentiation of roles in the monas-
tic sphere; c) these identities have been construed qua narratives and codes. In-
terestingly, a reconsideration of contemporary philosophical, psychological, and
sociological discourses of the self unveils a similar, albeit differently valued and
terminologically grasped concept. My claim that the autobiographical self con-
sists of a multiplicity of variously translucent masks determined by a mythologi-
cal structure affirms Seth Lerer’s intuition, voiced in the context of medieval
and postmodern textuality, namely, “that when supposedly postmodern we are
always at our most medieval: that the fracturing of forms or the deforming of
quotations lies at the heart of medieval textuality.”39 A similar concern with quo-

38
Horst Bredekamp, “Das Mittelalter als Epoche der Individualität,” ABBAW 8 (2000): 236.
A similar point can be made about the increased occurrence of autobiographies. Martina
Wagner-Egelhaaf argues that the collapse of a universal order prompts Renaissance indi-
viduals to construct such an order for themselves, now based on individual needs. Wag-
ner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000) 127. This argument is fraught
with the problem, however, that a Christian universal order was not a monolithic concept.
It is equally possible that a new order, a stricter order, engendered the need to create a
space for individual expression.
39
Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118.5
(2003): 1263.
34 Part One: Masking Identities

tation and pastiche, with the adoption of narratives is also pivotal for processes
of identification, modern and medieval, which form the subject of the following
chapter.
 CHAPTER TWO
(Post)Modern Selfhood: Toward Singularities and Multiplicities

The flood of publications on selfhood, consciousness, individuality, autobiogra-

phy, and so on, suggests an intense contemporary interest in questions of self-
hood, which perhaps replicates the phenomenon described by Bredekamp with
regard to early modern self-portraits: worries about a threatened self. It has be-
come commonplace in disciplines concerned with the self to posit its fragility,
its fragmentation, and its threatened status. Thus, James Holstein and Jaber Gu-
brium succinctly observe that “The self has fallen upon hard times. [...] Coher-
ence and constancy, it seems, don’t amount to much any more in a postmodern
world of instantaneous communication, hyperkinetic consumerism, and elec-
tronically mediated imagery. In such a world, the self is everywhere and thus
nowhere in particular – fleeting, evanescent, a mere shadow of what it used to
be.”40 Indeed, the Cartesian self of Enlightenment philosophy and the social self
of early twentieth-century psychology and sociology have become, in postmod-
ern times, a screen for the projection of several, often contradictory means of
identification and have thus made popular the trope of fragmented selves. Many
thinkers, especially in the realm of virtual selfhood, are not overly worried about
this development, since precisely in such a decentralization lies the opportunity
to liberate the self from its social conditioning and imprisonment – terms sug-
gesting that the modern self is not inevitably less codified than its medieval
predecessor. Although some theorists caution against the inflationary usage of
misleading psychological terminology (such as the liberating force of ‘schizo-
phrenia’),41 the postmodern self has allegedly emancipated itself from social
norms, from core identities. Such a self is seen as rigorously unique.
Not everyone is convinced and excited about the loss of core selves and
postmodern fragmentation. In fact, experiential accounts (of elucidating or writ-

40
James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a
Postmodern World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) 3. Cf. John W. Meyer, “Myths
of Socialization and of Personality,” Reconstructing Individualism, ed. Heller, Sosna, and
Wellbery esp. 208-09
41
See James M. Glass, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality Disorder in a Postmodern
World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), taking issue primarily with the usage of
schizophrenia in works such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capital-
ism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (1977; Min-
neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983). For a general discussion of the core self in
psychology, see Das Selbst im Lebenszyklus, ed. Hans-Peter Hartmann et al. (Frank-
furt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998).
36 Part One: Masking Identities

ing selves) are at odds with the fragmented self, suggesting instead the self’s
very desire for coherence and constancy believed by others to have been left be-
hind for good.42 This might be one reason for the popularity of ‘self-genres,’
such as autobiographies and memoirs, the main objective of which may be to
render an individual life coherent and consistent with existing value systems, al-
beit merely for the ‘present’ moment of articulation. Accordingly, not all con-
temporary scholars readily accept the liberating force of a coreless multiplicity
and find solace in locative and narrative models. Before such theories can be de-
lineated, however, one is well advised to consider terminological issues – after
all, definitions of self, identity, consciousness, individualism, and so on, are dif-
ferent in various disciplines, often even within single discursive fields. The first
and foremost category in debates about individual identities is the self, which,
according to the ‘old-fashioned’ Cartesian view is an entity.43 Recent studies are
skeptical of Cartesian-induced accounts and envision the self as a site. Thus,
Rom Harré argues that “the self, as the singularity we each feel ourselves to be,
is not an entity. Rather it is a site, a site from which a person perceives the world
and a place from which to act. There are only persons. Selves are grammatical
fictions, necessary characteristics of person-oriented discourses.”44 Site is an ap-
posite term for this ‘grammatical fiction,’ as recent work in cultural psychology
suggests, since it stresses the importance of location. In his account of how a
cultural psychology might envision selfhood, Ciarán Benson argues that “Loca-
tion is a basic ontological category for psychology.” Moreover, the “self is a
locative system with both evolutionary and cultural antecedents.”45 Such a defi-
nition of selfhood, “as an ongoing, living process of constant auto-referred locat-
ing recognises the centrality both of the body and of social relations. The ante-
cedents of bodily location are well understood in evolutionary terms, whereas
those of personal location among other persons are best understood culturally.”

42
The desire for coherence is often required in social interaction. For face-saving and self-
presentation, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York:
Anchor, 1959) esp. 17-76.
43
See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Antonio
Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Papermac,
1996). For the longevity of Cartesian selfhood, see Slavoj !i"ek, The Ticklish Subject: The
Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999; London: Verso, 2000).
44
Rom Harré, The Singular Self: An Introduction to the Psychology of Personhood (London:
Sage, 1998) 3-4.
45
Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human
Worlds (London: Routledge, 2001) 3. See further Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into
Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press, 1993); Rom Harré and Grant Gillett, The Discursive Mind (Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage, 1994) esp. 103-11; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. Northrop Frye has
remarked that in order to define Canadian identity the question ‘who are we’ should be
preceded by the question ‘where is here.’ Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian
Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971) 220.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 37

Neural and computational accounts by themselves are inadequate in explaining

selfhood. Therefore, his notion of locative selfhood entails perception (senses of
touch, movement, light, as well as auditory and visual systems) but also sym-
bolic worlds.46 The perceptual means of locating the self (binaries such as
here/there, up/down) precede linguistic means of locating the self, but “Once
developed at the genetic, the cultural and the personal levels, the perceptual and
linguistic binaries work symbiotically.”47 In other words, neurobiological and
cultural accounts of the self hierarchically interact at the level of location – a
phenomenon that is explained in detail in the following.

1. The Biological Self

My account of prosopagraphical identity is informed by and indebted to cultural
psychology.48 Like Benson’s theory of the self, my understanding of selfhood
owes much to Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens, which outlines
a theory of the self that maps the domains of biology and culture and the inter-
sections thereof. Damasio’s self is hierarchically organized – with a non-
conscious proto-self at the bottom, followed by core-consciousness that enables
the generation of core self, making possible extended consciousness which in
turn is capable of generating the autobiographical self in which the present study
is mainly interested, that is, the realm of cultural psychology.49 The proto-self, in
Damasio’s theory, is a “preconscious biological precedent” of the sense of self –
be it the core self or the autobiographical self; it is “a coherent collection of neu-
ral patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure
of the organism in its many dimensions.”50 The proto-self is the sine qua non of
consciousness and all higher levels, core consciousness among them. Con-
sciousness, in turn, is not separable from emotions. Not only does an impaired
consciousness create impaired emotions, generally, emotions are at the heart of

46
Benson, Cultural Psychology 4-5.
47
Benson, Cultural Psychology 10.
48
Cultural psychology studies “how people, working together, using a vast range of tools,
[...] make meaningful the world they find, make meaningful worlds and, in the course of
doing all these things, construct themselves as types of person and self who inhabit these
worlds.” Benson, Cultural Psychology 11.
49
Benson, Cultural Psychology 12-13. See also Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What
Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999; San Diego: Harvest,
2000) 310. As concerns the potential of cultural psychology, see also Alfred Gierer’s sug-
gestion that the humanities can teach more about consciousness than biology will ever re-
veal. Gierer, “Brain, Mind, and Limitations of a Scientific Theory of Human Conscious-
ness,” Proteus im Spiegel: Kritische Theorie des Subjekts im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Paul
Geyer and Monika Schmitz-Emans (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003) 202.
50
Damasio, Feeling 153, 154. Damasio’s proto-self is not structured as a language and does
not occur in only one place. Such functions are “not ‘located’ in one brain region or set of
regions, but are, rather, a product of the interaction of neural and chemical signals among
a set of regions” (154).
38 Part One: Masking Identities

ourselves: “there is something quite distinctive about the way in which emotions
have become connected to complex ideas, values, principles, and judgments that
only humans can have, and in that connection lies our legitimate sense that hu-
man emotion is special.”51 As such, emotions play a large role in decision mak-
ing as well as in location.52 Emotions are regarded as being highly subjective, a
fact that cultural psychology acknowledges. As Benson stresses, however, these
subjective emotions are “only [...] part of a larger story.” Since environments
play an important role in inducing emotions, they begin “in people’s physical or
social worlds.”53 This rests on Damasio’s distinction between feelings and emo-
tions: “It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emo-
tions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the
mind.”54 In other words, a person or an object – a representative of the cultural
or social sphere – induces emotions and likewise shapes what one feels, “acti-
vates memories and associations, guides actions, incurs consequences, and pre-
sents the person with new challenges to feeling and decision-making.”55 The
knowledge of being continuously one and the same is a matter of feeling. “This
feeling is supplied within the stream of consciousness by the hypothetical sec-
ond-order maps of the organism in the act of being changed by an object. Early
in an infant’s development this is the dominant, non-verbal narrative supporting
core consciousness. Later, with the advent of language [...] the narrative struc-
ture of the autobiographical self incorporates the presentations of the ongoing
non-verbal narrative.”56 At the heart of emotion lies a non-verbal narrative.
Damasio frequently invokes narrative, non-verbal and conscious, as well as
performance.57 Narratives play an important role when core consciousness as-
sumes its work: “This account is a simple narrative without words. It does have
characters (the organism, the object). It unfolds in time. And it has a beginning,
a middle, and an end.”58 This non-verbal storytelling is, indeed, a “brain obses-
sion.”59 Thus, the role of narrative emerges as central in accounts of selfhood, be
it conscious or unconscious. This is particularly relevant to the higher levels of

51
Damasio, Feeling 35-130, 35.
52
Damasio, Feeling 35-36. See further Benson, Cultural Psychology 105; Benson, “The Un-
thinkable Boundaries of Self: The Role of Negative Emotional Boundaries in the Forma-
tion, Maintenance, and Transformation of Identities” as well as W. Gerrod Parrott, “Posi-
tioning and the Emotions,” both in The Self and Others: Positioning Individuals and
Groups in Personal, Political, and Cultural Contexts, ed. Rom Harré and Fathali
Moghaddam (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003) 61-84 and 29-43, respectively.
53
Benson, Cultural Psychology 106-07.
54
Damasio, Feeling 36.
55
Benson, Cultural Psychology 107.
56
Benson, Cultural Psychology 112; Damasio, Feeling 170.
57
Damasio, Feeling 8, 11, 37, 51, 126, 128, etc.
58
Damasio, Feeling 168, 169. Another term that reoccurs throughout the narrative is that of
tropism (46). See further Benson, Cultural Psychology 111-12.
59
Damasio, Feeling 189.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 39

consciousness, autobiographical memory and autobiographical self. Before I

turn to the workings of autobiographical self and memory, the difference be-
tween core consciousness and extended consciousness should be clarified in re-
lation to the self. Core consciousness provides the organism with a sense of self
in the present, linking present to present without having past or future. Such rep-
resentations, including identity, history, and future are located in the extended
consciousness. Here, Damasio writes, “both the past and the anticipated future
are sensed along with the here and now in a sweeping vista as far-ranging as that
of an epic novel.” In Damasio’s framework, the core consciousness generates
the core self, “a transient entity,” which does not comply with traditional notions
of the core self. He locates the core self in the autobiographical self which, in
turn, depends on “systematized memories of situations in which core conscious-
ness was involved in the knowing of the most invariant characteristics of an or-
ganism’s life,” place and date of birth, likes, reactions, and so on. Damasio
terms this function autobiographical memory.60 It is the autobiographical self
and its organization that this study is interested in since this is where various
identities are negotiated.
When describing medieval selfhood in terms of autobiographical self and
memory, I assume core selves and core consciousness to be timeless categories
of human life. I further assume that the structure of the autobiographical self and
memory has not dramatically changed. Naturally, the question of internal hierar-
chies is a different matter.61 After elucidating the workings of the proto-self and
the “storytelling” of core consciousness, Damasio turns to autobiographical
memory. It is “an aggregate of dispositional records of who we have been physi-
cally and of who we have been behaviorally, along with the records of who we
plan to be in the future.” Autobiographical memory gives rise to the autobio-
graphical self when “certain personal records are made explicit in reconstructed
images, as needed, in smaller or greater quantities.” The basis for the autobio-
graphical self remains the same whilst its contents change with experience. In
contrast to the core self, the autobiographical self is “open to refashioning.”
Whereas core consciousness allows a person to perceive objects, the extended
consciousness is able to connect such events to a past as well as a possible fu-
ture. “The range of knowledge that extended consciousness now allows you to
access encompasses a large panorama. The self from which that landscape is
viewed is a robust concept in the true sense of the word. It is an autobiographical
self.” The act of representing an object in the autobiographical memory involves
more than creating images of aspects of the object itself. It involves “aspects of
our organism’s motor involvement in the process of apprehending such relevant
aspects: our emotional reactions to an object; our broader physical and mental
60
Damasio, Feeling 17-18.
61
See Rom Harré, Singular Self 150; Damasio, Feeling 16, 229. See further, with a view to
the Middle Ages, Paul Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White (Lin-
coln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986) 27.
40 Part One: Masking Identities

state at the time of apprehending the object.” Some of these aspects are repre-
sented each time one recalls the object in question.62
The autobiographical self bestows identity upon human agents. Despite the
possibly ever-expanding core self, the autobiographical self lends selfhood sta-
bility. The core self, which remains structurally the same, is ephemeral and tran-
sient since it “needs to be remade and reborn continuously.” Core conscious-
ness, although involving more than one brain region in its creation, is anatomi-
cally and functionally central. The sense of unchanging identity over time is
guaranteed by the autobiographical self, however, “because it is based on a re-
pository of memories for fundamental facts in an individual biography that can
be partly reactivated and thus provide continuity and seeming permanence in our
lives.”63 As concerns the mental representation of memories and experiences,
Damasio hypothesizes that, like words and concepts, these are not neatly filed
with a dictionary definition: “we store records of our personal experiences in the
same distributed manner, in as varied higher-order cortices as needed to match
the variety of our live interactions. Those records are closely coordinated by
neural connections so that the contents of the records can be recalled and made
explicit, as ensembles, rapidly and efficiently.” The evocation of clusters rather
than isolated records is particularly interesting, especially since the process is
decentralized: “the autobiographical self is a process of coordinated activation
and display of personal memories, based on a multisite network.”64 Within this
terminological matrix, Damasio can now turn to definitions of personality and
identity. For him, personality emerges as a combination of genetically transmit-
ted traits, “dispositions” acquired in early development under the auspices of
genes and education as well as “unique personal episodes, lived under the
shadow of the former two, sedimented and continuously reclassified in autobio-
graphical memory.”65 The autobiographical self is therefore an ‘end product,’
which is not only based on the past but also on the possible future, which high-
lights again the importance of standpoint, of place and location.
The foregoing summary of Damasio’s work is important for my argument for
two reasons. First, it answers questions concerning the uniqueness of individu-
als. If the structural, anatomical organization of consciousness has changed only
minimally in the last five hundred years, the combination of biological traits and
unique experiences automatically renders individuals unique. This complies
with biological accounts of individuality, according to which individuals are not
unique because of specific traits but because of a unique combination of traits.66

62
Damasio, Feeling 172-73, 196, 183.
63
Damasio, Feeling 217-19.
64
Damasio, Feeling 220-21, quotations at 221, emphasis added.
65
Damasio, Feeling 223.
66
Thus, Hans-Robert Jauss summarizes the biological perspective in “Fragmente der
Schlussdiskussion,” Individualität, ed. Frank and Haverkamp 636. For Jauss’s view on
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 41

This applies not only to a factor such as a unique combination of biological

traits, but also to personality. When people discuss the unique dignity of the
human being, it is the autobiographical self, which is at stake, the default posi-
tion, in Rom Harré’s words being “that each person is unique. Each, it is as-
sumed, actually differs in every respect from every other human being.”67 The
diachronic question regarding medieval and modern selfhood comes into view
again: the synthesizing of multiple narratives and the role of universals in the
narrative construction of selfhood. In fact, in the light of human changeability
and the potential “to create our own Hamlets, Iagos, and Falstaffs,” Damasio
rightly emphasizes that “it is almost astonishing that most of us have only one
character.” And yet, “more than one self per organism is not a good recipe for
survival. The rich imaginings of our mind do prepare ‘multiple drafts’ for our
organism’s life script [...]. Yet, the shadows of the deeply biological core self
and of the autobiographical self that grows under its influence constantly propi-
tiate the selection of ‘drafts’ that accord with a single unified self.”68
This view of selfhood, accounting for biological cores and autobiographical
selves, entails the key axioms of prosopagraphical selfhood, which will develop
in three stages in which the negotiation of multiplicities plays a major role. The
three key tenets for prosopagraphical selfhood are a) that the autobiographical
self is structured by means of several, layered narratives, b) that these narratives
can be envisioned in terms of roles or characters, and c) that the organizational
principle of these narrative clusters/masks are negotiated in the cultural sphere
and are structured mythically or mythologically, respectively.

2. The Narrative Self

The neurobiological account of the self frequently invoked notions of (prever-
bal) narratives, especially with regard to the autobiographical self. Recent work
on the narrative self,69 while disagreeing on particulars (among them coherence

medieval individuality, however, cf. “Vom plurale tantum der Charaktere zum singulare
tantum des Individuums,” Individualität, ed. Frank and Haverkamp 244.
67
Harré, Singular Self 7; Damasio, Feeling 229.
68
Damasio, Feeling 225. See also Harré, Singular Self 175.
69
For the recent work on narrative selfhood, see Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible
Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986); Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives
Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999); Harré, Singular
Self; Holstein and Gubrium, Self; Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal
Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: Guilford Press, 1993); Paul Ricoeur, One-
self as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (1992; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994)
113-68; George C. Rosenwald and Richard L. Ochberg, Storied Lives (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale Univ. Press, 1992); Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Indi-
viduality, Life, and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006) 172-80. The idea of narrative
selfhood, though, is not new in psychoanalysis either. Thus, Jacques Lacan believed that
the unconscious is structured like a text; before him, Freud likened the unconscious to a
wax tablet. For a summary of the employment of textual tropes for discussions of self-
42 Part One: Masking Identities

and contradiction), agrees on the pivotal role of narrative in making selves.

Thus, Benson writes, “The story or stories of myself that I tell, that I hear others
tell of me, that I am unable or unwilling to tell, are not independent of the self
that I am: they are constitutive of me.”70 Paul John Eakin similarly asserts that
self-narration is “the defining act of the human subject.” Like Damasio, Eakin
stresses the role of the body from a philosophical rather than neurobiological
perspective. Selfhood is rooted in the body, since it is the body that “anchors and
sustains our sense of identity.” In fact, “the bios of autobiography and biography
– ‘the course of life, a lifetime’ – expands to include the life of the body and es-
pecially the nervous system.”71 The stories that we tell of ourselves and to our-
selves can be radically different depending on spatio-temporal aspects as much
as the position that one assumes vis-à-vis one’s self. Narrative aspects of auto-
biographical discourse, such as agency, perspective, and editing come into view.
The specific point of view adopted is what determines relevance and is subject
to rectification. In Benson’s view, life “will always be an edited version.”72 The
extent to which storytelling shapes identity consequently hinges on the person’s
versatility in employing the narrative technology provided by a given culture
and the ability to “innovate and invent new narrative tools thereby enabling new
experiences of hearing or reading.” Not everything is narrative, of course, since
there is an “incommunicable core to personal identity”; however, many of our
private thoughts (the reticence of the subconscious) remain private due to social
norms, not because they are incommunicable as such.73 If the self continuously
processes new experiences that need to be represented in autobiographical
memory, the problem of accounting for changes must also be accommodated. In
fact, as Benson puts it, the “problem of achieving stability of self should present
itself as a core problem for psychology.” Narrative as a means of positioning
oneself in the world must account for changes in personal attitudes and social
structures; both ‘reader’ and ‘writer’ will at one point demand (or be challenged)
by the fact that “Sameness and change must both be accounted for.”74
The necessity for a unifying, contradiction-free account is also crucial for
most autobiographies. Usually, however, autobiographies present only a snap-
shot, perhaps an illusionary one, which provides a seemingly coherent picture.
They rarely attempt to account for a whole self but mainly represent a few of
one’s many roles. Persons similarly create autobiographical texts all the time in

hood, see Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (2000; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
2001) 157-73.
70
Benson, Cultural Psychology 45.
71
Eakin, Lives 21, 11, 18.
72
Benson, Cultural Psychology 47.
73
Benson, Cultural Psychology 48, 49. For the DNA as a narrative, see Jean Baudrillard’s
discussion of Thomas Sebeok’s “Genetics and Semiotics” in “The Orders of Simulacra,”
trans. Philip Beitchman, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 107-08.
74
Benson, Cultural Psychology 50.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 43

order to convince others (and, above all, themselves) that things (momentarily)
make sense. Every new situation or larger structural social changes may require
individuals to revisit and/or reinvent ‘their’ narratives in order to adapt to the
new situation. But how much unity is necessary? When is such unity threatened?
It is at this point that postmodern theories of free play, différance, and the frag-
mented self enter the realm of autobiographical scholarship. Autobiography, in
fact, has been often criticized for its essentialist assumptions about human
agency. In analogy to the proposed death of the author (or the dissolution of
Cartesian selfhood), Michael Sprinker proclaims the “end of autobiography,”
since “no autobiography can take place except within the boundaries of a writing
where concepts of subject, self, and author collapse into the act of producing a
text.”75 One is caught in a situation in which experiential accounts are at odds
with theoretical accounts. Wonders Eakin, “even if we were to grant the referen-
tial claims of autobiography [...], what would be the point of reporting the ‘indi-
vidual life’ and ‘personality’ of an ‘I’ based on illusion? On the other hand, why
attempt, as Nietzsche does, to demystify ‘the fundamental false observation ...
that I believe it is I who do something’ unless that belief is deeply rooted in hu-
man experience?”76
In keeping with this “human experience,” most autobiographies attempt to fit
the small narratives of an individual life into a coherent whole. They thus consti-
tute another anathema for post-structural and postmodern accounts of selfhood,
namely, grands récits.77 Master narratives, even if they temporarily lend unity to
the self, stand in juxtaposition to local stories and local ethics which render the
meta-narrative merely “one more body of accounts alongside the many other
narratives we use to construct ourselves.” In this vein, Holstein and Gubrium ar-
gue for a narrative identity that links selfhood to ethics, emphasizing that “Local
rights and wrongs, local goods and bads, and locally credited and discredited
identities diversely constitute the contemporary moral climate of the self. The
morally abstract is thoroughly embedded in the mundane details of daily life.”
The local, the writers assert, is important since “conceiving of identity in terms
of the local and the particular provides us analytic purchase on the multiplicity
of selves and the question of individualized agency, not to mention offering a
moral position on diversity.”78 What, however, if the multiplication of narratives
ultimately results in “multiphrenia,”79 a chaos of competing impulses pulling on

75
Michael Sprinker, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,” Autobiography: Es-
says Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1980) 342. See also Eakin, Lives 2-3.
76
Eakin, Lives 3.
77
The terminology is borrowed from Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne:
Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
78
Holstein and Gubrium, Self 215, 219, 221.
79
Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (1991;
New York: Basic, 2000) 7, 73-74.
44 Part One: Masking Identities

the self and bearing the risk of disintegration that Holstein and Gubrium de-
scribe as the moment “when ‘technologies of self-expression’ expand exponen-
tially, in effect overwhelming the moral agent with too many choices and con-
fronting it with endless possibilities of identity”? This stage is not particularly
‘postmodern’ at all, though: “The very scenes of everyday life topicalize and in-
form the possibilities of who and what we are in the immediate schemes of
things. The resulting narratives don’t collapse into each other in practice, be-
cause their practice is lived out, indeed, it is anchored in the contemporary geog-
raphy of self definition.”80 When competing and contradictory narratives
threaten the unity of the self, Holstein and Gubrium suggest ‘curing’ multiphre-
nia by “taking the bull by the horns.” When “firmly establishing one’s place” in
our fast-paced world, they offer, one can easily cope with its competing vehicles
for identification.81 When experiential accounts threaten to dissolve the sense of
coherence, this seemingly ‘postmodern’ disease can be ‘cured’ (by means of
therapy). For advocates of postmodern multiplicities, this suggestion probably
causes some dis-ease, indeed. The restrictive ideology postmodernism wants to
escape from enters again through the back door, with therapy at its center.
Advocates of decentered identities, suspicious of normative processes envi-
sioned as agencies of social control, are careful to stress the multiplicity of nar-
ratives as a means of escaping such mechanisms. Thus, White and Hellerich
hope for “the transformation of the modern rational self into the narrative self of
postmodernity.” This narrative self negates the existence of cores since the
“postmodern individual is both a single persona and a multiple of selves func-
tioning in various social and cultural capacities.”82 This view is only seemingly
congruous with accounts that define the self in terms of multiplicity, namely, in
having more than one story of one’s life.83 On this view, concomitant with
Damasio’s beliefs, the self has always been a matter of multiplicity which natu-
rally leads to doubting the ‘postmodernity’ of the “narrative self of postmoder-
nity.” White and Hellerich locate this very difference in the correspondence to
social fragmentation as such. Within this scenario, the self
will no doubt become more diversified, “schizophrenic,” multiform, and more difficult
to define and control. The difficulty for individuals enculturated into a social identity
of the Enlightenment will be to adapt to a new array of self-images, a different sense of
personality that is not understood as substantial but rather as a collection of convenient

80
Holstein and Gubrium, Self 222, 223.
81
Holstein and Gubrium, Self 223-24.
82
Daniel R. White and Gert Hellerich, Labyrinths of the Mind: The Self in the Postmodern
Age (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998) 1-14, quotations at 9, 11. The authors
are skeptical of the utilization of “social scientific theory and practice [...] in the service of
‘management’ on a broad scale” (4). Similarities to the management of souls in medieval
confessional practices are evident (see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 51-137).
83
Harré, Singular Self 149.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 45
masks, as the Latin for self, persona, indicates, for a variety of characters one might
play in a new social drama.84
What is interesting about this rendering of selfhood is that it is not at all dissimi-
lar to Damasio’s account which also allows for numerous scripts and personae.
The difference lies in the evocation of normalcy, of cores. White and Hellerich’s
version brings into play a visualization of the self in terms of Slavoj !i"ek’s
metaphor of the self as onion, in which the several roles are layered. In contrast
to accounts of flexible selfhood that are enhanced by role-playing in virtual me-
dia, he criticizes suspicions that such theories still assume a person behind the
mask. He sees on-screen identities that incorporate what the player would like to
be in terms of an onion: “they are like the layers of an onion: there is nothing in
the middle, and the subject is ‘nothing’ itself.”85 The ‘onion self,’ dispersed into
a multiplicity of selves, may indeed be more difficult to control; however, the
loss of stability can have severe consequences as well. James Glass articulates
these consequences, arguing that “Postmodernism calls for multiple selves,
without taking into account the effects of literally living with multiple (discrete)
selves within the same body. [...] The rejection of epistemology, fixed identities,
and theories of being, coupled with the call for proliferation of multiple selves,
involves more than a dalliance with style, taste, and irony.”86 This view is shared
by Harré, who stresses that multiplicity always has been “at the heart of person-
hood, a multiplicity which, though it has the appearance of a multitude of ‘be-
ings,’ is essentially a manifold of discourses, overlapping and diverging. But
they are tales told by one and the same person.” Multiplicity is necessary “to liv-
ing well, so that excessive rigidity as well as too labile a self are both on the
boundaries of acceptability.”87 The question to what extent narratives are con-
tradictory and still yield stability and unity can only be answered by conceptual-
izing the structural organization of divergent narratives. Given the many refer-
ences within the mentioned theories to theatrical performance, I would like to
propose in the following that autobiographical selves are matters of masks, that
selfhood is prosopagraphical selfhood. The model of prosopagraphical selfhood
brings Burckhardt’s ‘veil’ back onto the scene, albeit with a difference.

84
White and Hellerich, Labyrinths 5.
85
Slavoj !i"ek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997) 140-41. For virtual self-
hood, see Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995;
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996).
86
Glass, Shattered Selves 76. For ‘multiple personality disorder’ (dissociative identity disor-
der), see Damasio, Feeling 142-43; Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality
and the Sciences of Memory (1995; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998); Hack-
ing, “Making Up People,” Reconstructing Individualism 229-30; Harré, Singular Self 149-
56.
87
Harré, Singular Self 158-59, 149.
46 Part One: Masking Identities

3. The Prosopagraphical Self

In the light of the frequent references to dramatic aspects within narrative self-
hood,88 the narrative self might be better understood as a prosopagraphical self,
a term that also accounts for the fact that identities are construed along group
identities.89 There are two reasons for the recourse to the Greek terminology
rather than the Latin personae. First, persona has become a misleading term
since many discourses use it as denoting the singularity of the embodied person
rather than enacted characters. Second, I envision masks not as opaque theatrical
masks representing one role at a time, but rather as translucent masks that allow
several clusters of narratives to project through the collection of masks; even in
drama, roles are not usually so reductive as to be represented by one mask only.
Moreover, the term prosopagraphy alludes to the trope of prosopopoeia which
Paul de Man identifies as the key trope of autobiographical discourse. It is at this
point that the tenets hitherto engaged with – autobiographical self, self narrative,
and masks – fuse into one concept: the prosopagraphical self.
The term, stemming from the Greek word for mask, character, and face
(#!ó"##o$, prós!pon), literally translates into the writing down of masks,
which markedly contrasts with the term autobiography for the narrative of one’s
entire life.90 I adopt the term from Paul de Man’s work on autobiographical dis-
course. For him, “Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s
name [...] is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. Our topic deals with
the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and
disfiguration.”91 Autobiography endows narratives with coherence to the extent

88
The dramatic aspects are neatly encapsulated in White and Hellerich’s “convenient masks
[...] for a variety of characters one might play in a new social drama.” See further Bruner,
Actual Minds 39; Nicolas Evreinoff, The Theatre in Life, ed. and trans. Alexander I. Naz-
aroff (London: George G. Harrap, n.d.). For theatrical masks, see Horst-Dieter Blume,
“Maske II. Griechenland und Rom,” DNP 7: 975-980.
89
Harré argues that the philosophical usage of the term identity is best to be avoided since
“It has drifted right across the semantic landscape to come to mean more or less its oppo-
site. Someone’s ‘identity,’ in much contemporary writing, is not their singularity as unique
person but the group, class or type to which they belong.” Harré, Singular Self 6. For the
prosopagraphical model, see further Wolfram R. Keller, “‘Trying to Glimpse the Man Be-
hind the Mask of the Monster’: David Williams’s Mythological Construction of Regional
Counter-Nationhood in Eye of the Father,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 26.1/48 (2006):
77-92.
90
Richard A. Lanham defines prosopopopeia as either an animal endowed with human char-
acteristics or as the “rhetorical exercise known as the speech in character or impersona-
tion.” Furthermore, he lists prosopographia as a rhetorical figure, defined as enargia (vivid
description) of “the appearance of a person, imaginary or real, quick or dead.” Lanham, A
Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991) 123-24.
91
Paul de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” MLN 94.5 (1979): 926. For a revaluation
of this essay and the concept of prosopopoeia, see Jacques Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de
Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 47

that they appear as “memorable and intelligible” as a face, that is, a self-image.
Autobiography therefore never portrays a ‘life’ as such; rather, it is the depiction
of one specific mask. More accurately, it depicts the combination of specific
masks (roles) that, momentarily fixed, becomes “intelligible” as a face – hence
the plural prosopagraphy.92 Prosopagraphy thus captures the plurality of masks
already inherent in classical Greek identity formation. Although in the context of
Greek drama, masks are usually seen as monolithic (as representing one charac-
ter trait), Arbogast Schmitt emphasizes the plurality and variability of Greek in-
dividuality.93 The genre of autobiography, then, shares much with the workings
of the autobiographical self insofar as narrative clusters are momentarily assem-
bled from autobiographical memory – a process likewise captured in self-
portraiture. As in a self-portrait, what is depicted in autobiography is never the
unabridged story of one’s life, nor does an autobiography necessarily map the
entire self – the narrative portrait of a self must inevitably remain incomplete; it
is a sketch restricted to a surface. To the extent that “autobiography is life con-

Univ. Press, 1986) 22-28; Barbara Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction (Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1994) 16-23.
92
It is perhaps salient to stress that while I use the term mask in terms of a trope, my discus-
sion nevertheless sees identity as indistinguishable from masks. Without thinking of the
material origins, prosopagraphical selfhood is unthinkable. Richard Weihe reconciles ma-
terialistic and metaphorical accounts. This separation of ontological realms, however,
postdates the Greek concept of prós!pon: “Höchst folgenreich für das Verständnis und die
theoretische Auseinandersetzung mit der Maske ist indes die grundsätzliche Doppelbedeu-
tung des griechischen Wortes: prósopon bezeichnet zugleich die Maske und das Gesicht.
Die ursprüngliche Bedeutung von prósopon als Gesicht wurde auf die Maske übertragen.
Gesicht war demnach einfach jene Seite des Kopfes, die man ansah. Die Griechen diffe-
renzierten nicht zwischen dem natürlichen und dem künstlichen Gesicht.” He uses the
term “prosopische Einheit” for the unity of mask and face – “die Anwendung der Denkfi-
gur einer Einheit des Gegensätzlichen auf das Problem der Maske.” Weihe, Die Paradoxie
der Maske: Geschichte einer Form (München: Fink, 2004) 27, 33-34 n. 43.
93
The existence of Greek individuality is contested. Warren Ginsberg, for instance, argues –
with regard to Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics – that “A person [...] is defined [...] by his
ruling disposition.” Ancient rhetorical thinkers were meant to imitate life and customs to
lend authenticity to speeches. They emphasized “the qualities proper to each man’s na-
ture” and omitted whatever would appear incongruous with “a man’s ruling passion.”
Ginsberg, The Cast of Character: The Representation of Personality in Ancient and Me-
dieval Literature (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1983) 15, 18-19. Schmitt’s studies of
Greek individuality, however, suggest that characters, such as Achilles, do not conform to
this idea. In the very first line of the Iliad, Homer stresses Achilles’s changeability, which
becomes the principle around which the work is organized: Achilles’s wrath renders him
successively meek, aggressive, tearful, virtuous, and so on. He represents multiple disposi-
tions and is apparently capable of coordinating these masks without collapsing selfhood,
which is a multiple of personae. See Schmitt, “Homer, Ilias – ein Meisterwerk der Litera-
tur?” Meisterwerke der Literatur: Von Homer bis Musil, ed. Reinhard Brandt (Leipzig:
Reclam, 2001) 9-52; Schmitt, “Individualität als ein Faktum menschlicher Existenz.” See
further Sorabji, Self. Terminological recourse to prós!pon seems appropriate in this con-
text.
48 Part One: Masking Identities

struction through ‘text’ construction,”94 there is no such thing as a true-to-life

autobiography. In his autobiography, ‘Roland Barthes’ poignantly asserts this:
“It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”95 For Jerome
Bruner, autobiography is therefore “an extension of fiction, rather than the re-
verse, [...] the shape of life comes first from imagination rather than from expe-
rience.”96 William Spengemann contextualizes this uneasy relationship between
autobiography and fiction within the discourse of self-portraiture. He argues that
“every individual action is artistic [...] ‘Our actions write our autobiography,
which is, of course a fiction.’ The corollary of this proposition is that every fic-
tion is, willy-nilly, a self portrait.”97 The self of autobiographical discourse is
prosopagraphical, then, in the sense that it represents a mask or a particular
combination of masks rather than a complete life – the masks that one deems
appropriate (hence, fictional) in one or more particular instances.
Prosopagraphy, needless to say, involves multiplicities. If one assumes a col-
lection of masks, narrative clusters, in terms of translucence, the masks can
fleetingly surface or combine with one another into a changing and yet recog-
nizable ‘face.’ Autobiography depicts a combination of these masks but fixes
them in print, whilst the masks of the prosopagraphical self remain permanently
in flux according to the given interactional requirements. In accordance with the
argument in favor of the prepositional (that is, narrative) nature of selfhood, a
core continually maps the organism’s own state onto itself, whereas the autobio-
graphical self and memory are involved in the creation of masks for purposes of
self-presentation to others as well as the self.98 Prosopagraphical selfhood ac-
knowledges the pervasive role of culture insofar as the development from self to
unique individual can occur only by means of engaging with collectively circu-
lated roles: “Narrative processes are the intellectual meeting ground for theory
of self and theory of culture”; the self is shaped by culture as much as it is con-
stitutive of culture in formulating a specific worldview.99
How exactly, though, do selves organize available cultural narratives? Ac-
cording to Benson, “A pool of narratives and narrative-types (memes) will be

94
Bruner, “The Autobiographical Process,” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of
Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993)
38-39, quotation at 55.
95
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday, 1977) 1.
96
Bruner, “Autobiographical Process” 55.
97
William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Lit-
erary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1980) 167, citing Régis Michaud; cf.
Philippe Lejeune, “Looking at a Self-Portrait,” On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin,
trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989) 109-18. Eakin
agrees that autobiography is fictional while stressing that he does not “mean to confuse
autobiography with other works of the imagination” in his Fictions in Autobiography:
Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985) 277.
98
See Benson, “Unthinkable Boundaries” 61-62.
99
Benson, Cultural Psychology 54.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 49

available for the formation of all new selves in a society. Built into them will be
the values, hopes and fears which will suggest the ‘ideal self’ of that society as
well as positioning the society in relation to its past and its future, and incorpo-
rating its stances towards other societies.” Furthermore, in autobiographical and
personal life narratives, he argues, individuals strive for an all-encompassing
narrative that can contain the contradictions inherent in social interaction. For
this purpose, Benson assumes that, provided the individual possesses the skills
of efficient narration, these narratives “will allow me to reflect upon the various
accounts I can give of the different parts of my life so that I can pull them to-
gether into the coherence of ‘my story.’” In order to accommodate contradic-
tions and ruptures, divergent stories can be unified “into some sort of ‘omnibus
meta-narrative’ which may find favour with oneself and with those others whose
opinions matter.”100 In terms of prosopagraphical selfhood, the selves can adopt
complete masks (stereotypical roles or archetypes). Alternatively, parts of masks
(mythemes) can be incorporated into new masks. Benson’s “omnibus meta-
narrative,” however, remains a very vague concept, especially concerning the
incorporation and maintenance of contradiction. Although he gestures toward
narratological theory, he misses one theory of narrative that complies entirely
with the process he describes: mythology. Narrative Selfhood, I submit, is my-
thologized prosopagraphy; identity is mythology.
The resurrection of theories of mythology with regard to processes of identity
formation merits some explanation. After all, mythical approaches may rightly
seem dated.101 And yet, myths and mythologies in a structural sense are alive
and well in contemporary cultures.102 Mythology, then, is not to be understood
as the opposite of rationality but as a different kind of rationality; the Greek
word mythos originally had the same (or, at least, very similar) meaning as did
logos, namely, word.103 Generally, the understanding is that mythology conveys
sacred truths and provides guidelines for distinguishing between innocence and
guilt. Myths further serve a historical function in that they explain the origins of
institutions, rites, or social developments. Politically, myths represent a collec-
tive ‘narcissism’ and are auto-representations of the identity-consciousness of
societies.104 In the following, the focus is not on specific kinds of stories or the
100
Benson, Cultural Psychology 54, 55, with reference to C. Linde’s Life Stories, non
videtur.
101
Christoph Jamme, Einführung in die Philosophie des Mythos 2: Neuzeit und Gegenwart
(Darmstadt: WBG, 1991) 4.
102
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957) 213-68.
103
See Christoph Jamme, “Gott an hat ein Gewand”: Grenzen und Perspektiven philosophi-
scher Mythos-Theorien der Gegenwart (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) 22-24; Gerd
Brand, Gesellschaft und persönliche Geschichte: Die mythologische Sinngebung sozialer
Prozesse (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972) 83-85; Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By
(London: Routledge, 2004) 1-6; but cf. Emil Angehrn, Die Überwindung des Chaos: Zur
Philosophie des Mythos (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996).
104
Jamme, Einführung 1.
50 Part One: Masking Identities

knowledge that myths transport. Rather, I am interested in mythology as a ra-

tional,105 cognitive system that may help explain how contradictory narratives
can be synthesized within prosopagraphical selfhood.
Needless to say, this is hardly the first account to bring theories of mythology
to discussions of selfhood. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ernst Cas-
sirer famously articulated that the human agent is an “animal symbola formans,”
indicating not only the biological determinants of identity but also an intrinsic
relationship between identity and myth. In due time, however, philosophers in-
terested in mythology became increasingly skeptical of such views, demanding
the demythologization of our life-world.106 The longevity not only of mythical
structures but also of mythical stories themselves, though, has been anticipated
already in a lecture given by Max Weber in 1918, in which he argues that the
increasingly disenchanted modern world would soon see “Many old gods ascend
from their graves.”107 From a contemporary perspective, there can hardly be any
doubt about the correctness of Weber’s conviction. Mythical structures cannot
be dispensed with, even if (or because) they are caught within a continual proc-
ess of de- and remythologizing.
The mythological processes at work in prosopagraphical selfhood can be un-
derstood in terms of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological theory of mythology.
His work ensues from the premise that mythology represents its own logic, em-
phasizing that one day, the same kind of logic will be evinced as operating in
mythic and rational thinking.108 He further claims that myths cannot be analyzed

105
Jamme, Einführung 5-6; Barthes, Mythologies. For the discussions about an ‘enlightened’
mythology and demythologization, see Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frank-
furt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996); Karl Heinz Bohrer, ed. Mythos und Moderne: Begriff und
Bild einer Rekonstruktion (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983); Jürgen Habermas, Theorie
des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981) 1: 334, 2: 233;
Burghard Schmidt, Postmoderne – Strategien des Vergessens: Ein Kritischer Bericht, 4th
ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994) 108-24.
106
Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer
Verlag, 1923-1925) 1: 3-17. Martin Heidegger demands a demythologization of the world
as the only option for eigentliches Dasein. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 17th ed. (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1993) 51 n. 1. Later, however, he concludes that “der Mythos [...] das Denk-
würdigste bleibt.” Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Neske, 1954) 137. See
further Jamme, Einführung 104. Much (near-contemporary) myth-criticism has roots in
Freudian and Jungian theories, which already point to the important role of mythology for
processes of identification, for which see Laurence Coupe, Myth (London: Routledge,
1997). More recently, Brand argues that ‘one’s story is one’s personal mythology.’ Brand,
Gesellschaft 83.
107
Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Mod-
ernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Cahoone (Oxford: Blackwell,
1996) 175. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno appositely observe, “Schon der My-
thos ist Aufklärung, und: Aufklärung schlägt in Mythologie zurück.” Dialektik der Aufklä-
rung: Philosophische Fragmente (Darmstadt: WBG, 1998) 16.
108
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958) 255.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 51

separately from a general (encompassing) theory of society,109 which leads him

to conclude – inspired by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and
Roman Jakobson – that myths are an integral part of the order of language.110
Accordingly, he adds the mytheme to existing linguistic categories of phonemes
and morphemes, the mytheme working on the sentence level rather than on the
word level. The meaning of a myth for a society is determined by mythemes, the
smallest narrative elements in a mythical narrative that carry meaning, all of
which combine into a mythical story.111 By analogy to Lévi-Strauss’s theory, I
argue that individual masks are constituted by such small elements. On this
view, Benson’s “narratives and narrative-types (memes)” are mythemes; his
“omnibus meta-narrative” is a mythology. The organizational principle for Lévi-
Strauss’s mythology can likewise elucidate the internal workings of prosopagra-
phy, namely, bricolage. In La pensée sauvage, Lévi-Strauss advances the proba-
bly most influential facet of his work in his illustration of the processes of
mythic thinking.112 He compares mythological bricolage to the work of the engi-
neer. Like an engineer, the bricoleur has available a limited amount of tools, of-
ten an odd rather than systematized collection. This (and only this) corpus can
be used for the creation of the product (a new myth). The tools do not necessar-
ily have any relation to the product and thus can be employed in any way the
bricoleur chooses. The rules of the ‘game’ are defined and limited only by the
creativity of the bricoleur’s use of his tools. In the same way that the tools de-
termine the shape of the creation, the constituents of myths, the mythemes, are
predetermined by their existence in a language that establishes their meaning.113
Lévi-Strauss’s theory of mythology lends itself to describe creation of auto-
biographical selves by means of the available biological and cultural tools. As in
Lévi-Strauss’s theory, the corpus is not finite. By stressing that the analogy be-
tween the bricoleur and the scientist does hold, via the analogy to a corpus of
tools,114 Lévi-Strauss resurrects Boas’s statement that “on dirait que les univers
mythologiques sont destinés à être démantelés à peine formés, pour que de nou-
veaux univers naissent de leurs fragments.”115 In order to modify existing self-
narratives, the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction are pivotal.
Within the framework of prosopagraphical identity, a created myth represents
109
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques IV: L’homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971) 583-84; Lévi-
Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955) 351, 451-54. For Lévi-Strauss, mythical
structures do not play a role in ‘enlightened’ societies but survive in the realm of the arts.
Lévi-Strauss, “Mythos und Bedeutung: Fünf Radiovorträge von Claude Lévi-Strauss,”
trans. Brigitte Luchesi, Mythos und Bedeutung: Fünf Radiovorträge; Gespräche mit Clau-
de Lévi-Strauss, ed. Adelbert Reif (1980; Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996) 57-67.
110
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie 232.
111
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie 232-36.
112
Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962) 26.
113
See Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage 27-29.
114
Cf. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967) 418.
115
Boas qtd. in Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage 31.
52 Part One: Masking Identities

one mask (representing a social role). These masks, which can be partially
transparent, constitute in their entirety the corpus of available mythemes for self-
construction, for creating new masks or for the modification of existing masks.
This collection of layered masks finds an analogy in Lévi-Strauss’s works as
well. In discussing initiation rites, he mentions dance masks, “which opened
suddenly like two shutters to reveal a second face, and sometimes a third one
behind the second.”116 Structurally, this corresponds to prosopagraphical self-
hood in which each layered mask corresponds to a ‘face’ – a narrative that is a
myth. The difference between the opaque aboriginal masks mentioned by Lévi-
Strauss and the partially transparent masks of prosopagraphical selfhood lies in
the relation between the individual masks, which in the case of the latter is
highly dynamic. The advantage of the prosopagraphical model over older role
theories is that due to the mentioned transparency, a ‘horizontal axis’ can
emerge in a ‘vertical’ world of separate personae.
The distinction between ‘verticality’ and ‘horizontality’ within pro-
sopagraphical selfhood is also inherent in Lévi-Strauss’s extensive analysis of
more than eight hundred myths. His Mythologiques is a ‘mythology of myths,’117
which he likens to an orchestral score in order to highlight the workings of verti-
cal and horizontal axes within it – the reoccurrence of themes and motifs makes
sense only within the complete ‘narrative.’ These axes overlap with the axes of
selection and combination in Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy (see
below). They further parallel Damasio’s account of consciousness, in which
analogies to orchestral scores are omnipresent.118 These analogies of conscious-
ness, language, and mythology to the musical score illustrate very well the orga-
nization of prosopagraphical selfhood which represents a horizontal narrative
that links and integrates the consonance of specific mytheme-combinations
(masks). A specific harmony (mask) is fixed momentarily as a seemingly
opaque ‘harmony’ through which the previous and following movements are
contained and anticipated. Like the orchestral score, prosopagraphical selfhood
maps the connections between vertical elements, turning them into a ‘horizontal’
narrative. The multiple possibilities within the orchestral score to organize
‘mythemes’ vertically and horizontally translates within prosopagraphical self-
116
Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: Univ. of Washington
Press; Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 1988) 5. Medievalist Daniel Poirion
draws on the metaphor of layered masks in his discussion of “Mask and Allegorical Per-
sonification,” trans. Caroline Weber, YFS 95 (1999): “A mask hides one face under an-
other. [...] But culture imposes a social mask on us: on a daily basis, we turn a false face to
the world, in an effort to reassure, or to impress. In fact, the mask, a persona, is neither
more revealing nor more duplicitous than the face” (13).
117
Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques I: Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964) 9, 20.
118
Damasio, Feeling 87-88. The behavior of organisms is seen as the result of “a concurrence
of melodic lines at each time unit you select for observation; if you were a conductor look-
ing at the imaginary musical score of the organism’s behavior, you would see the different
musical parts joined vertically at each measure.”
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 53

hood into the option of frequently determining ‘vertical’ masks that appear again
from time to time, often with minor, but effective changes. Mythology as a
structural system, the musical score, and prosopagraphical selfhood thus exem-
plify how conflictual and conflicting narratives can be synthesized in “some sort
of ‘omnibus meta-narrative.’”119
The “pool of narratives” that contains the “values, fears and hopes” of a soci-
ety and from which, as Benson suggests, individuals can choose narratives for
their identity formation can be seen as a pool of myths, a mythology, from
which the bricoleur assembles a myth. Both pools appear to follow similar orga-
nizational principles, whereby Benson’s “narratives and narrative types (me-
mes),” represent the mythemes and myths (masks), respectively, that are circu-
lated in a given culture. Like these narratives and narrative types, mythological
narration is highly flexible because of the possibility of recombining mythemes
into new myths based on the interactional purposes and in order to accommodate
for new situations which existing narratives could not adequately assess or ex-
plain.120 Any mythology thus allows for the creation of an almost infinite num-
ber of new myths. As with Benson’s ‘pool of narratives,’ mythologies naturally
include and distribute values especially important to a society. Central values,
insofar as they would inform most myths, would correspond to those mythemes
reiterated more often than others in a mythological system. Within the collection
of masks in the prosopagraphical model, mythemes reiterated across several
masks constitute mask intersection at one particular point and therefore create
transparency. They form, metaphorically speaking, a ‘horizontal axis’ across the
layered ‘vertical’ masks.121 In place of one core self, I would characterize such
axes (plural!) as the multiple cores of the autobiographical self and memory. In
fact, horizontal and vertical become only relative positions because pro-
sopagraphical selfhood turns Lévi-Strauss’s two-dimensional structuralism into
a three-dimensional system: if one perceives the collection of masks in terms of
!i"ek’s onion-self, the continual act of bricolage may ‘horizontalize’ ‘vertical’
axes and vice versa so that they cut across the onion diagonally. On this view,
most masks are interconnected at one or multiple point(s), preventing the masks
from falling apart. This posits a middle ground between older theories of one
core deeply buried within the self and postmodern theories, advocating the frag-
mentation of selves. As Harré points out, these theories are problematic since
they suggest that within a person, several selves are hidden away to be

119
Benson, Cultural Psychology 56, cited above. See further MacIntyre’s characterization of
narrative identity in terms of Chinese boxes in After Virtue 213.
120
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie 227-55; Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage 26-44.
121
In intersection lies the option to render our lives coherent and consistent to ourselves
since, as Holstein and Gubrium have it, we “act toward the entity that we take to be our
moral core.” Holstein and Gubrium, Self 230. Taylor stresses the necessity to negotiate
central goods, “hypergoods,” which Benson reconstructs as phenomena of ethical location.
Taylor, Sources of the Self 63-73; Benson, Cultural Psychology 59-71.
54 Part One: Masking Identities

brought out randomly. Rather, there are “a person’s skills, capacities, disposi-
tions, tendencies and so on, which may from time to time be realized in private
and public action – action that the person, as active producer of meanings,
brings into existence in symbiotic relationships with others.”122
The “symbiotic relationships with others” bring into play again the cultural
sphere and the masks and mythemes circulated therein. As within the pro-
sopagraphical self, mythemes that are reiterated frequently within individual
masks and that find wide circulation among individuals represent those (ethical)
values important to the collectivity. Charles Taylor’s account of modern self-
hood is informative in this respect although it is perhaps terminologically mis-
leading insofar as he refers to ethical values as goods. For Taylor, “Selfhood and
the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably
intertwined themes.” What is at stake in his account is the particular orientation
toward certain values (mythemes). Living a meaningful life, he argues, depends
on frameworks: “Not to have a framework is to fall into a life which is spiritu-
ally senseless. The quest is thus always a quest for sense.” The sense or the
meaning sought is not universal, however, but depends on individuals’ means of
expression. Discovering a framework is therefore a matter of (rhetorical) inven-
tion. Anticipating Benson’s cultural psychology of a locative self, Taylor ob-
serves that the question ‘who am I’ is tantamount to the inquiry of ‘where I
stand’: that is, “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications
which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from
case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I en-
dorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of
taking a stand.”123 Rephrased in prosopagraphical terms, it is the horizontality
within the vertical masks (or myths) that enables taking a stand. Taylor invokes
language as the crucial means for this self-location, which ensues through one’s
relationships (negotiated through language) with the surrounding selves. Just as
a language only “exists and is maintained within a language community,” a “self
can never be described without reference to those who surround it.” While it is
possible to alter one’s perspective on one’s community and one’s orientation to
it in favor of another, this does not “sever our dependence on webs of interlocu-
tion. It only changes the webs, and the nature of our dependence.” Individuals,
that is, may adopt different masks or mythemes, but horizontal cores (points of
intersection) are always there. The mythemes at which masks intersect appear to
correspond to the many goods (ethical values) between which, according to Tay-
lor, individuals can qualitatively distinguish and choose. Those “goods which
not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint
from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about,”124 Taylor refers to

122
Harré, Singular Self 175-76.
123
Taylor, Sources of the Self 3, 17-18, 27.
124
Taylor, Sources of the Self 35, 39, 63.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 55

as “hypergoods.” Although the term calls to mind moral points of reference, I

think it nevertheless adequately captures the role of mythemes for the creation of
horizontal cores within prosopagraphical selfhood. Mythemes that form points
of intersection between several masks configure changeable, ethical trajectories
through the collection of masks, revealing those ethical frameworks that are
considered important in order to negotiate cultural worlds. It should be stressed
again that the model of prosopagraphical selfhood represents a ‘flexibly-
centered’ framework in that it does not negate the existence of core selves while
positing their flexibility. It is only through the continual renegotiation of (ethi-
cal) frameworks that individuals can determine new ‘languages’ and extend ex-
isting frameworks, that is, mythological systems.125
Since ethical frameworks appear to be inevitable for self-location, it is not
surprising that recent conversations about selfhood problematize such frame-
works, often dichotomized as normality versus deviance. Postmodern theory pits
against overarching frameworks the notion of deviance, “a key concept in psy-
chiatry and other therapeutic disciplines.” Many scholars have seen in Derrida’s
deconstruction the exemplification “that ‘deviation’ from a ‘norm’ can be
viewed as fundamentally important to the well-being of the norm in question.”126
Holstein and Gubrium are likewise skeptical of master narratives, which they
discuss in terms of Foucault’s ‘panopticism.’ Their view of master narratives,
though, is “less grand and confining” when seen as “operating in relation to the
particular.” In their opinion, the “panoptic presence of everyday life is more
variegated and disjoint than it is uniform and total.” 127 This may not do full jus-
tice to the complicated ways in which dominant ideology exerts itself, however
fragmented it may be.128 Certainly, the mythemes forming points of intersection
within prosopagraphical selfhood are not value-free; they may even be charac-
terized as the carriers of the norms that recent theoretical accounts intend to
challenge. And yet, Holstein and Gubrium stress the multiplicity of locative
props available – a multiplicity of ethical frameworks that are potentially subject
to continual deconstruction. The complete absence of such frameworks, how-
ever, leads to a radically decentered self, in which one would find very little to
no mask intersection; it leads to an ‘empty’ self.
The existence of a plethora of different mythemes (and ethical frameworks)
gives credence to Gubrium and Holstein’s belief that local narratives continually
challenge master narratives. At the same time, this somewhat contradicts experi-
ential accounts. Although the mythologies providing meaning and orientation
for people’s lives are complex and multi-layered, individuals tend to rely on one

125
For the crucial role of language, see Hacking, “Making Up People” 231.
126
White and Hellerich, Labyrinths 8.
127
Holstein and Gubrium, Self 225, 228.
128
See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972) 21-76; Foucault, Surveiller et
punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975).
56 Part One: Masking Identities

ethical framework.129 And perhaps the adjective ethical is slightly misleading.

Thomas Spitzley, for instance, maintains (against Taylor’s moral frameworks)
that sometimes there are alternative points of orientation. In accordance with
Benson and others, Spitzley ultimately argues that it is the desires, opinions, and
phobias of an individual that constitute personal identity (the ‘mental bun-
dle’).130 Desire probably lies at the root of agency – even for Taylor, narrative
self preconditions the desire to tell the story of one’s life in meaningful ways,
that is, one’s self-narrative is structured along one or more (hyper)goods.131 The
desire for coherence dictates the frameworks an individual may choose as a
means of self-location. The mythemes and masks necessary to ‘satisfy’ the de-
sire for coherence can either stem from master narratives or from local stories.
In fact, this desire probably charts a path from the more highly individualized
local to the collectivity and vice versa, potentially challenging or revising domi-
nant collective ideology.132 This version of the prosopagraphical self would in-
deed “accent the moral significance of the local, which is as varied and diverse
as the circumstances of contemporary life.”133
The potential for change and changeability should not be overemphasized,
however, as Ian Hacking’s account of how individuals are ‘made up’ evinces. In
arguing that “the idea of making up people [...] to all of us,” and gesturing to-
ward the possibility for change in that “We are not only what we are but what
we might have been, and the possibilities for what we might have been are trans-
formed,” Hacking describes self-construction in terms similar to the model of
prosopagraphical selfhood. For instance, he argues that “kinds of making up
people are far from exhaustion. Individuals serve as role models and sometimes
thereby create new roles.” New complete masks are thus available for adoption
for other individuals. In a globalized world, however, certain role models are
more powerful than others. In making up people, the advertising industry is sin-
gled out by Hacking as particularly potent insofar as it “relies on our suscepti-
bilities to role models and is largely engaged in trying to make up people.”134

129
Thomas Spitzley, “Identität und Orientierung,” On Human Persons, ed. Klaus Petrus
(Frankfurt/Main: Ontos, 2003) 201.
130
Spitzley, “Identität und Orientierung” 201-03.
131
Spitzley complicates this by introducing the aspect of objectivity in “Identität und Orien-
tierung” 207.
132
This inevitably raises questions about agency – a vexing problem for any theory of self-
hood. While prosopagraphical selfhood primarily aims to demonstrate the available
choices (and the availability of choice), it may also offer a way of conceptualizing mecha-
nisms of decision making. Insofar as the model charts the interplay of individual and so-
cial discourses, it makes palpable that neither discourse is wholly responsible for making
selves; rather, selfhood appears to emerge in the space between, in a reconfiguration of
available narratives based on those narratives already adopted, in which particular goods
form trajectories (cores), representing the desire of becoming a particular individual.
133
Holstein and Gubrium, Self 231.
134
Hacking, “Making Up People” 232-33, 234-35.
 Chapter Two: (Post)Modern Selfhood 57

The same applies to other media, chiefly the television, which largely dissemi-
nate stereotypical masks. Linking the ‘discovery’ of multiple personality disor-
der to the wide-spread availability of the remote control, Hacking notes that it is
not only multiples who “self-consciously act out television fantasies – or at any
rate, that they do so any more than the rest of us. We constantly mimic others.
Art, from great to tawdry, presents us with a selection of stylized characters
from whom we acquire bits of our own ever-developing personal style – and on
whom, selectively, we mold our own character.”135
The model of the prosopagraphical self accommodates both the potential
creation of new masks, new frameworks, and the desire for over-all coherence,
often seemingly provided by stereotypical narratives. In either case, specific
mythemes (Taylor’s goods) which link various masks keep the self from falling
apart, preventing multiphrenia; the prosopagraphical self is one vehicle contain-
ing multiple, even contradictory narratives. This also accommodates recent find-
ings in studies concerned with the cognitive representation of subjectivity. In his
account of autobiography, Eakin summarizes such investigations as evincing
that individuals become “different persons all the time, we are not what we
were.” Self and memory, while grounded in the body, are always in flux. In re-
sponse to “the flux of self-experience, we instinctively gravitate to identity-
supporting structures: the notion of identity as continuous over time, and the use
of autobiographical discourse to record its history.”136 Again, negotiating social
and cultural worlds is a matter of narratives stabilizing individuals, lending the
necessary (illusion of) coherence.
I hope to have shown above that the autobiographical narratives stabilizing
selves can be best described as prosopagraphy, that the autobiographical self is a
prosopagraphical self. In an effort to synthesize older psychological role theories
with theories of narrative selfhood, the model of prosopagraphical selfhood aims
at providing a tool to map the way in which inevitably contradictory narratives
can be reconciled without destabilizing and decentering the self.137 Moreover, I
offered Lévi-Strauss’s theory of mythology as an elucidation of the narrative
processes within prosopagraphical selfhood. Like the bricoleur, who either
chooses complete myths from a mythology or deconstructs mythemes into new
myths, individuals can adopt complete masks or recombine available narrative
clusters into new masks. This process works along two axes: if the self is imag-

135
Hacking, Rewriting the Soul 32.
136
Eakin, Lives 20. For variability within narrative stability in Lévi-Strauss’s theory of my-
thology, see Marcel Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Contact,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003) 31.
137
Sign systems and languages, Roman Jakobson argues, are inherently contradictory and
informed by antinomy, for without contradiction “there is no mobility of concepts, no mo-
bility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized.” Ro-
man Jakobson, “What Is Poetry?” trans. M. Heim, Roman Jakobson: Selected Writings,
ed. Stephen Rudy, 3 vols. (The Hague: Mouton, 1981) 3: 750.
58 Part One: Masking Identities

ined as a collection of ‘vertical’ masks, ontological bricolage allows individuals

to determine connections between several masks where mythemes are shared.
These intersections keep the self from falling apart by means of ‘horizontal’
axes which create nodal transparency. On this view, persons are (and have been)
inevitably unique by virtue of the different combinations of masks and
mythemes adopted. By means of the two axes, two divergent tracks of identifi-
cation can be conveniently mapped. Individuals can construct selves ‘vertically’
by adopting complete masks that are stereotypical and render most of what lies
underneath opaque. Alternatively, individuals can engage in the more demand-
ing deconstruction of circulated masks for the purpose of creating new masks,
new roles. In a sense, this track cannot be characterized as appropriation or
adoption but rather as approsopriation. Rather than simply imposing an arche-
typical mask, approsopriation entails that masks are deconstructed in order to
determine intersections with existing masks. The new mask is integrated in the
sense that it is neither completely vertical (opaque) nor completely horizontal
(transparent); rather, it is horizontalized, generating punctual transparency.
Mythological bricolage, that is, renders the prosopagraphical self translucent in-
sofar as it encompasses and synthesizes both transparency and opacity. Like
theories of narrative selfhood, the prosopagraphical model posits that self and
culture are mutually constitutive of one another, the intersections providing the
space for a productive recombination of available mythemes and masks. By
means of its ability to visualize this process in terms of opaque and transparent
masks, the model aims not only at synthesizing contemporary accounts of self-
hood but to further approach questions of personal and collective identity forma-
tion diachronically. As shall evolve in the following chapter, prosopagraphical
identities, that is, selves conceived of in terms of (metaphorical) masking, can be
substantiated for both antiquity and the Middle Ages.
 CHAPTER THREE
Prosopagraphical Selfhood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

In this chapter, I argue that prosopagraphical selfhood is not restricted to appli-

cation in contemporary selfhood or present debates about the self. Undoubtedly,
classical, medieval, modern, and postmodern identities are different. This differ-
ence, however, can be mapped by means of prosopagraphical selfhood by asking
to what extent identities are determined ‘vertically’ (mythically, by means of
adopting stereotypical masks) or ‘horizontally’ (mythologically, by means of
deconstructing mythemes). These will be very general mappings, since the te-
nacity of the model will ultimately be tested in my analyses of the Troy story.
After offering a brief prosopagraphical reading of Cicero’s De officiis as an ex-
ample of ‘classical prosopagraphy,’ I will provide a short history of the usage of
persona, which in Latin antiquity retained its meaning of theatrical activity im-
posed on role concepts. In the Middle Ages, however, persona was not used in
this sense which complicates the discussion of medieval identities in terms of
masks. Moreover, the lack of role-playing might suggest a limited capacity for
approsopriation, that is, for ‘trying out’ masks with the concomitant possibility
of integrating new mythemes and modifying existing masks. This corroborates
the (stereotypical) view of identity in the Middle Ages according to which indi-
viduals would exist only within the framework of a few available roles and
types. Evidence suggests, however, that the concept of masks was popular
throughout the Middle Ages. Masks were used for purposes not unlike theatrical
activities. Moreover, medieval selfhood cannot be described only in terms of
masks, but also in terms of narratively constructed masks. The medieval literary
persona, I argue finally, is the important agency for negotiating questions of per-
sonal and collective identification and participates in a discourse of diversity
rather than homogeneity and uniformity.

1. Classical Prosopagraphical Selfhood

In his Motives of Eloquence, Richard Lanham provides an account of the homo
rhetoricus which renders the notion of postmodern individuality – the possibility
of adopting “convenient masks” for a “new social drama” – rather old-
fashioned. The rhetorician, writes Lanham, is “an actor; his reality public, dra-
matic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histri-
onic re-enactment.” The rhetors engage in social situations as though they were
games, the purpose of which is to win. Much like the postmodern self, the homo
rhetoricus is alienated from his world, because he is “trained not to discover re-
60 Part One: Masking Identities

ality but to manipulate it.” Since past and future exist for him “as possibility
only, a paradigm he may some day have to learn,” by analogy to participants of
postmodern language games, “He can play freely with language. For him it owes
no transcendental loyalties.” The “rhetorical view of life [...] begins with the
centrality of language. It conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, man as
fundamentally a role player. It synthesizes an essentially bifurcated, self-serving
theory of motive.” By the same token, Lanham stresses the centrality of the
pleasure principle. If rhetorical men play to win, they also play for pleasure.
Moreover, homo rhetoricus
is not pledged to a single set of values and the cosmic orchestration they adumbrate.
He is not, like the serious man, alienated from his own language. And if he relin-
quishes the luxury of a central self, a soul, he gains the tolerance, and usually the sense
of humor, that comes from knowing he – and others – not only may think differently,
but he may be differently. He pays a price for this, of course – religious sublimity, and
its reassuring, if breathtaking, unities.
To the extent that all human beings partake in the serious and rhetorical worlds,
Lanham posits the split self: “The Western self has from the beginning been
composed of a shifting and perpetually uneasy combination of homo rhetoricus
and homo seriosus, of a social self and a central self. It is their business to con-
tend for supremacy.” Rhetorical training, despite the loss of its original motiva-
tion, remains residual because leaving it out “cuts man in half.”138
Lanham proposes a view of selfhood which problematizes the reconciliation
of a multiplicity of narratives with a central core. Both are necessary since with-
out rhetorical selves one would be “pure essence” and “would retain no social
dimension.” Accordingly, the homo rhetoricus resists what Lanham calls “cen-
termentalism because he knows that his own capacity to make up comforting il-
lusions is as infinite as the universe he is flung into. Naked into the world he
may come, but not without resource.” This is to articulate the aporia of present
theories of identity. Neither can the center be abandoned nor can one dispense
with some degree of free play. But instead of giving preference to one or the
other, Lanham locates a core in the struggle between homo seriosus and homo
rhetoricus, which is “a self-generating, self-protective device.”139 How this
struggle can be structurally accommodated, Lanham does not explain. Pro-
sopagraphical selfhood, I believe, can visually represent this process. It becomes
clear, however, that the narrative identity envisioned by Lanham for classical
antiquity is not as different from modern narrative selfhood as one would sus-
pect; it is a matter of reconciling contradictory narratives that can be conceptual-
ized as roles. This becomes tangible, for instance, in Lanham’s discussion of
Ovid, a true master of rhetorical selfhood, of playing with masks:

138
Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1976) 4, 5, 6.
139
Lanham, Motives of Eloquence 8.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 61
We must begin with the personae Ovid chooses to don. He is a teacher, lawgiver and
learned counsel of love; he is a !"#$"%&ó', a general of love; and he is its poet. He
thus takes upon himself, unsystematically and at pleasure, all the serious careers Rome
offered. Teacher, lawyer, and general by virtue of the imagery, he makes more – hi-
lariously too much – of his role as poet of love. [...] Ovid’s practical persona, like Pan-
darus’s in Chaucer’s Troilus, seems unhealthily close to pander pure and simple. [...]
On the one hand, Ovid plays heroic Virgilian vates; on the other, a more fundamental
role, poet as fabricator of a pleasant reality.140
The rhetor assumes different roles, if only, in this case, the poet’s role of fabri-
cating an alternative reality. The overlap between narrative, performance, and
selfhood stands out even more in Lanham’s analysis of Cicero’s First Oration
against Catiline – “the most famous oration ever composed” – the motive of
which is
to play Cicero and thus to establish Cicero’s reality. Further, this role is to be played
by a speech which defines the situation and places it in time [...] and also one which
imposes that definition on patres conscripti, so that Cicero can then be the Cicero
Cicero wants to be remembered as having been. [...] As we try to understand that huge
and exuberant Ciceronian egotism, we come again and again to a motive essentially
neither selfish nor patriotic but simply dramatic.
The purpose of this rhetoric is less to persuade the opponent but to change the
self, for which Lanham uses an analogy to psychoanalysis, in which the patient
is offered a new narrative frame: “Cast him in another play.”141 Classical rheto-
ric emerges as not only a matter of narrative, but of narrative as role, as persona.
In Roman antiquity, persona assumes a meaning of mask that encompasses
both theatrical activity and everyday life. In the public realm, Manfred Fuhr-
mann observes, persona meant the essential part of a human being or duty as,
for example, in Cicero’s assertion of the difficulty of playing the role of the
leading man in the state.142 The Romans were obviously familiar with masks as
kinds of costumes; roles were often treated as material items to don or doff. In
analogy to this tangibility, personae were a question of consistency, especially
in political discourse. Politicians had to stick to their role, to their opinions and
attitudes.143 Cicero’s De officiis is often discussed in this context since it devel-
ops a role theory analogizing theatrical roles: actors, like politicians, have to act

140
Lanham, Motives of Eloquence 53.
141
Lanham, Motives of Eloquence 13-14.
142
Manfred Fuhrmann, “Persona, ein römischer Rollenbegriff,” Identität, ed. Odo Marquard
and Karlheinz Stierle (München: Fink, 1979) 83-84; Hans Rheinfelder, Das Wort “Perso-
na”: Geschichte seiner Bedeutungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des französischen
und italienischen Mittelalters (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928) 6-26; Weihe, Paradoxie der Maske
181-89.
143
Fuhrmann, “Persona” 88, 93.
62 Part One: Masking Identities

according to their role.144 Moreover, Cicero’s role theory amounts to a theory of

selfhood distinguishing between several interrelated masks.
Cicero’s De officiis lays down the rules of duty. After arguing that propriety
is natural in the sense that when one follows natural laws, one cannot go wrong,
Cicero proposes a codification for social life, which includes an investigation of
what it means to be a human being. Here, Cicero distinguishes between two
masks: “Intellegendum etiam est duabus quasi nos a natura indutos esse perso-
nis: quarum una communis est ex eo, quod omnes participes sumus rationis
praestantiaeque eius, qua antecellimus bestiis, a qua omne honestum decorum-
que trahitur, et ex qua ratio inveniendi officii exquiritur, altera autem, quae pro-
prie singulis est tributa” [We must realize also that we are invested by Nature
with two characters, as it were: one of these is universal, arising from the fact of
our being all alike endowed with reason and with that superiority which lifts us
above the brute. From this all morality and propriety are derived, and upon it
depends the rational method of ascertaining our duty. The other character is the
one that is assigned to individuals in particular] (I, 107). Among these individual
characters, he lists appearance but also, regarding character (animis), wittiness,
seriousness, jollity, shrewdness, and so on. The individual must develop these
traits to their full potential (esp. I, 110). To these two masks, Cicero adds two
more, comprising chance and choice, respectively (I, 115). He specifically
stresses the element of free choice. Despite the fact that political offices, wealth,
and birth are granted by chance, the roles individuals adopt for themselves are a
matter of free choice – “a nostra voluntate” (I, 115). This is intrinsically related
to the natural talents that individuals must discover in order to make correct
choices. Additionally, one should be consistent throughout one’s life concerning
this choice (I, 117). If one were to discover that one has erred, however, change
would be inevitable (I, 120). Cicero thus recognizes that individuals are unique
insofar as they have different character(istic)s, that they are disposed toward the
adoption of specific masks.
Cicero emphasizes the role of others in making their choices. Individuals’
choices are often determined by upbringing or by society which circulates role
models that should be imitated. That one can determine the best course of one’s
life without external influence may befall a Hercules,
nobis non item, qui imitamur, quos cuique visum est, atque ad eorum studia instituta-
que impellimur; plerumque autem parentium praeceptis imbuti ad eorum consuetudi-
nem moremque deducimur; alii multitudinis iudicio feruntur, quaeque maiori parti pul-

144
Cicero, De officiis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller, LCL 30 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1913) I, 97, pp. 98-100. All translations are taken from this edition, occasion-
ally with minor modifications. For discussions of Cicero’s sources for the four-personae
theory and Ciceronian individuality, see Christopher Gill, “Personhood and Personality:
Cicero’s Four-Personae Theory in Cicero, De Officiis I,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Phi-
losophy 6 (1988): 169-99; Sorabji, Self 157-71.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 63
cherrima videntur, ea maxime exoptant; non nulli tamen sive felicitate quadam sive
bonitate naturae sine parentium disciplina rectam vitae secuti sunt viam. (I, 118)

[but it cannot well happen to us; for we copy each the model he fancies, and we are
constrained to adopt their pursuits and vocations. But usually, we are so imbued with
the teachings of our parents, that we fall irresistibly into their manners and customs.
Others drift with the current of popular opinion and make especial choice of those call-
ings which the majority find most attractive. Some, however, as the result either of
some happy fortune or of natural ability, enter upon the right path of life, without pa-
rental guidance.]
As has been argued for contemporary identity formation processes, Cicero’s in-
dividuals more often than not imitate particular role models – role models the
homo rhetoricus can exploit and ‘perform’ in order to persuade others. Cicero
frequently alludes to this performative dimension, comparing the real world to
the world of the stage. In the world of the theater, actors do not choose the best
plays but the roles that are best suited for their individual talents as well (I, 110).
Cicero’s understanding of the four personae indeed invites comparison with
‘modern’ theories of selfhood and with the model of prosopagraphical selfhood.
While some scholars have expressed reservations about the ‘modernity’ of
Cicero’s approach to sociological questions,145 and while notions of ‘right ca-
reers’ and of ethically ‘correct’ points of view are certainly not unproblematic,
the Ciceronian model is structurally analogous to theories that conceive of narra-
tive identities in terms of personae that individuals adopt in what White and
Hellerich call the “new social drama.” It may rightly be objected that Cicero ul-
timately talks about roles rather than masks.146 Moreover, social constraints pose
a limit to the developing individual in Cicero’s theory.147 And yet, the model
represents a layering of mutually interdependent masks, which accommodates
biologically determined narratives with equally or less determined social narra-
tives as well as unique personal narratives that may intersect with other masks at
various points; the self Cicero describes is a prosopagraphical self. Within the
framework of prosopagraphical selfhood, Cicero’s ideal results in (perhaps un-
healthy) transparent stasis: “Nam ut adversas res, sic secundas immoderate ferre
levitatis est, praeclaraque est aequabilitas in omni vita et idem semper vultus ea-
demque frons [...]” [But it is a fine thing to keep an unruffled temper, an un-
changing mien, and the same time cast of countenance in every condition of

145
Fuhrmann, “Persona” 97-100; De Lacy qtd. in Gill, “Personhood and Personality” 177.
146
Weihe, Paradoxie der Maske 331, but cf. 354. Richard Neuse, however, emphasizes the
theatrical dimension of the Ciceronian mask in Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Thea-
ter in “The Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991) 138.
147
Distinguishing between personhood (persons as class) and personality (persons as indi-
viduals), Gill argues that “The expression of ‘personality’ [...] does not lead to conflict
with the demands of ‘personhood’ because the claims of the former are specifically subor-
dinated to those of the latter.” Gill, “Personhood and Personality” 180, and see 182-83.
64 Part One: Masking Identities

life...] (I, 90).148 While Cicero’s personae-theory may seem an isolated case of
pre-modern prosopagraphical selfhood, concepts of individuality at the nexus
between masking, performance, and autobiographical narrative abound in the
Middle Ages.

2. Medieval Personae and Masks

Although prosopagraphical selfhood can be illustrated for Cicero’s codified so-
ciety as well as for (post)modern individuals, it is seemingly more difficult to
evince such a model for the Middle Ages, since the axioms central to this model
– role-play, masks, and autobiographical narratives – are often regarded as non-
existent.149 Moreover, the concept of persona, defined as mask, allegedly was
unknown until the sixteenth century.150 In the Middle Ages, Fuhrmann contends,
persona assumed its prior, ‘colorless’ rhetorical and legal meaning. Persona did
not connote role or performance, since the mask as a material object disap-
peared;151 it was only in the Renaissance that persona re-obtained the meaning
of role.152 Throughout the Middle Ages, then, persona was used primarily in the
realm of rhetoric, legal, religious, and philosophical discourse. Hans Rheinfelder
observes, however, that performative aspects of persona remain implicitly no-
ticeable in the non-dramatic usage of the word. On this view, persona remains
that through which one speaks – a meaning partially retained in Augustine’s us-
age – and that which renders someone a specific kind of person with respect to
their own dignity or their task. Rheinfelder likens this process to the actor put-
ting on a mask.153 The original meaning of persona, if not in its theatrical sense,

148
Gill comments that “it is an essential part of the theory that these four personae can and
must be made to cohere and coalesce by the self-directing moral agent, through the kind of
choices that give his life the unity and consistency [...] that is an integral component of de-
corum” (177).
149
De officiis was widely known in the Middle Ages, however. Ernst Robert Curtius, Euro-
pean Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1990) 50. For its relevance for Christian ethics of duty, see Josef
Delz, “Wo wurde die lateinische Literatur in das Mittelalter hinüber gerettet,” Medialität
und mittelalterliche insulare Literatur, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram (Tübingen: Narr,
1992) 46.
150
Fuhrmann, “Persona” 83.
151
See Rheinfelder, Wort “Persona” 41. Weihe argues that the term persona undergoes a
semantic shift in the second to sixth centuries that can be understood as an inversion of the
original meaning of the word. Rather than denoting a material item, it becomes a term
designating something internal. Weihe delineates meticulously the semantic development
of persona from Tertullian – ‘una substantia, tres personae’ – via Chrysostom and
Nestorius to Boethius in his Paradoxie der Maske 190, 191-206.
152
Fuhrmann, “Persona” 102-105. Thus, Thomas Hobbes defines persons in terms of the
word persona with explicit reference to the theater in his Leviathan or the Matter, Forme
& Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civill, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1904) 110-11.
153
Rheinfelder, Wort “Persona” 80, 85.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 65

is thus structurally retained as the adoption or integration of ‘a mask.’ This like-

wise applies to the rhetorical usage of persona. John of Garland, for example,
uses persona to indicate a particular role rather than a person in his distinction
between the genera hominum and the genera personarum.154
Whereas the above suggests that the theatrical meaning of persona had no
currency in the Middle Ages, recent studies demonstrate that masks have neither
disappeared throughout the Middle Ages nor have they been regarded as inde-
pendent of role-playing – the lack of an ‘appropriate’ linguistic representation of
a phenomenon does not suggest that the latter ceases to exist.155 Even if masks as
material items were scarce in the Middle Ages, medieval costumes, clothing,
and disguising practices can likewise be seen as acts of ‘masking.’ As the fol-
lowing survey of relevant scholarship reveals, even actual masks were not ab-
sent, however. Furthermore, both masking and disguising practices were explic-
itly seen in the context of (quasi-theatrical) performance. This point finally leads
to an investigation of narrative performance in ‘autobiographical’ texts. The as-
sembled evidence ultimately suggests that the model of prosopagraphical self-
hood can adequately describe and assess the structural foundations of medieval
identity formation processes.
Medieval masking practices occur mainly outside the theatrical world. After
all, “costume and disguise were prominent signs and symbols of medieval cul-
ture, which alongside the learned written forms include oral and visual lan-
guages.”156 Hence, costume and clothing have to be seen in the context of narra-

154
John of Garland, The “Parisian Poetria” of John of Garland, ed. and trans. Traugott
Lawler (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1974) 36-38. See further Franz Quadlbau-
er, Die antike Theorie der genera dicendi im lateinischen Mittelalter (Graz: Böhlau, 1962)
274, 272-78.
155
With regard to persona, see Berthold Wald, “‘Rationalis naturae individua substantia’:
Aristoteles, Boethius und der Begriff der Person im Mittelalter,” Individuum und Indivi-
dualität, ed. Aertsen and Speer 374. For Boethius, Weihe argues, persona is not a generic
term, but is used to designate individuals such as Cicero or Plato. Generally, “Boethius
[hat] den Sinn der Maske ins Gegenteil verkehrt. Das Wesentliche ist für ihn gerade nicht,
dass sie den Repräsentanten eines Typus zeigt, sondern ihre individualisierende und iden-
titätsstiftende Wirkung. [...] So gesehen, erscheint die These nicht unbegründet, es handele
sich hier um einen produktiven Irrtum, dass ihn sein eigenwilliges, meines Erachtens irr-
tümliches Verständnis der Theatermaske zu seiner epochalen Persona-Definition verleitet
hat, mit der Boethius den Begriff durch das ganze Mittelalter hindurch bis in die Neuzeit
weiterreichte. Denn die Auffassung der Person als geistige Individualität ist seither wirk-
sam geblieben.” Weihe, Paradoxie der Maske 201-06, quotation at 204.
156
Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, “Costume and Disguise as Signs and Symbols of Medieval Visual
Culture,” Assaph 9 (1993): 1. For medieval costume, see Mary G. Houston, Medieval Cos-
tume in England and France: The 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries (1939; New York: Do-
ver, 1996); Laura F. Hodges, Chaucer and Costume: The Secular Pilgrims in the General
Prologue (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000) 1. The wearing of garments, specifically in the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries, was heavily codified. Despite the threat of harsh punish-
ment, individuals often ignored such codes, however. See Johannes Grabmayer, Europa
66 Part One: Masking Identities

tive performance: “The costume played a major role in the visuality of medieval
official ceremonies where the individual stepped into specific prewritten roles
and acted in a preconstructed spaces [sic] while relating to age-old symbolic ob-
jects.” Medieval costumes may have made masks largely redundant, in fact,
since the wearer’s body and face were often covered by them. The removal of
the cover or mask, moreover, constituted an element of surprise and wonder,
particularly in narrative texts, where the “disclosure of the real self forms a high-
light of the plot.”157 Medieval masking, in this wider sense, obviously relates to
questions of identification, role-playing, and ritual. The same is true of actual
masks and masking practices, which, contrary to generally-held assumptions,
did not disappear in the Middle Ages.
Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter open their account of Masks and Mask-
ing in Medieval and Tudor England with the observation that “Huge numbers of
people from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, in countries from Sweden to Sic-
ily, were involved in masking.”158 Naturally, the points of reference to masking
were different in the medieval period, and, as has been already mentioned, the
word mask does not occur before the sixteenth century.159 Unfortunately, the
documentary evidence does not make accessible the experiences of individuals
involved in masking activities; the evidence suggests, however, that generally
“masked disguising” was perceived of as “a moment partly out of normal con-
trol.”160 Whether or not masking practices were capable of subverting dominant
ideology or worked toward the maintenance of power, in terms of ‘carnival’ or
‘regulated transgression,’ is not presently of concern. What does matter is that
masks were not only available but popular, and that masks functioned as a visu-
alization of an identity different from that of the wearer. While the meaning of
masks is inevitably contingent on the (ritualistic) context, Twycross and Carpen-
ter argue that “all public covering of the face involves some push toward per-

im späten Mittelalter 1250-1500: Eine Kultur- und Mentalitätsgeschichte (Darmstadt:

WBG, 2004) 42-46; Martial Rose, “Robing and Its Significance in English Mystery
Plays,” Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New
York: Palgrave, 2001) 342. For the theatrical use of costumes, see William Tydeman, The
Theatre in the Middle Ages: Western European Stage Conditions, c. 800-1576 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978) 194-96.
157
Kenaan-Kedar, “Costume” 2, 4-6. Caroline Walker Bynum warns readers not to assume
emotions to be historically constant, specifically with respect to ‘wonder.’ After acknowl-
edging that the function of masks deserves further scrutiny, she sees the non-use of masks
in romances and the use of them in depictions of the Devil as “reflecting the concept of the
mask as a demonic object.” She concludes that “while in life it was used on limited occa-
sions of theatre and carnival, in art it became a definite demonic figure.” Bynum, Meta-
morphosis and Identity (New York: Zone, 2001) 6, 7.
158
Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor
England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 1. Shumel Moreh discusses the Arabic origins of the
word mask in “Masks in Medieval Arabic Theatre,” Assaph 9 (1993): 89-94.
159
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 2; see OED, 2nd ed., s.v. mask n. 3.
160
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 3-5, quotation at 5.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 67

formance. This relates to the crucial role of the face in the public presentation of
identity,” that is, the enactment of a role. This accounts for the usage of masks in
mystery plays as well as in masking-games and other popular activities involv-
ing masks insofar as there is a distinction between individual and mask when
one enters a different level of social interaction (game).161 In all these contexts,
the adoption of roles is what is at stake.
This holds also for the early stirrings of medieval theater, in which masking,
disguising, and mumming were popular practices. In his survey of medieval the-
atrical activities, J. D. A. Ogilvy cites Isidore of Seville’s definition (in Ety-
mologiae xviii) of histriones, which “sunt qui muliebri indumento gestus impu-
dicarum feminarum exprimebant” [those who in female garb mimicked the go-
ings-on of shameless women]. Ogilvy suspects, since there is no source for this
definition in classical sources, that this refers to folk festivals “in which the
wearing of women’s attire by men seems to have been common.”162 That
histriones sometimes used masks is attested also by a generally disapproving
Thomas de Chobham in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.163 From
the frequent admonishments to monasteries not to grant refuge to individuals as-
sociated with secular entertainments, it can be deduced that dramatic activity
was widespread and always seen as a potential threat to authority.164 Ogilvy
dates the usage of masks to the Council of Nantes in the 890s.165 Masks were
frequently used also in carnival and mummings, although evidence suggests that
carnival was less popular in Britain than in continental Europe.166 At mummings,
attendees concealed their identity rather than appearing as professional actors.167
Therefore, mumming appears to have been forbidden since it allowed disguised

161
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 7-8, 10-11.
162
J. D. A. Ogilvy, “Mimi, Scurrae, Histriones: Entertainers of the Early Middle Ages,”
Speculum 38.4 (1963): 605. See further Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game:
English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 2001) 52. For the use of masks at village festivals, see John Wesley Harris,
Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992) 58; Allardyce
Nicoll, Masks, Mimes, and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York: Cooper
Square, 1963) 164-65.
163
Qtd. in Clopper, Drama 30-31.
164
Ogilvy, “Mimi” 605-07; Clopper, Drama 38.
165
Ogilvy, “Mimi” 613. In his account of performance in Old Norse literature, Terry Gunnell
stresses the plenitude of disguising activities which “might be said to stem from faint
memories of the ritualistic use of animal costumes [...].” The existence of facial masks
evinces dramatic activity at the time of the sagas as do other descriptions of facial dis-
guise: “costumed disguises must have been used in ritual activity prior to the advent of
Christianity in Scandinavia,” which suggests a development from ritual activities to drama
in which myth, mask, and performance intersect. Gunnell, The Origins of Drama in Scan-
dinavia (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995) 80, 86-87, 92.
166
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 78-81.
167
Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300-1660: Volume One 1300-1576 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959) 198.
68 Part One: Masking Identities

people to commit crimes. Officially ordained mumming, though, did not pose
problems, wherefore mumming could develop into the early modern masque.168
The court developed distinctive masking practices based on their popular
counterparts. At court, popular mumming transforms into a “spectacular planned
entertainment,” in which scripted roles play an important part, as Twycross and
Carpenter emphasize. The theatricality of court mumming “draws particular
attention to the fictional narrative implicit in this structure. Many games and
folk customs contain the seed of a narrative: the simple factors of disguise,
encounter, competition, exchange, departure, can be read as episodes in a short
story.”169 Similarly, tournaments became more theatrical, scripted events involv-
ing masks. The shift from group combat to single combat increased the desire of
the participant to be identifiable: “The quest for personal achievement and glory
meant the gorgeous panoply must display, as well as protectively conceal, the
identity of the wearer.”170 The individual casts himself in the role he desires to
play. Furthermore, tournaments increasingly included impersonations, for in-
stance, the recreation of romance themes, in which knights played Arthurian
roles,171 evincing a close relationship between mask, performance, and national
narratives. At least on one occasion, the Troy story was performed at court. Ac-
cording to Glynne Wickham, the battle of Troy was staged at the wedding feast
for Charles V and Isabella of Bavaria (1389). The account of the event, com-
piled by Froissart, intimates that both the Trojan and Greek camps were distinc-
tive locations framed by the tables for the guests. The manufactured castle of the
Trojans and a pavilion of the Greeks as well as a ship were moveable props –
whether the actors were masked, however, remains uncertain.172
Masks were probably further used in both the mystery and morality plays.
Evidence dating to the thirteenth century suggests that in the miracles or ‘clerk
plays’ (the predecessors of the mystery plays), “all the actors were masked, or
else that masking was a characteristic part of the performance.” While the 1234
decretal of Gregory IX forbids masking, it only underlines the immense popular-
ity of masking practices. Nevertheless, Twycross and Carpenter concede that al-
though there is widespread evidence for the use of masks in mystery plays, the
evidence is complicated – sources either refer to masking in too general or too
narrow terms.173 Moreover, the masks used in the mystery plays do not invite the

168
Wickham, Early English Stages 202-03; Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 82-100.
169
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 152, 153.
170
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 104-07, quotation at 106.
171
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 112.
172
Wickham, Early English Stages 213-15, esp. 214 fig. 14. According to Wickham, how-
ever, masks postdate 1512 (219).
173
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 192, 193. For costume change in liturgical drama, see
Dunbar H. Ogden, “Costume Change in Liturgical Drama,” Early Drama, Art, and Music
Review 21.2 (1999): 80-88. For the church’s problems with masking and theatrical activ-
ity, see Peter Meredith, ed. and introd., “Latin Liturgical Drama,” The Medieval European
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 69

spectator to question the reality of the mask or wonder whatever might lie be-
neath the mask. Rather, the masks “demonstrate a character, or an idea: they do
not conceal or disguise anything.”174 The same is true of the masks frequently
employed in the morality plays. Toward the sixteenth century, Twycross and
Carpenter observe, the “images of concealing masks multiply [...], perhaps
shadowing the period’s explicit concern with role-play, self-presentation, uncer-
tain and fractured states,”175 usually in the context of outward virtue concealing
corruption. The prosopagraphical model might reframe this in terms of an incli-
nation to play with the option, if not stipulation, of masking certain aspects of
one’s identity, of rendering one’s masks less transparent. Such a tendency is also
manifest in the morality plays.
Within the morality plays, emblematic and allegorical representation would
often have been difficult since the masks would have to be fairly elaborate.
Moreover, “allegory and realism, the metaphorical and the literal, remain diffi-
cult to separate throughout the morality drama. This can cause problems in de-
ciding whether masks are literal or figurative.”176 In this context, the relationship
of mask and mirror becomes interesting and explicitly relates to notions of iden-
tification and selfhood,177 since the relationship suggests that selfhood and oth-
erness constitute the basis for self-reflection:
Mirrors offer a physical means by which individuals can see themselves from the out-
side, as others see them, and arguably as they really are. Yet the unreality of a mirror’s
reflection makes it also suspect, and open to the perceptual distortions of pride and
fantasy. Masks can demonstrate concealment of the truth, the false face that covers the
real identity. Yet conversely the masks worn by morality protagonists may reveal the
true state of the soul; they offer the spectator a reflection of inner truth that may also be
apparent to the wearer.178

Stage, 500-1550, ed. William Tydeman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001) 113-
17; Weihe, Paradoxie der Maske 32.
174
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 198. It should be noted that a certain flexibility is main-
tained within church drama. The creation of character in the Montecassino Passion, which
marks a decisive step in the development of church drama, amounts to an act of mytho-
logical bricolage, balancing role models and possibilities of choice. This is true for charac-
ters as well as the genre as such, which testifies to what Robert R. Edwards refers to as a
‘Christian antiquarianism’ in The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval
Drama (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977) esp. 176-88.
175
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 234. See further Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Me-
dieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (Hound-
mills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) 1-30.
176
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 244, 246.
177
See Herbert Grabes, Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass: Kontinuität und Originalität
der Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtiteln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des
13. bis 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973); Donald Maddox, Fictions of Iden-
tity in Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).
178
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 266. See further Sarah Carpenter, “Masks and Mirrors:
Questions of Identity in Medieval Morality Drama,” Medieval English Theatre 13.1-2
70 Part One: Masking Identities

The masks, as used in the morality plays, thus reveal that what one ‘wears’ are
masks in the first place, insofar as the alteration of one’s looks, by means of
make-up or simply by adopting a different perspective on oneself in the mirror,
alters the image in accordance with one’s desires or the role one would like to
play.179 This indeed brings the medieval understanding of masks and mirrors
into close proximity with face-work, with self-presentation.180
Whether or not such theatrical, masked role-play was widely popular, medie-
val individuals appropriated roles and masks on an everyday basis. Children, for
example, are known to learn about life qua role-play, playfully adopting their
parents’ roles.181 At the other end of the spectrum, there is a famous, early six-
teenth-century case of non-theatrical, very dramatic mask appropriation. Arnaud
du Tilh’s appropriation of the persona or even personae of Martin Guerre is a
rather extreme case. His near-impeccable approsopriation further evinces the
narrative construction of masks, since Arnaud must have had access to parts of
Guerre’s narrative and apparently knew and re-enacted specific verbal markers
of the impersonated man to the extent that even Martin’s wife was fooled.182
Such an extreme act of appropriating another’s identity is certainly exceptional,
but emphasizes that the narrative enactment of masks applies to antiquity, the
Middle Ages, and our ‘postmodern’ age alike. The foregoing summary demon-
strates that masks (despite the fact that the word persona may have lost its theat-

(1991): 7-17. Marie-Luce Demonet contends that mirrors are not at all transparent and that
it is their opacity that allows the reflection of the world. Qtd. in Hillman, Self-Speaking 4.
179
The medieval mirror thus often depicts not only that which is but also what should be, “of
what ought, or ought not to be.” Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 266, with reference to
Grabes, Speculum and Hillman, Self-Speaking.
180
Goffman cites Robert Ezra Park to the effect that the concept of person is derivative of
mask-wearing. Insofar “as this mask represents the conception we have formed of our-
selves – the role we are striving to live up to – this mask is our truer self, the self we
would like to be. In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an in-
tegral part of our personality.” Park qtd. in Goffman, Presentation of Self 19-20. The no-
tion of face remains eminently relevant, for which see Thomas Morawetz, Making Faces,
Playing God: Identity and the Art of Transformational Makeup (Austin: Univ. of Texas
Press, 2001) 3-4.
181
Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood,” Speculum 77.2 (2002):
449-50.
182
See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1983). Gurevich, who treats the case as an example of medieval identity for-
mation due to the rural setting stresses that people did not usually look at the face of the
person opposite them throughout the Middle Ages. He further believes that the ability to
recognize faces was not as developed as it is today. Gurevich, Origins 247. According to
Augustine, however, eye contact was frequently established in order to communicate
wishes in De doctrina christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green, Oxford Early Christian
Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) II, 5. Moreover, J. A. Burrow finds nothing in the
textual evidence forming the basis of his study to evince “differences in physical form be-
tween facial expressions then and now.” Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narra-
tive (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) 70.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 71

rical connotations) fascinated people, were often part of narratively scripted self-
performances, and frequently related to issues of identification. The extent to
which individuals were able to appropriate masks ‘horizontally’ rather than
merely adopting archetypal masks crucially hinges on the availability of narra-
tive models, the topic of the next section.

3. Medieval Prosopagraphical Selfhood

My short account of medieval masking practices indicates that, as in classical
drama, masking was usually a scripted event in which individuals assumed roles
unrelated to their own identity – roles which nonetheless reflected identification
processes in general insofar as the question of what it is like to be someone else
always entails the question of what it means to be ‘one’s self.’ The question I
wish to address now is to what extent medieval autobiographies and other (nar-
rative) self-images can be seen in terms of prosopagraphical processes. The me-
dieval self is certainly a narrative self since medieval identities are ‘book-ed’
identities in two ways. First of all, medieval writers often conceptualize their (or
others’) identity metaphorically as books. Second, these often Biblical concep-
tualizations are manifested also in less clerical narratives, in autobiographies and
romances, for example, but also in visual narratives such as self-portraits. While
these discourses function primarily to disseminate role models, they also show
the individual’s capacity to deconstruct narratives, locally and globally, and to
create potentially new narratives, new selves. It is especially in this field of in-
quiry, however, that many scholars argue that the ‘individuals’ emerging in
autobiographies and self-portraits are never unique individuals since the univer-
sal is what lends them their identity. And yet, the above account has indicated
that the universal plays a role also for contemporary individuals who are not
able to construct themselves ex nihilo.
Before engaging with medieval autobiographical narratives, it is important to
acknowledge the role of books for processes of identification. Ernst Robert Cur-
tius does so in remarking upon the usage of book metaphors in discussions of
selfhood and nature in religious (con)texts.183 More recently, Eric Jager investi-
gates the metaphors for selfhood across the ages with particular respect to what
he calls the Book of the Heart, which axiomatically combines the trope of the
self as text with the heart, regarded as the seat of the emotions and/or the source
of vital functions throughout the Middle Ages. Examining the book of the heart,
Jager believes, “is to examine the origins of the modern individual.”184 His his-

183
Curtius, European Literature 302-47. For the relevance of books for processes of identity
formation, see further Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in
Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); Eugene Vance, Mervelous
Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (1986; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska
Press, 1989).
184
Jager, Book xix. His account offers illuminating insights into individual stages of book
production and their relationship to models of selfhood. In the twelfth century, in which
72 Part One: Masking Identities

tory of the book of the heart is important in two related ways. On the one hand,
he provides a cognitive account of (medieval) selfhood that underscores the nar-
rative nature thereof. On the other hand, he assembles a plethora of sources, in
which the trope of the heart appears in relation to selfhood, frequently analyzing
how the latter notion is construed within the former. My account of medieval
narrative selfhood is supplementary in that I am interested in what kinds of nar-
ratives people used to fashion themselves and, more pressingly, how these narra-
tives are structurally organized.
Another important recent investigation into narrative selfhood is Laurel
Amtower’s Engaging Words. From the premise that the act of reading books is
constitutive of selfhood, Amtower argues that individuality becomes possible
since lay readers could increasingly question the authority of the sources avail-
able to them. Her engagement with the history of the book and the portrayal of
reading acts shows a transformation from Bernard of Clairvaux’s unbending be-
lief in the truth of printed matter to Chaucer’s “distrust” of the written word.
Like the perception of authority and truth in literature, “the concept of human
identity in the Middle Ages was transformed by the idea that the individual as
text might be written or revised by the individual as author.” Amtower points
out that for many late medieval readers, the act of reading offered them a poten-
tially new vision of the world.185 I find particularly interesting her observation
that with the increasing accessibility of books, “readers began themselves con-
sidering the various ways in which texts and books improved them as individu-
als, perhaps by guiding and reconciling, as many texts claimed, the private and
social roles.”186 Again, in applying the prosopagraphical model, one can grasp
how this reconciliation can be achieved by mythological bricolage. Amtower
likewise believes in a structural continuity of selfhood into which new roles,
read new ideologies, are integrated. The Renaissance marks less the “emergence
of the modern self than [... a] site at which this new textual self is reinscribed
into a set of changed political and ethical parameters. The guidelines for subjec-
tivity [...] are long established; it is instead the institutions, the ideologies, that
change.”187 As in Jager’s study and in recent work in cultural psychology, self-

“authors created the most detailed model of the self as a book that had ever appeared up to
this time,” the increase of private reading corresponds to an increasing individualization.
In terms of book history, the codex had several advantages over scrolls in this respect,
since it was “divisible into separate parts, a quality that obviously appealed to the scholas-
tic mind seeking analogies for a complex and multipartite self” (44, 50). Thus, this self lit-
erally represents several horizontally layered narratives, amounting to the layers of pro-
sopagraphical selfhood.
185
Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages
(New York: Palgrave, 2000) 10. She stresses the relationship between reading and self at
the beginning of her investigation: “The individual came to be pervasively described in
terms of textual metaphors. That is, the self was the texts s/he read” (9).
186
Amtower, Engaging Words 11-12.
187
Amtower, Engaging Words 15-16.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 73

hood is discussed in terms of autobiographical memory, providing the mythemes

and archetypes for the creation of new roles, of new masks. Curtius, Jager, and
Amtower are but three examples that implicitly raise questions about claims ac-
cording to which written documents are not people.188 While documents are
clearly not flesh-and-blood individuals, the ‘narrativity’ of documents may nev-
ertheless yield important insights into how narratives constitute people.
For the investigation of medieval prosopagraphical selfhood, autobiographi-
cal and literary discourses thus become crucial. In fact, scholars frequently (and
somewhat mistakenly) discuss Augustine’s Confessions as the first autobiogra-
phy. Moreover, the Confessions often has to bear testimony to the discovery of
inwardness in the Middle Ages. Charles Taylor, for example, writes that it is
“hardly an exaggeration to say that it was Augustine who introduced the in-
wardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of
thought.” For the mystical and heretical traditions of the later Middle Ages, the
“Augustinian theory of inwardness” is further seen as highly influential. 189
Augustine’s Confessions, however, is not exemplary for medieval autobio-
graphical practice. Rather, the absence of similar texts throughout most of the
Middle Ages is often seen as evidence for the exceptional status of the Confes-
sions.190 Unfortunately, this absence of autobiographies was also instrumental in
reinforcing the widespread belief that self-consciousness was underdeveloped in
the Middle Ages, that individuals were not interested in self-representation.191 In
his Geschichte der Autobiographie, Georg Misch also attests to the relative scar-
city of classical and medieval autobiographies, emphasizing Augustine’s promi-
nent position in the development of the genre.192 In his opinion, the rhetorically-
inclined classical autobiographies make way for medieval autobiography, which
he characterizes as stemming from a general urge to tell stories, a medieval Er-
zählfreudigkeit. In this context, Misch takes issue with Burckhardt insofar as
medieval autobiographies do testify to an interest in individuality. Nevertheless,
Misch thinks that in contrast to Renaissance individuality, medieval persons,

188
Gurevich, Origins 13. For books as metaphorical selves, see further Neil Rhodes, “Articu-
late Networks: The Self, the Book and the World,” The Renaissance Computer: Knowl-
edge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2000) 184-96.
189
Taylor, Sources of the Self 131; Aers, “Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists” 182-85.
See further Robert Folkenflik, “The Self as Other,” Culture of Autobiography, ed. Folken-
flik 215-34, esp. 215-18; Christian Strub, “Singularität des Individuums? Eine begriffsge-
schichtliche Problemskizze,” Individuum und Individualität, ed. Aertsen and Speer 37-56.
190
Benton, “Consciousness of Self” 264-72; Gurevich, Origins 250.
191
See Wilhelm Kölmel, “Autobiographien der Frühzeit,” Individuum und Individualität, ed.
Aertsen and Speer 667.
192
Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie: Das Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main:
Schulte-Bulmke, 1955) 1: 8-9, henceforth cited as Misch, Mittelalter. He discusses
Augustine in his Geschichte der Autobiographie: Das Altertum, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt/Main:
Schulte-Bulmke, 1950) 637-78.
74 Part One: Masking Identities

while capable of autonomous action, remain steeped in the universal, wherefore

he characterizes medieval selfhood as ‘morphologic individualism.’193
As concerns autobiography, Misch argues that medieval autobiographies may
appear to be rare, but they are not exceptional; if one considers autobiographical
sections in learned works and other discursive practices (in Arabic, Byzantine,
and Germanic sources), the numbers actually increase quickly.194 These medie-
val autobiographies are different from their modern counterparts, but there are
some general developments. And yet, many studies concerned with medieval
autobiographies ultimately assert that they, with the possible exception of late
medieval self-writing, primarily express exemplary roles. On this view, the me-
dieval individual emerges yet again merely as a representation of the universal.
Hans Robert Jauss stresses this in his historical sketch of developing individual-
ity. While he believes that Christianity marks the beginning of modern individu-
alism in that writers like Augustine discover uniqueness within themselves, the
quest for the interior self is paradoxical, since it throws the individual back to an
inquiry of how God can ‘live’ in people’s memories. The individual soul does
not represent individuality, he argues. Rather, the individual soul is an allegory
of the universal, an “Allegorie des Allgemeinen.”195 This applies even to
Augustine’s Confessions, which is “commonly read as if it were an autobiogra-
phy.” The last four books, especially the commentary on Genesis in Book XI,
however, complicate such a reading. Augustine increasingly grows “dissatisfied
with the narration of his personal life as a source of true wisdom and will conse-
quently invite his soul [...] to reflect upon its own inner, spiritual substance
rather than upon external images of the creation that have until now corrupted
his soul by infiltrating his memory.”196 The point here is, though, that he does
provide these external images as a narrative of his experiences which largely
constitutes his autobiographical memory, whereby Augustine provides a model
for autobiographical discourse. Even if his life ultimately is subsumed under an

193
Misch, Mittelalter 1: 14-15, 18-24.
194
Misch, Mittelalter 2: 24-26.
195
Hans Robert Jauss, “Vom plurale tantum der Charaktere” 244-45. Dieter Kartschoke
stresses that medieval Latin autobiographies, including Augustine’s Confessions, were a
matter of constituting examples, of role models; only in the late Middle Ages and the early
modern period do personal and private memories replace “repräsentativen Memoria.”
Kartschoke, “Ich-Darstellung in der volkssprachlichen Literatur,” Entdeckung des Ich, ed.
Dülmen 74-75.
196
Vance, Mervelous Signals 2-3, 23. The Confessions marks “a progress away from the
rhetoric of autobiographical narrative itself, because such a narrative is ultimately the me-
diator of false pretences. The Confessions may be seen as a sequence not only of events,
but also of discursive acts which carry us beyond the narrative to the philosophical, and
beyond the philosophical to the exegetical” (28). Zumthor argues that within Augustine’s
discussion of Genesis, “individual experience, even on the level of the deep intention of
the text is transcended.” Paul Zumthor, “Autobiography in the Middle Ages?” Genre 6
(1973): 30.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 75

allegory of the universal, allegory itself is not necessarily as transcendent or

even transparent as is suggested by this criticism; allegory is a mode of concep-
tualizing the world that not only accommodates, but also invites difference.
That medieval individuality is limited by the rule of the universal is an asser-
tion frequently reoccurring not only in scholarship dealing with autobiographical
narratives, but also in studies of self-portraiture. While the prosopagraphical
model enables one to see in a momentary self-portrait a particular combination
of masks, medieval self-portraits, criticism emphasizes, shows a preference for
the type over the unique individual.197 Many art historians would thus agree, for
instance, that Dürer’s self-portrait of 1498 marks the decisive step in which the
self-portrait becomes autonomous in the sense that it shows an individual not
embedded within other contexts. Most of the individuals depicted in medieval
self-portraits, however, are embedded in specific contexts.198 Recently, art histo-
rians have become skeptical of this perspective. Horst Bredekamp, for example,
locates medieval individuality in an altogether different kind of self-portrayal:
the signature. Around the year 1030, the first artists signed their own work –
Michelangelo was not the first to promote his own work by means of a signa-
ture. In Bredekamp’s opinion, this was not an extraordinary occurrence at all,
but rather a ‘mass phenomenon.’ Such self-referentiality is not restricted to
painting and portraiture and can be substantiated also in the work of many me-
dieval architects. During the twelfth-century renaissance, however, authoritative
limitations to the freely unfolding individuality can be witnessed, for instance, in
the architectural program of Bernard of Clairvaux, which discourages authorial
architectural statements. Bredekamp argues that the anonymity which thus re-
sults from authority’s envy considering the excessive individuality on the part of
the artists does not reflect on actual limitations of individuality. And yet, the
Gothic style generally represents a challenge to self-proliferation. The cathedral
of Chartres demonstrates the dangers of excessive individuality and re-imposes
order. While Bredekamp submits that it would be absurd to claim that medieval
people were not individuals, Gothicism does mark a return to a universal order.
Even if it is true that Gothicism can be seen as an allegory of the universal, alle-
gory is not quite the transparently universal mode suggested here.199
Questions of self-portraiture are prevalent also in Annabel Patterson’s
counter-chronological history of self-referentiality, which is important for my
argument because of its overlap with the prosopagraphical model. Starting with

197
Fortunately, historians increasingly study self-referential material in non-autobiographical
sources, for which see Klaus Arnold, Sabine Schmolinsky, and Urs Martin Zahnd, eds.,
Das dargestellte Ich: Studien zu Selbstzeugnissen des späten Mittelalters und der frühen
Neuzeit (Bochum: Winkler, 1999).
198
For Gunter Schweikhart, this suitably captures the difference between medieval and Ren-
aissance individuality. Schweikhart, “Vom Signaturbildnis zum autonomen Selbstporträt,”
Das dargestellte Ich, ed. Arnold, Schmolinsky, and Zahnd 165, 187.
199
Bredekamp, “Mittelalter als Epoche der Individualität” 193-94, 201-13, 228-34.
76 Part One: Masking Identities

John Locke’s concern about procuring a portrait of himself for inclusion in the
English edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, she moves
backward in time in an attempt to dispense with Burckhardt’s periodic division
and to blur the borderline between self-portraiture and portraiture. She suggests
that modern and early modern identity share a mixed concern “of self and social
consciousness, of egocentricity and self-ironization, of intellectual aspiration,
economic constraints, personal relationships, and public goals.” One key differ-
ence between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is that the latter period
could not take the portrait for granted. Moving backward from Locke, “portraits
become less ubiquitous than they were in his culture. Nevertheless, the exhibits
that follow raise the same issues as those to which Locke has alerted us,”
namely, continuity, the relationship between the personal and the emblematic,
and juridical aspects. Patterson suggests that the portrait for which a person
dresses up in specific attire and poses in a particular way is no less a self-portrait
than an actual self-portrait.200 From Milton, she moves to Donne’s commis-
sioned portraits evincing such concerns before engaging with two portraits of
Chaucer – in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales and the Harley
manuscript of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes – both originating around 1410.
In so doing, she confronts the assertion that the miniatures are not actually por-
traits but identify a type rather than an individual, that the portrait is
“unidimensional, uncomplex.”201 Patterson notes, however, that Hoccleve ‘edits’
the image, arguing that the medieval lens does not necessarily preclude the de-
piction of individuality. With reference to Janet Backhouse, she first observes
that “dynastic and social portrait painting was well advanced all over Europe by
the middle of the fourteenth century.” Second, Patterson embeds the portraits in
the context of “defences of the image against contemporary Lollard icono-
clasm.” Most importantly, she refers to self-portraiture in a truly prosopagraphi-
cal fashion in acknowledging that Hoccleve was a poet of self-portraiture, of
identity: “Hoccleve’s work is one continual self-portrait, to the point of eccen-
tricity.”202 This is to emphasize, from a different perspective, that literary works,
whether or not they are autobiographical, always represent a mask, or a combi-
nation of masks. Literary texts are prominent disseminators of what I refer to as
masks and mythemes that audiences can adopt for (re)creating their autobio-
graphical selves. What Benson says about contemporary narratives likewise per-

200
Annabel Patterson, “‘The human face divine’: Identity and the Portrait from Locke to
Chaucer,” Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Sally McKee (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999) 161-62.
201
Alan T. Gaylord, “Portrait of a Poet,” The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation,
ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library; To-
kyo: Yushodo, 1997) 138, cited also by Annabel Patterson, “Identity” 171.
202
Annabel Patterson, “Identity” 171-72, 173. For Hoccleve’s self-fashioning, see further Lee
Patterson, “‘What is me?’: Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hoccleve,” SAC 23
(2001): 437-70.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 77

tains to the Middle Ages: Besides the church, “Primary makers and purveyors of
such [self-constituting] narratives will be poets, writers and other artists.”203
The ‘self-portraits’ disseminated in literary discourse are indeed crucial for
processes of identification whether or not narratives were circulated as written
texts or by word of mouth. As Gurevich observes, since the individual uses the
available language for self-construction – a language embedded within a net-
work of rituals, norms, codes, and so on – this language becomes the language
of the self. For Gurevich, this means that the codification of textual evidence
may lead to the manufacture of masks and roles, behind which one may not find
an authentic self.204 The prosopagraphical corollary of this position is that be-
hind the mask one would only find other masks and in them the narrative means
to fabricate masks in the first place. It is tempting to conclude with Leo Spitzer
that within this ‘pool of narratives’ the medieval poetic ‘I’ had “more freedom
and more breadth than it has today.” And yet, Spitzer quickly brings back me-
dieval poetic individuality to the universal insofar as “at that time the concept of
intellectual property did not exist because literature dealt not with the individual
but with mankind: the ‘ut in pluribus’ was an accepted standard.” The “medieval
public saw in the ‘poetic I’ a representative of mankind, [...] it was interested
only in this representative rôle of the poet.”205 Contrary to the assumption that a
different person may lurk behind the persona of the author, I submit that the col-
lection of other masks ‘hidden’ underneath the authorial persona inevitably in-
tersects with the narratives of the performance,206 that the medieval “text dis-
closes aspects of this web [of discourses and social practices], potentially reveal-
ing something about [...] projects, ideologies, and anxieties. Some texts may
manifest disturbing contradictions or tensions in prevailing theory and practice
while others, probably rather few, may even dramatize and explore them criti-
cally.”207 Given the intersections between selves and cultures potentially mapped
by the prosopagraphical model, it might be more suitable to inquire not into the
character of the author ‘hidden’ behind the mask, but into the imaginative space
a multiplicity of competing narratives created for the audience to re-imagine
themselves. The aspect of entertainment is not to be overlooked in this context.
If entertainment value was crucial for medieval audiences, such entertainment
would be presumably achieved by difference rather than similarity. If Christian-
ity were to have been a monolithic mythical system, the disseminated roles and
masks would always be the same. Since this is not true of characterizations in
literary texts, this suggests that the performance of roles always principally en-

203
Benson, Cultural Psychology 54.
204
Gurevich, Origins 238-39.
205
Leo Spitzer, “Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4
(1946): 415.
206
Spitzer concedes that there is a relationship between the empirical and poetical individual.
Spitzer, “Note” esp. 416-17.
207
Aers, Community 4.
78 Part One: Masking Identities

tailed the opportunity to question standardized role narratives. That a persona

need not be identical with the author is clear. This does not preclude the possi-
bility, however, to glimpse processes of individuation within narrative texts.
Processes of individuation with regard to the literary persona have received
much critical attention. Peter Dronke, for instance, studies Poetic Individuality
in the context of the twelfth-century ‘discovery of the individual’ in which he
locates a wide “range of poetic individuality” and an “abundance of poetic ex-
periment.”208 While Dronke’s stress on experiment and the potential for original
self-expression has not been uncontroversial,209 other studies corroborate the
foregrounding of the literary persona. Robert Hanning is convinced that “one of
the central motivating forces of the twelfth-century Renaissance was a new de-
sire on the part of literate men and women to understand themselves as single,
unique persons – as what we would call individuals.” Among the motors of this
development toward unique individuality Hanning lists “both a new grasp of
Latin as a literary language capable of expressing personal reactions in all their
complexity, and the impetus for a new, nonarchaic vernacular culture, greatly
expanded in mimetic strategies, which creatively adapted classical works and
themes.” The individual does not survive into the thirteenth century, though. The
reason for this lies in a more rigidly organized society; the increased power of
the papacy to enforce ecclesiastical rules; the codification of confessional prac-
tices; and, in the realm of the arts, a preference for “more mannered techniques.”
Moreover, “the allegorization of all parts of the Mass and the increasing empha-
sis on the dramatic elevation of the Host testified equally [...] to tendencies sub-
versive of accepting the individual experience of sensory reality as a normative
one.” Hanning believes that the “dramatic epiphany” built into Mass “supports
the idea that outward reality – bread and wine – masks a higher inward reality –
the body and the blood of Christ – for God’s chosen ones. [...] In short, the
autonomy of experience is denied, and the concept of the individual becomes the
handmaiden of an epiphanic, ‘elitist’ view of Truth,” a cultural transformation in
which a “canonic impulse” resembles the attempt to order a newly existing liter-
ary tradition into a coherent whole.210 As shown above, this need not inevitably
limit the possibilities of self-expression, however. On the one hand, a stronger
desire for codification may testify to a liberalization of discursive modes. On the
other hand, allegory is not necessarily a reductive narrative mode. And yet, ac-
counts such as Dronke’s and Hanning’s are seen recently as problematic even in
their application to the twelfth-century renaissance.
Annette Gerok-Reiter complicates the ‘discovery of the individual’ from the
perspective of the narrative structures that embed literary personae. While me-
dieval narratives are predominantly structure-oriented, modern audiences favor
208
Dronke, Poetic Individuality 23.
209
See, e.g., Annette Gerok-Reiter, “Auf der Suche nach der Individualität in der Literatur
des Mittelalters,” Individuum und Individualität, ed. Aertsen and Speer 749.
210
Hanning, Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance 1-2, 234-37.
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 79

subject-oriented narratives. Naturally, structure-oriented narratives are beset

with types – characters are either good or evil. Within the structure-oriented nar-
ratives, there is further no subjective ‘inner space,’ no self-reflection, no room
for individual agency (choice), and no deviation from cultural norms.211 Gerok-
Reiter emphasizes that it is nonetheless necessary to study the medieval narra-
tive persona as an important step in the development toward individuality, al-
though, as she illustrates in a reading of Parzival, individualizing tendencies
tend to occur in the margins of the narratives, which become a laboratory for
experimenting with individuality. What should be studied here is deviance and
the possibilities of role-playing, with a focus not only on what individuals expe-
rience but also how they reflect the world.212 Even if medieval literature is struc-
ture-oriented, it is important to remember that the audience inevitably responds
to narratives, enjoying certain texts while disliking others. This in itself consti-
tutes individualization.213 Moreover, the virtual adoption of a new mask in the
act of recreating or listening to a text (that is, approsopriation) renders the per-
sona itself a locus not only of experience but also reflection.
Authorship is, of course, a concept closely related to medieval literary perso-
nae, which, in turn, provides the narrative modes and structures that become the
tools for listeners and readers to ‘make’ themselves. Notably, it is also in the
course of the twelfth century that third-person narratives increasingly yield to
first-person texts;214 authors begin to step out of the realm of anonymity. Be-
cause of this development, the world could be recontextualized: “Slowly, the
world, which had been described by Augustine in the Confessions as an unfurled
scroll, came to be ‘detextualized’ in inverse proportion to the ‘retextualization’
of human authors of individual poems, of individual texts ‘unfurled’ before their
listeners and readers. These were authors who took specific names, who es-
chewed anonymity.” While this describes a process akin to the mythological bri-
colage within the prosopagraphical model, Burt Kimmelman emphasizes that
authorial names are fictional: “They alluded to their real authors, yet they were
also meant to be comprehended as separate from their authors – within their
authors’ texts. With the emergence of the literary persona, which in its early
stages was named after its author, fiction in its modern conception appeared [...].
There could be no history as a distinct genre until there was, in contrast, fic-
tion.”215 The prosopagraphical model might in fact emerge as a useful heuristic

211
Gerok-Reiter, “Auf der Suche” 751-52. Medieval literature, that is, chiefly trades in flat
characters. Individuality is not a matter of ‘colorful characters,’ though. See Karl Heinz
Ohlig, “Christentum – Individuum – Kirche,” Entdeckung des Ich, ed. Dülmen 14, 38-40.
212
Gerok-Reiter, “Auf der Suche” 761-62, 764-65.
213
Volker Gerhardt, “Individualität: Das Element der Welt,” ABBAW 8 (2000): 156-57.
214
See Burt Kimmelman, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emer-
gence of the Modern Literary Persona (New York: Lang, 1996); Hanning, Individual in
Twelfth-Century Romance.
215
Kimmelman, Poetics of Authorship 230.
80 Part One: Masking Identities

tool to capture the complex interplay between personae and authors insofar as
literary personae can indeed be regarded as masks which authors (and individu-
als) can appropriate (opacity) or approsopriate (transparency, translucence). Acts
of impersonation, of layering and linking divergent masks, are by no means ex-
clusive to authors such as Chaucer, who is usually mentioned in the context of
impersonation and authorial encoding. As my analyses demonstrate, Benoît de
Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne are aware of being involved in a textual
performance of a specific role vis-à-vis the audience. In their engagement with
the (fictionalized) history of Troy, they theorize models of authorship and liter-
ary careers in important ways – developments toward which my interpretations
frequently gesture, albeit without a necessary systematization that inevitably lies
beyond the scope of this study.216
While the above discussion of medieval personae seems to affirm (at least
inklings of) medieval individuality, most scholars are quick to point out that the
pervasiveness of the universal immediately contains individuality. One recent
example is Dieter Kartschoke’s interpretation of Eilhart von Oberg’s twelfth-
century Tristan and Isolde. Although the text at first includes everything neces-
sary for generating individuality – non-interchangeability of individual destiny,
self-consciousness, reflection, introspection, and self-reflection – Isolde’s com-
plaint, a prayer, is immediately seen as casting doubt on the possibility of indi-
viduality. Moreover, love in the text is not a subjective experience but becomes
objectified qua allegorical associations with “Frau Minne.”217 The scenery for all
literary performance is governed by an unalterable, universal order. The several
narrative ‘genres’ analyzed by Kartschoke reveal only that the idea of authentic
individuality is always already delimited by the universal.218
The pervasiveness of the universal is perhaps invoked all too quickly in the
many studies that see in the universal restrictions to individuality. It seems to me
that the issues with universality might rather point up contemporary concerns

216
For concepts of literary careers, see Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning
and Ending Poetic Careers (1981; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984); Richard Hel-
gerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Ber-
keley: Univ. of California Press, 1983); Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas, eds.,
European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto:
Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002). Robert Edwards’s essay in this volume, “Medieval Literary
Careers: The Theban Track,” complicates any hurried generalizations about medieval ca-
reer models (104-05). My interpretation of the different Troy stories, however, evinces an
interesting tension between Ovidian and Virgilian poetological paradigms, which perhaps
represent a preface to the “Ovidian counter-nationhood” which Cheney sees as opposing
the Virgilian laureate career in the Renaissance.
217
Kartschoke, “Ich-Darstellung” 61.
218
Kartschoke, “Ich-Darstellung” 64-65: “Und der Horizont, vor dem er [the medieval ‘indi-
vidual’] handelt, empfindet und reflektiert, ist das unverrückbare Allgemeine, die gottge-
wollte und mit Sinn ausgestattete Welt in allen sie garantierenden und über sie hinauswei-
senden Ordnungen.”
 Chapter Three: Prosopagraphical Selfhood 81

than reflect medieval actuality. For one, as Alasdair MacIntyre observes, medie-
val society was not pervaded by a single monolithic ideology. There is no doubt
that those in power would have liked to impose a universal, homogeneous order,
which in and of itself simply underwrites the heterogeneity of medieval cultures.
For MacIntyre one of the central medieval concerns was precisely “how to edu-
cate and civilize human nature in a culture in which human life was in danger of
being torn apart by the conflict of too many ideals, too many ways of life.”219
These ideals and ways of life are recontextualized in terms of the many roles and
role narratives available for identity formation, which constitute and “bind the
individual to the communities in and through which alone specifically human
goods are to be attained.” While this seemingly contrasts with modern individu-
alism, in which “a community is simply an arena in which individuals each pur-
sue their own self-chosen conception of the good life, and [in which] political
institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes such self-
determined activity possible,” contemporary life becomes a narrative arena in
which the community nonetheless takes a prominent role:
I spoke earlier of the agent as not only an actor, but an author. Now I must emphasize
that what the agent is able to do and say intelligibly as an actor is deeply affected by
the fact that we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own
narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life [...] we are always
under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find
ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main charac-
ter in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama
constrains the others.220
The modern self, then, is not liberated from certain constraints (social norms,
values, in short: a more or less universal ideology) provided by groups which
are, in turn, constituted by individuals. Without the general, there are no particu-
lars; in Volker Gerhardt’s words: “Das Allgemeine ist eine Erkenntnisbedingung
des Individuellen – und umgekehrt. Gäbe es nichts Individuelles, hätten wir
nichts zu denken. Und die Individualität der Dinge erfahren wir nur in der An-
wendung allgemeiner Begriffe.”221 Rephrased in terms of prosopagraphical self-
hood, the differences between pre-modern and (post)modern individuality are
primarily a matter of the circulated archetypes and mythemes that are and have

219
MacIntyre, After Virtue 165. For medieval heterogeneity, see further Aers, Community 6;
Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100 – c.
1550 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2000). Peter Haidu challenges the
binarism of medieval versus modern identities along similar lines: “What is asked of the
subject is historically specific; the structure of the modern subject is not radically different
in nature from subjectivities adumbrated, constructed, and formulated in the Middle
Ages.” Haidu, The Subject Medieval / Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press) 341-64, quotation at 363.
220
MacIntyre, After Virtue 172, 195, 213.
221
Gerhardt, “Individualität” 152.
82 Part One: Masking Identities

been subject to change.222 If individuality – past and present – is a matter of pro-

sopagraphy, then artists and intellectuals are the chief providers of narratives
that are not only constitutive of selves, but also theorize and potentially change
the circulated narratives of individual and collectivity alike, as my analyses of
the medieval Troy story will demonstrate.
The foregoing illustrates that medieval individuality is no less unique than its
modern counterpart insofar as – general frameworks notwithstanding – the auto-
biographical self and memory (re)create narratives based on a unique sequence
of experience. Moreover, what renders both medieval and modern individuality
unique is the combination of masks rather than distinctive traits. Individuals can
choose from a multiplicity of roles that they either mythically appropriate or my-
thologically approsopriate. This corresponds in interesting ways to the flexibility
and complexity entailed in medieval masking, about which Twycross and Car-
penter write:
Both audience and, ultimately, mask-wearer must recognise the mask as a reflection of
inner reality: yet it remains always potentially under the control of the character who
wears it. This emphasises a particular conception of selfhood: by their own will and
actions these characters can change the aspect of the self the mask represents; by rec-
ognising the truth of the mask they can find the power to put off its entrapment. Con-
sequently a tension is set up between face and mask, for although the mask represents
a truth about the self that cannot be denied, it is possible by changing the self to cancel
the mask.223
Such prosopagraphical processes, as they emerge in (fictional) role-play, enable
individuals to alter narratives and, therefore, create unique masks and circulate
new role models. Structurally, this at once attests to the importance of frame-
works, which are – whether modern or medieval – ultimately subject to change.
What may be different in the Middle Ages is the number of masks, the ideologi-
cal pervasiveness of specific mythemes and/or particular clusters of mythemes,
and so on. In fact, it is by means of the model of prosopagraphical selfhood that
the varying degree of verticality (opacity) and horizontality (transparency) in
medieval and modern texts can be potentially mapped. At first glance, it appears
that in the Middle Ages, widely circulated masks would usually strive for over-
all similarity, if not identity, which contrasts with postmodern theories of indi-
viduality, in which a desired multiplicity may be seen as threatening person-
hood. This view of medieval individuality suggests yet again that despite all in-
timations of individuality, selves remain mere allegories of the universal. While
such assumptions have already been complicated from a contemporary perspec-
tive, they likewise appear doubtful from a medieval perspective. Perhaps the
medieval ‘rule of allegory’ entails a more flexible epistemological mode than
the present-day Rule of Metaphor.

222
See also Kartschoke, “Ich-Darstellung” 63.
223
Twycross and Carpenter, Masks 277.
 CHAPTER FOUR
Medieval Metaphors of Self: Toward Conceptual Allegory

This chapter revisits the misleading metaphor of medieval individuality as alle-

gory of the universal. When scholars refer to medieval individuals as allegories
of the universal, allegory is clearly meant to evoke negative connotations. In
terms of the prosopagraphical model, medieval individuals become completely
un-veiled and transparent, permeated by the Godly light of Christian universal-
ism. As opposed to this Jaussian allegorical track, Christian universality can be
seen as a veil covering personal identity and suppressing individuality, that is, an
opaque mask – Burckhardt’s ‘veil’ – is imposed. Both tracks, opacity and trans-
parency, are little desirable: either selfhood becomes a matter of the same hy-
pergoods (mythemes), informing and thereby dissolving all masks, or selfhood
becomes one mask, presumably that of Christian doctrine, veiling all other
masks and fostering a universal rather than personal identity – or rather non-
identity. In my opinion, medieval allegory is neither a transparent nor an opaque
epistemological mode. Rather, it is both at the same time; allegory is a translu-
cent mode – doubly so.224 In fact, Otto von Simson notes that the most fre-
quently reoccurring adjectives in medieval philosophical discourse are luminous,
lucid, and clear. He emphasizes the importance of translucence for medieval
culture (he uses the adjective transparent) as tangible in Gothic architecture and
in stained glass windows – “The objective value of a thing is determined by the
degree to which it partakes of light.” Moreover, “Light, which is ordinarily con-
cealed by matter, appears as the active principle; and matter is aesthetically real
only insofar as it partakes of, and is defined by, the luminous quality of light.
[...] In this decisive aspect, then, the Gothic may be described as transparent, di-
aphanous architecture.”225 In analogy to the screen, behind which God is con-
224
My argument for allegory as a translucent mode is indebted to Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s
Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: Univ. of To-
ronto Press, 2004). She takes issue with what one could refer to as allegory’s ‘transpar-
ency fallacy.’ Emphasizing that many studies of allegory choose as their examples pure al-
legories, she observes that “The transparent mediation between subject and object, be-
tween reader and meaning, is the unreachable goal of language; in particular, it is the goal
of allegory” (7). From a different perspective, she likewise distinguishes between vertical
and horizontal allegory in ways similar to my visualization of mapping processes in terms
of Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy (14, and see below).
225
Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval
Concept of Order, expanded ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989) 51-52, 4.
For the aesthetics of light, see Edgar de Bruyne, L’Esthétique du moyen age (Louvain:
Éditions de l’institut supérieur de philosophie, 1947) esp. 70-79.
84 Part One: Masking Identities

cealed in order to be revealed, however, the light is usually filtered, turning

transparency into translucence.226 Marshall McLuhan adopts von Simson’s dis-
cussion of translucence in Gothic architecture and stained glass in order to ap-
proach the human senses, particularly in relation to Biblical exegesis, which ad-
dresses several senses at once. The medieval ‘light through,’ he argues is re-
placed – after the invention of the printing press – by a modern ‘light on.’ In oral
cultures, individuals can read through the letter: “the literal is inclusive, contains
all possible meanings and levels. So it was for Aquinas. But the visual man of
the sixteenth century is impelled to separate level from level, and function from
function, in a process of specialist exclusion.”227 It is in this context of layering
that I would like to explore the parallels between allegorical modes of reading
and being, the main focus being on allegory as an epistemological tool, as a
means of reading the world and the self. Thus, the hotly-debated generic classi-
fications of allegory are not of concern here except to the extent that certain ge-
neric classifications elucidate the means of interpretation.228
The prosopagraphical model bears many resemblances to allegory insofar as
allegories contain many levels or layers of meaning that intersect at certain
points rather than at all points or no point. At such points of domain intersection
(correlating with mask intersection), the relationship between the several levels
becomes metaphoric since one domain is rendered congruent with another do-
main. But unlike metaphor, allegory can accommodate more than two levels. It
adds new levels to a two-dimensional system of source and target domain (or
tenor and vehicle), opening up a more intricate set of correspondences that, more
so than metaphor, emphasizes difference. In that allegory can thus accommodate
identity (transparency) and difference (opacity), it is translucent. Yet, there is a
second way in which allegory constructs translucence, which becomes tangible
when considering it in terms of Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy.
Here, metaphor is represented as a vertical ‘axis’ (matter of identity) which is
opposed to a horizontal axis (of prose) that represents metonymy. For Jakobson,
the horizontal axis is a matter of contiguity, of similarity or likeness rather than
identity. A revaluation of allegory through the lens of Jakobson’s model sug-
gests that present-day predilections are problematic since metaphor actually col-
lapses difference and is not quite as flexible and accommodating of difference as
is (medieval) allegory, which indeed represents a ‘reading through’ that operates

226
For the roles of opacity, transparency, and translucence in working with stained glass, see
Johannes Schreiter, Johannes Schreiter zur Ethik der Kunst, ed. Glasmalerei Peters, trans.
Ursula Andrews (Darmstadt: Das Beispiel, 2000) 24-26.
227
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962; To-
ronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1965) 106-07, 111.
228
After all, all genres can be approached allegorically. See Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The
Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964); but cf. Deborah L.
Madsen, Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1994) 24-25.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 85

on translucence (contiguity) rather than only transparency (identity). On this

view, allegory emerges as an epistemological system that recognizes the non-
continuity of domains while nevertheless enabling contiguity (translucence) and
identity (transparency).

1. The Subject of Allegory

Time and again the above discussion of studies of medieval selfhood suggested
that even in the most optimistic accounts of medieval individuality, the latter
was eventually always only an allegory of the universal. Through the pro-
sopagraphical lens, however, it also appeared that medieval individuals are
structurally not any less unique than their modern counterparts. The corollary of
this position is that modern individuals are also not ‘ruled’ by allegory. This, in
turn, necessitates a revaluation of allegory as an interpretative (that is, epistemo-
logical) strategy – a revaluation that hopefully illustrates the ‘modernity’ of me-
dieval allegory and the ‘medieval-ness’ of modern allegory. Before approaching
modern, conceptual theories of allegory, however, I shall briefly recapitulate
important stages and changes in the history of allegory, from late antiquity to the
Middle Ages.
In classical rhetoric, allegory denotes the act of saying one thing and meaning
another. As such, Quintilian’s educational treatise for orators, the Institutio
oratoria, defines allegory as presenting one thing in words representing some-
thing else in meaning if not, in fact, the contrary thereof: “Allegoria [...] aut ali-
ud verbis aliud sensu ostendit aut etiam interim contrarium.”229 The key classical
rhetorical treatises, such as Quintilian’s Institutio and Cicero’s Orator were not
widely accessible in the Middle Ages. The more widely disseminated Rhetorica
ad Herennium,230 often incorrectly attributed to Cicero, defines allegory in very
similar terms, however: “Permutatio est oratio aliud verbis aliud sententia de-
monstrans. Ea dividitur in tres partes: similitudinem, argumentum, con-
trarium.”231 These definitions are often the starting point for contemporary ac-
counts of allegory as they were in the Middle Ages.232 Augustine, whose De
doctrina christiana can be seen as “the first truly medieval treatise about the

229
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., LCL 124-27 (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1920, 1921, 1922) VIII. vi. 44. For Aristotelian and
pre-Aristotelian notions of allegory, see Luc Brisson, Einführung in die Philosophie des
Mythos 1: Antike, Mittelalter und Renaissance, trans. Achim Russer (Darmstadt: WBG,
1996) 42-54.
230
Cicero’s Orator and Brutus as well as Quintilian’s Institutes were losing readers already in
late antiquity. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (1988; Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989) 215-16.
231
Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, LCL 403 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1954) IV. xxxiv. 46.
232
“In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another.” Fletcher, Allegory 2.
86 Part One: Masking Identities

communicative arts,”233 lists allegory among those tropes yielding a methodol-

ogy to decipher the obscure passages of the Bible in order to unclothe hidden
meanings. It is the distinction between what has to be understood figuratively
and what has to be read literally that becomes the main theoretical crux. 234
Without providing a textbook definition of what exactly allegory is,235 Augustine
explains that all passages that do not make sense literally, that cannot be recon-
ciled with Biblical discourse or good morals, are to be taken figuratively.236 Ac-
knowledging the historiographical difficulties (the awareness that different times
had different customs) and addressing the problem of multiple meanings that
may arise, Augustine expects the reader to employ hermeneutic reasoning. In
comparing the obscure passages with other Biblical passages that are unequivo-
cal in their meaning, the reader has to study the figurative expression carefully
until he can determine an interpretation that is consistent with the truth, with
what Augustine refers to as the ‘realm of love’ – “ad regnum caritatis” (III. 54,
see also 59, 84).237 These strategies of Biblical exegesis likewise apply to the
reading of pagan texts.238 For such purposes, Fulgentius employs the metaphor
(allegory) of the nut and the shell which had wide currency throughout the Mid-
dle Ages. The ancient texts are compared to an unshelled nut. If one cracks the
tasteless shell, the flavor of the nut shall be revealed.239 For contemporary read-
ers, the unresolved problem lies in establishing the truth or defining the Augus-
tinian ‘realm of love.’ For Augustine and medieval readers, however, the act of
233
Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the
Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1997) 88.
234
In Augustine, terms designating allegorical processes are so closely related that they be-
come synonymous. An important term Augustine intrinsically relates to allegory is ambi-
guity. All further parenthetical references to Augustine are to Green’s edition (cited
above). It was essential for Augustine to find a code of interpretation to delimit free asso-
ciation. See Simon Brittan, Poetry, Symbol, and Allegory: Interpreting Metaphorical Lan-
guage from Plato to the Present (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003) 25.
235
Augustine provides his readers with an example in IV. 107. Otherwise, he lists allegory
alongside aenigma, parabola, and catachresis (IV. 88-89).
236
“Demonstrandus est igitur prius modus inveniendae locutionis, propriane an figura sit. Et
iste omnino modus est, ut quidquid in sermone divino neque ad morum honestatem neque
ad fidei veritatem proprie referri potest figuratum esse cognoscas.” De doctrina christiana
III. 33, and see III. 54.
237
For Augustine’s hermeneutics and the reader’s responsibility for making meaning, see
Rita Copeland, Rhetorics, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic
Tradition and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991) 165, 158. See
further Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2000) 314-23.
238
See Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the
Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (1965; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993)
27-66; Curtius, European Literature 74.
239
Super Thebaiden, Fabii Placiadis Fulgentii V.C. opera: Accedunt Fabii Claudii Goridani
Fulgentii De aetatibus mundi et hominis et s. Fulgentii episcopi Super Thebaiden, ed. Ru-
dolf Helm, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898) 180-81.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 87

establishing a correct reading was presumably not quite as difficult, although

readings frequently and inevitably gave rise to debate.240
Augustine’s definition of allegorical interpretation acknowledges an interpre-
tive aporia that can only be solved by good readerly practice,241 which endows
the listener and reader, specifically of non-Biblical texts, with much power and
allows for various interpretations. Such theoretical accounts of exegetical prac-
tice have also affected medieval scholarship, often with the tacit understanding
of a homogeneous culture represented in allegory. D. W. Robertson, Jr., for in-
stance, challenges the stress on the inherent tensions in Augustine’s model of
allegorical reading with the dictum that medieval individuals were “innocent of
our profound concern for tension. [...] But the medieval world with its quiet hi-
erarchies knew nothing of these things. Its aesthetic [...] developed artistic and
literary styles consistent with a world without dynamically interacting polari-
ties.”242 And yet, it needs to be stressed “that the terms of literary analysis in the
Middle Ages are essentially contested forms. They are not simply descriptive of
literary practice and therefore applicable to poetry as if they were straightfor-
ward hermeneutic instruments.” Medieval literary theory becomes “a collection
of analytical topoi,” comprising “a vocabulary that allows medieval writers to
predicate arguments about poetic texts. Accordingly, these commonplaces have
to be read as an ensemble of literary themes and not used as an authoritative
template for exegesis.”243 Deviation from such non-articulated ‘templates’
probably enforced the codification of scriptural interpretation,244 most intricately
encapsulated in the fourfold model of allegory – historical (literal), allegorical
(general Christian), tropological (individual Christian), and anagogical (es-
chatological) sense. Recent studies therefore carefully distinguish between me-
dieval ‘literary theory’ and actual reading practices,245 and contemporary defini-
240
Paul Zumthor argues that allegory’s transparency is increasingly complicated from the
twelfth century onward. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
2000) 159-65.
241
Moreover, the ambiguity and uncertainty of allegory is already encapsulated in Quintil-
ian’s discussion of allegory as riddle (“Sed allegoria, quae est obscurior, aenigma dicitur”)
and the categorization of contradiction ($(")*#$!)() as allegoria. Quintilian, Institutio
oratoria VIII. vi. 52, 57. Augustine argues, however, that ambiguities are blemishes given
that clarity is a virtue. Augustine, De doctrina christiana esp. IV. 64-71, 142-50. Multiple
readings are possible as long as those can be reconciled with Christian truth, advancing
what Walker calls a “closed hermeneutic loop.” Walker, Rhetoric 317, 319.
242
D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962) 51.
243
Robert R. Edwards, Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative (Nash-
ville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1989) xiii-xiv.
244
See esp. Thomas Aquinas, S. Thomae Aquinatis Summa theologiae, ed. Petri Caramello,
vol. 1 (Torino: Marietti Editori, 1952) esp. q. 1, a. 9-10.
245
For the limits of allegorical interpretation, see Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990) 8-22; Brittan, Poetry 34-35, 37. See further
Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place
88 Part One: Masking Identities

tions of allegory highlight the instability of analogical interpretation as such. Al-

legory is here usually defined in a two-fold way, either as a metaphor that is ex-
tended through an entire passage or as one of the mentioned senses of interpreta-
tion “common in medieval and Renaissance exegesis, and thus a method of
reading and of listening.” The writer notes further that “With such a method,
more often than not one could find what one sought,” rendering interpretation
“radically interactive, requiring the self-conscious collaboration of the audience.
Indeed, as it worked out in practice, it must have been similar to an aleatory
composition in music, where the performer establishes certain rules which allow
a collaboration with chance.”246 As in the discussion about medieval individual-
ity, assumptions about the general nature of medieval reading practices say more
about the establishment of heuristic devices for present historicist purposes than
the generation of complex meanings for medieval audiences or authors. Andrew
Laird emphasizes this in his account of allegory in epic: “The detection of alle-
gory is really a subjective issue, or to be more accurate, a question of ideology.
Someone’s detection of allegory is more likely to be determined by culturally
induced expectations than by any personal perspective.” Ultimately, what is and
is not allegory has been (and still is) an ideological question – after all, medieval
allegorists gave priority to sacred texts in their allegorical understanding of the
classics. Despite the acknowledgment of allegory’s liberating force, negative
connotations prevail in critical discourse: allegorization “usually conveys a
negative value-judgement in modern accounts of such interpretative practices.”
The sense of the letter – the allegorical interpretation, that is – is not put into the
work by the writer; it is “constructed from the sense of the letter by readers.”247
In this vein, J. Hillis Miller finds a contradictory relationship between symbol
and allegory. Arguing that allegory is a public mode of speaking, since the “The
word allegory always implies not only the use of figures, but a making public,
available to profane ears, of something which otherwise would remain secret,”
he observes that
What seems specific to allegory is a larger degree of manifest incompatibility between
the tenor and the vehicle than we tend to expect in symbol, where the ‘material’ base
and the ‘spiritual’ meaning are thrown together, as the name suggests, with some im-
plication of overlapping, consubstantiality, or participation. In allegory the one does
not directly suggest the other. This means, oddly enough, that the more esoteric, the

in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (1953; Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1981) 87-88; Curtius, European Literature 48-54; Judson Boyce
Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982) 67-116. For the four levels, see Heinrich Laus-
berg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft,
2 vols. (München: Hueber, 1960) 1: 444-46.
246
Lanham, Handlist 4.
247
Andrew Laird, “Figures of Allegory from Homer to Latin Epic,” Metaphor, Allegory, and
the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions, ed. G. R. Boys-Stones
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003) 153, 173, 175.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 89
more appropriate to the marketplace, the more down to earth, homely, and realistic it is
on the one hand, the more esoteric and in need of commentary it is on the other.
Far from being transparent then, “What the allegory reveals at the same time it
hides, since the more visible and audible it is to ordinary eyes and ears, the more
accommodated it is to limited vision, and therefore the less directly representa-
tive of the secrets it would tell.”248 This clearly underlines the problematic refer-
ential relationship between the several levels of meaning involved in allegory.
Simon Brittan traces the increasing separation of referential realms and the po-
tential for contradictory reading across the ages. If one assumed a linear histori-
cal development of allegory as literary mode, in view of the interpretive difficul-
ties involved in reading fourteenth-century allegorical texts, contemporary alle-
gorical narratives would be unreadable, meaningless texts.249 Such a productive
view of allegory, however, seems prohibitive given that the trope dominating
discussions of selfhood and consciousness is metaphor, frequently in the guise
of conceptual metaphor theory (henceforth CMT).

2. The Rule of Metaphor

Paul Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor could not have been more appropriately
titled. Throughout many decades, if not centuries, the foremost trope of literary
criticism has been metaphor, chiefly because of its ability to substitute one thing
for another.250 Outside the (narrow) rhetorical application, metaphor has recently
been discovered by the cognitive sciences as the means of locating individuals in
the world. My concern in what follows is not to question the usefulness of CMT
to describe cognitive processes, but rather to highlight that allegory, which is
largely ignored in CMT, is a more complex trope and potentially a more appro-
priate heuristic tool to describe the mapping processes by means of which indi-
viduals navigate cultural and social worlds.
In the realm of rhetoric, metaphor was always prized for its ability to describe
one thing in terms of another – that is, by nature of metaphor’s split into tenor
and vehicle, as I. A. Richards has it. The relationship between the levels in-
volved in metaphor can be best described as substitution or comparison, as a
change of “a word from its literal meaning to one not properly applicable but
analogous to it.”251 Increasingly, scholars acknowledged that metaphor does not
necessarily ‘discover’ an existing similarity but actually constructs it – substitu-

248
J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Allegories,” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W.
Bloomfield (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981) 356-57, 358. See further C. S.
Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936; London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1938) 44, 48.
249
Brittan, Poetry 73.
250
Metaphor is “The most elaborate of tropes.” Bernard Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary
Devices, trans. Albert W. Halsall (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 276.
See further Lanham, Handlist 101; Lausberg, Handbuch 1: 285-91.
251
Lanham, Handlist 100.
90 Part One: Masking Identities

tion theory became interaction theory.252 Based on these findings, George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson argue that human conceptual systems are structured meta-
phorically. “If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely
metaphorical,” they conclude, “then the way we think, what we experience, and
what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor,”253 hence, the term
conceptual metaphor. Conceptual metaphors, cognitive scientists believe, gov-
ern essential cognitive processes such as perception and being. A conceptual
metaphor is “defined as understanding one conceptual domain in terms of an-
other conceptual domain,” often expressed in the formula “CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN
(A) IS CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN (B).”254 Granted that the mind classifies items by
analogy, that is, by mapping one conceptual domain onto another, Lakoff and
Johnson elaborate a number of general conceptual metaphors, such as ‘life is a
journey,’ ‘ideas are containers,’ ‘argument is war,’ ‘time is money,’ and so on.
Such metaphors are fundamental for concepts of selfhood as well. Lakoff and
Johnson discuss the interrelation of metaphor and selfhood as embedded within
rituals, and acknowledge that “there can be no coherent view of the self without
personal ritual [...]. Just as our personal metaphors are not random but form sys-
tems coherent with our personalities, so our personal rituals are not random but
are coherent with our view of the world and ourselves and with our systems of
personal metaphors and metonymies.”255 By implication, the Metaphors We Live
By are part of the Myths We Live By,256 or, more concretely the Mythologies We
Live By. It is at this point, that prosopagraphical selfhood accommodates and
subsumes metaphorical systems as clusters on the level of mythemes. Given the
predominantly narrative view of the world, one suspects that in analogy to Ben-
son’s claim that most of the memes used for self-fashioning and new modes of

252
The so-called ‘interaction’ theory emphasizes the interaction of a metaphorical expression
with its context. While I. A. Richards questions views according to which metaphor pro-
vides two ideas in one – in his The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936; New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1965) 89-138 – Max Black anticipates the cognitive function of metaphor as
a means of mapping one domain onto another. See Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies
in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962) 25-47. See further
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Mean-
ing in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello, Sr.
(1977; London: Routledge, 1978) 216-56. For the construction of similarity, see George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s observation that “The similarities arise as a result of concep-
tual metaphors and thus must be considered as similarities of interactional, rather than in-
herent, properties.” Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980; Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1981) 215. For a survey of these historical developments in metaphor the-
ory, see Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid, An Introduction to Cognitive Linguis-
tics (Harlow: Pearson, 1996) 114-55.
253
Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 3.
254
Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002)
4.
255
Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 235.
256
The phrase is adopted from Midgley’s The Myths We Live By.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 91

being are provided by literary discourse, the latter would play a prominent role
as a disseminator of new metaphors to live by.
For the authors of Metaphors We Live By, however, literature is a matter of
figural language and, therefore, a category that does not fall within the scope of
their studies; their interpretation of metaphor is decidedly non-figural, although,
Mark Turner and Lakoff co-authored a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Zoltán
Kövecses is more optimistic about the role of literature for our mind’s analogical
modes. He recognizes, with reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s metaphors,
that “Original, creative literary metaphors such as this are typically less clear
but richer in meaning than either everyday metaphors or metaphors in science,”
but quickly points out “that most poetic language is based on conventional, or-
dinary conceptual metaphors.” The creative use of metaphor, mentioned here,
lies in the employment and modification (extension, elaboration, questioning,
and combination) of ordinary metaphors,257 which underlines Jakobson’s intui-
tion that poetics and linguistics cannot be easily separated, and that poetic lan-
guage, like all language, works along the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes
and, thus, is either metonymic or metaphorical.258 CMT analyses of literary
texts, however, are rarely conducted.259 One notable exception, published twenty
years prior to Metaphors We Live By, takes into account not only the mind’s ob-
session with analogy but also places metaphor in the context of selfhood qua
autobiographical discourse. In his study of autobiography, Metaphors of Self,
James Olney contends that
Metaphor is essentially a way of knowing. New sensory experiences – or their conse-
quence, emotional experience – must be formulated in the mind before one can grasp
and hold them, before one can understand them and add them to the contents of
knowledge and the complex of the self. [...] This is the psychological basis of the
metaphorizing process: to grasp the unknown through the known, or to let the known
stand for the unknown and thereby fit that into an organized, patterned body of experi-

257
Kövecses, Metaphor 43, 44, 47-51.
258
Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”; Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two
Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” both in Roman Jakobson, ed. Rudy 2: 18-51 and 3: 239-
59. For syntagmatic and paradigmatic poles, see Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguis-
tique générale, ed. Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1972) 170-80. Ricoeur criticizes the dis-
tinction between substitution and combination, offering instead that it is, in fact, meton-
ymy which substitutes one thing for another while metaphor is interactional. Ricoeur, Rule
of Metaphor 173-256. See further Michael Silk, “Metaphor and Metonymy: Aristotle,
Jakobson, Ricoeur, and Others,” Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition, ed.
Boys-Stones 139-41.
259
But see Norman N. Holland, The Brain of Robert Frost: A Cognitive Approach to Litera-
ture (New York: Routledge, 1988); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool
Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989); Uta
Lenk, “Konzeptuelle Metaphern zu Sprache in literarischen Texten: Möglichkeiten einer
interdisziplinären Anglistik,” AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 27.1
(2002): 51-68; Margaret H. Freeman, “Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis,” Style
36.3 (2002): 466-83.
92 Part One: Masking Identities

ential knowledge. A metaphor [...] allows us to connect the known of ourselves to the
unknown of the world, and, making available new relational patterns, it simultaneously
organizes the self into a new and richer entity [...].260
If metaphor organizes selfhood, the ontological argument necessarily follows
suit: “The self expresses itself by the metaphors it creates and projects, and we
know it by those metaphors; but it did not exist as it now does and as it now is
before creating its metaphors.”261 The self, in its quest to navigate new environ-
ments by means of existing environments, is part of a culture, or more precisely,
part of a mythological system, in which metaphorical (dis)placement abounds.
The importance of metaphor as a discourse for making selves is thus also
stressed by Benson in his proposition of a cultural psychology of the self: pri-
mary metaphors are constitutive of selfhood.262
While CMT is no doubt useful in explaining epistemological processes, the
reliance on metaphor is philosophically problematic. What is particularly com-
plicated is metaphor’s construction of identity, often at the expense of recogniz-
ing difference. Of course, conceptual metaphors also involve difference, as do
all binary oppositions; as an epistemological process, however, metaphor chiefly
emphasizes the shared properties rather than those not shared. Metaphor is ulti-
mately a trope of identity, of “a momentary masking” of difference.263 Perhaps
the difference between the figural use of metaphor – in literary texts in which
metaphor is no less an epistemological tool – and the non-figural use of meta-
phor is that the former more explicitly attempts to acknowledge difference inso-
far as figural metaphors trigger not only multiple readings from a network of
correspondence but multiple, mutually exclusive readings. The problematic ex-
clusion of difference in nonetheless inevitable metaphorical mappings has been
anticipated by Northrop Frye, who argues that the problem with metaphors is
mirrored in mirrors. Without a mirror, there is no self-reflection. With mirrors,
self and self-image converge, but something is always missing. As concerns acts

260
James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton Univ. Press, 1972) 31-32.
261
Olney, Metaphors of Self 34.
262
Benson, Cultural Psychology 25-27, and see Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 57.
263
The phrase is borrowed from Fletcher, “‘Positive Negation’: Threshold, Sequence, and
Personification in Coleridge,” New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth: Selected
Papers from the English Institute, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1972) 161. For Kenneth Burke, metaphor highlights “the thisness of that, or the
thatness of this.” He emphasizes, however, that the “two realms [involved in metaphorical
transference] are never identical.” Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1969) 503, 504; and see Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anat-
omy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984) 194. For Frye, meta-
phor is based on “its sense of identity of life or power or energy between man and nature
(‘this is that’).” Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge,
1982) 7-8. See further Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker
& Warburg, 1958) 23-24; Lanham, Handlist 100.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 93

of interpretation, Frye cautions that “We are not observers but participants, and
have to guard against not only the illusion of detached objectivity but its oppo-
site, the counsel of despair that suggests that all reading is narcissism, seeing
every text only as a mirror reflecting our own psyches.”264 Lakoff and Johnson
do acknowledge that metaphors may (intentionally) hide as much as they reveal:
“a metaphor in a political or economic system, by virtue of what it hides, can
lead to human degradation.”265 Not only are metaphors a risky business in politi-
cal discourse, danger also lurks in metaphorizing illness and topography. Thus,
Susan Sontag cautions against talking metaphorically about illness, especially
with regard to the common equation of cancer and death which still keeps many
patients from seeking treatment; Graham Huggan sees embedded in the seem-
ingly mimetic (that is, metaphorical) discourse of maps “a falsely essentialist
view of the world which negates or suppresses alternative views which might
endanger the privileged position of its Western perceiver.”266 Literary discourse,
insofar as it might be complicit in fostering ‘incorrect mappings,’ would natu-
rally also be problematic.
None of the above is meant to suggest that one could do without metaphors,
which are not only helpful but indeed necessary in translating foreignness into
something familiar. This inevitability notwithstanding, one has to be careful
with metaphors, warns anthropologist Naomi Quinn. Metaphors are often se-
lected and favored by speakers “because elements and relations between ele-
ments in the source domain make a good match with elements and relations
among them in the cultural model,” which entails that “thinkers ordinarily know
the structure of the domain that is the target of their metaphor.” This, from a dif-
ferent perspective, underwrites the constructedness of conceptual metaphors.
Stressing that “cultural understanding underlies metaphor use,” she concludes
that “there is more to culture than just metaphor.”267 This recapitulates Lakoff
and Johnson’s (implicit) coupling of metaphor and ritual, both of which turn out
to be mythological processes. Quinn’s critique of CMT, I think, legitimately
spotlights that the ‘rule of metaphor’ fosters a mythology of identity, emphasiz-
ing sameness (encapsulated in the formula A=B) over difference and thus oc-
cluding a multiplicity of alternative meanings (perspectives), of different levels
of similarity and difference. Allegory, qua its ability to represent mappings

264
Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature”
(San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990) 75.
265
Qtd. in Peter Mühlhäusler “Metaphors Others Live By,” Language & Communication
15.3 (1995): 281.
266
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) 23; Graham
Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism and the Carto-
graphic Connection,” Ariel 20.4 (1989): 116.
267
Naomi Quinn, “The Cultural Basis of Metaphor,” Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of
Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press,
1991) 65, 77, 56-57.
94 Part One: Masking Identities

across multiple domains, can accommodate identity, similarity, and difference,

describing mapping processes akin to those within prosopagraphical selfhood.
Here metaphorical mappings play an important role insofar as they transfer
goods from one masks to another; they construct mask intersection. While the
concomitant veiling of difference is important in many interactional contexts,
however, metaphor is only one mapping process among many. While meta-
phor’s drive for identity creates transparency, allegorical mappings enable the
maintenance of transparency (identity), opacity (difference) and translucence
(similarity) at the same time.

3. The Archetype versus the Mytheme

Individuals, as was demonstrated above, strive for a maximum of coherence
(transparency) in autobiographical selfhood. For the purposes of establishing
coherence and unity, it is equally necessary to sustain differences to prevent
fragmentation. Allegory – rather than metaphor – is the trope that allows the rep-
resentation of metaphorical mappings across multiple domains whilst maintain-
ing contradiction; allegory, in other words, turns the two-dimensional mappings
of metaphor into a three-dimensional system. Few cognitive linguists have thus
far considered in detail the different conceptual functions of metaphor, meton-
ymy, and allegory, but existing studies have acknowledged the capacity of alle-
gory to enable multiple domain intersections without inevitably collapsing the
domains involved in the mapping process; allegory is more than extended meta-
phor. Michael Sinding is one of the few scholars to engage with the more com-
plex multi-domain mappings that CMT has hitherto ignored. While CMT rightly
refers to allegory as “a kind of blending, a complex conceptual operation akin to
metaphor,” Sinding subsequently illustrates the different modus operandi of al-
legory, which is not ‘simply’ a one-way mapping process. The three blending
processes (composition, completion, and elaboration), which modify the alle-
gorical ‘input,’ transform metaphor’s establishment of one-to-one correspon-
dences between source and target domains into a multiplicity of metaphorical
and non-metaphorical mappings across different levels. To illustrate these proc-
esses, Sinding suggests visualizing allegory as a scene: “To turn a sentence into
an allegory, we must imagine entailments as participants in a rich scene, with a
fictional existence. To do this, we must blend mapping elements and structure
with the generic structure of a coherent scene, which we abstract from the space
of everyday experience.” Allegorical narratives connect the scenes in sequence,
creating a “whole story ‘world,’ because the action may take the characters
anywhere. At each stage our implied ontological commitments are expanded but
still limited: we draw a line around the whole that we need to imagine.” From
the perspective of blending theory, allegory is a multifaceted genre, the varia-
tions of which depend “on how explicit are the signs of its identity; how exten-
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 95

sive is its elaboration; and how much it is occluded by other spaces.”268 Under-
stood as a cognitive process, allegory is an extended metaphor. Moreover, it sus-
tains several sub-metaphors, but goes beyond what Sinding calls “bi-level corre-
spondence” insofar as some items need not or cannot be mapped. Blending the-
ory accommodates the different mapping processes in allegory:
That the topic can be the target of the dominant metaphor explains the persistent sense
that allegory “is” an extended metaphor. That the blend can be linked to many spaces
answers the fact that allegories are not just source-target “correspondences,” but in-
deed integrate material from theory, culture, inner and outer experience, and more. The
link between topic and many-blend accounts for “anomalies in the poem’s literal fic-
tion.” These express some aspect of the topic that is inexpressible by the basic meta-
phor. Finally, the emergent-structure principle refutes the cliché that allegory only il-
lustrates mechanically some prior system.269
Allegory is a complex epistemological process analogous to the constructions of
‘horizontal’ axes within prosopagraphical selfhood. The mythological bricolage
to be witnessed in prosopagraphical selfhood is an allegorical mapping process
in which identical mythemes in several masks are brought in line to make trans-
parent one’s central goods while other aspects of the masks concerned remain
momentarily ‘hidden’ at the moment of mask creation; and yet, these contradic-
tions are maintained, not excluded as they are in metaphorical mappings.
Allegory, as a process akin to conceptual metaphor, is capable of more than
illustrating how metaphoric mappings construe two or more domains as identical
while keeping other domains opaque; conceptual allegory is likewise able to
construct translucence by means of rendering aspects of two or more domains
similar rather than identical. Allegory therefore establishes translucence in two
ways: on the one hand, allegory enables translucence because it maintains iden-
tity (transparency) and difference (opacity). On the other hand, allegory con-
structs similarity by means of metonymic mappings. As opposed to conceptual
metaphor, ‘conceptual metonymy,’ as a revaluation of the theories of Jakobson
and recent studies in CMT evinces, is able to map items from one domain onto
another without collapsing the domains. Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and me-
tonymy, operating within language’s vertical and horizontal poles, describes
processes similar to mythological bricolage – and in the context of CMT, where
his theories feature minimally,270 it might be important to remember that for
Jakobson himself, the dichotomy between metaphor and metonymy, is of conse-
quence for “all verbal behavior and for human behavior in general.”271

268
Michael Sinding, “Assembling Spaces: The Conceptual Structure of Allegory,” Style 36.3
(2002): 504-06, 510-11.
269
Sinding, “Assembling Spaces” 516-17.
270
René Dirven observes that this critical neglect is surprising, and he consequently envisions
the potential for Jakobson’s theories within CMT. Dirven, “Metonymy and Metaphor: Dif-
ferent Mental Strategies of Conceptualisation,” Leuvense Bijdragen 82.1 (1993): 1-28.
271
Jakobson, “Two Aspects” 256.
96 Part One: Masking Identities

For Jakobson, language use presupposes two processes: selection and combi-
nation. He refers to these processes as the paradigmatic and syntagmatic pole,
respectively. In his explanation of Jakobson’s theory, David Lodge points to
Roland Barthes’s analogy of choosing what to wear. On the paradigmatic ‘axis,’
a person selects one item from those items of clothing that cannot be worn to-
gether (covering upper or lower parts of body, for instance). These items are
then combined into a ‘message,’ a complex higher-order unit resulting from se-
lection and combination.272 The paradigmatic axis is a matter of metaphor; one
chooses items from one set based on similarity and the possibility of substitu-
tion. The paradigmatic axis is vertical as opposed to the axis of combination
which Jakobson sees as inherently metonymic. From the dichotomy between
paradigmatic (selection, metaphor, verticality) and syntagmatic (combination,
metonymy, horizontality) poles, Jakobson differentiates generically between
lyric poetry, which is metaphorical, and prose (epic), which is a matter of me-
tonymy.273 The two axes are not static, however; they interact dynamically: “The
selection is produced on the basis of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity,
synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of the sequence,
is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence
from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted
to the constitutive device of the sequence.”274 This process is similar to the
mythological bricolage within prosopagraphical selfhood in that individuals
‘horizontally’ align elements within several ‘vertical’ role narratives. Jakobson’s
distinction between metaphor and metonymy is helpful in this respect insofar as
metonymy, as a conceptual process, describes a mapping that, unlike metaphor,
is based on similarity.
Jakobson’s definition of metonymy differs in useful ways from current un-
derstandings of the concept, where its function is seen as complementary to that
of metaphor.275 For Jakobson, metonymy is structurally opposed to metaphor,
however. While he aligns metaphor with selection and substitution, metonymy is
aligned with combination and “contexture,” which means, a linguistic unit func-
tions as a context for a simpler unit or a simpler unit is embedded within a more
complex system. Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy an-
ticipates recent findings in conceptual metaphor theory. René Dirven, after dis-
tinguishing between different kinds of metonymy, draws on the conceptual dif-
ference between similarity and contiguity in order to complicate current notions

272
David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of
Modern Literature (1977; London: Arnold, 1979) 74.
273
Criticism vehemently favors metaphor over metonymy: “the study of poetical tropes is
directed chiefly toward metaphor. The actual bipolarity has been artificially replaced by an
amputated, unipolar scheme [...].” Jakobson, “Two Aspects” 259.
274
Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics” 27. See further “Two Aspects” 241-44.
275
Lanham, Handlist 100-02; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 35-40.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 97

of metaphor as a mapping from one domain onto another, and metonymy as a

mapping within a single domain.276 Dirven’s study suggests that
in metonymy the two domains both remain intact, but they are to be seen in line,
whereas in metaphor only one domain viz. the target domain is kept and the other do-
main viz. the source domain disappears [...]. The mapping process is just that: by map-
ping elements of the (structure of the) source domain onto the target domain, the
source domain itself ceases to exist. This is completely different in metonymy. There-
fore, contiguity in metonymy can be defined as the existence, side by side, of two do-
mains (or two subdomains of one domain) and contiguity is constituted by a concep-
tual act rather than just “given” in the objective environment.277
If allegory – understood as conceptual allegory – challenges the ‘rule of meta-
phor’ from above, so to speak, Dirven’s view of metonymy challenges it from
below. His observation concerning the collapse of domains in metaphorical
mappings very well captures the creation of transparency within prosopagraphi-
cal selfhood, too, in which similar mythemes dissolve domain separation. Pro-
sopagraphical selfhood, however, like conceptual allegory, is able to maintain
difference since metaphorical mappings may only map parts of domains and
therefore construct punctual rather than complete transparency. Moreover, me-
tonymic mappings (as understood by Jakobson and Dirven) construct translu-
cence insofar as they can link masks at points where similar mythemes are reit-
erated – but without dissolving the domains. Allegory represents a conceptual
process that also describes the mapping processes within prosopagraphical self-
hood; allegory and prosopagraphy are mythological systems in which meta-
phoric or metonymic mappings variously create transparency and translucence
or sustain opacity.278 Where differences are maintained, they co-exist side-by-

276
Dirven, “Metonymy and Metaphor” 6-10. For metonymy as a mapping within a single
domain, see, for instance, George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What
Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987) 114.
277
Dirven, “Metonymy and Metaphor” 12-15, quotation at 14. In a revised version of this es-
say, Dirven adds that “in spite of these fundamental differences between metonymy and
metaphor, and the contiguity-similarity dichotomy underlying them, we have as yet no ex-
planation for the fact that both mapping processes, however different they may be, can
lead to new figurative meanings.” Dirven, “Metonymy and Metaphor: Different Mental
Strategies of Conceptualisation,” Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast,
ed. René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (2002; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003) 91. See further
Antonio Barcelona, “Clarifying and Applying the Notions of Metaphor and Metonymy
within Cognitive Linguistics: An Update,” in the same volume, esp. 223-26.
278
For the metonymic nature of allegory, see Holly Wallace Boucher, “Metonymy in Typol-
ogy and Allegory, with a Consideration of Dante’s Comedy,” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol,
ed. Bloomfield 130; Frye, Great Code 33. For Frye, however, allegory remains “a special
form of analogy, a technique of paralleling metaphorical with conceptual language in
which the latter has the primary authority.” Rather than emphasizing difference, that is, al-
legory “smooths out the discrepancies in a metaphorical structure by making it conform to
a conceptual standard.” Frye, Great Code 10, and see further Anatomy of Criticism: Four
Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957) 90. This quotation underlines Frye’s
98 Part One: Masking Identities

side, by means of contiguity (that is, translucence), without assuming identity.279

The several possibilities of transferring mythemes from one mask to others
within allegory and prosopagraphical selfhood potentially likewise threatens the
archetype. As an interpretive, epistemological process, allegory becomes a site
of a continual renegotiation of meaning, of deconstruction, calling into question
universality rather than reinforcing it.

4. The Mythologies We Live By

The model of prosopagraphical selfhood – the conception of selfhood as a col-
lection of layered, variously transparent, translucent, and opaque masks subject
to mythological bricolage – entails a revaluation of allegory as a productive,
complex epistemological and ontological concept. Rehabilitations of allegory, in
fact, have frequently occurred over the course of the centuries, often in times of
“intense cultural disruption,” most recently throughout the 1960s and early
1970s when New Critical modes of interpretation were increasingly chal-
lenged.280 One of the most influential revaluations of allegory was no doubt con-
ducted by Paul de Man, whose argument bears directly on mine.281 In his analy-
sis of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, de Man attests to the aes-

view of metaphor (located, with myth, at the “headwaters of literary experience”) as con-
veying identity while entailing its own contradiction. Frye, Words with Power 71, 72.
279
In contrast to conceptual metaphor, conceptual allegory is capable of leaving unchanged
“alternative metaphorical systems,” the loss of which may entail “a large number of alter-
native [...] ways of interpreting the world [...].” For alternative metaphorical systems, see
Mühlhäusler, “Metaphors Others Live By” 287. Moreover, metonymy, which warrants the
maintenance of difference, may indeed be productive of new meanings, as Jakobson pro-
poses in “Two Aspects” 243.
280
Madsen, Rereading Allegory 135. Important revaluations of allegory occur in: Walter
Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1927)
esp. 157-236; Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1929); Lewis, Allegory of Love; Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: Les origines grecques et
les contestations judéo-chrétiennes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1976); Hans
Robert Jauss, Alterität und Modernität in der mittelalterlichen Literatur: Gesammelte Auf-
sätze 1956-76 (München: Fink, 1977) esp. 154-59; Fletcher, Allegory; Paul de Man, Alle-
gories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Ha-
ven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1979); Akbari, Seeing through the Veil.
281
For De Man’s “climactic” recuperation of allegory, see Murray Krieger, “‘A Waking
Dream’: The Symbolic Alternative to Allegory,” Allegory, Myth and Symbol, ed.
Bloomfield 13. For a critical view, see esp. Madsen, Rereading Allegory 128-29. What in-
terests me in de Man’s theory of the reading process is the parallelism of the deconstruc-
tion of symbol into allegory and the deconstruction of metaphor into metonymy in Jakob-
son’s oeuvre, which has been noted by Shiva Kumar Srinivasan, “De Man, Paul,” A Dic-
tionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
135. De Man’s description of the text’s recurrent deconstruction further offers an analogue
for the processes of mythological bricolage in prosopagraphical selfhood. De Man, Alle-
gories of Reading 17.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 99

thetic rule of metaphor over metonymy. Moreover, the narrator itself emerges as
a metaphor,282 inviting deconstruction:
The self which was at first the center of the language as its empirical referent now be-
comes the language of the center as fiction, as metaphor of the self. What was origi-
nally a simply referential text now becomes the text of a text, the figure of a figure. [...]
By calling the subject a text, the text calls itself, to some extent, a subject. The lie is
raised to a new figural power, but it is nonetheless a lie. By asserting in the mode of
truth that the self is a lie, we have not escaped from deception. We have merely re-
versed the usual scheme which derives truth from the convergence of self and other by
showing that the fiction of such a convergence is used to allow for the illusion of self-
hood to originate.283
De Man’s deconstruction thus not only exposes the totalizing aspects of meta-
phor, but is further analogous to the processes of mythological bricolage in
which mythemes are severed from disseminated masks and recombined into new
masks that, by means of their recombination, result in individual, unique masks
flouting the workings of overarching myths of universality. In de Man’s words,
deconstruction “always has for its target to reveal the existence of hidden articu-
lations and fragmentations within assumedly monadic totalities.”284 The totalities
of metaphorical, transparent selfhood then are perhaps temporarily unavoidable,
but they can and should be exposed. Texts, like masks, can and should be de-
constructed. It is only through a failed process of figuration that unities can be
challenged.285
In this context, de Man introduces the Allegories of Reading, the search for a
narrative capable of sustaining the contradictions inherent in any reading proc-
ess. This narrative, then, “would have the universal significance of an allegory
of reading.” While allegory is similar to metaphor, allegory may further feature
a literal meaning different from the meaning it portends; allegories, de Man ar-
gues, “tell the story of the failure to read.”286 Allegory becomes a “deconstruc-
tive master trope” insofar as “Allegory involves a perpetual suspension of mean-
ing, a detour through the various tropes, figures, and modes of oblique significa-
tion where language can never reach the point of simply saying what it sets out

282
De Man, Allegories of Reading 14, 19. See further de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays
in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1983) 189.
283
De Man, Allegories of Reading 112. For de Man’s notion of rhetorical selfhood, see Ro-
dolphe Gasché, “Setzung and Übersetzung: Notes on Paul de Man,” Deconstruction: A
Critique, ed. by Rajnath (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989) 225-26.
284
De Man, Allegories of Reading 249.
285
De Man, Allegories of Reading 173-74. See further Gasché, “Notes on Paul de Man” 226.
286
De Man, Allegories of Reading 72, 72-74, 205. “Allegories are always allegories of meta-
phor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading – a sentence in
which the genitive ‘of’ has itself to be read as a metaphor” (205).
100 Part One: Masking Identities

to say.”287 Eventually, allegory turns into “an open figure, into a figure of non-
closure – a figure which is no longer a figure.”288 De Man’s theory underlines
the ability of allegory to maintain several contradictory narratives in an act of
continual textual re-creation. This is likewise true of prosopagraphical selfhood,
which enables the temporary intersection of narrative masks at certain points
while warranting the co-existence of contradictory narratives. The epistemologi-
cal ambiguity entailed in allegorical processes likewise pertains to the narrative
self: selves are never completely coherent – never completely transparent – al-
though self-presentation is driven by the desire for transparency, which can be
achieved temporarily only.289
For de Man allegories are “always ethical,” whereby he argues that the term
ethical designates “the structural interference of two distinct value systems”:
In this sense, ethics has nothing to do with the will (thwarted or free) of a subject, nor
a fortiori, with a relationship between subjects. The ethical category is imperative (i.e.,
a category rather than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not subjective. Mo-
rality is a version of the same language aporia that gave rise to such concepts as “man”
or “love” or “self,” and not the cause or consequence of such concepts. [...] Ethics (or,
one should say, ethicity) is a discursive mode among others.290
De Man glimpses in allegory a force “that disrupts the metaphoric coexistence
of a value system and a narrative, a referential discourse and a proof-text, self
and world, fabulistic tenor and vehicle.”291 The representation of several contra-
dictory value systems disrupts the rule of sameness, the rule of metaphor.
Moreover, while allegories are narratives for understanding notions such as self-
hood, love, and so on, the very structure of concepts, like the self, is allegorical
in itself.292 Again, the conceptual overlap between allegory and prosopagraphical
selfhood emerges: self-narratives and available cultural narratives are caught in
a process of constant renegotiation of similarity and difference in the quest for
self-location, for orientational frameworks which are naturally a question of
what de Man describes as “ethicity.” Like allegory, the mythological bricolage

287
Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology
(New York: Routledge, 1988) 95, 99.
288
Gasché, “Notes on Paul de Man” 233.
289
De Man argues that allegory can “blur, confound, and hide discontinuities and disruptions
in the homogeneity of its own discourse,” while maintaining the discourse as such. Qtd. in
Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (New York: Co-
lumbia Univ. Press, 1983) 184. Leitch’s summary of de Man’s theory of allegory similarly
applies to the promised coherence in narrative selfhood: “Reading uncovers and confronts
a language that vacillates uncontrollably between the promise of referential meaning and
the rhetorical subversion of that promise. Truth is permanently threatened. A disruptive
tropological language endlessly repeats the threat.”
290
De Man, Allegories of Reading 206. Fletcher refers to allegories as the “natural mirrors of
ideology” in his Allegory 368.
291
Madsen, Rereading Allegory 127.
292
See Johnson, Wake of Deconstruction 68-69.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 101

in prosopagraphical selfhood theoretically entails a continual renegotiation of

where masks intersect, potentially challenging the given ethical framework
which is, in turn, represented by those mythemes used to form ethical (rather
than moral) cores. Metaphoric mappings may make transparent ethical and other
orientations, but they do so (in allegory and prosopagraphical selfhood) without
completely collapsing the involved domains (‘value systems’).
From de Man’s Allegories of Reading, I would now like to return to allegori-
cal personifications in medieval literature, which very concretely tie allegory as
a conceptual mode to masks and prosopagraphy. In his study of twelfth- and
thirteenth-century French allegories, Daniel Poirion argues that one finds in al-
legory “the logical hesitation between the image and the mask,” suggesting that
“The real degree-zero of allegorical disguise can be found in prosopopoeia,
which contents itself with giving a voice to ideas.” These allegories, he ob-
serves, are obsessed with imposture and disguise which corroborates the medie-
val fascination with masking. Moreover, in the thirteenth century, masking be-
comes the point of reference for interpreting society. Individuals become masks,
which are understood as aspects or roles of the individuals. Masking therefore
relates to “the subjective universe, the mental theater, the imaginary world that
we project onto the reality that surrounds us. The ideas that masks represent
have lost the prestige of the divine and have merged with the gratuitousness and
arbitrariness of signs and judgments marked by a culture and an era.” In the
“game of allegory,” that is, “subjectivity disintegrates into masks, disguises, and
discoursing voices, in the contradiction between discourses of pedagogical, po-
litical, or theological authority, and the ventriloquism of popular or elementary
inquiry. It is above all this counter-discourse, that of the pagan festival, that we
must recognize under the mask of personification.” For Poirion, allegory fosters
an aesthetic of seeming: “The mask is [...] not the metaphor of writing or of the
writer; it is their emblem, their true appearance [...]. It reminds us that art’s call-
ing is simultaneously to mask and to mime, to conceal in order to reveal; for it is
semblance that signifies, since every senefiance is given in appearance.”293 The
processes of veiling and unveiling Poirion analyzes are, as the discussion of nar-
rative selfhood reveals, true also of life-writing. On this view, allegory becomes
a mode of being, of prosopagraphical selfhood, adequately visualizing the narra-
tive mapping processes that transform selves and thereby potentially challenging
ethical systems, that is, mythologies.
This returns me to the beginning of this chapter, with the claim that medieval
individuals are mere allegories of the universal. In a similar vein, scholars often
maintain that allegories are incapable of transforming myths into new mytholo-
gies. Jauss, for example, questions the limitations of allegory as a means of re-
mythologizing, while admitting that lacunae in the ancient texts, for instance,

293
Poirion, “Mask and Allegorical Personification” 19, 25, 26, 14-15.
102 Part One: Masking Identities

must have invited fables and stories to explain archetypes to the audience.294 Al-
though it is true that ancient myths survived chiefly qua allegorically interpreta-
tion, it is evident that this cultural translation ensued not without debate and a
great deal of ambivalence. Moreover, however much doubt was cast on the an-
cient tales, their allegorical reinterpretation simultaneously affirms a certain his-
toricity. The excessive allegorizing (especially of stories contained in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses in monastic correspondence), further underlines the popularity
and productivity of allegorical remythologizing,295 capable of transforming and
enriching an individual’s perspective and collective mythology. Lastly, even if
allegory indeed fails to advance new mythologies, it nevertheless remains an
ideal vehicle to articulate counter-mythologies.
Medieval allegory, then, is not quite as reductive an epistemological mode as
has often been argued; and it certainly is not characteristic of the transparency
often attributed to medieval individuality, collapsing identity by dissolving the
boundaries between self and non-self. Rather than transparency, the medieval
ideal appears to have been translucence. On the one hand, Biblical exegetical
praxis evinces that allegory is variably capable of constructing opacity and
transparency at the same time, the resulting structure being translucent. In this,
allegory emerges as a more complex trope than metaphor, which actually is the
realization of transparency since metaphor creates identity at the cost of exclud-
ing difference. On the other hand, allegory is translucent insofar as it subsumes
not only metaphorical mappings that result in punctual transparency (while ren-
dering opaque other aspects of the involved domains), but is able to align several
similar mythemes in order to form a ‘horizontal’ core. Assuming the Jakob-
sonian model of a vertical axis of selection (metaphor) and a vertical axis of
combination (metonymy [that is, contiguity]), it is possible to see that contigu-
ous concepts connect domains translucently rather than rendering them identical.
All of this bespeaks the inadequacy of describing medieval individuality as alle-
gory of the universal. Moreover, it paradoxically revives Jacob Burckhardt’s
version of the medieval individual as to be discovered underneath the ‘veil’ of
the universal. That recent discussions of medieval selfhood often oscillate be-
tween these two metaphorical representations is unsurprising perhaps when one
considers that the medieval Troy stories analyzed below likewise construct indi-
viduality amidst the ontological dichotomies of transparent and opaque pro-
sopagraphy, increasingly attempting to locate individuality in the translucence
poised between the two extremes. There is another reason for the preceding dis-
cussion of medieval and modern concepts of allegory, namely, that the story of
the Trojan War itself is an allegory – a conceptual allegory for thirteenth-century
Sicily and late medieval England alike, in which the intersections between the
domains are permanently subject to change. Often, the authors of these narra-

294
Jauss, Alterität und Modernität 287, 290-307. See also Brand, Gesellschaft 86-90.
295
Brisson, Einführung in die Philosophie des Mythos 168-82.
 Chapter Four: Medieval Metaphors of Self 103

tives, besides negotiating a translucent poetological space, also locate their re-
spective collectivities between the extremes of Troy and Greece, between trans-
parency and opacity. The Troy stories, as allegories of change, entail the possi-
bility of individuals to change myths circulated for collective identity formation.
This is possible mainly because in analogy to the several allegorical domains,
the narratives of personal and national identity are structurally embedded within
the same framework, to which I will now turn.
 CHAPTER FIVE
Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectivities:
Toward Medieval Nations

Prosopagraphical selfhood attributes much importance to the role of myths and

mythemes that are available for adoption by the individual members of a collec-
tive. Selfhood is a matter of cultural narratives – either widely-circulated, com-
plete narratives are adopted, or individuals deconstruct the available narratives
in order to recirculate their adapted narratives. In fact, I argue that person and
nation overlap conceptually insofar as both are a matter of mythology. Even if
personal and national identities are mutually constitutive, however, the question
as to whether the term nation is appropriate to describe medieval collectivities
has to be addressed. This question, in fact, has spawned controversial discus-
sions. In these debates, one encounters a familiar pattern: because the Middle
Ages were permeated by Christian universalism, national identities were un-
thinkable. The nation, in analogy to the ‘modern’ self, could occur only after the
Reformation and the invention of the printing press. It is my goal in this chapter
to rethink this Andersonian argument from a prosopagraphical perspective.
Along with Thorlac Turville-Petre, Adrian Hastings, and others, I believe that
medieval communities were not only a laboratory for a developing ‘modern’ na-
tionhood, they were nations proper. Two aspects are particularly important, I
think: the myths and symbols central to nation making (for example, the Troy
story) and a vernacular (oral) literature capable of reaching many people. Within
the medieval English creation of a unified national image, a flexible, allegorical
(prosopagraphical) system emerges and counters an emerging, static ideal of na-
tionhood along Virgilian lines. While this Virgilian tendency emerges already in
the thirteenth-century Historia destructionis Troiae by Guido delle Colonne, the
late medieval versions of the Troy stories articulate an Ovidian challenge to Vir-
gilian conceptions of empire, turning English nationhood into counter-
nationhood, a concept borrowed from the work of Patrick Cheney. The medieval
negotiations about nationhood thus emerge as a pivotal stage also in the formu-
lation of alternative ways of conceiving nations.

1. Person and Nation

The nation, just like the person, boasts a unique history as well as a coherent
mental and physical development. The characteristics of a nation, like the char-
acteristics of a person, are seen further as depending on the different perspec-
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 105

tives chosen by the observer. The nation has become a person per analogiam.296
Moreover, the nation is constituted by a body, at least in terms of the socio-
cultural and symbolic practices pivotal for the formation of selfhood. Personal
and collective intelligibility, on this view, is exclusively a symbolic category
and by no means bound up with corporeality. But who belongs to the body? It is
difficult to ascribe a particular identity to a nation since the metaphor of the
body signals a unity that does not capture the multiplicity of interests of the in-
dividuals that make up the nation.297 Thus, nationhood has to be thought bottom-
up, focusing on the specific elements of the national discourse with which indi-
viduals identify. National identity means identifying with the self-image created
by a collectivity. Such self-images, symbols, and myths are, in turn, capable of
motivating individuals298 – by providing narratives and narrative masks. This
symbiotic relationship comes into view in Benson’s cultural psychology. Na-
tional identity is described here as a multidimensional framework weaving to-
gether narratives much like the prosopagraphical self weaves together personae.
“With its repertoires of shared values, symbols and traditions,” Benson argues,
“national identity bonds individuals, classes and interest groups together under
the superordinate category of the nation. This is a potent way of assisting indi-
vidual selves to locate and define themselves in the wider world.” Personal and
national identity
share key features, and each feeds off the other. The psychology of persons and nations
is all of a piece. Pre-existing processes of national identity shape and become part of
the selves of citizens, and those citizens in turn become, as it were, individual ‘carriers’
of that identity insofar as it has become part of themselves. [...] If we adopt the per-
spective of a cultural evolutionary psychologist, we will identify all the constituting
ideas of nationalism as memes, or more simply as ideas. Their power derives both
from the extent to which they have shaped the autobiographical selves of individuals,
and also from the proportion of a population whose selves have been significantly
shaped in this way.299
Nationhood, then, is a matter of ‘autobiographical’ narrative, of the mythology
that also shapes (and is shaped by) the prosopagraphical self. This perspective
on nationhood at once empowers individuals but also reinforces the role of uni-

296
Kurt Hübner, Das Nationale: Verdrängtes, Unvermeidliches, Erstrebenswertes (Graz: Sty-
ria, 1991) 227-29, but cf. John Colmer, “Constructing a National Tradition: Myths, Mod-
els and Metaphors,” Literature(s) in English: New Perspectives, ed. Wolfgang Zach
(Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1990) 123-24.
297
See Jürgen Straub, “Personale und kollektive Identität: Zur Analyse eines theoretischen
Begriffs,” Identitäten: Erinnerung, Geschichte, Identität 3, ed. Aleida Assmann and Hei-
drun Friese, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999) 96-102.
298
Straub, “Personale und kollektive Identität” 102-03, with reference to Jan Assmann, Das
kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in den frühen Hochkul-
turen (München: Beck, 1992) 132. See further Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation,” trans.
Martin Thom, Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990) 19.
299
Benson, Cultural Psychology 208-09, emphases added.
106 Part One: Masking Identities

versal narratives; the self depends on the nation as much as the nation depends
on the self.300
This perspective on nationhood overlaps strikingly with prosopagraphical
selfhood, in which individuals adopt complete narratives, including narratives of
national identity, or combine circulated mythemes into national masks that they
in turn recirculate. On the one hand, collective discourses allow a highly indi-
vidualized construction of nationhood qua mythological bricolage. On the other
hand, national masks require the predominant circulation of specific clusters of
mythemes (archetypes) in order to fashion a homogeneous, unified nation. In
order to construct such coherence, it is in the interest of those capable of dis-
seminating narratives to circulate complete masks rather than merely individual
mythemes. While this underlines Benson’s characterization of the nation as a
“superordinate” category, it does not preclude more flexible, less externally
structured modes of creating national masks. Like selfhood, nationhood can be
shaped along the two axes of prosopagraphical selfhood: opacity and transpar-
ency. Individuals can choose (and sometimes cannot but choose) to adopt a
widely circulated mask (myth) of the nation that synthesizes the elements char-
acterizing the nation’s ideal ‘subject.’ This corresponds to opaque prosopagra-
phy insofar as a mythical mask might impose values that contradict and veil in-
dividual desires and aspirations. At the other extreme of the prosopagraphical
spectrum, national masks may aim to create the proverbial allegory of the uni-
versal in that the goods incorporated in the national mask permeate all other
masks, resulting in maximal mask intersection and complete transparency. Such
masks, beyond prescribing universal behavior, eventually disintegrate the dis-
tinction between individual and other. Alternatively, individuals can subject na-
tional masks to mythological bricolage in order to synthesize national and indi-
vidual masks, challenging archetypal constructions of nationhood.301 This trans-
lucent prosopagraphy enables individuals to inscribe their personal desires into
national masks, reshuffling and changing these masks that are, in turn, recircu-
lated, providing new modes of conceptualizing selves and nations in a continual
(allegorical) process of deconstruction. This productive metamorphosis of na-
tional masks corresponds, especially within the textual corpus analyzed below,
to what Patrick Cheney refers to as counter-nationhood.
The concept of counter-nationhood implies a subversive critique of empire,
which emerges in early modern England in the context of competing career
models. Cheney argues that Christopher Marlowe fuses several career models
(Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, Lucretius) into an “Ovidian” career path, undermining

300
See also Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992; Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1993) 3.
301
With reference to the translatio imperii, Richard Waswo observes that “we enact the sto-
ries of our past, and so reproduce the version of it that the stories give us.” Waswo, The
Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam (Hanover, N.H.: Univ.
Press of New England, 1997) 28.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 107

Edmund Spenser’s monolithic construction of nationhood, based on the Virgil-

ian, imperial cursus. As a poet-playwright, Marlowe “rewrites Spenser’s Eng-
land with a poetics of counter-nationhood: ‘scourging kingdoms.’” Marlowe’s
tragic “poetics of counter-nationhood [...] foregrounds a bitter objection to the
power structure’s tyrannical, deterministic suppression of individual freedom,”
whereby libertas, for Ovid, Lucan, and Marlowe, primarily entails the “freedom
of expression: in thought, word, action and [...] print.” As such, “counter-
nationhood is less concerned with the health of the nation than with the illness of
the individual.”302 Constructing nationhood along the lines of opaque pro-
sopagraphy is indeed detrimental to ‘individual health,’ since in the latter self-
expression becomes impossible. The dichotomy between Virgilian and Ovidian
models Cheney evinces for the Renaissance, is not exclusive to periods beyond
the Renaissance,303 as my analysis of the Troy stories demonstrates. Within the
analyzed texts, the opposition of Virgilian and Ovidian constructions of nation-
hood and counter-nationhood falls in line with opaque and transpar-
ent/translucent prosopagraphy, respectively.304

302
Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997) 9, 19, 21, 25. Counter-nationhood, as a term re-
ferring to the subversion of imperial discourse by means of pitting Ovidian against Virgil-
ian models, adequately captures the (late) medieval negotiations of nationhood in the Troy
story, although none of the writers I discuss are poet-playwrights – with the possible ex-
ception of John Lydgate. Virgil’s idea of empire, it should be emphasized, is culturally
specific. See Philip R. Hardie, Virgil’s “Aeneid”: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1986). For the Aeneid’s role in constructing Roman identity, see Yasmin Syed,
Vergil’s “Aeneid” and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse (Ann
Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005); J. D. Reed, Virgil’s Gaze: Nation and Poetry in
the “Aeneid” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). For the medieval recep-
tion of Virgil, see Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M.
Benecke (1885; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997); David Quint, Epic and Em-
pire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1993); Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval
“Aeneid” (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994); Christopher Baswell, Virgil in
Medieval England: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).
303
For Virgilian/Ovidian dichotomies in John Gower’s Confessio amantis, see James Simp-
son, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s “Anticlaudianus” and John
Gower’s “Confessio amantis” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995) esp. 289.
304
It should be stressed again that complete transparency and complete opacity are pro-
sopagraphical extremes. It is unlikely that national discourse renders selves completely
transparent. Likewise, only rarely would national masks suppress all individual desires. In
its literary application, prosopagraphical selfhood is a heuristic device to visualize both the
attempts to craft all-encompassing national masks and the “faultlines,” the ruptures in
ideological systems, that are often intrinsic to that very process and which the writers dis-
cussed in this study attempt to suppress or exploit. For faultlines, see Alan Sinfield, Fault-
lines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992).
108 Part One: Masking Identities

2. Modern and Medieval Nations

What is problematic about the claim that in the Middle Ages, the nexus between
personal and national identity formation can be mapped within prosopagraphical
selfhood, is that many scholars unanimously assert that the nation is a modern
concept. Benedict Anderson, for instance, contends that in the medieval period,
people were ‘imprisoned’ by a universal language and dependent on a ruler for
the mediation between heaven and earth. The individual and the nation are, he
argues, products of the combination of print-capitalism and linguistic diversity,
of eighteenth-century newspapers and novels.305 Not surprisingly, recent writing
on medieval nationalism “begins by establishing Benedict Anderson as a sort of
straw man.”306 Although Anderson certainly “gives short shrift to the medieval,”
his “notion of the ‘imagined communities’ is an important contribution to politi-
cal theory”307 – and medieval nationalism is certainly no less imagined than
modern nationalism. Given that for medievalists, the Middle Ages are not quite
as homogeneously permeated by the universal as Anderson seems to think, how-
ever, one might well wonder to which extent medieval kingdoms are not nations.
Whether or not medieval nations are nations has become a contentious issue.
While modernists fervently agree with Anderson’s skepticism vis-à-vis medieval
nations, they find themselves in disagreement with what Anthony D. Smith re-
fers to as the “perennialists,” who believe that nations have always existed. Be-
cause this approach is fraught with “the danger of imposing a retrospective na-
tionalism onto communities and cultures whose identities and loyalties were lo-
cal, regional, and religious, but barely national,” this approach, according to
Smith, is “distinctly out of fashion.”308 Modernists are convinced that industri-
alization and modernization characterize the age of nationalism; it was here that
the “ideal of the sovereignty of the people was fused with the drive to cultural
homogeneity, to forge self-determining nations of co-cultural citizens.”309 The
305
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991) 24-25.
306
Richard J. Moll, “‘Off quhat nacioun art thow?’ National Identity in Blind Hary’s
Wallace,” History, Literature and Music in Scotland, 700-1560, ed. R. Andrew McDonald
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002) 120.
307
Richard K. Emmerson, Rev. of The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen, Speculum 76.4 (2001): 1015.
308
Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
5; Smith, “National Identities: Modern and Medieval?” Concepts of National Identity in
the Middle Ages, ed. Forde, Johnson, and Murray 22.
309
Smith, Myths and Memories 6. For modernist views on the nation, see Hans Kohn, “The
Genesis and Character of English Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1.1
(1940): 69-94; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); Anderson, Imagined Communities;
Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 2002); John Breuilly, “Changes in the Political Uses of the Nation:
Continuity and Discontinuity,” Power and the Nation in European History, ed. Les Scales
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 109

predominant modernist interpretation of nationalism bespeaks the impossibility

of discussing medieval nations. Exceptions notwithstanding, modernists’ studies
frequently (and unfortunately) have little to offer concerning medieval collective
identity formation. More disconcerting, however, is that reference works written
by and for medievalists cement the notion that there were no medieval nations,
which implicitly suggests that students of nationalism can learn little from so-
called pre-modern examples. Entries on nation and related terms in such works,
quickly refer the reader to nationes, that is, the divisions of students at medieval
universities.310 Even if the medieval nationes referred to something other than
what one now would call nation, this would, of course, not preclude the exis-
tence of the concept itself.311 Moreover, Adrian Hastings has shown that in the
Vulgate, the immense influence of which need not be specified here, nation was
“regularly used” in the sense “of a people distinct by ‘language, laws, habits,
modes of judgement and customs’ – to use an almost defining phrase by Ber-
nard, first Norman Bishop of St. David’s.”312 But other factors stand in the way
as well, for example, the predisposition to define the Middle Ages as a uni-
formly priest-ridden age.
There are more faultlines in modernists’ accounts that would lend some
credibility to medieval nationhood. Smith’s work on nationalism, for example, is
ideally suited to approach the Middle Ages. In his ethno-symbolist approach, he

and Oliver Zimmer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) 67-101. John A. Arm-
strong’s Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982)
reinforces the modernist view (4), while stressing the pivotal role of mythology in pre-
modern nation making (7-9, 129-67).
310
Ralf Mitsch, “Nationalbewußtsein,” Sachwörterbuch der Mediävistik, ed. Peter Dinzelba-
cher (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992) 577-78; Lotte Riedlsperger, “Nationes,” Sachwörterbuch,
ed. Dinzelbacher 578. The Lexikon des Mittelalters does attest to medieval national con-
sciousness which changed, allegedly, with the French Revolution; the term natio as refer-
ring to students is secondary (J. Ehlers, “Natio. 1.” and J. Verger, “Natio. 2.,” LexMA 6:
1035-38 and 6: 1038-40, respectively). See also OED, 2nd ed., s.v. nation. The MED (s.v.
nacioun), however, defines nation first as “A nation, people; a race of people; a political
country, nationality,” as “country,” and as “fellow countrymen” – only the third definition
specifies “A class or group of people.” That nationes refers to the division of students has
become a household concept in studies of nationalism. See Elie Kedourie, Nationalism
(London: Hutchinson, 1960) 13-14; Greenfeld, Nationalism esp. 4-5; Hobsbawm, Nations
and Nationalism 14-18.
311
See Susan Reynolds, “The Idea of the Nation as a Political Community,” Power and the
Nation, ed. Scales and Zimmer 55.
312
Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) 14-19, quotation at 17, with reference to R. R. Da-
vies’s “The Peoples of Britain and Ireland 1100-1400: I Identities,” Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society 4 (1994), non videtur. In the light of the above, Hasting contends
that “While the Vulgate certainly does not employ it [natio] with any technical precision,
the regular implication that the word consists of a number of nameable peoples is clear
enough; it is absurd to disregard such usage and refer instead for its Latin medieval mean-
ing to the division of students in various universities into four ‘nations’” (17).
110 Part One: Masking Identities

defines the nation as “a named human population sharing an historic territory,

common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common
economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.”313 Smith sees the
emergence of nations as related to ethnic communities which can be traced back
to the early civilizations. Smith contends that the state was the necessary “ma-
trix” for the development of “national loyalties,” while it was not in the state’s
power to create them – rather, it was the administrative revolution, the develop-
ing market economy, and the emerging cultural and educational system,
whereby the intellectual sphere became pivotally important.314 There is an alter-
native track, however, in which nations emerge from small, demotic communi-
ties “whose ethno-religious self-conceptions had to be exchanged for more ac-
tivist, political ones.” In the course of this process, educator-intellectuals appeal
to the ethnic past of the community: “Ethnic distinctiveness remains a sine qua
non of the nation, and that means shared ancestry myths, common historical
memories, unique cultural markers, and a sense of difference, if not election
[...].” The most potent means of maintaining ethnic distinctiveness, Smith argues
further, are symbols, customs, and ceremonies, since they make visible what
otherwise remains abstract for the members of the nation. 315
The structural importance of mythology for shaping national identities slowly
comes into view, substantiating from a political/historical perspective the over-
lap between selves and nations. Like mythology, the nation is a “framework to
order chaos and render the universe meaningful by harnessing pre-modern mass
aspirations and sentiments for local and familial attachments.” For proponents of
Smith’s ethno-symbolist approach, “what gives nationalism its power are the
myths, memories, traditions and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in
which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered and reinterpreted
by modern nationalist intelligentsias.”316 On this view, nationhood can certainly
be seen as emerging in the Renaissance and accordingly falsifies the modernity
of the nation.317 Moreover, the nation becomes a narrative, mythical concept

313
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 1991) 14. For an ap-
plication of Smith’s axioms regarding early modern Ireland, see Bianca Ross, Britannia et
Hibernia: Nationale und kulturelle Identitäten im Irland des 17. Jahrhunderts (Heidel-
berg: Winter, 1998) 11-18.
314
Smith, National Identity 22-23, 54-61, quotations at 59. Cf. Gellner, Nations and Nation-
alism 19-52. For the role of intellectuals or “intelligentsias,” see further Bernhard Giesen,
Kollektive Identität: Die Intellektuellen und die Nation 2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1999); Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “Die Konstruktion nationaler Identitäten in vergleichen-
der Perspektive,” trans. Peter Fuchs and Kay Junge, Nationale und kulturelle Identität:
Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit, ed. Bernard Giesen
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) 21-38.
315
Smith, National Identity 68-69, 70, 74-77.
316
Smith, National Identity 78; Smith, Myths and Memories 9.
317
For early modern English nationalism, see G. R. Elton, “English National Self-
Consciousness and the Parliament in the Sixteenth Century,” Nationalismus in vorindus-
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 111

through the choices of individuals to share and remold national narratives which
enable collective identification and participation in an imagined community. The
most potent myths are those ‘originating’ in the respective culture; nations and
nationalism thus become cultural artifacts.318 The cultural realm is therefore piv-
otally important for constructing national myths and identities:
It is the intellectuals – poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, novelists, historians and
archaeologists, playwrights, philologists, anthropologists and folklorists – who have
proposed and elaborated the concepts and language of the nation and nationalism and
have, through their musings and research, given voice to wider aspirations that they
have conveyed in appropriate images, myths and symbols.319
Intellectuals, that is, disseminate the masks and mythemes for individuals to
adopt, which again brings into play the necessity to synthesize contradictory nar-
ratives, to negotiate otherness. Peeking over the rim of one’s national border to a
flourishing nation often prompts collective self-consciousness and ‘embarrass-
ment’ which can subsequently mobilize powers to reshape cultural narratives
from the outside.320 One encounters this (universal and repetitive) structural
element frequently in historiographical and in literary texts. In fact, within the
realm of early modern English historiography, this dialectics results in a ‘world-
wide-web’ of interrelated self-definitions, calling to mind Taylor’s “webs of in-

trieller Zeit, ed. Otto Dann (München: Oldenbourg, 1986) 73-82; Aleida Assmann, “‘This
blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this England’: Zur Entstehung des englischen Natio-
nalbewußtseins in der Tudor-Zeit,” Nation und Literatur in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus
Garber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989) 429-42; Greenfeld, Nationalism 29-87; Richard Hel-
gerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Ref-
ormation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); Claus Uhlig, Klio
und Natio: Studien zu Spenser und der englischen Renaissance (Heidelberg: Winter,
1995); the essays in Herbert Grabes, ed., Writing the Early Modern English Nation: The
Transformation of National Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Am-
sterdam: Rodopi, 2001); Gillian E. Brennan, Patriotism, Power and Print: National Con-
sciousness in Tudor England (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne Univ. Press, 2003). For early
modern nationalism in general, see Helmut Berding, ed., Mythos und Nation: Studien zur
Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit 3 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1996), esp. with a focus on mythology: Olaf Mörke, “Bataver, Eidgenossen und Goten:
Gründungs- und Begründungsmythen in den Niederlanden, der Schweiz und Schweden in
der frühen Neuzeit” 104-32; Otto Dann, “Begriffe und Typen des Nationalen in der frühen
Neuzeit,” Nationale und kulturelle Identität, ed. Giesen 56-73.
318
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism 36, 48; Smith, National Identity 69; Anderson,
Imagined Communities 19; Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” Nation
and Narration, ed. Bhabha 1-2; Uhlig, Klio und Natio 23.
319
Smith, National Identity 93. See further Bhabha “Introduction” 1; Bhabha, “DissemiNa-
tion: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” The Location of Culture
(London: Routledge, 1994) 139-70.
320
Reinhard Bendix, “Strukturgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen der nationalen und kulturellen
Identität in der Neuzeit,” Nationale und kulturelle Identität, ed. Giesen 54-55.
112 Part One: Masking Identities

terlocution.”321 The Troy story therefore becomes an ideal field of inquiry inso-
far as it negotiates cultural difference on the plot level (Trojans versus Greeks),
while providing the narratives employed by several European nations in order to
foster national unity, often against other nations.
The argument sketched here finds support from a sociological perspective as
well. Considering the various tools that create collective identities, Bernard Gie-
sen develops a model for the construction of group identities which attributes
crucial importance to the role of rituals. The realm of ritual lies beyond rational-
ity, which enables rituals to eradicate the differences between individual mem-
bers of a community – the common denominator is participation. Rituals thus
lend themselves to the construction of collective identity. While this model pro-
vides a structural context for the formation of collective identity, Giesen ac-
knowledges that it inadequately addresses the images and symbols which mem-
bers use to rationalize their participation in national rituals. The images of the
self and other foster a feeling of community, which is reinforced through rituals,
warranting the longevity of these images since they become embedded within a
cultural world-view, a mythology. Images and model narratives (Mustererzäh-
lungen) are an important communicative means of reinforcing collective identi-
ties insofar as they create the necessary coherence for members (and non-
members) of a community.322 These ‘model narratives’ are necessarily arche-
typical narratives (that is, complete masks) which can be easily adopted by indi-
viduals. Since they are complete narratives, they do not require any work (de-
construction) on behalf of the individual if the latter is not inclined to question
the incorporated values and norms. The unified culture thus established repre-
sents a common horizon, beyond which the world, at least for some individuals,
cannot be imagined.323 Archetypal narratives explain the position of one com-
munity vis-à-vis its origin, its past, its future, and other communities, but they
are not inevitably monolithic.
These processes of collective identity formation do not readily provide a so-
lution to the vexing issue of medieval nationhood. Smith, while acknowledging
that perennialist and modernist approaches are problematic, is uncertain about
medieval nationhood, dating the nation to the early modern period. In order to
gain purchase on the issue, Smith generates axioms applicable to a ‘pure type’ of

321
Uhlig, Klio und Natio 23; Uhlig, “Nationale Geschichtsschreibung und kulturelle Identität:
Das Beispiel der englischen Renaissance,” Nationale und kulturelle Identität, ed. Giesen
169-91.
322
Giesen, Kollektive Identität 12-15, 17-18. Members can articulate alternative narratives
and integrate them into the model narratives as long as they do not contradict the latter’s
constitutive goods. For the relationship between myth and ritual, see Jamme, Grenzen
151-66.
323
See Giesen, Kollektive Identität 18. The self-definition of the collective, Giesen argues, is
determined by the self-definition of other collectives; each collective confers value on dif-
ferent constitutive goods (18-19), that is, archetypes and mythemes.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 113

the nation, including common myths and common ancestry, a shared public cul-
ture based on indigenous cultural resources such as language, a “compact his-
toric territory,” a “single socio-economic unit based on a single culture and
homeland for the unit of population,” and common codes and institutions in one
legal order – that is, common rights and duties for its members. While in antiq-
uity ethnic communities were more common than nations, (late) medieval Eng-
land comes close to qualifying as a nation. One can witness the dissemination of
myths of common ancestry and descent, shared memories of migration, and a
growing public culture as early as in eighth-century England; from the eleventh
and twelfth centuries onward, common laws and “a measure of common trade”
can be attested as well. What Smith eventually finds lacking in order to discuss
medieval England as a nation is the political process of centralization. Thus, “It
is only from the late fifteenth century that we can confidently speak of a grow-
ing sense of English national identity, in a wider national state.”324
Recent inquiries into collective identity formation in medieval England are
less hesitant to classify England as a nation. Thorlac Turville-Petre’s England
the Nation draws attention to an increased emphasis on the unity of the British
Isles, chiefly in Matthew Paris’s thirteenth-century Chronica majora, and the
dissemination of myths of common descent as a legitimation of rule. Turville-
Petre is aware that such myths invoke unity on paper only – borders were con-
stantly in flux, different identities vied for adoption, legal practices differed
from region to region, and so on; however, national myth “came increasingly to
dominate others [...], because it best served the interest of all sides, whatever
their political agenda.” With the additional spread of a centralized bureaucracy,
necessitated by the ever-needed cash to finance wars, Turville-Petre sees real-
ized Smith’s definition of the ‘pure nation’: “The nation had a territory, a his-
tory, a set of cultural traditions, a body of legal practices expressed in the Com-
mon Law, a single economy with a common coinage and taxation, and some

324
Smith, “National Identities” 23, 27-28, 29-32, 35. Inferences about previous periods, he
warns, are difficult since records only allow insights into elite circles (39); but cf. Hast-
ings, Construction 54. For Anglo-Saxon nationhood, see Hastings, Construction 36-42;
Kathleen Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial
Thinking about the Nation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3 (1998):
611-37; Mary P. Richards, “Anglo-Saxonism in the Old English Laws” and Janet Thor-
mann, “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Poems and the Making of the English Nation,” both
in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John
D. Niles (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1997) 40-59, 60-85; Alfred P. Smyth, “The
Emergence of English Identity, 700-1000” and Timothy Reuter, “The Making of England
and Germany, 850-1050: Points of Comparison and Difference,” both in Medieval Euro-
peans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe, ed. Al-
fred P. Smyth (Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) 24-52, 53-
70; Sarah Foot, “The Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Nation-State,’” Power and the
Nation ed. Scales and Zimmer 125-42. For tenth- to thirteenth-century nationhood, see
further Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities esp. 250-331.
114 Part One: Masking Identities

concept of shared rights, even if that did not extend very far down the social
scale.” A common language can also be attested for the period postdating the
1290s.325 In order for the elites to disseminate national myths to the majority of
the people, a common language is obviously necessary. While it is true that the
English spoken in England differed from region to region, what is relevant is
that “it was all thought of as English. It is this self-definition that matters.”326
Hastings likewise underscores the importance of a common language and,327
more importantly, “an extensively used vernacular literature.” But even in the
Latin writings predating the ‘vernacular turn,’ Hastings locates national tenden-
cies, for example, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c.
730), in which Bede assumes a territorial and ecclesiastical unity; a “medley of
peoples and kingdoms has become a single nation.” In King Alfred’s age, then,
one finds a national language, a national literature, common law, a vital econ-
omy, and common codes and institutions. In this context, Hastings stresses time
and again the massive circulation and availability of books in Anglo-Saxon Eng-
land, not all of which were written for clerics: “If the equation of a significant
vernacular literature and a nation bears any weight at all, it must be applicable
here.”328 In the light of these developments, Hastings and others argue that Eng-

325
Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity,
1290-1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 1-9, quotations at 8. See further H. R. Loyn,
The Making of the English Nation: From the Anglo-Saxons to Edward I (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1991) esp. 6; M. T. Clanchy, England and Its Rulers 1066-1272: Foreign
Lordship and National Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) 241-62. For Peter Line-
han and Janet L. Nelson, European identity formation as such is a matter of exclusion: “A
European identity was formed at the expense of minorities: to identify and organise was to
exclude. [...] By the later Middle Ages, Europe had become a Europe by negation, by as-
serting what it was not, and by proscribing assorted Others.” See “Identities: Selves and
Others,” The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (2001; London:
Routledge, 2003) 12.
326
Turville-Petre, England 19-20, quotation at 20. For the importance of self-definitions in
the context of nationhood, see further Hastings, Construction 19. For a linguistic account
of English nationhood, see Stanley Hussey, “Nationalism and Language in England, c.
1300-1500,” Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism, ed. Bjørn, Grant, and Stringer 96-108.
327
The ‘language question’ is a controversial one. Tim William Machan, for instance, argues
that “the mere act of writing in a vernacular, testifying to its existence, or translating the
Bible into it do not constitute linguistic rationalization, nor are they, as Hasting’s position
would require, sufficient for the transformation of a language’s ecology.” Machan, Eng-
lish in the Middle Ages (2003; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) 93. See further Derek
Pearsall, “The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century,” Nation, Court and Culture:
New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2001) 15-27. It should be emphasized, however, that multilingualism does not rule
out nationhood. See Joachim Schwend, “Nationalism in Scottish Medieval and Renais-
sance Literature,” Nationalism in Literature – Literarischer Nationalismus: Literature,
Language and National Identity, ed. Horst W. Drescher and Hermann Völkel (Frankfurt:
Lang, 1989) 29.
328
Hastings, Construction 36-41, quotations at 37, 41.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 115

land is the first nation in Europe, becoming “the prototype of both a nation and a
nation-state.”329 This early English nation survived the Norman conquest, foster-
ing a stronger national consciousness in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
emerging most forcefully during the Hundred Years War. Hastings concedes,
however, that the “greatest intensity of its nationalist experience” was not
reached before the late sixteenth century.330 While this suggests a (problematic)
teleological development, it nonetheless indicates that medieval England was a
nation. My interpretation of the medieval Troy story is not meant to pinpoint in-
stances of English nationhood, but rather to analyze a textual corpus that poten-
tially yields insights into the processes “that maintain, reinterpret and transmit
values” associated with English nationhood.331
The role of a vernacular literature in the formation and negotiation of medie-
val (English) nationhood cannot be over-emphasized, because it was one of the
most potent means of providing national narratives and masks for individuals,
whereby Hasting stresses that it is the written vernacular literature that makes all
the difference: “Oral languages are proper to ethnicities; widely written vernacu-
lars to nations.”332 While the quickly increasing number of medieval books has

329
Hastings, Construction 4. See further Greenfeld, Nationalism esp. 14; Joseph R. Strayer,
“The Historical Experience of Nation-Building in Europe,” Medieval Statecraft and the
Perspectives of History: Essays by Joseph R. Strayer, ed. John F. Benton and Thomas N.
Bisson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971) 341-48; Strayer, On the Medieval
Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970). For Hastings,
the nation is an imagined community, a “horizontally bonded society to whom the state in
a sense belongs.” This “horizontally bonded society,” connects at once to prosopagraphi-
cal selfhood, in which ‘horizontality’ has been seen as productive in connecting vertically-
layered masks and to the increasing development of horizontal bonds in medieval society.
See M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theo-
logical Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (1968; To-
ronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997) 265; Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (1989; Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994) x; Janet Coleman, “English Culture in the Four-
teenth Century,” Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1983) 34; Robert R. Edwards, “‘The Metropol and the Mayster-Toun’:
Cosmopolitanism and Late Medieval Literature,” Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Loca-
tions in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001) 30.
330
Hastings, Construction 5.
331
Breuilly, “Changes in the Political Uses of the Nation” 69. He emphasizes that perennial-
ists frequently do not evince these processes which are the sine qua non of nationalism.
332
Hastings, Construction 21. Jonathan Shepard argues that “notions at grass-roots of wider
regional, let alone ‘national’ or ‘ethnic,’ identities beyond membership of one’s kin-group
or immediate locality were indistinct and confined mainly to pious bookmen.” Monarchs,
he notes, could only affirm power to those present at court, chiefly by means of ritual and
staged performance. Jonathan Shepard, “Courts in East and West,” Medieval World, ed.
Linehan and Nelson 14, 20-22. Such court rituals, however, became the means of control-
ling larger regions insofar as rituals became myths, the “pious bookmen” playing a deci-
sive role in the invention and the circulation of these rituals – “descriptions of rituals be-
came as important as their performance.” Philippe Buc, “Political Rituals and Political
116 Part One: Masking Identities

been mentioned already, books were, of course, also circulated orally – the
combination of oral and written language potentially ensuring that “a linguisti-
cally based nationalism quickly gains support even in largely non-literate com-
munities.”333 A nation of ‘readers’ emerges, the centrality of which has been
long acknowledged for modern constructions of nationhood.334 This is no less
true of the late medieval period, in which literary and historical narratives were
mainly circulated in manuscript miscellanies, the organization of which was
quite diverse. These medieval anthologies, however, were not assembled arbi-
trarily. They were anthologies in the sense of canons, which were remade “with
each manuscript assembly – and this fluid canonicity of medieval manuscript
society sustains itself through early print.” These canons, moreover, are highly
individualized rather than universal, contrasting sharply with later notions of
canonicity.335 This kind of canon making becomes complicit in nation making,
an early instance being Alfred’s massive translation program – in Kathleen
Davis’s words, “The vernacular prose during Alfred’s reign forms a canon of
texts [...] that all relate in complex ways to a conception of national identity
[...].” The sheer amount of these translations further testifies to the “strong
emergence” of national identity.336 Moreover, medieval ‘literary’ canons also
play a crucial role for the mediation between selves and nations, as Peter Haidu
observes: “The constitution of the subject is an integral part of medieval state-
formation, with its increasing reliance on ideology and discipline. [...] Above all,
however, practices modernity categorizes as ‘literature’ [...] do the ideological
work of their polity in exploring and constituting subjectivity by providing per-
formative models of human comportment.” The emerging “canon” becomes “an
uncanny allegory of the state and its discontents, which grips us, often against
our taste and will, because it tells the story of our coming to the untenable site of

Imagination in the Medieval West from the Fourth Century to the Eleventh,” Medieval
World, ed. Linehan and Nelson 190, 196. For the role of political rituals, see further Janet
L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon Press,
1986); Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter
(Darmstadt: WBG, 2003).
333
Hastings, Construction 23, 31. The differences between manuscript and early book cul-
tures are less marked than is generally assumed. See Lerer, “Medieval English Literature”;
Ralph Hanna, III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996).
334
For eighteenth-century national (literary) canons, see Anderson, Imagined Communities;
Greenfeld, Nationalism 14; Hastings, Construction 28. See further Sarah M. Corse, Na-
tionalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) 23.
335
Lerer, “Medieval English Literature” 1255, 1260; Hanna, Pursuing History 9-10.
336
Kathleen Davis, “National Writing” 615-16. “Nations necessarily articulate their particular
identities in terms of perceived or accepted universal codes, and translation enables the
production of a universally recognizable canon of texts and genres that is, simultaneously,
a national canon attesting the nation’s own historical existence and its own literary and
cultural tradition.”
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 117

subjectivity we occupy. The canon is an allegory whose code has been mis-
placed, or, more precisely, repressed.”337 This ‘allegorical canon’ reformulates
the fluidity of medieval literary canons and posits – to a certain degree – the in-
dividual’s capacity to challenge and renegotiate both individuality and nation-
hood, as my analyses of the Troy stories will demonstrate.
This is not to suggest that medieval nations are exactly like their modern
counterparts or that nations, medieval or modern, are exclusively fashioned and
maintained by literary discourse. My purpose here is rather to analyze the rene-
gotiations of selves and nations in the transformation of one of the founding
myths of England. At the intersections of historiography, literature, and political
theory, this textual corpus can be seen as somewhat analogous to the nation
making of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which philology
plays an important role insofar as it enlisted historical (especially medieval) evi-
dence to bolster nationalist sentiments. Stressing territorial continuity with me-
dieval predecessors, “This pseudo-history assumes, first, that the peoples of
Europe are distinct, stable and objectively identifiable social and cultural units,
and that they are distinguished by language, religion, custom and national char-
acter, which are unambiguous and immutable.” While “Europe’s peoples have
always been more fluid, complex, and dynamic than the imaginings of modern
nationalists,”338 nationalism thrives on contradiction-free, unifying accounts – on
opaque masks – and on literary-historical narratives that fabricate such unities.339
If medieval, like modern, canon building can also be regarded as nation and em-
pire building,340 an investigation of the nature of (medieval) canon building is
urgently needed to obtain a better view on present discussions about nationhood
and post-nationhood. Potentially, the medieval negotiations of the nexus be-
tween selves and nations may offer alternative models for the construction and
perception of nationhood; and I believe that the counter-nationhood that emerges
337
Haidu, Subject Medieval / Modern 4-5, 342. Haidu emphasizes the heterogeneity of ‘liter-
ary’ canons, which not only provide individuals with a multiplicity of role narratives, but
with a multiplicity of contradictory narratives that subsequently force “actants into acting
as subjects making ‘free choices.’ Narrativized, freedom appears as the product of contra-
dictory determinism” (342).
338
Geary, Myth of Nations 11, 13.
339
In this context, Geary discusses the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, which – unbe-
knownst to their creators – became a canonical model for ethnic nationalism. The model,
quickly adopted by philologists in Germany and other countries, enabled scholars to go
back to the ancient texts the dates of which became synonymous with the birth of the re-
spective peoples. Nationalism and philology are thus complicit in the birth of nations.
Geary, Myth of Nations 28-37. For the nineteenth-century quest of medieval origins, see
further Franti$ek Graus, “Nationale Deutungsmuster der Vergangenheit in spätmittelalter-
lichen Chroniken,” Nationalismus, ed. Dann 52-53, and Helmut Beumann, “Zur Natio-
nenbildung im Mittelalter” in the same collection (21-33).
340
To rephrase Toni Morrison’s famous dictum that “Canon building is Empire building.
Canon defense is national defense.” Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The
Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly 28 (1989): 8.
118 Part One: Masking Identities

in the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson may pose a viable alternative
to those theories that talk of the end of the nation, or see it challenged by supra-
national regionalism, envisioning nationalism’s transformation into post-
nationalism.341 It is hoped, then, besides providing a heuristic instrument to cap-
ture the negotiation of nationhood within the medieval (English) Troy story, that
the model of prosopagraphical selfhood may suggest ways of rethinking present
debates about the future of the nation, and attendant concepts such as regional-
ism and post-nationalism.
I have offered an account of nationhood above that is primarily based on
Smith’s ethno-symbolist definition of an ideal nation, in which myths, symbols,
and cultural discourses emerge as pivotal for nation building. Most of the (mod-
ernist) tenets defining nationalism could be shown to be equally applicable to
medieval nationhood. I will now turn to the Troy story, the most widely dis-
seminated secular myth of origin in the Middle Ages. The Troy story is of par-
ticular interest because it is the myth of common descent imperative to most
European collectivity’s constructions of nationhood while also representing a
mythology in structural terms. In other words, the Troy story is a myth of com-
mon descent that at once promulgates myths of nationhood while negotiating the
nexus between selves and nations, often testing different modes of constructing
selfhood and nationhood alike. More specifically, by means of the several ‘axes’
of the prosopagraphical model (‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ prosopagraphy), it be-
comes possible to chart the varying degrees of transparency and opacity, that is,
the varying degree of individuality made possible in several intra- and extra-
textual constructions of nationhood.342 Within the English transmission of the
Troy story, an increasingly translucent mode of constructing the relationship be-
tween discourses of selves and nations emerges. At this point, nationhood
metamorphoses into counter-nationhood, which questions the very merit of nar-
341
Hanna observes that the regional manuscript circulation speaks in interesting ways to the
present debates about nationalism insofar as the medieval textual situation “represents an
actual, historically extant model of a culture that lacks a single stabilizing literary tradi-
tion.” Hanna, Pursuing History 12. For the post-national debate, see Jürgen Habermas,
Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998);
Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (1995;
New York: Free Press, 1996); Frank Davey, Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the
Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993); but cf.
Barbara Korte, “Survival of the Nation(al)? Notes on the Case of English-Canadian Litera-
ture,” Connotations 8.3 (1998/99): 362-73. Some scholars, like Hastings, see parallels be-
tween modern English and medieval Latin as universal languages, between the proto-
nation of the ‘priest-ridden’ Middle Ages and the ‘business-ridden’ globalized world. See
Hastings, Construction 7. It was precisely the lack a “common mythology” which Russell
Peck believed set the modern age apart from the Middle Ages.” Peck, “Public Dreams”
462.
342
In Greenfeld’s framework, the differences between opacity and transparency can be re-
phrased as the distinction between collective-authoritarian and individualistic-libertarian
nationalism. Greenfeld, Nationalism 9-12.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 119

rowly-defined nationhood as such; it turns nationhood into a “non-patriotic form

of nationhood that subverts royal power.”343

3. Medieval Nations and Myths of Troy

In order to map the interplay between medieval selfhood, nationhood, and
counter-nationhood within the prosopagraphical model, I have chosen the most
pervasive secular myth of origins, whereby the focus does not primarily fall on
the historical (that is, chronicle) tradition but also on those publicly-mediated
versions which found wide circulation beyond monasteries.344 While Guido’s
translation of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie can legitimately be
called a historical work, the other works discussed here, most of which are at
least to some extent reminiscent of Guido’s Historia, choose to convey the Troy
story in different generic forms with the goal of disseminating narratives that
negotiate and circulate model narratives for constructing individual and national
identities. This endeavor seems no less legitimate than investigations into the na-
tional dimension of the Arthurian tradition;345 after all, the Arthurian material
was intricately related to Trojan history, most prominently in the Brut tradition,
notably preceding the events surrounding King Arthur’s court. Thus, the stories
of and about the Trojan War deal with the oldest, non-Biblical English ancestry.
Historical accounts, such as the Troy story, serve purposes beyond conveying
the historical truth. As Andrew Galloway observes (with reference to John of
Salisbury), history “revealed the invisible things of God, offered examples of
reward and punishment, and helped establish or abolish customs and strengthen
or destroy privileges.” History shapes both past and present; and the Troy story

343
Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2004) 41. For Jörn Garber, the translatio imperii, bridging the gap between univer-
sal and national history, yields insights into a ‘pre-state nation-theory.’ My focus falls
rather on the articulation of a pre-nation theory of counter-nationhood. Jörn Garber, “Tro-
janer – Römer – Franken – Deutsche: ‘Nationale’ Abstammungstheorien im Vorfeld der
Nationalstaatsbildung,” Nation und Literatur, ed. Garber 114-17. For the translatio im-
perii, see Werner Goez, Translatio Imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichts-
denkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: J.
C. B. Mohr, 1958); Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Translations of Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1992). Waswo observes that “History gets made by people enacting stories.
We in the west will make ours in large part by enacting this one, the very story that Virgil
himself is (re)telling, our founding legend.” Waswo, Founding Legend of Western Civili-
zation 28.
344
For the popular appeal of origin stories, see Susan Reynolds, “Medieval origines gentium
and the Community of the Realm,” History 68 (1983): 378.
345
See A. E. Parsons, “The Trojan Legend in England: Some Instances of Its Application to
the Politics of the Times,” MLR 24 (1929): 253-64, 394-408; Felicity Riddy, “Reading for
England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness,” Bibliographical Bulletin of
the International Arthurian Society 43 (1991): 314-32; Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign
Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2001).
120 Part One: Masking Identities

lends itself particularly well to this enterprise since it was a particularly malle-
able myth.346
While the Troy story “is a paradigmatic cosmopolitan narrative,” its “mytho-
graphic amplitude” aside, it “offered a myth of national origins for European cit-
ies, regions, and nations [...] and a mirror for aristocratic and princely con-
duct.”347 Only very recently have scholars become interested again in the na-
tional (and imperial) dimension of the Trojan narratives. Sylvia Federico, for
example, observes that “The medieval fascination with Troy [...] places an indi-
vidual claimant in relation to a fantasied history. The symbolic appropriation of
Troy is at once a means of creating a past, present, and future in accord with
specific ideals and also a means of mobilizing that imagined historicity in ges-
tures of self-invention and self-definition.” This endeavor emerges as an “impe-
rial gesture,” and it “encourages the creation of the idea of England as a nation.
The writers of this period, in turning collectively to Trojan stories, help create an
empire of English letters that is just as fantasmatic and just as ultimately defini-
tive: the canon of the medieval matter of Troy and, more broadly, English liter-
ary history in the later Middle Ages.”348 I believe that a revaluation of this
“canon” within the framework of prosopagraphical selfhood, engaging both with
the depiction of self and nation within the textual corpus and beyond, is not only
useful but also necessary insofar as it makes palpable the highly interesting for-
mation of a counter-national (and therefore by definition counter-imperial) dis-
course in the formative period of the English nation. It is almost inevitable that
such a revaluation begins with Guido’s translation of Benoît’s Roman de Troie,
simply because it was translated no less than three times in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Moreover, Guido’s Historia was the most widely circulated
and probably most influential Troy story in the late Middle Ages, which is cer-
tainly not reflected in the contemporary critical landscape.

346
Andrew Galloway, “Writing History in England,” The Cambridge History of Medieval
English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999) 255;
Nicholas Birns, “The Trojan Myth: Postmodern Reverberations,” Exemplaria 5.1 (1993):
45-78.
347
Edwards, “Cosmopolitanism” 43-44.
348
Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003) xii, xvi. Federico’s stress ultimately falls on the represen-
tation of gender. Where my argument differs from Federico’s is in the clarification of how
exactly personal and national identities intersect and what kind of nationhood is envi-
sioned. Claims, such as Susan Reynold’s – according to which “from the sixth to the four-
teenth centuries at least, peoples (gentes, populi, nationes) were normally thought of as
social and political communities and that myths of the common origin of a people served
to increase or express its sense of solidarity” – have surprisingly not been “generally ap-
preciated.” Reynolds, “Medieval origines gentium” 375; but cf. Hans Matter, Englische
Gründungssagen von Geoffrey of Monmouth bis zur Renaissance: Ein Versuch (Heidel-
berg: Winter, 1922) 86-87.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 121

Obviously, the Troy story does not originate in the Middle Ages. Whereas in
the East, the Homeric epics enjoyed wide circulation, in western Europe,
Homer’s epics were not known. Moreover, for medieval writers Homer was not
highly esteemed.349 The Troy story was known mainly through Virgil and Ovid,
whose mythical gods rarely seemed to have bothered the Christian world.350 The
importance and popularity of the Aeneid are often seen as the result of the clever
reorganization of the classical material and its “new patriotism.” Aeneas man-
ages to escape the cunning Greeks and become “part of the surviving human
wreckage out of which was to be built a stronger nation in the West.” In contrast
to Virgil, Ovid enjoyed a doubtful reception in the medieval period, since he
transformed the Trojan heroines “in the light of his own sentimental and erotic
interests” in the Heroides; his Metamorphoses is “lifeless” and “nothing short of
parody.”351 The early Church Fathers were generally critical of the Troy story.
Augustine, for example, singles out the actual powerlessness of the (Trojan)
gods unable to warrant the Virgilian myth of an empire without end. If Rome
were to cling on to its gods, it would become a second Babylon. Harsh critiques
of the Troy story notwithstanding, it was widely studied in the medieval
world.352 Since Virgil does not provide a full account of the war and since his
authority was questioned,353 readers turned to two accounts of the Trojan War
firmly believed to be true since they were eye-witness reports, namely, the Troy
stories of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan. These texts quickly became
the main sources for medieval historians, with a broad preference for the pro-
Trojan Dares.354 These ‘eye-witness accounts,’ which differ from the Virgilian
tradition, especially as concerns the lack of self-sacrifice and heroism cherished
in the latter,355 represented an important alternative to the Virgilian version.

349
See Max J. Wolff, “Der Lügner Homer,” GRM 20 (1932): 53-65. Both Guido and Benoît
have their own doubts about Homer’s reliability.
350
See Diane P. Thompson, The Trojan War: Literature and Legends from the Bronze Age to
the Present (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004) 126. For diachronic accounts of represen-
tations of Troy in the arts, see Margaret R. Scherer, The Legends of Troy in Art and Lit-
erature, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 1964); Arthur M. Young, Troy and Her Legend
(Pittsburgh, Pa.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1948); Barbara Theune-Großkopf et al., eds.,
Troia: Traum und Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2001); Scot McKendrick’s “The Great
History of Troy: A Reassessment of a Secular Theme in Late Medieval Art,” Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 43-82.
351
Young, Troy 38, 41, 42.
352
Garber, “Trojaner” 124. For Augustine’s critique of the Virgilian imperial narrative in his
City of God, see Francis Ingledew, “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction
of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,” Speculum
69.3 (1994): 670-73.
353
Baswell, Virgil esp. 18.
354
Wolff, “Lügner Homer” 58-62. For the medieval preference for Dares as a “Trojan ally,”
see Young, Troy 50; Frazer, Trojan War 3; Thompson, Trojan War 131.
355
For differences between Dares and Dictys (and between them and the Virgilian tradition),
see Young, Troy 52-57; Werner Eisenhut, “Spätantike Troja-Erzählungen – mit einem
122 Part One: Masking Identities

The seventh and eighth centuries mark the beginning of the quest for Trojan
origins in medieval Europe, as in Fredegarius Scholasticus’s Chronicle, which
claims Trojan origins for the Franks;356 the Trojan origins of the British Isles
first surface in Gildas’s De excidio et conquestu Britanniae and in the Historia
Brittonum, often attributed to Nennius. The Trojan heritage increasingly be-
stowed upon rulers and collectivities soon became a highly infectious fashion
throughout Europe in spite of the disparity of the accounts. In the eleventh cen-
tury, Dudo of St. Quentin argues for the Norman Vikings’ Trojan ancestry; dur-
ing the twelfth century, Anglo-Norman families began to construct Trojan gene-
alogies.357 At this point, Trojan history turns into Trojan romance, most promi-
nently in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie and the anonymous Eneas,
both focusing primarily on the love stories. It was the redaction of Benoît’s Ro-
man at the hands of Guido delle Colonne, which re-historicized the material and
ensured an enormous dissemination of the Troy story across Europe.358
In England, the Trojan material found its most ingenious disseminator in
Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose anti-ecclesiastical Historia regum Britanniae (c.
1135-38) became the most widely circulated version of the Troy story in Britain
and remained the most dominant myth of origin until it was partially replaced in
the sixteenth century by the myth of Anglo-Saxonism.359 Geoffrey’s Historia
mainly draws on the Trojan material available in the Historia Brittonum, which
also forms the basis for Henry of Huntingdon’s nationalist chronicle.360 Geoffrey

Ausblick auf die mittelalterliche Troja-Literatur,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 18 (1983):

12-28; Dares, Untersuchungen zu Dares Phrygius, ed. and trans. Andreas Beschorner,
Classica Monacensia 4 (Tübingen: Narr, 1992) 266-70; Stefan Merkle, “Troiani belli
verior textus: Die Trojaberichte des Dictys und Dares,” Die deutsche Trojaliteratur des
Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Materialien und Untersuchungen, ed. Horst Brunner
(Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1990) 491-522.
356
Franti$ek Graus, “Troja und trojanische Herkunftssage im Mittelalter,” Kontinuität und
Transformation der Antike im Mittelalter, ed. Willi Erzgräber (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke,
1989) 32-33.
357
See Waswo, Founding Legend of Western Civilization 48-49, 60-61. For Troy narratives
preceding Benoît, see Eisenhut, “Spätantike Troja-Erzählungen” 1-28, esp. 3-4. For the
German tradition, see Hans-Josef Dreckmann, ed., Das Buch von Troja von Hans Mair:
Kritische Textausgabe und Untersuchung (München: Fink, 1970) 233-38; Brunner, ed.,
Die deutsche Trojaliteratur des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit; Elisabeth Lienert,
Deutsche Antikenromane des Mittelalters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001).
358
Scherer, Legends of Troy 224-25; Young, Troy 64-65; Thompson, Trojan War 139-40.
359
Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-
Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House; Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1982) 1-
3. For the dissemination of Geoffrey’s Historia, see Julia C. Crick, The “Historia regum
Britannie” of Geoffrey of Monmouth. IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Mid-
dle Ages (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991) esp. 224. For Ingledew, the Historia is not only the
“most reproduced historical work written in the Middle Ages” but also “the exemplary
historiographical work of the Middle Ages.” Ingledew, “Book of Troy” 669.
360
See John Gillingham, “Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the Eng-
lish Nation,” Concepts of National Identity, ed. Forde, Johnson, and Murray 75-101, rpt.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 123

does not relate the events of the Trojan War itself but focuses on the translation
of empires: Aeneas’s son Ascanius founds the city of Alba on the Tiber, and fa-
thers Silvius, who after a wild affair with a niece of Lavinia, learns that he will
give birth to a boy who shall eventually cause the death of both mother and fa-
ther before, and after long wanderings in exile, he shall rise to the highest honor.
Accordingly, the unfortunate Brutus is exiled, where he meets his Trojan rela-
tives and gains fame for military skills. The Trojans elect him as their leader in
their striving against Greek oppression. Brutus thus negotiates with the Greek
king Pandrasus, sending the (famous) letter in which the Trojans articulate their
desire to rather live in poverty and freedom than being subjected to Greek slav-
ery, even if the latter entails wealth. Pandrasus loses this inverted siege of Troy.
In order to settle the conflict between Greeks and Trojans, Brutus marries Pan-
drasus’s daughter Ignoge. Subsequently, the Trojans leave. During their wander-
ings, Brutus inquires about his future at a temple of Diana where he receives the
prophecy that he will found a second Troy – “altera Troia” – and rule the whole
world – “et ipsis / Tocius terre subditus orbis erit,” which testifies to the impe-
rial ambition of Geoffrey’s Historia. On the way to Britain, the Trojans pick up
several other groups of Trojan ancestry, fight in Aquitaine and are victorious
over it, engage and secure victory against the Gauls, decide to leave, and arrive
on the island called Albion – “Insule huic tunc nomen Albion erat [...].” Brutus
decides that the island should bear his name – its inhabitants and its language
were thus referred to as Britons and British, respectively – and founds a capital
on the River Thames which he chooses to call “Nouam Troiam,” which due to
verbal corruption became “Trinovatum.” The translation of the Trojan empire to
Britain has been accomplished: “The new Britons are Trojans reborn.”361
The depiction of empire in Geoffrey’s Historia is interesting particularly be-
cause of the tensions that later ensue between Rome and Britain, especially in
Arthur’s conflict with emperor Lucius, who is defeated as Arthur reaches out for
domination over Europe. Judith Weiss notes in this context that insular ro-
mances and chronicles align the supposedly Christian emperor with pagan sup-
port, and “Dominion here [in Geoffrey] temporarily passes from Rome to Brit-
ain.”362 Lee Patterson also locates a shift toward secular history, toward a Virgil-
ian translatio imperii that is not so much concerned with sanctioning history by

in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Po-
litical Values (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000) 123-44. Galloway emphasizes the Virgilian
perspective of Huntingdon’s chronicle in “Writing History” 263-64.
361
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The “Historia regum Britannie” of Geoffrey of Monmouth. II:
The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988)
2-17, quotations at 11, 16, 17; Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain:
From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966) 157.
362
Judith Weiss, “Emperors and Antichrists: Reflections of Empire in Insular Narrative,
1130-1250,” The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, ed. Phillipa Hardman (Cam-
bridge: Brewer, 2002) 88. See further MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History 13-16.
124 Part One: Masking Identities

means of spiritual history but invests secular affairs with legitimizing power.
Geoffrey’s translatio, he argues, posits that the “legitimizing force at the origin
was itself unproblematic.” Geoffrey’s Historia “is a myth of origins that decon-
structs the origin.” Geoffrey provides a narrative easily exploited by rulers to
historically legitimate their rule; however, it also imparts the very instability of
historical origins. Patterson believes that the various attacks on authorities in the
many accessus in England and the differences in the vernacular versions point
up this instability which is further underlined by the various genres in which the
plot has been relayed: eye-witness accounts, romances, histories, and so on.363
The Virgilian dimension of the Historia is likewise emphasized by Francis In-
gledew who believes that Geoffrey’s Virgilian view of history is constituted by
“the genealogical, the prophetic, and the erotic.” The erotic elements in the His-
toria explain the difficulty of establishing a “categorical distinction between
medieval romance and historiography,” he believes. With its devotion to origins,
its concern with collective identities, with secular prophecy, and its inclusion of
eros, Geoffrey’s work becomes a “history constructed from another social start-
ing point, that of the institutions of principality and aristocracy, with their inter-
ests in an emergent sense of nation.”364 Hence, Geoffrey’s Historia marks a kind
of translation imperii in terms of smaller collectivities. Moreover, it questions
how such smaller collective identities can be fashioned, that is, which masks are
appropriate and should therefore be circulated.
Geoffrey’s myth-making “mirrors political ideals first being widely contem-
plated in the twelfth century” and prompted a “proliferation of vernacular na-
tional chronicles.”365 While the nationalist mask of the Historia is monolithic, its
opacity is the result of ingenious acts of mythological bricolage or, more bluntly
put, “the Historia is a complete invention from start to finish. Geoffrey was cer-
tainly a man of immense imaginative powers, but it seems likely that he did
have a collection of fragmentary sources of a derived inferior kind, perhaps tra-
ditional material transmitted orally in the form of short tales about King Arthur
and the Trojan origins of the British [...].”366 Geoffrey combined available
mythemes into a plausible tale of British origins – so plausible, in fact, that “the
fantastic histories of Geoffrey of Monmouth” remained influential beyond the
363
Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature
(Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987) 201-04. For Geoffrey’s Virgilian historical
perspective, see John Clark, “Trinovantum – the Evolution of a Legend,” Journal of Me-
dieval History 7.2 (1981): 143. Waswo believes that “Geoffrey is a long way from achiev-
ing the Virgilian perspective on how history is made”; and yet, “The new order cultivates
the land, builds its capital city, and marches toward empire.” Waswo, Founding Legend of
Western Civilization 57-58. See also Federico, New Troy xv.
364
Ingledew, “Book of Troy” 666-67, 668, 680.
365
Galloway, “Writing History” 267. Geoffrey’s historiographical infidelity was remarked
upon already around 1200 by William of Newburgh. See Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the
Subject of History (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991) 95.
366
T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950) 6.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 125

Renaissance.367 Given the erotic discourses injected into Geoffrey’s account of

British origins and its implicit historiographical instability, the Historia is also a
narrative that engages with questions concerning the relationship between selves
and nations and with changeability – causality, within the Historia, is not divine;
it is decidedly human.368 Comparing the Historia to Gildas’s account of Britain’s
Trojan origins, Robert Hanning comments on the Trojans’ choice to be either
socially enslaved or ‘savagely’ free. Geoffrey’s Trojans, he notes, are “clearly
ready to live outside society indefinitely, if necessary.” Whereas for Gildas, ex-
istence outside society is unnatural, Geoffrey presents the forest as a place
where social rules are suspended, enabling self-fashioning: “The individual may
live a full life as his own ruler and seek personal fulfillment as he sees fit, unfet-
tered by other obligations.” More generally, the Historia frequently revisits such
tensions between individual desires and collective obligations.369 The problem of
reconciling selves and nations, I believe, is further related to the attested histori-
ographical instability. The quest for individual freedom against oppressive col-
lective discourse finds an analogue in the Ovidian opposition to an ultimately
Virgilian historiographical trajectory. As the following analyses demonstrate,
the tensions between a Virgilian imperial imperative and Ovidian individual lib-
ertas in nation building are an on-going concern in the Troy story.
The British quest for Trojan origins is no different in this respect from the
French negotiation of Trojan nationhood in twelfth-century romance, for in-
stance, in the anonymous Eneas and Benoît’s Roman de Troie, the latter being
an important product of the twelfth-century renaissance also because of its Ovid-
ian transformation of the Trojan narrative.370 Ovidian metamorphoses, particu-
larly Benoît’s magic, prove to be exceedingly problematic for later translators of
the Roman de Troie. In any event, like Geoffrey, Benoît perceives in the Trojans
a “distinct people, united by a common history, descent and culture, and linked
to a specific territory,” which, for Penny Eley, places both Eneas and Benoît’s
Roman in the context of nation building: the poets’ description of their “mythi-
cal ancestors indicates that they and their contemporaries did indeed have a clear
perception of national identity, which they located primarily in territory and cul-
ture, and which formed the basis for a form of national consciousness not too
dissimilar from our own.”371 In the course of the transmission of the Troy story,
what seems to be more of a problem are the languages of transmission.

367
Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1999) 130. See further Kendrick, British Antiquity 7.
368
The “fatality that brings down the Arthurian empire locates causality at the level not of
divine superintendance but human action.” Patterson, Chaucer 95.
369
Hanning, Vision of History in Early Britain 157-59.
370
Young, Troy 58.
371
Penny Eley, “The Myth of Trojan Descent and Perceptions of National Identity: The Case
of Eneas and the Roman de Troie,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 35 (1991): 29, 40.
126 Part One: Masking Identities

Geoffrey’s Historia was enormously popular in the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries and is frequently expanded and translated into French.372 Through the
Brut tradition, the Trojan foundation of Britain enjoyed an immense circulation,
even among lay people, including women. For Felicity Riddy, Geoffrey’s read-
ers and listeners form a ‘textual community’ in the sense of a “community of
people who read the same text, who are brought together simply by the act of
reading (or hearing); a community which the text itself creates insofar as it seeks
an audience.”373 Besides crossing geographical and clerical borders, gender
boundaries are crossed with Wace and Laõamon’s summaries and translations of
Geoffrey’s Historia. Laõamon presents himself as a reader and a writer, but at
the very moment that he “acknowledges textual mutability, as he compresses his
three sources into one, he is also talking about textual fixity.” He imagines, that
is, “the act of copying out a final version, the truthful words, fixing them on to
expensive and permanent parchment,” notably in his native language.374
Whereas Laõamon’s version enjoyed a somewhat limited circulation,375 Wace’s
Brut was very fashionable; it “was the version that smart people wanted to be
seen reading.” Until the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the Brut tradition was
extant in more than 221 manuscripts, more than the 217 of Geoffrey’s Historia
(and only outnumbered by the Wycliffite Bible). While the Arthurian material
must certainly be conceived of as national,376 this would likewise apply to the
story of Brutus’s arrival in Britain, with which the narrative of the Brut tradition

372
For example, Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (1130s), Wace’s Roman de Brut
(1155), and Laõamon’s Brut (c. 1200). For the sources of Laõamon’s Brut and the influ-
ence of Gaimar’s Estoire on the prose Brut, see Françoise H. M. Le Saux, Laõamon’s
“Brut”: The Poem and Its Sources (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989); John Gillingham, “Gai-
mar, the Prose Brut and the Making of English History,” English in the Twelfth Century
113-22; David F. Johnson, “The Middle English Brut Chronicles,” Readings in Medieval
Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine
Treharne (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) 216-27. For the transformation of the Arthu-
rian matter in these accounts, see Wilhelm G. Busse, “Brutus in Albion: Englands Grün-
dungssage,” Herkunft und Ursprung: Historische und mythische Formen der Legitimation,
ed. Peter Wunderli (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994) 207-21; Alan Lupack, The Oxford
Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) 24-34.
373
Riddy, “Reading for England” 315. For the term textual community, see Stock, Implica-
tions of Literacy 88-240.
374
Riddy, “Reading for England” 321, 323. Riddy therefore believes that Laõamon is looking
forward and backward – “backward to the eleventh century when English was a language
of status, and forward to the fourteenth when it would be again” (323). See further Daniel
Donoghue, “Laõamon’s Ambivalence,” Speculum 65.3 (1990): 537-63.
375
Nevertheless, Diane Speed is tempted to “see in Laõamon’s poem the earliest of a cluster
of Brut-based English-language historical works recording and updating English national
history and thereby functioning in much the same way as the later newspapers which
[Timothy] Brennan sees as responsible in part for constructing the modern nation.” Speed,
“Construction of the Nation” 142.
376
Riddy, “Reading for England” 324, 326, 331.
 Chapter Five: Medieval Prosopagraphical Collectives 127

begins. While Geoffrey’s Historia and its derivates do not touch upon the actual
Trojan War, the narrative presupposes the audience’s familiarity with the siege
of Troy, which accordingly must have been widely known. The Trojans are
therefore crucial for the history of Britain since they provide the oldest non-
Biblical exemplars of heroism for Britons to mold their national identity.
In sum, the Troy story was a myth of origin in the prosopagraphical sense
from at least the twelfth century onward; it was the myth by which many com-
munities and nations chose to live, one of the main providers of masks and
mythemes for the construction of selves and nations. Throughout Europe, the
Trojan origins were increasingly incorporated into collective – that is, national –
historiographical discourse, peaking in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.377
The stories of origin thereby function in two related ways. On the one hand, the
myth of Trojan origins promotes the concept of a coherent community with a
common origin. On the other hand, origin myths are special histories insofar as
they foster the belief in the community’s collaborative ‘journey’ from time im-
memorial to the present.378 What an investigation into the Middle English trans-
lations and adaptations of Guido delle Colonne’s Troy story illustrates, however,
is how differently personal and national identities are conceptualized even
within one genealogical, Trojan line of descent.

377
Gert Melville, “Troja: Die integrative Wiege europäischer Mächte im ausgehenden Mittel-
alter,” Europa 1500: Integrationsprozesse im Widerstreit; Staaten, Regionen, Personen-
verbände, Christenheit, ed. Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1987) 419; Bernard Guenée, L’Occident aux XVIe et XVe Siècles: Les Etats (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1971) 123-30.
378
Melville, “Troja” esp. 431-32.
 Conclusion

My summary of scholarly accounts of medieval individuality initially seemed to

reinforce the conventional notion that medieval selfhood is primarily a matter of
types; individuals become allegories of the universal. If medieval selfhood is a
matter of adopting social roles within general frameworks that are narratively
constructed, however, it is legitimate to ask how this view of medieval selfhood
differs from modern beliefs regarding the self, that is, a narrative self embedded
within general narrative frameworks. The postmodernist call for a liberation of
the modern subject from the imperative of the universal oddly mirrors the al-
leged liberation of the medieval subject in Renaissance individualism. Differ-
ences notwithstanding, there are several striking similarities between modern
and medieval selves: both are seen as narrative constructs and both posit selves
as adopting circulated role narratives and their attendant goods. While on these
views, narrative selfhood, medieval or modern, necessarily implies individuality
insofar as self-narration always differs in unique combinations of narratives, this
study intends to address how individuals achieve coherence in the light of often
contradictory role narratives and how, given the vexing question of universals,
different degrees of individuality in the history of the self can be charted, which
led to the proposition that medieval and modern selves can be seen as pro-
sopagraphical selves.
The novelty of the prosopagraphical model lies in visualizing roles as narra-
tive masks constructed by means of mythological processes. This approach to
selfhood thus utilizes a metaphor prominent in postmodern and modern discus-
sions of selfhood – the persona (Burckhardt’s timeworn ‘veil’) – in order to en-
able a diachronic perspective on the self capable of mapping differences within
the contexture of selfhood. I argue that the self resembles a collection of ‘verti-
cally’ layered masks, to which individuals can add new masks. They can adopt
widely circulated, ‘stereotypical’ roles, corresponding to myths, which I refer to
as opaque masks. Opaque masks can maintain contradiction, but they also im-
peril individuality because the self threatens to disintegrate into several, un-
linked masks. Alternatively, individuals can disassemble myths (that is, subject
myths to processes of mythological bricolage) with the result that separate
masks intersect at the level of reoccurring mythemes (representing particular
goods). Instead of appropriating ‘stereotypical’ masks, individuals approsopriate
roles. Within a ‘vertical’ collection of masks, ‘horizontal’ axes emerge, creating
punctual transparency and centering various personae. In extreme cases, over-
riding goods (Taylor’s hypergoods) threaten selfhood in that they construct
complete transparency, collapsing all masks. Theories of medieval selfhood
paradoxically (and erroneously) emerge as fraught with either extreme. Burck-
 Conclusion 129

hardt’s ‘veil’ subsumes individuality under a collective veil (that is, opaque pro-
sopagraphy); Jauss’s view of medieval selfhood as allegory of the universal dis-
solves individuality into transparency (that is, transparent prosopagraphy).
Translucent prosopagraphy bridges the interstices as an ontological mode ena-
bling both transparency and opacity. As the following analyses evince, it is
translucent prosopagraphy that is increasingly at stake in the late medieval
transmission of the Troy story in England.
Cicero’s De officiis, a popular medieval school text, testifies to the fact that
conceptualizations of selfhood in terms of narratively constructed personae are
well established in debates about selfhood in Roman antiquity – and, as the term
prosopagraphy implicitly suggests, in Greek antiquity as well. Definitions of
persona, however, undergo changes in the Middle Ages and especially perfor-
mative aspects appear to be muted. Nonetheless, recent scholarship suggests that
masking was very popular in the (late) Middle Ages and that masking ensues in
explicitly ontological contexts. While the respective role narratives involved in
masking practices intimate the suitability for approaching medieval selfhood
prosopagraphically, studies of medieval autobiography tend to the other ex-
treme, postulating for the self emergent in autobiographical discourse complete
transparency – the autobiographer becomes an allegory of the universal. Medie-
val theories of allegory, however, complicate the alleged pervasiveness of the
universal. Medieval notions of allegory are, in fact, analogous to translucent
prosopagraphy insofar as allegory is not an epistemological model striving for
the eradication of difference; it radically posits and reasserts difference. While
metaphor, the prized trope of current literary and cultural theory, effaces differ-
ence in rendering the involved domains identical (with the source domain disap-
pearing), allegory is capable of constructing identity while explicitly maintain-
ing difference at the same time. It is a translucent mode capable of maintaining
transparency and opacity.
The strength of existing studies of medieval selfhood lies in the weakness
they often attribute to medieval individuality. By emphasizing the role of the
community to a much greater extent than postmodern musings on the self, they
implicitly acknowledge that the mythology of person and nation is ‘of one
piece’; selfhood, medieval and modern, always already entails the renegotiation
of circulated narrative roles. The most widely disseminated stories are those of a
collectivity’s history – stories that define ideal selves and therefore ‘make’ par-
ticular kinds of individuals: national narratives. The nation, much like the indi-
vidual, however, is usually seen as a modern concept, defined against the priest-
ridden universals of medieval culture. Given that medieval England boasts
common ancestry, common myths and symbols, a shared public culture based
on common cultural resources such as language, a historically defined territory,
and that it unified economic and social entities into one socio-economic unit,
developed common codes, institutions, and common rights as well as duties for
its members, medieval England would certainly qualify as a nation, at least in
terms of Smith’s ethno-symbolist approach. Besides the mentioned tenets, Smith
130 Part One: Masking Identities

emphasizes that common myths of origin (within vernacular literatures) are the
chief means of fostering national identity. In fact, the Troy story, as the most
widely disseminated secular story in the Middle Ages, plays a key role in circu-
lating models for making persons and nations. But how does the Troy story con-
struct individuals? To what extent are important characters in the Trojan narra-
tives modified within the late medieval transmission of the Troy story, and how
does this reflect national concerns? How do the individuals retelling the story of
the Trojan War themselves reconstruct models for personal and national identi-
fication? In the next part, I turn to Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis
Troiae in order to answer these questions. As will emerge quickly in my pro-
sopagraphical analyses, opacity and transparency are key concerns in Guido’s
ontological investigation of the nexus between person and nation. Neither
Guido’s concern with collective identity nor his interest in self-fashioning, how-
ever, has hitherto been recognized.
 PART TWO

Masking Troy:
Making Personal and Collective Identities in
Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae
 Introduction

After having outlined the theory of prosopagraphical identity in the previous

chapters, I will now turn to the beginnings of imperial, national, and counter-
national prosopagraphy in the transmission of the Troy story in thirteenth-
century Italy. What was initially meant to be a cursory investigation of Benoît
de Sainte-Maure’s and Guido delle Colonne’s versions of the Troy story,
quickly turned into a more sustained investigation of Guido’s Historia destruc-
tionis Troiae, which has suffered from critical neglect for too long. The Historia
is a Latin translation of Benoît’s Roman de Troie, which was one of the first
French romances running to over 30,000 lines, presenting an exhaustive treat-
ment of the Troy story. Although Benoît’s work is generally regarded as far su-
perior to the Historia in terms of literary artistry, and although his love stories
proved to be more influential beyond the Renaissance,1 my analyses of pro-
sopagraphical individual and collective identities in Middle English Troy stories
begin with the Historia since throughout the Middle Ages, readers believed that
the Historia preceded the Roman. In fact, it took until the nineteenth century for
scholars to realize that the Historia was a Latin translation of the French ro-
mance.2 In other words, “the educated world soon accepted his Historia for the
genuine history of Troy.”3 Moreover, the Historia also enjoyed far greater popu-
larity throughout Europe than any other medieval account of Troy: it is extant in
more than 150 manuscripts,4 and it was translated into English at least three
times. In the light of such popularity, it is odd that the Historia has received only

1
C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Col-
onne’s “Historia destructionis Troiae” in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Brewer; To-
towa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980) 3-4.
2
The ‘hoax’ was independently discovered by Hermann Dunger and A. Joly. Dunger
writes, “Dass aber Benoit seine Hauptquelle ist, neben welcher er nur hier und da selb-
ständig den Dares benützt, beweisst eine genaue Vergleichung der Quellen. Allerdings
finden wir manches bei Guido, was er nicht aus Benoit genommen hat.” Among the things
not to be found in Benoît (but in Guido), Dunger lists mythological expansions (esp. the
passage on idolatry), geographical, scientific, and moral information with regard to
women, “auf welche er sehr schlecht zu sprechen ist,” as he diplomatically puts it. Dun-
ger, Die Sage vom trojanischen Kriege in den Bearbeitungen des Mittelalters und ihren
antiken Quellen (Dresden: Teubner, 1869) 61, 61-63, quotation at 62. See further A. Joly,
Benoît de Sainte-More et “Le Roman de Troie” ou les métamorphoses d’Homère et de
l’épopée gréco-latine au Moyen-Age, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Franck, 1870-71) 2: 470-84.
3
Benson, History 4-5, quotation at 4.
4
Mary Elizabeth Meek, introduction xi. Werner Eisenhut stresses the importance of the
translation, especially for the fifteenth century and beyond. Eisenhut, “Spätantike Troja-
Erzählungen – mit einem Ausblick auf die mittelalterliche Troja-Literatur,” Mittellateini-
sches Jahrbuch 18 (1983): 5-6.
134 Part Two: Masking Troy

scant critical attention. There are two reasons that may explain this neglect.
First, the Historia poses as a historical work and as such, with few exceptions, is
linguistically dry and technical, whereas Benoît’s account is indeed livelier and
more interesting, especially from a contemporary perspective, due to its expan-
sion of the love stories, which have had a more glorious and famous critical af-
terlife. Second, the critical neglect of the Historia may be due to prevailing as-
sumptions in critical discourse. Roman Jakobson is right perhaps in arguing that
the metonymic nature of prose has been neglected in favor of the metaphorical
pole of verse. I shall have more to say on these two poles with reference to the
Historia’s advancement of a prosopagraphical model that also pits metaphorical
relations against relationships capable of maintaining differences. For now, it
suffices to note that medieval Latinists have more interesting sources to engage
with than a dry, albeit popular, history of the Trojan War. Moreover, until the
mid-1980s literary translations were not credited with much literary value. This
has changed slightly in the past two decades as scholarship becomes increas-
ingly interested in medieval theories of translation.5 Whereas the Middle English
translations of the Historia have received more attention due to this renewal of
interest, the Historia has not benefited from this rehabilitation of translations
since Guido translated the material into the ‘wrong’ language – not into the ver-
nacular but into ‘outdated’ Latin. The overall reason for the non-interest of spe-
cialists in Guido’s Historia, then, is that it is not only a translation into a ‘less
interesting’ language but also that it is more of a redaction.
It is precisely this feature, however, which makes a revaluation of the Histo-
ria a necessary task in order to uncover an ideological agenda that is very differ-
ent from the Roman de Troie. The changes and omissions in the transmission
from Roman to Historia and the shift from Old French verse to Latin prose yield
interesting insights into the creation of personal and collective identities in thir-
teenth-century Sicily. In the following, I demonstrate that the Historia engages
with questions of personal identity in terms of prosopagraphical selfhood. This
process is extended to collective identification where, in contrast to the govern-
ing assumptions in critical discourse, the Historia counters a proto-model of my-
thologized prosopagraphical identities that develops throughout Benoît’s Roman
rather than merely putting the plot into a different language and omitting the
love stories. In fact, Guido suggests that the problematic political situation in
contemporary Sicily can be solved by adopting the opaque, imperial mask that
the Historia attributes to the Greeks rather than to the Trojans, with the conse-
quence that the latter emerge as legitimate ‘losers’ and the former as model rul-
ers. As such, the Historia suggests that the Troy story can be read allegorically,
5
For example, Jeanette Beer, ed., Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages
(Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric,
Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular
Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds., The
Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520
(Exeter: Exeter Univ. Press; University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999).
 Introduction 135

which likewise applies to the Middle English translations. Furthermore, the His-
toria counters the beginnings of a more flexible, mythological creation of selves,
allowing a greater degree of fluctuation between personal and collective masks,
in favor of the repression of individuality by the imposition of one (and only
one) mythical and imperial mask.
Before I delineate the development of Guido’s opaque prosopagraphy, a few
remarks concerning Guido’s reputation with contemporary readers are neces-
sary. The Historia has been generally characterized as a historiographical work,
as a redaction of Benoît’s more accomplished Roman. Fortunately, C. David
Benson’s The History of Troy in Middle English Literature provides an exten-
sive discussion of Guido’s Troy story so that the reader can often be referred to
his account. Many scholars, though, attribute to Guido’s Historia a despondent,
pessimistic view of Trojan history without any providential or national under-
pinning. These notions will have to be revised in the course of my argument. In
order to evidence the design of the Historia, its status as a translation of Benoît’s
treatment of the Troy story has to be revisited. In Chapter Six, following a short
evaluation of recent translation theory with regard to the Middle Ages, I argue
that in order to do full justice to Guido’s ‘translation,’ it has to be seen as em-
bedded within a medieval framework of translation rather than merely as a re-
daction. That Guido translates a vernacular work into Latin and, therefore, into
an entirely different setting regarding audience and intention, has consequences
for any approach to the text – a fact often acknowledged in passing rather than
seriously considered. Due to the scant criticism, which reflects the Historia’s
status as “a dull and almost indigestible chronicle that is often cited but little re-
garded by modern critics,”6 more space than anticipated will be devoted to an in-
depth reading of the Historia – a situation caused by the fact that most readers
will come to the Historia via the English translations and Chaucer’s Troilus
rather than the other way around. The other methodological consideration evolv-
ing from the above is that as an autonomous work, a detailed comparison of the
Historia with Benoît’s Roman is neither necessary nor possible at this point –
where necessary, though, the Roman will be discussed. Although the Historia
follows the Roman more or less directly, the fact that it does so in Latin alters
the framework of reference.
In Chapter Seven, I illustrate that, at the outset of the Trojan War, the Histo-
ria juxtaposes two models for personal identification within a prosopagraphical
framework. Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece amounts to an extended lesson
in effective self-fashioning. Starting out with the medieval ideal of transparent
identity, Jason realizes that this model is deeply flawed and unfit to procure him
individual fame. Through his encounter with Medea, he learns to adopt an
opaque mask and thus a model radically different from Medea’s. In contrast to
him, she is unable to mask her emotional turmoil, illustrating the consequences

6
C. David Benson, “‘O Nyce World’: What Chaucer Really Found in Guido delle Col-
onne’s History of Troy,” ChauR 13.4 (1979): 309.
136 Part Two: Masking Troy

of the transparent prosopagraphy that Jason has abandoned and which does not
facilitate the maintenance of contradictions between personal desires and collec-
tive obligations. In a further step, the Historia opposes these two models in
terms of sources as well, juxtaposing the Virgilian quest for imperial fame (Ja-
son) with the Ovidian principle of cupiditas and changeability (Medea). This
‘feminine’ instability of identity has dire consequences for questions of collec-
tive identification, which I discuss in Chapter Eight.
The different models of identification exemplified by Medea and Jason are
also evident in the Greek camp and the Trojan city, respectively, whereby Tro-
jan rule is particularly problematic. I therefore engage primarily with Trojan rul-
ers as individuals (Laomedon and Priam), extending this argument to the collec-
tives that support both camps. Their individual decisions (much like Medea’s)
follow an Ovidian pattern of transparent prosopagraphy. Priam’s personality and
his views on the Trojan War, for instance, operate in correspondence with the
fates in that his decisions are always subject to change. Furthermore, Priam’s
resolutions are overtly determined by his uncontrollable emotionality, especially
with regard to the destinies of his relatives. Whereas the Greek model, intro-
duced by Peleus and Jason, proposes that the individual’s actions are governed
by the collective good, the common Trojan hypergood (Taylor’s term) is deter-
mined by the familial principle that gives rise to a decision making process
overtly affected by emotions (revenge, hatred) and not by reason. Having estab-
lished this primarily for Laomedon and Priam in contrast to Agamemnon, the
concept is then illustrated beyond the individuals in charge of the war. Through-
out the battles, Priam’s fickleness emerges as a genetic principle in that his mask
is adopted by his male offspring. In this context, it also becomes understandable
why Guido maintains many of Benoît’s marvels. Criticism hitherto has had
problems reconciling the Historia’s tendency to rationalize Benoît’s ‘irrationali-
ties’ with the maintenance and embellishment of others. The marvelous and the
monstrous mainly appear in the Historia in alliance with the Trojans, among
whose support the reader finds centaurs and Amazons. These creatures illustrate
the Trojan incapability of maintaining a stable mask covering (that is, control-
ling) their ungovernable emotionality. Priam’s fickleness, therefore, becomes
the collective hypergood. Troy as such becomes an effeminate, aberrant city pit-
ted against the Greek model of rule in which personal and public masks are suc-
cessfully separated. Guido’s positive revaluation of the Greek style of rule is
worth stressing, since the Historia does not align with the contested medieval
“preference [...] felt for Dares as a Trojan ally.”7

7
Arthur M. Young, Troy and Her Legend (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1948)
50; Benson, History 14. See further William H. Brown, Jr., “A Separate Peace: Chaucer
and the Troilus of Tradition,” JEGP 83.4 (1984): 492-508; W. R. Barron, English Medie-
val Romance (Harlow: Longman, 1987) 111; Alfred Ebenbauer, “Trojastoff,” Sachwör-
terbuch der Mediävistik, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992) 838-40; Scot
McKendrick, “The Great History of Troy: A Reassessment of the Development of a Secu-
 Introduction 137

Following the chronology of the story and in order to show the developing
juxtaposition of emotional city versus rational empire, my analyses of the politi-
cal negotiations and the battle scenes will be interrupted in Chapter Nine to con-
sider a central aspect of Guido’s Historia in terms of its reception throughout the
Middle Ages – the ‘go-betweens.’ Helen of Troy is one of the ‘characters’ in the
Historia who manages to live with both the Trojans and the Greeks. In fact, she
is the only individual who moves back and forth between the two warring fac-
tions. She thus illustrates the potential of mythological bricolage within pro-
sopagraphical selfhood insofar as she is able to adopt the respective masks for
making selves. In keeping with the Historia’s antifeminist attitude, however,
Guido mutes this potentially viable, more flexible model since it is not in the
service of empire. The same applies to Briseis who, in the Roman, represents a
pre-modern version of Ovidian counter-nationhood. The Historia again mutes
this positive model in favor of advancing a Virgilian imperial model that has
been successfully adopted by Calchas: the longevity of empire is more important
than the fulfillment of individual desires.
In Chapter Ten, I engage with the complete realization of prosopagraphical
selfhood which now can be substantiated also from a rhetorical perspective. If
the argument concerning the dichotomy between Ovidian city and Virgilian em-
pire throughout the Historia is correct, it follows that these notions align with
the appropriate rhetorical models of verticality (which, with its maintenance of
separate domains, is metonymic) and complete horizontality (which collapses
domains as does metaphor). On the battlefield, Trojan rule is indeed metaphori-
cal in that the destiny of the changeable city is intricately bound up with one
hero, Hector. His death, as evinced also in his epitaph, marks the fall of Troy
whereas Achilles, although representing his collective, only adopts the imperial
mask and does not, like Hector, constitute it. Here, the domains of private and
public remain separate, albeit set in a hierarchical relationship. Achilles’s ill-
advised decision to attempt transparent prosopagraphy (in his pursuit of Polyx-
ena) has no consequences for the Greeks, since he is only one person among
many who have adopted the imperial model. The individual is subsumed under
the imperial mask which occludes contradictions felt in a metaphorical model in
which separations between self and collective invariably collapse. This neces-
sarily raises the question of how a metonymic mask of empire can be con-
structed – a question that is answered in the Historia through the illustration of
efficient rhetoric by means of the extended consideration of Ulysses’s life after
the Trojan War, which exemplifies how masks can be approximated rhetorically
for the extension of empire. Mythical bricolage is the means by which opacity
can be construed and circulated. The remainder of the chapter illustrates the two
levels on which this model operates throughout the Historia. On the one hand,
Ulysses’s service to the empire has to be evaluated. He becomes the representa-

lar Theme in Late Medieval Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54
(1991): 43-82.
138 Part Two: Masking Troy

tive of mythical bricolage, of opaque prosopagraphy, which Guido, unlike many

of his translators, unreservedly admires. This admiration also evinces itself in
Guido’s own rhetorical strategy in translating his source, which – because of its
many interpolated narratives and multiple perspectives – invites mythological
bricolage. Whereas Benoît attempts to approsopriate the masks of his characters
in ways later to be found in Chaucer’s Troilus, Guido avoids such identification
and tries, where possible, to suppress all the contradictions intrinsic to the Ro-
man in the service of empire. In my analysis of Guido’s complex construction of
pagan antiquity, it emerges that he (sometimes more, sometimes less) subtly as-
sociates the Trojan tendency toward emotional rule with an unnatural shifting of
shapes. This process then extends to the workings of demons which the Chris-
tian epic substantiates by means of scriptural quotations. Not only is Ovidian
changeability an effeminate principle, it is eventually likened to the Devil’s
work.
Lastly, the juxtaposition of Trojan and Greek rules with their respective
alignments of opaque and transparent prosopagraphy has immediate ideological
purposes. Although criticism denies that the Historia has a clear ideological
agenda, a reconsideration of Guido’s references to Sicily, its past and thirteenth-
century present, illustrates that contemporary politics may have played a much
larger role than has yet been recognized. First, Guido was not only interested in
his people’s ancestry, he was excessively interested in it. In comparison with
possible sources for the translatio imperii, which Guido considers to be a posi-
tive by-product of the destruction of Troy, he quickly glosses over the founda-
tions by Francus and Brutus, focusing instead on Italian settlements. By means
of mythical bricolage, which this study shows to be Guido’s primary narratorial
strategy, his investigation of several sources is overtly indicative that many Ital-
ian foundations are Greek. In the context of thirteenth-century Sicilian politics,
Guido’s hybrid genealogy of Sicily, which a prosopagraphical analysis unveils,
suggests that Guido invites an allegorical reading of the Historia – even, per-
haps, as a mirror for princes. Having experienced Frederick II’s imperial rule in
his youth, which bestowed upon Sicily a key political role in the known world,
the subsequent history, also witnessed by Guido, is one of many changes. As
Sicily changed ‘ownership’ time and again, the unsatisfactory situation for many
Sicilians culminated in the Sicilian Vespers, when Sicily violently expelled the
Angevin army. Guido’s Historia was finished within a decade after the event
and, therefore, in a period of relative uncertainty. He had witnessed the tremen-
dous decline of Sicily. Although once a central part of the Hohenstaufen empire,
Sicily was now on the way to becoming an insignificant political entity, a sepa-
rate nation rather than the heart of an empire. The Historia vigorously contests
such small-scale nationhood. Aeneas’s doubleness, again contextualized in
terms of a Greco-Trojan hybridity, illustrates the capacity of the Greek imperial
mask of rule. Conferring on Sicily both Trojan and Greek lineage, and favoring
the adoption of an opaque mask, Guido emphasizes that the Greek imperial
model potentially counters the loss of (political) significance of smaller political
 Introduction 139

entities such as his contemporary Sicily. Translating a French vernacular text

that is potentially complicit with the creation of nationhood, Guido allows read-
ers to glimpse a molding of power that thirteenth-century Sicilian readers would
clearly recognize as reminiscent of the Hohenstaufen empire.
 CHAPTER SIX
Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie:
French Romance versus Latin Prose

Guido’s Historia is often regarded as more or less a translation of Benoît de

Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, and its artistic inferiority is frequently stressed.
The chief virtue of Guido’s text lies in its authoritative, more widely accessible
historical narrative, disseminating the myth constitutive of many European na-
tions. While space does not permit a sustained analysis of both works here, some
brief remarks characterizing the French ‘original’ preface my discussion of the
Historia in order to make palpable the ideological underpinnings of the en-
deavor to translate a French romance into Latin prose. In view of recent work in
translation theory, a critical reinvestigation of the axioms that serve as a basis
for Guido’s omissions – and (rather rare) expansions – yields insights, not only
into the thirteenth-century Sicilian discourse on collective identification, but
also beyond this, into the realm of negotiating fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
English (Trojan) nationhood.
Benoît’s Roman is a twelfth-century vernacular romance combining the
authoritative Latin and Greek historical accounts of the Trojan War by Dares
and Dictys into a coherent narrative of the events on the battlefield, enriched
with the love stories of some of the key heroes.8 Although the work is generi-
cally categorized as a roman, this is primarily due to Benoît’s choice of the ver-
nacular; otherwise, he claims to be a translator and poses as a historian.9 D. H.
Green attests to Benoît’s narrator performing the role of the historian, arguing
that the Roman was most likely regarded as historically accurate and could thus
appear as a founding story of the realm – it was commissioned by Henry II.10
8
Meek, introduction xiii.
9
Paul Strohm, “Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the
Middle English Troy Narratives,” Speculum 46.2 (1971): 349.
10
D. H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150-1220 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) 155. For the (discussion about the) role of Eleanor
of Aquitaine, alluded to in an ambiguous passage which interrupts the narrator’s diatribe
against inconstant women to praise a “Riche dame de riche rei” (l. 13468), see Ulrich
Broich, “Heinrich II. als Patron der Literatur seiner Zeit,” Studien zum literarischen Pa-
tronat im England des 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. Walter Schirmer and Ulrich Broich (Köln:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1962) 78; Inez Hansen, Zwischen Epos und höfischem Roman: Die
Frauengestalten im Trojaroman des Benoît de Sainte-Maure (München: Fink, 1971) 87;
Douglas Kelly, “Le patron et l’auteur dans l’invention romanesque,” Théories et pratiques
de l’écriture au moyen âge, ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Christiane Marchello-Nizia
(Paris: Paris X-Nanterre; Fontenay/St Cloud: ENS, 1988) 36; Karen M. Broadhurst,
“Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patrons of Literature in French?” Viator
 Chapter Six: Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie 141

Green emphasizes that Benoît admits to adding passages to the narrative time
and again, which substantiates that he follows “poetical” advice and accordingly
modifies the historical narrative, which scholarship has categorized as amor et
militia.11 For this reason, Green locates in the Roman an important step toward
fictionality:
In grafting fictive Ovidian love-stories on to his historical material Benoît is repeating
what Virgil had earlier done in transposing the story of Jason and Medea on to that of
Aeneas and Dido, a procedure that Macrobius described in words that reveal it as con-
sciously fictional. [...] Even though Benoît’s controlling manipulation of events can
occasionally be long-term in its effects, his fictional interventions in the form of love-
affairs are essentially episodic [...].12
In other words, the Roman is in many ways not a historical narrative, since the
episodic additions alter the framework of historiography. This is typical of
twelfth-century vernacular romances which turn to ancient history and values in
order to question new moral systems and deviate from traditional Christian tele-
ology.13 Romances such as the Roman can be seen, therefore, as sustained onto-
logical investigations, a category that has increasingly incited interest in the po-
etics of identity in romances. Philippa Hardman, for example, observes that “at a
profound level the subject of identity is the matter of all romance.”14 Not only
are questions of individual identity addressed in the romance tradition, but it is
also important to stress that this inquiry extends into the realm of collective
identities.
Stephen C. Jaeger has lately commented on the fact that the splendid world
of courtly romance is an illusion, masking the brutality and vicissitudes of daily
life; romance becomes an “instrument of ideology: a means of maintaining and

27 (1996): 53-84; Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the “Roman Antique”
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992) 41; Tamara F. O’Callaghan, “Tempering
Scandal: Eleanor of Aquitaine and Benoît de Sainte-More’s Roman de Troie,” Eleanor of
Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons (New York: Pal-
grave, 2003) 301-17.
11
See Alfred Adler, “Militia et Amor in the Roman de Troie,” Romanische Forschungen
72.1-2 (1960): 14-29.
12
Green, Beginnings of Medieval Romance 156, with reference to Barbara Nolan. Green
refers to Benoîts’s Ovidian episodes as “small-scale fictionality” (189). See also Penny
Eley, “How Long is a Trojan War? Aspects of Time in the Roman de Troie and Its
Sources,” Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A “Festschrift” for Dr Elspeth
Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994) 145.
13
Nolan, Chaucer 9.
14
Phillipa Hardman, “Introduction: The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance,” The Mat-
ter of Identity in Medieval Romance, ed. Phillipa Hardman (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002) 1.
The ontological concern of twelfth-century romances is part and parcel of the “twelfth-
century renaissance,” in which questions of personal identity received much attention (see
Chapter One). Erich Köhler sees in the twelfth-century recovery of antiquity a tool for
self-fashioning, which is thoroughly Ovidian. Köhler, Ideal und Wirklichkeit in der höfi-
schen Epik: Studien zur Form der frühen Artus- und Graldichtung, 2nd ed. (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1970) 45.
142 Part Two: Masking Troy

legitimizing the power of a ruling elite.”15 In Benoît’s case, the question of pa-
tronage may help ascertain the ideological purpose.16 For Jaeger, however, pa-
trons did not make courtly romance but “courtly romance made patrons.” Cler-
ics, after all, had the power to shape their contemporary reality; or, as the
Carmina burana has it, “Universa clerico constat esse prona, / et signum imperii
portat in corona” [By custom all things favor the cleric, / And he bears the sign
of empire in his crown].17 Clerics, such as Benoît, were able to teach and correct
the “ways of laymen. They put forward ideal models of behavior for imitation,
and that means they were free to create ideals of behavior. They used letters,
histories, ‘Fürstenspiegel,’ and their own behavior, to do it. And some especially
clever clerics invented a new form: courtly romance.”18 To the extent that the
Roman posits ideal selves, it also constructs ideal relationships between selves
and nations, and thus answers the call for a collective mythology, contributing to
the making of nations and empires. It is not surprising, then, that Henry II chose
to ‘appropriate’ the Roman de Troie after it had been written.19 W. B. Stanford
fittingly describes Benoît’s ideological motivations: “being a French court poet
he deliberately glorifies the Trojan ancestors of French kings and barbarizes
their Greek enemies,” for example, in his negative depiction of Ulysses.20 Like-
wise, Penny Eley emphasizes, particularly with respect to the Trojan games, that
throughout the Roman, Troy is depicted as a model for “courtoisie, home to an
unparalled social and material civilisation.” In due course, she argues that in the
15
Stephen C. Jaeger, “Patrons and the Beginnings of Courtly Romance,” Scholars and
Courtiers: Intellectuals and Society in the Medieval West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 55.
16
For patronage and the Roman, see Broich, “Heinrich II.” 77-88; Broadhurst, “Henry II of
England” 73-74; O’Callaghan, “Tempering Scandal.”
17
Qtd. in Jaeger, “Patrons” 48.
18
Jaeger, “Patrons” 54-55.
19
Jaeger, “Patrons” 57. Douglas Kelly writes, “To be sure, Trojans are positive figures in the
Troie [...]. They are positive because they are the ancestors, notably, of the British, Nor-
man, and English nations, as Benoît claims in his later Chronique des ducs de Normandie,
which is a kind of sequel to the Troie both in Benoît’s literary career and in some medie-
val manuscript collections.” Kelly, “The Invention of Briseida’s Story in Benoît de Sainte-
Maure’s Troie,” Romance Philology 48.3 (1995): 225. For the French reception of the
Troy story, see Ulrike Krämer, Translatio Imperii et Studii: Zum Geschichts- und Kultur-
verständnis in der französischen Literatur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Bonn:
Romanistischer Verlag, 1996). Hansen argues that the myth of Trojan origins did not mat-
ter to Benoît, that the Roman does not favor Dares over Dictys. Hansen, Zwischen Epos
und höfischem Roman 26; but cf. Maria Klippel, Die Darstellung der fränkischen Troja-
nersage in Geschichtsschreibung und Dichtung vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance in
Frankreich, diss., Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1936. For textual transmission and manu-
scripts, see Marc-René Jung, La légende de Troie en France au moyen âge: Analyse des
versions françaises et bibliographie raisonnée des manuscrits (Basel: Francke, 1996). For
Benoît’s relationship to Dares and Dictys, see Wilhelm Greif, Die mittelalterlichen Bear-
beitungen der Trojanersage: Ein neuer Beitrag zur Dares- und Dictysfrage: I. Benoît de
Sainte-More, diss., Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1885.
20
W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963) 284.
 Chapter Six: Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie 143

Roman and the Eneas, it would not be an “anachronism in talking about ‘na-
tions’ and ‘national consciousness’ in relation to these texts.”21 The Roman’s
interests in identity formation, personal or national, overlap with Guido’s Histo-
ria. Two decisive differences, however, have to be considered. First, Guido’s
work is not a roman but a historia, necessitating a generic distinction. Second,
the Historia is a translation into Latin – and the translation of a work into a dif-
ferent cultural context inevitably incorporates ideological differences.
Guido’s Historia (c. 1287) is generally discussed as a chronicle.22 Benson
provides a list of numerous characteristics that demonstrate Guido’s rendition of
the Trojan War as a chronicle, including the brief records with factual accuracy,
reliance on eye-witness accounts, eye-witness style, and resemblance to clerical
chronicles.23 In the Prologue to the Historia,24 Guido presents his work in the
context of saving historical facts from extinction and falsification. He empha-
sizes a notion akin to the Arnoldian touchstone embodied by those historical
events that withstand the test of time. These are archetypes, in other words, that
(should) inform present-day behavior:
Et antiquorum scripta, fidelia conseruatricia premissorum, preterita uelud presentia re-
presentant, et viris strenuis quos longa mundi etas iam dudum per mortem absorbuit
per librorum uigiles lectiones, ac si viverent, spiritum ymaginarie uirtutis infundunt.
Troyane igitur urbis excidium nulla dignum est longeui temporis uetustate detergi.
(Pr., 3)
[Writings of the ancients, faithful preservers of tradition, depict the past as if it were
the present, and, by the attentive readings of books, endow valiant heroes with the cou-
rageous spirit they are imagined to have had, just as if they were alive – heroes whom
the extensive age of the world long ago swallowed up by death. It is fitting, therefore,
that the fall of the city of Troy should not be blotted out by a long duration of time.]

21
Penny Eley, “The Myth of Trojan Descent and Perceptions of National Identity: The Case
of Eneas and the Roman de Troie,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 35 (1991): 37, 39. In
Elisabeth Lienert’s opinion, the Roman – commissioned after it was written – does not be-
tray any interest in genealogy and does not mention Brutus. Thus, she argues, the romance
does not and cannot function as a means of political legitimization. Lienert, Deutsche An-
tikenromane des Mittelalters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001) 109.
22
For the question of whether Guido de Columnis is identical with the Guido delle Colonne
mentioned in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, see F. Bruni’s “Colonne. I. C., Guido delle”;
Bruni, “G. de Columnis,” both in LexMA 3: 59-60 and 4: 1775, respectively; Carlo Dioni-
sotti, “Proposta per Guido Giudice,” Rivista di cultura classica e medievale 7 (1965): 453-
54. Dionisotti is generally displeased with the state of Guido scholarship; even Raffaele
Chiàntera’s biography – Guido delle Colonne: Poeta e storico latino del sec. XIII e il pro-
blema della lingua della nostra primitiva lirica d’arte (Napoli: Casa Editrice ‘Federico &
Adria’ di P. Federico, 1956) is little consolation: “E bisogna purtroppo dire che l’ultimo,
per quanto so, e recente studio monografico su Guido delle Colonne, in cui anche Historia
è discussa, non giova a colmare la lacuna: piuttosto la aggrava” (454).
23
Benson, History 3-31.
24
The accessus to the Historia, as Barbara Nolan notes, is ‘clerklier’ than the one in Benoît.
Nolan, Chaucer 319 n. 24.
144 Part Two: Masking Troy

That historical events of the magnitude of the Trojan War could be forgotten is
construed as a threat by Guido rather than a mere statement of antiquarian inter-
est. In his opinion, the Troy story must be written down in order to maintain the
factual accuracy absent in the accounts of poets (probably Benoît among them)
who have treated the material with great freedom: “Nonnulli enim iam eius ysto-
rie poetice alludendo ueritatem ipsius in figurata commenta quibusdam fictioni-
bus transsumpserunt, vt non uera que scripserunt uiderentur audientibus pers-
cripsisse sed pocius fabulosa” [Certain persons, indeed, have already transcribed
the truth of this very history, dealing with it lightly as poets do, in fanciful in-
ventions by means of certain fictions, so that what they wrote seemed to their
audiences to have recorded not the true things, but the fictitious ones instead]
(Pr., 3-4, emphasis added). More importantly, and here my argument differs
from previous accounts, knowledge of the Trojan War has to be kept alive be-
cause important ‘lessons’ can be learned from the shape of events; the Historia
is a Fürstenspiegel with ideological motivations very different from Benoît’s
Roman. While two different (and juxtaposed) models of collective identification
can be extrapolated from the Historia, only one of them would be useful were it
adopted for the contemporary Sicilian situation.
The argument for a quintessential difference between Guido’s Historia and
his French sources rests on the findings of recent scholarship concerned with
medieval genre and translation theory. As concerns the transformation of ro-
mance into historical narrative,25 scholars agree that the Historia was immedi-
ately accepted as genuine history since it was written in Latin prose – Guido
may have embellished slightly, but he cites his sources and rationalizes the
events.26 This likewise ensured greater popularity for the Historia. It was the
authoritative account of the Troy story,27 and it was often considered just as im-
portant as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, which Guido’s
work often accompanies in manuscripts.28 Regarding the aesthetics or ideology

25
Benson, History 3-31; Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding
of Medieval Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987) 204.
26
Meek, introduction xv-xvi.
27
Margaret R. Scherer, The Legends of Troy in Art and Literature, 2nd ed. (London: Phai-
don Press, 1964) 225; Young, Troy and Her Legend 64.
28
See Julia C. Crick, The “Historia regum Britannie” of Geoffrey of Monmouth. IV:
Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991) 48.
The combination of these two texts is not unusual. For the Icelandic, Welsh, and Irish
traditions, see Stefanie Würth, Der “Antikenroman” in der isländischen Literatur des
Mittelalters: Eine Untersuchung zur Übersetzung und Rezeption lateinischer Literatur im
Norden (Basel: Helbing & Lichterhahn, 1998) esp. 68; Thomas Jones, “Historical Writing
in Medieval Welsh,” Scottish Studies 12 (1968): 15-27; Erich Poppe, A New Introduction
to “Imtheachta Aeniasa” the Irish Aeneid: The Classical Epic from an Irish Perspective
(Dublin: Irish Text Society, 1995); Poppe, “Imtheachta Aeniasa: Virgil’s Aeneid in Me-
dieval Ireland,” Classics Ireland 11 (2004): 74-97. For medieval anthologizing and mis-
cellanies, see Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their
Texts (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996); Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Litera-
 Chapter Six: Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie 145

of Guido’s translation, aside from his pessimism, criticism has found compara-
tively little of value.29 Lee Patterson, for example, opines that Trojan history in
the Historia is principally unreadable with too ambivalent an outcome for the
affected parties to learn about historical processes.30 This response has been
qualified by Robert Edwards, who argues, that “Trojan historiography contains
numerous reminders of historical alternatives to the final shape of events.” The
“necessary pattern of history,” he observes, “unfolds as a series of choices that
could have been different.” Ultimately, it is true that “Historical necessity un-
folds [...] as a combination of fate and human choice working together not just
to force an outcome, but also to preclude alternatives.”31 This outlook forms the
nucleus of my argument. Guido’s Historia surely addresses the fateful outcome
of the Trojan War, but perhaps not quite as pessimistically. Guido does not arbi-
trarily admonish all leaders for ill-advised decisions; he almost exclusively ad-
monishes Trojan leaders and, therefore, charts an alternative to a Trojan rule that
can be characterized, from Guido’s point of view, as effeminate. Instead of mak-
ing Trojan kings role models for ideal rule, he proposes the adoption of the im-
perial Greek mask for the perilous Sicilian present. This argument somewhat
rectifies the claim that the “Guido tradition,” as James Simpson calls the Histo-
ria and its Middle English translations, is “resolutely anti-imperialistic in a vari-
ety of ways. These narratives all powerfully express a sense of historical se-
quence generated by poor decisions and unfolding towards a catastrophe beyond
the power of any king to control.” Simpson maintains further that “The philoso-
phical, prudential voices within the narrative are silenced, with disastrous con-
sequence; an alternative philosophical voice, in opposition to unthinking chival-
ric aggression, is offered by the prudential practice of these narratives them-
selves.”32 This may be true for Guido’s translations (although these are far from

ture and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118.5 (2003): 1251-67. The combination of
Guido and Geoffrey, then, amounts to a regular Fürstenspiegel-anthology. Meek already
contends that Guido’s narrative is a kind of “anthology of what the Middle Ages consid-
ered the basic materials of the Troy legend,” wherefore “the Historia has a modest but as-
sured place as a work of literature.” Meek, introduction xiv.
29
Benson finds among the additions to the Roman “Guido’s deep pessimism concerning
man’s ability to shape or even comprehend his own destiny. In a series of emotional la-
ments, uttered in a distinct, almost personal voice far different from the formal one used to
narrate historical events, Guido looks back across the centuries and agonizes over the triv-
ial faults and unknowing mistakes that bring about the ruin of Troy.” Benson, History 23.
30
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,
1991) 124-25.
31
Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Houndmills: Pal-
grave, 2002) 47, 48.
32
James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350-1547: Reform and
Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) 119; both passages are also in-
cluded in Simpson’s “The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destruc-
tionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Speculum 73.2 (1998): 422.
Simpson does not make the above claim for the Historia per se but concentrates on the
English translations. Perhaps the reference to a ‘Guido tradition’ is misleading, since the
146 Part Two: Masking Troy

homogeneous), but the Historia itself, I believe, is a rigorously imperialist text,

which is not only a matter of the generic difference but also of Guido’s choice of
language.
While romances are frequently translated into vernacular languages, there are
significantly fewer cases in which vernacular romances were translated into
Latin.33 For Guido, however, Latin is the one language all of Europe could read.
Moreover, the truth of the Trojan matter can endure for all time in Latin: “Sed ut
fidelium ipsius ystorie uera scribentium scripta apud occidentales omni tempore
futuro uigeant successiue, in vtilitatem eorum precipue qui gramaticam legunt”
(Pr., 4). Latin, for Guido, is the language of stability and of truth. As concerns
Guido’s abilities as translator, the general view is favorable. Although he (delib-
erately) neglects to mention that he is translating Benoît’s Roman, he more or
less faithfully represents the material.34 The Latin chronicler “drops, reduces, or
doubt’s Benoit’s marvels” and adds a few learned digressions whilst otherwise
following the Roman.35 Such a view of translation embedded within the frame-
work of redaction, however, has to be reconsidered in the light of recent scholar-
ship studying medieval practices of translation. John Finlayson argues that the
Middle English translations of the Troy story, specifically the Destruction of
Troy, have been unjustly dismissed as ‘mere’ translations.36 In re-evaluating the
evidence concerning medieval notions of translation, J. D. Burnley suggests that
“Translation from a source is [...] not incompatible with enditing, and by the
same token translating is not necessarily oriented towards, even less limited to,
the individual source text; and so it may involve compilation.”37 In fact, the

translated work has all the overtones of an imperialist stance, especially when considering
the historical situation in which it originates. Moreover, his claim that the ‘Guido tradi-
tion’ is counter-Virgilian does not hold for Guido’s Historia which, as I argue below, at-
tributes more importance to Virgil than any other classical author – to the point of Guido’s
attempt to construe his own narrative endeavors as identical with Virgil’s. The claim is
likewise problematic with respect to John Lydgate’s Troy Book, as I will argue in Chapter
Twenty.
33
Christopher Baswell, “Marvels of Translation and Crises of Transition in the Romances of
Antiquity,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) 42; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature
and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1990) 26.
34
Meek offers an alternative view, namely, that Guido “himself was as much deceived as
deceiving,” in that he believed the Roman to be a ‘romanticized’ version of historical
events as they occurred. Meek, introduction xvii.
35
Benson, History 4.
36
John Finlayson, “Guido de Columnis’ Historia destructionis Troiae, The ‘Gest Hystorial’
of the Destruction of Troy, and Lydgate’s Troy Book: Translation and the Design of His-
tory,” Anglia 113.2 (1995): 142-43.
37
J. D. Burnley, “Late Medieval English Translation: Types and Reflections,” The Medieval
Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis
(Cambridge: Brewer, 1989) 39; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation 179-
220; Douglas Kelly, “Translatio Studii: Translation, Adaptation, and Allegory in Medie-
 Chapter Six: Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie 147

meaning of the word translatio in the Middle Ages was closer to explanation
and explication than the linguistic transference of meaning.38 In the case of the
new verse romances in English, choosing a different language meant primarily
adapting a text for a different audience, whereby the Anglicization was con-
comitant with a silencing of aristocratic cultural references, for instance, classi-
cal references, psychological subtleties, and so on.39 If this is true for transla-
tions into English, it is tempting to assume that the reverse is true for the re-
translation of a romance into Latin. Like late medieval England, Sicily was a
multilingual kingdom in which, besides Greek, Latin, and Italian, most learned
readers would well have been capable of reading French. Therefore, Guido’s
Historia is a translation of the Roman into a different cultural framework rather
than an ‘exotic’ language, since translations, specifically of classical texts adapt
their material for the present historical moment.40 Unlike Latin, of course, ver-
nacular translations are potentially subversive, since the vernacular “introduces
interlingual transfer, thereby opening the project of translatio studii to linguistic
diversity and exposing the unifying claims of Latinitas as a myth serving the
interests of cultural privilege.”41 The vernacular therefore also contributed to the
creation of new native literary traditions, of national literatures, which Guido
would probably not have preordained in late thirteenth-century Sicily. And yet,
Benoît’s ‘translation’ of Dares and Dictys, along with its transfer of historical
authority to a vernacular literature, would probably have been ill-received by a
Sicilian judge, whose main work was written in Latin and whose allegiance was
with an empire that was falling apart.
By the same token, the Sicilian judge obviously took exception to Benoît’s
digressions from his sources, the addition of the love plots, which Patterson re-
fers to as “counterplots”42 – an enrichment of exegetical techniques with topical
invention that is characteristic of vernacular literatures. The translation differs
from the original, and it employs ‘unreliable sources’ – notably Ovid. In terms
of the cognitive model outlined above, Benoît’s text, in Guido’s eyes, does not
correspond to a metaphorical rewriting but rather becomes an allegorical text
unfit to reproduce historical truth. Within the adaptation of an exegetical model
hitherto reserved for Latin culture, translating the Troy story (back) into Latin

val French Literature,” PQ 57.2 (1978): esp. 292; Rosemarie Potz McGerr, “Editing the
Self-Conscious Medieval Translator: Some Issues and Examples,” Text 4 (1988): 147-61.
For an overview of “vernacular theory,” see Ruth Evans et al., “The Notion of Vernacular
Theory,” Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Wogan-Browne et al. 314-30.
38
Thus A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott in their introduction to “The Transformation of Critical
Tradition: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio,” Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.
1100 – c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 374.
39
Burnley, “Late Medieval English Translation” 42.
40
See summary in Andreas Krass, “Spielräume mittelalterlichen Übersetzens: Zu Bearbei-
tungen der Mariensequenz ‘Stabat mater dolorosa,’” Wolfram-Studien 14 (1996): 98-99.
41
Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation 223. This amounts to a replacement of
one authority for another.
42
Patterson, Chaucer 118. The counterplots strive against the main narrative “in vain.”
148 Part Two: Masking Troy

can be understood as an engagement with two related problems. The transfer of

an authoritative (that is, Latinate) model of narrative into a vernacular language
inevitably also implies a shift in readership. More importantly, the translation is
embedded within the translatio imperii model which, it seems to me, means a
different kind of translation to Guido than to later vernacular writers. If the His-
toria is indeed concerned with re-appropriating a mythically constructed impe-
rial mask, Guido addresses not a courtly audience but the European literati – in a
language that metaphorically represents empire.
If the vernacular creates a much wider audience, this may not prima facie be
as threatening to Latinitas as would be expected. Ernst Robert Curtius, for in-
stance, points out that translations from the vernacular into Latin show that the
rise of vernacular languages does not mark the defeat of Latin culture but in-
stead prompts a distinction between the “language of the people and the lan-
guage of the learned (clericii, literati).”43 Guido’s choice of Latin certainly re-
flects his double aim of reaching a learned audience and bestowing authority
again on the history of Troy. Guido cannot avoid retranslating into authoritative
Latin precisely the narratorial instability he resents in the works of the poets, but
unlike Benoît, Guido’s combination of sources amounts to an act of mythical
rather than mythological bricolage in that he synthesizes his sources into a
monoglossic text, attempting to mask inherent contradictions befitting a histori-
cal narrative that is also a myth of origins – the narrative strategy is as such very
different from Benoît’s. At the same time, Guido circulates a narrative model to
unify imperial discourse that is diametrically opposed to the creation of national
collectivities inherent in the vernacular myths of origins. For Guido, the ver-
nacularization of the Troy story was certainly also a vulgarization of history.
Such a vulgarization of history is related to the intrinsic connection between
the translatio studii and the translatio imperii. The twelfth century generally
saw an astounding increase of vernacular narratives dealing with historical
themes.44 This development stands “at an originary moment that blurs our mod-
ern distinction between history and fiction.” Along with the French recovery of
Aeneas, Patterson further argues, comes also the crafting of “a realm of privat-
ized and subjective value.”45 And yet, as the most distinguished theory of the
vernacular – Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1300) – indicates, the pre-
eminence of vernacular literatures derives from their ability to confer the author-
ity of Latin to the vernacular, rendering it a ‘Latin vernacular.’46 Vernacular lan-

43
Curtius, European Literature 26.
44
For a discussion of the beginnings of translation from Latin to Romance, see Roger
Wright, “Translation between Latin and Romance in the Early Middle Ages,” Translation
Theory and Practice, ed. Beer 7-32.
45
Patterson, Negotiating the Past 158-59. See further Curtius, European Literature 384-85.
46
For Dante’s vernacular theory, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation
180-84. The Historia has been often translated into the “Latin vernacular.” See Nicola de
Blasi, “Il Rifacimento napoletano trecentesco della Historia destructionis Troiae, I: Rap-
porti con la tradizione latina e con volgarizzamenti conosciuti,” Medioevo Romanzo 6
 Chapter Six: Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie 149

guages, that is, operate in Latinate discursive norms and are closely related to
each other, a fact perhaps implicitly acknowledged by Dante’s choice of Latin
for his treatise on the vernacular.47 This complicates the idea of vernacular lan-
guages as inevitably subversive: “In reproducing the strategies of exegesis, the
vernacular also reproduces the very system of exegesis. Vernacular writing thus
lays claim to the official discourse of academic culture.”48 In this diachronic
view, vernacular languages become part of the translatio imperii in a literal
rather than merely metaphorical sense. Ruth Evans, in discussing vernaculariza-
tion embedded within (post)colonial theory, writes that
In medieval historiography the concept of translatio (transference) underwrote notions
of empire via the ‘modernizing’ narrative of conquest and displacement that was
known as translatio studii et imperii [...]. This discursive structure, which is essentially
metaphoric, serves to define and reproduce cultural norms through translation and
composition practices. The modern hegemony of Europe is thus subtended by a narra-
tive of translation-as-empire that runs back through the Middle Ages to antiquity.49
On this view, the translatio imperii becomes a cognitive metaphor: medieval
cultural norms are mapped onto ancient cultural norms as present empires are
compared to ancient empires. Although translating a historiographical text car-
rying imperial knowledge thus amounts to a metaphorical equation of one set of
cultural norms with another, Benoît’s version contains a nucleus of difference,
which Guido is at pains to mute and reconfigure since he believes that the trans-
ferred knowledge is factually (and ideologically) incorrect; for him, the usage of
a non-imperial language is potentially subversive. In fact, Guido re-conceives
the translation imperii in metaphorical terms, while Benoît’s translation of em-
pire invites a multiplicity of divergent mappings of past onto present that is
more fittingly described as allegorical. The Latin hermeneutical tradition, em-
phasizing “historical and cultural continuity,” ultimately “serves to conceal both
the inevitability of historical difference and the actual process displacement that
is played out in exegetical practice. As an ideological force Latinity works to
contain and suppress the contradictions inherent in the very practices that it sup-
ports.”50 Rita Copeland refers to this structure as metonymic, but in the light of
cognitive theory, it is a metaphorical process insofar as, in the case of the Histo-
ria, a source domain (Roman empire) is mapped onto a target domain (Hohen-
staufen empire) rendering the domains identical.

(1979): 98-134; de Blasi, “Il Rifacimento napoletano trecentesco della Historia destruc-
tionis Troiae, II: La Traduzione,” Medioevo Romanzo 7 (1980): 48-99. For the difficulties
of crafting vernacular literatures in languages other than Romance languages, see Evans et
al., “Notion of Vernacular Theory” 319-21.
47
Evans et al., “Notion of Vernacular Theory” 322.
48
Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation 223.
49
Ruth Evans, “Historicizing Postcolonial Criticism: Cultural Difference and the Vernacu-
lar,” Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Wogan-Browne et al. 367. See further SunHee Kim
Gertz, Chaucer to Shakespeare, 1337-1580 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001) 34-41.
50
Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation 105-06.
150 Part Two: Masking Troy

Guido’s choice of Latin has to be seen precisely in the context of bestowing

continuity of imperial rule upon the Sicilian present. That the vernacular was
eventually able to assume the authority of Latinity may not necessarily have
been foreseeable at this point. Even if it had been, however, empire would have
been translated into the wrong collectivity, namely, that of the Angevins, who
exerted cultural hegemony over late thirteenth-century Sicilians. Moreover, the
Roman does not address a large audience and thus does not indicate imperial
ambition; it merely bespeaks national identification. What is at stake in the His-
toria, however, is the recirculation of an imperial mask at a highly problematic
time in which the translatio imperii creates smaller political units, nascent na-
tion-states,51 threatening Guido’s Sicilian imperial ambitions. Hence, Guido’s
translation of Benoît’s Roman into Latin amounts to a retranslation of empire, an
inversion of a westward moving empire. Guido maintains an imperial model
analogous to or concomitant with the Christian empire, the unity of which he
frequently postulates. As I hope to demonstrate, the desire for such a unified
Christian empire evolves in the light of the increasing formation of smaller po-
litical entities, of nations, threateningly emerging in vernacular literatures. It is
therefore small wonder that Guido brings into play the notion of the war’s ar-
guably beneficial side-effects, namely, the foundation of European nations, a
point not made by Benoît, as Patterson observes, with the important addition
that Guido’s “comprehensive sense [...] of the story’s range of meanings” pro-
hibits settling for narrow answers.52
Guido’s retranslation of the Troy story into a Latinate, imperial framework is
revealed most clearly by his juxtaposition of opaque and transparent pro-
sopagraphy, which the following analyses uncover. Approaching Guido’s Histo-
ria by means of prosopagraphical selfhood not only visualizes the clear-cut di-
chotomy between Trojan and Greek rule, but also lays bare Guido’s ideological
motivations. Far from rendering the Troy story a pessimistic chaos, “unattached
to any ideological scheme,”53 Guido’s Historia provides a guideline for avoiding
Trojan-style nationhood in favor of a Virgilian imperial model of opacity. Natu-
rally, Guido’s imperial poetics are affected by his cultural environment,54 by the

51
Hagen Schulze dates the beginnings of the first modern state to twelfth-century France.
Schulze, Staat und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte (München: Beck, 1994) 31-37;
Jean Dunbabin, Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-
Century Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1998).
52
Patterson, Chaucer 124. I discuss the Historia’s imperial aspirations in detail in Chapter
Eleven.
53
Benson, History 9.
54
What Judith Weiss observes about the twelfth-century translatio imperii likewise applies
to Guido: “Portrayals of empire in twelfth- and thirteenth-century history and fiction were
thus likely to be influenced by a writer’s nationality and opinions about how contempo-
rary emperors were behaving.” Weiss further concludes that thirteenth-century Anglo-
Norman romances generally illustrate the weaknesses of the ‘Roman’ empire. Judith
Weiss, “Emperors and Antichrists: Reflections of Empire in Insular Narrative, 1130-
1250,” Matter of Identity, ed. Hardman 87, 102.
 Chapter Six: Translating Benoît’s Roman de Troie 151

heydays and the decline of the Hohenstaufen empire. While Guido clearly out-
lines how imperial rule should work, namely, by means of the circulation of an
opaque imperial mask, what was lacking in late thirteenth-century Sicily was the
appropriate emperor.
 CHAPTER SEVEN
Creating Opacity and Transparency: Heart versus Mind

Guido’s translation of a French romance into a Latin prose history reassesses –

and critiques – Benoît’s promotion of a vernacular Trojan nationhood. In order
to illustrate this, I begin my discussion of Guido’s Historia with Jason’s quest
for the Golden Fleece, which also features at the outset of Benoît’s Roman and
Dictys’s Ephemeridos Belli Troiani libri. If national identity is a mask intri-
cately linked to personal identity, as I have contended in the first part of this
study, Peleus, Jason, and Medea are the first three “characters” who show the
reader how selves are created in the Historia. At first glance, the depiction of
selfhood, especially when considering Jason’s self-fashioning, seems to follow
general characterizations of medieval personal identities as governed by one set
of all-informing goods, following one institutional code – the transparency of
the individual or literary hero, in which exterior and interior are identical.55
Jason appears as a transparent hero insofar as he is virtuous, without fault, and
an upholder of Greek values and customs. The text describes him as valiant and
beautiful, stressing his ‘superior virtues’ which appear to penetrate to the exte-
rior – “vir fortis et strenuus et iuuenis, nimium speciosus, modestus, largus,
affabilis, tractabilis, pius, et omni morum uenustate corruscus” (I, 6). His beauty
matches his superior virtues. In terms of prosopagraphical selfhood, his masks
are transparent, as though informed by one hypergood. On closer inspection,
however, it turns out that most individuals in the Historia do not correspond to
this ideal: Jason is incapable of maintaining his transparency in his quest for in-
dividual fame, which is – by metaphorical extension – also Thessalian fame.
Transparency, that is, does not warrant the longevity of person and collectivity.
The alternative – that is, the fashioning of opacity – is also problematic, how-
ever, since human cupidity and changeability always threaten to penetrate the
opaque mask. In this chapter, I illustrate that Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece
prefaces the Troy story by exploring two possibilities of fashioning selves:
opaque and transparent prosopagraphy. This ‘preface’ depicts Jason’s indoctri-
nation into a quintessentially Greek dogma of how opaque masks can be main-
tained. This important lesson in personal identity formation emerges in his con-
frontation with Medea, who exemplifies the dangers of the transparent model,

55
For medieval individuals as transparent allegories of the universal, see Chapters One and
Four. For the transparent hero, see further Aaron J. Gurevich, The Origins of European
Individualism, trans. Katherine Judelson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 25-27; Laurel
Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages (New York:
Palgrave, 2000) 1-2.
 Chapter Seven: Creating Opacity and Transparency 153

demonstrating that personal desires and public obligations are irreconcilable.

The juxtaposition of these two models is further aligned with different rhetorical
models: Jason becomes associated with the Virgilian quest for imperial fame
whereas Medea’s self-fashioning is linked to Ovidian changeability, that is, a
female fickleness and instability that later becomes the structural principle of
Trojan personal and collective identification.

1. Jason’s Heart versus Peleus’s Mind

The dichotomy of opaque and transparent prosopagraphy is set up by the ‘con-
flict’ between Jason and Peleus. After Jason has been introduced as the ideal
knight, he finds his counterpart in Peleus, a deceptive mask maker who is jeal-
ous of Jason’s popularity and who effortlessly uses the identification machinery
to his advantage. In the following description of Peleus’s motivation, an interest-
ing dualism emerges between his mind and his heart:
Longe igitur in mente secum seruauit ardorem, quem sagaci studio tegere ne actu ali-
quo publicatus euagari posset extrinsecus diu per fatigabilem tollerantiam est conatus.
Quare disquisiuit in corde suo uiarum ymaginata proposita quibus posset Iasonem
perdere absque sui sugillatione pudoris. (I, 6, emphases added)
[Therefore for a long time he preserved within himself the rage in his mind, which he
made a shrewd attempt to conceal by means of an exhausting effort to be patient, lest
being made known by some act of his it should come out into the open. And so he
searched his heart and imagined ways and means by which he might be able to destroy
Jason without taint of shame.]
Peleus is able to conceal his rage from the Thessalian public and, at the same
time, transfers it to his heart. This may indeed be the location of his all-
informing hypergood, hatred of Jason, but instead of letting this penetrate the
surface, he veils it by imposing another mask which evidently does not cohere
with his central values. In other words, the construction of an opaque mask hid-
ing his real intentions has been achieved by a mental process, one in which ethi-
cal cores are not construed ‘horizontally’ but ‘vertically.’ This is a rhetorical
process, which is underlined by the passage’s resemblance to Geoffrey of Vin-
sauf’s guidelines for invention, in which poetic craft is compared to the con-
struction of a house – first the mind lays out the plan before it is built: “Mentis
in arcano cum rem digesserit ordo, / Materiam verbis veniat vestire poesis”
[When due order has arranged the material in the hidden chamber of the mind,
let poetic art come forward to clothe the matter with words].56 This resulting
mask has all the appearance of transparency since it is bereft of shame, but it
merely covers the sentiments confined to the heart. The heart – the location of
all feeling and interiority which in Alberto Manguel’s words is “the body’s ul-

56
Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria nova, Les arts poétiques du XIIe e du XIIIe siècle: Recher-
ches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen age, ed. Edmond Faral (1924; Pa-
ris: Champion, 1958) I. 60-61, trans. as Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf by Margaret
Nims (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967) 16-17, quotation at 17.
154 Part Two: Masking Troy

timate ruler”57 – initiates the mental fabrication of a mask. This rhetorical veil
shall stay intact even after the deed has been committed. From a contemporary
perspective, it would appear that this mask is so disconnected from his core
identity that his self is in danger of falling apart; the mask, however, is self-
maintaining and therefore informed by its own ethos – a set of values that can be
easily adopted by Peleus’s citizens in terms of a logical and conclusive role,
since the informing value is collective fame which connects with the quest for
individual fame, perhaps an intrinsic value of (idealized) medieval individuality.
Jason’s ability to obtain the Golden Fleece correlates, in fact, with a triple pro-
curement of fame: Jason wins fame for himself, for Peleus, and for Thessaly.
Therefore, Jason’s fame becomes a metaphor of transparency. Everyone would
profit from one singular deed, because all adhere to the pervasive set of hyper-
goods related to honor – hypergoods which through their repetition in private
and public masks can construe themselves horizontally. In Peleus’s words: “Es
enim Thesalonicensis regni et mei potius honor et gloria, cum te saluo regnum
Thesalie timeatur ab omnibus et te uigente nullus audeat inimicus. Porro uirtutis
tue gloria in sublimi me poneret [...]” [For you bring honor and glory to the
Thessalian kingdom, and even more so to me, since while you are safe, the
kingdom of Thessaly is feared by all, and while you are alive, no-one dares to be
hostile to it. Furthermore, the glory of your courage would place me with the
greatest of men...] (I, 8). This verbal characterization of Jason’s mission not only
connects personal fame to collective fame, it identifies the two metaphorically:
the masks become identical and collapse. A similar fusion of masks is ques-
tioned by the Greek leadership at a decisive juncture of the Historia, when an
impending one-on-one combat between Achilles and Hercules is interrupted
since both reach for a similar association of their persons with the respective
collectives (see below). At this stage of the ‘Trojan War,’ though, Jason feels
honored by this three-level possibility of procuring fame for himself. Guido re-
peatedly stresses Peleus’s foul motivation as though the narrator cannot under-
stand how easily Jason could fall for the ploy. Nevertheless, Jason cannot help
but believe the expressed sentiments precisely because the mask fits in well with

57
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (1996; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) 30.
According to medieval medical treatises, often following Galen, the senses (touch, taste,
smell, sight, and sound – the latter pivotal to rhetoric) were located in the brain but con-
nected to the heart, the locus of all feeling. The senses, therefore, were primarily associ-
ated with the brain, but ruled by the heart. See further Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early
Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1990) 81-82, 107, 102. The medieval view of anatomy engendered meta-
phorical representations of politics, which Jacques Le Goff investigates in his “Head or
Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages,” trans. Patricia Ranum,
Fragments for a History of the Human Body: Part Three, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Nad-
daff, and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989) 12-27. For the pervasiveness of the dichot-
omy of heart and mind, of emotion and reason, of docere and movere, see B. Munteano,
“Constantes humaines en littérature: L’éternel débat de la ‘raison’ et du cœur,” Stil- und
Formprobleme in der Literatur, ed. Paul Böckmann (Heidelberg: Winter, 1959) 66-77.
 Chapter Seven: Creating Opacity and Transparency 155

his ethical core, because the mask is completely lucid. It proceeds “de pure regis
consciencie cellulla” [from the recesses of a clear conscience] (I, 8). The mythi-
cal narrative that fits in so well with Jason’s personae is that of the public good,
the mask that the Greek empire circulates for easy adoption and for territorial
maintenance; it informs all communicative processes.
The communicative situation is mono-directional, as it is so often when
Guido portrays the Greeks. Jason’s answer, for example, is merely reported,
whereas Peleus’s conniving is given as a direct speech. Peleus actively provides
the mask that Jason can easily adopt passively; later, Guido introduces a rhetori-
cal ‘Ulysses-theme’ for readers to adopt for their own purposes. The lesson to be
drawn from the above is that in order to mask one’s intentions, one circulates a
mask that can be easily adopted, one that appeals to the common myth inform-
ing social processes. For Jason the quest is to increase his own fame (“in sui ho-
noris incrementa”) and therefore his country’s reputation, which affects his us-
age of the word person in this context. Jason, according to Guido, pays no atten-
tion to Peleus’s bad intention. Peleus would naturally be interested in his honor
rather than the potential injury to his person – “in sue detrimenta persone” (I, 8),
because of his assumption of transparent modes of identification. Indeed, Jason
is a person, but in this case, Guido uses the singular rather than the plural, the
usual reference to personae when Greeks are concerned. Guido’s narrative re-
veals what Jason cannot see: for the empire, the loss is but of one mask.
At the beginning of the second book, Peleus’s ability to keep a straight face
furthers Guido’s exploration of the problems with cupidity and changeability,
processes akin to the workings of fortune. In the first book already, Peleus is
described as anticipating that his actions mock fortune (I, 9). In Book II, the His-
toria suggests that duplicitous fortune causes the Trojan War – “inuida fatorum
series.” That the fates draw causes for enmity from hidden places is a medieval
commonplace, of course. In the present context, however, this has resonances
for processes of identification insofar as the fates unveil – without a cause –
hitherto invisible intentions – “ab inopinatis insidiis sine causa” (II, 11). Peleus
probably knows, deep down (in his heart?), that he is ultimately unable to main-
tain his mask. The narrator’s focus, however, is on the emotionality involved in
decision making, when individuals follow their heart rather than their mind, as
do the Trojans in their unwillingness to provide hospitality to the Argonauts on
their way to Colchis. By mentioning the hidden intentions of the fates here, sev-
eral analogies to prosopagraphical processes emerge. Fortune’s operations bear
resemblance to Peleus’s creation of a veil hiding his real intentions. Jason is na-
ïve enough not to second-guess Peleus’s proposal, much as the Argonauts and
Trojans are unaware of the consequences of the expulsion of the Greeks from
Trojan territory. Ultimately, it is not the Trojan short-sightedness in refusing
hospitality to the Greeks which leads to the war, although their ill-conceived
actions set the tone for all subsequent Trojan negotiations with and about the
enemy; rather, it is Peleus’s construction of the imperial mask which aligns itself
with the traps devised by the fates and which sets the wheel in motion. If this
156 Part Two: Masking Troy

train of thought is pushed to its logical conclusions, Peleus’s jealousy, accompa-

nied by the construction of the imperial mask, could also be seen as a cause of
the Trojan War in that Peleus’s creation of opacity lies at the heart of the expan-
sion of the Greek empire and the victory over the Trojans, who are incapable of
veiling their intentions. At the same time, the Historia emphasizes the differ-
ences between Peleus’s prosopagraphy and the structural organization of the
fates as well – after all, Peleus’s actions are organized by a core self. Such a
core seems absent from changeable Fortuna. Peleus’s actions, unlike Fortuna’s,
are not arbitrary. Accordingly, the intentions of the fates finally reveal them-
selves, whereas Peleus’s rationale remains hidden. In prefacing the Troy story in
this way, Guido introduces a taxonomy of opacity and transparency that lies at
the root of the conflict – and at the root of making selves and nations.
When Jason, representing his kingdom, is confronted with Trojan inhospital-
ity, the transparency of imperial fame begins to undergo changes. After a Trojan
messenger has relayed Laomedon’s message that the Greeks should depart im-
mediately, Jason turns to his men before answering the messenger. He reiterates
the common myth of honorable behavior, which he believes the Trojans would
have received had they come to Thessaly, in sharp contrast to the present ‘dis-
grace.’ Now, however, the adopted imperial mask allows Jason attain balance.
Although his speech is spoken “in ira et dolore cordis exacerbatus intrinsecus”
[he was torn in his heart by anger and vexation] (II, 13), Jason is able to discon-
nect his personal emotions from the imperial task at hand. His anger is visible to
his own people, but not to the messenger. Jason is able to postpone his private
vendetta since the imperial mission takes precedence over fighting the Trojans at
this point. He uses irony to admonish Laomedon, a verbal refinement not within
the realm of possibility for Hercules, for example, who threatens the Trojans and
is appropriately put in his place by the messenger who well knows that Hercu-
les’s behavior is not befitting for a knight. It is even more ironic that the un-
named messenger should speak a profound truth about transparent prosopagra-
phy in advising the Argonauts to depart rather than fight “cum leue non sit per-
sonas perdere que se possunt consilio salubri tueri” [since it is not easy to de-
stroy people who are able to protect themselves by sound advice] (II, 14). Pro-
tecting themselves by sound advice and containing their effeminate emotional
behavior, however, is precisely what the Trojans are incapable of doing. They
operate on a fickle, transparent version of prosopagraphical selfhood, which is
introduced with Medea.

2. Ovidian Medea versus Virgilian Jason

The specter of identification in the Historia is further complicated by the intro-
duction of women. Whereas the king of Jaconites, Aeëtes, is simply character-
ized as being of innate nobility – “innate sibi nobilitatis” (II, 15), reflected in his
outward smiling and his joyful appearance – the characterization of Medea is
endlessly complex. Guido more or less faithfully (and with some admiration)
reports Medea’s fame as being more learned than any other person alive. She
 Chapter Seven: Creating Opacity and Transparency 157

can even alter the course of the rivers and planets, “Hanc credere uoluit antiqua
gentilitas” [The pagans of antiquity were willing to believe] (II, 16). Her apti-
tude is questionable for good Christians because the story originates with a pa-
gan writer who generally needs to be met with suspicion: “Sed ille fabularis
Sulmonensis Ouidius sic de Medea, Oetis regis filia, de ipsa fabulose commen-
tans, tradidit esse credendum (quod absit a catholicis Cristi fidelibus credi debe-
re nisi quatenus ab Ouidio fabulose narratur)” [But that storytelling Ovid of
Sulmo, writing fictitiously about Medea, daughter of King Aeëtes, thus pro-
posed it should be believed of her (which is not fitting that Catholics faithful to
Christ should believe, except to the extent that it was told as a story by Ovid)]
(II, 16). Only God (and certainly not a woman), thus Guido, can control the
heavens and change the laws of nature (II, 17). Guido’s problem is that Ovid
does portray individuals capable of changing nature – “In nova fert animus mu-
tatas dicere formas / corpora” [Of bodies changed to other forms I tell] (Met. I.
1-2).58 Since changeability, in the course of the Historia, is imminently threaten-
ing,59 Guido devotes some time to associating Medea’s capabilities with Ovid’s.
Where Ovid’s story lacks basis in fact, Medea’s talents must necessarily also be
fictitious. At the outset of her description, Medea is portrayed as having gained
knowledge from Helicon with all her heart (the locus of identity): “sic totum
cordis auiditate scientie inbibens Elycona” (II, 15). Her scientific knowledge
thus stems from the well of the muses, mostly associated with the craft of poetry
and pagan mythology (and therefore Ovid). She is further able to shape her envi-
ronment with a magical power irreconcilable with Christian virtue. Like Ovid,

58
This and all further parenthetical references are to P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed.
William S. Anderson, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1977). Translations,
occasionally with minor alterations, are from Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (1986;
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).
59
Vincent Gillespie surmises that “The subtlety and elusiveness of Ovid’s literary personae
posed perhaps the most significant challenge to the hermeneutical systems of the medieval
commentary tradition. Disapproval and a desire to control the perceived wilfulness and
immorality of the Ovidian text by masterful moralisations were common responses.”
Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century to c. 1450,” The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, Volume 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) 186. Control of elusive material seems to be Guido’s main
concern in his depiction of Medea. In fact, as cited by Gillespie, Ovid was criticized by
Conrad of Hirsau for similar matters as are frowned upon in Guido’s antifeminist depic-
tion of Medea. In response to his pupil, the teacher advises careful treatment of the works
of Ovid. While some of Ovid’s works may be acceptable, “quis eum de amore croccitan-
tem, in diversis epistolis turpiter evagantem, si sanum sapiat, toleret? Nonne auctorem
eundem maximam dixerim partem ydolatriae in Metamorfosion, id est in transformatione
substantiarum [...]?” [who in his right mind would endure him croaking about love, and
his base deviations in different letters? Should I not name him as the inventor of a large
part of idol-worship in his Metamorphoses, that is the transformation of substances?].
Dialogus super auctores, Accessus ad auctores: Bernard D’Utrecht, Conrad D’Hirsau;
Dialogus super auctores, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1970) 114, trans. Medieval
Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. and trans. Minnis and Scott 56).
158 Part Two: Masking Troy

Medea is a poet of change. Although the following antifeminist complaint about

female inconstancy is common in medieval literature, the dichotomy of change
versus stability in which it occurs emphasizes the alignment of Ovidian fiction
with Medean prosopagraphy. Not surprisingly, the indictment starts with a para-
dox: “Numquid est sapientis se credere constancie puellari aut sexui muliebri,
qui nullis annorum circulis nouit captare constantiam?” [is it wise to trust to
feminine constancy or the female sex, which has never been able, through all the
ages, to remain constant] (II, 17)? Not only are women as inconstant as are
Ovid’s constantly changing bodies, women are also eternally in flux:60
Scimus enim mulieris animum semper virum appetere, sicut appetit materia semper
formam. O utinam materia transiens semel in formam posset dici suo contenta forma-
to! Set sicut de forma ad formam procedere materie notum est, sic mulieris concupis-
centia dissoluta procedere de viro ad virum, uti esse creditur sine fine, cum sit quedam
profunditas sine fundo, nisi forte pudoris labes aliqua abstinencia laudanda concluserit
sub terminis honestatis. (II, 17)61

60
Michael A. Calabrese relates that medieval readers of Ovid would have been acquainted
with his life, which formed part of the accessus. Aside from authors who believed in the
ethical dimension of Ovid, there was an anti-Ovidian tradition, manifested, for instance, in
the fourteenth-century Italian Antiovidianus or in the memoirs of Guibert de Nogent.
Calabrese further cites Petrarch to the effect that Ovid was a ‘womanly’ poet “beset by a
prurient and lubricious nature, and ultimately, a female weakness of spirit.” Calabrese,
Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1994) 11-32, at 23;
Guibert de Nogent, Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert
of Nogent, ed. John F. Benton, trans. C. C. Swinton Bland, Medieval Academy Reprints
for Teaching 15 (1970; Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984). For the medieval recep-
tion of Ovid (and the two ‘Ovids’), see Jeremy Dimmick, “Ovid in the Middle Ages:
Authority and Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) 264-87; John V. Fleming, “The Best Line in Ovid
and the Worst,” New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J.
Ridyard (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003) 51-74; Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century to c.
1450,” esp. 186-206. For the Ovid of the accessus-tradition, see Accessus ad auctores, ed.
Huygens, for Ovid esp. 29-38; Alison G. Elliott, ed. and trans., “Accessus ad auctores:
Twelfth-Century Introductions to Ovid,” Allegorica 5 (1980): 6-48; Medieval Literary
Theory and Criticism, ed. and trans. Minnis and Scott 20-30. For a sustained discussion,
see Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commen-
taries on Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria,” “Epistulae ex Ponto,” and “Epistulae Heroidum”
(München: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1986).
61
In his Legend of Good Women 1580-85, Chaucer applies this changeability to Jason.
Guido’s antifeminist passage is reminiscent of Andreas Capellanus, De Amore libri tres,
ed. E. Trojel (1892; München: Eidos, 1964), trans. as The Art of Courtly Love by John Jay
Parry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960): “Est etenim mulier tanquam cera liques-
cens, quae seper est formam novam parata suscipere et ad sigilli cuiuslibet impositionem
mutari. Sed nec ulla posset mulier te facere tanta promissione securum, cuius voluntas et
propositum non inveniatur brevi momento circa promissa mutari. Nec horae spatio in eo-
dem statu cuiusque mulieris animus perseverat [...]. Sed mulieris omnes cuncta, quae di-
cunt, in cordis scimus duplicitate narrare, quia semper alia corde gerunt, quam ore loquan-
tur” [A woman is just like melting wax, which is always ready to take a new form and to
receive the impress of anybody’s seal. No woman can make you such a firm promise that
 Chapter Seven: Creating Opacity and Transparency 159
[For we know the heart of woman always seeks a husband, just as matter always seeks
form. Oh, would that matter, passing once into form, could be said to be content with
the form it has received. But just as it is known that matter proceeds from form to
form, so the dissolute desire of women proceeds from man to man, so that it may be
believed without limit, since it is of an unfathomable depth, unless by chance the taint
of shame by a praiseworthy abstinence should restrict it with the limits of modesty.]
What is described here is indeed the poetical craft of Ovid, which Guido associ-
ates with women in general – the ephemeral changing of form caused by their
desires, the very interior experience and transformation on which Ovidian poetry
focuses.62 The consequences for processes of identification are disastrous.
Women ceaselessly search for husbands, and in order to procure the interest of
men, they perform various roles. Desire initiates the creation of more and more
masks in their insatiable quest for men; women are always in flux. Thus, the
processes of female identification are apparently very similar to mythological
processes on multiple levels. On the one hand, Guido requires a myth to impose
a possible (causal) explanation for what ensues. Therefore, he renders Medea a
victim of her gender – and everything else subject to her schemes – in what is an
outdated myth of stability. On the other hand, female selfhood becomes a matter
of adapting different roles for changing situations. Like mythological stories,
which are adaptable to different circumstances by a recombination of mythemes,
Medea’s desire – which, according to Guido, is the driving force of her identifi-
cation and is consequently seen as proceeding from her heart (“quem totum
clausum gestat in corde” [II, 18]) – is of fathomless depth, a collection of other
mythical stories, the mythemes of which can variously surface to fit the circum-
stances. Medea’s mutability is also the mutability of the poet, who recognizes
the ability to recombine elements of stories into new stories. Guido implicitly
raises this complaint vis-à-vis Benoît by omitting the mention of the latter’s
dangerous Ovidian transformations of history. Guido avoids such unstable com-
binatory changes, ‘verticalizing’ Benoît’s story by imposing this structural prin-
ciple on Medea. Guido prefers an opaque mask for his narrative, muting the in-
consistencies of Medea’s prosopagraphical self.
Medea’s mutability is not a matter of always choosing roles arbitrarily, which
somewhat softens Guido’s complaints about inconstancy. Medea’s changeability
can also be seen in terms of productive adaptability rather than instability and
fluctuation. During the banquet, when Medea muses on the possibility of marry-
ing Jason, she behaves similarly to other women, “semper est moris vt cum in-
honesto desiderio virum aliquem appetunt, sub alicuius honestatis uelamine suas
excusationes intendant” [For it is always the custom of women, that when they

she will not change her mind about the matter in a few minutes. No woman is ever of the
same mind for an hour at a time [...]. We know that everything a woman says is said with
the intention of deceiving, because she always has one thing in her heart and another on
her lips] (III, 345-47, 354).
62
See, e.g., Robert R. Edwards, The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in
the Early Narratives (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1989) 68.
160 Part Two: Masking Troy

yearn for some man with immodest desire, they veil their excuses under some
sort of modesty] (II, 18). Love and shame are at war within her. A paragraph
later, with fickle fortune as an accomplice, the opportunity to speak to Jason is
provided. Drawing attention to her own female amorality, hoping that Jason
might deny it, she offers to help him procure the Golden Fleece with notable
overtones of approsopriation: nobles know how to treat other nobles and should
help them (II, 19). Medea is able to understand Jason’s problems and is accord-
ingly in the midst of making herself conform to the husband she seeks. First, she
reminds Jason of impossibility of the quest, but the impending loss of his fame
stands in the way: “Numquid, si fieret, uti posset aliqua gloria uita mea? Sane
uiuus uiuaci uituperio tabescerem inter gentes et omnis exutus honoris laude
perpetui dedecoris uilescerem ubertate” [If this were allowed, how could I gain
any glory? Even during my life I should languish under the lively scorn of eve-
ryone, and, stripped of honor and praise, I should be perpetually despised on ac-
count of the completeness of my disgrace] (II, 20, emphases added). Eternal
shame precludes the possibility of surrendering the plan. The love of a woman,
whatever his personal feelings, cannot change his mind. The opaque imperial
mask has been firmly adopted; his kingdom’s fame is more important than his
own person. This principally agrees with Guido who contrasts Jason’s loyalty to
his kingdom with Medea’s lack thereof.
In her willingness to help Jason, provided he marry her, Medea even consid-
ers leaving behind her father and his kingdom in what comes close to a counter-
Virgilian neglect of responsibility toward the collectivity.63 This, at least, can be
extrapolated from the kind of help she can offer: “Sum enim inter mortales alias
sola que possum uirtutes Martis eludere et eius potentialiter institutis per contra-
riam artis potentiam obuiare” [For I am the only one among mortals who can
elude the power of Mars and powerfully frustrate his designs through the oppos-
ing power of my craft] (II, 21). Not only is her construction of selfhood flexible
and changeable, it further enables her to overcome Mars, the god of war. Mars,
who is invoked at the beginning of the Aeneid and necessarily related to any
tales of war, is a representative of the epic mode.64 Virgil writes underneath the

63
For Medea as an object in a network of complex economic and social exchanges, see
Scott-Morgan Straker, “Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate’s Troy Book,” New Medieval
Literatures 3 (1999): esp. 132-34. Straker’s discussion of Lydgate’s Troy Book, one of
three English translations of Guido’s Historia, is often likewise applicable to Guido’s ver-
sion.
64
Virgil’s epic opens with “Arma uirumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam fato
profugus Lauiniaque uenit / litora [...]” [I sing of warfare and a man at war. From the sea-
coast of Troy in early days he came to Italy by destiny, to our Lavinian western shore, a
fugitive...]. This opening is often associated with the prowess of Mars. In his edition of the
Aeneid, Johannes Götte remarks that Virgil uses Mars as a ‘metonymy for war’ (630-31).
Aeneis: Lateinisch – deutsch, ed. and trans. Johannes Götte (Zurich: Artemis & Winkler,
1994). This and further references to the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid are to P. Vergili
Maronis Aeneidos liber primus, ed. R. G. Austin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), transla-
tions are from The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1983; New York: Vintage, 1990).
 Chapter Seven: Creating Opacity and Transparency 161

laurel tree, the serious mode in the rota Virgilii, the poetic mode Guido prefers
(see Chapter Ten). Thus, Medea’s changeability is related to her control of Mars
and the epic tradition he represents; Medea’s personality is structured along
Ovidian lines. To posit such a juxtaposition of poetical models is only seemingly
complicated by observations according to which Guido has little patience with
all the classical writers – Barbara Nolan’s argument even suggests that Guido
disliked Virgil more than Homer and Ovid.65 Guido first complains about
Homer, then about Ovid, who added more inventions to the ones already trans-
mitted by Homer. Virgil’s Aeneid, in contrast, emerges as a commendable
source: “Virgilius etiam in opere sue Eneydos, si pro maiori parte gesta Troum,
cum de eis tetigit, sub ueritatis luce narrauit, ab Homeri tamen fictionibus noluit
in aliquibus abstinere” [Even Virgil, in his work the Aeneid, although for the
most part he related in the light of truth the deeds of the Trojans when he
touched upon them, was nevertheless in some things unwilling to depart from
the fictions of Homer] (Pr., 4). For the deeds of Aeneas, Guido refers his reader
twice to the Aeneid without commenting on any possible inaccuracies (V, 45;
XII, 109-10). It is true that at the end of the Historia, he claims that Ovid and
Virgil are untrustworthy; and yet, Virgil is singled out: “[...] et specialiter ille
summus poetarum Virgilius, quem nichil latuit” [...and especially that highest of
poets, Virgil, whom nothing obscures] (XXXV, 276). Praising Virgil as the
‘highest’ of poets aligns Guido directly with the rota Virgilii which would
probably have been known to Guido through ‘literary theorists’ such as John of
Garland or others. Needless to add, the serious mode ranks higher than Ovidian
tales, drenched in love stories, as adopted by Benoît’s Roman.66 Medea’s
changeability and her ability to perform different roles amount to the same prob-
lem – mutability – and both are finally related to an Ovidian principle of meta-
morphosis, a vexing concept for Guido. Medieval writers were fascinated with
change, which was always bound up with ontological questions.67 And Medea’s
mutability indeed poses ontological questions for Guido – questions that become
more pressing as the narrative unfolds.

65
“Guido delle Colonne, who takes a much less favorable view of fiction, accuses not only
Virgil but also Homer and Ovid of using ‘fictionibus’ [...].” Nolan, Chaucer 316 n. 13.
See also Simpson, Reform 96.
66
John of Garland discusses the rota Virgilii in The “Parisian Poetria” of John of Garland,
ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1974) 38-42. For
the reception of Virgil’s wheels, see Curtius, European Literature 201n, 232; Elena
Theodorakopoulos, “Closure: The Book of Virgil,” The Cambridge Companion to Virgil,
ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) 155-65. For the me-
dieval English reception of the Aeneid, see Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval Eng-
land: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1995). For a brief discussion of John of Garland with regard to career
models, see Robert R. Edwards, “Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track,” Euro-
pean Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney
and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002) 104-05.
67
Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone, 2001) 18.
162 Part Two: Masking Troy

That Medea’s adoption of different masks is not entirely arbitrary has already
been indicated. Her masks are structured either mythically or mythologically,
always in accordance with the requirements of the communicative situation.
This does not result in an non-identity, as Guido would have his readers believe.
Implicitly, Guido describes translucent prosopagraphical selfhood, a middle
ground between transparency and opacity, which allows for the allegorical ac-
commodation of contradictions while determining mask intersection at the same
time. Medea remains Medea in the Historia; she does not metamorphose into a
different being. Since her changeability does not contradict her integrity as a
person, the model she elucidates is highly productive, for it maintains contradic-
tion. This sharply contrasts with Peleus’s ability merely to mask his intention by
constructing an opaque mask. Whether this mythical mask intersects with exist-
ing masks is questionable. In Medea’s case, love functions as the ethical good
enabling mask intersection which prevents her from becoming a decentered in-
dividual. In contrast to the fates, whose wheels ceaselessly turn, Medea’s iden-
tity is centered by ethical cores which cut across her masks ‘horizontally.’ While
Guido does not follow his Ovidian source concerning potential bodily transfor-
mations, which he later attributes to the Trojan cause, he renders her model in-
appropriate in the light of the consequences for collective identification. As re-
gards nationhood, Medea represents the potential to transgress the boundaries of
the collective. She construes nationhood mythologically rather than mythically.
Instead of opaque or transparent prosopagraphy, she offers a hybrid model for
constructing selves and nations; she represents translucent prosopagraphy.
That hybridity can be seen as an Ovidian principle is obvious from medieval
etymological interpretations of the title of the Metamorphoses. In his accessus to
the Metamorphoses, Arnulf of Orléans, for example, writes, “Titulus vero huius
libri sumptus est materia. Quod ut melius videamus, exponatur titulus sic ‘meta’
grece, de latine, ‘morphe’ mutatio, ‘usios’ substancia quasi de mutacione sub-
stancie. [...] In hoc titulo designatur materia, de mutacione enim agit tripliciter s.
de naturali, de magica, et de spirituali. Naturalis est que fit per contexionem vel
retexionem elementorum” [In fact, the title of this work is to be taken from the
subject matter. So that we may better understand this fact, I interpret the title as
follows: meta in Greek is de in Latin [‘concerning’], morphe is mutatio [‘trans-
formation’], and usios is substantia [‘substance’], as if it were ‘concerning the
transformation of substance.’ [...] The subject matter is indicated by this title, for
Ovid is concerned with three kinds of transformations, that is, natural, magical,
and spiritual. The natural is that which occurs from the interweaving or unravel-
ing of elements]. One of the examples of interweaving he mentions is that of the
mixing of elements that results in the birth of a boy. This kind of hybridity does
not necessarily have negative connotations, although many medieval commenta-
tors had problems with Ovid’s Metamorphoses because of its changeability and
hybridity, which Arnulf ultimately deems ethical.68 For Guido, Medea’s change-

68
Elliott, ed. and trans., “Accessus ad auctores” 14-17, 6.
 Chapter Seven: Creating Opacity and Transparency 163

ability and her ability to adapt to her environment and to construct hybrid masks
by means of determining mask intersection is certainly unnatural.69 Guido’s dis-
like of hybridity also informs his description of the monstrous support for the
Trojans (see below). Arguably more problematic for Guido is that Medea’s
translucent prosopagraphical selfhood entails an Ovidian principle of counter-
empire (or counter-nationhood) that enables the inscription of personal desires
into collective discourses. For the narrator, there is little to rejoice about in such
an option, since Medea’s counter-imperial stance poses somewhat of a threat to
the imperial model that he is interested in disseminating. Hence, Jason does not
simply leave her, he rather follows the imperial imperative to leave behind a
flawed model of collective identification; his personal emotions, love or attach-
ments, likes or dislikes have no place in Guido’s imperial worldview.
Jason does notice the liberating potential of Medea’s selfhood, albeit merely
as a means to succeed in terms of the adopted imperial mask. “Et me liberare
preterea a tantorum malorum noxiis, aureo ariete quesito” [And in addition, you
will free me from the injuries of such great evils in the quest for the Golden
Fleece]. The liberation from outside pressures can only be alleviated, though, by
extra-human capabilities, wherefore he attributes his luck to the fates instead of
crediting Medea: “Scio tamen me iustum esse non posse pretium tante rei. Et qui
dona tam cara grata offerente fortuna renueret merito dici posset summa fatuita-
tis insania penitus agitari” [Yet I know that the reward of such an object is not
mine by right. He who would refuse so precious a gift offered by favorable for-
tune can deservedly be said to be wholly moved by the greatest madness and
folly] (II, 21). By means of this misattribution, Guido is able to gloss over the
potential faultline inherent in Medean prosopagraphy; for the Historia, Medea is
fortune. She therefore can be enumerated among other unpredictable, unruly,
and inconstant women. Jason’s emphasis on the fact that it was not Medea but
fortune alleviates him of any responsibility for his own actions as well, includ-
ing his later betrayal of Medea. Additionally, this mutes Medea’s productive
potential. Silencing otherness is specifically necessary since Medea, beyond the
other associations with counter-imperial poetics, also inhibits a large degree of
freedom (libertas). On the one hand, Jason acknowledges her as a liberating
force because his destiny (and that of his kingdom) is safely in her hands. On the
other hand, her character allows her to do as she likes in her own household, al-
beit in a limited way since she is only free to do so when everyone is asleep, al-
lowing the ‘lovers’ to prepare for the acquisition of the Fleece (III, 23).
If Medea represents a potentially threatening counter-imperial model, it may
seem inconclusive that the Historia criticizes Jason for leaving her after his suc-
cessful mission, but Guido adds a passage to his source here. The expansion,
borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Heroides (Meek 278-79n),

69
Medea’s ability to construct hybrid masks contrasts sharply with an opaque Ovidian
model later developed at the hands of Chaucer’s Pandarus – a model in which intersec-
tions are completely absent, where masks are arbitrarily adopted.
164 Part Two: Masking Troy

serves two purposes. First, although Guido admonishes Jason for being false, he
enumerates everything Medea has done for him, suggesting, when read with the
problem of maintaining empire in mind, that Medea has committed grave injus-
tices in order to be with Jason. Besides criticizing her for giving up body and
soul for him – which, following Guido’s antifeminist logic, is only natural for
women – he stresses her cardinal sin: leaving behind her father and his kingdom
– “cum tui amoris causa seipsam hereditario septro priuauerit, et senem patrem
irreuerenda reliquerit, thesauri sui cumulo spoliatum, et paternas sedes deserens
propter te elegit exilium, preponendo natalis soli dulcedini prouincias alienas”
[For love of you she deprived herself of her hereditary scepter and shamelessly
left her old father, after having robbed him of a mass of treasure, and leaving her
ancestral home, because of you chose exile, preferring foreign provinces to the
sweetness of her native land] (III, 24). She sins against her own people and her
native soil. This complaint, reiterated throughout this passage, again associates
Medea with Ovid through his (and her) exile. Second, Guido uses the Ovidian
source to deflate it. By muting differences between Ovid and Medea (and their
‘chosen’ exile), Guido relishes the opportunity to beat Ovid at his own game.
The passages in which praiseworthy Jason is blamed are taken from the un-
trustworthy Heroides.70 After reminding the reader that Jason’s task is to win
honor for his kingdom, Guido is able to finish the story with a complaint di-
rected at Medea, her pagan values, and Ovidian changeability: “Set tu, Medea,
que tantarum diceris scientiarum illustratione decora, dic, tibi quid profuit noti-
tia legis astrorum, per quam dicitur futura posse presciri? Si presciencia futuro-
rum uiget in illis, vnde tibi tam enormiter tam impie prospexisti?” [But you,
Medea, who are said to have been adorned with the splendor of so many accom-
plishments, say, what did knowing about the laws of the stars avail, through
which it is said the future can be foretold? If foreknowledge of the future lives in
them, why did you provide for yourself such a terrible and wicked future?] (III,
24). Since only God can see the future (III, 24-25), Guido enjoys denouncing
pagan beliefs with the ultimate, rational explanation of Medea’s shortcomings –
how could she have chosen a fate that she knew to be fatal? The point is well
taken within the immediate context of its utterance, but the implication which
Guido attempts to mute in this rationalization of pagan logic is that Medea has a
choice. In contrast to Jason, who has to adhere to the imperial mask adopted
from Peleus, Medea is able to shape her own destiny (and Jason’s to an ex-
tent).71 It is not surprising then that despite his rational point of view, Guido re-

70
See esp. Heroides XII. 111-14: “Proditus est genitor, regnum patriamque reliqui, / munus
in exilio quodlibet esse, tuli, / virginitas facta est peregrini praeda latronis, / optima cum
cara matre relicta soror.” P. Ovidii Nasonis Epistulae Heroidum, ed. Heinrich Dörrie, Tex-
te und Kommentare 6 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971). All future parenthetical references are to
this edition.
71
The relationship between Medea and Jason is characterized by a mutual penetration of
interiors: Whilst Jason opens the gates of virginity in her – “virginitatis claustra [...] aperu-
it in Medea” – she opens, in exchange, the “doors” to her secret councils: “rogo deuote ut
 Chapter Seven: Creating Opacity and Transparency 165

tains Benoît’s miracles in Jason’s quest for the Fleece, which is narrated in de-
tail. With Medea’s help, Jason is victorious not only over the ram but also over
Mars, the latter causing admiration in Colchis. Jason and Medea leave Colchis
without permission – “a rege Oete licentia non petita” (III, 31) – which, by way
of mirroring the earlier transgression of the Trojans, foreshadows the outcome
of the Trojan war. Guido then hastily condemns Medea again for leaving her
country: “Set, O Medea, uentorum secundorum auram multum diceris peroptas-
se ut tuam desereres patriam et paterna septra diffugeres” [Yet, O Medea, you
are said to have wished very much for the breath of favorable winds so that you
might leave your country and flee parental control, and cross the sea intrepidly,
not perceiving that you risked bitter misfortune] (III, 32). Without a doubt, her
disloyalty to her country is Guido’s chief problem with her; this later emerges as
a reoccurring concern with Helen and Briseida.72
Guido’s prosopagraphical preface closes with another encounter of Peleus
and Jason. When the latter returns to Thessaly, Peleus exemplifies his pro-
sopagraphical abilities again by controlling his anger underneath the opaque
mask of empire – “sui tamen cordis celans angustias” – and surrenders the con-
trol over his kingdom to Jason as promised (III, 32). ‘Heroic’ Jason does not
care about his successes, though (which are not his successes, after all). Not be-
ing pleased with the rule of Thessaly (“nec regni Thesalie prepositione conten-
tus”), he initiates vengeance on the Trojans, which amply testifies to his new
imperial ambitions; the imperial mask is firmly in place. By offending Hercules
and Jason, the Trojans also offended the feelings of the princes of Greece (III,
32). The motivation for Jason’s delusions of grandeur is not relayed in the His-
toria, but it might not be too far-fetched to assume that Medea’s temporary sus-
pension of Mars may have given him a taste for imperial ambition, forgetting
momentarily that the power was hers and not his. Against Medea’s Ovidian
transmutability, Virgilian Jason has emerged.
The preface to the Trojan War allows Guido to introduce two different tracks
of prosopagraphical identification. First, the mythical model of identification
which allows for the construction of rhetorical opacity, enabling the adoption of

tui secreti consilii michi seras aperias ut per te instructus hoc exequar” (III, 25). This al-
lows Guido to equate and contrast her fleeting sexual enjoyment to Jason’s ever-lasting
fame for procuring the Golden Fleece. Moreover, Jason’s sexual exploitation, which sur-
faces in the English versions, is completely muted in favor of a general repudiation of
bodily pleasures.
72
Guido inverts the topos of the ‘abandoned woman.’ Lawrence Lipking defines abandoned
women as both “physically deserted by a lover and spiritually outside the law” in his
Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988) xvi.
Besides the fact that they offer an alternative perspective, however, they “subvert the rule
of action,” resulting, on the level of poetic traditions, in an “insidious countertradition” (3,
8). This “countertradition” may have collective significance (11-14). Lipking does not
discuss medieval poetry in detail, for which see Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned
Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press, 2004).
166 Part Two: Masking Troy

a vertical mask that is not inevitably integrated into the collection at all, but cre-
ated for a specific purpose. From the beginning, this opaque prosopagraphy is
associated with Peleus and the Greeks who, in the course of the narrative,
emerge as the shapers of imperial masks. This model finds its counterpart in the
transparent prosopagraphy of Medea. To take note of the productive potential of
the integration of a new mask by determining mask intersection where similar
mythemes inform separate masks and thus maintaining a centered identity sus-
taining contradictions – such as Medea’s decision to consciously choose death
and betrayal in accommodating her love for Jason – is not Guido’s task. For
him, this counter-imperial model is destructive. It is associated with female mu-
tability and the incapability of controlling personal emotions for a greater good.
To place one’s own destiny over that of one’s kingdom, to satirize imperial epic,
is unthinkable in the framework of the Virgilian story of empire that the Historia
relates. The juxtaposition of these two models shall henceforth inform Guido’s
narrative in its entirety insofar as the valiant Greeks adopt the model of opaque
prosopagraphy, whereas the Trojans, especially their ruler Priam, are character-
ized by transparent prosopagraphy, which exacts the price of defeat.
 CHAPTER EIGHT
Masking Rule: Trojan Transparency versus Greek Opacity

As a prologue to the Trojan War proper, Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece
allows Guido to develop several themes related to questions of individual and
collective identity, specifically the complex interactions between self and collec-
tive. Throughout the Historia, the Greeks represent an empire governed by a
common mask. With the exception of Achilles, the Greeks are able to subsume
their personal interests under the umbrella of the imperial imperative that even-
tually grants them victory. This contrasts sharply with the depiction of Trojans
in the Historia, almost all of whom are unable to separate personal and collec-
tive domains. Their personal identification is subject to a principle akin to Med-
ean (and Ovidian) changeability. Their transparency allows them to reconcile
personal desires with whatever is required from them on the battlefield or
throne; they strive for an intersection of those masks that remain irreconcilable
for the Greeks. Moreover, their uncontrollable emotionality usually appears in
the context of domestic ties – one notable exception is Hector, whose special
role will be discussed in greater detail below. The unified as well as unifying
myth of the Greek empire is also organized by the metaphor of familial geneal-
ogy. Whereas both Greek and Trojan collectivities seem to be conceptualized by
the traditional metaphor of the nation as a family, the situation is more complex.
George Lakoff discusses this metaphor in terms of U.S. politics in a way that
also allows an illustration of the differences between Trojan and Greek ‘fami-
lies’ in the Historia. He argues that the nation is conceptualized as a family in
which political factions (conservatives and liberals) apply different moral sys-
tems, namely, the strict father morality versus the nurturing parent morality.73
Greek rule indeed follows a strict hierarchal structure, capable of de-
emotionalizing loss and the frustrations of individual representatives, fore-
grounding instead the importance of maintaining the collective. The Trojan
counter-national model follows a similar organization, as is discernible in
Medea and the nurturing parent model. Disobedience is frequent (but often tol-
erated) and losses of individuals lead to excessive, uncontrollable grief, which
heavily affects decision making processes. When studying more closely the way
in which the Historia shapes person and collective, it is more appropriate to dif-
ferentiate between a metonymic and a metaphorical pole of conceptualizing self
and nation (see Chapter Four for terminology). As concerns Greek rule and col-
lective decision making, the imperial mask, once it collapses, does not inevita-

73
George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
Chicago Univ. Press, 2002) esp. 41-140.
168 Part Two: Masking Troy

bly result in the loss of the individual or the collective. The other roles, though
exposed and fragile, are not affected; one domain collapses whilst the others
stay intact. The relations are therefore metonymic in that the imposed imperial
mask does not necessarily intersect with other masks – it merely veils them.
Trojan collectivism is a matter of metaphor, since mask intersection, the per-
sonal implication in collective decision making, leads Trojans to assume that
one is the other. The separation between self and nation becomes increasingly
impossible – an analogue to disappearance of the source domain in metaphor’s
mapping process. It follows that the Trojan foregrounding of individuality leads
to the fall of Troy. The juxtaposition of metaphorical individuality and me-
tonymic empire is the logical extension of the conflict between Ovidian and
Virgilian models introduced at the outset.

1. Transparent Intersection versus Opaque Imposition

At the outset of the Greek mission, the imperial tone is set by Peleus again who
summarizes the prerogatives and legitimization for an invasion of Trojan terri-
tory: “Primum est ut in defensionem nostrarum personarum ab hostibus nostris
simus omnimode curiosi vt salutationem ex eis omnimodam consequamur” [the
first thing is that we should take every precaution for the defense of our persons
against our enemies, so that we may attain every possible safeguard against
them]. Then, the enemy should be destroyed, and fortune shall be on their side.
Besides a heavy emphasis on the legitimacy of invading foreign territory, Peleus
appeals to the common myth of the Greek empire; the multiplicity of nos and
nobis in the above passage is readily evident.74 Moreover, the developed ideol-
ogy is one governed by ethical questions: whereas Greek (‘our’) behavior is
ethical since it is informed by a common myth, the Trojans’ (‘their’) actions are
unethical since their ethical standards (that is, ideology) are divergent and in-
compatible with those of the Greeks. Hercules thanks Peleus for such wise
words, repeating that what is at stake is the audience as a constructed family, a
metonymic ‘we’: “laudanda sunt dicta que per uos in nostra communi audiencia
sunt prolata” (IV, 36). Hercules then suggests that the best chances for success
lie in a division of the army, a multiplying of domains, formulating in nuce the
familiar ‘divide and conquer’ philosophy of the Greeks.
The first battle of Troy brings into focus the very different construction of
collective identity on the Trojan side. Here, family is not a metonymy, a matter
of domains that are structurally alike but remain separate. Rather, family affects
all actions, all masks. When the Trojan Cedar, for instance, is being pursued, his
relative Seguridan comes to help – “eidem Cedar linea consanguinitatis astricus,
[...]. Seguridan consobrinum [...]” (IV, 39). Such emotional deeds in the battle
are not limited to the lesser nobles, they are also found among the ruling strata.
Thus, Laomedon enters the fight, emotionally charged, after Pollux attacked El-
yacus, “Erat autem hic Elyacus filius regis Carthaginis, nepos regis Laumedon-

74
In Peleus’s speech (with a total of 23 lines) the word appears thirteen times (IV, 35-36).
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 169

tis, ex sua sorore primogenitus” [Now this was Elyacus, the son of the king of
Carthage, King Laomedon’s nephew, the eldest son of his sister]. After Elyacus
is killed by Pollux, a Trojan hypergood is revealed that ultimately ensures their
defeat. Not even retreating from the battlefield, Laomedon bewails the death of
his nephew, bursting into tears: “fluuiales prorupit in lacrimas, nepotis sui mise-
rabiliter deflens casum” (IV, 40). His renewed vigor could have ended the war;
however, due to the division of the Greek army, the city has fallen in the mean-
time. The Trojans lose, Laomedon is killed, the town is ransacked, and the be-
sieged are put into perpetual servitude – “perpetue seruituti” (IV, 42). Guido
moralizes the defeat at the beginning of the next book. The first lesson is that
visiting kings and princes, who have no evil intentions, should be received hos-
pitably, which indirectly blames Laomedon for the war. Later, the narrator sug-
gests that Laomedon’s death was caused by this ‘crime,’ adding only parentheti-
cally “si facinus dici potest” [if it can be called a crime] (V, 43).
A different explanation for the destruction of Troy is frequently alluded to in
the Historia, namely, that Troy was destroyed by the fates: “Sub hoc igitur inuo-
lucro fatis ingerentibus, prima Troya destructa” [And so, when the first Troy
was destroyed by the fates acting under this pretext]; Guido adds, “talis nobilis-
simi regis Laumedontis infelicissimus finis fuit” [such was the very unfortunate
end of the very noble King Laomedon] (V, 43). Maybe Laomedon and the fates
do indeed bear comparison: both act upon whims and are evidently subject to
cupidity and fickleness, both are incapable of keeping up a mask. The structural
principle formerly attributed to Medea is associated with the Trojans. Hence,
Guido’s pen immediately turns to a description of Priam because, like his father,
he is unable to prevent his personal emotions from affecting his role as a ruler.
Although he is at first introduced as a valiant man of wise counsel, one also
reads that he was busy besieging a rebellious castle, which already casts into
question Trojan imperial maintenance, since the Greeks are nowhere depicted in
such a weak position (V, 44). Among Priam’s prestigious offspring, Cassandra
is introduced as skilled in telling the future and gifted in the artes liberales (V,
45), aligning her with Medea’s changeability. Most problematic, however, is
Priam’s excessive grief: “Obstupuit Priamus in talium relatione rumorum et do-
lore pro nimio factus est anxius, et in continuis lacrimis flebilem uitam trahens
querulis vocibus anxiosa lamenta prodit et cumulat mestuosus” [Priam was
stunned at the report of such rumors and was torn by excessive grief, and lead-
ing a life of tears and continuous weeping, poured forth and heaped up in
mourning anguished laments with words of grief]. Grief is understandable, of
course, but it is excessive in Priam’s case and prompts him to abandon the siege
in order to see the ruins of his city, where his presence might be welcomed by
the few surviving Trojans but is ultimately superfluous (V, 46). Hence, his char-
acterization remains highly ambivalent. The valiant deeds and wise counsel at-
tributed to him, in any case, are questionable in the light of interrupting the siege
and leaving behind a rebellious city. The decision to return to Troy is the conse-
quence of Priam’s uncontrollable emotional turmoil.
170 Part Two: Masking Troy

One can even discern an association of Trojan architecture with Priam’s

fickle rule which underlines the metaphorical quality of the concept. Guido’s
intentions ultimately remain opaque, of course, but the rebuilding of Troy is one
of Benoît’s ‘marvels’ that Guido chooses to retain. Whether or not the depiction
is intentional, the unconquerable city (V, 47) appears but as a brittle ‘mask’ of
defense. Significantly, Guido adds details to Benoît’s description of the palaces
and to city life, which gives rise to an attempted mythical bricolage fusing
Greek and Trojan elements into a hybrid origin for thirteenth-century Sicilian
readers (see below). For the time being, the well-protected outside wall of the
city are of interest: “Erant etiam ipsi muri ex exteriori parte per ambitus circum-
quaque obscuris hyatibus profundo uallo firmati” [the outer side of these walls
was also protected along the circumference by a deep trench with hidden pit-
falls] (V, 47). This ‘deep trench’ with ‘hidden pitfalls’ points to the intentions
hidden behind the wall (mask) representing Trojan rule to the outside. The citi-
zens are further shielded by a strong wall:
Huius Ylion murorum superficies que se intuentium presentabat aspectibus non ex lac-
tee calcis nitida forte dealbatura uiuebat, cum tota esset lapidibus incrustata marmo-
reis, in multorum uarietate distincta colorum et in diuersarum ymaginum celaturis, que
intuentium aspectibus alludebant” (V, 49-50).
[The outer surface of this Ilium’s walls, which presented itself to the view of those
gazing upon it, did not glitter because some shining whitewash had perhaps been plas-
tered over it, but because it was completely veneered with slabs of marble, decorated
with a variety of colors, and carved with diverse figures which gladdened the sight of
those gazing.]
Contrary to what onlookers might expect of frighteningly high walls, the fortifi-
cation is ornamented. The fortification of the city, meant to deter the enemy, is
as ambivalently described as is Priam’s character, torn between protecting the
city and making it attractive to enemies rather than instilling fear. The walls pro-
tect the city as inefficiently as does the king when he invites the Greek horse
into the city, which, metaphorically speaking, pierces through Priam’s public
mask into the heart of Troy.

2. Trojan Femininity versus Attempted (Greek) Rationality

Priam’s attempts at fashioning a mask to react appropriately to the Greek de-
struction of the first Troy are similarly marred. After rebuilding the city, he
speaks to the assembled people, stressing the losses – with emphasis on the fa-
milial ties – before advising against engaging in war. Instead, he suggests de-
manding the return of his abducted sister Hesione to the Trojan people. That
Priam is torn between military intervention and negotiations becomes clearest
when he asks himself – in the light of their military power and the great injustice
done to them – whether he should refrain from the grief of his heart (“An absti-
nere ualeo rationabiliter a dolore cordis eximio [...]” [V, 51]). The heart (cors),
as with Peleus, is the locus of his emotions, which needs to be concealed, he re-
alizes, if he wants to negotiate successfully with the Greeks: “set sub silentio de
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 171

cetero compellemur inuiti dissimulare factas nobis iniurias vt a quietis nostre

securitate perpetua fatorum inuida series repellatur” [but concerning the rest, we
shall be forced reluctantly to conceal in silence the injuries done us in order to
divert the envious course of the fates from our perpetual security and peace] (V,
52). What Priam overlooks is that his destiny is bound up with the fates, not in
the sense of immediate agency but in that the Historia bestows the same struc-
tural principle upon the Trojans – the destinies of Cassandra and of Medea. To
emphasize this structural dichotomy, the text subsequently parallels Priam’s un-
stable rule with the responses made individually and separately by several Greek
kings. Their rule is governed by the same ideology; the same imperial mask is in
place. All of them are angry about Antenor’s (Priam’s) demand that Hesione
should be restored. Peleus even characterizes Priam’s request as originating
from a feeble mind: “facilitatem ei exprobrans sensus sui” (V, 53). Empire le-
gitimates their deeds: they were roused to anger, they saw their chance in battle,
and they conquered (V, 52-55). The outcome of Antenor’s mission provokes
Priam’s change – a change Guido finds hard to believe, and even harder to jus-
tify:
Set dic, rex Priame, quis fatorum casus infelix ad tante infelicitatis audaciam tue quie-
tis animum instigauit ut frenare proprios animi motus tui, licet non sint in hominis po-
testate, per matura consilia minime potuisses, ut, dum licebat, abstraheres ab iniquis
consiliis pedem tuum, et dum licebat, sciuisses tuas preteritas dissimulare iacturas, que
per tot annorum curricula forte poterant obliuione deleri? (VI, 56-57)
[But, say, King Priam, what unhappy quirk of fate incited your peaceful heart to such
unfortunate boldness, so that you were not able in the least to restrain the impulses of
your heart by mature counsels (although, granted, these impulses are not in the control
of man), so that while it was possible, you might have withstood evil counsels, and
while it was possible, you would have known how to conceal your past losses, which
perhaps through the course of so many years could have been destroyed by forgetting.]
Linking Priam’s decision to the fates has almost become a familiar theme at this
point, the parallels being obvious. Priam is unable to keep a straight face. He
could have prevented the second Trojan War, had he believed in the power of
forgetting, or had he managed to conjure up a mask to cover up his emotions.
Although Guido tries to defend Priam’s actions with reference to the human in-
ability to control one’s impulses, one may also construe this aside as an ironic
comment, since it is apparent that the majority of the Greek leaders are well able
to subject their private grievances to the imperial mask. The description of
Priam is ultimately that of a (Guidoan) woman since the only other characters so
far introduced, who are unable to restrain themselves and who are in constant
flux, are females beyond male (rational) control – Guido’s homines indeed
means men rather than humans. Priam is, in fact, out of Priam’s own control
since he behaves like an ‘unstable’ woman, like Medea or his daughter Cassan-
dra. That this association is not far-fetched is underlined later, when Priam
voices his reason to go to war, namely, a woman: “[...] tamen preponderans cau-
sa magis est illa vt meam possim exinde recuperare sororem” [still the over-
172 Part Two: Masking Troy

whelming reason is rather that I may then recover my sister] (VII, 68). He acts
upon blood ties (that is, his sister) and on account of a woman outside the con-
trol of man (that is, his sister). In the Historia, Trojan nationhood eventually be-
comes an effeminate concept. Whereas the rule of the Greek empire is not ques-
tioned by Guido up to this point, his invective against Priam’s changeability
succinctly summarizes the latter’s changeability and effeminacy:
Tutius ergo fuit ei quod uulgariter dicitur similiter adherere: ‘Qui bene stat, non festi-
net ad motum’; nam qui sedet in plano, non habet unde cadat. Voluisti enim te submit-
tere fatis ambiguis ut de infelici casu tuo et finali tuorum excidio, de tante urbis ruino-
sa iterata iactura, dares futuris gentibus longam materiam – uelut delectabiles fabulas –
recensendi, cum de sinistris successibus aliorum libenter hominum mulceantur auditus.
Set quid postea tibi et tuis inde successit presens narrationis ystorie series manifestat.
(VI, 57)75
[It would have been safer to cling to what is likewise commonly said: “Let him who is
well off be in no hurry to change”; for he who is sitting on level ground does not have
a place to fall from. But you wished to submit yourself to the fickle fates, with the re-
sult that you will give future generations much material to be reported concerning your
unfortunate overthrow and the final defeat of your people, and concerning the second
ruin and destruction of your city – most enjoyable tales, in a way, since hearing of the
adverse fortunes of other men is pleasing and delightful. But the present sequence of
the historical account reveals what happened afterward to you and yours.]
Priam is again associated with the effeminate principle of the fates, and obvi-
ously Guido believes it would have been wiser to stick with an opaque mask.
For someone presumably pro-Trojan, the narrator’s delight in telling the story of
the destruction of Troy must also strike the reader as peculiar. Guido, however,
is only able to narrate the Troy story because of Troy’s fall, which is enjoyable
not only since battles are entertaining but also because the tale is instructive.
Due to Priam’s association with the fates, his effeminacy and his constant weep-
ing (that is, his transparent prosopagraphy) are not to be imitated.
Priam’s ungovernable emotionality connects in interesting ways with views
of performance and emotionality. Supposing for a moment that Guido’s Troy
story is meant to instruct as much as to delight, which is evident in the frequent
recourse to proverbial knowledge primarily with reference to Priam, notions of
performance and the orthodox view on it, shed light on Priam’s problematic per-
formance as a ruler. The medieval church criticized the theatrum as hypocritical
and effeminate, since the actors wore masks and their gestures and emotions
were exaggerated. In its exaggeration, Priam’s emotionality becomes an effemi-

75
The pleasures of history are reminiscent of Otto’s Ottonis Gesta Friderici (I, 47): “Verum
quia peccatis nostris exigentibus, quem finem predicta expeditio sortita fuerit, omnibus
notum est, nos, qui non hac vice tragediam, sed iocundam scribere proposuimus hystori-
am, aliis vel alias hoc dicendum reliquimus” [Since everyone knows how this crusade
ended due to our sins and because we decided not to write a tragedy but rather an enjoy-
able historical work, may others report about it in a different place]. Bischof Otto von Fre-
ising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici seu rectius Cronica / Die Taten Friedrichs oder rich-
tiger Cronica, ed. Franz-Josef Schmale, trans. Adolf Schmidt (Darmstadt: WBG, 1965).
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 173

nate attribute,76 and by association with him as a ruler (and as the origin of thea-
ter), Troy itself becomes completely effeminate. One case in point is the para-
dox of Trojan rule which (not accidentally) is transferred from Priam to Hector,
precisely because Priam sees something in Hector that he himself lacks. Hector
is described as ‘manly’ in the Historia because of his ability to ‘subdue the
proud by your mighty power and influence’ (“in potentia tuarum uirium nosti
domare superbos et in tue animositatis audacia cogis flectere ceruicosos” [VI,
59]). Priam therefore decides to place on Hector’s shoulders the responsibility
his own ‘weak nature’ cannot uphold:
Ego enim ab hodie in antea de eo quod de presenti negocio sit futurum me totum
ex<s>polio et tuis humeris fortioribus totum impono, quia in tua iuuenili duritia potens
es bella committere et bellis strenuis preualere, quod me natura debilis posse non pati-
tur, cum ad senium iam declinem. (VI, 59)
[For from this day forth I remove myself completely from what will take place con-
cerning the present business, and I place the responsibility completely on your stronger
shoulders, because you are strong in your youthful hardiness for waging war and win-
ning in active warfare, which my weak nature does not let me do, since I am already
declining toward old age.]
Priam speaks the truth when mentioning that he is weak, his greatest weakness
being his inability to stick to his decision, in this case, to actually leave Hector
in charge of the war.
Guido may well have wondered about the transfer of power from Priam to
Hector, since Priam decides that war shall ensue before he passes on the respon-
sibility for it to Hector, who immediately tries to undo Priam’s fatal mistake.77
Hector speaks out against military action on two counts. First, Hesione is old – a
reason which from a humane perspective is perhaps not generally convincing.
More to the point is the second reason for avoiding war, namely, that “[...] totam
Africam et Europam hodie Grecis esse subiectam, quanta Greci multitudine mi-
litum sint suffulti, quanta sint strenuitate pugnaces, quantis sint pleni diuiciis, et
quante potestatis uigeant di[c]tione” [that all of Africa and Europe is today con-
trolled by Greece, and you know also what a large number of soldiers support
the Greeks, with what valor they fight, what great riches they possess, and with

76
Once the church had replaced the theatrum as a cultic center, the theater became a nega-
tively slanted metaphor. See Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English
Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 2001) 52. The Greeks are no less mask makers, but this does not bother Guido.
77
In Book XV, when Hector asks for his support, Priam willingly invests all his hope in the
leadership he so frequently overrules. This is the second time Priam contradicts his own
decisions: “Non enim est michi, post deorum auxilium, spes alia neque fides nisi in tue
uirtutis brachio et in tui prouidi sensus gubernacione discreta. Diis humiliter supplico ut te
michi seruent incolumem et ab omnibus tueantur aduersis” [For after the help of the gods,
I have no hope or trust in anything except in the might of your courage and in the wise
guidance of your cautious disposition. I humbly entreat that they will preserve you safe for
me and will protect you from all opponents] (XV, 131).
174 Part Two: Masking Troy

what strength their dominion flourishes] (VI, 60).78 Hector perceives the Greeks’
imperial model while Priam does not. Hector further draws attention to the fact
that his advice against the war does not stem from feebleness of heart – “cordis
pusillanimitate.” Rather, he articulates his fears, which interestingly associates
Priam’s rule with fortune again, since even Priam’s rule might falter: “et ne tui
sceptri dignitas sub insidiosis casibus fortune uacillet” [and I fear that the
authority of your rule will falter under the deceiving quirks of fortune] (VI, 60).
Such rational arguments cannot compete with the Trojan belief in paganism,
however, that materializes in the guise of Paris’s dream vision, in which (a na-
ked) Venus promises Paris the most beautiful Greek woman as a wife. And de-
spite Hector’s and Helenus’s urgent warning, it is Troilus’s speech that rein-
forces Priam ominous decision.79 Hector’s inability to persuade his fellow Tro-
jans to abstain from military action demonstrates Hector’s inefficiency in mask
making and points up a rift between political theory and practice. While Hector
comes closest to the ideal of opacity, Guido draws attention to his hesitancy in
speaking (“Parum uero erat balbuciens in loquela” [VIII, 85]), which contrasts
markedly with the efficient rhetoric of Ulysses and Aeneas.
It is clever verbal manipulation, which plays into the hands of Paris (and
Priam). Despite the fact that he has surrendered his authority in this matter to
Hector only moments ago, Priam sends Deiphobus and Paris off to Greece to
abduct Helen, as preordained in Paris’s dream. Guido does not let the opportu-
nity slip by to alter the judgment of Paris as he found it in Ovid. In the Heroides,
Paris is unable to decide which of the three goddesses is more beautiful based on
outer appearance. Consequently, he evaluates their promises, which are care-
fully vetted against one another. Eventually, he is persuaded by Venus, who ar-
gues that power and braveness, offered by Juno and Pallas, are equally painful –
only her gift, he would truly love (Her. XVI. 73-88).80 Strikingly, Guido over-

78
This passage provides the audience with an external view of the political institution of the
Greeks, and it corroborates the Greek imperial model. Admittedly, their imperial model is
different from the one Guido discerns in Virgilian epic; Agamemnon’s rule differs from
Augustan imperial ideals.
79
See Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 48; Patricia R. Orr, “Pallas Athena and the Three-
fold Choice in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable
and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, ed. Jane Chance
(Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1990) esp. 164.
80
In Dares, Paris’s decision also appears to be influenced by the promise rather than mere
beauty itself: “et tunc sibi Venerem pollicitam esse, si suam speciosam faciem iudicaret,
daturam se ei uxorem, quae in Graecia speciosissima forma videretur: ubi ita audisset, op-
timam facie Venerem iudicasse” [Then Venus promised, if he judged her most beautiful,
to give him in marriage whoever was deemed the loveliest woman in Greece. Thus, fi-
nally, on hearing Venus’s promise, he judged her most beautiful]. Untersuchungen zu Da-
res Phrygius, ed. and trans. Andreas Beschorner, Classica Monacensia 4 (Tübingen: Narr,
1992) VII, 20. For the Troy stories of Dares and Dictys I use the English translation by R.
M. Frazer, Jr., The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966).
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 175

states the sexual connotations; Ovid’s version does not involve naked goddesses,
whereas the Historia emphasizes that Paris asks for the goddesses to appear na-
ked before him (“omnes nudas”) so he can ‘inspect’ their bodies – “singulas ea-
rum corporis pro uero iudicio ualeam contemplari” (VI, 62). Thus, Guido again
synthesizes the three axioms central to Trojan transparency. First, Priam appears
in effeminate overtones and invests into Venus’s promise (rather than that of
Mars). He is portrayed as changeable, which is further underlined when Priam
implicitly questions his own decision. After Paris and Deiphebus are en route to
Pannonia, Priam informs the Trojans about the proposed mission, only to be un-
dertaken, however, should the Trojans wholly endorse the plan: “Et quod omnes
tangit, sapiente dicente, debet ab omnibus comprobari” (VI, 65).81 Second, the
Trojans invest in Ovidian fairy tales rather than reason and rationality, masks
they cannot maintain. Third, their destiny is settled by their trust in an Ovidian
story that is ironically concerned with a pagan goddess and an effeminate
Paris.82 Fittingly then, the sixth book ends with a complaint about fickle Fortuna,
presenting the abduction Helen as the favorable case before the wheels start
turning (VI, 65).
Menelaus’s reaction to the kidnapping of his wife, which follows the above,
demonstrates the very different Greek way of handling the loss of relatives. His
reaction only seemingly mirrors Priam’s response to the kidnapping of Hesione;
in fact, Menelaus’s reaction represents a counter-emotional, Virgilian track,
muting the individual’s interests in favor of imperial politics. Although Mene-
laus breaks down and Nestor can hardly console him at first, Agamemnon is
able to restore the desired imperial attitude, that is, opaque prosopagraphy:
Ad quid, frater, tanto dolore deprimeris? Etsi te iusta causa dolendi moueat, non tamen
est prudentis uiri animi sui motum extrinseca demonstratione uulgare. Dolor enim pa-
tefactus extrinsecus in aduersis ad dolendum amicos plus prouocat et maiora gaudia
generat inimicis. Finge ergo propalare leticiam, cum dolor habundat, et finge te non
curare de hiis in quibus te debet rationabilis cura mordere. Curis anxiis aut fluuiis la-

81
Not all Trojans agree. Panthus warns against the proposed mission since he has fore-
knowledge of the events. Guido reports, however, that he is the son of Euphorbus who is
imbued with the soul of the great Pythagorus, which we know only through unreliable
Ovid. The parliamentary debate is a truly Ovidian moment, indeed, chiefly due to Priam’s
fickleness. He is consistent, for once, in adopting the martial mask, but at the wrong time.
Moreover, instead of being consistent with his proposition that the mission should only be
undertaken if everyone agrees, the mission is now undertaken in spite of the opposition of
several Trojans: Hector, Cassandra, Helenus, and Panthus (VI, 67). By placing into an
Ovidian framework the debates about whether or not to war on the Greeks, Priam’s lack of
Virgilian strategies could be hardly more pronounced.
82
In the Metamorphoses, Priam is very happy about Achilles’s death, brought about by an
effeminate Paris: “quod Priamus gaudere senex post Hectora posset, / hoc fuit. ille igitur
tantorum victor, Achille, / victus es a timido Graiae raptore maritae; / at si femineo fuerat
tibi Marte cadendum, / Thermodontiaca malles cecidisse bipenni” [This, after Hector, was
a thing to make old Priam glad. And so Achilles fell, victor of mighty triumphs, van-
quished by the craven ravisher of that Greek wife: if in a woman’s fight he had to fall,
he’d preferred the Amazon’s double axe] (Met. XII. 607-11).
176 Part Two: Masking Troy

crimarum honor non queritur nec uindicta. Ense igitur petenda est ulcio, non murmure
querelarum. (VIII, 80-81)
[Why, brother, are you weighed down by such grief? Although a just cause for griev-
ing disturbs you, still it is not the act of a prudent man to display by outward indication
the disturbance of his heart. For grief revealed outwardly in adversity provokes friends
to greater grief, and engenders greater joys in enemies. Pretend, therefore, to show
happiness, although grief abounds, and pretend not to care about these things concern-
ing which a reasonable anxiety should pain you. Neither honor nor vengeance is to be
obtained by painful anxiety or rivers of tears. Revenge is therefore to be sought with
the sword, not by murmurs of complaint.]
Agamemnon’s imperial formula for opaque prosopagraphy is relayed in direct
speech, and the Greek leader thus speaks not only to Menelaus, but also to
Guido’s audience. Agamemnon believes that Menelaus’s emotions, even though
they are justified, should be kept private – animus is indeed the heart rather than
the mind here. The threat of overt emotional turmoil lies in the effect it has on
friends, since they are likely to also adopt the mask of mourning. This adoption
may result in a doubly weakened position insofar as it contributes to the satisfac-
tion of the enemy as well as the weakening of the Greeks. In order to avoid the
display of such emotionality, Menelaus must suppress his trauma by creating a
fiction: Agamemnon uses fingere twice in this passage, indicating the impor-
tance of inventing a mask that contains no traces of mourning however legiti-
mate it might be.83 The mask to be invented should follow the imperial rule of

83
This forms an analogue to Hector’s earlier advice to Priam not to engage the Greeks,
where he also recommends the fabrication of a mask: “Conniuentibus igitur occulis non
est incongruum Exione dissimulare fortunam, que iam tot annis suis est aptata dispendiis”
[It is not improper, then, to close one’s eyes on the fate of Hesione, since she has already
for so many years been abused to her wrongs] (VI, 60). The Middle English versions of
the Historia handle the scene differently. In the Destruction of Troy, Hector’s speech is
prefaced by a description that does not stress his modesty but his shame – the Trojans will
quickly forget the grief on account of Hesione. John Clerk, The “Gest Hystoriale” of the
Destruction of Troy: An Alliterative Romance Translated from Guido de Colonna’s
Hystoria Troiana, ed. G. A. Panton and D. Donaldson, 2 vols., EETS, o.s. 39, 56 (1869,
1874; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968) VI, 2210. William Caxton also omits this pas-
sage entirely in The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye Written in French by Raoul Le-
fèvre, ed. Oskar Sommer (1894; New York: AMS Press, 1973) III, 519-20. John Lydgate
translates the passage as “Wherfore I rede, by dissymulacioun, / With-oute more êat we
oure wo endure” (II. 2294-95). While the Latin text places the concealing of emotionality
in an epistemological context – to hide from view – Lydgate’s dissymulacioun suggests an
ontological context. The MED defines the word in terms of “assuming a false or deceptive
appearance,” of concealment, evasion, and self-deception or illusion. MED, s.v. dissimu-
lacioun. For dissimulo as conceal, see Lateinisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch, s.v.
dissimulo I. A; Latin Dictionary, s.v. dissimulo I. – the examples provided in the former
are primarily from Ovid, furthering Hector’s Ovidianism (see below). Agamemnon’s ad-
vice reinforces Guido’s antifeminist stance. The only characters who express their exces-
sive grief are either abandoned women, who, according to Lipking, command “such
threatening and fascinating power” for that reason (Abandoned Women 20), or Trojans.
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 177

the sword – Virgil’s iron – since revenge can only be obtained by fighting. 84
Agamemnon further reminds Menelaus that the ensuing warfare shall not be a
trifling matter of one kingdom versus Troy:
Nosti enim nos habundare uiribus et in hac ulciscendi cura nos multos habere consor-
tes, cum in hoc tocius Grecie assurgat imperium et a nobis moniti reges singuli arma
Troyanis ingerere non negabunt. (VIII, 81)
[For you know that we have great forces, and in the management of this revenge we
have many allies, since in this the whole empire of Greeks will arise, and, advised by
us, not a single king will refuse to take arms against the Trojans.]
The allies of the Greeks, the consortes, constitute a powerful imperium. That
this empire can count on the support of the individual kingdoms has been exem-
plified above. What this speech expands upon is the power derived from alle-
giances that are based on a common cause in combination with strict control of
passion. Unlike Priam, who immediately leaves a rebellious city in order to be at
the former site of his father’s Troy, such aberrancy of rule is absent from the
Greek imperial model.
A juxtaposition of Trojan emotionality and Greek non-emotional imperial
politics prominently reoccurs at the end of the Historia, reminding the audience
of the crucial importance of opaque mask making. The episode begins with
Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who is an eminent, but failing Greek mask maker.
After learning about his great-grandfather’s decision to send his father Peleus
into exile, he intends to take vengeance on Acastus. He lands on an island off
the coast of Thessaly where Peleus is hiding (a mock pastoral framework
quickly turning into brutal epic). After their reunion, Pyrrhus is grief-stricken
and very emotional, but he keeps ‘mentally’ quiet – “omnia in mente conseruat”
(XXXIV, 264). He murders Menalipus and Philistenes, sons of Acastus, in dis-
guise and intends to do the same with Acastus, pretending that he is one of
Priam’s sons who successfully escaped Pyrrhus. The killing of his great-
grandfather is interrupted, but not on account of his affection for him. Peleus
must decide on his father’s destiny, and ordains that he should stay alive. More
importantly, the affairs of the kingdom are yielded to Pyrrhus. At this point,
Guido interrupts to relate simultaneous developments in Crete. Thessaly,
though, is the most exalted kingdom of Greece and until the ‘extreme end of his
life’ (“extremum exitum uite sue”), Pyrrhus rules in peace (XXXIV, 267). The
fates, however, have different plans for him in the guise of Hermione. Stricken
with ‘ardent love,’ Pyrrhus kidnaps Hermione from Orestes. The reader knows
how such kidnappings end in the Historia – the final consequence of allowing
emotionality to penetrate through the imperial mask is death. In contrast, the af-
flicted Orestes is capable of maintaining the opaque mask. He waits for the right
moment to reclaim his ‘property.’ In a passage that reminds the reader of Aga-

84
Agamemnon’s speech can also be seen as poetological: the pen is the sword of the cleric.
On this view, the creation of fictions is duly excused since it is in the service of the collec-
tive. Guido is writing of armed deeds – in the Virgilian style (see Chapter Ten).
178 Part Two: Masking Troy

memnon’s advice to Menelaus (and Hermione is his and Helen’s daughter), he

reasons: “Dolet ergo Horrestes de tanta verecundia sibi facta, sed in regnum
suum inuadere Pirrum non est sibi tanta potestas. Tacitus tamen reseruat in men-
te futuros euentus per quos sibi possit plene parari uindicte faculas” [Orestes
accordingly grieved that such a disgrace should have happened to him, but he
had not enough power to attack Pyrrhus in his kingdom. He kept silent and con-
sidered in his mind, however, the future events by which the means of venge-
ance would be fully prepared by him] (XXXIV, 267-68). Opportunity affords
itself when Pyrrhus visits the oracle in Delphos where Orestes kills him. It is
perhaps not accidental that – in a passage that alludes to the daughter of Aga-
memnon and the son of Achilles – the ‘shadow’ of Hector reappears. Guido re-
lates how Peleus and Thetis leave Thessaly with the pregnant Andromache and
her son, Laomedon. Achilleides, king of Thessaly in spe and son of Andromache
and Pyrrhus, rejects his kingdom, giving his crown to Laomedon, the son of
Hector. Achilleides also desires that the captive Trojans in Thessaly should en-
joy freedom (XXXIV, 268-69). By means of Greek mercy and imperial politics,
Hector’s offspring rules after all, but contained within a Greek imperial frame-
work – a hybridity that concerns me below.
These examples, which frame the Trojan War, illustrate the juxtaposition of
fickle, emotional and stern, imperial rule. Whereas the example from the end of
the Historia can only invite speculation as to the ultimate outcome, Agamem-
non’s emphasis on imperial mask making, which always takes supremacy over
personal revenge, make him an ideal emperor for the siege of Troy; he is conse-
quently elected. Now, Guido continues with portraits of his principal heroes, a
catalogue that becomes important for translators of the Historia, after which he
eventually can turn to the valiant deeds on the battlefield. The trope by which he
does so is certainly conventional; its placement, however, suggests that Guido
sees himself as taking up the ‘swords of revenge’ mentioned by Agamemnon. In
the absence of an actual sword, Guido sharpens his (Virgilian) pen – stilus – to
relay the blow-by-blow account of the Troy story.

3. Natural Empire versus Aberrant Antagonists

Guido continues to develop his prosopagraphical investigation that emerges
throughout the first third of the Historia in his description of the Trojan War.
Thus, Priam’s fickleness resurfaces in the characterization of his sons (with the
exception of Hector, that is) but also in the support lined up for the defense of
the city. The military assistance, which is enumerated at the outset of the battles,
furthers the association of weak rule with aberrant nature since Guido maintains
Benoît’s fabulous creatures at this point where he normally mutes such irrational
features of the Roman. The hybridity of the creatures emphasizes the Trojan in-
capability of maintaining an opaque and stable collective mask. In sharp con-
trast, Agamemnon’s imperial opacity is often explicitly pitched against Trojan
transparency, and its effectiveness is shown even in the light of antagonism from
within. The extension of both leaders’ prosopagraphical models to their people
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 179

reflects the willingness, if not the necessity, of loyal subjects to adopt the mask
circulated by their ruler and represents, in Priam’s case, a preference for the ab-
errant even in his choice of allies. The Trojan War, it emerges, has to be seen in
terms of a rational Greek empire besieging an emotionalized Troy, the Ovidian
principle of mutability thereof marking its eventual downfall.
The fighting ensues after the Greeks have procured a favorable answer from
the Delphian oracle, and after Calchas had rebuked them for their delay. Guido’s
descriptions of the Trojan fighting style are, from the beginning, reminiscent of
Priam’s style of rule. The citizens of Tenedos, six miles from the city of Troy,
are overcome quickly by Greek ingenuity and the assistance of the Greek forces
by military machinery: “Sed demum Troyani, multo labore lassati, se quasi lan-
guida et effeminata defensione tuentur” [At last the Trojans, wearied by the
great effort, defended themselves with a weakened [effeminata] and debilitated
resistance] (XI, 103). In contrast to the effeminate Trojans, the Greeks emerge
as more reliable and thoughtful in their counsels. More importantly, Agamem-
non is able to learn from past mistakes. He advises the Greek leaders against
pride, which ultimately results in decline, while their military superiority is not
to be questioned (XII, 104-05). Agamemnon’s realization of the dangers of pride
stem from the Greek’s refusal to restore Hesione to Priam: “Scimus preterea non
esse diu Priamum regem qui nos per suos nuncios speciales requisiuit vt Exio-
nam, sororem suam, sibi restituere deberemus. Sed nos multa superbie elacione
tumentes requisitionem eius audire improuida responsione negauimus [...]” [We
know besides that Priam was the king who not long ago sent us special messen-
gers to ask us to restore his sister Hesione to him. But we, swollen with great
exaltation of pride, refused by short-sighted answers to hear their request...]
(XII, 105). Hence, Agamemnon sends messengers to Priam to allow him to re-
store Helen – if he were to grant this request, the Greeks could retreat without
dishonor. If Priam does not agree, it follows that the complete destruction of
Troy would be just (XII, 106). The focus then shifts to the Trojan council,
clearly emphasizing the difference of rule. After Ulysses demands the restitution
of Helen from Priam, the Trojan ruler retorts that he has no reason to believe
that the Greeks could overpower him, and he does not consult his sons before
making a decision: “nullius expectata deliberacione consilii.” Moreover, he even
considers the problems of fashioning opaque masks by wishing to lead a life in
silence rather than to battle the Greeks – “Ego autem nichilominus uolui sub si-
lencio tanti mali uitam educere nec anxiari strepitu preliorum [...]” (XII, 107).
Not only does he reject the Greek offer, he also threatens the messengers’ lives,
whereupon Diomedes ridicules him, drawing attention to the fact that Priam’s
time for such insults is limited (“secura libertate”). Priam chooses to ignore that
his freedom and his security are threatened. Exemplifying the incapability to
mask their emotions so characteristic of Priam, his attendants intend to kill the
messengers immediately, which may have had its merits. Priam prevents this
from happening, ironically calling Diomedes a fool and thus assuming the role
of the wise man tolerating the foolish errors of the Greeks – yet another change
180 Part Two: Masking Troy

of position. This mask, in view of his previous errors, seems particularly ill-
fitting. In the remainder of the encounter, Aeneas publicly disagrees with Priam,
wishing rather that the offender be disciplined. This response already amounts to
a small act of rebellion since Aeneas challenges the Trojan rule from within.85
Diomedes evidently comprehends this when describing Aeneas as being of dis-
service to his king: “O tu, quisquis es, in sermonibus tuis bene cognosco te rec-
tum non esse iudicem sed oblocutorem acutum” [O you, whoever you are, I
know well by your speech that you are no upright judge but a shrewd speaker in
rebuttal] (XII, 109). Ulysses, the successful rhetor and the only knight in control
of himself, knows when it is better to obscure one’s emotions; he cuts Diomedes
short and leaves the assembly, eloquently promising to relay Priam’s words to
Agamemnon. The final destruction of Troy is thus prefaced by two radically dif-
ferent styles of decision making underscoring the conflict between Ovidian
changeability and a Virgilian military strategy of divide and conquer.
The divergent styles of rule are also reflected in the support lined up for ei-
ther side. The enumeration largely follows Benoît’s Roman, and it is rather sur-
prising that Guido lists the marvelous Pannonians among the Trojan allies. This
is not the first association of Trojans with nature’s oddities; some fabulosity has
already been quietly introduced in the previous book when Agamemnon’s mes-
sengers are on the way to Priam. Guido decides to retain the magic tree at this
point, which is described in familiar transformational terms – “arborem manu-
factam mathematice artis subtili ingenio constitutam” (XII, 106) – drawing the
reader’s attention to the affinity of the Trojans with the marvelous: here, the
magical arts usually attributed to women and Ovidian mutability. It also indi-
cates a shift from the ruler’s personality to his environment, which is furthered
by Guido’s expansion of the catalogue of heroes, since Guido not only retains
the Pannonians, he even adds to Benoît’s description. As Meek observes, neither
the fauns nor the satyrs appear in the Roman. Furthermore, Benoît’s knights
carry steel-pointed arrows rather than lances (299n). While the shift from lances
to arrows is a minor change, Guido’s continuous and consistent association of
the Trojans with the supernatural merits attention.
That the Trojans are supported by a country in the forests where one finds
much marvelous to behold (“Et ideo dicitur in ea multos satyros faunosque bi-
cornes quam plurimum habundare et ideo eciam multa in ea miraculosa visa fu-
isse” [XIII, 116-17]) neatly fits in with the description of King Epistropus, who

85
Meyer Reinhold notes that the association of Aeneas with rebellion ultimately stems from
his portrayal in the Iliad, where Aeneas challenges Priam’s rule (Iliad XX. 461, 178-83).
The Augustan tradition reversed this negative portrayal of the Roman hero, a tradition that
eventually was “strong enough to put into the shade the unheroic aspects of the Aeneas
legend.” In Dares and Dictys, one finds the most “un-Homeric and un-Vergilian portraits
of Aeneas.” Eventually, though, the Latin West inherits an ambivalent Aeneas. Reinhold,
“The Unhero Aeneas,” Classica et Mediaevalia 27.1-2 (1966): 200-01, 202. Aeneas’s por-
trayal in the Historia is also ambivalent; however, it is important to keep in mind that
Aeneas’s character is formed under Laomedon’s and Priam’s transparent rules.
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 181

brings with him a centaur: “Hic duxit secum mille milites et quendam sagittari-
um uisu mirabilem, cuius vna medietas ab umbilico superius erat homo et ab
vmbilico deorsum erat equus et illa medietas que erat humana tota erat corio
cooperta piloso, sicut corium equi” (XIII, 118). This extends beyond the estab-
lished correlation of changeability and effeminacy with the Trojans; it assumes a
specific kind of Trojan hybridity that recalls Medea and her Ovidian transforma-
tions, the ‘interweaving or unraveling of elements.’86 The horse/man combina-
tion no doubt strikes the medieval reader’s fancy, but it also characterizes an
inconsistency of roles; two roles penetrate each other to the extent of becoming
visible, emphasizing the inability of the Trojans to construct opacity, their (emo-
tional) nature always being discernible. The description of the centaur leads over
to Guido’s musings on the ‘feeble reason’ for the war: “Attendant ergo lectores
presentis hystorie quam leui causa et quam debili ratione tot fortium et tot maio-
rum processit interitus. Sane abhominanda sunt scandala quantumcumque debili
sint ratione subnixa” [Let the readers of the present history consider for how
trivial a cause and how feeble a reason the death of so many men took place.
Surely causes of offense should be abhorred to the extent that they are under-
taken for a feeble reason] (XIII, 118). In order to understand better the relation-
ship between ‘weak’ rationality and Ovidian rule, it is useful to consider briefly
the role of the monstrous in medieval literature.
Guido generally mutes Benoît’s marvels, wherefore his preservation of the
centaur and others must appear as inconsistencies. Meek observes that “It is in-
teresting that he [Guido] can accept the centaur, and talismans such as Medea
gave Jason, but not these contrivances [in the Chamber of Beauty]. He also
shows himself to be critical of Benoit’s apparatus for preserving Hector’s body
[...]. Here, as so often, Guido is reinterpreting the facts as he found them in the
light of what he considers reasonable.”87 Centaurs do not fit into the category of
‘reasonable’; and yet, centaurs are as aberrant and unreasonable as are Priam’s
decisions. Thus, Guido’s strategy to keep these creatures, even expand on their
presence, appears to be quite reasonable. Medieval audiences were fascinated by
monsters and the monstrous, by hybridity. The connotation of such aberrant be-
ings was generally problematic, if not negative, mainly because the unnatural
combination of elements is constitutive of monstrosity.88 Monsters are “disturb-
ing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them
in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form sus-
pended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.”89 The ontological

86
As in Arnulf of Orléans’s interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, quoted above.
87
Meek, introduction xxii-xxiii.
88
Benoît’s Orient is much more positively connotated. The native country of the Amazons,
for example, is known for wonderful medicines that cure all wounds (Roman ll. 16295-
98).
89
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Monster Theory: Reading Cul-
ture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996) 6. See fur-
ther Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity. For medieval monsters as constituting entire
182 Part Two: Masking Troy

borders occupied by the monstrous are closely related to the marvelous which
has also often been conceived of as threatening in the early Middle Ages. This
perception slowly changed throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with
the emergence of an “alternative culture” within the “lower and middle ranks of
nobility, the knightly strata.” This culture drew on the oral traditions, in which
the marvelous was an “important component” and “plays such a large part in
courtly romance.” Both the marvelous and the monstrous are threatening and
invite questioning, but they are also attractive, can “evoke potent escapist fanta-
sies.”90 Whereas magical charms were beneficial to the knightly challenges and
achievement in romances, monsters could be marveled at, but eventually had to
be combated and conquered.91 This certainly applies to the role of the marvelous
in Benoît’s Roman. In Guido’s chronicle, however, the marvels must appear as
monstrous rather than marvelous. Guido does not write a romance; he chronicles
history. The beckoning hybridity of the monstrous support for the Trojans does
not necessarily cause problems for Guido, since the ontological questions raised
by these specters need not be addressed. Guido makes sure, though, that the is-
sue is not entirely brushed aside. The magical, in Le Goff’s differentiation be-
tween mirabilis, magica, and miraculosus, quickly “became associated exclu-
sively with the Devil, with Satan. It referred to the maleficent supernatural, to
the Satanic forces.”92 Guido likewise discredits erroneous beliefs in the magical
arts, when associating Trojan effeminacy with the unnatural changeability of the
Devil later on.93 Guido is thus part of what Le Goff calls a “historicizing ten-
dency” which “worked against the tradition of the marvelous.”94 Due to the lack
of ornamental description in favor of simply referring to the monstrous, it suf-
fices to stress here that the “unnatural” and the “maleficent supernatural” feature
as the salient Trojan structural principle and find visual representation in unsta-
ble identities. Inevitably, Guido’s monstrous creatures are surprisingly ineffec-

peoples, see John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981).
90
Cohen, “Monster Culture” 17, with reference to monsters. Wonder is evoked by “events or
phenomena in which ontological and moral boundaries are crossed, confused, or erased.”
Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity 69.
91
Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (1988; Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992) 29, with reference to Erich Köhler, Ideal und Wirklichkeit.
92
Le Goff, Medieval Imagination 30.
93
Medieval giants are likewise often effeminate. See Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and
the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999) xii. In antiquity, Judith J.
Kollmann observes, “the centaur population as a whole was associated with drunkenness
and physical, especially sexual violence.” In the Middle Ages, “The centaur was not for-
gotten [...]. Its position in the zodiac would have kept it from extinction, but, perhaps be-
cause of its connection with sexual licentiousness and because of the Physiologus, which
characterized the only type of centaur of which it was aware [...] as a symbol of the Devil
[...], the centaur flourished mainly in the marginalia of European art and literature [...].”
Kollmann, “The Centaur,” Mythical and Fabulous Creatures: A Source Book and Re-
search Guide, ed. Malcolm Southern (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987) 227, 233.
94
Le Goff, Medieval Imagination 34.
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 183

tive on the battlefield. Epistrophus’s aberrant archer, for example, is described

again in Book XVIII. In addition to the definition quoted above, the archer’s
face is described as glowing with red rage. The inability to maintain a mask –
the emotions of the archer are as visible as is his aberrant nature – is furthered
by the fact that he does not carry any armor and battles only with bow and ar-
rows in hand: “Hic nulla armorum tutela uestitus cum quodam arcu in manu et
quadam faretra plena sagittis bellum intrauit” (XVIII, 158). Whereas the archer
initially wreaks havoc among the Greek forces, Diomedes, unwillingly, has to
fight the archer. Unlike other romance battles with supernatural forces and aber-
rant beings, Diomedes’s victory is so natural that it can be relayed in a single
line. Not quite as monstrous, but also related to the effeminate Trojan principle
of fickle rule, is the support procured from the Amazons. The Historia does not
leave any doubt about the problematic nature of these ‘creatures’ and accord-
ingly stresses their isolated, unnatural existence on an island without men: “in
qua sole femine sine masculis habitabant” (XXVIII, 212). Pyrrhus concurs with
the historian’s estimation when he notices that his Myrmidons apparently fear
the female fighters, asking them if they are not ashamed of dying at the hands of
women. Such unnatural ‘knights’ have to perish: “Nonne uereri debetis quod sic
turpiter interficiamini a manibus mulierum? Anhelate ergo mecum ut eas subito
in ore gladii morti tradamus” (XXVIII, 215); the Amazons cannot procure vic-
tory over the Greeks. The effeminate principle cannot maintain in the military
and political taxonomy of the Historia – just as the city of Troy perishes on ac-
count of its unnatural hybridity.95
A brief look at recent work on medieval monsters, however, illustrates fur-
ther the connection between monstrosity, Priam’s problematic rule, and Ovid-
ianism. The ontological questions concerning the hybridity of individual crea-
tures immediately affect notions of collectivity. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, for in-
stance, posits a connection between medieval hybridity and borderlands theory.
He observes an interesting historical emplotment of monstrosity:
Medieval hybridity is an impudent, relentlessly embodied phenomenon that brings to-
gether in a conflictual, “unnatural” union races (genera) in the medieval sense: not just
different kinds of human bodies, with their competing determinations, but geographic,
animal, “inanimate” bodies that incarnate heterogeneous histories of colonization, in-
scription, transformation. [...] Medieval hybridity is inherently monstrous.96

95
The Palladium likewise belongs to the realm of the supernatural. As long as it remains in
Troy, it will safeguard the city, whereupon the traitors conspire to remove it from Troy
(XXIX, 226-27). The Amazons are frequently spoken of respectfully, as unadulterated,
and chaste women often married to bad men – as pagan representations of Christian vir-
tues, that is. See Friedman, Monstrous Races 129-30, 170-71.
96
Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” The Postcolo-
nial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2000; New York: Palgrave, 2001) 89. Gerald
of Wales, Cohen contends, presents all kinds of human-animal hybrids which are as de-
spised as are women. Gerald’s monstrously inhabited Wales becomes the bridge to a fan-
tastic elsewhere, that is, to Ireland (93, 95-98).
184 Part Two: Masking Troy

A similar case can be made regarding the depiction of a different, metaphorical

monstrosity throughout the Historia. Priam’s principle of rule represents differ-
ent genera that cannot be mixed since his unruly emotions always interfere with
the supposed stability of his rule. In the realm of medieval politics, Judith Weiss
argues, the association of rulers with erroneous, ‘pagan’ support was a fre-
quently employed strategy. She briefly discusses the depiction of empire in
Geoffrey’s Historia and locates tensions between Rome and Britain, especially
in Arthur’s conflict with emperor Lucius who is defeated. Subsequently, Arthur
reaches out for domination over Europe. Many insular romances and chronicles
seem to align the supposedly Christian emperor with pagan support: “Dominion
here [in Geoffrey] temporarily passes from Rome to Britain and we are encour-
aged to see the latter as the more worthy of it by the number of pagan allies the
supposedly Christian emperor employs to attack his enemies.”97 The allies sup-
porting the Trojans and Greeks are clearly pagans, but it is only among the Tro-
jans that Guido locates the marvelous. Greek multiculturalism, in contrast, does
not threaten imperial rule at all. Being Greek in the Historia is to subscribe to
the same opaque mask, which is continually renegotiated in the Greek camp.
Such negotiations are conducted fairly differently within Troy, where the hy-
bridity of rule substantiates itself in uncontested rebellion (Aeneas), confusion
about who is in charge, and in Priam’s inconsistencies.
On the Greek side, the opaque mask rules, but is (re)negotiated when prob-
lems arise, always with the goal to reach a unanimous decision. Palamedes’s
arrival provides a rupture in the Greek power structures, a rupture that is imme-
diately confronted in ways radically different from the negotiations on the Tro-
jan side. Palamedes is reprimanded for his arrival after battle had already com-
menced. Confronted with the allegation, Palamedes provides a rational excuse
for his absence: “Qui asserens fuisse se morbo graui detentum suam absenciam
rationabiliter excusauit” (XIV, 118). Thus, the Greeks can quickly focus on the
battles again, in which emotional Trojan rule likewise contrasts with rational
Greek command. The effeminate Trojans cannot restrain themselves upon spot-
ting the Greek ships approaching their coast. Irrationally, they run toward their
enemy without awaiting a command from their ruler: “Troyani uero uidentes
naues ipsas iam eorum litus et litora in tanta multitudine attigisse, subito in arma
prosiliunt, armati armatos equos ascendunt, et, non expectata ducis seu regis eo-
rum licencia, inordinato cursu festinant ad litus” [The Trojans, however, saw
these ships approaching their coast and shores in such a great number and sud-
denly sprang to arms. In armor they mounted their armed horses, and without
awaiting the permission of king or duke, hastened to the shore at an inordinate
speed] (XIV, 120). Everything is in disorder; even the speed with which they
approach the Greeks is unnatural. The theme continues throughout many fights:
when Philimenis is thrown off his horse half-dead by Ulysses, the Trojans are
immediately thrown into disorder on account of his supposed death: “De puta-

97
Weiss, “Emperors and Antichrists” 88. See also Le Goff, Medieval Imagination 33.
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 185

tiua igitur morte Philimenis Troyani turbati sunt ualde” (XIV, 123). No-one as-
certains if Philimenis is actually dead which, Guido writes, ensures the survival
of the enemy since, had it not been for the disorder caused by this event, the
Trojans surely would have won the battle (XIV, 123). This emotional reaction
on behalf of the dead differs strikingly from the behavior of the Greek leaders.
When the Greek knight Protesilaus, whose men were part of the front line, no-
tices that almost all of his followers died, he cries in secret instead of falling
prey to violent rage: “in quorum morte latentes multas produxit lacrimas” (XIV,
124). Only then does he engulf on a retaliatory mission. Even Hector is moody
and changeable. He leaves the battle, for instance, when he is wearied and does
not, unlike other Trojans, return to the battlefield (XIV, 125). Whereas the Tro-
jans fight aggressively (all of the valiant heroes are described as bellicosus, Hec-
tor being more cautiously described – “inmoderata animositas” [XV, 128]), the
Greek battle order does not feature a single knight described in such terms. Un-
like his fickle counterpart, Agamemnon enters battle with the last battalion as
befits the imperial imperative, “vtpote tocius exercitus imperator” [since he was
the leader of the whole army] (XV, 133).
Before explaining the sufficiency of Agamemnon’s rule in detail, Hector’s
complex role merits consideration. It is at a crucial moment in Book XV that the
Trojans are almost victorious over the Greeks had it not been for Hector. While
the Trojans are ready to loot the Greek camp, they suddenly waver, which is
proverbially fatal: “Nam si ea hora illud non recipit et admittit sed differendo
dimittit, nunquam ad illud quod vno puncto potuit obtinere poterit postea perue-
nire” [For if on that hour he does not receive and accept the thing, but sends it
away by delaying, he will never afterward reach that which he could have ob-
tained at one point] (XV, 146). The reason for their delay is a pattern already
established as essentially Trojan, namely, the familial principle. Hector recog-
nizes his blood ties with Ajax Telamonius, “Committitur ergo durum prelium
inter duos tam fortes, sed dum inter se bellando mutuo loquerentur, agnouit Hec-
tor illum esse filium amite sue et sibi linea sanguinis esse coniunctum” [Hector
recognized the son of his aunt and that they were related by blood ties. Hector
accordingly became very happy at that point, and when he had laid down his
arms, he softened toward him with great affection and promised to please him in
all things, and advised and asked him to come to Troy to see the large family of
his kinsmen] (XV, 146). At this point, which occurs toward the middle of the
work,98 Troy’s future is settled. Ajax refutes the domestic ties and rejects Hec-
tor’s offer to visit Troy. Loyalty to his country (“sue patrie”) takes priority over
his life and that of his blood relatives; it is the imperial mask that matters. Hec-
tor’s rather problematic stance surprises even his own soldiers, who are perhaps
astounded to see that their otherwise good counselor finally adopted Priam’s
transparent principle of rule: “Iam Troyani in Grecorum naues ignem inmise-

98
In the mss. chosen as the base text by Griffin, the passage can be found on f. 75v (out of
130). The scene occurs in the 15th out of 34 books.
186 Part Two: Masking Troy

rant, iam omnes naues finaliter excussissent, sed ad uocem et mandatum ducis
eorum omnes totaliter destiterunt et multo dolore commoti ad ciuitatem redeunt
et ingrediuntur in ipsam” [The Trojans had already set fire to the Greek ships
and were already setting all the ships adrift, but at the voice and command of
their leader, they desisted completely from everything, and greatly disturbed and
disappointed, went back to the city and entered it] (XV, 147).99 The Trojan loss
of all reason is further stressed by direct comparison to the Greeks at the begin-
ning of the next book, which begins with a portrait of Achilles mourning the
death of Patroclus.100 The latter compares favorably with Priam’s excessive sor-
row for his son Cassibilans, who has been mentioned only twice: “pro eo quod
eum magis quam capiat paternus affectus tenerrime diligebat, in lacrimis uacauit
diucius et lamentis” [because he loved him more tenderly than fatherly feeling
requires, spent quite a long time in tears and laments] (XVI, 148).101 Witnessing
(and, of course, partaking in) these laments, Cassandra comprehends the emo-
tional instability and its deadly consequences. Like Hector before her, she con-
cedes rationally that Helen is hardly worth all the suffering she causes: “Sane
non fuit Helena tam doloroso tam exicioso precio comparanda vt omnes usque
ad vnum sub tanto martirio pereamus” (XVI, 148). The uncontrollable emotion-
ality of her people renders them unbefitting enemies of the Greeks. While Priam
is incapable of restraining his own emotionality, he is capable of controlling
Cassandra, who is seized and imprisoned (XVI, 148). This affords Guido again
with an opportunity (emerging qua the Roman) to parallel the different ways in
which Priam and Agamemnon manage challenges to their authority.
Meanwhile, in the imperial camp, Palamedes challenges Agamemnon’s lead-
ership since he believes himself to be a worthier ruler. He argues that Agamem-
non has been elected only by three kings rather than the entire assembly of more
than thirty kings. Agamemnon stays in power, however, without any further nar-
ratorial deliberations about the how and why (XVI, 148). But Palamedes’s dis-
satisfaction with Agamemnon surfaces again in Book XXII. Agamemnon’s re-
sponse again incorporates the imperial model. Guido introduces Agamemnon’s
reaction by mentioning his great restraint and his moderation, on account of his
great wisdom – “utpote qui erat in omnibus multa sapiencia moderatus” (XXII,

99
The Trojan familial principle further emerges in Guido’s description of the battle orders.
The Greek battalions are referred to by the names of the kings (and kingdoms of the em-
pire). The Trojan divisions are always led by the natural sons of Priam (e.g., Books XX
and XXI).
100
Guido mutes the homoeroticism present in Benoît’s Roman (esp. l. 10335). See also
Baswell, “Marvels of Translation” 41.
101
Achilles does mourn for Patroclus and like Priam, he cries; his grief is not described as
excessive, however. Notably, Cassibilans is buried in the temple of Venus, predominantly
associated with fickleness and Ovid qua the festival of Venus in Book VII.
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 187

179).102 He chooses his words moderately in the rare instance in which his per-
sonal feelings ‘shine’ through the mask:
Amice Palamides, de potestate mei regiminis hucusque michi concessa an putas me
exinde multa iocunditate letari, cum ab ipso principio nec eam exquisiuerim nec eam
procurauerim michi dari, cum in ipsius prelacione nulla michi emolumenta quesierim
sed exinde meo spiritui et persone mee continuas curas addiderim et labores ut reges et
principes et ceteri sub mea gubernacione salui in omnibus ducerentur? Et si ea me con-
tigisset potestate carere, potuisset michi abunde sufficere esse sub alterius ducis regi-
mine, secundum quod sufficit et suffecit cuilibet aliorum regum et principum meo esse
sub ductu. Et satis puto me in meo regimine non peccasse nec aliquid dolo uel negli-
gencia commisisse quod michi sinistre posset ascribi. [...] Et ne forte putetur quod talis
regiminis sim multum auidus et forsitan concupiscens, gratum est michi quod alius eli-
gatur, in eleccione cuius paratus sum vna cum aliis regibus laborare et affeccione ma-
xima consentire. Nec potes dicere, domine Palamedes, quod exercitus noster sine tuo
consilio duci non ualeat, cum te absente et absque tuorum consiliorum dictamine multa
in hoc exercitu acta et gesta fuerunt que satis salubriter omnibus communiter successe-
runt. (XXII, 179-80)
[My friend, Palamedes, do you think that hitherto I have rejoiced with great pleasure at
the power of the rule given to me, when from the beginning I neither asked for it nor
took care to have it given me, and when I looked for no profit on account of the pre-
ferment, but from it have acquired constant cares and labor of mind and body in order
to lead the kings and princes under my direction to safety in all things? And if it should
happen that I should lose this power, it would be more than enough for me to be under
the command of another leader, just as it is and was enough for any of the kings and
princes to be under my leadership. I think I did not make many mistakes during my
rule or by fraud or negligence do anything which could impute evil to me [...] Lest
perchance it be thought that I am very eager for this command, and perhaps too desir-
ous for it, it is pleasing to me that another be elected, for whose election I am prepared
to work with the other kings in harmony and great affection. For you cannot say, Lord
Palamedes, that our army cannot be led without your advice, since in your absence and
without the precepts of your counsel many acts and deeds have been done in this army,
which have turned out well enough for all in common.]
Since this is a political speech, it is first and foremost a rhetorical exercise in
order to persuade the assembled knights about the successes of his rule. As con-
cerns prosopagraphical processes, however, it is interesting that Agamemnon
completely dissociates his role as a leader from his personal ambitions; his de-
sires have to be subordinated to the common good, the imperial mask. He has
not assumed the role of emperor for reasons of personal gain. Rather, he has suf-
fered many a time with the safety of all on his mind; that is, his person is not
important, his service to the cause is. Moreover, he would assume the imperial
role anyway, whether as a leader or as someone being led, which indicates that
had Palamedes assumed the imperial role, he would have no reason to complain.
This comment becomes more important in the light of Palamedes’s absence dur-

102
This contrasts markedly with the eruption of dissatisfaction on account of envy and greed
that Joseph of Exeter attributes to a disorganized Greek camp in his De bello Troiano (V.
276-315).
188 Part Two: Masking Troy

ing Agamemnon’s election: if Palamedes had completely adopted the imperial

mask, he would have been on time. Eventually, Agamemnon says he is willing
to surrender his leadership as long as this would not be attributed to problems
with his rule. Moreover, he reminds the assembly that Greek rule does not de-
pend on one person, but is the collaboration of many who assume the imperial
mask and govern themselves accordingly.
Agamemnon’s speech moves from the rejection of personal motivations to
the collective good, which rightly governs all individual actions. Emotions play
a role only insofar as the imperial mask must be adopted. The Greek model thus
proposes an internalization (or subjection) of individual desires, which is an in-
version of Trojan leadership, in which emotions dictate political decisions,
marking a movement from interior to exterior. This becomes a genetic principle
since all Trojans are affected by it. Eventually, Agamemnon proves his point
and declines to rule further since he believes it to be unfair that the destiny of
the Greeks should be determined by one man only rather than being distributed
among the many: “Sed cum equum sit ut vniuersitas non debeat vni tantum in-
cumbere sed equa distribucione ceteros de vniuersitate grauare qui iniuncto
[h]oneri pares existant [...].” Guido is unhappy about this development; never-
theless, it affords him with the opportunity to liken the Greeks’ happiness about
Palamedes’s leadership to the effeminacy associated with Troy: “cum hominum
sit uicium naturale frequenter de nouo dominio gratulari et de noua mutacione
gaudere” (XXII, 181). Achilles, interestingly, is untainted by this common hu-
man error – after all, he evolves as the most valiant Greek knight in the end.
Toward the end of the Historia, Guido emphasizes that it is Priam’s effemi-
nate irrationality that eventually settles the Greek victory rather than their mili-
tary prowess or the will of the Fates. Guido depicts a wavering king, unfit to rule
and not in control of his subjects, let alone the situation. When Antenor and
Aeneas propose that Priam surrender and negotiate a peace treaty with the
Greeks, the Trojans deliberate over the proposal. Priam is unable to restrain his
emotionality yet again: “Rex uero Priamus ad hec animi sui mot<us> temperare
non ualens, multum alias promptus ad iram contra Anthenorem et Heneam, eos
increpando sic dixit” [At this King Priam was not able to moderate the distur-
bance of his heart;103 far from it, he was much stirred to anger against Antenor
and Aeneas, and spoke thus to reprove them] (XXIX, 221). He blames Aeneas
and Antenor for causing the war, first of all since Antenor persuaded him to
send Paris to attack the Greeks. Priam’s recollection of the event is somewhat
faulty, however. After his journey to Greece, asking for the restoration of He-
sione, Antenor does not suggest going to war. Instead, Priam’s enflamed heart
and burning hatred cause Guido to wonder why Priam changed his peaceful dis-
position to outright hatred. Priam further persuades the Trojans to go to war
given the good chances for the conquered to conquer (VI, 58). Next, Priam

103
Meek translates animus as mind at this point. Since what is clearly at stake are Priam’s
uncontainable emotions, the translation heart seems more suitable here.
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 189

blames Aeneas whom he approaches thus: “Et tu, domine Henea, quando te cum
Paride contulisti, nonne fuisti auctor consilii principalis ut Paris Helenam raperet
et duceret in hoc regnum? Et tu eciam fuisti personaliter adiutor ipsius, qui si
tunc Paridi dissuadere uoluisses, nunquam uidisset Helena muros Troye” [You,
Lord Aeneas, when you went with Paris, were you not the chief agent of the
plan for Paris to abduct Helen and bring her to this kingdom? You even aided
him in person, although if you had wished to dissuade Paris, Helen would never
have seen the walls of Troy] (XXIX, 221). Priam errs again; Aeneas is not one
of the speakers in the fateful assembly of Book VI, in which Priam, Hector,
Paris, Deiphobus, and Helenus rehearse reasons for and against military action,
with Troilus making the speech to shift popular opinion toward Trojan aggres-
sion. While Aeneas could have prevented Paris’s kidnapping of Helen, Aeneas,
for once, follows his monarch’s orders to accompany Paris (VII, 67). In this
context, Priam’s speech must seem defensive, if not utterly pathetic. Moreover,
Priam chose to follow their advice and, as their ruler, has therefore made their
advice his decision. Additionally, the recovery of his sister was first and fore-
most on his mind. To blame Aeneas and Antenor for the war misses the point.
Priam notices the deceptiveness embedded in Antenor’s and Aeneas’s sug-
gestion, but he fails to comprehend that there is more at stake than his own per-
son: “Sane non est tale consilium exequendum propter quod michi laqueus pre-
paretur vt finiam in tanti obprobrio dedecoris uitam meam” [Obviously such a
plan is not to be followed, because a snare is prepared for me so that I will end
my life in the disgrace of great infamy] (XXIX, 221). Priam overlooks that his
own emotionality and downfall is Troy’s emotional fate, which renders absurd
his refusal to take responsibility for his actions. To save himself (Troy), Priam
wants to kill Aeneas and Antenor, but fails. Despite being against negotiating
peace with the Greeks, Priam thus agrees to follow the traitors’ advice also be-
cause the majority of the Trojans favor the plan. One can only speculate as con-
cerns the people’s motivation. It is reasonable to assume, though, that their own
lives are dearer to them than the city, which is also Priam’s rationalization given
his earlier statement that the plan was to murder him, not Troy. Fearing his own
subjects (‘the error of opposition’), Priam notably concurs with Aeneas after the
latter tells him that his opinion does not matter (XXIX, 223), and Antenor is
chosen to negotiate with the Greeks. When Aeneas addresses the assembled
Trojans and informs them about the demands of the Greeks for ‘restitution,’
Priam furtively retires to his room to cry (“suam se secreto recepit in aulam”),
not – as one would expect – about the doom to come but the loss of material
goods: “[...] quod pretextu redempcionis ipsius a me totum aurum exhauriant
quod multo tempore cumulaui, vt demum spoliatus omnibus bonis meis in pro-
fundum paupertatis inmergar. Et O utinam esse possem de mea uita securus!”
[they, on the pretext of this reparation, consume all the gold that I have accumu-
lated for a long time, so that at last, despoiled of all my goods, I shall sink into
the depths of poverty. And oh, would that I could be untroubled concerning my
life] (XXIX, 224-25). Upon the negotiation of the peace, Priam seems to have
190 Part Two: Masking Troy

forgotten that Antenor and Aeneas are betraying Troy, since he appears to be
convinced that the oaths of the Greeks are without guile – “Quibus prestitis iu-
ramentis, dum rex Priamus pro certo putaret iuramenta a Grecis facta dolo carere
[...]” (XXX, 231). Then, he suspects treachery again when the horse is brought
into the city, notably after he consented to this (XXX, 231-32). The next Greek
lie is as easily swallowed when they insist that Helen should be sent to Tenedos
so that she is not immediately killed by the Greek army. Not only does Priam
not expect any false play, he even approves of the sentiment: “Placuerunt igitur
Priamo uelut ignaro ficticia uerba Grecorum, ea reputans esse uera” [These
feigned words of the Greeks pleased Priam, as he did not know they were
feigned and thought them true] (XXX, 232). It is not until the butchering of his
people has commenced that he fully realizes he had been betrayed. Instead of
valiantly opposing the Greeks or, at least, joining the fight, however, Priam pre-
fers to await his death: “Quare pronus coram magno altari occubuit, indubitanter
mortem expectans” [For this reason he fell flat before the great altar, awaiting
certain death] (XXX, 233). Meanwhile, Agamemnon is shown to care about the
Greeks – the spoils are divided equally (XXX, 234-35).
Since Guido follows Dictys (that is, Benoît’s Roman) as concerns the struc-
ture of the Troy story, the last books of the Historia are concerned with Greek
imperial rule. Agamemnon’s leadership again is shown to be a matter of rational
decisions and ingenious plans. The familial principle and individual desires have
no place in such a world, as is testified by Achilles’s attempt to place person be-
fore empire (see below). The Greeks are aware of the problems inherent in emo-
tional rule (or the rule of emotion) and are able to exploit this Trojan weakness.
Thus, they notice that the Trojan collective rests on one person only, Hector,
who metaphorically represents his city. Since the valiant Trojan knight is their
strongest adversary, if not their only one, the assembly decides that Achilles
should kill him, by overcoming Hector: “[...] non tantum suis uiribus quam suo
sagaci ingenio terminandum” [not so much by means of his strength as by
means of his ingenious cleverness] (XVII, 151). Ingenious cleverness is the key
to the Greek fabrication of an opaque, mythical mask. The rhetorical strategy for
such mask making is illustrated by Ulysses, whose rhetorical powers – shown at
the end of the Historia – enable the construction of imperial opacity for the
Greek ‘characters’ and for Guido, whose rhetorical strategy closely follows the
Ulyssean model (see Chapter Ten).
Overall, these examples should be sufficient to delineate the oppositional
structure within the Historia, which frequently contrasts Greek imperial opacity
with Ovidian changeability and irrationality in the Trojan camp, made strikingly
visible in the marvelous, aberrant creatures associated with the Trojans. Their
transparency is summarized succinctly at the end of the Historia. In relaying that
no-one knows how Aeneas and Antenor could have possibly received news of
the impending assassination at the hands of Amphimachus, Guido has recourse
to proverbial knowledge: “Sed cum nichil occultum sit quod reuelari non ualeat”
[however, there is nothing hidden which cannot be revealed] (XXIX, 222). This
 Chapter Eight: Masking Rule 191

encapsulates the Trojan inability to fashion opaque masks, their failure to check
their uncontrollable effeminacy.104 Beyond the dichotomy between Greek opac-
ity and Trojan transparency, however, there are characters able to cross the bor-
der between the rational camp and the emotional city, namely, Helen and
Briseida.

104
Even Hector is subject to his emotionality. He is overcome by the desire – “raptus deside-
rio” (XV, 134) – to have Patroclus’s weapons after slaying him, for instance, and when
Teucer wounds him seriously, he cannot restrain his anger, goes after him, and finds him-
self surrounded by a multitude of Greeks. Theseus has to remind him that this was an un-
wise course of action (XV, 138-39). Many Trojans are fickle and emotional in battle and
act upon the familiar principle (e.g., X, 136; XV, 138), but Hector’s eclectic fighting style
is particularly problematic. He tries to help wherever he is needed and occasionally dis-
cerns the necessity of opaque prosopagraphy, reminding his knights what would ensue
should the Greeks be victorious; unlike the day before, when he retired early from battle,
he only shortly leaves the battlefield to have his severe wounds bandaged. The Trojans
prevail and are about to loot the Greek camp, because of Hector, when the Fates (that is,
Hector) oppose complete victory (see Chapter Ten).
 CHAPTER NINE
Transgressing Borders: Benoît’s Roman versus Guido’s Historia

Arranged around the center of the Historia is the triangular love story of
Briseida, Troilus, and Diomedes, which was ‘invented’ by Benoît and contains
the nucleus of a story explored and expanded in vernacular works by Boccaccio
and Chaucer, enjoying a wide dissemination in the later Middle Ages.105 But
Briseida is not the only character familiar with both camps. Helen even moves
back and forth between Trojans and Greeks, presenting a viable model for
transgressing boundaries; she anticipates translucent prosopagraphy. Both Helen
and Briseis in Benoît’s Roman represent an Ovidian model for subverting
mythical processes of creating collective identities. Such an Ovidian model nec-
essarily has to be muted in the Virgilian, imperial Historia. Sally Mapstone ob-
serves about the Roman – with respect to the origins of Criseyde – that it is “one
of a group of romans d’antiquité in which a powerful Ovidian influence is un-
mistakable. It is transmitted through a conception of love as both overwhelming
and foolhardy, and through stylistic and expressive mannerisms, including the
monologue and epistle, which create a sense of interior depth in the speaker or
writer.”106 Such a depth of character, or more appropriately, characters or masks,
is tangible in Benoît – his ‘go-betweens’ are able to adopt several masks and
reconcile them with their other personae. This is true of Helen but also of
Briseis, who is able to transfer Trojan transparency to the Greek camp. Despite
Benoît’s antifeminism, Briseis’s translucent model subverts Greek opacity and
thereby opens up an Ovidian path of changeability, a female counter-imperial
model. The remodeled Briseida of Guido’s antifeminist epic, however, learns a
different lesson from her father Calchas, who has successfully incorporated the
collective Greek mask which restrains again any individual desires as Greek
opacity literally covers a Trojan model of changeability.

1. Trojan Helen: Hybridity and Muted Flexibility

Helen is the only genuine ‘go-between’ in the Troy story since she not only
moves from the Greeks to the Trojans, she also is reconciled with her husband
Menelaus at the end of the Historia, rendering her the only character to cross
cultural borderlines twice. Helen is introduced to the reader shortly before she is

105
For the literary invention of the Briseis-episode and Benoît’s mythological bricolage, see
Kelly, “Invention of Briseida’s Story” 223-237.
106
Sally Mapstone, “The Origins of Criseyde,” Medieval Women: Texts and Context in Late
Medieval Britain; Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2000) 140.
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 193

abducted by Paris. The description is one of Guido’s expansions, the “most

noteworthy perhaps.”107 The overtones are reminiscent of female characteriza-
tion as it has hitherto emerged throughout the Historia: women are as fickle as
they are changeable,108 which explains Helen’s immediate infatuation with Paris,
who has just arrived:
Quod postquam eidem innotuit Helene, uarie uoluntatis desiderabilis appetitus, qui
mulierum animum consueuit subita leuitate corripere, Helene animum inconsulta fla-
grancia concitauit vt optaret ad ipsius festiuitatis sollempnia se conferre gaudia uisura
festiua et inspectura ducem Frigie nacionis. (VII, 70)
[After Helen had learned of this, the eager appetite of changing desire, which is wont
to seize the hearts of women with sudden lightness, excited Helen’s heart with an ill-
advised passion, so that she wished to go to the ceremonies of this festival in order to
see the festive celebrations and to look at the leader of the Phrygian nation.]
Although Guido does not deny that men are not entirely innocent in their deal-
ings with women, the spectacles of ‘ancient’ culture, such as the rites at the
temple of Venus, are especially treacherous for changeable (and shameless)
women – “multas impudicissimas mulieres” (VII, 70). Ovidian sources surface
immediately again. In the description of Helen, which Meeks deems conven-
tional (287-88n), the Historia pays ample attention to Helen’s bosom, the show-
ing of which has to be seen as immoral: “Sic miratur in illa lati pectoris equalita-
tem extensam, in cuius planicie duo urbera ueluti duo poma surgencia aeris na-
tura quasi geminas cacuminauit in pilas” [He admired the even expanse of her
broad bosom, on whose surface two breasts like two apples, rising lightly as air,
culminated in twin nipples] (VII, 73). This shameless exposure has its source in
Ovid’s Heroides, the emphasis on whiteness preceding the sentence in which
Helen’s fingers shine forth milky-white in the Historia: “digiti sereni candoris
lacteo fulgore nitebant” (VII, 73).109 Guido’s antifeminist comments are imme-
diately followed by guidelines on how to avoid the consequences of female be-
havior. Besides further underlining the effeminacy of counter-imperialism, the
passage stresses the dangers of engaging with the (ethnic) ‘other’: “O quam grati

107
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, “A Brief Account of Dares and Dictys, the Roman de Troie and
Its Redactions,” appendix, The Seege or Batayle of Troye: A Middle English Metrical Ro-
mance, ed. Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, EETS, o.s. 172 (1927; New York: Kraus, 1971) 227.
108
Because of her changeability, Criseyde was a more “interesting figure” than Helen of Troy
in the Middle Ages, the former possibly becoming a surrogate for the later. E. Talbot
Donaldson, “Briseis, Briseida, Criseyde, Cresseid, Cressid: Progress of a Heroine,”
Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, ed. Ed-
ward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press,
1979) 3-4.
109
“Prodita sunt, memini, tunica tua pectora laxa / atque oculis aditum nuda dedere meis /
pectora vel puris nivibus, vel lacte tuamque / complexo matrem candidiora Iove” [Once, I
remember, your dress moved, one could see your breasts and they were provided naked
before my eyes, breasts whiter than pure snow, than milk, even whiter than was Jove, who
slept with your mother] (Her. XVI. 249-52). For Guido’s employment of Ovid, see Meek
288n.
194 Part Two: Masking Troy

feminis esse debent earum domorum termini et honestatis earum fines et limites
conseruare! Nunquam enim nauis sentiret dissuta naufragium si continuo suo
staret in portu, in partes non nauigans alienas” [Oh, how pleasing to women
should be the walls of their homes, how pleasing the limits and restraints of their
honor! For an unrigged ship would never know shipwreck if it stayed continu-
ally in port and did not sail to foreign parts]; from Helen’s point of view, Paris
should be a “virum [...] barbaricum” (VII, 71). Guido expands the material from
Benoît at this point, which is likely due to the historical importance of the
scene,110 and it indicates that Guido was aware of the parallels between Helen
and Briseida.111 And again, Guido’s borrowings from the Heroides align female
fickleness with Ovid’s effeminate changeability.
Helen virtually becomes a Trojan in her inability to mask her emotions in ac-
cordance with imperial rules. Instead of staying away from a barbarian, she
submits to her emotions and determines the appropriate ‘form of matter’ rather
quickly. The immediate, severe attack of mutual love afflicting Helen and Paris
substantiates this since both, though at pains to reveal to each other their respec-
tive emotions, can do so only non-verbally. The emotional transparency makes
verbal articulation redundant:
Quam dum Paris percipit sibi suis luminibus blandientem, gaudet suos radios uisuales
uisualibus Helene radiis commisceri, et sic per mutuas et placidas uisiones sibi inui-
cem consonantes communis amoris uehementiam manifestant, et dum ambo cogitant
in seipsis qualiter eorum vnusquisque alteri sue intencionis archana reuelet, ausus est
Paris per intersigna uocis uicaria primicias exsoluere uoti sui. (VII, 73)
[Thus through reciprocal and pleasing glances they revealed to each other that they
agreed together in the violence of their mutual love, and while both wondered in-
wardly how each would reveal the secret of his intentions to the other, Paris dared to
deliver the first indications of his desire by exchanging signs instead of words.]
Helen’s revelatory selfhood in love matters, then, emphasizes her allegiance
with the Trojans, who act upon whims rather than rationalizing their emotions
by means of the imperial mask. Unlike many Trojans, Helen is capable of realiz-
ing and articulating her position – and her abilities emerge more concretely in
the Roman, where she feigns anger and sorrow (ll. 4639-40). The Historia is
more concerned with stressing the suddenness of her change, omitting elements
of pretence: she is first more animated by assent rather than dissent and does not
110
Meek, introduction xxiii.
111
O’Callaghan emphasizes that whereas Briseis is condemned by Benoît, followed by a pas-
sage praising Eleanor, he curiously does not blame Helen, whose love changes even more
quickly. “It is consequently impossible to read the two love episodes in the Roman de
Troie without noticing how one parallels the other. Like a mirror, each heroine is both the
reflection and the inversion of her counterpart.” Moreover, Eleanor “remarried under the
shadow of a past legitimate union as well as to her former husband’s greatest political en-
emy. Even the names of the two women, Aliénor and Heleine, suggest a connection, albeit
unintentionally, for in French they sound very like one another.” Instead of treading on
thin ice, Benoît invents another woman, who does not resemble Eleanor. O’Callaghan,
“Tempering Scandal” 304-12, quotations at 308, 311.
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 195

break down until the Trojans arrive at Tenedos (VII, 75-76). Nevertheless,
Guido cleverly uses her changeability for his own purposes. Soon after the ab-
duction, Helen mourns the loss of her kinsfolk and her native country, for which
she is reprimanded by Paris. He thinks she has cried enough already and prom-
ises that she will not suffer the want of anything in his father’s kingdom. Helen
answers, consistent with Guido’s attempt to mute flexible characters capable of
maintaining change, that women have no choice: “Scio, domine, velim nolim,
habere necesse tuas exequi uoluntates, cum femina non possit potencie preualere
uirili et precipue in captiuitate detenta” [I know, lord, that I must of necessity
follow your wishes, whether I want to or not, since a woman, and especially one
held in captivity, is not able to prevail over masculine force] (VII, 76-77). Al-
though Paris promises her many things, including that she is now with a) the
greater knight (since he has more power than Menelaus) and b) that she is with
the more powerful kingdom – promises which are not unlike those motivating
Calchas’s quick change of camps (see below) – she still chooses out of necessity
rather than emotion. Her last reported words before the wedding are that she had
wished for a different destiny: “Sed ex quo aliud esse non potest, inuita tuas pre-
ces admittam, cum tue resistere uoluntati nulla sit potencia penes me” [Since it
cannot be otherwise, I unwillingly grant your entreaties, since there is no power
within me to resist your will] (VII, 78). Helen still learns to adopt Trojan trans-
parency. When Paris is killed, her emotional outbursts surprise even Priam and
Hecuba, and it increases their grief to witness her pain (XXVII, 211).
Helen has become a transparent character whose emotional fickleness con-
structs horizontality. While the effeminate principle necessarily dies in the end,
Helen survives. Although she only seems to be a fickle female, she actually is
showing her adaptability by adopting the respective mask, learning to act in ac-
cordance with Trojan mythology, with Trojan emotional transparency. Maybe
this threatening theatrical ability prompts the short, one-sentence report of her
reconciliation with Menelaus (XXX, 234; cf. Roman ll. 26279-98). Guido at-
tempts to characterize Helen as a weak woman easily reconciled to the antifemi-
nist notion that women should be subjected to male rule. Nevertheless, she im-
plicitly represents a hybrid prosopagraphical model that lends authenticity to a
joint Greek-Trojan ancestry (see below) – Guido cannot entirely mute the flexi-
bility of a character capable of reconciling her masks to a changed situation, as
is true also of his more extensive treatment of Briseida.

2. Trojan Briseida: Negotiating Transparency

Guido’s version of Troilus and Briseida was widely disseminated in the Middle
Ages and was the source for many other works concerned with the predicament
of the lovers. Thus, Guido’s handling of this episode from Benoît’s Roman has
drawn some critical interest, for instance, R. M. Lumiansky’s encyclopedic
treatment of the differences between the two versions. My focus here is on how
far these differences illustrate different modes of prosopagraphical selfhood.
First of all, it is important to note that Guido destroys the unity of Benoît’s love
196 Part Two: Masking Troy

story and that he simplifies the Roman’s details.112 Generic differences might be
the reason for these changes, that is, the transformation of “a lengthy poetic ro-
mance in which this love story suitably appeared” and “a prosaic history which
recorded supposedly factual events and had little place for a love story not actu-
ally necessary to the chronological account.” This likewise affects the perspec-
tive on Briseida as an agent, after all, “Benoit is much less vociferous antifemi-
nist than Guido, for whom the function of the love story is sufficiently satisfied
by the mere fact that Briseida deserts Troilus for Diomedes.” Moreover, Guido
betrays little interest in psychological matters, reports rather than maintains
speeches, which “does much to make the individuals involved seem wooden
figures rather than actual people.”113 A careful review of these (and other)
changes suggests that many of the modifications can be accounted for by
Guido’s interest in the masks of the self and in the dichotomy between opaque
and transparent prosopagraphy. In this framework, the reduction of speeches
represents a limitation of circulating mythemes, testifying to Guido’s preference
for mythical over mythological models yet again; the written presides over oral
discourse, which also coincides with the respective audiences: Benoît’s was
most likely a courtly audience listening to the poem, while Guido’s audience
was largely one of readers.
In the Historia, Briseida appears to be a Trojan female from the outset, but
later learns from her father how imperial masks can be profitably maintained,
which somewhat complicates Gretchen Mieszkowski’s belief that Briseis is a
“type figure” from her inception in the Roman, in which the narrator undoubt-
edly presents Briseida as a turn-coat.114 Briseida therefore fits into Guido’s gen-
eral association of women with changeability, but she also offers a more produc-
tive, translucent prosopagraphical model for later writers. With few exceptions,
however, Briseis has been turned upside down in critical studies, as Roberto An-
tonelli observes: she is “one of the very few female characters in courtly litera-
ture who have an autonomous existence (who are not, that is, the mere projec-
tion or schematic reduction of the male imagination, and thus non-existent)
[...].” Her character is “inevitably contradictory, and thus dynamic.” Most im-

112
R. M. Lumiansky, “The Story of Troilus and Briseida according to Benoit and Guido,”
Speculum 29.4 (1954): 727-28. See further Roberto Antonelli, “The Birth of Criseyde –
An Exemplary Triangle: ‘Classical’ Troilus and the Question of Love at the Anglo-
Norman Court,” trans. Evelyn Bradshaw et al., The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed.
Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 46-47. He emphasizes that Guido omits
anything that is inconsistent with “the representation of a betrayal of a young hero by a
young woman who is depicted from the beginning as suspect” (46).
113
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 732-33.
114
Gretchen Mieszkowski, “The Reputation of Criseyde: 1155-1500,” Transactions of the
Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 43 (1971): 79. More positive views of Briseis
have been prompted by Robert Gordon’s translation, she believes, which omits most of
Benoît’s moralizing (80 n. 12). Nonetheless, she contends that Briseis is “complex and
quite interesting,” that the reader never knows whether her dealings with Diomedes are
conscious, and that Briseis is variously described as being ashamed of her fickleness (80).
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 197

portantly, Antonelli draws attention to the lack of role models for Briseis (of
adoptable masks, that is). Male writers, he suggests, express their “hostility to
the woman who has no precise institutionalized role (mother and wife) [...].”115
Thus, Guido’s crux in the story “is the betrayal, the natural inclination of every
woman to be inconstant.” Perhaps, Briseida had to be depicted as fickle and
changeable since the audience was not ready to identify “with an enigmatic fig-
ure who goes beyond her pre-established role.”116 I agree with the claim that
there were no masks in circulation for women like Briseida to adopt – it was up
to the Trojan women to fashion new masks, and Guido is (paradoxically) com-
plicit in the development of the translucent prosopagraphical model that he des-
perately attempts to silence. Guido accordingly mutes the criticism of Calchas
since he is laudably able to adopt the Greek imperial mask. While Medea and
Cassandra fail in their attempt to negotiate roles for themselves, Guido’s
Briseida learns from her father to likewise appropriate the Greek imperial
model. She literally transcends the opaque mask, however, and becomes an in-
dividual by means of subjecting to the processes of mythological bricolage both
Trojan and Greek concepts of personal and collective identities.
From the beginning Benoît and Guido treat Briseis differently. For Benoît,
the love stories are central, and he foreshadows the ensuing tragedy (ll. 362-80);
Guido does not. As concerns the portrait of the characters, Diomedes’s portrait
is only slightly reduced in the Historia – the Greek’s basic attributes fit well into
place. He is tall and broad-chested (“amplo pectore”) and does not keep his
promises (“in promissis fallax”). Guido retains Diomedes’s fallibility which, in
Latin, can also mean cunning, craft – traits necessary for the successful fabrica-
tion of masks. His torment due to his love interests, which prompts Guido to de-
scribe him as libidinosus (VIII, 84), does not entail, though, that he was fre-
quently engaged in confrontations on account of his love interests (Roman ll.
5211-24). Troilus is described in only six lines in the Historia and does not ap-

115
Antonelli, “Birth of Criseyde” 22. Furthermore, Antonelli stresses that without “Briseis
Troilus would not exist. Or, to be more precise, without her betrayal Troilus would not be
the object of discussion today [...]” (21). Ovid’s Briseis, trying to regain Achilles’s love, is
very aware of the roles she performs in that she describes herself in relation to Achilles in
terms of several masks: “Tot tamen amissis te compensavimus unum: / Tu dominus, tu vir,
tu mihi frater eras. / Tu mihi iuratus per numina matris aquosae / utile dicebas ipse fuisse
capi” [Despite all these losses you were a substitute for all of them, you were my master,
my husband, you were my brother. You swore by the name of your mother, the goddess of
water, how advantageous it were to be your captive] (Her. III. 51-54). Mapstone argues
that the Ovidian version “contributes to the impression that Briseis exists in a disturbing
and unresolved relation to the only male figure who can make sense of her life.” In Ovid’s
handling of the material, the letter is not that of a “woman in love. It is the letter of a
woman coping with situations far from her own making, at once accusing and inviting the
only person who can give meaning to her existence.” Mapstone, “Origins of Criseyde”
137, 138. While being dependent on male authority, Briseis is aware of the several perso-
nae she has to enact.
116
Antonelli, “Birth of Criseyde” 46, 48.
198 Part Two: Masking Troy

pear as the full-fledged courtly lover of the Roman, as Lumiansky notes. The
description, however, begins in a similar fashion: Troilus has a large body, but
instead of stressing his broad chest, Guido stresses his big heart (“corde
magnaminus”), highlighting a Trojan trait. Moreover, Guido does not follow
Benoît’s characterization of Troilus as double-faced. On the one hand, he has a
gentle appearance and expression; on the other hand Benoît adds, “Mais une rien
vos di por veir, / Qu’il ert envers ses enemis / D’autre semblant e d’autre vis”
[but one thing I can tell you for certain: he had a different appearance and ex-
pression for his enemies] (ll. 5404-06). Instead, Guido proceeds to associate
Troilus with Trojan effeminacy, maintaining Benoît’s characterization of Troilus
as a second Hector – “alius Hector” (VIII, 86).117 While the Roman indicates
that Troilus is able to fashion an opaque mask, that of the valiant fighter, Guido
mutes this aspect, stressing instead his popularity among the ladies. Although
Briseida appears almost unaltered, both Lumiansky and Antonelli find a heavier
stress on her joined eyebrows in the Historia,118 and concomitantly greater em-
phasis on her inconstancy (VIII, 85). The description renders her, in analogy to
Troilus, as a lover.119 Retroactively, this further associates Troilus with the
world of courtly love – not only is he a changeable Trojan, he is further associ-
ated with a changeable Trojan woman. This is consistent with another change
introduced when reporting the first martial encounter of Troilus with Diomedes.
In the Roman, Diomedes captures Troilus’s horse (ll. 10725-84); in the Historia,
it is Troilus who is captured by Diomedes (XVI, 150), which somehow casts
doubt on the Trojan’s alleged status of a second Hector.
The Historia similarly transforms the circumstances for Briseida’s exchange.
In the Roman, Calchas’s reasons for wanting Briseida exchanged are given
much more space, with an emphasis on the familial principle: his daughter is
much loved, and the poet explicitly mentions that she should not perish along
with the Trojans (ll. 13086-120); Guido merely mentions that Calchas wanted
her restored. The Greeks concur with Calchas’s request and eloquently repeat
his plea in Troy. In both works, the Trojans blame Calchas for being a traitor.
Priam’s reaction in the Roman, however, is a verbalized complaint about Cal-
chas, making Priam a strict ruler – only Briseida’s nobleness and worthiness
have kept him from killing her on account of Calchas’s misdemeanor. Guido’s
Priam emerges as changeable insofar as the Historia posits a juxtaposition be-
tween Priam’s actions and the feelings of his people: “Sed Priamus ad petitio-
nem Grecorum inter commutacionem Anthenoris et regis Thoas Briseydam uo-
luntarie relaxauit” [King Priam, however, willingly released Briseida at the peti-
tion of the Greeks during the exchange of Antenor and King Thoas] (XIX, 161).
117
For the addition of “licentious” and Troilus as ‘a second Hector,’ see Antonelli, “Birth of
Criseyde” 47; Meek 290n. Barry Windeatt describes Troilus’s portrait in the Roman de
Troie as “lavish” in his Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 80-82.
118
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 728-29; Antonelli, “Birth of Criseyde” 46-47.
119
Whereas Troilus’s heart is ‘big,’ hers is changeable in Benoît’s Roman: “Mout fou amee e
mout amot, / Mais sis corage li chanjot” (ll. 5285-86).
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 199

By leaving out Priam’s concurrence with the complaint of the Trojans, he ap-
pears as a fickle ruler yet again.
The Trojan inconsolability in the light of the parting with Briseida is ex-
panded slightly, as is Briseida’s reaction.120 Upon learning about his father’s de-
cision to exchange Briseida, Troilus, in contrast to Benoît’s Roman, “quam mul-
to amoris ardore diligebat iuueniliter, nimio calore ductus amoris in desideratiua
uirtute ignee uoluptatis multo dolore deprimitur et torquetur funditus, quasi totus
in lacrimis, anxiosis suspiriis, et lamentis” [was overwhelmed and completely
wracked by great grief, and almost entirely consumed by tears, anguished sighs,
and laments, because he cherished her with the great fervor of youthful love and
had been led by the excessive ardor of love into the intense longing of blazing
passion] (XIX, 163). Briseis’s reaction to the exchange includes the much-cited
speech detailing her concerns about her future in the Greek camp (ll. 13276-
294), which implicitly highlights her rhetorical abilities. By contrast, Guido
drops Briseida’s rational concerns for her future, leaving her without a voice and
veiling her (threatening) eloquence. In the Historia, she becomes a “wooden
character,” illustrating Guido’s demotion of the female principle in which ra-
tionality has no place. He further mutes the Ovidian source which assigns a
voice to Briseida, albeit a confusing one.121 These changes suggest that Guido is
aware of the dangers inherent in Benoît’s (ambiguously antifeminist) depiction
of Briseis. Guido’s Briseida is irrational, she is incapable of analyzing her situa-
tion, and even her attire is bereft of ornament and color – Guido shortens the
Roman’s long description of Briseida’s beautiful dress and the attendant ability
to mask her emotionality. In Guido’s version, the exchange prompts her to react
like a madwoman, tearing out her hair, much like Medea and Cassandra, who
also fall prey to irrational, emotional reactions befitting the Trojans throughout
the Historia. Lastly, Guido checks her impending autonomy in the Greek camp
by emphasizing that her happiness depends on Troilus – “quam uita potiri ex
quo eam ab eo separari necesse est a cuius uita sue uite solacia dependebant”
(XIX, 163). Benoît almost seems to have the reversed situation in mind when
‘his’ Briseis turns to Troilus to articulate her emotions, self-confidently chal-
lenging Priam’s royal authority:
Ja mais nul jor que seiez vis
Nos amera rien plus de mei.
Mout a mal fait Prianz, le rei,
Qui de sa vile m’en enveie. (ll. 13288-91)
[Nevermore in your life will anyone love you at all better than I. I declare that Priam is
doing a great injustice in banishing me from this city.]

120
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 730; Meek 301n.
121
Mapstone argues that because of his familiarity with the Heroides, Benoît “found sugges-
tive things in the Briseis there to carry over into the creation of his own Briseida.” Map-
stone, “Origins of Criseyde” 141. See further Nolan, Chaucer 109-14; Donaldson,
“Briseis” 6.
200 Part Two: Masking Troy

Troilus’s sorrow, in contrast, is mute. In effect, he becomes the wooden figure,

while nothing in the world is as beautiful as to behold Briseis before the ex-
change. Only the tears of the assembled Trojan women prompt her to join in
their sorrow (ll. 13327-340).
Both authors contend that the Trojan lady will soon be happy again – when
one eye weeps the other smiles. In this context, Benoît advises his audience not
to trust women (ll. 13437-56, 13471-94).122 While Benoît quickly begins to mute
his criticism, perhaps in light of his potential readership,123 Guido overtly
stresses the changeability in terms of deception. Benoît admits that women can
be very strong, especially when combining chastity and beauty; it is the persis-
tence of the suitors (male agency, that is) that overpowers women, not necessar-
ily their fickleness. Guido rather blames Troilus for falling prey to a fickle
woman, to actress Briseida: “Sed, O Troile, que te tam iuuenilis coegit errare
credulitas ut Briseyde lacrimis crederes et eius blanditiis deceptiuis?” [But oh,
Troilus, what youthful credulity forced you to be so mistaken that you trusted
Briseida’s tears and her deceiving caresses] (XIX, 164)? Instead of translating
the lovers’ parting promises, Guido continues to admonish Troilus for foolishly
falling in love with Briseida. Upon her arrival in the Greek camp, Guido’s Troi-
lus immediately turns around. His grief remains unexplored (cf. Roman ll.
13524-528): Troilus is subject to Briseida and the female principle inherent in
Trojan selfhood. Eventually, Guido is not entirely able to devalue Briseida’s
productive potential,124 which is inextricably related to her ability to transgress
boundaries, which in turn depends on her changeability and her acting talent,
explored in greater depth by later writers.

3. Greek Briseida: Negotiating Opacity

Briseis’s life among the Greeks illustrates the problems of opaque mask making.
Diomedes’s courtly wooing of the Trojan lady is one of the first scenes that
spotlights differences between Benoît’s and Guido’s accounts. In the Historia,
Diomedes immediately falls in love with Briseida: “Inter quos dum esset Dyo-
medes et illam Dyomedes inspiceret, in flammam statim venerei ardoris exarsit
et eam uehementi desiderio concupiuit” [Among them then was Diomedes, and
as Diomedes looked at her, he was immediately on fire with the flames of ardent
love, and desired her with vehement longing] (XIX, 164). Benoît rationalizes
Diomedes’s feelings and emphasizes his awareness of the problems involved in
changing national allegiances. The Historia further reduces Briseida’s reply and
adds the usual tirade against fickle women. Any inkling of Briseis’s intelligence

122
Benoît offers many antifeminist moralizations, but he gives rise also to a more sympa-
thetic perspective on Briseis character, for instance, when he suggests that someone who
separates lovers is committing a sin (ll. 13313-14).
123
Léopold Constans, introduction, Roman de Troie 6: 188-90; Mieszkowski, “Reputation”
92.
124
For the forcefulness of Guido’s condemnation of Briseida, see Mieszkowski, “Reputation”
92-93; Donaldson, “Briseis” 7; Nolan, Chaucer 323 n. 49.
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 201

is omitted, since Guido intends to render her initial refusal as typical of women
generally. In the Roman, Briseis stresses that some men make promises they
cannot keep (ll. 13626-32). This is apparently too risqué and too Ovidian a
statement for Guido. From the beginning of his courtship, one witnesses “an
Ovidian doubleness of intention”; Briseis’s reaction to Diomedes’s wooing cor-
responds closely to Helen’s letter to Paris.125 Since Benoît mentions Briseis’s
worries about not being accepted by the Greeks, her happiness at receiving at-
tention from Diomedes is rather understandable. In the Historia, she appears to
be inappropriately happy at the ‘theft’ of her glove (XIX, 165), which she gives
Diomedes in the Roman (l. 13709). This change blackens her in several ways.
First, she should not be happy so shortly after being forced to leave her home,
nor should she attempt to conceal her joy. Second, Diomedes’s sudden infatua-
tion with Briseida implies that Briseida’s seductiveness is such that the poor
man cannot resist her and inevitably misbehaves – Diomedes turns Trojan.
Briseida’s reunion with her father is handled differently by Guido as well,
again highlighting questions of collective allegiances, of transparency and opac-
ity. Stressing their long separation, Benoît has father and daughter kiss each
other upon their reunion – “Mout l’a joïe e ele lui, / E mout se sont baisié andui;
/ Assez se sont entrembracié: / Calcas en plore de pitié” [He greeted her warmly,
they exchanged many kisses and embraces, and he was moved to tears] (ll.
13715-718). In contrast, Guido only mentions Calchas’s happiness in passing
(XIX, 165). The passage is contained between Briseida’s inappropriate happi-
ness and the narrator’s references to Diomedes’s love-stricken heart, wherefore
readers learn only about Briseida’s feeling vis-à-vis the reunion after Guido’s
dismissal of Diomedes’s emotionality. She is upset with her father for changing
sides. While the Roman foregrounds her concerns with the loss of honor, Guido
emphasizes her exilic plight. For Briseis, Calchas’s defection to the Greeks is
tantamount to the loss of his clear intelligence: “Vostre clers sens, li hauz, li
granz, / Qu’est devenuz? Ou est alez?” [What has happened to your clear, noble
and powerful intelligence? Where has it gone] (ll. 13734-735)? Calchas has lost
his transparency; his identity is now veiled. This is maintained in the Historia,
but the phraseology is different: “O quanta inter homines pudoris labe confunde-
ris” [with how great a taint of shame among men are you covered] (XIX, 165).
In both cases, prosopagraphical identities are at stake. Calchas’s ‘veiled voice,’
however, marks an important shift from eye to ear, stressing the rhetorical
means necessary to fashion opacity, that later become associated with Ulysses
(and Guido). From a Trojan perspective (Benoît), Calchas has become impure
by means not otherwise specified; Guido’s Briseida realizes that Calchas has
adopted a mask, veiling his true identity.
This affects Calchas’s rebuttal of his daughter’s accusation. In the Roman,
Calchas emphasizes the pain suffered on account of the god’s command to live
with the Greeks; the present reunion with his family is all that matters. In the

125
Nolan, Chaucer 110.
202 Part Two: Masking Troy

Historia, Calchas’s answer is short – “uerborum breuitate” (XIX, 166). His

stance does not necessitate lengthy arguments. The familial principle, a Trojan
hypergood, is muted entirely, which does not apply to Briseida. She never men-
tions the reunion with her father as a source for happiness in the Historia, as one
may have expected given the mutual happiness in Guido’s source. Calchas’s
hope for a different outcome remains un-translated as well:
Jo n’en dei pas estre honiz,
Quar, se il fust al mien talent,
Ceste uevre alast tot autrement.
Rien ne set mie la dolor
Qu’en sofre mis cuers nuit e jor. (ll. 13790-794)
[I never did anything with such reluctance and should not be condemned for it, for if I
could have had my way, matters would have gone very differently. No-one has any no-
tion of the pain this gives my heart both night and day.]
In the Roman, the familial principle is the be all and end all of his speech:
“Quant or vos ai, mout bien m’estait: / N’avrai mais ire ne deshait” [Now that I
have you, all is well for me, and I shall never have reason for grief or regret] (ll.
13813-814). This ‘familial transparency’ is consistently suppressed in the Histo-
ria, where Calchas proposes the adoption of the imperial mask: “Quare, karissi-
ma filia, satis est nobis melius hic esse quam hostili gladio seuiente perire” [For
this reason, dearest daughter, it is much better for us to be here than to perish by
a hostile sword] (XIX, 166). The question is one of us, of the collective, not the
individual agent. Only Briseis can potentially negotiate an autonomous stance;
for Calchas, the opaque, imperial mask is good enough, a fact commended by
Guido.126 Benoît’s Briseis has the potential to go beyond this insofar as she be-
comes an independent woman whose happiness is not ‘located’ in her lovers.
The central good (that is, mytheme) informing Calchas’s decision is not
autonomous individualism, but rather the maintenance of a certain degree of
individuality in the light of uncontrollable collective forces or Apollo’s de-
mands.127 In the Roman, the familial loyalties are substituted for an imperial
family of the Greeks, and Briseis is considered a family member. After her ex-
change, the Greeks accompany her to a tent, inquire news about Troy, and gen-
erally seem to like her; the Historia stresses that the Greeks liked her looks, not
her intelligence. While Briseida also becomes part of an imperial family, there is
no question as to the hierarchies: “Quare omnes maiores ipsam in filiali affec-
tione recipiunt, promittentes ei eam habere caram ut filiam et ipsam in omnibus

126
See A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: Brewer; Totowa, N.J.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1982) 78.
127
Initially, Calchas shows all the signs of Trojan changeability and transparency. The
Greeks welcome him warmly (X, 98), and Calchas adapts quickly to the imperial envi-
ronment. Shortly after his defection, he has to remind the Greeks of their own ideology
when they are about to delay attack – Trojan-style: “Nunquid in vobis frustratoria creditis
promissa deorum, qui forte propter uicium ingratitudinis possunt in contrarium commu-
tari” (XI, 100, and see XI, 99).
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 203

honorare” [Hence all the officers received her with fatherly affection, promising
they would hold her dear as a daughter and would honor her in everything]
(XIX, 166). The Greek empire assumes the role of her father. Even in the Histo-
ria, however, the adoption into the imperial family is not without its problems.
Both narratives subsequently turn to the encounters between Troilus and Dio-
medes on the battlefield. Diomedes unhorses Troilus and sends the horse to
Briseida as a token of love. This episode occupies much space in the Roman,
where it is prefaced by Diomedes’s prerogative to fight for Briseis: “Diomedès
est alez joindre / O Troïlus por la danzele: / Jus le trebuche de la sele” [Dio-
medes comes forward to fight for the lady with Troilus, and thrusts him from his
saddle] (ll. 14286-288). In the Historia, their encounter is merely accidental and
not about Briseida. As Lumiansky notes, Briseida’s reaction to the gift of the
horse is handled differently in the two works. In the Roman, Briseis rejects the
horse and conveys to Diomedes that although she does not dislike him, she is
unwilling to grant him her love. In the meantime, he should know better than to
treat her friend so badly (ll. 14324-336). Lumiansky suspects that Benoît’s mo-
tivation is to increase the suspense of the love story.128 It further counterbalances
the antifeminism, since Briseis does not altogether change as quickly as one
would expect. In the Historia, though, Troilus drops out of her thoughts entirely
insofar as the reduced passage suggests that the gift of the horse and the victory
over Troilus are reasons for her changed attitude toward the Greeks. Guido
stresses Briseida’s emotional attachment to Diomedes, for she misconstrues his
love as originating in a pure heart: “tanta puritate sui cordis affectat” (XX, 169).
Her actions are informed by Trojan transparency, while Diomedes recovers
opaque imperialism: he wants to be victorious in battle, regardless of whom he
is fighting – the horse is only of secondary importance.
If Diomedes recovers the imperial mask in the Historia, the opposite is true
of Troilus, who neither can recover his nor obtain Diomedes’s horse (Polydamas
does, however). The fact that Troilus is reinvigorated by the possession of Dio-
medes’s horse, intending to have his prowess talked about among the ladies,
specifically Briseida, Guido omits,129 since it would impart positive connotations
regarding the lack of emotional control. The Historia revisits this motif in the
twelfth battle, which illustrates the negative outcome of Troilus’s infatuation
with Briseida, while the Roman focuses on the unfolding love story of Diomedes
and Briseis, and the latter’s gradual change. She thinks that Diomedes was too
generous in bequeathing Troilus’s horse to her, so that she worried about the
loss of his horse. She lends him a horse and also parts with her sleeve as a pen-
nant. Benoît thus depicts Diomedes as sorely at Briseida’s mercy (ll. 15001-
185). Guido’s omission of this passage renders Diomedes less emotionally in-
volved with Briseida and, therefore, able to fully focus on the fighting. The His-
toria makes no further mention of the lovers until Troilus nearly kills Diomedes.

128
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 730.
129
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 730-31.
204 Part Two: Masking Troy

Instead of killing his adversary right away, though, Troilus loses valuable time
in taunting Diomedes with opprobrious words for loving Briseida: “Troilus au-
tem tunc amorem Bryseide Dyomedi obprobriosis uerbis improperat” (XXVI,
197). These changes yet again underscore Troilus’s excessive emotionality.130 In
the Roman, Diomedes’s emotionality in battling Troilus is stressed by Briseis’s
sleeve, which he attaches to his lance (ll. 15173-178). Ultimately, Troilus’s in-
ability to kill Diomedes bespeaks the effeminacy of the former and his problems
in separating personal emotions and military duties.131

4. Hybrid Briseida: New Self (Denial)

The passage depicting Briseida’s eventual acceptance of Diomedes as a suitor is
very brief in the Historia and criticizes female changeability.132 The Roman
anticipates Briseis’s change through its gradual portrayal of Diomedes’s
courtship, however. Moreover, a decisive difference concerns Briseis’s
reflections about her past and the motivation for her change(ability),133 which
amounts to an ontological model capable of maintaining contradiction whilst
sustaining unified selfhood. Although Briseis is already in love with Diomedes
before voicing her intentions, she emerges as a stronger character because of her
ability to acknowledge past wrong-doings – an ability that is only granted to the
Greek leaders and, to a lesser extent, Hector in the Historia:
Si set el bien certainement
Qu’el se mesfait trop laidement.
A grant tort e a grant boisdie
S’est si de Troïlus partie,
Mesfait a mout, ço li est vis,
E trop a vers celui mespris
Qui tant est beaus, riches e proz,
E qui as armes les veint toz. (ll. 20229-236)
[But she also knows that she is acting despicably. She has abandoned Troilus most un-
justly and treacherously, and knows that she has behaved very badly and greatly
wronged a man who is fair, noble and valiant and superior as a soldier to them all.]
These thoughts preface her crucial monologue that lends depth and interiority to
her,134 which is omitted in the Historia. The monologue is important for later

130
Without noting the implications of Troilus’s Ovidian effeminacy and the consequences for
identification, Mieszkowski observes that Guido talks about Troilus’s love for Briseida
“with contempt,” characterizing it as “the foolish lust of an unreasonable young man,”
whose desire is “excessive.” Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 115.
131
The Historia further omits Troilus’s farewell speech as well as his ‘firm’ belief that
Briseida will soon find a new suitor, and the fact that Benoît’s Troilus knows all about
Diomedes’s courtship, indicating a steady flow of news between the two camps with re-
spect to the lady’s ‘double-dating’ (ll. 20080-120).
132
See Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 92.
133
This is a typical stance for abandoned women. See Lipking, Abandoned Women 22.
134
For the psychological complexities of Briseis’s decision making, see Kelly, “Invention of
Briseida’s Story” 236; Nolan, Chaucer 113; Patterson, Chaucer 119.
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 205

writers, who are able to develop Briseis’s stance to a full-blown counter-national

model (especially Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson). First of all, Briseis ac-
knowledges the desirability of static and transparent prosopagraphical selfhood:
her heart should have stayed firm. Second, she acknowledges that her change-
ability was induced rhetorically. She was deceived by a speech – rhetoric mis-
leading even the prudent:
Fause fui e legiere e fole
La ou j’en entendi parole:
Qui leiaument se vueut guarder
N’en deit ja parole escouter;
Par parole sont engeignié
Li sage e li plus veziié. (ll. 20249-254)
[but I was false, fickle and foolish in listening to a man’s speeches. Whoever wishes to
maintain their loyalty should never give heed to speeches, for by such means the wis-
est and most prudent people have been misled.]
Words do play a major role in a verbal arena, in which she amply participates
and which has Ovidian precursors.135 But should she repent? Can she? She has
to answer in the negative, since Troy(lus) is thoroughly out of reach. Her deci-
sion to stay with Diomedes is not motivated by such rationalization, however.
Her heart has been already bound to Diomedes’s, which would not have hap-
pened were she to be confined in Troy forever where, she believes, she would
have stayed loyal:
Jo ne puis mais la revertir
Ne de cestui mei resortir:
Trop ai ja en lui mon cuer mis,
Por c’en ai fait ço que j’en fis.
E n’eüst pas ensi esté,
Se fusse ancore en la cité. (ll. 20279-284)136
[I shall never be able to return to Troy nor leave him, for my heart is too firmly bound
to him, and it was for his sake that I did what I did. Yet it would not have been so if I
were still within the city.]
Her relocation into the Greek camp can thus be construed as a liberation, since
her changeability and her attachment to Diomedes are related to her experience
of a different way of life, transgressing existing cultural boundaries and expos-
ing her to new narratives. This requires strength, especially when considering
that she is without friends in the Greek camp and has to rely solely on herself to
survive (ll. 20287-300). In this context, it is especially remarkable that she ac-
cepts Troilus as a past lover, forming an integral part of her identity, who is wor-
thy and should be happy again, too: “Deus donge bien a Troïlus! / Quant nel
puis aveir, ne il mei, / A cestui me doing e otrei” (ll. 20318-320). While An-
tonelli is correct in arguing that she does not have a role model, Briseis is never-
135
Nolan, Chaucer 113-14.
136
These sentiments are echoed in Guido’s condemnation of Helen, who should have been
confined to her home and should not have been exposed to otherness at all (see above).
206 Part Two: Masking Troy

theless able to fashion a new role for herself (and for later writers to critique or
modify). She realizes that a completely autonomous position cannot presently be
achieved; that is, she recognizes that individuality is unthinkable without models
provided by the collective. At the same time, she realizes that these models are
narratives that can be changed. On a different level, Benoît does justice to the
fact that courtly society is not (yet) able to accommodate Briseis’s newly deter-
mined mask, her ability to shape individual identity within two mythical systems
– her Trojan past and her Greek future:
Mout voudreie aveir cel talent
Que n’eüsse remembrement
Des uevres faites d’en ariere:
Ço me fait mal a grant maniere.
Ma consciënce me reprent,
Que a mon cuer fait grant torment.
Mais or m’estuet a ço torner
Tot mon corage e mon penser,
Vueille o ne vueille, dès or mais,
Com faitement Diomedès
Seit d’armor a mei atendanz,
Si qu’il en seit liez e joianz,
E jo de lui, puis qu’ensi est.
Or truis mon cuer hardi e prest
De faire ço que lui plaira:
Ja plus orgueil n’i trovera. (ll. 20321-336)
[I should dearly love to be able to forget what has been done in the past, for the mem-
ory of it sorely afflicts my heart. But whether I wish to or not, I must from now on de-
vote all my energy and thought to making sure that Diomedes remains in love with me
– so that he may have joy and pleasure from it and I from him, since that is how things
must be. Now I feel my heart bold and eager to do what would give him pleasure, and
he will meet no further resistance.]
Briseis fashions a new mask for herself, reconciling her Trojan past – personal-
ized as (her love for) Troilus, with her present situation, although she would pre-
fer to become a ‘past-less’ woman. She can confer coherence onto her new role
since she can integrate the new mask rather than imposing it onto the others,
thereby suppressing individuality. She does not adopt a new role arbitrarily,
based on Diomedes’s expectations of her as a lover, for example. Rather, the
negotiation of this mask occurs in oscillation with her role as a (past) lover of
Troilus. Her rhetorical abilities, emphasized in both Roman (l. 5282) and Histo-
ria (VIII, 85) indicate that rhetoric is the means to this end. Briseis synthesizes
two cultural narratives translucently rather than transparently or opaquely; she is
able to determine mask intersection at the mytheme level. This mytheme inter-
section enables the fabrication of a rather autonomous stance: the synthesis of
the two models on the textual level is made explicit here by the alignment of
heart (emotion) and mind (rationality): while her heart is afflicted, her thoughts
are devoted to the other and strengthen her heart. Interior and exterior strive for
maximal correspondence (for the maximal inscription of person into collective
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 207

discourse) in what probably is one negotiation among many. Although Benoît

may not intentionally advance such a strong female position – he condemns
changeability (ll. 13438-56)137 – the translucent model is there to be extrapo-
lated. Such an extrapolation is likewise forced upon the audience, given the mul-
tiple perspectives provided in the Roman.138 Guido rather translates Briseis’s
productive mutability into indictable female fickleness.
Guido is at pains to reduce Briseis’s anticipated autonomy.139 Benoît may not
ultimately have intended to “exculpate her” but the speech omitted in Guido’s
Historia “reacts against the more morally restricted role assigned to her by the
narratorial commentary.” This inkling of stability within an Ovidian system
must be eliminated in the Historia, since Guido cannot and does not want to
imagine a powerful Briseida.140 In the absence of the monologue and the length-
ier depiction of Diomedes’s courtship, Guido’s Briseida rationalizes her posi-
tion, pondering chiefly her own advantage. She is not in love with Diomedes
until submitting herself to him completely which, in this reduced form, appears
as a drastic and incomprehensible change for Guido and the reader alike:
Que dum diligenter attendit de se iungenda cum Troilo nullam sibi superesse fiduciam,
totum suum animum, tamquam uaria et mutabilis, sicut est proprium mulierum, in
Dyomedis declinat et conuertit amorem, proponens in corde suo amplioribus expecta-
cionibus nolle Dyomedem abstrahere, sed quam primum conualescenciam fuerit adep-
tus, absolute facere uelle suum, cum in eius amore tota deferueat et flagranti desiderio
penitus incalescat. (XXVI, 198)
[When she carefully considered that no assurance remained to her of uniting herself to
Troilus, she, so variable and changeable, as is typical of women, inclined her whole
thought toward Diomedes and changed her love, proposing in her heart not to put
Diomedes off with further expectations, but, as soon as he had reached convalescence,
to do his will completely, since she was entirely enflamed by his love and burned hotly
with blazing desire.]
Guido’s explanation for her change mutes all overtones of a strong position in
the light of having to change collective allegiances. Troilus disappears from her
thoughts entirely. Briseida is a weak, changeable female, who, among other
things, disobeys her father (“contra uoluntatem patris sui” [XXVI, 198],141 is
disloyal to Troilus, and untrue to Troy. The problems of collective identity are
completely brushed aside. Meek’s astute observation that the antifeminist pas-
sage is reminiscent of the Aeneid ultimately reinforces the lack of national sen-
timents since Guido can rest on the imperial writer for his condemnation of
137
Benoît interrupts the passage; he is afraid that an influential lady may blame him for such
antifeminism. For the “Riche dame de riche rei,” see also Chapter Six.
138
For the multiple perspectives, see Kelly, “Invention of Briseida’s Story” 234.
139
See Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 91.
140
Mapstone, “Origins of Criseyde” 143.
141
According to Benoît, she visits Diomedes against her father’s will, too. The disrespect for
her father furthers her achievement of autonomy, however, since neither the fear of gossip
nor her father’s reproaches prevent her from seeing the wounded knight frequently (ll.
20206-17).
208 Part Two: Masking Troy

Briseida.142 Ovidian, Trojan changeability has no place in the maintenance of

empire. For Guido, the ménage à trois has developed into a stable relationship
with Briseida as an Ovidian female whose ability to negotiate two different cul-
tural systems with the eventual creation of a new, hybrid mask has to be muted.
The omission in the Historia of Troilus’s final lament about the loss of
Briseis to Diomedes (ll. 20666-682) neatly fits into this pattern, since the reader
is left in the dark about Troilus’s reaction to Briseida’s acceptance of Diomedes.
That he is not shown to be overtly moved by it underlines that Troilus is a typi-
cal Trojan: fickle and changeable, even to the extent of forgetting his own lady.
Diomedes’s and Briseida’s relationship is also not mentioned again. Whereas
some critics claim that the Roman and the Historia “blamed both lovers, and
especially Troilus, for indulging in sensuality,”143 the Historia foregrounds
Briseida’s immoral fickleness, for she is the ‘unnatural,’ Ovidian agency in this
love affair. In contrast to Benoît, Guido does not blame the Greek warrior, for
instance, whose chief importance lies in defending his empire. Since the latter is
eventually not affected negatively by his burning love, which can be contained
by the imperial mask, his personal motivations are ultimately unimportant.
Guido’s initial description of Diomedes is therefore appropriate: he is equipped
with a big chest, “amplo pectore” (VIII, 84), which represents his means of
shielding his emotionality from penetrating to the outside in battle. This sharply
contrasts with Troilus’s initial description as being unable to control his great
heart, “corde magnaminus,” whether in battle or love. Troilus becomes an apt
metaphor for the Trojan situation – the heart governs all.
The Troilus and Briseida episode highlights Guido’s assessment of different
prosopagraphical models in the Historia. The opaque, mythical construction of
masks is demonstrated by Calchas, whose defection is motivated by reason and
informed by the concept of an imperial family – a matter of metonymy, as I
shall argue below. Briseida could potentially determine an opaque pro-
sopagraphical self, but fails since she is ‘merely’ a fickle woman. Guido renders
her a truly Trojan woman, who is ultimately contained safely within the imperial
family. Diomedes admittedly falls for her in what undoubtedly has to be charac-
terized as unrestrained emotionality. And yet, he is able to win her without los-
ing control of his emotions on the battlefield by means of adopting the imperial
mask – unlike Troilus, whose love-struck heart settles his destiny. The longevity
of empire is decidedly more important than personal fulfillment, and any inkling
of the possible reconciliation of private and public masks, discernible in Be-
noît’s Briseis, has to be eliminated. Future readers of the Historia, and only the
Historia, will have problems espying the astonishing development of a potential
counter-national process of identity formation which ensues in Benoît’s Roman,
142
Meek 302n; P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos liber quartus, ed. R. G. Austin (1955; Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982) IV. 569-70: “‘heia age, rumpe moras. varium et mutabile semper /
femina.’ sic factus nocti se immiscuit atrae.”
143
C. David Benson, “True Troilus and False Cresseid: The Descent from Tragedy,” Euro-
pean Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Boitani 163.
 Chapter Nine: Transgressing Borders 209

however muted. Briseis’s mythological bricolage, her ability to use the imperial
mask in order to transform a transparent into a translucent self, and her recon-
figuration of diverging cultural narratives so as to enable mask intersection re-
mains confined to the French text. Instead, the Historia provides the appropriate
means to curb emotionality, to prevent the personal from penetrating into the
public sphere. For Guido, the Trojans’ inability to manufacture opaque masks
(informed by different narratives and values than their own) marks the downfall
of the heroes of the Troy story. They ultimately fail because transparent pro-
sopagraphy is a metaphorical model, in which one (incapable) leader settles the
destiny of the entire city, in which the boundary between individual and collec-
tive collapses, in which selfhood itself is under attack. Within the Historia,
Greek opacity offers a solution insofar as it maintains the longevity of empire,
albeit at the cost of personal fulfillment.
 CHAPTER TEN
Writing Selves and Nations: Myth versus Mythology

Guido’s suppression of any reconciliation of personal desires and collective de-

mands is part of a larger rhetorical strategy that forms the topic of this chapter.
The Ovidian principle of changeability, often negatively associated with women
in the Historia is, in effect, a metaphorical model. Several domains, represented
by masks, collapse, creating complete transparency ultimately resulting in a
‘non-identity’ of a person – personal and collective domains become indistin-
guishable. This has repercussions for the collectivity since the loss of one hero,
who emerges as the metaphorical representation of Troy, correlates with the loss
of the city. The following analysis of the battle between opaque (Greek) and
transparent (Trojan) prosopagraphical selfhood serves to further highlight the
ontological differences between Trojan and Greek heroes. Achilles, one of the
chief heroes of the Greeks and Hector’s counterpart, is in many ways compara-
ble to his adversary. Yet, he only metonymically represents the Greek empire
insofar as he dons an imperial mask that he can doff. Unlike conceptual meta-
phor, as I argued in Chapter Four, metonymy does not collapse the respective
domains. For Guido, the sharp differences between Trojans and Greeks raise the
important question as to how opaque, ‘metonymic’ masks can be assembled ef-
fectively. Not surprisingly, the Historia suggests that it is manipulative language
that enables the construction (and wide circulation) of the imperial mask. On the
plot level, it is Ulysses’s rhetorical ability that ensures the expansion of the em-
pire. On the narrative level, Guido’s own manipulation of Benoît’s Roman cor-
responds to a kind of mythical (rather than mythological) bricolage, which en-
ables the creation of an opaque mask (myth), suppressing contradictions by
seemingly fashioning coherence. Such can be best witnessed in Guido’s discus-
sion of Biblical stories, which analogizes Troy’s metaphorical Ovidianism with
the Devil’s work.

1. Metaphorical Collectives: Hector versus Achilles

Troilus’s magnanimous heart illustrates the tragic transparency of metaphoric
constructions of identity. Opposed to Trojan transparency, the Greek imperial
strategy confers responsibility onto many knights, who represent the empire
only metonymically: knights are adoptive of the imperial mask, including its
main goods and affecting in turn the choices of the ‘individuals’ whose indi-
viduality is largely suppressed. The central motivation among the Greek soldiers
is Virgilian fama, which requires opacity. The Trojan attempt to find maximum
coalescence between individual and collective goods ignores the fact that, al-
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 211

though individual and collective desires may indeed intersect, such intersection
is far from inevitable. More often than not, public and private goods contradict
one another. Rather than negotiating a translucent track, as does Briseis, the un-
governable Trojans choose transparency: emotional changeability. Trojan iden-
tity becomes a matter of conceptual metaphor, that is, the complete mapping of
the source domain onto the target domain. The Trojans are metaphorically in-
vested in Priam’s family, which becomes the metaphor for Troy; more con-
cretely, Hector becomes Troy insofar as he is the city’s only safeguard. Unfor-
tunately, however, he is not Troy’s leader, despite Priam’s transference of mili-
tary responsibility to him. It is ironic that Hector is closest to approximating the
imperial model. If it was not for Hector, the Trojans would have been defeated
much earlier. For example, Hector is able to read the signs when detecting
treachery in the Greeks’ requests for a truce at a point when it should have been
obvious to all Trojans that they needed to obtain provisions rather than time to
bury their dead, as only Hector rightly suspects (XIX, 160).
The truce Hector argues against enables his encounter of Achilles in the
Greek camp, which reveals the counterpart function of these two knights. When
Hector approaches Achilles, the latter is very aggravated about Patroclus’s
death, which he would like to avenge. The argument between the two replicates
the pairing of Diomedes and Troilus as well as Peleus and Jason at the outset of
the Historia. When telling Hector that he is anguished in his heart for being
wounded by a Trojan knight, Achilles rationalizes his emotionality by using
animus; Achilles calmly relates that Hector must die, not immediately but within
the next year. Hector, in contrast, is not only anxious in his heart, his heart is full
of hatred: “et te odio habeo in toto corde meo” (XIX, 161).144 More problemati-
cally, Hector’s speech literally turns into his offer to fight as Troy. He proposes
a one-to-one battle to settle their argument once and for all – along with the col-
lectivities they represent. Should Hector be killed, he guarantees, the Trojan
kings will be exiled, surrendering their territory to the Greeks. Should Hector
slay Achilles, the Greeks should leave Troy and its inhabitants in peace. Hector
believes himself to be Troy in extensio: he does not merely identify himself with
Trojan values, he is Troy. Such behavior might be legitimate in the sense that
Priam had once bequeathed the command to him, but since Priam has been
meddling with Trojan decisions ever since, Hector cannot assume the powers of
the king. Achilles has even less of a claim to such authority but rises to the chal-
lenge nonetheless. Agamemnon, however, fervently disagrees with this meta-
phorical substitution, which resolutely strives against imperial politics:
Sed Agamenon, multorum inde loquencium audito tumultu, cum multis Grecorum re-
gibus ad Achillis tentorium properauit, ubi, facta statim omnium maiorum congrega-
cione Grecorum, omnes vnamimiter contradicunt, nolentes id ratum habere ad quod

144
Hector’s reaction to Achilles’s consent to a one-to-one combat is one of gladness of heart,
for which Guido also uses animus (XIX, 162).
212 Part Two: Masking Troy

Achilles se obtulit inconsulte. Nec enim placet eis se uelle insidiis fortune subicere ut
ab vno milite tot regum et principum pendeat mors et uita. (XIX, 162-63)
[But Agamemnon, when he had heard the tumult of many persons speaking of this,
hastened with many Greek kings to Achilles’ tent, where, after all the Greek officers
had been assembled at once, they all unanimously objected, for they did not wish to
confirm what Achilles had recklessly agreed to. For it did not please them to subject
themselves to the snares of fortune so that the life and death of so many kings and
princes would hang on one knight.]
Book XIX thus turns out to be a meditation on the collective responsibilities of
individuals. Agamemnon, who emerges as a prudent ruler here, construes Greek
collective identity as a matter of separate domains. Each knight chooses to adopt
the imperial mask, which can be altered only by unanimous consent. Individuals
cannot make their personal business the business of the empire. While Hector
and Achilles may represent their nations, they cannot settle the destiny of the
collectivity. Admittedly, the Trojans concur with Agamemnon’s rejoinder – with
one notable and predictable exception: “[...] excepto rege Priamo, cui tali casui
se submittere placet ex eo quod uires Hectoris et potenciam bene nouit, cui faci-
le nimis erat de vnius tanti militis uictoria gloriari. Sed quia tantorum consensi-
bus quorum intererat non potuit contraire, duorum belli dissensum cum ceteris
est sequtus” [...with the exception of King Priam, whom it pleased to submit
himself to such chance, because he well knew the strength and might of Hector,
and it was very easy for him to boast of the victory of such a great knight. But
because he could not oppose the opinion of so many men to whom this affair
was important, he followed the rest in rejecting the duel] (XIX, 163). Priam thus
emerges as the changeable, transparent ruler again. As with the entire war,
Priam submits himself and Troy to the workings of Fortuna. Moreover, he is
rendered doubly weakened. If Hector were to win the battle, his weakness of
character would lie in his inability to oppose a majority vote. His regal mask
becomes a mixture of personal emotions and collective demands. He attempts to
reconcile the two, but his wavering fatally affects his reactions as a ruler. Em-
perors of the stature of Agamemnon readily distinguish between the two respec-
tive roles, which appear to have fewer points of intersection. Priam, it becomes
increasingly clear, is incapable of making that distinction.
The antagonism between Hector and Achilles does not end here. Before the
final battle between them, their encounters on the battlefield increase – and a
third party enters the conflict as well: the ‘second Hector,’ Troilus. Progres-
sively, Hector loses his initial calm. He openly disobeys his father and ignores
his wife’s advice in going to battle despite his injuries. Although Priam is able to
stay his ambitions briefly (supported by the Trojan women), Hector does not
unclad his armor. When Margariton dies, Hector falls for the familial principle
and joins battle after all:
Quem ut mortuum Hector audiuit, multo dolore torquetur, diligenter querit quis eum
interfecerit. Quem Achillem fuisse relatum est ei. Tunc Hector quasi furibundus, in ira
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 213
ligata casside, rege patre inscio, bellum ingreditur et statim in furore suo duos magnos
duces interfecit, Euripolum scilicet et ducem Astidum. (XXI, 174)
[When Hector heard that Margariton was dead, he was wracked by great grief and ear-
nestly demanded who had killed him. He was told that it had been Achilles. Then Hec-
tor, as if filled with fury, angrily strapped on his helmet, and without the knowledge of
the king his father, advanced to the battle, and at once in fury killed two great dukes,
that is, Eurypylus and Astidus.]
As with the offer of a duel to decide the outcome of the war, Hector reacts emo-
tionally and rashly. While he hastens to battle without a clear plan in mind as to
how he is going to take revenge, Achilles’s attack is premeditated. Although a
quick decision is required, Achilles searches his mind for the right means of
achieving his ends – “Diligenter igitur sciscitatus est in sue mentis archano.” His
deliberations are rudely interrupted by the death of his friend Policenes, which
prompts Achilles to react emotionally since he considers the former part of the
family. In accordance with the dichotomy between transparent and opaque styles
of rule, however, military action based on familial ties is rarely effective. Con-
sequently, the emotional attempt on Hector’s life fails; it is premeditation that
accomplishes the death of the metaphorical Trojan leader. Achilles now consid-
ers that Hector must perish even if he himself has to die for it (XXI, 175) – his
own identity is not as important as the longevity of empire. He takes advantage
of Hector’s unprotected chest and kills him rather cowardly.145
Greek metonymy and Trojan metaphor continue to be contrasted beyond
Hector’s death. After Guido mentions briefly that Memnon wounds Achilles, the
narrative turns to the Trojan reaction to Hector’s death, which emphasizes the
metaphorical relevance of the deceased knight: “Troyani uero quasi deuicti
campum deserunt, ciuitatem intrant, in quam corpus Hectoris mortuum, Grecis
non resistentibus, detulerunt” [The Trojans deserted the field as if vanquished,
and with no resistance from the Greeks entered their city into which they had
taken the dead body of Hector] (XXI, 175). Achilles’s reputation seems to be
more strongly blackened in the Historia,146 however, which seems to contradict
any argument for Guido’s preference for the Greek modus operandi. What mat-
ters here, though, is how the complaint about Achilles’s treachery is contextual-
ized. If the narrator were to be troubled about the mischievous traitor, one would
expect him to comment immediately on the events just witnessed (as is the case
in the Middle English translations). Instead, the narrator postpones his complaint
and continues with the very emotional Trojan reaction to Hector’s death. The

145
It is notable that many Trojans variously go unarmored. Even in this minor detail, their
emotional transparency is tangible. When Hector intends to take a Greek king hostage, he
removes his armor in order to move around more easily, exposing his unprotected chest:
“scuto sibi suo post terga reiecto ut habilius regem ipsum a turmis eripere potuisset” (XXI,
175). Guido does not comment on the passage, but readers may legitimately wonder if the
captivity of one king justifies the removal of Hector’s armor.
146
Guido’s blackening of Achilles is usually seen as stronger than Benoît’s. See Meek, intro-
duction xxv-xxvi; Benson, History 29; Thompson, Trojan War 152.
214 Part Two: Masking Troy

Trojan women recognize the metaphorical relevance of Hector’s death. They

lost the security, “firma securitas” (XXII, 176), that granted them a degree of
liberty now jeopardized – they see their husbands confined to servitude.147 Hec-
tor’s epitaph at the end of the Historia likewise identifies Hector with Troy: with
Hector, Troy perished (see below).
Before Guido turns to Achilles again, the Historia describes – in detail – the
burial of Hector. Through the prosopagraphical lens, the tomb splits Hector lit-
erally in two. On the one hand, he becomes a memorial turned toward the Greek
camp, threatening sword raised in the air, which Guido conceives in terms of
likeness, that is, non-identity: “similitudinem Hectoris describentem” (XXII,
177). On the other hand, his actual body is preserved by means of a liquid imi-
tating the workings of blood. His body, in Guido’s words, becomes a fiction: “Et
sic per has apposiciones cadauer Hectoris quasi corpus viui ficticie presentabat,
in multa durabilitatis custodia conseruatum” [the corpse of Hector appeared
falsely to be just like a living body, since it was preserved with many precau-
tions for endurance] (XXII, 178). While the first ‘depiction’ represents a glori-
ous military mask, the artificially preserved body does not gesture toward a per-
sonal mask. Even after his death, Hector attains only two public masks: the
mask of the valiant knight and the regal mask, which was never actually adopted
during his life. The first depiction of the knight accurately stresses that he was
like a soldier. The image of Hector sitting on a throne, remains, indeed, a fiction.
Hector’s memorial is an ironic counterpoint to Trojan transparency – only after
his death can they create masks that are ‘fictitious,’ but would have been effec-
tive militarily and politically. The Greeks, to whom the narrative shifts, could
not but agree with the Trojan women insofar as the death of Hector intimidates
the fall of Troy. Agamemnon therefore hopes that Achilles recovers quickly
since his appearance on the battlefield is psychologically useful. His semblance
will remind the Trojans of their inevitable downfall: “[...] absque ipsius Achillis
presencia uirtuosi [...]” (XXII, 179).
Since Guido is translating Benoît’s Roman, the possibilities of changing
essential facts are limited. Achilles cannot, therefore, become the central hero of
the Historia, however much Guido condones imperial opacity. More problem-
atically, Achilles has a weak spot – for Polyxena – which enables Guido again to
modify Ovidian love-plots in accordance with Virgilian purposes. The love story

147
The narrative first focuses on the grief of the Trojan women, before reporting Priam’s re-
action. The latter is so shocked that when he is not embracing the dead body, he loses con-
sciousness. The grief of Hector’s mother, his sisters, and Andromache is even worse.
Thus, Guido decides to omit it altogether. Priam’s grief, however, is described in terms
familiar from Guido’s previous discussions of female grief: “Et mulieribus sit insitum a
natura quod dolores earum non nisi in multarum uocum clamore propalent et impiis et do-
lorosis sermonibus eos diuulgent” [It is inborn in women by nature to reveal their grief in
loud exclamations and to make them known with impious and grievous speeches] (XXII,
176). Trojan women, like Priam, are unable to fashion a public mask of mourning that re-
tains some dignity.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 215

of Achilles and Polyxena ultimately serves to corroborate the importance of the

imperial mask by indicting Achilles’s inability to reconcile his emotional appe-
tite with his public role. His wish to attend the anniversary of Hector’s death is
motivated already by unrestrained, ‘Trojan’ emotionality – “inconsultus rapuit
appetitus” (XXIII, 183). This is partially motivated since Polyxena appears to be
more beautiful a maiden than her counterpart in the Roman; her portrait is
greatly amplified and it has been suggested that the embellishments are “clearly
an exercise in rhetoric” (Meek 302n), but there may be more at stake.
When Achilles sets eyes on the young lady at the tabernacle, Polyxena is in a
state of utter emotional despondency: tears are rolling down her face and she is
tearing out her hair. Her emotional distress has several functions. Most impor-
tantly, it introduces to Achilles a mode of identification diametrically opposed to
his own: she come across as utterly transparent. Guido details her emotionality
by means of a close description of her tears: “Sane sic reuera uidebatur intuenti-
bus ut eius defluentes lacrime per maxillas instar illud proprie viderentur habere
ueluti siquis tabulam recentis eboris, in suo lacteo candore nitentem, ex guttis
aque lucide et preclare desuper irroraret” [In fact, it seemed to the onlookers that
the tears flowing down her cheeks seemed to have the appearance of a tablet of
new ivory, gleaming with milk-white radiance, which someone had bedewed
with drops of brilliant clear water] (XXIII, 184). Her face retains the redness of
roses, too. Guido does mute the overtones of physical beauty that he found in
Benoît, however, who also describes her breasts as the main ‘torment’ for Achil-
les (ll. 17569-73). Guido would not have had a problem with describing her
physical assets, after all, he pays meticulous attention to Helen’s breasts. Within
the framework of prosopagraphical selfhood, Achilles appears to be less drawn
to Polyxena’s physical beauty than to the sentiment she represents, since she
illustrates an alternative model of identification which attracts Achilles’s atten-
tion; she is able to project both the ‘rosyness’ of health and happiness and her
emotional turmoil. She can accommodate, in other words, two contradictory
masks in a difficult situation, mourning her brother’s death, fully knowing what
that death entails. Her face becomes translucent, exemplified in the crystal clear
tears which do not, as Guido emphasizes, ‘darken’ her eyes, as one would ex-
pect: “uel forte lacrime fluuiales ab eius oculis decurrentes splendorem suorum
offuscauerant oculorum” (XXIII, 184).
That the description features opposed, but simultaneously expressed senti-
ments may be accidental, although Achilles’s immediate thoughts upon behold-
ing her corroborate that the pairing is deliberate: “Et dum in eius persona con-
currerent ista duo, tam generosa nobilitas et tam excellentis copie pulchritudo
[...] sagitta cupidinis fortem Achillem subito uulnerauit [...]” [And since two at-
tributes existed together in her, that is, both free and noble birth and a superior
amount of beauty ... the arrow of Cupid unexpectedly wounded the mighty
Achilles ...] (XXIII, 184). Achilles observes the concurrent performance of two
roles. Polyxena is able to accommodate her public role with her personal emo-
tions and provides a viable model for reconciling the contradictions of personal
216 Part Two: Masking Troy

desire and public pressures: she becomes translucent. Her ‘face work’ gives
away further the processes by which she is able to achieve mask intersection –
her face is likened to a tabula, a book. The structural principle of accommodat-
ing public and personal masks lies in mythological bricolage, in rewriting a
book. Guido may not be consciously theorizing narrative identities, but it is no-
table that Polyxena’s act of keeping face, of shaping identities, is discussed in
terms of a book. As with Briseida, however, the advantages of translucent pro-
sopagraphy are immediately rejected. Guido’s choice of tabula in reflecting
upon Polyxena’s apparently flexible mask creation contradicts the inherent
changeability. A reader versed in Scripture, which can be safely assumed for
Guido, may glimpse further evidence for the ivory tablets as delimiting flexibil-
ity since they allude also to the tablet of the heart, which, Eric Jager suspects,
“may have been modeled on the clay tablets used in the Near East from very
early times, or the writing boards of ivory and wood that superseded them. But it
most likely,” he continues, “alludes to the original stone tablets of the Mosaic
Law – a connection that Paul would make explicit by associating the inward and
outward tablets, respectively, with Ezekiel’s distinction between the ‘heart of
stone’ and the ‘heart of flesh.’”148 No such distinction holds for Polyxena, whose
association with the book of the heart does not go further than her innermost
emotions being projected from her heart onto her face.
Polyxena’s ability to narratively synthesize opposing emotions nevertheless
strikes a chord with Achilles. Born and raised in the Greek imperial tradition,
Achilles first attempts to hide his feelings (and tears) for Polyxena; these emo-
tions cannot be reconciled with imperial opacity. While the warrior initially
wipes the tears off his face to keep the public mask in order (“faciem suam lauat
ut suarum signa lacrimarum abstergat” [XXIII, 186]), controlling his emotions
becomes a perilous issue for him. Finally, Achilles’s emotionality results in the
neglect of his imperial duties, the latter possibly explaining the postponement of
Guido’s blackening of Achilles’s character and the shortening of his self-
analytical speeches in the Roman.149 After being introduced to Achilles’s first
(emotionalized) attempt to kill Hector and his second premeditated and success-
ful attack, the reader is now faced with an Achilles seduced by a problematic
ontological model. Subsequently, Achilles fails to create a mask capable of con-
taining his passion. He even approaches Hecuba, Paris, and Priam, offering that
he will send the Greeks home should he be granted his wish to marry Polyxena.
Achilles falls for the metaphorical construction of collective identities, which he
was willing to engage with earlier when Hector offered a duel. Back then, Aga-
memnon could interfere, but now the prudent leader cannot curb Achilles’s
emotionality, which prompts him to keep his Myrmidons from fighting. Guido
laconically comments that lovers make promises they cannot keep.

148
Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (2000; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001) 10.
149
See Meek, introduction xxiv.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 217

Since his arguments for abandoning the siege ensue from personal rather than
imperial motivation, Achilles is naturally unable to convince the Greeks to fol-
low his advice. He argues that Helen is hardly worth all the commotion, won-
ders whether Menelaus cannot find another wife, and suggests leaving Troy, be-
cause the greatest of the enemies, Hector, has been disposed of (XXV, 188-89).
Evidently, he forgets that without Hector, the opposition is likely to be minimal
and that the imperial model calls for the complete destruction of the enemy to
minimize the possibility of future conflict, a lesson the Greeks learned after not
killing all the Trojans the first time around. Even though Achilles proves unable
to persuade the Greeks to leave, he clings to his resolution and abstains from
battle. Neither after the king of Thrace dies in his tent, nor after an attendant ap-
peals to the eternal glory Achilles could procure for himself were he to return to
the battlefield presently, does he change his mind. Love’s power enslaves peo-
ple, remarks Guido (XXV, 192-93). At last, Agamemnon, showing the leader-
ship qualities Palamedes neglected during his short and inefficient rule, sends an
envoy to Achilles. Ulysses, the great rhetor is able, perhaps because he creates
whichever mask is necessitated by the context, to discern the problem with
Achilles, namely, the adoption of one key Trojan attribute: changeability. He
points out to Achilles that he contradicts his own intention to stop the war in or-
der to prevent further losses: “[...] uoluntate mutata in contrarium [...]” (XXV,
194). This change of constitutive goods results also in a change of the perspec-
tive regarding personal fame, argues Ulysses: not only will Achilles extinguish
his fame, it shall be reversed entirely: “[...] uultis ut nunc tante glorie fama ue-
stra per actus contrarios extinguatur [...]” (XXV, 195). Achilles’s rejoinder testi-
fies to his newly-acquired metaphorical arrogance and his threatening abandon-
ment of the imperial mask: “Nam malo meam strennuitatis famam extingui po-
cius quam personam” [I would prefer that my reputation for valor be extin-
guished rather than my person] (XXV, 195). If Achilles previously sees his fame
as metaphorically representing Greece, he now suggests that his life is more im-
portant than the health of the empire, which emphasizes again his wish to nego-
tiate the autonomy witnessed in Polyxena. Achilles’s resistance to what is ‘right’
ultimately remains a regulated transgression, even if Ulysses and Nestor are
somewhat convinced by Achilles’s arguments at first. After Calchas reminds the
Greeks that Troy will fall, however, they realize that one individual, Achilles,
does not genuinely jeopardize their undertaking; empire is a matter of endowing
people with rule, and dividing it. Eventually, Agamemnon manages to convince
Achilles to send his Myrmidons to battle, which Achilles readily grants, given
his respect for the emperor (XXVI, 198-99). Because the Myrmidons are killed
numerously, chiefly by Troilus, Achilles’s mind begins to change toward the
common good again, while he has yet to accommodate his guilty conscience
regarding the unfulfilled promise. When Troilus butchers Greeks among their
tents, and the Trojan threat becomes imminent, Achilles “[...] amore Polixene
postposito arma petit” [put(s) aside his love of Polyxena] (XXVI, 202). He be-
comes even keener to kill Troilus, especially since the latter wounds him. Achil-
218 Part Two: Masking Troy

les’s sudden and unrestrained loathing, culminating in the ‘unmanly’ killing of

Troilus, might be motivated chiefly by his hatred for the Troilus he has become
himself: a fickle, effeminate Trojan. This would explain the exaggerated vio-
lence with which he kills Troilus and drags him behind his horse.
The detailed account of Achilles’s transgression precedes Guido’s attack on
Achilles’s character and contextualizes it accordingly. The latter is not at all
surprising if one allows that the Historia is interested in promoting opaque pro-
sopagraphy to maintain empire. Guido does not criticize Achilles after killing
Hector, but he does criticize Achilles’s un-courtly treatment of Troilus’s corpse.
Compared to the Roman, Achilles’s violence is much intensified in the Historia;
Dares neither stresses that Troilus’s death was perpetrated treacherously, nor
does he offer comments on the dragging of the corpse. Benoît’s intention may
have been to glorify Troilus’s character, but he may also have misunderstood
Dares’s commentary. More importantly, both accounts are similar to the
Aeneid’s description of Troilus’s death,150 where the ‘luckless’ Troilus clings to
the reins of his team, ‘scribbling S’s in the dust’ (Aen. I. 474-78). This raises the
question of why Guido did not fully revert to Virgil rather than Benoît, since
Achilles generally comes across as a valiant fighter in the Aeneid; however, Vir-
gil nowhere specifies that Achilles did not drag Troilus’s body behind him.
A more conclusive explanation for Guido’s qualified adoption of Virgil’s ac-
count lies in the different handling of Troilus: Virgil does not mention Troilus’s
infatuation with Briseida. Guido would have had to accept this love plot as his-
torical if he indeed believed in the historicity of the Roman, which the muted
inclusion of the other love plots suggests. Guido himself thus has to reconcile
two divergent readings with each other in fabricating his mythical mask. Benoît
portrays Achilles negatively, so Guido has to account for it. Moreover, Guido’s
hybrid version parallels Troilus and Achilles, who are both caught in unsuccess-
ful – in Achilles’s case, completely unfulfilled – relationships. Troilus emerges
as overtly weak in dealing with his emotions; for Achilles, the love ‘affair’ is
about to become rather destructive, too. Part of the violence with which Achilles
kills Troilus (and which is partly justified in light of the Virgilian text) is psy-
chologically motivated: Achilles kills the Troilus that he has become himself.
This conjecture is consistent with the composition of Achilles’s character. He is
one of the few Greek knights associated with the female principle, culminating
in his proposition to bring the war to an un-imperial end – by marrying Polyxena
rather than quenching future fires among the frustrated, remaining Trojans.
Guido’s last sentence of the invective against Achilles’s lack of virtue ges-
tures toward such an interpretation as well: “Sane si nobilitas eum mouisset, si
strennuitas eum duxisset, compassione motus nunquam ad tam uilia crudeliter
declinasset. Sed ipse ad ea moueri non potuit que uere non erant in ipso”

150
See Meek 302-03n. According to Dares, Achilles, after persuading the Myrmidons to at-
tack Troilus, kills his adversary after he fell from his wounded horse. Achilles then at-
tempts to pull Troilus out of the battlefield (XXXIII, 50).
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 219

[Clearly if he had acted from nobility, if he had been led by valor, he would
have been moved by compassion and would never have cruelly inclined to such
vile deeds. But he could not be moved to do such things which were not really in
him] (XXVI, 205). That Achilles lacks valor, however, must strike readers of
the Historia as odd given that Guido generally portrays Achilles in a neutral, if
not favorable light. This leads me to suspect that the actual problem is Achilles’s
changeability, which Guido constructs by means of several changes to the Troy
story, in which the problematic event was the butchering of Hector, not Troilus.
Although Guido does mention that the act was premeditated, he does not com-
plain about it – nor does he complain about Achilles’s victory. Subsequently,
Achilles’s actions are governed by a passion he is increasingly unable to control.
Now, Guido complains. But once the imperial mask is in place, Guido implicitly
extols Achilles’s virtues again, for instance, in his encounters with Memnon,
related in the paragraph following Guido’s indictment of Homer for praising
Achilles. The latter is severely wounded and falls from his horse: “Et statim in
eum irruens cursu [s]celeri equi sui sic ipsum in sue ictu lancee grauiter in pec-
tore uulnerauit quod Achilles uix se potuit sustinere, et statim extracto ense
Achillem super cassidem quam gerebat in capite ictibus duris inpugnat adeo
quod Achilles, grauiter uulneratus, ab equo corruit semiuiuus in terram” [And
rushing at once upon Achilles in a swift charge of his horse, Memnon, with a
blow of his lance, wounded Achilles so seriously in the chest that he could
hardly remain upright, and Memnon at once pulled forth his sword, and with
fierce blows struck Achilles so heavily upon the helmet he was wearing on his
head that Achilles, seriously wounded, fell half-dead from his horse to the
ground]. Contrary to one’s expectations, the lance piercing his chest (in pectore)
does not kill the Greek knight. A couple of lines later, Achilles is on horse-back
again, he regains his strength, and he furiously attacks Memnon (XXVI, 205).
The imperial mask that Achilles briefly renounced, saves his life. The narrative
thus returns to the opening dichotomy between heart and mind, between the
emotional doffing and imperial donning of masks. Whereas Achilles’s animus or
his cors may be faulty inasmuch as neither contains any such virtuous attributes
that Guido’s (and Benoît’s courtly) readership would expect, he cannot be killed
since he is protected by what encloses the proclaimed lack of cultural goods –
his chest. Achilles’s adoption of the fallible concept of changeability, his meta-
phorical understanding of himself as Greece leaves him without a central good.
Imperial opacity is eventually restored, however, and literally shields him from a
severe attack on his heart, and he continues to perform miraculous deeds on the
battlefield. Guido makes much of his valiant defense against many Trojans, for
instance, before he is killed treacherously by Paris (XXVII, 207-08).
Memnon’s death, contrived by Achilles’s familiar treachery, causes problems
in this context. The Myrmidons keep Memnon alive until Achilles arrives and
the two engage in a duel, in the course of which Achilles himself is seriously
wounded, his blood is pouring down to his heels in large quantities, so large that
one expects him to die: “ipsum pluries grauibus uulneribus afflixisset, per que
220 Part Two: Masking Troy

ab eo sanguis in nimia quantitate eius deriuabatur ad talos, propter quod de mor-

te eius sperabatur pocius quam de uita.” After Achilles kills Memnon, Guido
returns to indicting Homer. The second complaint about Homer’s praise of
Achilles’s character is highly ambiguous, if not outright ironic, however: “At-
tende, miser Homere, quod nunquam Achilles uirum strenuum nisi proditorie
interfecit, vnde merito dignus est laude si prodicio est laudis titulis extollenda”
[Notice, miserable Homer, that Achilles never killed any valiant man except by
treachery, so that he is deservedly worthy of praise, if treachery is to be extolled
by the titles of praise] (XXVI, 206). In the traditional reading, the caveat seems
to be merely rhetorical. Provided that imperial opacity is generally victorious
over emotional transparency, this second diatribe can be read differently. In the
first invective, Guido wonders why Homer praises the men who killed two
‘Hectors.’ This time, in the context of Priam’s fickle rule and Trojan changeabil-
ity, there are reasons to believe that sometimes treachery is a virtue. It is true
that Achilles can kill Hector only by means of treachery – but only because Hec-
tor removes his armor and thinks of nothing but taking a captured king away:
“quo quasi factus inermis tunc ad nihil aliud intendebat quam regem captum a
turmis extrahere ut ipsum captiuum suis bellancibus assignaret” (XXVI, 204).
Looking at only this scene, it seems as though Hector is extremely disadvan-
taged and that, as Guido wonders, he would have quickly put on his armor again
had he seen Achilles coming. Within the entirety of the Historia, however, Hec-
tor has been previously depicted as rather emotional when it comes to despoiling
other soldiers in the first place. Within the Historia, taking captives is often
risky and unsuccessful, since the opposing army usually tries to free the captive.
It is just as much Hector’s lack of prudence as it is Achilles’s treachery that con-
tributes to Hector’s death.
The above suggests, I believe, that Guido’s question whether treachery
should be praised will have to be answered in the affirmative, although Guido
has reservations about Achilles’s changeability and emotionality (“compassione
motus”), his love-sickness contributing to his death. When Achilles receives a
message from Hecuba, inviting him to meet her in Troy, imperial duties are
quickly forgotten: “Et statim, misso per Hecubam nuncio ad Achillem, infelix
Achilles amoris inconsulto calore deceptus, qui ualde sapientibus sensum aufert,
vna cum Antilogo, Nestoris filio, ad Appollinis templum accessit” [At once, by
the messenger sent through Hecuba to Achilles, the ill-omened Achilles, de-
ceived by the ill-advised passion of love, which deprives even wise men of their
senses, came to the temple of Apollo, accompanied by Antilochus, the son of
Nestor] (XXVII, 207).151 Achilles’s downfall is doubly a fall. First, he falls in
151
Benoît reinterprets Dares’s timing of Achilles’s murder, which in the Roman occurs “liter-
ally and metaphorically in the dark.” Eley, “How Long is a Trojan War” 147. Guido does
not specify the time of day, leaving readers to conjecture that the business of treachery is
brought about in broad daylight, emphasizing Achilles’s incapability to anticipate it. Rob-
ert Edwards points out to me that the “infelix Achilles” parallels Virgil’s “infelix puer,”
which makes both knights equally emotional.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 221

love with Polyxena and adopts a ‘feminine’ principle of autonomy, even though
he fails since he reaches out for an illegitimate metaphorical representation of
his empire. Second, he falls for a letter sent by a woman, being unaware of the
very treachery the imperial mask had him perform on the battlefield. Given
Achilles’s emotional disposition, it even appears to be appropriate that Priam
grants that the Greeks erect a tomb for Achilles in Troy – temporarily, Achilles
has more in common with the transparent Trojans. The latter rejoice at the death
of Achilles, believing that they now will be victorious (XXVII, 208), which is
yet another metaphorical misjudgment since Achilles is not Greece. Only mo-
ments later, they realize the absence of their safeguards: “Sed O quanto terrore
concutitur Troyanorum gens cum uidet se bellum ingredi sine ductu fortissimi
Hectoris, sapientis Deyfebi, et Troili nimium animosi!” [But oh, with what ter-
ror were the Trojans smitten when they saw themselves marching to battle with-
out the leadership of the very brave Hector, the wise Deiphobus, and the exceed-
ingly bold Troilus] (XXVII, 209).
Guido offers Achilles’s life as an example of the advantages of imperial
opacity and as an illustration of the dangers of emotional transparency and at-
tempts to represent empire metaphorically. Achilles’s vita further underscores
Guido’s juxtaposition of two modes of self-fashioning. While Greek ‘individu-
als’ represent their empire metonymically, that is, as a domain separate from
their person, the Trojans consider the domains of personal and collective iden-
tity largely in terms of identity, with the consequence that Hector’s death be-
comes synonymous with Troy’s demise. Guido advocates imperial opacity, his
Historia arguing that the domains of personal and collective identities must re-
main separate – at the cost of individuality. Guido is able to shape the plot to
this end largely without changing the historical ‘facts’ gleaned in Benoît’s ro-
mance. Additionally, Guido liberally recombines available ‘classical’ sources –
Dares, the Aeneid, and the less reliable Metamorphoses and Heroides. Hence,
Guido has to determine a narrative model capable of accommodating Benoît’s
Roman as well as other, conflicting narratives about Trojan communities, in-
cluding the Hohenstaufen empire. In the last part of the Historia, Guido muses
on Ulyssean rhetoric that elucidates how imperial opacity can profitably veil all
kinds of contradictions and inconsistencies.

2. Ulyssean Collectives: Ulysses versus Circe

The Historia argues that a non-metaphorical imperial model, which circulates a
viable mask for the adoption of individuals whose individuality becomes sub-
sumed under the common good, is preferable to Ovidian Trojan transparency.
After the betrayal of Troy at the hands of Aeneas and Antenor, whose reputa-
tions are not quite as heavily blackened as one would expect, Guido turns to the
odyssey of Ulysses, whose portrait is longer than that of any other Greek or Tro-
jan knight. Ulysses’s rhetorical talent not only illustrates how opaque masks can
be created and employed in order to veil inherent contradictions, but also yields
222 Part Two: Masking Troy

insights into Guido’s own rhetorical strategies, which correspond to the mythical
bricolage of imperial opacity.
Guido follows Benoît and Dictys in relaying Ulysses’s destiny after the final
destruction of Troy. Although Ulysses has been mentioned in passing before the
distribution of the spoils of war, it is here that his role assumes greater impor-
tance, beginning with the distribution of the spoils among the Greeks. Contro-
versy arises over the Palladium, which Ajax Telamonius thinks he deserves bet-
ter than any other. Ajax attempts to emphasize his imperial importance, but fails
to convey this adequately. His argument centers on his personal exploits before
he mentions his service to the common good consisting of the addition of many
kingdoms to the “dominio Grecorum” (XXXI, 238). This is highlighted further
by Ajax’s excessive use of the first person pronoun: “et ego” is his favorite
phrase (XXXI, 237-238). He demotes Ulysses’s prowess:
At ipse Ulixes carens omni strennuitate milicie sola sui sermonis facundia uigere et
superesse uidetur, que non preualet nisi in blandiciis tantum et fallaci arte uerborum.
Qui si dixerit nos dominos per eum Troyane ciuitatis effectos, hoc non a sue strennui-
tatis uirtute processit sed a proditoriis et fallacibus uerbis suis, propter quod perpetue
labis laboramus infamia inter gentes, ut Troyanos, quos debuimus in potencia uestra
deuincere, ui[n]cerimus per machinacionis fallaciam et per dolum. (XXXI, 238)
[But Ulysses, lacking all valor of knighthood, seems to flourish and survive by the
eloquence of his speech alone, which has no strength except in flattery and the decep-
tive art of speaking. If he has said we were made lords of the city of Troy through him,
this has not proceeded from his valor or courage, but from his treacherous and deceiv-
ing words, on account of which we labor perpetually under a taint of infamy among all
nations, namely, that we have conquered the Trojans through the deceptions of ma-
neuvering and through guile when we should have vanquished them on account of
your power.]
Ajax’s worries are almost ‘Trojan’ insofar as for him winning a war by (verbal)
deception lessens the worthiness of victory. Furthermore, an empire built on
rhetoric (that is, deception) is not an empire at all. Therefore, Ajax – rather than
the scoundrel Ulysses – deserves the Palladium. Ajax’s own inefficient rhetoric
underscores the point, whereby Guido grants him more space, omitting the re-
port of many of his military deeds, which Guido believes to be superfluous
(XXXI, 238). Ulysses’s speech, by contrast, is rhetorically polished and con-
vincing. He retorts that the Greeks only overcame the Trojans by means of his
wise council and valor – “ex sua strennuitate uicisse et sapienti consilio sensus
sui.” Had it not been for his intelligence, Troy would still stand (XXXI, 238).
Although Ulysses’s speech is much shorter – his longer speech later serving as a
more impressive testimony to his rhetorical abilities – it is balanced with regard
to the relationship between the one and the many, between ‘I’ and ‘us.’ Accord-
ingly, Agamemnon and Menelaus decide to grant him the Palladium, corroborat-
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 223

ing that Ulysses’s abilities are superior to Ajax’s ‘simple’ military operations on
the battlefield.152
Ulysses’s ability to rhetorically veil his desires is associated with other means
of finding cover in the Ulysses story, for example, his departure under the cover
of darkness after Ajax has been killed and Greek rule slowly disintegrates
(XXXI, 239). Pyrrhus suspects that Agamemnon, Menelaus, and especially
Ulysses may have had a hand in the deed. After Ulysses has left Troy, Aeneas is
punished for concealing Polyxena, that is, for not concurring with the imperial
model and foregrounding his desires and the familial principle. He is exiled, but
not without taking revenge on Antenor, who is called back by the Trojans to
protect them. After some negotiations, they decree, Antenor should live in exile
where he founds a city to which the majority of Trojans follows him (XXXI,
240-42). Many of the departing Greeks will encounter problems on their respec-
tive ways home, as Cassandra prophesizes, but most of them finally manage not
only to survive, but also to increase the empire through intermarriage. I shall
briefly refer to these episodes regarding questions of opacity and transparency,
but the focus will be on the mask maker par excellence, Ulysses.
Several episodes toward the end of the Historia, which are all interwoven
with the Ulysses plot, evince familiar prosopagraphical concerns, negotiating the
differences between condoned imperial mask making and condemned mask
making for personal gain. In Book XXXII, Naupilus and Oectus are informed by
some liars that their son and brother, Palamedes, died at the hands of Ulysses
(XXXII, 246), which results in a plot that kills many Greeks off the coast of
Naupilus’s kingdom. After their scheme has proven unsuccessful, Oectus tries to
trick Agamemnon. In a reversal of Peleus’s stratagems at the outset of the Histo-
ria, Oectus (also called Peleus) decides, having diligently pondered this over in
his mind (“suo disquirit in animo”([XXXII, 248]), to send Clytemnestra a letter
revealing her husband’s alleged infidelity, which leads her to order Aegisthus to
kill Agamemnon. Guido reprimands her for doubly neglecting imperial duties on
account of her personal desires, for intending to kill Agamemnon, and for her
adultery with Aegisthus, the Historia being most concerned with the fact that he
is not even of royal birth (XXXII, 248-49). Aegisthus kills Agamemnon in his
sleep and becomes the (illegitimate) king of Mycenae. Clytemnestra’s emotional
transparency and neglect of imperial responsibilities are naturally penalized.
The narrative then shifts to Diomedes’s wife, Egea, who also receives a mes-
sage from Oectus to the effect that Diomedes killed her beloved brother, where-
fore she exiles Diomedes. Her feelings regarding her brother ill-advisedly super-

152
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ajax and Ulysses’s rhetorical battle is much less clearly de-
cided in favor of the latter, Ovid’s intentions perhaps being to prove that he can argue op-
posing views excellently. See Melville, Metamorphoses 449-50n. On Ulyssean rhetoric in
Ovid, see further Alison Sharrock, Seduction and Repetition in “Ars Amatoria” 2 (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 78-83; Gareth Williams’s “Ovid’s Exile Poetry” and Fritz
Graf’s “Myth in Ovid,” Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie 236 and 114, respec-
tively.
224 Part Two: Masking Troy

sede her faith in her husband. She changes her mind, though, upon learning
about Diomedes and Aeneas’s victories over the remaining adversaries of Troy.
Fearing destruction at the hands of her husband, she chooses to welcome him
again (XII, 252). While Egea is certainly changeable, she eventually makes the
‘right’ decision, which is also the case in the story, interlocked with the Egea
plot, of Demophoon and Athamas, both of whom are rejected by their own
kingdoms. Although both feel strongly that military action against the agents of
unrest is inevitable, Nestor convinces them to try flattery and promises first.
This persuasive track indeed works, and both kings return home (XXXII, 251).
The entire chapter, in fact, ends with general harmony, which is generally over-
looked in criticism emphasizing fatality and catastrophe as the main themes of
the Historia:153 “Ceteri uero Grecorum qui reges eorum redeuntes a Troya reci-
pere recusauerant, penitencia ducti, humiliter querunt eos et ipsos regnorum suo-
rum restituunt dignitati. Qui postquam ad regna peruenerunt eorum, urbes et lo-
ca collapsa in eorum absencia solicita mente reformant et in meliorem statum
instaurare procurant” [The rest of the Greeks who had refused to receive their
kings returning from Troy, led by remorse, humbly sought them and restored
them to the dignities of their kingdoms. After they had reached their kingdoms,
with earnest thoughts they rebuilt the cities and places which had collapsed in
their absence and took pains to restore them to better condition] (XXXII, 252-
53). Notably, these Greeks do not merely restore the status quo ante, they ulti-
mately improve the Greek imperial foundations.
Individuals interfering with this process, like Clytemnestra, pay a high price.
Clytemnestra is not merely killed, her son Orestes ensures that her death is a
violent one. First, her breasts are cut off, before her naked body is dragged
through the city. Aegisthus, her second husband, with whom she committed
adultery, is likewise dragged through the city and hanged from the gallows.
Guido reports this rather unemotionally:
Quid ultra? Ex omnibus impiis, infidelibus, et peruersis per Horrestem Micenarum
ciuitate purgata, uere dici potuit Agamenonis mortem per tantorum mortes ultam plene
fuisse necnon et de Clitemestra propter obprobrium a se turpiter uiro factum necnon et
illatam iniuriam per eam nato suo in multis in quibus Clitemestra peccauit. Fuit enim
homicidii rea, que talem et tantum regem qualis fuit inclitus Agamenon, sub eius secu-
ritate cubantem, fecit occidi, uirum et filium turpis adulterii affecit iniuria, et seipsam
naturam et morem mulierum nobilium non obseruans. Quare iustum fuit ut de tot malis
incurreret multa mala per eum precipue quem in nota dedecoris tot malis affecit.
(XXXIII, 255)
[Need I say more? When the city of Mycenae had been purged by Orestes of all the
wicked, disloyal, and evil people, it could be said that the death of Agamemnon was
fully avenged by the deaths of so many and also by the death of Clytemnestra, who
153
See, e.g., Patterson, Chaucer 121-22 n. 91; but cf. O’Callaghan, “Tempering Scandal”
313: “The last two stories focus as much on the reestablishment of hereditary lines as on
themes of vengeance, leaving the reader with a more positive view of the conclusion of
the Trojan war. [...] Thus the Roman de Troie [...] finishes with reestablished peace and
familial descent by a new generation.” The same is true of the Historia.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 225
was killed on account of the dishonor shamefully done by her to her husband, and the
injury offered to her son in the many things in which Clytemnestra had sinned. For she
was guilty of homicide, since she had had such a man and such a great king as the il-
lustrious Agamemnon killed while he slept under her protection, and she had done in-
jury to her husband and son by disgraceful adultery, and had violated both nature itself
and behavior befitting noble women. Hence it was right that on account of so many
evils she should have met with much evil, especially through him upon whom she had
inflicted so many evils with the marks of dishonor.]
Clytemnestra’s rebellion and disloyalty against the king represents an active
counter-imperial stance for Guido, which legitimates her horrible death. This
passage serves a further purpose that extends beyond revenge, however, since
the event prompts Menelaus (traveling with Helen) to mend the chaotic situation
in Mycenae after the death of his brother Agamemnon. Despite some misgivings
about Orestes’s treatment of Clytemnestra, he ensures that Orestes becomes king
of Mycenae. Both Orestes and the people legitimize the death of Clytemnestra
as being ordained by the gods (XXXIII, 255-56), which likewise sanctions im-
perial opacity and the translatio imperii it perpetuates. All of these events un-
derscore the importance of imperial mask making and further anticipate the piv-
otal role of rhetoric for opaque prosopagraphy, fully exemplified by Ulysses.
W. B. Stanford observes that Ulysses appears in a much more positive light
in the Historia than in the Roman de Troie,154 a transformation in keeping with
Guido’s imperial stance. Moreover, Guido’s gives more space to Ulysses’s des-
tiny, which has been seen as a consequence of his adherence to Dictys. In fact,
Ulysses’s report of his adventures is the longest speech in the Historia, in which
his ability to adapt to situations and evade dangers is always linked to his per-
suasiveness. Thus, Ulysses best exemplifies Lanham’s notion of rhetorical self-
hood, that is, the talent to fashion consistent, opaque masks in order to convince
others to do his bidding. From the beginning, his rhetorical skills are heavily
emphasized; he is described as handsome, valiant, shrewd, eloquent, and as a
good teller of lies (VIII, 84). It is by means of his wit that he is capable of escap-
ing Ajax Telamonius’s and Nauplius’s attempt to murder him. While Guido
sometimes grants Ulysses narrative space, at other times, he hints at his poten-
tial, always with a sense of approval. After his departure from Troy, for in-
stance, he falls into the hands of Ajax Telamonius’s people and King Nauplius,
who want to avenge the death of Telamonius and Palamedes: “Sed Vlixes indu-
stria sensus sui euasit a laqueo gentis ipsius, pauper tamen et egenus et penes se

154
According to Stanford, Guido removes “two slurs on Ulysses’s character. The first is in
his rendering of the stock description of Ulysses: instead of Benoit’s reference to mockery
and derision he gives Dares’s meaning better with ‘scattering many a joking word.’ (But
he retains the Benoit-Virgilian reference to Ulysses as a liar [...].) Further, [...] Guido re-
stores Dares’s version of the death of Palamedes, stating emphatically that the Dictys ver-
sion, which Benoit had emphasized, was a malicious lie.” Stanford, Ulysses Theme 285.
Piero Boitani rather emphasizes that in most accounts (from Virgil to Guido), Ulysses
emerges as a “trickster, a teller of tall stories, a sharp-talker.” Boitani, The Shadow of
Ulysses: Figures of a Myth, trans. Anita Weston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 38.
226 Part Two: Masking Troy

nichil habens. [...] Vlixis igitur sagacitas magna fuit, per quam a manibus regis
Nauli de persona saluus euasit” [But Ulysses, by the quickness of his wits, had
escaped from these people’s noose, although he was poor and destitute and had
no possessions. ... The cleverness of Ulysses was very great, and by it he es-
caped safely with his life from the hands of King Nauplius] (XXXIII, 256-57).
The Historia, writes Guido, will not reveal the details of Ulysses’s ingenious
deeds; however, Guido presents Ulysses’s skills directly to the reader, especially
in his four-page report of his adventures to Idomeneus, whose surprise about
Ulysses’s poverty prompts the latter to tell his tale. Since neither Dictys nor Be-
noît provides these episodes in direct speech, the way in which Ulysses conveys
his odyssey is foregrounded, especially so, considering that Ulysses’s adven-
tures are often about his persuasiveness.
Ulysses’s report of the Circe episode illustrates Guido’s careful reworking in
the light of his own (prosopagraphical) project. The description of Circe, whom
Ulysses encounters after he managed to escape Polyphemus (in Sicily!), and her
magical powers evoke the love story of Jason and Medea, the latter being a
changeable woman capable of magical arts, at the beginning of the work. The
Historia thus finishes on a story presenting similar characters. Both Circe and
her sister perform magic – “arte nigromancie et exorzizacionibus” (XXXIII,
258); both are changeable; and both are capable of changing the appearance of
matter, for example, changing men into beasts. Circe postpones Ulysses’s depar-
ture by one year, in the course of which she conceives a son by him. Although
her magic is sound, Ulysses is not completely spell-bound: “Ego autem,” he ex-
plains, “circa propositum mei recessus curam adhibui” [I took care, however,
concerning the plan for my departure]. As a magistra of magic, however, Circe
discerns his intentions:
Sed Circes irata persensit, et suis magicis artibus me credidit detinere. Sed ego, qui de
arte eram similiter ualde instructus, contrariis operacionibus omnia sua figmenta de-
struxi et penitus annullaui. Et quia sic ars deluditur arte, contrariis commentis Circes in
tantum preualuerunt efficacius artes mee quod cum omnibus sociis meis qui tunc erant
mecum a Circe nimium anxiosa recessi. (XXXIII, 259)
[Circe clearly perceived this and was angry, and thought to detain me by her magic
arts. I, who was likewise very erudite in this art, destroyed all her devices by contrary
operations and made them completely vain. Because art was thus deluded by art, my
more effective arts prevailed over the contrary contrivances of Circe so much that I,
with all the companions who were then with me, left Circe in great distress.]
Although the narrative is concerned with magical arts, it appears that these are
contrived verbally – Ulysses counters her figmenta, that is, her inventions or im-
ages. For once, a man is able to outwit a female ‘perpetrator’ by appropriating
the structural principle of changeability. Ulysses likewise appropriates this
structure when Circe’s sister detains him for longer than he wishes: “Tandem
per mei sensus industriam factum est quod ab ipsa salue recessi, in maxima ta-
men mei pena laboris, cum artes mee artes suas uix repellere potuissent” [At
length it happened that by the exercise of intelligence, I departed from her
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 227

safely, although with the greatest pains and difficulty, since my arts could barely
repel her arts] (XXXIII, 259). Again, his intelligence overpowers a woman ca-
pable of magic. While the verbal nature of his art is not acknowledged openly –
the terms hitherto employed are ambiguous – the sirens necessitate discursive
techniques and rhetoric. In keeping with the Ovidian and Trojan principle of
changeability, the sirens (sea monsters: “maxima monstra marina”) are half ani-
mal and half human, the human part being female: “Sunt enim ab umbilico
superius forme feminee, uirgineum uultum habentes, ab umbilico uero citra om-
nem formam piscis obseruant.” Their treachery lies in their deceptive rhetoric,
which is pleasant to the ear and lulls the senses. Just like Guido’s women, they
represent dangerous promises that cannot be kept. Fortunately, Ulysses is ‘man
enough’ to know how to overcome these monsters – after all, he not only knows
how to lull other people’s senses by means of his ‘art,’ but also how to avoid
being deceived: by blocking his ears, he represses his emotions and conquers the
female principle (XXXIII, 260). At the end of the Historia, then, Ulysses over-
comes the principle of female fickleness represented by Medea at the outset.
While the latter was capable of overcoming Mars, Ulysses’s imperial mask mak-
ing represents the appropriate means to counter such threatening Ovidian
changeability.
Ulysses’s rhetoric is greatly admired, for example, by one Antenor, who
gladly receives Ulysses as a visitor: “Cui multum grata fuit Vlixis multa facun-
dia et nimia industria sensus eius” [Ulysses was very acceptable to him on ac-
count of his great eloquence and the great quickness of his wits] (XXXIII, 261).
Antenor offers his help in Ulysses’s quest to reconquer his own nation, in which
his wife has been under pressure to surrender her (that is, his) rule. Ulysses
manages easily to regain his kingdom, and he is happily welcomed by Penelope
and Telemachus. On a bright and lucid (!) day, Ulysses can be himself again
without the necessity for masquerade when entering his own palace with An-
tenor: “Adueniente uero die in sui fulgoris lucida claritate, in suum pallacium
cum rege Anthenore se recepit.” Ulysses’s narrative predictably ends with a
small expansion of the empire since Telemachus marries Antenor’s daughter,
Nausicäa (XXXIII, 261-62). In this context, it is notable that Guido changes Be-
noît’s Alcenon to Antenor here,155 which renders the Greek expansion of empire
by marriage a hybrid Greco-Trojan intermarriage policy. The expansion of em-
pire continues, however, with a second round following in the last book of the
Historia, which relays Ulysses’s death. In a dream, Ulysses beholds a beautiful
person, possibly a divine, non-human specter: “forme tante mirabilis speciei
quod ymago non putaretur humana.” Ulysses is overcome with desire: “Videba-
tur eciam sibi ultra modum appetere ymaginem illam posse tangere et eam suo
cogi tenaciter in amplexu, sed illa suos uitabat amplexus et eum uidebatur a lon-
ge intueri” [It also seemed to him that he desired exceedingly to be able to touch
that apparition and to enfold it firmly in his embrace, but that it avoided his em-

155
See Meek 304n; Roman l. 28951.
228 Part Two: Masking Troy

braces and seemed to him to gaze upon him from afar] (XXXV, 269). The appa-
rition refuses Ulysses: “O quantum in hoc est tua grauis et amara peticio! Tu
enim petis a me ut tibi coniungar. Sed O quantum illa coniunccio erit infelix!
Nam ex tali coniunccione necesse est quod vnus nostrum exinde moriatur” [Oh,
how painful and bitter is this request of yours! For you ask me to join you. But
oh, how unfortunate that union would be! For it is necessary that one of us die
from such a union] (XXV, 269-70). Fatally, after reenacting mask upon mask,
Ulysses does not recognize that he is confronting a mask of his own making. He
literally encounters an embodiment of the mask adopted to flee Circe’s island –
that is, their son. Furthermore, the mask beheld cannot be accommodated in the
present circumstances. The synthesis of personal and public masks that Ulysses
desires can only have one consequence in the fictional economy of the Historia:
death. Only the division of person and nation warrants the longevity of empire.
Ulysses misunderstands the vision; he surmises that he will be killed by Tele-
machus and, in order to avoid this destiny, he walls himself in – “muris altis et
fortibus” (XXXV, 270).156 Ulysses publicly puts on display his personal fear.
Inevitably, this transgression against imperial opacity has grave consequences:
Telegonus arrives in Achaia, demands to see Ulysses, and is rejected. A fight
ensues, and Telegonus unknowingly kills his father as had been predicted by the
apparition. Ulysses’s inability to keep separate the two masks settles Ulysses’s
destiny. Before he dies, Ulysses finds an alternative, however, that ensures the
longevity of both kingdom and empire. Telemachus and Telegonus become
friends, the former is made the ruler of Achaia, and the latter rules his mother’s
kingdom after Circe’s death. In the light of imperial politics, then, it might be
less surprising that Ulysses dies happily, which is relayed in a passage that is
usually seen as a misreading: “Vlixes autem uixit annis lxxxxiii et feliciter mor-
tuus est in regno suo” [Ulysses, on the other hand, had lived ninety-three years
and died happily in his kingdom] (XXXV, 273, emphasis added).157 Ulysses has
every reason to be happy: he lived a long life and, secondly, a reconciliation of
his masks was possible after all – by dividing his regal rule among Telemachus
and Telegonus, expanding Ulysses’s kingdom and the Greek empire, especially
under Telemachus’s seventy year reign, in which the kingdom expands further:
“Thelamacus uero regnauit in Achaya annis lxx et multiplicatum est regnum
Achaie sub eius gubernacione ualde nimis” (XXXV, 273).
Ulysses’s happy death fittingly completes the Historia insofar as Guido’s
Ulysses exemplifies one last time the problems with synthesizing personal emo-
tions and collective (political) demands. That Guido subsequently turns to the
circumstances in which he penned his Historia also underscores the histori-
156
As he does in the Roman (ll. 29755-58). According to Dictys, Ulysses moves to a remote
place. Dictys, Ephemeridos belli Troiani libri a Lucio Septimio ex Graeco in Latinum
sermonem translati, ed. Werner Eisenhut, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner,
1958) 131.
157
Meek argues that Guido most likely meant to write infeliciter (305n). Griffin’s edition
does not record any variants for this word.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 229

ographical importance of Ulysses’s imperial mask making. By means of Ulys-

ses, Guido illustrates how opacity can be constructed and how it can be used for
his own clerical purposes. Guido’s Historia itself is a matter of mythical brico-
lage, of opaque prosopagraphy. As a translation of the Ovidian Roman, how-
ever, it necessarily also includes its own faultlines – as emerges below, but also
in the Middle English ‘translations’ of Guido’s Historia that recover its muted
Ovidian underpinning and quibble the disastrous consequences of imperial opac-
ity for individuality. As the following evinces, Guido’s Virgilianism cannot en-
tirely eschew Ovidian changeability.

3. Guidoan Collectives: Virgil versus Ovid

On the plot level, Guido opposes opaque and transparent prosopagraphy, a
dichotomy that is then extended onto the Greek and Trojan collectivities, as
opaque empire versus transparent city-state (nation), respectively. Guido gener-
ally seems to favor a separation between the domains of imperial politics and
individual desires, of which Ulysses is the last example and whose depiction
foregrounds the rhetorical construction of opacity. The rhetoric of opacity is im-
plicit in other parts of the Historia, too, and has occasionally surfaced in my dis-
cussion, specifically where Guido juxtaposes a Virgilian imperial narrative
stance to an undesirable Ovidian changeability. The proposition of opaque pro-
sopagraphy as a means to sustain imperial ambitions is mirrored in Guido’s nar-
rative strategy. His synthesizing of different sources is an act of opaque pro-
sopagraphy insofar as he attempts to mute all contradictions inherent in the ma-
terial he has chosen for translation. Guido may not consciously advance the
model of prosopagraphical selfhood, but the narrative opposition of opacity and
transparency, which suggests that narrative identity is perceived of in such
terms, finds an interesting extension (and parallel to the Greek imperial model)
in that Guido renders opaque his immediate source, Benoît’s Roman, in more
ways than one.
While Ulysses, as a homo rhetoricus, represents the advantages of opaque
prosopagraphy, the Historia itself likewise pleads persuasively for adopting and
circulating opaque masks, for construing personal and collective identities
mythically – especially for readers familiar with the Roman. Thus far, I have not
distinguished between Guido and the narrator and, given the fact that Guido in-
cludes his own name and his motivation of writing the Historia, Guido indeed
appears to be the persona; the many references to (contemporary) Sicily sup-
ports this assumption. Guido’s inclusions of biographical facts and personal
opinions become an important arena for his poetics of identity and strongly dis-
tinguish the Historia from Benoît’s Ovidian Roman, in which Nolan perceives
a strong element of impersonation. The poet enacts by turns the roles of the scholarly
moralist, the careful translator, the Horatian composer, and the eye-witness chronicler,
privy to the most intimate details of historical events as they unfold. [...] The roles he
assumes, and those he distributes among his characters, are not stylistically differenti-
ated. But they do represent several alternative, sometimes contradictory positions in re-
230 Part Two: Masking Troy

lation to the same matter. Benoît’s most original contribution to the form of the roman
antique lies in his play with a multiform authorial presence and with several drama-
tized perspectives as he gives form to his ancient historia.
This multiform narrative perspective, she argues, is checked by an ethical re-
sponsibility. With recourse to Spitzer’s essay on the poetic “I,” she concludes
that Benoît’s first person is a rhetorical strategy, “aiming to persuade his audi-
ence to certain views about Troy’s fall.”158 Approaching the Historia with this in
mind, one is indeed struck by the absence of multiple perspectives and “alterna-
tive, sometimes contradictory positions in relation to the same matter.” This is
largely due to the fact that Guido is a chronicler, mainly interested in relaying
historical facts, which may also motivate Guido’s neglect to mention his source,
the historical ‘accuracy’ of which undermines the principles of historiography.
And yet, penning the veritable history of Troy, is no less the matter of perform-
ing a role – a role that bears many a similarity to Ulysses’s role-play (and to
Lanham’s homo rhetoricus). The desirable historical narrative has to be like
Ulysses’s: chronological, unchanging, free of contradiction, and it has to veil the
underlying personal motivations. The Historia thus aims not at persuading read-
ers about certain views but rather about certain facts, which is difficult in the
light of the various, contradictory sources. That Guido does not slavishly follow
‘one’ source is evident in his frequent commentary on the events narrated and
the knowledge he frequently imparts to his audience; he is also not entirely unin-
terested in the destiny of ‘his’ heroes. In contrast to Benoît, however, Guido
avoids impersonation at all costs since, as I shall illustrate below, impersonation
is the Devil’s work. Remaining aloof of his characters in this respect, Guido
nevertheless adopts an opaque mask.
This view differs from earlier work on the Historia. Benson, for instance,
characterizes the narrator as a pessimist, whose additions to the story are largely
laments different in tone from the historical narrative itself. The narrator
emerges as torn between relaying the historical account of the Trojan matter, on
the one hand, and weeping at the destiny of his characters’ ill-informed choices,
on the other. Benson attributes Guido’s pessimism to his “sense of human igno-
rance” and “the inability to find God’s guiding hand or any other logic in the
ruin and carnage of the Trojan War.” Fortune does not rule in the Historia, Ben-
son continues, but is substituted by vaguer terms such as fata and fortuna. Ulti-
mately “Guido is [...] unable to discover any pattern in the events of Troy” and
does not to go beyond ineffectual proverbial knowledge.159 The foregoing pro-

158
Nolan, Chaucer 44, 45.
159
Benson, “What Chaucer Really Found in Guido” 309, 310-11. One example Benson offers
as evidence for Guido’s proverbial knowledge concerns the contradiction between two
maxims. In Book XIX, Hector opposes a truce (160), for which he is praised, since the
wise man always offers his advice even when it is unpopular. The same does not hold for
Amphimachus, who also argues against a truce; Guido complains that he should not have
voiced unpopular advice (XXIX, 226). These two situations are much less contradictory
when seen in the context of prosopagraphical selfhood. In the first case, Hector speaks his
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 231

sopagraphical analysis of the Historia suggests, however, that Guido is rather

adept in discovering and extrapolating patterns of identification, that he is very
well able to transcend proverbial wisdom. The neat dichotomy between Greek
opacity and Trojan transparency is further indicative of the fact that Guido does
have an ideological agenda, discernible also in his narrative strategies that form
the topic of this section: first, Guido’s final comments on his sources evince a
careful act of mythical bricolage; second, Guido’s inclusion of classical and
Biblical narratives underlines his procedures as a historical narrator; third, his
mythical bricolage works toward the fashioning of a desirable imperial mask for
the reader, a mask perhaps usefully adopted also by Guido’s (politically trou-
bled) Sicilian contemporaries, which Guido probably had in mind when musing
on the progeny of his own people. In short, Guido recasts an Ovidian romance
as a Virgilian, imperial, historiographical epic.
At the end of the Historia, Guido claims that Dares’s version of the Trojan
War also ends with the death of Ulysses, an assertion he has to rectify: Dares
ends with the destruction of Troy; Dictys includes the events befalling the
Greeks after Troy’s fall. Both sources have Antenor and Aeneas cause the fall of
Troy.160 Whereas in Dares, Polydamas is mentioned as the chief Trojan negotia-
tor with the Greeks, Guido follows Dictys (through Benoît) and, therefore, an
account biased toward the Greeks. He likewise adopts an ultimately Virgilian
perspective concerning the horse episode,161 maybe because Dares’s version
minimizes the ingenuity of the Greeks. Guido also prefers Dictys’s version re-
garding Aeneas’s rescue of Polyxena (Dares’s Hecuba is rescued by Aeneas as
well). After commenting on these differences, Guido adds a list of combats and
deaths resembling Dares’s version. Then follow the epitaphs which are, alleg-
edly, also in Dares. Amidst this multiplicity of versions, Guido comments on his
own narrative strategies, which evince a shift from an inclusive rhetoric of mul-
tiplicity to an exclusive, monoglossic text. Guido’s style has been characterized
as a “turgid rhetoric,” which “might easily have swollen into bombast had he

mind – not as a son of Priam but as a military leader. He has to say his piece although he
is probably aware that it avails to nothing because of Priam’s ‘Ovidian’ leadership.
Amphimachus voices his opinion in a council deciding on a truce suggested by the trai-
tors. Amphimachus notices Antenor’s changeability and refers to him as a manipulative
turncoat: “nunc reuoluto mantello persuadere nobis irreuerenter intendis” (220). What is
problematic about his articulation of a different opinion is that it occurs at a time when the
adoption of an imperial mask, rather than fighting a lost war, may have been expedient.
Moreover, Amphimachus problematically makes himself a spokesperson against the
wishes of his own father. Lastly, Hector’s reaction is a rational, balanced response to
Priam’s actions; Amphimachus’s response is fatally emotional.
160
Antenor becomes a “metaphor for treachery [...] because he betrayed Troy to the Greeks.
Dante even named a section of hell the ‘Antenora’ [...].” Thompson, Trojan War 137;
Dante, Inferno XXXII, 88-90.
161
See Lienert, Deutsche Antikenromane 106: “Für Trojas Untergang stehen der Verrat des
Antenor und des Aeneas (nach Dares) und die List der Griechen mit Scheinabzug und
Trojanischem Pferd (nach Vergil) zur Verfügung.”
232 Part Two: Masking Troy

introduced those ‘ampliores methaphores et colores et transgressiones’ from

which [...] he was retrained by the fear of death.”162 The passage here alluded to
is worth considering at length since it demonstrates how Guidoan rhetoric is
complicit in circulating a static imperial mask. The passage is placed after the
epitaph of Hector and Achilles, and it fittingly ends with Guido’s worries about
his own death and that of the archbishop of Salerno. First, Guido reassures his
readers that Dictys is his source:
Ego autem Guido de Columpnis predictum Ditem Grecum in omnibus sum sequtus,
pro eo quod ipse Ditis perfectum et completum fecit in omnibus suum opus ad littera-
torum uidelicet solacium, vt ueram noticiam habeant presentis hystorie et ut magis de-
lectentur in ipsa. Et ego hystoriam ipsam ornassem dictamine pulchriori per ampliores
methaphoras et colores et per transgressiones occurrentes, que ipsius dictaminis sunt
picture. (XXXV, 275-76)
[However, I, Guido delle Colonne, have followed the aforesaid Dictys the Greek in all
things, because this Dictys made his work perfect and complete in everything for the
pleasure of the learned, so that they might have true knowledge of the present history
and might take more delight in it. And I would have decorated this history with a more
beautiful style by means of richer metaphors and figures of speech and through occa-
sional digressions, which are the artistry of this style.]
Guido’s emphasis on having avoided ‘richer metaphors and figures of speech’
bespeaks more than the fear of not finishing the Historia, I think. Metaphorical
ornament is inherently dangerous – an amplified, extended metaphor can gener-
ate new metaphors and, by augmentation can render a text unstable. Guido
would like to avoid the Ovidian rhetorical flourish, characteristic of the Roman,
then, since it threatens the desirable metonymic construction of empire: history
should have a ‘smooth’ sur-face and should be free of contradiction. Rather than
making available to his readers a whole storehouse of Trojan mythology, he set-
tles for one Trojan myth. This is underlined by Guido’s subsequent reconsidera-
tion of his sources (discussed already in the accessus). I have shown in Chapter
Seven that while Guido criticizes Homer and Ovid for lying, Virgil is exempt
from this charge. He now complains again about the lack of historical veracity
in the writing of the ancients, despite their employment of an exceedingly glori-
ous style: “apologos in stilo nimium glorioso” (XXXV, 276). The fables of an-
cients, preferring inventio over factual history are problematically fraught with
embellishments (that is, mistakes), which Guido might have used, too. He, how-
ever, favors an unambiguous narrative, free of contradiction. Notably, this brev-
ity of style was often associated with Virgil.163
There are two further instances, in which Guido places his own poetics in a
Virgilian context. The transition from the unsuccessful negotiations between the
Greeks and the Trojans to the beginning of the Trojan War starkly juxtaposes
Trojan emotionality and the Greek fabrication of opacity in the light of impend-

162
Griffin, introduction xvii. According to Meek, Guido adds “embellishments” and writes in
“a style more pretentious than elegant.” Meek, introduction xiv.
163
See, for example, Curtius, European Literature 487-94.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 233

ing military action. Guido introduces the narrative shift as follows: “Superest
ergo quod ad ipsius hystorie seriem explicandam per suos actus continuos suc-
cessiue stilus noster deinceps veridicus acuatur” [It remains, therefore, that our
truthful pen be sharpened in order to reveal the course of this history in its con-
tinuous acts one after the other in succession] (VIII, 87). Guido’s choice of stilus
is rather interesting in this context given the wide semantic range of the word –
from pen to plough to sword. In this military context, an allusion to the Virgilian
iron is most suitable, especially since it further alludes to the Virgilian high style
(that is, epic).164 A further Virgilian moment occurs when Guido’s vita evokes
parallels with Virgil’s insofar as Guido worries that the Historia may remain
unfinished, like the Aeneid. Forasmuch as Guido aims for an unambiguous, con-
tradiction-free narrative, however, he not only mutes many of Benoît’s stories
and excursions, he frequently adds narratives as well. In its synthesizing of vari-
ous, often contradictory sources, the Historia occasionally appears to engage in
the mythological bricolage associated with Ovid and the Trojans – narrative
strategies Guido condemns. Guido’s treatment of the pagan past illustrates,
however, that his bricolage is mythical rather than mythological in that its pri-
mary aim is the suppression of all contradictions, the production of a ‘coherent’
narrative, glossing over the various inconsistencies maintained in other Troy
stories, crucially Benoît’s vernacular romance. The Historia aligns different tra-
ditions, brining them into line with Christianity, which is a standard procedure
for the ‘survival of the pagan gods.’ The creation of coherence thus necessitates
metaphorical representation, that is, rendering identical the domains involved in
the mapping process. In other words, Guido employs Ovidian means to his Vir-
gilian ends.
Following the chronology of the Troy story, Guido introduces a learned di-
gression about the pagan world views informing Achilles and Patroclus’s mis-
sion to the oracle of Delphi. Guido thus imparts his knowledge of Christian doc-
trine in the same passage that foretells the final destruction of Troy. For a Chris-
tian writer, this is precisely the problem: how can ‘false’ oracles make ‘correct’
predictions? Guido is quick to associate the oracle with other individuals in the
Historia, who are capable of predicting the future, notably Medea and Cassan-
dra, thus characterizing the oracle as yet another instance of female changeabil-
ity and unreliability. Guido’s exhortation of paganism deserves further critical
attention, since it yields insights into Guido’s historiographical strategies. In-
stead of allegorizing the pagan values and customs with Biblical stories, Guido’s
commentary has recourse to many narratives beyond his immediate source in
order to mute any possible contradictions. Guido rationalizes the pagan world
mainly, but not exclusively, with the aid of the Bible and Isidore’s Etymologiae

164
See Lateinisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch, s.v. stilus esp. II., IV., and Latin Dictionary,
s.v. stilus esp. II. A., II. B. 1-2. If Guido would have liked to leave it at a pen, and merely
a pen, the appropriate term would have been calamus. For the topos of sapientia et
fortitudo from Virgil to the Renaissance, see Curtius, European Literature 173-79.
234 Part Two: Masking Troy

(Meek 292n). The motivation is not merely to confer likeness on the two do-
mains, but to make them identical.
Guido begins with etymological issues: The pagans referred to the island as
Delos because the sun (Apollo) and the moon (Diana) were first seen here after
the Flood receded. The island was also called Ortygia, because of the first ap-
pearance of quail. For the pagans Apollo was a god, who was sometimes called
“Pythias,” because he was killed by a python. From here, it is but a small step to
the serpents of the First Book of Kings, who are able to predict the future. Guido
thus expands Benoît’s brief reference to Delphos with Isidore, accusing the pa-
gans of worshipping deaf and dumb idols that actually were mortals without
much power (X, 93). Guido thus manages to establish a link between the pagan
world and Biblical history which is problematic in that the answer of the oracle
turns out to be true. Guido condemns idolatry primarily because it represents a
simulation of reality. He fabricates an opaque mask in his exhortation of idola-
trous changeability, which Guido associates with Ovidian metamorphoses in
pagan cultures and with the changeability of the Devil. First of all, Guido reports
that the coming of Christ destroyed all the idols – according to the Jews, Ishmael
was the first to fashion images from clay, whereas the pagans believed that
Prometheus was the first idol-maker. Subsequently, images in the likelihood of a
person became worshipped like gods; the first “simulachrum” was erected by
Ninus (X, 94). This is characteristic of the euhemeristic tradition, which increas-
ingly loses its hostility to paganism in favor of historical inquiry, wherefore the
pagans could become the progeny of the European peoples: “They are the pa-
trons of this or that people, the parent stem from which the race has issued and
from which it derives its glory.”165 And Guido indeed turns to collective identity
next: “Sicque per diuersas hominum naciones gentiles diuersa ydola coluerunt”
[Thus throughout the different nations of men the pagans worshipped different
idols” (X, 95). While the unfavorable aspects of pagan culture cannot only be
likened but also identified with Biblical (hi)stories, Guido’s bricolage reaches its
limits when it comes to regional differences, especially concerning Sicily (see
below); these can be overcome, however, by reinstituting Christian empire.
The regional differences prompt a lengthy excursus on the Devil, the angel
‘preferred before all others,’ who immediately fell for his pride (X, 95). Guido
reconciles the “dyabolus et dyaboli” with the Etymologiae, according to which
Lucifer is also called Behemoth in Hebrew, which in Latin means ‘brute beast’
(X, 96). This corresponds to God’s ‘conversion’ of the Devil into a “animal
brutum,” a crooked serpent. The Devil is now associated with shape-shifting,
and he was so magnanimous that some even called him a dragon (in David). The
serpent-dragon, Guido continues, is Leviathan of Saint Brendan’s Apographia;
the various stories begin to merge. Genesis verifies Guido’s account, since it

165
Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place
in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (1953; Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1981) 15-20, quotation at 20.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 235

portrays the Devil as a shape-shifter as well (X, 96-97). Following Genesis,

Bede, and the Historia Scholastica, “Hic est ille Leuiathan qui factus serpens, a
sue deieccionis principio inuidens glorie primorum parentum nostrorum, ausus
est uoluptatis paradisum intrare, et erectus gradiens sicut homo primos parentes
nostros cecis temptacionibus, uicio preuaricacionis, affecit [...]” [This is that Le-
viathan, who was made a serpent and who from the beginning of his banishment
envied the honor of our first parents; he dared to enter the Paradise of pleasure,
and walking erect, just like a man, influenced our first parents by concealed
temptations and by lies...] (X, 96). According to the universal Catholic church,
Guido specifies, the Devil can choose or generate (genere) a face to speak of
things he does not understand, as is the case with some contemporaries that are
possessed by the Devil. How this is accomplished, Guido does not discuss; for
Catholics, he writes, “certum est quod ille Leuiathan, id est, dyabolorum
princeps, a culmine celesti deiectus, uel per seipsum corporaliter factus serpens
uel per serpentem animal, ingressus in ipsum, callidis temptacionibus suis mise-
ros parentes nostros et successores eorum perpetuam deiecerat in ruinam” [it is
certain that that Leviathan, that is, the Prince of Devils, cast down from the
height of heaven, either by making himself bodily into a serpent, or by entering
in his own person into a serpentine animal, with his cunning temptations cast
our miserable parents and their descendants into perpetual ruin] (X, 97). In other
words, the Devil either literally im-personates other individuals or shifts his
shape so as to appear as a different being – transformations that are not without
consequence for the Troy story.
Guido’s bricolage of various sources serves multiple purposes. First, the pa-
gan world can be explained in analogy to the Christian world, and pagan errors
can be reconciled with the Christian lessons included in the Historia for the
reader’s benefit. Second, the discussed sources enable Guido to yet again delib-
erate about changeability: devilish changeability is brought in line with feminine
(Trojan) changeability. Third, the Devil’s doubling of (incongruous) identities
approximates the monstrous, unnatural combinations of disparate identities as
witnessed on the battlefield alongside the Trojans. Fourth, the excursus on the
Devil allows Guido to distinguish between masking identities and Ovidian
metamorphosis. The Devil does not adopt a mask; s/he literally enters other per-
sons – hypergoods (animus, cors) are replaced by ‘hyperbads.’ Fifth, potential
differences between Ovidian changeability and the Devil’s shape-shifting are
not explored. Rather, the association of the Devil with female changeability is
furthered, with reference to Bede, to the effect that “dyabolus elegit quendam
serpentem tunc de quodam genere serpencium uirgineum habencem uultum et
mouit ad loquendum linguam eius quid loqueretur nescientis” [the Devil then
chose from a certain race of serpents a certain serpent which had a girl’s face
and moved its tongue for speaking what it did not understand] (X, 97). Once and
for all, Guido purges the productive capabilities of female doubleness and
changeability.
236 Part Two: Masking Troy

Guido’s explication of pagan rites by means of Biblical commentary under-

scores his worries about pagan-derived processes of collective identity forma-
tion. The Trojans’ effeminate shape-shifting, and their inability to stick to their
decisions belong to a devilish world of role-play, in which fixed identities and
role models cannot be maintained. The framework of this discussion implicitly
suggests that Trojan changeability and emotional transparency are related to the
problematic origins of small-scale collectivities. With reference to David, Guido
concludes, “Quoniam omnes dii gencium demonia; dominus autem celos fecit”
[For all the gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens] (X,
97). Regional and national identities, that are founded on erroneous beliefs in
the first place, are now pitted against the universality of the Christian empire;
changeability and emotional transparency are contrasted with the adoption of an
imperial mask, which is associated with the Greeks throughout the Historia.
Guido’s indictment of idolatry can further be seen in the framework of medieval
imperial practice, namely, to identify one’s adversaries (personal or national) as
Antichrists.166 Following this logic, Guido exposes the enemies of imperial
opacity as cooperating in demonic enterprise; regional diversity generally is a
devilish accomplishment,167 which applies equally to Guido’s native Sicily.
In the excursus on paganism and its troublesome regionalism, Guido emerges
as an adept fashioner of an appropriate mask for his task as a chronicler, veiling
any possible contradictions in his sources by embedding the ontological differ-
ences between Trojans and Greeks in a Christian framework. As changeable and
emotionally transparent individuals, the Trojans become devilish shape-shifters,
associated with regional cultic practices at odds with the ethical foundations of
Christianity. Under the veil of historical veracity, Guido uses narrative tech-
niques akin to mythological bricolage – but it is the veil that matters. Guido’s
mythical bricolage, that is, the fabrication of a contradiction-free, opaque sur-
face, sharply contrasts with the narrator’s mythological bricolage in the Roman,
which is a matter of impersonation, the latter being, in Guidoan terms, synony-
mous with devilish shape-shifting and with girl-faced serpents speaking in nu-
merous (vernacular?) tongues. Against Benoît’s exploration of his characters’
interiority, and against the narrator’s approsopriation of their masks, Guido pos-
its opacity, eliminating contradictory narratives; against orality and vernacular-
ity, Guido posits literacy and Latinity; against effeminate Trojan nationhood,

166
See, e.g., Weiss, “Emperors and Antichrists” 96.
167
Guido’s indictment of pagan idolatry along with its Ovidian changeability is natural given
the prosopagraphical framework of the Historia, but it is problematic insofar as the Greeks
invest in the oracle’s prophecy, too. Neither Trojans nor Greeks, of course, can be blamed
for this, since they did not have the benefit of Christian doctrine. Nevertheless, it is worth
noting that the Greeks are merely assured of their victory, whereas the Trojan emissary is
told to change sides. More importantly, the Greeks win the war. For all Guido knows, the
prophecy may be wrong. Guido’s point appears to be that the Greek empire, associated
with the Christian empire qua the above, is victorious on account of the opaque mask
rather than the intervention of the gods.
 Chapter Ten: Writing Selves and Nation 237

Guido posits Greek-inspired imperialism. Although Guido cannot help having

recourse to Benoît’s narrative techniques, he is able to turn the Roman’s ver-
nacular mythological bricolage into a mythical bricolage that, like Latinity itself,
as Copeland has it, “works to contain and suppress the contradictions inherent in
the very practices it supports.”168 Given the immediate historical context, in
which the Historia originates, it appears that imperial opacity may have offered
itself as the appropriate Virgilian means to stop Sicily’s increasing lack of geo-
political importance.

168
Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation 105-06, cited above.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
Making Sicily: Imperial versus National Bricolage

Guido’s mythical bricolage and his apparent preference for imperial opacity
over what he perceives as an inefficient transparent model of national indecision
can be, and perhaps should be situated in the historical context. This is only
rarely touched upon in scholarship,169 which usually concludes that national his-
tory is not important to Guido. I believe, however, that Guido’s careful extrapo-
lation of ontological dichotomies attests to Guido’s interest in Sicilian politics.
On this view, his obsession with Sicilian analogies and motifs, most of which
have been identified in Meek’s translation, does not follow the prerogative to
substantiate the Trojan origin of Sicily, but rather to produce hybrid Greco-
Trojan origins for Sicily, in which the potential Trojan heritage can be profitably
amended toward the re-creation of the imperial mask, which has been lost after
the Hohenstaufen rule of Frederick II. That the turmoil ensuing after Frederick’s
death furthered a (dreaded) Angevin rule of Sicily, which culminated in the Si-
cilian Vespers, must have made the enterprise of translating a vernacular French
text into Latin, and thereby demoting Benoît’s Roman, doubly rewarding.170
Scholars routinely emphasize that the Historia betrays little interest in courtly
love, fanciful stories, or heroic deeds since it is a chronicle. In contrast to C.
David Benson, the most distinguished commentator on Guido, I am not sure that
the purging of love plots and fanciful stories ensues without an “ideological
scheme.” I am further unconvinced of the claim that the Troy stories of Guido
and his English ‘translators’ are “neither Providential nor nationalistic, but [...]
may be defined as classical chronicles.”171 Historical narratives always function
to shape the past, the present, and the future, aiming, for example, at the modifi-
cation or the abolishment of customs.172 Lee Patterson thus wonders whether
“the fall of Troy [was] a felix culpa? Unlike Benoît, Guido produces the inevita-
ble answer – it gave rise to the European empires.” And Guido appears to be

169
The following historical sketch is meant to supplement my discussion of Guido’s interest
in Sicily, its origins, and in collective identity formation processes, but it can only gesture
toward a reading of the Historia as a commentary on Sicilian politics in the late thirteenth
century. More work needs to be done to investigate the Historia’s intertextual relationship
to Hohenstaufen legal and political documents, particularly the Liber Augustalis. Another
area that merits further examination is Guido’s potential Sicilian audience.
170
Additionally, if the Roman was indeed written for Eleanor, it represents a ‘female’ text not
only on account of its textual mutability but also with regard to its audience, for which see
Broich, “Heinrich II.” 199-200; cf. Broadhurst, “Henry II of England” 69-70.
171
Benson, History 9, 5.
172
Galloway, “Writing History” 255.
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 239

interested precisely in the rise (and fall) of empires. Patterson continues with
Guido’s quibble that the mind is ultimately uncertain concerning the outcome of
the Trojan War (see below) and argues that the Historia “securely locates the
responsibility on the human plane,” which suggests that the meaning of the
events “transcends easy moralization.” Like Benoît, Patterson suggests, Guido
ultimately believes that “history teaches us that history teaches us nothing.”173
Through the prosopagraphical lens, however, this argument appears to be prob-
lematic since the Historia does follow an organizing principle, the overt objec-
tive of which is to instruct readers about viable means of making selves and na-
tions – and the attendant repercussions. The patterns of identification tested
throughout the Historia are further bound up with questions of Guido’s own ex-
perience. In fact, the narrative is framed by his autobiography – the allusion to
his profession conferring a bureaucratic subtext on the Historia. Admittedly, the
Historia’s commentary on the outcome of the Trojan War does not, at first
glance, represent an unambiguous narrative. Meek, for example, notes that
Guido casts doubt on the Trojan origins of many European peoples, which she
finds reminiscent of Otto of Freising’s Chronica.174 As the following, pro-
sopagraphical analysis of Guido’s musings on Sicily’s origins evinces, these
ambiguities are consistent with his preference for imperial opacity.

1. Sicilian Politics: Angevins versus Hohenstaufen

The question of Sicilian origins surfaces already in the Prologue of the Historia,
where Guido says he wants to provide readers with the details of the war,
que fuit origo inimicitiarum et scandali que aduersus Frigios Greciam concitauit (vt
appellatione Grecie non Magna Grecia, Ytalia uidelicet, ut uoluerunt nonnulli, debeat
comprehendi, dicentes aduersus Troyanos et Magnam Greciam, id est Ytaliam, quam
appellamus hodie Romaniam, confluxisse, cum parua scilicet sola, licet paucis aliis si-
bi adiunctis, uenerit expugnatura Troyanos, prout ipsius ystorie series per ea que infra
legentur apertius demonstrabit). (Pr., 4-5)
[that is, what was the origin of the enmities and of the cause for offense which aroused
Greece against the Phrygians. (Magna Graecia, that is, Italy, should not be understood
in the designation Greece, as some have wished, saying that Magna Graecia, that is It-
aly, which today we call Romania, came against the Trojans, although in fact, when
Greece came to attack the Trojans, it was small, and indeed all alone, with, however, a
few allies joined to it, as the course of this history will plainly show in what will be
read below).]
The geographical terminology Guido employs is very ambiguous since the quam
introducing the current usage of Romania might refer to either Ytaliam or
Greciam. Meek assumes that Guido means “Greece” when he says “Romania”
(and not Italy, since the “arrangement of the sentence works against this.” Ro-
mania was a new usage in the thirteenth century, referring to the Eastern Em-
pire, whereas Magna Graecia was used for the ancient Greek colonies, among
173
Patterson, Chaucer 124-25.
174
Meek, introduction xvi-xvii.
240 Part Two: Masking Troy

them Sicily. The disclaimer that Sicily is not of Greek origin can be explained,
beyond the general claim to Trojan lineage, as stemming from Guido’s presence
at Frederick II’s court and the latter’s alignment with Rome; he was called Cae-
sar and Augustus, and his legal reform promoted a Roman model. Meek also
draws attention to the Greek-speaking colonies in Sicily and that there was a
tradition, “based on the designation ‘Magna Graecia,’ that Italy was the Greece
that fought against Troy.” Guido appears to be wavering; “as a careful historian,
he gives opposing views” (Meek 268-69n). The historical context, I believe, al-
lows for other explanations, with different conclusions; for the time being, the
syntactical ambiguity and the context in which the passage occurs are striking.
The passage is preceded by Guido’s distinction between historians and poets,
the latter condemned as writers of fiction. A good poet does not make a good
historian (translator), since factual knowledge is more important than rhetorical
elaboration. In order for the reader to distinguish between falsehood and truth in
existing Latin accounts, Guido retranslates the story into Latin (from French) so
that historical veracity endures, fixing the truth (imperial model) in writing once
and for all. His emphasis on Latin implicitly acknowledges Guido’s translation
of a vernacular source into authoritative Latin (see above), that is, his ‘inven-
tive’ translation. That Guido pits the endurance of historical veracity against po-
etic, Ovidian invention after raising the question of whether Sicily was part of
the Greek empire suggests again that the Historia favors imperial opacity over
changeability. It further invites readers to see in Guido’s Troy story the attempt
to invert the translatio imperii. His wavering between an open pro-Greek and a
traditional pro-Trojan position may owe less to analytical historiography than to
his desire to see imperial rule re-established in Sicily (and Italy) given the threat
of imperial disintegration on account of the proliferation of vernacular cultures
that are partially complicit in Sicily’s economic and political decline.
As a historiographer and a poet, Guido would have sharply felt this decline,
since he profited from the promotion of the arts and sciences at Frederick II’s
court and may have benefited from Frederick’s legal reforms.175 Since 1015, the
kingdom of Sicily had been under Norman rule, opening its “most important
chapter” with Roger II.176 Roger’s rule was a synthesis of Byzantine, Arabic,
175
Frederick II had pushed for a reform of the legal system, arguing that law could not prop-
erly be administered without the help of the learned, of bureaucrats with a university edu-
cation. Since Guido’s Historia was written almost forty years after the death of Frederick
II, it can be only speculated that Guido would have been pleased with the reforms – al-
though his praise of the emperor elsewhere in the Historia leaves little doubt that he gen-
erally admired Frederick. For Frederick’s legal reforms, see Wolfgang Stürner, Friedrich
II., 2 vols. (1992; Darmstadt: WBG, 2003) 2: 39-47. For Frederick’s support of the arts
and sciences, see Denis Mack Smith, A History of Sicily: Medieval Sicily 800-1713 (Lon-
don: Chatto & Windus, 1968) 61- 63; Stürner, Friedrich 2: 361-74; Carl A. Willemsen, in-
troduction, Kaiser Friedrich II. und sein Dichterkreis: Staufisch-Sizilische Lyrik in freier
Nachdichtung, ed. Carl A. Willemsen (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1977) 5-26.
176
Stürner, Friedrich 1: 18. For historical overviews, see Mack Smith, History of Sicily 3-84;
Errico Cuozzo, “Sizilien B. Das Königreich Sizilien I. Herrschaft der Normannen und
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 241

and Franco-Norman imperial traditions and implemented a large degree of self-

administration, also within the legal system.177 Roger’s stable rule declined with
his successor, William I, who had to fight both Pope Hadrian IV and the Byzan-
tine emperor Manuel Komnenos, the latter teaming up with Frederick I against
Sicily. William ultimately achieved peace with Hadrian (in 1156), pushed his
family into important administrative positions, and began to neglect his adminis-
trative duties, earning him the nickname “William the Evil.”178 The brief interim
rule of Margaret of Navarra (1166-71) witnessed the continuity of private feuds
among the aristocracy, and the rise of the English Walter as archbishop. Wil-
liam’s son profited from the latter, since the rule of Walter, his brother Bar-
tholomew, and Bishop Palmer was a relatively quiet and peaceful period; the
kingdom remained threatened, however, especially by William’s family politics,
eventually bringing Sicily within the ambit of Frederick II’s power. The Pope
was displeased, for the Hohenstaufen empire suddenly had enormous influence
on Southern Italy. Since Frederick was not yet old enough to assume power, In-
nocent III took control of Italy, leaving Sicily in chaos and anarchy until Freder-
ick was crowned king and emperor (in 1215 and 1220). Due to his diplomatic
talents and with the assent of the Pope, Frederick’s rule, experienced first-hand
by Guido,179 marked the last phase of stability in Sicily for a long time to come.
After Frederick’s return to Sicily in 1220, the “Norman laws about feudalism
were precisely re-stated” and, among other administrative changes, “royal judi-
ciaries took back rights of justice which had been usurped.”180 Frederick’s style
of rule was rather authoritarian. He outlawed games, forced citizens to return to
their homes by the third ring of the evening bell, prohibited prostitutes from liv-
ing within the city walls, and he heavily regulated the citizens’ private lives.
Whether or not these laws were rigorously implemented must remain question-
able, especially in the North where the political situation was hardly as stable as
in Sicily.181 The Liber Augustalis – which was published in Latin rather than

Staufer,” LexMA 7: 1956-60; Eva Sibylle and Gerhard Rösch, Kaiser Friedrich II. und
sein Königreich Sizilien (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1995).
177
Stürner, Friedrich 1: 22-26. Roger adopted Byzantine courtly ceremonies, and he built the
Cappella Palatina in Palermo and the cathedral in Cefalù (1: 22), which may have been
Guido’s model for Priam’s palace. See further Cuozzo, “Sizilien” 1957-58. For a histori-
cal overview, see John Julius Norwich, The Normans in Sicily: The Normans in the South
1016-1130 and the Kingdom in the Sun 1130-1194 (1967-70; Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1992).
178
See Moses I. Finley, Denis Mack Smith, and Christopher Duggan, Geschichte Siziliens
und der Sizilianer, trans. Kai Brodersen (1986; München: Beck, 1989) 87-88.
179
Guido was already a judge in 1242. Chiàntera, Guido delle Colonne 244.
180
Mack Smith, History of Sicily 52-53.
181
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (2001; Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 2002) 276-77; Mack Smith, History of Sicily 53. For a qualified account of Freder-
ick’s power, cf. Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittel-
alter (Darmstadt: WBG, 2003) 158-59.
242 Part Two: Masking Troy

Greek182 – is unique in that Frederick receives the regnum from no lesser author-
ity than God himself, and that the clerus had no right to interfere with secular
questions at all, marking a clear return to William II’s principle of rule as rex in
regno suo. Frederick’s administrative reform led to the first period of economi-
cal growth since 1190.183 Frederick also continued to relocate Muslims on the
Italian mainland in order to create a more homogeneous society, which resulted
in a loss of important manpower on the island itself, however.184 Frederick’s rule
was mainly characterized by his relative ability to control an entire empire and
its constituents – he was the stupor mundi. His death marked the end of a politi-
cally stable Sicily and caused the bifurcation thereof. Since Guido was a Sicilian
in public office, these developments would surely have concerned him.
After Frederick’s death in 1250, central authority fell apart and the economic
situation exacerbated. Several of Frederick’s enemies now intended to procure
their share of Sicily. The popes, for example, tried to establish their feudal rule
in Sicily, although the Sicilian aristocracy was so busy fighting one another that
it may have escaped their notice.185 The Sicilian crown was sold to Edmund of
Lancaster, who ruled ineffectually for ten years. When a French Pope was

182
Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan, Geschichte Siziliens 92-93. The Liber Augustalis was
quickly available in Greek translations, which have the character of official documents.
For this and the Greek influence in Southern Italy, see Thea von der Lieck-Buyken, intro-
duction, Die Konstitutionen Friedrichs II. von Hohenstaufen für sein Königreich Sizilien:
Ergänzungsband, 2 vols. (Köln: Böhlau, 1978) 1: cxxii-clxv; Ernst Kantorowicz, Kaiser
Friedrich der Zweite: Ergänzungsband, Quellennachweise und Excurse (Berlin: Georg
Bondi, 1931) 132-33; Robert Weiss, “The Greek Culture of South Italy in the Later Mid-
dle Ages,” Medieval and Humanist Greek: Collected Essays by Roberto Weiss, ed. Carlo
Dionisotti, Conor Fahy, and John D. Moores (Padova: Antenore, 1977) 13-43; Walter
Berschin, Griechisch-Lateinisches Mittelalter: Von Hieronymus zu Walter von Kues
(Bern: Francke, 1980) 290-93. According to Weiss, “The Hohenstaufens definitely cher-
ished their Greek subjects, who gave them in turn their devoted allegiance. It is therefore
hardly surprising that these Greeks would have wholeheartedly sided with Frederick II in
his desperate struggle against the Papacy, a struggle in which they saw this emperor as
their champion against Latin oppression” (18). Among the Angevin rulers, however, “the
benevolent attitude shown by Frederick II and his son Manfredi could not continue [...].
The policy now was to regard them with suspicion as heretics and as subjects of the Byz-
antine Patriarchy” (19).
183
Mack Smith attributes the economic growth of Frederick’s reign in Sicily to factors out-
side the control of the emperor. Mack Smith, History of Sicily 56-57. For Frederick II’s
‘modern’ administration, see Schulze, Staat und Nation 29-31.
184
Mack Smith, History of Sicily 58-60; Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan, Geschichte Sizili-
ens 94-95.
185
Smith, History of Sicily 65-66; Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan, Geschichte Siziliens 96-
97. Frederick’s testament specified that Conrad IV should succeed him as the emperor as
well as the king of Sicily, but he failed to succeed his father and died, age 26, in 1254. See
Martin Kaufhold, “Die Könige des Interregnum: Konrad IV., Heinrich Raspe, Wilhelm,
Alfons, Richard (1245-1273),” Die deutschen Herrscher des Mittelalters: Historische
Portraits von Heinrich I. bis Maximilian I. (919-1519), ed. Bernd Schneidmüller and Ste-
fan Weinfurter (München: Beck, 2003) 320-23.
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 243

elected, Charles of Anjou, the brother of Louis IX, became king of Sicily.186
Aware of the remaining Hohenstaufen threat, Charles immediately sought ways
to rid himself of Manfred, who had been on the Sicilian throne since 1258 (and
with whose court Guido is primarily associated).187 Manfred could not overcome
Anjou and neither could Conradin, his nephew, who was captured and beheaded
in 1268. Charles was probably chosen because the “popes needed in this case
not a candidate willing to stand for election but a designated warrior determined
to destroy the last vestige of Hohenstaufen claims.”188 Charles did have support-
ers among the Sicilians, but so had the Hohenstaufen, although many of them
had left Sicily. Increasingly, administrative offices went to French bureaucrats
or to Italians from the mainland, who were not better liked. While Charles’s rule
may have been based on that of William II rather than the more authoritarian
style of Frederick, Sicilians, especially the local aristocracy, did not like their
main administration’s move to the mainland (chiefly Naples), and Anjou’s eco-
nomical exploitation of Sicily effected a decline of living conditions for many
Sicilians.189 Charles’s rule is thus often compared to a “military garrison occupy-
ing a resentful province.”190 Support for the Sicilians, albeit in a problematical
form, came from Peter of Aragon, who had married Manfred’s daughter (Con-
stance of Hohenstaufen) and, therefore, could claim the Sicilian crown; he came
to power after the so-called Sicilian Vespers.
The Sicilian Vespers was one of the central events in the second half of thir-
teenth-century Sicily. It was caused by the Angevin army, when the Angevins
insulted a Sicilian woman at the occasion of an organized search for weapons of
the assembled citizens outside the Palermo city walls on 31 March 1282. Popu-
lar hatred immediately unleashed itself and initiated a rebellion in the course of
which allegedly more than one thousand Sicilians of French origin were killed.
Many causes led to this incident, which Guido would certainly have known
about, if he had not witnessed it himself: popular dislike of Charles’s mala si-
gnoria; the wish to return to orderly administrative structures; the movement of
the capital from Palermo to Naples; and the allocation of offices to Angevin
rather than Sicilian bureaucrats. Peter III, under the guise of an African crusade,
arrived at the right time, in August, along with the Aragonese claim to the Ho-
henstaufen throne. The Sicilians were not completely appeased by this either,
since most offices now went to Ghibellines as the main European antagonism

186
For the rule of the Angevins in Sicily, see Salvatore Fodale, “Sizilien B. Das Königreich
Sizilien II. Herrschaft der Anjou und Aragón,” LexMA 7: 1960-64.
187
See Chiàntera, Guido delle Colonne 245.
188
Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages 278.
189
As a result of which “the tensions between the Angevin military forces that now domi-
nated Sicily and the local inhabitants were rarely far from exploding point.” Jordan,
Europe in the High Middle Ages 278-79.
190
Mack Smith, History of Sicily 68.
244 Part Two: Masking Troy

shifted toward the dichotomy between the Ghibelline and Capetian dynasties.191
Peter’s death in 1285 allowed for potential amendments to the Sicilian predica-
ment, especially since many other meddlers in Sicilian affairs also died: Charles
Anjou, Pope Martin V, and Philip III, leaving the throne to Philip IV the Fair.192
The events following the coronation of Peter’s son, James II, in Palermo could
not have been of concern to Guido anymore, since he would have been close to
the end of his life. The political situation held as much promise as uncertainty,
however, during the changeable times in which Guido was working on the His-
toria – and perhaps James II could have well profited from the imperial strate-
gies outlined in the Historia.
James II was unwilling, at first, to surrender the titles to both Sicily and Ara-
gon; he was finally persuaded by the Pope to leave “this distant and unimportant
island to the Angevins.”193 Sicily indeed was in bad shape, as Guido would have
witnessed with worry: the kingdom was bifurcated, since Calabria became part
of Naples, and Sicily now had to compete economically with the latter; ties with
Greece and Africa were thoroughly cut; the well-known University of Naples,
the backbone of the Hohenstaufen monarchy (and boasting a prestigious legal
faculty) was not Sicilian anymore.194 “Even after the peace of 1302 war regu-
larly broke out between the two parts of what had seemed in 1282 to be a firmly
welded political unity.”195 Given the political situation in which Guido was pen-
ning the Historia, it would not be surprising if Guido, like other Italian writers
of his day, would make a case for the re-appropriation of an imperial mask –
Dante being only the most prominent example. Although William Chester Jor-
dan heeds scholars not to over-interpret literary works in terms of political
commentary, he speculates that Dante’s works, primarily De monarchia, “are
explicitly concerned with the overarching political problems and how to correct
them – in Dante’s view by the restoration of strong imperial authority.”196 For
example, in De vulgari eloquentia, in a passage that also mentions Guido,197

191
For Peter’s rule (and its aftermath) in the context of Aragon expansion, see Steven Run-
ciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thir-
teenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1958) esp. 228-79; Ludwig Vones,
Geschichte der Iberischen Halbinsel im Mittelalter (711-1480): Reiche – Kronen – Regio-
nen (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1993) esp. 136-42; Dunbabin, Charles I of Anjou.
192
Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages 281-82.
193
Mack Smith, History of Sicily 77.
194
Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan, Geschichte Siziliens 97-101.
195
Dunbabin, Charles I of Anjou 101-02.
196
Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages 276.
197
Guido and Frederick are mentioned in Dante’s commentary on Italian poetry: “Et primo
de siciliano examinemus ingenium: nam videtur sicilianum vulgare sibi famam pre aliis
asciscere, eo quod quicquid poetantur Ytali sicilianum vocatur, et eo quod perplures doc-
tores indigenas invenimus graviter cecinisse, puta in cantionibus illis ‘Anchor che l’aigua
per lo foco lassi,’ et ‘Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato.’ Sed hec fama trinacrie terre,
si recte signum ad quod tendit inspiciamus, videtur tantum in obproprium ytalorum prin-
cipum remansisse, qui non heroico more sed plebeio secuntur superbiam. Siquidem illu-
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 245

Dante voices his frustration about “the disintegration of the Hohenstaufen in-
heritance in Italy at the hands of what he regards as a multitude of contemptible
princelings.” If, as Charles Till Davis has it, for “Dante, it is Italy that needs the
emperor’s discipline most desperately,”198 then for Guido, it is Sicily that needs
imperial opacity.
In the light of the historical circumstances surrounding Guido’s completion
of the Historia, it is hard to believe that the latter was not influenced by the for-
mer. The Sicilian Vespers must have been a memorable and traumatic event for
Sicilian citizens. Moreover, Guido belonged to those officials most heavily af-
fected by the changes introduced by the Angevin administration, which makes it
likely that he would have advocated a more autonomous, self-confident Sicilian
stance, that is, a return to the Sicily of Frederick II and to the administrative
world of William II. Both rulers procured greater autonomy for Sicily, mainly
since they were able to control the larger territory beyond the regnum as well as
Sicily itself. Despite William’s luxurious lifestyle, Sicily was still a rich king-
dom – rich enough to tolerate the Muslim population, for example, which was
persecuted elsewhere in Europe.199 This period of economic growth was paral-
leled by another development, which would bestow a favorable perspective
upon William and, most of all, Frederick. Among the great novelties of Wil-
liam’s rule was the creation of larger administrative units – such as the Sicilian
provinces of Salerno, Calabria, Apulia – in which the legal matters were in the

stres heroes, Fredericus Cesar et benegenitus eius Manfredus, nobilitatem ac rectitudinem

sue forme pandentes donec fortuna permisit, humana secuti sunt, brutalia dedignates”
[First let us turn our attention to the language of Sicily, since the Sicilian vernacular seems
to hold itself in higher regard than any other, first because all poetry written by Italians is
called ‘Sicilian,’ and then because we do indeed find that many learned natives of that is-
land have written serious poetry, as, for example, in the [i.e., Guido’s] canzoni ‘Anchor
che l’aigua per lo foco lassi’ and ‘Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato.’ But this fame
enjoyed by the Trinacrian isle, if we carefully consider the end to which it leads, seems
rather to survive only as a reproof to the princes of Italy, who are so puffed up with pride
that they live in a plebeian, not a heroic, fashion. Indeed, those illustrious heroes, the Em-
peror Frederick and his worthy son Manfred, knew how to reveal the nobility and integrity
that were in their hearts; and, as long as fortune allowed, they lived in a manner befitting
men, despising the bestial life] (I. xii. 2-4). Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans.
Steven Botterill, Cambridge Medieval Classics (1996; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2005). In a later passage, Dante complains about the son of Manfred’s daughter
Constance and the son of Charles of Anjou, both of whom are also mentioned (dismis-
sively) in Purg. VII, XX and Par. XIX.
198
Charles Till Davis, “Dante and the Empire,” The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed.
Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993) 67, 69. In the Convivio, the em-
peror appears as “the rider of the human will (IV, ix, 10),” controlling people’s cupidity
“that also finds expression in the ambitions of subordinate societies like kingdoms and cit-
ies (IV, iv, 3).” For the political commentary of the Divine Comedy, see Joan F. Ferrante,
The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1984).
199
Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan, Geschichte Siziliens 89-90.
246 Part Two: Masking Troy

hands of administrators and judges like Guido. These offices were staffed with
local ‘aristocrats,’ who still were diverse in origin, a mixture of Greeks, Arabs,
and increasingly Lombardians.200
Guido’s Historia frequently touches on Sicilian issues and endorses strict
imperial rule at a time when Sicily was lacking the latter. As a Sicilian judge, it
would not be surprising had Guido disliked the takeover of important govern-
ment posts by the Angevins. The task of re-translating the Troy story (from the
French vernacular) into Latin, then, would certainly have taken on a new dimen-
sion, especially since the text in question claims Trojan (that is, effeminate) an-
cestry for the Angevins. Guido translates a vernacular text into the language of
Frederick’s empire, the legislative basis of which was outlined in the Latin Liber
Augustalis, the esteemed legal concordance representing the first attempt to lay
down (more than two hundred) specific and detailed laws, incorporating at least
65 laws decreed by Roger II or William II – a clever act of mythical bricolage
on Frederick’s part, honoring his ancestry and testifying to his awareness of mis-
takes in past administrations,201 which, in the context of the Historia, calls to
mind Agamemnon’s suggestion to learn from past mistakes in demanding the
restoration of Helen before commencing the Trojan War. Generally, the Histo-
ria’s concern with imperial opacity appears to owe much to Sicily’s glorious
imperial past (under William and Frederick) which, toward the end of Guido’s
life, had steeply declined. I offer this historical sketch merely as a contextual
argument. There are no immediate sources that conclusively substantiate these
claims; however, Guido’s investigation of Greek opacity and Trojan transpar-
ency as viable means of making selves and nations overlaps with the Sicilian
desire to reestablish (the Hohenstaufen) empire. In addition, the many references
to Sicily throughout the Historia render Sicily a hybrid of (weak) Trojan stock
and (enlightened) Greek imperial rule, whereby opaque prosopagraphy becomes
an issue not of ethnicity but rather of individual choice.

2. Sicilian Poetics: Trojan Nation versus Greek Empire

Questions of Sicilian origins surface especially at the beginning of the Historia.
Increasingly, though, the question is not whether Sicily was originally Greek or
Trojan but whether it could claim the best of both worlds. After the initial con-
fusions about the exact meaning of Magna Graecia (cited above), Guido queries
another potentially Sicilian matter when discussing the location of Thessaly.
Thessaly was a province of Romania, which Guido reads as a gloss for the East-
ern empire, reigned by Peleus and Thetis, Achilles’s parents. The inhabitants are
called Myrmidons. Musing on the name, Guido again wonders if Sicily was ul-
timately Greek:

200
Stürner, Friedrich 1: 32-33. Although Frederick attempted to create a homogeneous soci-
ety by relocating Arabic citizens, his Sicily was still ethnically diverse.
201
Stürner, Friedrich 2: 194.
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 247
Hos Mirmidones illi qui dicere uoluerunt Magnam Greciam, id est Ytaliam, in Troya-
norum excidium aduenisse Aprutinos esse dixerunt, gens quedam uidelicet que in re-
gni Sicilie finibus habitat constituta. Vnde prouincia illa Aprucium dicta est et ciuita-
tem Thetim que in ipsa prouincia sita est a predicta Thetide nomen asserunt assumpsis-
se. Sed sic dicentes perhibentur errare, cum Mirmidones habitatores Thesalie nuncu-
pentur, quorum dominium, post obitum regis Pellei patris sui nactus, Acchilles in
Troyano bello multa cum eis miracula bellicosa peregit. (I, 5)
[Those who wished to say that Magna Graecia, that is Italy, came to overthrow the
Trojans, say these Myrmidons were Abruzzans, a certain people who, it is evident, live
established within the confines of the kingdom of Sicily. For this reason that province
is called Abruzzi, and they assert that the city of Thetis which is located in the same
province has taken its name from the aforesaid Thetis. But those who make this claim
are believed to be in error, since the inhabitants of Thessaly are given the name Myr-
midons, and when Achilles had succeeded to the throne after the death of his father,
King Peleus, he accomplished with them many wonderful deeds in battle in the Trojan
War.]
Guido’s reflection on the original habitat of the Myrmidons can be again seen as
an attempt to represent divergent (historical) opinions. Yet, the continual inquiry
into Italy’s (and Sicily’s) potential Greek origin would not be without effect on
(Sicilian) readers. A similar excursus occurs in Book XIII, when Achilles and
Telephus are sent to Messa in order to procure provisions for the Greeks. Messa,
Guido argues, could well have been Messina: “Plerique enim dicere voluerunt
hanc fuisse Siciliam, que in multorum uictualium fertilitate fuit semper habun-
dans, dicta Messa a ciuitate Messana existente in ipsa, que, sita in introitu ipsius
insule ex parte litorum regnorum [...]” [Many have wished to say that this was
Sicily, which was always overflowing with an abundance of many provisions,
and was called Messa from the city Messina in it, which is located at the en-
trance of this island on part of the coast of the kingdom...] (XIII, 111). Admit-
tedly, Messa’s name may also stem from one King Messanus, which seems
momentarily the likelier explanation for the narrator, since the latter realm is
closer to Greece. Nevertheless, Guido stresses that Sicily was once subject to
Greek rule: “Que, cum forte sit alia a Sicilia, potuit esse Grecis magis propinqua
quam insula Sicilie, que erat eis ualde remota, licet hoc ratum sit quod Sicilia
subiecta fuerit dicioni Grecorum” (XIII, 111). Meek further observes that
Guido’s reference to a place abounding in provisions appositely describes
Messina.202 The political overtones of these geographical and etymological ex-
planations gains momentum when considering how the question is contextual-
ized, namely, within a story dealing with rebellion and imperial obedience.
After the Greeks arrive on his island, King Theutras immediately commences
battle with them at the price of his life. When Achilles is about to administer the
fatal blow to the already mortally injured king, Telephus intervenes. It comes to
light that Telephus and Theutras are related through Telephus’s father. Since
Theutras is related to a Greek king, he is part of the Greek empire, wherefore his
actions against the Greeks cannot be construed as self-defense but as a rebellion.
202
Meek 298n, with reference to Mack Smith, History of Sicily 30-31, 55-57.
248 Part Two: Masking Troy

On his deathbed, Theutras bequeaths his kingdom to Hercules, Telephus’s fa-

ther, re-integrating the island into the Greek empire; Telephus stays behind as
the new ruler. Coming back to the question of whether Messa is Messina, Guido
reports that Hercules came to Sicily, where, in the ‘barbarian’ parts, he is re-
puted to have erected his famous pillars. While there is no certainty about this,
Guido now turns to Frederick II, the prince of the “Roman Republic and king of
Sicily,” who certainly piled up land in that area (XIII, 113-14). The Historia
thus creates an imperial framework which may allude to a contemporary event.
Given the mentioned triangular references (that is, Messa is Messina; Theutras’s
rebellion against Greece is introduced qua Hercules; Hercules may have been to
Sicily, heaping up land exactly where Frederick did the same), the rebellion in
question might well have been the 1232 Messina rebellion, which occurred dur-
ing Frederick’s absence, and which was caused by popular dissatisfaction with a
judge – Richard of Montenigro. The judge, threatened by the rebellion, left the
island without battle, and when Frederick II returned, he could quickly appease
the citizens, arresting and executing the leaders of the rebellion. Whatever the
exact causes for this rebellion, parallels are undeniable. The empire, represented
by Achilles and Telephus, brought into line a rebellious island, which is overtly
likened to Messina qua etymology and allusions to Hercules and Frederick. By
means of these allusions, Hohenstaufen imperial politics are offered as a viable
model to counter resistance.203 Although the Historia remains ambivalent as to
the Greek ancestry of Sicily, it certainly translates Greek imperial politics into a
Sicilian framework as an efficient way of stifling dissent.
Guido’s ambivalence concerning Sicily’s Greek past also surfaces in the
above cited discussion about the origin of the Myrmidons. After delineating op-
posing views, Guido interrogates his sources in order to substantiate either
claim. Relaying that the inhabitants of Thessaly, among them Achilles, are
called Myrmidons, Guido, unlike Benoît, turns to Ovid:
Dixit enim hos Mirmidones in viio Methamorphoseos fuisse formicas, ad preces regis
Thesalie diis porrectas in homines transformatas, [...]. Qui dum in quodam nemore iux-
ta radices cuiusdam arboris adhesisset, inspectis ibidem innumerabilium formicarum
discurrentibus aciebus, in homines redigi suppliciter postulauit. (I, 5-6)
[For he said in Book VII of the Metamorphoses that these Myrmidons were ants trans-
formed into men by prayers directed to the gods by a king of Thessaly.... He was near
the roots of a certain tree in a certain grove when he noticed in the same place the scur-
rying lines of innumerable ants, and he prayed humbly that they be made into men.]
203
For the 1232 rebellion, see Stürner, Friedrich 2: 263-66. Meek does not comment on pos-
sible references to Sicilian politics here. She compares the description of the Greek camp
– depicted much less luxuriously than in the Roman – in Book XIV to the forces of Char-
les of Anjou camping outside of Messina, however (299n). Guido’s omission of Benoît’s
ornaments may reflect the sober style of the Greeks, who place imperial rule over luxury.
Frederick II, too, favored defense bastions to luxurious castles. See Carl A. Willemsen,
“Die Bauten Kaiser Friedrich II. in Süditalien,” Die Zeit der Staufer: Geschichte – Kunst –
Kultur; Bd. 3: Aufsätze, ed. Württembergisches Landesmuseum (Stuttgart: Württembergi-
sches Landesmuseum, 1977) 143-63.
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 249

Unlike other references to Ovidian texts in the Historia, this episode is associ-
ated with military strength, which seems to contradict the association of Ovid-
ianism and fickleness. Even so, the marvelous transformation of ants into men
evokes the image of helpless Priam toward the end of the Historia, when the
Trojan ruler, in the light of too many Greek victories, desperately whishes he
had more support. Of greater importance is the kind of support envisioned here.
As Meek observes, the passage is ambiguous because “as a military term agmen
is practically synonymous with acies.”204 Thus, the Greeks are supported by a
‘cloned’ army, consisting of subservient fighters, who, as in the Metamorphoses,
are not likely to ask too many questions and will remain loyal to their leader;
they become disseminators of the imperial mask. Guido’s etymological rumina-
tions further ensue in front of the background of Achilles’s military successes
(often achieved with the help of the Myrmidons), pointing forward to the end of
the work. The Ovidian borrowing sheds little light on the question of Sicilian
origins with which Guido begins this chapter, but rather embeds questions of
military organization and government in a geographical, historical excursus.
Guido’s reconstruction of Sicilian history continues. He introduces (unspeci-
fied) ‘authorities’ according to whom Chieti, a city under Sicilian rule, is
whence Thetis and the Myrmidons originate. Another source is meant to shed
more light on the matter. Finally, Apostle Matthew is mentioned as maintaining
that the Myrmidons lived in Thessaly, not in Sicily. For Christian readers, this is
ultimately a more reliable source – more reliable, that is, than Ovidian fables.
And yet, Guido’s conclusion that those who believe that the Myrmidons are Si-
cilian “are believed to be in error” is not exactly the strongest refutation imagi-
nable. The Ovidian source becomes at once fabulous invention but, in admitting
uncertainty about the real place of the Myrmidons’ origin, enables the associa-
tion of an ironically un-Ovidian Sicily and Greek military prowess. Guido’s
Myrmidons become a hybrid ‘site’ for identification, associating the Greeks
with opaque prosopagraphy while connecting Sicilians with the same military
aptitude should Ovid be wrong in geographical terms. Guido does not even have
to discredit his sources, since the framework of reference is so ambiguous that
no authority could allege that he is forging historical evidence; and through the
backdoor, Guido furthers the correlation of Greek imperial rule with Sicilian
origins and politics.
The ambiguous concern with origins emerges again at the beginning of the
second book, in a more obvious imperial context. Guido opens with a seemingly

204
Meek 270n. Lateinisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch, s.vv. acies II. b and agmen II. 1 & 2;
Latin Dictionary, s.vv. acies I. 2 and agmen II. Book VII of the Metamorphoses includes
Aecus’s story about a plague in Aegina which destroys farm animals and farmers alike.
Aecus wishes to die along with his people and complains to Jupiter about the human
wreckage. Having voiced his wish for new citizens, the miraculous transformation ensues,
providing him with them. Once they are of age, they will be good soldiers: “hi te ad bella
pares annis animisque sequentur” (Met. VII. 658).
250 Part Two: Masking Troy

conventional passage about the Trojan birth of nations, the translatio imperii, in
which he muses on the many Greek deaths, which spoiled the fruits of victory:
Sane si diis tot mala grata fuerunt, primordialis causa tamen eorum, tam nulla tam leu-
is, animos non immerito perturbat humanos vt pro culpa tam leui tante acerbitatis pena
meruisset infligi, nisi benigne forsitan diceretur ut procedentis mali congeries esset
boni hedificatio subsequentis, cum ab hiis malis per Troye casum tanta bona processe-
runt vt ipsa Troya deleta insurexerit, causa per quam Romana vrbs, que caput est vrbi-
um, per Troyanos exules facta extitit uel promota, per Heneam scilicet et Ascanium
natum eius, dictum Iulium. (II, 11)
[Even if these many woes were pleasing to the gods, still, the original cause of these
things, as trifling as unimportant, rightly troubles the human hearts; that is, that a
punishment of such severity had to be inflicted for such a trivial fault, unless perhaps it
might be said in justification that the amount of evil which took place was the basis for
good to come, since so much good has proceeded from these evils connected with the
fall of Troy. Though Troy itself was completely destroyed, it rose again, and its de-
struction was the reason that the city of Rome, which is the chief of cities, came into
existence, being built and extended by the Trojan exiles, by Aeneas, that is, and As-
canius his son, called Julius.]
Guido approaches the translatio imperii with the ambiguity familiar from his
previous reflections on the origins of Sicily. Again, I argue that he intends to
negotiate a middle ground between Greek rule and Trojan fickleness. While
Guido may favor imperial opacity, he cannot directly claim Greek origins for
Sicily – rulers, such as William II and Frederick II, were continually at war with
Constantinople. Claiming Trojan origin for Sicily is likewise problematic since
Trojan-style rule frequently proves to be catastrophic. In the above quotation,
Guido follows the received notion of the translatio imperii, which he would
have known through Otto of Freising (and Virgil),205 according to whom Troy
fell and rose again in Rome. He retains the Trojan foundations of the cities also
included in Otto’s listing: Rome, France, Venice, and Apulia, expanding this
with other sources, for example, with Isidore and Ovid for Diomedian founda-
tions, adding Britain (a foundation story originating with Nennius and Geoffrey
of Monmouth) which has prompted speculations about whether Guido had been
to Britain (Meek 275n). In several instances, however, Guido’s Historia differs
from Otto’s Chronica as concerns the report of national foundations. While
Guido is indecisive about whether the good outweighs the bad, he is certain
about the foundations where Otto is not. Otto chiefly adheres to Virgil when re-
laying that Rome was founded by a misplaced Trojan and, like Guido, Otto
questions whether Aeneas is really a hero. Relegating the veracity of this infor-
mation to Virgil, he is doubtful if the Franks are related to the Trojans. Initially,
he writes, “Ferunt etiam Francorum gentem ab eis traxisse principium” [Also
the Franks are said to stem from the Trojans]. Ulysses, however, is credited with
the foundation of Lisbon and Gallia (Troyes), which casts doubt on his previous
assertion that the Franks stem from Franco, the foundation of Xanten: “Hic in

205
Meek suggests that Otto’s Chronica is the source for this passage (274-75n).
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 251

Hispania Ulixibonam [...] et in Gallia Troiam, de sua supra mentio facta est,
primus con-didisse dicitur. Quare et hoc, quod de Francone traditu, ficticium
videtur” [Ulysses, so it is said, has founded Lisbon in Spain and the mentioned
Troy in Gallia. Therefore, what has been transmitted above about Franco seems
to be a fable].206 Notably, Ulysses – one of Guido’s ‘stars’ – is not credited with
the foundation of France in the Historia. Ulysses’s rhetoric of opacity may be
one reason for this omission (which is further consistent with Sicily’s problems
with the Angevins). Guido is primarily interested in Italian foundations, though,
and he might have adapted from the Chronica Antenor’s foundation of Venice.
Yet, Antenor is a Trojan ultimately adoptive of the Greek imperial mask. Inter-
estingly, Guido is more specific than his sources concerning this foundation;
Otto queries whether Virgil’s Patavium is Venice, offering alternatives with
Poitiers and Passau. Guido continues with Sicanus, leaving Siculus (his brother)
in charge of Sicily in order to move on to Tuscany. Since Benoît does not men-
tion Sicanus, Guido has little else to report on the issue.
Guido next turns to Aeneas and his multiple Italian foundations, including
Naples and Gaeta,207 before the focus shifts to Diomedes who, while not of Tro-
jan stock, defended ‘Troy’ after it had been sacked. Promptly, Guido reports
(from Isidore) that the Diomedian birds shy away from the Latin people, flock-
ing to the Greek inhabitants of Calabria. Ovid’s story of how Circe changed
Diomedes’s companions into birds also can be validated by Christian narrative,
but doubts remain.208 Ultimately, the Historia, in its intricate combination of
sources, authorizes the story about the Diomedian birds qua Isidore. Unlike
Otto, Guido believes Diomedes founded Calabria (rather than Apulia).209 If the
Historia indeed reflects contemporary political issues, this reading is interesting
in the light of William II’s reform, which created larger administrative units
(among these Calabria) with their own legal and organizational structures. In
any case, Calabria is associated with Greek rather than Trojan lineage. The men-
tioned foundations then are only problematically Trojan: Diomedes was Greek;
Aeneas and Antenor were turncoats, who adopted the opaque, imperial mask;
the only truly Trojan hero would be Sicanus, for whom Guido lacks biographical
information beyond the thin etymological argument (which he generally discred-
its in the first place). By means of mythical bricolage, Guido focuses on those
‘Trojan’ foundations, with the possible exception of Sicanus, by knights who
adopted the imperial mask. Moreover, Guido’s translatio imperii, save for Brit-
ain (which had cultural ties with Sicily during Guido’s lifetime), does not move

206
Otto Bischof von Freising, Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus / Chronik oder die
Geschichte der zwei Staaten, ed. Walther Lammers, trans. Adolf Schmidt (Darmstadt:
WBG, 1960) I: 25, 26. See further Meek, introduction xvi-xvii.
207
Otto is doubtful of Virgil’s attribution of Rome to Trojan origins (Chronica I, 26).
208
Otto introduces the Diomedian birds with a general disclaimer about the doubtful truthful-
ness of fables, which proliferate in history books (Chronica I, 26).
209
Otto, Chronica II, 12.
252 Part Two: Masking Troy

further westward than Sicily. Significantly, Guido neglects to mention the Tro-
jan foundations in France.210
The context in which Guido discusses the translatio imperii merits attention
as well, since it is embedded in the question of what benefit the Trojan War may
have had for the present. Human hearts, he writes, are troubled by such a ques-
tion: “animos non immerito perturbat humanos” (II, 11). Meek translates animus
as heart, with reference to the locus of the essence or soul,211 that is, the location
of higher ranking ethical goods. While initially the focus is on the troubled heart
(animus), a decisive transfer takes place at the end of this passage, when the
troubles shift location from the heart to the mind (mens): “Sed si tante proditio-
nis causa fuerit subsequentis boni causa finalis humana mens habet in dubio”
[But the human mind is uncertain whether the cause of such a great betrayal was
finally the cause of subsequent good] (II, 12). Head conquers heart once
again.212 Guido’s hybrid narrative of Sicilian origins stresses the importance of
imperial opacity, the adoption of which could prevent Sicily from turning into
yet another unimportant ‘nation’ within, or even worse, without the empire.213
Guido’s national bricolage connects conceptually (more precisely, metonym-
ically) to Sicilian problems. When describing the Greek warriors at the outset of
the war, Guido includes a brief description of the origins of Helen. As so often
with Guido, this description of the pagan world is rationalized by means of to-
pographical references. Helen’s name, Guido claims, is a derivative of Tyndaris,
a place in Sicily (IV, 33). Guido offers the Ovidian source as evidence, putting
the fickle poet of changeability to good (imperial) use again. Helen’s vita illus-

210
Perhaps Guido’s readership would have been more interested in the Sicilian origins than
that of France or Britain. The quick reckoning with Francus ultimately squares with
Guido’s silencing of his source, though – and the probable dislike of the Angevins.
211
See Chapter Seven, above, and Jager, Book of the Heart 8, 31-32.
212
It is tempting to read this as a metaphorical representation of the monarchical state. In his
essay on the heart as a political metaphor, Le Goff remarks that the heart “had become the
center, the metaphorical center of the body politic. The centrality attributed to the heart
expresses the evolution of the monarchical state in which the most important thing is the
centralization that is taking place around the prince, not the vertical hierarchy expressed
by the head, and even less the idea of unity – the union between the spiritual and the tem-
poral characteristic of an outmoded Christianity that is breaking into a thousand pieces.”
Le Goff, “Head or Heart?” 22. Guido’s ruminations revert exactly to the old, vertical hier-
archy of the head, associated with the metaphor of God (the Pope) at the top of the body
politic. This is consistent with the choice of Latin and the transformation of a vernacular
text into imperial ‘epic.’
213
At the beginning of Book IV, Guido also rationalizes creation myths by locating them
geographically rather than following the fictitious stories of the poets (“dogmatizauerunt
poete” and “fabulose poete”). The description of the departure of the Greeks, which is
original with Guido, bears similarities to the opening of the Canterbury Tales (Meek
281n). Since empire is what is at stake in Guido, Chaucer’s pilgrimage can be likened to a
military outing beyond Canterbury (toward France), for which see John Bowers, “Chaucer
at Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author,” Postcolonial Middle Ages,
ed. Cohen 53-66.
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 253

trates that allegiance to empire is not a matter of family or ethnicity – as also

testified by Sicily’s ethnic diversity which did not adversely affect Frederick’s
rule. According to Guido, Helen is a changeable, Ovidian woman, but unlike
other fickle females, she is able to successfully adopt the respective collective
masks in both camps, that is, she learns to perform the roles social norms im-
pose on women in Greece and Troy. Her eventual reconciliation with Menelaus
(XXX, 235) testifies to her ability to adopt masks consistently. She metaphori-
cally represents Sicily in reverse: Greek in origin, she is able to live among the
Trojans, she even adopts their transparent ‘mask,’ for example, when she faints
twenty times after learning about Paris’s death (XXVII, 211, and see above).
Helen’s incorporation of Greek and Trojan assets is further analogous to the hy-
bridity Guido wants to bestow upon Sicily. If Sicily was a weak nation before
the Sicilian Vespers, it can now benefit from the adoption of imperial opacity. In
conceptual terms, Sicily is not Troy, but it is like Troy and has to be rebuilt im-
perially.214 This necessary reconstruction of Sicily can profitably orient itself on
the foundation of Rome at the hands of Aeneas, who successfully adopts the im-
perial mask.

214
Guido’s description of the rebuilt Troy likewise combines Sicilian and Trojan attributes.
Meek suspects that Guido maintains Benoît’s description of an awesome Troy since what
seemed exotic to Benoît was real for Guido (282-83n). Troy is, for example, associated
with the silk industry (“gineciarii”), for which Sicily was as famous as Calabria – associ-
ated with Diomedes, that is, the Greeks – and which Frederick had promoted. Mack
Smith, History of Sicily 58. The association of Troy with the silk industry thus alludes to
both Greece (Calabria) and Troy. The Historia also compares the river Xanthus to the Ti-
ber (V, 48-49), which associates Sicily with Rome in terms of imperial relevance. Accord-
ing to Meek, Priam’s palace bears resemblance to the Royal Palace in Palermo (V, 46-48;
285-86n). Notably, Benoît modifies his source as concerns the settlement of the second
Troy. In the Roman, people flocked to Troy because of the city’s beauty, not because of
Priam’s ‘decree’ (V, 49), which might be due to Guido’s recollection of “the way Freder-
ick II forced the relocation of thousands of Sicilians” (286n). This underlines Guido’s
mythical bricolage, since the association of Priam with Frederick is rather unflattering. Al-
though Frederick attempted to homogenize the population of the city by excluding Islamic
elements, however, his Sicily included Greeks and Lombards, who settled in the under-
populated areas of Sicily (Mack Smith, History of Sicily 58-59), whereas Priam populates
Troy with people from neighboring kingdoms, which are not specified as being racially
diverse. The combination of Trojan and Greek elements surfaces again in the description
of the entertainments to be enjoyed in the newly-built city. The Historia mentions that
dice were invented in Troy, equating Troy with chance. Likewise tragedy and comedy are
listed as important inventions, which, according to other authorities (namely, Isidore),
were invented in Sicily (V, 49). Interestingly, Guido translates Benoît’s remark that games
flourished in Troy as games being invented in Troy, which Meek believes to be a misread-
ing (286n). Games, though, “[...] humanis aspectibus solatia delectationis inger(r)ere ad
exillarandas intuentium uoluntates [...]” [bring the delights of pleasure before the faces of
men] (V, 49). In other words, games make visible emotionality, that is, Trojan transpar-
ency. For differences between Benoît’s and Guido’s accounts of the rebuilt city, see also
Malcolm Hebron, The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 110.
254 Part Two: Masking Troy

3. Sicilian Men: Aeneas versus Troy

In the course of the Historia, treacherous Aeneas becomes a hybrid individual,
who realizes and illustrates the benefits of imperial opacity. In Book XII, in the
course of which the Greek messengers fruitlessly ask for the restoration of
Helen, Priam’s weak rule is heavily punctuated by Aeneas’s open disagreement
with him, which allows Guido to introduce a short biographical sketch. The
founder of Rome is the son of Anchises and Venus. After the Trojan War, he
flees to become the prince of the city of Rome and the Roman Republic, and the
great Augustus is his descendant. Aeneas first governed the city and then the
Roman Republic in imperial rule: “post multos successus Romane urbis et Ro-
manorum rei publice factus est princeps, de cuius stirpe inclitus ille magnus Ce-
sar Augustus in magna felicitate processit. [...] qui primus rem publicam Roma-
norum imperiali quasi sceptro imperialiter gubernauit” (XII, 109-10). For a thir-
teenth-century Sicilian reader, the titles of Caesar and Augustus would be famil-
iar from Frederick II, who claimed both titles.215 In the same passage, Guido re-
ports that Justinian mentions Aeneas in an imperial context in his Liber Autenti-
corum, a book of laws like the Liber Augustalis, which suggests an analogical
relationship between Augustus/Caesar and Aeneas/Frederick II, underlining the
contemporary relevance of the Historia and its potential appeal to Sicily’s impe-
rial past (including both the Augustan and the Hohenstaufen empire).
Aeneas’s important imperial role is further stressed in Guido’s admiration for
Virgil, the poet of empire. While Virgil’s poetological relevance has been al-
ready touched upon, the quoted passage furthers the parallel between Virgil and
Guido, that was already insinuated in Book V. The portrait of Aeneas’s life ends
with Guido’s assertion that Virgil was unable to finish his work since he died in
the midst of composing it (XII, 110) – a ‘fact’ to be found in traditional (medie-
val) biographies of the Roman poet. In my opinion, the inclusion of this infor-
mation furthers the parallelism of Virgil’s and Guido’s imperial tasks since, at
the end of the Historia, Guido worries that he might perish before finishing his
task as well. He would have liked to use a more elaborate style to pen his his-
tory, “sed territus ex magnitudine operis, ne dum occasione magis ornati dicta-
minis opus ipsum longa narraccione protraherem, infra cuius temporis longitu-
dinem aliqua michi superuenissent incomoda, prout est fragilitatis humane uel
mutacio uoluntatis, propter quod cessassem ab opere et opus ipsum suum non
peruenisset ad finem, vtpote sui carens beneficio complementi” [but frightened
by the magnitude of the task, lest I prolong this work by a long narration on the
pretext of a more decorated style, and during this long period something unto-
ward would happen to me, in accordance with human weakness or change of
purpose, on account of which I would have desisted from the work and the work
would not come to an end, and would lack the advantage of being complete]

215
Stürner, Friedrich 2: 250-52.
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 255

(XXXV, 276).216 This not only underscores Guido’s Virgilian aspiration, it fur-
ther situates change and changeability as something detrimental to his own life
and to the purpose of the work. Aeneas’s life is not of pivotal importance to the
work he translates, especially since Virgil is more of a poet than a historian.
Nevertheless, he attributes much importance to Aeneas’s and Virgil’s destinies,
since he refers his readers no less than three times to Virgil’s Aeneid should they
want to learn more about the Roman hero (V, 45; XII, 109-110; XXXII, 252).
Guido thus confers the same authority of imperial narrative on his Historia that
he understood to be at work in Virgil’s Aeneid.217 Guido writes in Latin – the
language of both the Augustan and Hohenstaufen empires – about a Trojan trai-
tor later to lay claim to the Roman empire.218 Given Guido’s mythical bricolage
with regard to Sicilian and Roman issues, the Historia increasingly has a ring of
a Fürstenspiegel, with decidedly Machiavellian overtones.219

216
Note Guido’s reference to himself in terms of “fragilitatis humane uel mutacio uoluntatis,”
which is already indicative of the necessary faultlines in the contradiction-free narratives
for which all ideologies inevitably strive. The Virgilian, imperial Historia can only come
about because of Guido’s employment of Ovidian narrative techniques, however.
217
Besides the fact that Guido generally believes Virgil to be more truthful than other ancient
‘fictions,’ the last reference to Virgil’s epic concerning the life of Aeneas after the siege of
Troy, ensues in an Italian context: “Sed uoluntate deorum cum suis nauibus pontum intrat,
et tamdiu per peregrina maria nauigauit quod peruenit Ytaliam et in Thusciam se recepit.
De processibus autem Henee particularibus, qualiter sibi successerit post recessum eius a
Troya, et qualiter sibi contigerit postquam peregrinari desiit ex quo uenit in Thusciam,
presens hystoria non describit. Sed qui eorum voluerit habere noticiam legat Uirgilium in
Eneydos” [But by the will of the gods he entered the ocean with his ships, and he sailed
for a long time through foreign seas until he reached Italy and went to Tuscany. The pre-
sent history does not tell about the particular adventures of Aeneas, however, and how it
turned out for him after his departure from Troy and what happened to him after he ceased
to voyage, that is, from the time when he came to Tuscany. But he who wishes to have
knowledge of these things should read Virgil in the Aeneid] (XXXII, 252). For the recep-
tion of Aeneas in the Middle Ages, see also Reinhold, “Unhero Aeneas.”
218
For the Latin Liber Augustalis and its translation into Greek, see Mack Smith, History of
Sicily 53; Finley, Mack Smith, and Duggan, Geschichte Siziliens 93.
219
Most of Guido’s successful individuals, such as Ulysses and Aeneas, illustrate that impe-
rial longevity can be achieved by opaque prosopagraphy. In rendering opaque his French
source and in liberally reshaping the narrative to his own ends, Guido himself emerges as
particularly adept in masking his intentions, while simultaneously providing the rhetorical
means necessary for the fabrication of opacity. Ulysses’s and Aeneas’s rhetorical exer-
cises furnish the quintessential Machiavellian lessons that rulers occasionally must dis-
semble to maintain their power: “every man may come to see what thou seemest, few
come to perceive and understand what thou art.” See Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince:
Reprinted from the Translation by Edward Dacres Published in 1640, ed. and introd. W.
E. C. Baynes (London: De La More Press, 1929) 81. For Machiavelli’s role in humanist
politics and court criticism more generally, see Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar:
From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (2002; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003) 62-91;
Claus Uhlig, Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters: Studien zu einem Gemeinplatz der eu-
ropäischen Moralistik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973).
256 Part Two: Masking Troy

In the medieval tradition, Aeneas is usually portrayed not as a hero, but as a

traitor, even if he is celebrated by Virgil. The aspect of treachery, however, is
downplayed in the Historia. Admittedly, when Anchises, Antenor (founder of
Venice), and Aeneas approach Priam with their plan to restore Helen to the
Greeks, this can proceed only from guile and treachery, argues Guido. Yet, the
description of their treachery is framed by indictments of Trojan fickleness and
Priam’s weak rule. Guido grumbles that it would have been a happy circum-
stance, indeed, if the Greeks were willing to grant such a wish, which would
have enabled Priam to save his life, that of his wife, his family, et cetera. This
passage could have easily been extended into a critique of Greek (and Trojan)
treachery, but the employment of treachery is only the logical extension, the
translatio of individuals’ opaque prosopagraphy onto the workings of empire,
which should not be castigated. Rather, the necessity of adopting imperial opac-
ity is emphasized: The Greeks could not possibly accept not destroying the city,
which is technically theirs anyway. Furthermore, it is Priam’s problematic rule
which prompts Trojan treachery in the first place. Priam could have accepted a
deal, for instance, when Agamemnon offered to discuss peaceful options while
the Greek army was still at Tenedos. As the proverbs say, however, treaties can
only be negotiated at the beginnings of conflicts, not toward their end:
Post dampna enim et personarum dispendia quis potest ad concordiam illum pocius
declinare qui pocior est in obtinendo de discordia uoto suo? Sane quis posset pro certo
tenere Grecos uelle tali concordie consentire post tanta eorum dampna, tot eorum nobi-
libus interfectis, tanta subiisse propterea dispendia et iacturas, et nunc precipue qui in
spe manifesta sunt positi eos esse debere de presenti bello uictores, ut secundum euo-
rum intentum credant vniuersos Troyanos morti tradere et ciuitatem Troye funditus in
ruinam? Quare manifeste conicitur consilium predictorum ex solo dolo procedere, ut
sub ipsius pacis tractatus uelamine habilitatem captent et habeant proditores prodendi
ciuitatem eorum, si se alio more saluare non possunt. (XXIX, 219)
[For after the injuries and losses of life, who can incline himself to agreement who is
better able to obtain his wish by disagreement? Who could hold it certain that the
Greeks would wish to consent to such an agreement after their great injuries, with so
many of their nobles slain, and after they had on this account been subjected to so
many losses and setbacks, and now especially, when they were placed in the manifest
hope that they would be victors in this present war, so that they believed that according
to their intent they would deliver all the Trojans to death and the city of Troy to com-
plete ruin? For this reason the counsel of these men is conjectured to have proceeded
solely from guile, so that under the cover of treating for peace, these traitors could
seize the opportunity to betray their city, if they could save themselves by no other
way].
The treachery ensues from considerations of imperial logic. Once an enemy has
been conquered, they should not recover their original strength; the fact that the
Trojans were capable of rebuilding their city after the first destruction was an
important lesson for the Greeks. The positioning of treachery within the frame-
work of imperial policy marks the moment when Aeneas and Antenor adopt the
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 257

imperial mask which not only ensures the durability of empire but also marks
the substitution of a weak ruler, who continuously ignored good advice.
The Historia’s characterization of Aeneas is reminiscent of the Chronica,
which mentions a heroic Aeneas who is referred to as a traitor by others.220
Guido’s depiction is ultimately less unfavorable, however, since Aeneas be-
comes a male counterpart of Guido’s female ‘go-betweens.’ Aeneas is not like
Briseida, whose changeability Guido condemns, muting the counter-national
potential of Benoît’s Roman; rather, Aeneas is, like Helen, successful in adopt-
ing and maintaining the imperial mask. In contrast to Helen, though, he is not an
Ovidian woman, necessitating masculine, Virgilian control. Aeneas’s position
in-between camps already evolves in his genealogy: he is the son of Venus (the
Ovidian goddess of love), as Guido finds written in the Aeneid, which opens
with the ‘iron’ overtones associated with Mars. In the Historia, Aeneas is indeed
first subject to Trojan cupidity before changing toward the adoption of the impe-
rial mask. In Book VIII, for instance, the reader learns about the prerequisite
skill for the adoption of imperial opacity – Aeneas is eloquent: “Eloquentia mul-
ta refulsit, sanis consiliis satis plenus, mirabiliter sapiens, et multa litteratura pe-
ritus” (VIII, 86). The Historia’s first exemplification of Aeneas’s eloquence,
however, is problematic. Aeneas rudely interrupts Priam’s response to the Greek
delegation, demanding that a fool (Diomedes) should be answered accordingly;
in Aeneas’s opinion, Priam handles the Greek embassy too tolerantly, and he
publicly challenges Priam’s leadership, drawing attention to the latter’s weak
rule (XII, 108-09). Aeneas’s rhetorical abilities are rendered less ambiguously
when he prudently advises the Trojans not to kill the prisoner Thoas; Priam dis-
agrees, but nevertheless follows Aeneas’s counsel (XVIII, 155-56). The decision
to exchange Thoas rather than to kill him, which is seconded by Hector, com-
plies with the imperial mask insofar as the desire to kill the adversary gives way
to the rational reflection upon the prisoner’s exchange value, which can be util-
ized to improve the Trojan position. Not only is Aeneas rhetorically talented, he
realizes for the second time that Priam’s uncontrollable emotionality does not
further the Trojan cause. In the mentioned negotiations about Aeneas and An-
tenor’s treacherous plan, Guido illustrates Aeneas’s imperial tendencies yet
again. For example, he restrains Amphimachus with gentle words (“multum
uerbis dulcibus”), after the latter accused Aeneas and Antenor of treachery on

220
Otto, Chronica I, 25: “Hinc Romanorum gentem duxisse originem ab Enea profugo et, ut
ipse adulatur, viro forti – ut vero ab aliis traditur, patriae proditore ac nicromantico, utpote
qui etiam uxorem suam diis suis immolaverit – scribit Virgilius” [Virgil reports that the
Roman people originate there, that is, from Aeneas. He was a fugitive and, as he calls him
flatteringly, a virtuous hero – others report, however, that he was a betrayer of his country
and a necromancer, since he even sacrificed his own wife to his gods]. See also Meek, in-
troduction xvi-xvii. That both Chronica and Historia find agreement on this issue indi-
cates that this is an accepted point within Hohenstaufen historiography. The reception of
Aeneas in different traditions invites further study with respect to questions of developing
collective identities.
258 Part Two: Masking Troy

account of their belief that negotiations with the Greeks would be the only vi-
able solution, since military victory was unthinkable. At this point, Priam’s
emotions become uncontrollable. His heart (“hec animi sui mot<us>”) pene-
trates through his rhetorical masks (XXIX, 220-21). It is only after Priam’s out-
burst, in the course of which he blames Aeneas’s rather than his own weakness,
that Aeneas is also aroused to anger. At the same time, the scene illustrates
Aeneas’s difficulties to reconcile personal desires and collective necessities. Un-
like Hector or Troilus, however, he is able to construct opacity when needed.
Priam’s attempt to have the traitors killed again evinces the problems with
Trojan transparency. Amphimachus’s plan cannot be kept secret in what I have
characterized above as the Trojan motto: ‘there is nothing hidden which cannot
be revealed.’ While Aeneas and Antenor’s treachery does not remain entirely
concealed, their scheme can be implemented nonetheless, chiefly because they
are capable of constructing (imperial) opacity. In fact, it is precisely when
Priam’s plan to kill the traitors is revealed that Aeneas and Antenor decide to
betray the city – at which point Guido emphasizes that Aeneas equals the king in
power and has a large following (as does Antenor): “Erat enim tunc Heneas ual-
de potens in ciuitate Troye in consanguineis et amicis et nullus de ciuibus dicior
erat eo, adeo quod regis potencie poterat coequari; similiter et Anthenor”
(XXIX, 222). Aeneas is as powerful as Priam, but he is not part of the imperial
family – the Historia mutes Aeneas’s association with Priam’s family; Aeneas is
not subject to the familial principle. Moreover, most Trojans agree with
Aeneas’s proposition to negotiate with the Greeks, a proposition that crystallizes
the difference between Priam’s changeability and emotionality and Greek ra-
tionality, between Trojan transparency and Greek opacity. Aeneas recognizes
the potential of imperial mask making.
Guido favors the circulation of an imperial mask which warrants a maximum
of stability, putting into service other narratives that may potentially contradict
imperial ideology. Even for Aeneas, however, the imperial mask is not adopted
without difficulties. During the second destruction of Troy, Aeneas encounters
Hecuba and Polyxena, who try to evade Greek captivity. Hecuba accuses
Aeneas of treachery and blames him for the fall of Troy. Aeneas reacts emotion-
ally: “Ad Heccube igitur uerba motus Heneas Polixenam suscipit et eam inco-
gnite secum ducit, quam in secreto loco consignat” [Moved by the words of
Hecuba, Aeneas received Polyxena from her and took her with him without
anyone’s knowledge, and consigned her to a secret place] (XXX, 234). Aeneas’s
attempt to conceal Polyxena is not without consequence since his transgression
against imperial politics is soon discovered, and Aeneas is exiled (XXXI, 240).
What troubles Aeneas more than his exile is the fact that Antenor could move
around freely. By means of his eloquence and by invoking the common good
rather than his individual desires, he persuades the remaining Trojans to call on
Antenor, who had left with a large number of Trojans, for protection. His plan to
kill Antenor upon the latter’s arrival fails, but he does manage to convince the
Trojans that Antenor should be exiled, too (XXXI, 240-41). Again, Aeneas can
 Chapter Eleven: Making Sicily 259

achieve his ends by means of veiling his personal desires, which eventually not
only ensures his own survival, but also that of the future empire.
Guido’s assessment of Aeneas differs slightly from the general medieval
tradition. While Aeneas is complicit in the treachery, the Historia usually refers
to Antenor as the turncoat, which also contrasts with the Middle English
versions of the Troy story, which primarily stress the treachery of Aeneas or
Aeneas and Antenor. This deviation is consistent with Guido’s interest in how
imperial opacity can be constructed and circulated. Aeneas exemplifies both the
repression of individual desires in the interest of imperial longevity and the
problems thereof. These carry over into those parts of Aeneas’s vita not con-
veyed in the Historia, when readers – in Book XXXII – are advised to read the
Aeneid if they are interested in Aeneas’s adventures after the Trojan War,
whereby Guido refers the audience to a book that features again at the end of the
Historia, where he clearly adopts the Virgilian cursus (see above). In the
Historia, then, Virgilian Aeneas becomes one of the heroes of the Trojan War,
since he is one of the few transparent Trojans to successfully construct the
opacity necessary for the foundation of empire. Aeneas’s problems in
suppressing his emotionality are also reflected in the Aeneid, which relays a
triumphant story of empire building in which the hero struggles continually
against his emotional dispositions. The same, presumably, would apply to late
thirteenth-century Sicily, which requires a new Frederick (Virgil, Augustus,
Aeneas) to render collective identities in non-metaphorical, that is, non-
transparent terms, a process necessitating much work.
The above indicates that the Historia is not an ideology-free, historical narra-
tive without national and/or contemporary overtones. Rather, the Historia has to
be read in the context of the political turmoil ensuing after Frederick II’s death.
By means of his mythical bricolage, Guido presents a Virgilian history in which
the question of Sicily’s origins always plays an important role – more so than
the ancestry of France, for example, which is virtually omitted. An analysis of
the passages engaging with Sicilian issues as well as their sources evinces that
Guido’s be-devilling of Trojan changeability also affects his view of Sicily’s
heroic past, which, he argues, partakes in both Trojan and Greek stock. This si-
multaneously suggests that the transparent predicament of the Trojan city state
bears similarities to what Guido’s Sicily was in danger of becoming: a small po-
litical entity positioned on a thin borderline between imperial importance or im-
pending national insignificance. The Historia’s promotion of opaque pro-
sopagraphy potentially provides the narrative means to reinstate Sicily’s value
on the political European map.221 The increasing stress on smaller political units
that was accompanied, if not furthered by vernacular texts, such as the Roman,
221
In this context, Meek’s comments on Guido’s skepticism concerning the outcome of the
Trojan War gain importance. She argues that his doubts may stem from the knowledge
that all of Europe was potentially “afflicted with the same kind of delusions and dissen-
sions as had beset the Trojan kingdom.” Meek, introduction xxix. See further Edwards,
Chaucer and Boccaccio 50-51.
260 Part Two: Masking Troy

evidently worried Guido – and may have prompted his (re)translation of a ver-
nacular, national work into the Latin of a Christian, Hohenstaufen empire.222
Thus, the Historia inverts the traditional translatio imperii, trying to reconquer
the imperial mask that had moved westward after Frederick’s rule and Peter of
Aragon’s demise. Paul Zumthor’s estimation about the supposed unity of Chris-
tianity – which in itself shares in the interest of disseminating imperial masks for
individual adoption – is also applicable for Guido’s empire making: “La chré-
tienté médiévale ne s’est pensée elle-même avec cohérence qu’à partir du mo-
ment où se développaient les États nationaux qui allaient la faire éclater.”223
Guido shows an astounding awareness of the threatening quality of national,
transparent prosopagraphy – his opinions, as shall emerge in my readings of the
Middle English transmission of the Troy story, were those of a different time,
however.

222
Perhaps Guido was aware of the implications of Benoît’s opening “Por ço qu’il vit si garnt
l’afaire / Que ainz ne puis ne fu nus maire” (ll. 97-98), about which Nicholas Birns ob-
serves that the poet “was brushing against the providential centrality of the Christ-event.
This was not a Promethean anti-ecclesiastical deviance on the part of Benoît. Relying on
the expertise and awareness of his reader to fill in the blank, Benoît would have expected
a response that took note of the drama of his assertion with respect to the Christian pat-
tern.” Birns, “The Trojan Myth: Postmodern Reverberations,” Exemplaria 5.1 (1993): 55.
223
Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (1972; Paris: Éditions du Seul, 2000) 19. See
also Janet Coleman, English Literature in History 1350-1400: Medieval Readers and
Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1981) 14-15.
 Conclusion

A prosopagraphical analysis of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis

Troiae reveals that received critical views have to be revised as concerns the
Historia’s relevance for the construction of and the nexus between personal and
national identity formation. First of all, recent work on medieval translation the-
ory shows that Guido’s treatment of the Troy story has to be seen as an autono-
mous ‘literary’ work, that is, independent of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman
de Troie. Second, through the prosopagraphical lens, several ontological di-
chotomies became visible – dichotomies Guido extrapolates from the Roman.
Third, Guido brings Benoît’s dichotomies more sharply into focus regarding
questions of making personal and collective identities, reflecting contemporary
Sicilian politics. These dichotomies, I believe, are immensely important insofar
as they (partially) surface again in the Middle English versions of the Troy
story, from the Laud Troy Book to John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century Troy Book
and beyond.
From the beginning, the Historia juxtaposes opacity and transparency. Both
Peleus and later Jason adopt a Greek imperial mask, the main characteristic of
which is opacity, that is, the veiling of personal desires by means of a rhetori-
cally fabricated mask. This opaque prosopagraphy contrasts sharply with an on-
tological model that Guido introduces by means of Medea. She is unwilling, and
indeed unable, to veil her emotional turmoil, which frequently renders her trans-
parent. In the Historia, her identity becomes a non-identity insofar as her striv-
ing for transparency obliterates the difference between personal desires and col-
lective obligations, destabilizing all masks. Guido not only entirely mutes the
productive potential of Medean individuality, he further associates the latter
with an Ovidian poetological model, which largely informs the Roman and
which thrives on changeability and metamorphosis. While Medea’s fickleness
and instability become a matter of Ovidian changeability within the fictional
economy of the Historia, Peleus’s and Jason’s quests for fame by means of veil-
ing individuality underneath the cloak of empire represent a Virgilian stance.
Agamemnon, the emperor of the Greeks, becomes the champion of this Virgil-
ian opacity. His elaborate speech on how personal turmoil must be rhetorically
masked at all costs turns into a Greek paradigm that Trojans are notoriously in-
capable of adopting for their purposes. Trojan rulers, chiefly Priam, respond to
challenges with an emotional transparency the audience has hitherto witnessed
primarily with women like Medea. Their sudden changes of opinions and their
inability to distinguish between personal and collective concerns render Troy an
effeminate city, which is hardly a match for the opacity of Greek imperial poli-
tics. This is consistently emphasized in major scenes – for instance, the death of
262 Part Two: Masking Troy

Troy’s most valiant Hector on account of his inability to control his desires – as
well as minor skirmishes, not to mention the problematic, monstrous support
lined up on the Trojan side, which underscores Trojan transparency.
Transparency is thus a truly Trojan trait – fatally so, since it becomes a ge-
nealogical principle. As most Trojans tend not to distinguish between personal
and collective concerns, all masks collapse into one another, leaving the entire
city unguarded. The opaque prosopagraphy of the Greeks more carefully distin-
guishes between person and empire; the imperial mask subordinates all other
masks and veils the potential differences between the individuals constituting
the empire in the first place. This emerges prominently at the end of the Historia
when Guido chooses to add epitaphs for two of his heroes: Hector and Achil-
les.224 Hector is described externally as though he is portrayed by an omniscient
narrator. He not only represents Troy, he is Troy. Characterized as the defender
of his country, as a threat to the Greeks, and as a second wall, he represents the
hope of Phrygia. With his death, the epitaph states, not only did Troy’s hope die,
nothing less than Troy itself was at stake. Notably, and reminding the reader of
their leader’s key character trait, the image of a weeping Priam is also included.
Achilles, on the other hand, authors his own epitaph; it is a first-person narra-
tive. Achilles is only a single entity of the Greek empire, an individual who wins
fame because he adopted the imperial mask. Achilles is a particularly apt exam-
ple since he illustrates not only the successes of the imperial model but likewise
represents the flawed attempt to prioritize individuality over empire when he
hopes to end the war on account of his love for Polyxena.
Since Guido’s preferences lie with Virgilian opacity, he usually reduces Be-
noît’s Ovidian additions, especially the love stories; he renders opaque the pos-
sibilities transparency may entail. This potential lies in the ability of Benoît’s
female characters to perform the right roles at the right times – a ‘game’ at
which Helen excels: she is opaque in Greece and transparent in Troy. Benoît’s
Briseis is a more complicated case, since she adopts many masks and is de-
scribed from many perspectives. She is a complex individual, capable of voicing
her own views, which largely works to undercut Benoît’s antifeminism. In a
central monologue, she is even capable of crafting a new role for herself among
the Greeks. She is able to reconcile the contradictions of her new situation with
her past by means of mythological bricolage, enabling the maintenance of trans-
parency and opacity – she becomes translucent. In Guido’s Historia, such com-
plexity cannot be maintained. He indicts Briseida for being as changeable as
Medea; later writers, among them Chaucer and Lydgate, are nevertheless able to
resurrect Briseis’s translucence.

224
According to Meek, Guido may have found the epitaphs in the Dares manuscript he was
using. Since he uses names here that are used nowhere else, it is likely that there is a
source for the epitaphs (305-06n, 395-06n). Whatever the source, Guido would probably
not have included them, if they were not consistent with his purposes.
 Conclusion 263

The Historia leaves no questions about the inefficiencies of transparent pro-

sopagraphy. By the same token, Guido fastidiously explicates how to manufac-
ture the opacity he extols throughout his translation of the Roman, his chief ex-
ample being Ulysses. The Greek wanderer exemplifies the narrative creation of
masks appropriate to the circumstances. By means of his art, Ulysses is even
able to outwit changeable women like Medea, who are initially perceived of as a
threat in the Historia since they have the potential to overcome Virgil’s Mars.
Ulysses’s rhetoric is analogous to Guidoan rhetoric. Like Ulysses, Guido is
highly adept at masking contradictions, not to mention the literal masking of his
source: Benoît’s Roman is not mentioned anywhere. Not surprisingly, Guido
would like to see his historiographical project embedded within a Virgilian cur-
sus. Virgil may ‘only’ be a poet, but in contradistinction to Ovid, the author of
the Aeneid is for the most part reliable – and he pushes the right, imperial
agenda. Not only does Guido therefore try to emulate Virgil’s elevated style, he
likewise aims to recirculate an imperial mask appropriate for the political tur-
moil of late thirteenth-century Sicily.
Many of Guido’s infrequent embellishments are concerned with Sicily – al-
most excessively so. Using Ulyssean mythical bricolage to his own advantage,
Guido bestows on Sicily a hybrid Greco-Trojan heritage, implicitly indicative of
the benefits of re-appropriating a Greek imperial model for a declining Trojan
‘city state,’ that is, Sicily – a strategy heretofore practiced only by some rather
infamous Trojans. Having witnessed the imperial glory of Frederick II’s Hohen-
staufen empire, the takeover of the Angevins, the Sicilian Vespers, and the po-
litical uncertainties in the wake thereof must have been deeply troubling for
Guido. While the Roman embraces the emergence of smaller, national patterns
of identification and imperils empire, Guido’s Troy story may appear in this
context as an attempt to halt the increasing loss of political unity in and signifi-
cance of Sicily. The chief problem in this scenario of devolution is the inability
to circulate and adopt an imperial mask without which the formation of regional
political entities, such as the emergent nation-states, cannot be prevented. Trojan
transparency (neatly encapsulated in Guido’s “Sed cum nichil occultum sit quod
reuelari non ualeat”) needs to be avoided at all costs. Allegorizing Sicily as a
weak Troy, only opaque prosopagraphy, which is doubly illustrated by the con-
tent and by the narrative technique of the Historia, can prevent the devolution of
Christian, Hohenstaufen imperial unity. The anonymous Laud Troy Book, Chau-
cer’s House of Fame, his Troilus, and Lydgate’s Troy Book not only take up
Guido’s prosopagraphical dichotomies, they also allegorize England as Troy.
All of them, including Lydgate’s Troy Book, will further reverse Guido’s impe-
rial politics, arguing increasingly for the tenacity of Ovidian, translucent pro-
sopagraphy for crafting an English counter-nationhood rather than nationhood.
 CHAPTER TWELVE
Interchapter One:
Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book

The Troy story was widely circulated in fourteenth-century England, which

manifests itself, for example, in three independent Middle English translations
of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae. The Trojan origins of
Britain were further politically exploited, for example, in Edward I’s claim over
Scotland – a claim bolstered by the Troy story in a letter to the Pope.1 Through-
out the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, English territorial unity was
generally secure, particularly in comparison with France and Spain, which ex-
plains why many histories were not commissioned by monarchs.2 While histori-
ographical works betray a changed perception of Anglo-Norman relationships
(the relationship between England and France also playing an important role in
the Laud Troy Book),3 English chronicles are usually prefaced by the account of
Brutus’s foundation of Britain. Like other works in the Brut tradition, the Laud
emphasizes the purity of descent, which, given the fair amount of treason in the
Troy story, makes the reconstruction of Britain’s original purity somewhat
doubtful. A good example for the construction of a transparent England is Rob-
ert of Gloucester’s Chronicle (c. 1300), which briefly reports the events follow-
ing the Trojan War after informing the audience about the seven ages of the
world. The Trojans emerge as very honorable; they are the “stalworêe folc of
troye” and the “gode folc of troye,”4 who, after arriving in Britain and slaying

1
See “Littere misse ad curiam Romanam super jure regi competente in regno Scocie,” An-
glo-Scottish Relations 1174-1328: Some Selected Documents, ed. and trans. E. L. G.
Stones, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) 192-219, esp. 194. For
the transmission of the Troy story in fourteenth-century England, see also Lee Patterson,
Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991) 86-99.
2
See Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (Lon-
don: Hambledon, 2004) 154; Andrew Galloway, “Writing History in England,” The Cam-
bridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1999) 260-61. For fourteenth-century English nationhood, see Thorlac
Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-
1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) esp. 40; but cf. Tim William Machan, English in
the Middle Ages (2003; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) 6-7.
3
See Given-Wilson, Chronicles 181; Turville-Petre, England 91-103.
4
Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle, ed. William Aldis Wright, 2 vols., Rerum
Britannicarum Medii Ævi Scriptores (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887) 1: 435, 441.
All further parenthetical references, by volume and line number, are to this edition.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 265

the giant Gogmagog, found the “niewe troye” (1: 534)5 in a remarkably ‘clean’
England:
So clene lond is engelond . & so cler wiê outen hore .
Êe veireste men in êe world . êer inne beê ibore .
So clene & vair & pur õwit . among oêere men hii beê .
Êat me knoweê hem in eche lond . bi siõte êar me hem seê .
So clene is al so êat lond . & mannes blod so pur .
Êat êe gret evel ne comeê naõt êer . êat me clupeê êat holi fur .
Êat vorfreteê menne limes . riõt as it were ibrend .
Ac men of france in êulke vuel . sone me sucê amende .
Õif hii beê ibroõt in to engelond . õware êorõ me may iwite .
Êat engelond is londe best . as hit is iwrite .
Fram êe biginnine of êe world . to êe time êat now is . (1: 180-90).6
The original purity of England (and its new inhabitants) is an important aspect
not only of the Brut tradition but also of the three Middle English translations of
Guido’s Historia, the Laud Troy Book, John Clerk’s alliterative Destruction of
Troy,7 and John Lydgate’s Troy Book, as well as Chaucer’s Troy stories and
Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid.8 The Laud Troy Book is the first of
5
For London as the New Troy, see esp. John Clark, “Trinovantum – the Evolution of a
Legend,” Journal of Medieval History 7.2 (1981): 146-49.
6
In a later version of the Brut, the original inhabitants of England are associated with the
Devil: “Whanne êe Deuyll that perceyued and wente by diuers contres, & nome bodys of
êe eyre & likyng natures shad of men, & come in-to êe land of Albyon and lay by êe
wymmen, and schad tho natures vpon hem, & they conceiued, and after êei broughten
forth Geauntes, of êe which on me called Gogmagog, [...]; & in êis manere they comen
forth, and weren boren horrible Geauntes in Albion.” The Brut or the Chronicles of Eng-
land, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, 2 vols., EETS, o.s. 131, 136 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner & Co., 1906, 1908) Prol., 4.
7
John Clerk’s Destruction of Troy is not discussed in this study (although occasional refer-
ence is made in the notes) on account of the uncertainties regarding its date. The Destruc-
tion postdates Chaucer’s Troilus, but it is uncertain by how much. Turville-Petre has been
able to identify John Clerk as the author of the work. Turville-Petre, “The Author of The
Destruction of Troy,” Medium Ævum 57.2 (1988): 264-69. For discussions of the date, see
C. A. Luttrell, “Three North-West Midland Manuscripts,” Neophilologus 42 (1958): 38-
50; C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Col-
onne’s “Historia destructionis Troiae” in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Brewer; To-
towa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980) 155-56 n. 1.
8
The Troy story also features as a narrative frame for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Although Turville-Petre emphasizes that what is at stake in Sir Gawain is not the unique-
ness of England but its participation in an international court culture shared, among others,
with France, other critics highlight a national aspect comparable to the transparent identi-
ties negotiated in the Laud, the Destruction, and in Troy Book, namely, changeability.
With regard to the opening lines – “Siêen êe sege and êe assaut watz sesed at Troye, / Êe
borõ brittened and brent to brondez and akez / [...]” – Nicholas Birns argues that brittened
is a pun on Britain in that it is also “Britained,” authorizing “latter-day Britain by virtue of
its simultaneous authority and oblivion.” Turville-Petre, “The Brutus Prologue to Sir Ga-
wain and the Green Knight,” Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo
266 Interchapter One

the three Middle English translations, similarities notwithstanding,9 to negotiate

the dichotomies inherent in Guido’s Historia in different ways. The Laud’s ac-
count of Trojan changeability and transparency literally stands Guido’s Historia
on its head,10 undermining the latter’s latent Virgilian imperialism. As such, the
Laud is indeed anti-imperialistic;11 however, it is so in ways that invite further
study vis-à-vis its perspective on the making of selves and nations.
Excepting C. David Benson’s study of the three Middle English translations
of the Historia and work by John Finlayson and James Simpson, the Laud re-
mains an understudied and under-appreciated work. Unfortunately, Robert K.
Root’s scathing 1905 comment on the Laud largely prevails. According to Root,
the poem is “quite untouched by any breath of true poesy, and extended to the
weary length of 18664 verses of halting octosyllabic couplets.”12 Benson is more
positive in his evaluation, allowing that the poet “writes the freest translation of
the Historia in Middle English.” Besides acknowledging the liberal handling of
the poem, Benson believes that the Laud “never strays very far from Guido’s
medieval history of Troy because its ultimate aim is as much to conserve the his-
torical truth of Troy as to make the story appeal to a wide audience.”13 There is
no doubt that the Laud intends to conserve historical fact. Considering the above
interpretation of the Historia, and when analyzing the construction of personal
and collective identities in the Laud, however, the Middle English work emerges
as advancing an idiosyncratic national stance quite different from Guido’s. Fur-
thermore, the poem anticipates the construction of an Ovidian counter-
nationhood, prevalent in Chaucer’s Troilus, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Hen-
ryson’s Testament of Cresseid.
To substantiate this claim, my discussion of the Laud will proceed in three
steps. First, the Laud will be contextualized within the existing criticism, includ-
ing brief accounts of the work’s audience, distribution, and date of composition.

(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004) 340-46; Birns, “The Trojan Myth: Post-
modern Reverberations,” Exemplaria 5.1 (1993): 63. For discussions of the Trojan frame,
see Malcolm Andrew, “The Fall of Troy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Troilus
and Criseyde,” The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989) 75-93. The opening lines of Sir Gawain are cited from Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1968) ll. 1-2.
9
Because of the many verbal similarities between the Destruction, the Laud, and Chaucer’s
“Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea,” Elizabeth Sklar argues that they “are based on a com-
mon Middle English intermediary.” Sklar, “Guido, the Middle English Troy Books, and
Chaucer: The English Connection,” Neophilologus 76.4 (1992): 627.
10
A similar case can be made for the Destruction of Troy.
11
See James Simpson, “The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destruc-
tionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Speculum 73.2 (1998): 422;
Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350-1547: Reform and Cul-
tural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) 119.
12
Robert K. Root, rev. of The Laud Troy Book, a Romance of about 1400 A.D., ed. J. Ernst
Wülfing, JEGP 5.3 (1905): 367.
13
Benson, History 67.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 267

As this survey quickly evinces, one obvious difference from Guido’s Historia
concerns the genre of the poem: the Laud is not a chronicle but a romance. The
translation of the Historia as a romance has two consequences for the interpreta-
tion of the poem. The Laud-poet chooses a genre overtly interested in questions
of personal identities. This interest is discernible already in the invocation of the
trinity at the outset of the poem, which in itself would be unremarkable were it
not repeated almost verbatim in the framework of what is one of the most in-
sightful of Hector’s speeches. In the course of his speech, the hero of this ro-
mance makes transparent his emotionality in a genealogical context, which testi-
fies to the poet’s extrapolation of the prosopagraphical framework of the Histo-
ria. Not only is Hector glorified in the Laud because he is transparent (which is
a decisive deviation from the Latin source), but he is one of many transparent
heroes who will succeed him after his death; the Laud-poet uses specific (trans-
parent) assets associated with Hector to subsequently promote other heroes to
nearly the same elevated status. Troilus thus emerges as a stronger hero in the
Laud due to his emotional transparency. Beginning with the fatal death of Hec-
tor and steadily increasing until and beyond the death of Troilus, Achilles like-
wise becomes a champion of (Trojan) transparency before Penthesilea takes
over after him. Emotional transparency and changeability form the very back-
bone of the narrator’s purpose in translating the plot. It is far from accidental
that the narrator closely associates himself with Hector or that, whenever alter-
ing the source concerning heroic deeds, he muses explicitly on literary texts, of-
ten placing the reported plot in a genealogy of romance heroes. In so doing, the
narrator himself partakes of the heroic genealogy.
While the Laud-poet (whom I take to be the narrator) crafts his own fictional
space as the creator of a superlative romance concerned with Hector, this narra-
torial changeability is also important as concerns national genealogies. Besides
the fact that the Laud rigorously reinvents Guido’s Greco-Trojan hybridity in
terms of a dichotomy in which the narrator sides with the pro-Trojan Dares (and
besides some curious references to France in the course of the work), what ap-
pears to be of particular significance to the narrator is the nexus between person
and nation. In aligning himself with Hector, the poet emphasizes Hector’s in-
scription of his personality into collective discourse, not rarely resulting in a
modification of Trojan discourses (that is, challenging Priam’s rule) in a frame-
work that is readily conducive to such challenges and eschews opacity of all
kinds. Changeability and transparency, indicted by Guido, become laudable as-
sets in the Laud, with the consequence that national discourses also should be
subject to change. While not denying the Trojan ancestry of the English, the
plethora of similes evoking English country life indicates that, when allegorizing
England as Troy, one should do so with a difference.
268 Interchapter One

1. From History to Romance: Genre

The Laud Troy Book is a verse translation of Guido’s Historia and survives in a
single manuscript. The dating of the poem is problematic. In Wülfing’s opinion,
the poem is the first introduction of the complete Troy story into medieval Eng-
land.14 Wülfing suggests that Dorothy Kempe’s argument cannot be corrobo-
rated by much evidence; however, he admits that some of her points, such as the
usage of florayns, are indeed indicative of a composition postdating 1343. Re-
garding the cut-off date, he accepts Kempe’s argument for 1378-83 – but only
grudgingly, since the date, in his opinion, requires ‘careful investigation.’15
While the Laud predates the other translations of the Historia, it appears that the
poem was composed after the Seege of Troy.16 Geographically, the Laud origi-
nates in the northwest Midlands.17 Given both timeframe and location, the work
originates at a historical moment in which the English vernacular is increasingly
employed for chronicles and in which Middle English romances flourished. As a
historiographical romance, then, the Laud makes available the ancient history of
England in a widely accessible format, although probably not as widely as some
have claimed. Benson, for instance, suggests that the assumption of a low-born,
rural audience is doubtful despite the frequent references to contemporary rural
life. After all, most people’s everyday life was rural, especially in the Midlands.
As concerns transmission and audience, Benson claims that “In the case of
the Laud, the fact of translation itself proves the poet’s intent to make the history
accessible to a wide and non-scholarly audience [...].”18 Contributing to the in-
tended appeal to a wider audience, the poem was most likely composed for “oral
presentation” which is indicated by the self-description as a “tale,” a “spelle,”
and as a “romaunce.”19 That the Laud was meant for oral recitation, whether in
its entirety or in episodes, is generally accepted.20 This complicates the claim

14
Wülfing, “Das Laud-Troybook: Hs. Bodl. Laud 595 (früher K. 76),” Englische Studien
29.3 (1901): 376-77. For the Laud as predating (and the Destruction as postdating)
Lydgate’s Troy Book, see Luttrell, “Three North-West Midland Manuscripts” 38-50.
15
Wülfing, “Laud-Troybook” 377-78. For the usage of florins, see Dorothy Kempe, “A
Middle English Tale of Troy,” Englische Studien 29.1 (1901): 5-6.
16
Simpson, “Other Book of Troy” 405; Malcolm Hebron, The Medieval Siege: Theme and
Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 100.
17
Wülfing, “Laud-Troybook” 394-95.
18
Benson, History 70.
19
Paul Strohm, “Storie, Spelle, Gest, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinction in the Mid-
dle English Troy Narratives,” Speculum 46.2 (1971): 354.
20
James Simpson concurs with the notion of oral performance: “Both the Destruction and
the Laud Troy Book address their audiences as listeners. This posture is plausible for the
Laud version; whether listeners really could take in the 14,044 lines of the Destruction
must be an open question.” Simpson, “Other Book of Troy” 407 n. 42. If length is the de-
termining factor, oral recitation would be equally plausible for either work, since the Laud
is not shorter but longer than the Destruction. Dieter Mehl qualifies the claim that long
romances would hardly be completely narrated by minstrels in Die mittelenglischen Ro-
manzen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Winter, 1967) 17-18. Benson believes
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 269

that because of its survival in only a single manuscript, the dissemination was
rather limited; to what extent people were exposed to oral recitations of the
poem must ultimately remain speculation21 – and is, in any case, unimportant for
the present study, the focus of which is on how the Laud conceptualizes selves
and nations, that is, on the kinds of narrative models it circulates. In this respect,
the question of the relationship of the Laud to its sources is relevant; the ques-
tion as to the poem’s generic status is essential.
That Guido’s Historia is the source for the Laud was emphasized already at
the beginning of the twentieth century. The Historia is not retained in its en-
tirety, however. The poet omits Guido’s occasional lapses into (Ovidian) fable,
his frequent rationalizations, and his interests in geographical matters. Moreo-
ver, the Laud appears to be less interested in Guido’s antifeminism, his many
moralizations, and the love story of Troilus and Criseyde. While the poet occa-
sionally omits or mutes plots and characterizations of the Historia, he embel-
lishes other aspects, such as the description of Ilion, dress code, armor, as well
as issues of warfare, feasting, and Greek and Trojan customs, “giving a national
colouring to the ancient tale of Troy.”22 Since these embellishments are partially
consistent with Benoît’s Roman de Troie, the poet may have had access to both
sources.23 Wülfing voices reservations about this (and A. Joly’s claim) based
largely on his observation of the frequent employment of French loan-words.
Although Joly remarks upon the general tendency to borrow from the French,
Wülfing does not believe that this fact alone has any significance.24 Although
Kempe argues that due to the close proximity of the Historia and the Laud, it is
“almost impossible that any intermediate rendering other than an exact transla-

that “The Laud is the only Middle English version of the Historia to transform Guido’s
distant narrative into a poem specifically intended for oral recitation.” Benson, History 67-
68; but cf. Albert C. Baugh, “The Middle English Period,” A Literary History of England,
Volume 1: The Middle Ages, ed. Albert C. Baugh, 2nd ed. (1967; London: Routledge,
1972) 184.
21
For the complex issues of the reception and re-creation (often co-authorization) of oral
literature, see Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990) esp. 183-95. Summarizing recent scholar-
ship, Rosalind Field writes “That the audience is a fiction is now the most common per-
ception. The social complexities of the fourteenth century [...] indicated a considerable
range of audiences. [...] That the fictional audience is always secular, almost invariably
male, often drunk and always collective, is no reason for us to exclude from our picture of
the actual audience the solitary reader, the clerical, the female, or even the sober.” Field,
“Romance in England, 1066-1400,” Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature,
ed. Wallace 169.
22
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 6-9, quotation at 9.
23
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 16.
24
Wülfing, “Laud-Troybook” 379-81; Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 11-14. The
Laud-poet’s interest in Hector led A. Joly to think that the English poet used Benoît’s Ro-
man, since both convey the same idea of him. Joly, introduction, Benoît de Sainte-More et
le “Roman de Troie” ou les Métamorphoses d’Homère et l’épopée gréco-latine au moyen-
age, 2 vols. (Paris: Franck, 1870-71) 2: 498.
270 Interchapter One

tion, can have been employed by the English author,”25 it is likewise not impos-
sible for the poet to have had access to another English translation or some other
intermediary. Since I am interested primarily in those cultural forces that consti-
tute the Laud’s conception of selves and nations, the shape of the circulated nar-
rative, and the formation of culture(s) therein envisaged, it suffices to note that
there remains little doubt that the poet mainly uses the Historia. The poet very
liberally reinterprets Guido’s history, however, introducing changes yielding in-
sight into the altered framework in which the Laud shapes selves and nations.
The most decisive change, besides that from prose to verse, is the conversion of
history into romance.
Criticism concerned with the Laud usually discusses the poem as a romance.
This terminological framework is not unproblematic, unless it can be clearly es-
tablished how the author uses the term.26 Strohm observes that the poet fre-
quently refers to his sources as storie(s) and only once as romaunce. Given the
prominent role of Hector in the poem, which opens new ventures in historical
narrative, Strohm argues that:
By placing Hector at the center of his narrative, the Laud poet finds a new organizing
principle, not necessarily opposed to historicity but indifferent to it. A romaunce might
indeed be explicitly historical. The Laud poet’s doughty heroes must have had a more
historical flavor for the medieval reader than the reader today, and the Cursor Mundi
says that romances might contain ‘Storyes of dyuerse êinges / Of princes prelatis & of
kynges’ (ll. 21-22). At the same time, however, the romancer was free to wink at his-
torical truth. [...] Deeds, whether true or false, seem the principal material of the Laud
poet.27
The poet is thus free to indulge in ‘action’ while omitting Guido’s historical and
moral discourses. Instead, he embellishes his hero’s deeds, which suggests that
“The key to these changes and to other, smaller ones is the Laud poet’s under-
standing of his task of writing a romaunce of Troy.”28 As Benson has it, he in-
tends to pen a romance “that is clearly the top of the line.”29 In contrast to
Strohm, Benson contends that “poetic freedom is never allowed to become his-
torical license. However gaudily dressed or dramatically presented, Guido’s his-
torical record always remains beneath.”30 And yet, as Lee Patterson observes

25
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 9.
26
Strohm, “Generic Distinctions” 354.
27
Strohm, “Generic Distinctions” 355-56. Helen Cooper, writing about romances after 1400,
believes that romance began to prefer the fabled over the factual and “acquires a new sig-
nificance in promising to preserve the old values of high chivalry and orthodox piety
against the dangers of theological and political motivation.” Cooper, “Romance after
1400,” Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. Wallace 690.
28
Strohm, “Generic Distinctions” 356.
29
Benson, History 77.
30
Benson, History 91. Benson finds striking modifications, however, especially in the poet’s
handling of the eleventh and twelfth battles of the Historia. Besides the obvious similari-
ties, he records the following differences: expansions for dramatic narrative, particularly
regarding the battle scenes as well as the depiction of the homecoming and the feasting
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 271

with regard to Trojan historiography in general, “At the center of the narrated
action is a human agent who does not merely react to events but creates them: in
the world of romance, history is less given than made. And the linearity of ro-
mance narrative, as distinct from that of ecclesiastical history, implies a causal-
ity that is, however obscured by enigma or thwarted by chance, finally grounded
in the human will.”31 Thus, the changes introduced in the Laud are quite sub-
stantial insofar as they present an individual – character or narrator/author – in
the process of reshaping a narrative. After all, even if Benson were to be correct
about the lack of poetic freedom, the overall structure of the poem itself, which
is certainly a major ‘invention’ on the part of the poet, changes the perspective
vis-à-vis the content of the story. It is therefore pertinent to ask what it means to
read the Laud as a romance.
In approaching the Laud as a romance, it is necessary to clarify what is meant
by a generic label that describes a variegated corpus of texts. Summary accounts
of romance are loath to define the term in detail. Rosalind Field, for example,
prefers a broad definition based on the function of the genre when explaining
that “we will work with a recent definition that is also one of the simplest, ‘the
principal secular literature of entertainment of the Middle Ages.’ This usefully
places the stress not on form or content, both shifting ground, but on the essen-
tially recreational function of romance,” with an emphasis on the story and the
often exotic setting.32 Likewise, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg proposes that romance
is “a kind of entertainment whose job is to deliver ‘wonders’ (things or occur-
rences that astonish), and thus to deliver us from feeling ‘weary’ [...].”33 As con-
cerns fourteenth-century romance specifically, Field sees in the anonymity of
the works a movement from the twelfth-century courtly context to “a more im-
personal relationship with a wider audience.” The “romantic image of the min-
strel,” then, is seen as “internalized into the romance genre to provide the audi-

among Greeks and Trojans. In the twelfth battle, the encounter of Troilus and Diomedes
has more overtones of chivalry. Whereas the fight between Troilus and Menelaus is only
slightly longer in the Laud, “to the Historia’s vague statement that Agamemnon entered
the battle with others, the Laud provides specific names (13465-82). Finally, the poet ex-
pands the epilogue to this battle with a long passage on the wounds of Menelaus and Dio-
medes, a simple deduction from the narrative, and he gives more details concerning the
truce negotiations (13513-42).” For further additions, see Benson, History 94-95.
31
Patterson, Chaucer 96. Although this is also true for Guido’s Historia, it is strikingly evi-
dent in the Laud. The poet omits, for instance, the opening of the second book of the His-
toria, in which Guido mentions the role of the fates. Similar changes occur in the transla-
tion of Books IV and V of the Historia.
32
Field, “Romance in England” 152. The quotation is from Derek Pearsall, “Middle English
Romance and Its Audiences,” Historical and Editorial Studies: in Medieval and Early
Modern English for Johan Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes (Groningen:
Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985) 37-47, non videtur. Pearsall reduces the definition of the Man-
ual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500 to “a narrative intended primarily for en-
tertainment, in verse or prose, and presented in terms of chivalric life” in “The English
Romance in the Fifteenth Century,” Essays and Studies 29 (1976): 57.
33
L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Simply Marvelous,” SAC 26 (2004): 21.
272 Interchapter One

ence with a sense of the past and of community.”34 This posits two differences
between the Laud and the Historia. The deeds of the Laud, which Strohm re-
gards as crucial to the poet, make it an entertaining recreational text for recita-
tion, whereas the Historia appears to primarily appeal to solitary readers. Sec-
ondly, the sense of a past and community created by romances points to another
difference between the Historia and the Laud. Romances, at least those treating
historical topics, more or less directly reflect upon (near) contemporary political
events, a point which is relevant to the Laud’s representation of collective iden-
tities, too. Romance authors, argues Field, are in full control of their historical
matter: “The general point is that history will continue to appeal [...] in terms of
romance stereotype and mythic patterning; and romance will continue to provide
a view of history which is acceptable and comprehensible.” All of this suggests
that the historical myth imported from Anglo-Norman writers, maintained in an
English tradition, “is in tune with the basic operations of the romance mode, and
was perceived to be and indeed created as such by the vernacular historians and
romance writers of the twelfth and thirteenth century.”35 Christopher Baswell
contextualizes this within the translatio imperii tradition:
First, the clerk’s vernacular retelling of stories from learned Latin sources serves an
aristocratic society’s sense of its historic past and its current political destiny, even
shaping the former to underwrite the latter. These texts involve a translation of empire
as well as learning. [...] Second, the romances of Antiquity offer a way of looking
through the mirror of the past at a range of ways, some of them unstable and unnerv-
ing, in which social order was translating itself into a new form: new modes of power,
possessions and their transmission across generations [...].36
In Britain, this is particularly true of the Arthurian tradition: the English interest
in insular history slowly takes precedence over the ‘Matter of France,’ for in-
stance, although Field believes that the ‘Matter of Rome,’ under which she
groups the Seege of Troye, was not made for easy adoption.37 As evolves below,
critical accounts arguing for the complicity of romance in the making of nation-
hood are a suitable lens for discussing the Laud, which is rarely discussed in
such contexts.

34
Field, “Romance in England” 168.
35
Rosalind Field, “Romance as History, History as Romance,” Romance in Medieval Eng-
land, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Brewer,
1991) 173.
36
Christopher Baswell, “Marvels of Translation and Crises of Transition in the Romances of
Antiquity,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) 31.
37
Field, “Romance in England” 172-73. She also expresses reservations about the classifica-
tion by means of ‘Matters,’ since “the rest of the large output of Middle English romance
finds itself in ‘Miscellaneous’” (173).
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 273

2. From Writing Romance to Writing Selves: Masks

In keeping with the generic transformation from history to romance, the Laud
not only pays close attention to individual identities, but also considers the dia-
logical nature of self-fashioning, that is, self-performance. The poet adds flesh
and blood to Guido’s narrative skeleton, especially (but not exclusively) to the
battle scenes. Moreover, Guido’s omniscient and factual description of events is
transformed into a dramatic enactment with a limited point of view: “Guido’s
fact is transformed into human drama,” and Guido’s reported speeches become
proper speeches, “giving dramatic life to the formal monologues.”38 Besides de-
picting the characters in immediate, life-like interaction, this dramatic enactment
literally conforms to the idea of prosopopoeia as giving “a voice to ideas.”39 No-
tably, the poet attempts to un-write his heroes’ blemishes (opacity). “So solici-
tous is the Laud-poet of his heroes,” writes Benson, “that he will often explain
away their smallest failings.”40 Hence, the Laud propagates a transparent ideal,
chiefly exemplified by the Trojan heroes. While some Trojans are capable of
masking, their masking differs from that of their adversaries insofar as Greek
opacity is aligned with the decidedly negative attribute of treachery, an aspect
much expanded upon in the Laud.
The Laud proclaims its interest in matters of personification and performance
from the outset by means of a seemingly commonplace invocation of God:
Alle-myghty god in trinite,
Sothfaste god in persones thre,
Fadir, sone, and holi gost,
In whom is witte and myghtes most. (1-4)
The sentiment reoccurs frequently in romance discourse, often at the beginning
and the end of romances. In contrast to many of these invocations, the phraseol-
ogy is (to my knowledge) rather rare.41 In the Laud’s invocation, God represents
one substance in three personae, in three masks, Tertullian’s ‘una substantia,
tres personae.’42 While this might not consciously set up a prosopagraphical
framework, the romance nevertheless opens with a dramatization of Guido’s
Historia with the ideal of a transparent identity, with masks that are only seem-
ingly masks since all of them designate one substance, which can be grasped as
a hypergood (Taylor’s term). The narrative construction of transparency is like-

38
Benson, History 69-77, quotations at 74, 69.
39
Daniel Poirion, “Mask and Allegorical Personification,” trans. Caroline Weber, YFS 95
(1999): 19, cited in Chapter Four.
40
Benson, History 81.
41
Romances typically begin with and/or end on an invocation of Christ. A brief look at some
anthologies of medieval romances – such as Medieval English Romances, ed. Diane
Speed, 3rd ed, 2 vols., Durham Medieval Texts 8 (Durham: School of English, 1993) –
substantiates this. The invocation of the trinity with reference to the three personae ap-
pears to be rare, however.
42
See Richard Weihe, Die Paradoxie der Maske: Geschichte einer Form (München: Fink,
2004) 190-206.
274 Interchapter One

wise anticipated by the following enumeration of narrative models, and the he-
roic identities described therein, elucidating the poet’s poetical project:
Many speken of men that romaunces rede
That were sumtyme doughti in dede,
The while that god hem lyff lente,
That now ben dede and hennes wente:
Off Bevis, Gy, and of Gauwayn,
Off kyng Richard, & of Owayn,
Off Tristram, and of Percyuale,
Off Rouland Ris, and Aglauale,
Off Archeroun, and of Octouian,
Off Charles, & of Cassibaldan,
Off Hauelok, Horne, & of Wade; –
In Romaunces that of hem ben made
That gestoures often dos of hem gestes
At Mangeres and at grete ffestes.
Here dedis ben in remembraunce
In many fair Romaunce. (11-26)
Certain individuals and their deeds, the poet argues, are transmitted through
books, particularly through romances. Their identities become narrative con-
structs – they become role narratives. Moreover, consistent with Strohm’s belief
that the deeds are the primary focus of the works, rede rhymes with dede, paral-
leling reading and fighting. After enumerating the romances that the poet either
has read or knows to exist (but also drawing attention to the possible, if not de-
sired reception of his own work), he emphasizes the channels of circulation and
dissemination of romances that warrant the narratives’ popularity as they create
a sense of the past. His own work, he imparts, also deals with a hero, with none
other than the “worthiest wyght in wede / That euere by-strod any stede.” Of this
hero “Spekes no man, ne in romaunce redes / Off his batayle ne of his dedis”
(27-30). Before the poet introduces Hector’s name, he likewise complains that
no-one speaks of the battle that marks the beginning of heroic culture as such,
where “alle prowes of knyghtes be-gan” (32). As with Guido, the instructional
purpose of the work is evident, but in contrast to the Historia, the personal pre-
cedes the collective to the extent that Hector’s prowess becomes more important
than the Trojan War itself, since his destiny relates to questions of collective
identification (and the narrator’s inscription of himself into this discourse).
While individuals are important to Guido merely insofar as they are of service to
the collective (at the expense of individuality itself), the Laud foregrounds Hec-
tor, leaving the collective in the background – and the background is perceived
simply as a genealogy of other ‘almost-Hectors,’ notably the ‘second Hector,’
Troilus. Hector’s Christ-like significance emerges most forcefully in a context
that nationalizes the Trojan hero, along with the narrator, who at this early point
already likens himself to Hector, who exceeds all other heroes since his story
implicitly (and inevitably) supersedes all mentioned romances concerned with
‘lesser’ subjects. The Laud, that is, constructs a narrative intersection between
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 275

personal and national genealogies in romance.43 The Laud thus dresses down
Guido’s imposed masks, exposing the treachery of opacity and apotheosizing
the virtues of transparency.
Following the Historia, the Laud prefaces the Trojan War with Jason’s quest
for the Golden Fleece. Peleus is the first Greek to illustrate the ‘virtues’ of opac-
ity in the Historia, and the Laud-poet initially retains the opposition of heart and
mind (thought) (141, 147). At the same time, he moderates the Historia’s violent
emotionality of Peleus who “ardebat tamen et fluctuabat intrinsecus” (I, 6).
Whereas the Historia draws attention to the fact that Peleus ensures that none of
his emotions penetrate to the outside, the Laud does not. Instead, the Laud im-
mediately characterizes Peleus’s mask making as ensuing from envy, focuses on
his fear (“He was aferd in his herte”), and ends on the notion of treachery, since
Peleus wonders night and day “How he myõt brynge that child to nought / With
sum sleyõte priuily, / That he were not shent ther-by” (141, 148-50). Guido’s
muted connotations are brought into the open in the same terms usually applied
to Greek treachery in the Laud. In order to entice Jason to quest the Golden
Fleece, Guido’s Peleus addresses the assembly before the narrator complains
about the insidious design of the speech. Jason, that is, rejoices at the opportu-
nity without noticing Peleus’s duplicity – Guido thus indicts the treachery im-
plicitly at best. The Laud-poet handles this episode differently by explicitly con-
fronting Peleus’s deceit:
He [Peleus] spak to him with fair semblaund,
With louely chere and speche smyland;
But it was fals and foule disseite,
For he him be-thouõte thanne wel streite. (249-52, emphases added)
Moreover, Greek treachery arises from duplicity, the trait that becomes the sali-
ent feature of Greek self-fashioning in the Laud.
In the Historia, Jason’s acceptance of the challenge to procure the Fleece is
further prompted by the fact that Jason believes Peleus’s plans to ensue from a
clear consciousness. The poet maintains this, but with interesting modifications.
Jason neither trusts in his own powers to successfully complete the mission, nor
does he accept the task as unreservedly as he does in the Historia, which is par-
ticularly ironic given that Peleus explicitly searches for a means of inciting Ja-
son to “go on his fre wille” (224). This compares oddly with Jason’s decision-
making process:
He wiste wel if he seide ‘nay’
By-fore the lordes, that he schulde ay
Holde him for a coward
And neuere-more of him take reward,

43
For the importance of genealogy, see R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A
Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1983).
276 Interchapter One

But hope it were for cowardise

That he durst not take a prise. (297-302)
The desire to commit valiant deeds is absent here, and Jason implicitly doubts
his capabilities – Hercules later describes him fittingly as speaking too “mekely”
(482). In Guido’s version, Jason decides quickly without wasting any thought on
how an answer in the negative would affect his public standing – the extrapo-
lated self-image being an addition in the Laud that later recurs in versions by
Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson. A similar modification occurs slightly later,
when Medea tries to persuade Jason not to attempt to obtain the Fleece. In the
Historia, he rhetorically asks if she thinks that she could frighten him with her
tales, inquiring how else he is supposed to win glory (II, 20). The Laud keeps
Jason’s assertion that he would be rather dead than unsuccessful, but the answer
is preceded by his worries about the “vylonie” and “schame” implied in not at-
tempting the task (758, 762). Fame is not one of his motives. In the Laud, indi-
vidual fame is aligned with collective fame, and it is depicted in a decidedly
negative way.44
Guido’s appraisal of Greek collectivism generally appears in a more dubious
light in the Laud; it stands opposed to the promotion of transparent individuality.
After the successful procurement of the Golden Fleece, the poem again consid-
ers Peleus’s mask making but shortens his imperial speech before the attack on
Laomedon’s Troy (1285-94). For Guido’s Peleus, three aspects are particularly
important: as few casualties as possible should be incurred; the maximum force
should be accumulated; the enemy must be completely destroyed. Two conse-
quences arise from this: the wrongs will be redressed and the Greeks will ac-
quire the treasures of Troy as befits imperial politics (IV, 35-36). The Historia
thus furnishes a rationale for empire making and scrutinizes the efficacy of rhe-
torical mask making; these aspects are absent from the Laud. Moreover, Hercu-
les’s divide-and-conquer strategy (voiced after Peleus’s speech) is met with
unanimous consent among the Greeks in the Historia (IV, 36-37). In the Laud, it
is Peleus who agrees and who is obviously in charge (1339-42). The make-up of
imperial opacity does not invite investigation in the Laud.
The lack of interest in the construction of opaque masks so important to
Guido likewise shows in the poet’s handling of a passage crucial to Guido: Me-
nelaus’s grief over the loss of his wife, and Agamemnon’s articulated guidelines
for constructing opacity in order to save one’s face.45 The poet embellishes Me-
nelaus’s weak moment, rendering his emotionality in a fashion reserved for the
Trojans in Guido’s version. Notably, Agamemnon’s advice regarding the inven-
tion of an opaque mask is nowhere to be found in the Laud. Rather, Agamemnon
questions the necessity of his sorrow in a much abbreviated speech: “Iff thow

44
The Laud omits Jason and Medea’s lovemaking and Guido’s complaint about the falsity of
men (Historia II, 24). The poet neither blames Jason for falsity nor does he blame Medea
for stealing away from her country. Her death is also omitted (cf. Historia III, 32).
45
Menelaus only regrets the loss of his fair Helen in the Laud. See Benson, History 80-81.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 277

haue cause suche dole to make, / Lete it passe and ouer-slake!” (3111-12). The
focus thus shifts quickly to the assistance of the Greek empire (3125-50) and
again underlines the lack of interest in Greek opacity. In the Laud, the Greeks
are instead characterized in terms of their duplicity and semblaunce, which ter-
minologically frames the romance. The “fair semblaund” with which Peleus ad-
dresses Jason becomes a visual representation of the treachery openly attributed
to the Greeks. For instance, before attacking Troy, the Greek embassy ap-
proaches Priam without greeting or proper obeisance, which is emphasized in
the Laud – as is the Greeks’ semblaunce: “But non of hem thei ones gret, / But
sette hem doun with semblaunt store / A-õeyn the kynges in-myddis the flore”
(3844-46). Later, Achilles is described as bearing a mask (of a devil), too, when
attacking Hector: “As a deuel with foule semblande” (8796). In yet another em-
bassy, the Greeks ride around with “louely chere & fair semblaunt” (14456). In
sum, most of the Greeks (with the exceptions of Achilles and, to a lesser extent,
Hercules) partake in opaque prosopagraphy, an ontological strategy unexplored
in the Laud.
The Greeks are not exclusively privy to the benefits of mask making, how-
ever, although the commendable Trojans carry their true meaning in their “good
visage” or on their lips; the Trojans are a transparent people. To my knowledge,
the only instance in which the poet uses semblaunce in describing a Trojan
knight occurs after Hecuba instructs a messenger to dispatch Achilles to Troy in
order to avenge the death of Troilus – as do Greek mask-makers, she searches
her mind for a means to her end. It is the Trojan porter, instructed to let Achilles
pass, who does so “with fair semblaunt” (15363). Ironically, mask-maker Achil-
les is unable to discern the treachery. The capability of veiling transfers to other
Trojans as well – with dire consequences and always in passages expanded by
the poet. Thus, for example, the Laud renders in great detail Antenor’s negotia-
tions with the Greek embassy at the end of the romance, which is a matter of se-
crecy and should remain “priuay” (17619-28, rhyming on “pay”). When Antenor
discloses his ‘falsehood’ and ‘treason’ to the Greeks (17632-33), the narrator
comments:
Now hath this traytour be-trayed Troye, –
These kynges maken moche Ioye, –
For him & Eueas it is solde.
God wolde it were the burgeis tolde!
For he wolde his tresoun hide.... (17659-63)
In the ensuing talks, the poet focuses on Antenor’s demeanor, observing how
“He schewed to hem but flaterye, / For he wolde hele his traytourie, / But tolde a
prologe mochel & long” (17691-92); opacity is created by means of rhetoric:
Lo! how slely he hem blente
With his sleyght & his Argument!
Then did the traytour more quayntise,
For he wolde In no wyse
278 Interchapter One

His ffals tresoun that thei perceyue,

And for he wolde hem clene disceyue.... (17721-26)
Antenor apparently learned about the advantages of opaque prosopagraphy and
uses this knowledge, gained perhaps during his Greek captivity, to save his skin.
The poet does not condone opacity and is apparently suspicious of political
rhetoric generally, which may have been one of the reasons for not translating
the last five chapters of the Historia (see below), which largely deal with Ulys-
ses,46 the expert for opaque prosopagraphy.
The first Trojan, whose changeability and emotionality is considered in the
Historia, is Laomedon. The portrayal of Laomedon and the first confrontation of
Greeks and Trojans is handled very differently in the Laud. Guido’s Laomedon,
informed about the advent of Greek troops, autocratically sends an embassy to
the Greeks asking them to depart immediately (II, 12). The poet preserves this
report, but is able to provide more information. The Greek knights appear to be
noble (“wel be-semed of gret noblay”), they will most likely rob this country,
and they will burn the city to the ground. Therefore, the people suggest, it would
be good to learn the Greeks’ intentions, before asking them to leave. And if they
do not leave, they should be “honge and drawe, / If thei dwelle til the day dawe”
(413-24). The motivations and fears of the Trojans are as transparent as the deci-
sion making process itself: the Laud’s Laomedon lends an ear to the people’s
concerns and, in fact, follows their advice rather than making the decision alone
to bid the Greeks leave. Within the framework of the Historia, such transpar-
ency would be deeply problematic. Consistent with the frequent embellishments
of the Trojan deeds, the Laud’s Laomedon becomes an exemplary ruler, espe-
cially when considering the poet’s expansions of Laomedon’s virtuous deeds.
Laomedon rushes to the battle without delay, “is armed wel, / His stede is
trapped In iren & stel” (1365-66) and, when the virtuous Castor (Historia IV,
38) joins the battle, Laomedon becomes a ‘roaring lion’:
But Lamedon, that douõti kyng,
When he saw his men fleyng,
With alle the men In his warde
He ran thedur as a lyparde,
And sclow Gregeis here and there
As a lyon fers and fere.
He felde doun some, and some fflow,
And of here hors doun hem drow,
And lete hem lye, and some storuen,
Sore woundid and al for-koruen,
Many he greued and al to-hewed;

46
The poet, Benson argues, “can supply public, manipulative words, like those of Ulysses,
whose speech to win Achilles back to battle begins with a conciliatory and shamelessly
flattering preface not in the Historia (13047-60).” Benson further observes that “The poet
adds a similarly rhetorical introduction to the speech in which Antenor tries to persuade
Peleus that Hesione should be returned to the Trojans (1993-98).” Benson, History 69, 159
n. 6. Both Ulysses and Antenor are opaque prosopagraphers.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 279
That he was a knyõt, ful wel he schewed:
He ferd with hem so sorily,
That thay discomfith were wel ny. (1429-42; cf. Historia IV, 38)
The Laud’s characterization of Laomedon as a valiant and praiseworthy charac-
ter is, if at all, only implicit in the Historia.47
The poet not only portrays Laomedon as more heedful of others’ advice and
as a more valiant ruler, the Laud also stresses Laomedon’s emotional transpar-
ency. Laomedon is immediately in tears on account of the loss of Elyacus in the
Historia, in which an immediate counter-attack is initiated that may ensure Tro-
jan victory (IV, 40). In the Laud, the death of his kin results in a short speech,
which condones those traits condemned in the Historia:
Se õe not my cosyn dere
Lye be-fore me ded here,
The kynges sone of Artage?
Pollus sclow him In his rage.
Now with alle the myght that õe konne
Venge now my sistir sone! (1595-600)
Laomedon’s subsequent military success – he surely would have conquered the
Greeks had it not been for their second division – is possible because of his
emotionality. The Laud further embellishes Laomedon’s deeds, for instance, by
means of rendering the Trojan success as his personal accomplishment (1601-
06). In the Laud, Laomedon becomes an emotionally transparent ruler, whereby
transparency becomes a positive trait, since Laomedon is a good ruler. Addi-
tionally, this altered characterization occurs at a crucial narrative juncture, and
anticipates a transparent counter-model to Greek opacity and semblaunce. From
this moment onward, Trojan emotional transparency becomes a genetic princi-
ple, as is illustrated first by the principal leader of the Trojans, Hector.

3. From Greek Opacity to Trojan Transparency: Hector

In her essay on the Laud, Kempe suggests that “There is little attempt to differ-
entiate the characters of the heroes; each in turn is boldest and best of men.”
And yet, “they have a certain individuality which becomes gradually impressed
upon the reader [...].”48 The observation that the heroes are successively charac-
terized as the “boldest and best of men,” inadvertently insinuates a genealogical
aspect of Trojan transparency that needs emphasizing. At the beginning and at
the end of this genealogy, I believe, stands the narrator himself. This, too, is
consistent with the promotion of transparency against Greek opacity. After all,
the poet himself is changeable. He increasingly modifies Guidoan history, revis-

47
Moreover, when Laomedon assembles the Trojans into a unit after observing that they are
fighting “Ouer myõt and out of mauõt,– / What with loue and what with awe,–” (1452-53),
he does so “As a witti kyng, myõti, and õepe” (1456). In the battle with Nestor, Laomedon
is described as “worthi kyng” and “douõti man” (1496, 1513).
48
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 23.
280 Interchapter One

ing a myth central to English nationhood. Heroic transparency, featuring in the

poet’s prologue and epilogue, is transmitted from Hector to Penthesilea via Troi-
lus and Achilles. In determining the shape of the narrative, the poet styles him-
self as a national hero. Before engaging with the poet’s transparency, I shall turn
to Hector, who becomes the model of Trojan transparency.
That Hector is the central hero of the Laud has been widely acknowledged in
scholarship.49 I argue that he is the chief hero particularly on account of his
transparent, changeable self. From the beginning of the poem, Hector features as
the worthiest of knights, killing many more knights than any other valiant knight
present at the siege. The only other hero explicitly mentioned by name in the
prologue is Achilles. No one stands a chance against Hector, “But the strong
Achilles, / That was best of alle that pres / Off the kynde of Gregeys” (61-63).
Achilles’s role in the Laud is indeed problematic. Despite the fact that he is a
double-dealing Greek, however, he eventually assumes Hector’s role at a later
stage. After introducing the importance of Hector and Achilles, the poet follows
Guido in naming his sources, in the course of which brief reference is made to
Achilles and Hector again. Dares and Dictys, the poet reports, were eye-
witnesses to the Trojan War and relay the truth “with-oute les / Of gode Ector
and Achilles” (93-94). The position of the adjective and the conjunction and
creates a syntactical ambiguity which underlines Achilles’s ambivalence:
whether good is meant to include Achilles is left for the audience to decide.
Hector is undoubtedly good and is frequently (almost obsessively) described as
such. Given the invocation of the trinity at the outset of the poem, which sug-
gests the validity of a prosopagraphical reading, good Hector has to be seen in
the context of the homograph God.50 This is hardly surprising since the romance
hero “is, consciously or unconsciously, a figuring of Christ, whatever else he
may be as well. From this point of view, it is not hagiographical, Christ-
imitating characteristics that will be noteworthy in the presentation of a national
hero, but the absence of them.”51

49
For the role of the heroes, especially Hector, in relation to the poet’s purpose in writing the
Laud, see Mehl, Romanzen 25-26, 30 n. 61. For Hector’s heroism generally, see Franti!ek
Graus, “Troja und trojanische Herkunftssage im Mittelalter,” Kontinuität und Transforma-
tion der Antike im Mittelalter, ed. Willi Erzgräber (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989) 30.
50
The adjective is very occasionally employed to describe other knights, mostly those later
to assume Hector’s role. On rare occasions (see below), the adjective is also used for
Greeks, but almost exclusively as qualifying their function, that is, the good king, the good
knight, etc. Hector is described as good Hector or ‘Hector the good’ at 94, 1722, 1853 (in
anaphoric reference to God), 3283, 4858 (his goodness), 5332 (in an ambiguous context),
7077, 7187, 7210 (linking him to Aeneas and, as above, to Achilles), 9700, 9914, 10139
(in Priam’s speech), 10971, 10987-89 and 10993 (as “the gode knyõt” and “gode body”),
11080, 11216, and 11932 (at the anniversary of his death). Given the otherwise sparse
employment of this adjective, the frequency of this usage is significant.
51
Diane Speed, “The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance,” Readings
in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994) 149.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 281

When describing the Trojan heroes after the erection of the second Troy, the
poet retains Guido’s character portraits of Priam’s offspring. First among
Priam’s sons is Hector, who is described in terms of universal ethical values that
hold in the world of antiquity as much as in the world of the poet:
Gode Ector the furst hyght;
God made neuere a beter knyõt
Off douõtinesse and of chiualrie
In cristendome ne in paynie. (1853-56)
The poet analogizes the ancient pagans and the enlightened Christians here since
the world of the ancients was not any less a creation of God. Slightly later, the
narrator observes Hector’s men rejoicing about their leader’s return to support
them against the Greeks (after killing many Greeks on his own): “Ihesu lord!
what thei were glad, / When thei here noble leder had” (4549-50). The poet also
compares Hector with Biblical individuals: “I trowe, god made neuere suche a
knyõt” (6721), he informs his readers and specifies further that “Off Sampson
hadde ben ther that tyde / And al that day hadde reden him be-syde, / He ne
myõt haue don no more then he” (6727-29). The opening invocation (with the
quick shift to Hector via the poet’s own genealogical discourse) and the frequent
employment of the adjective good clearly substantiate Hector’s “figuring of
Christ.” Moreover, Hector’s model is offered for imitation as frequent modifica-
tions of the knight’s personality indicate. Hector’s changeability and transpar-
ency exemplify how personal narratives can be inscribed into collective dis-
course, how several, contradictory roles (for example, martial aggression and
Christian mercy) can be synthesized in a translucent model that is fully realized
in Chaucer’s Troilus.52 Thus, Troilus, Achilles, and Penthesilea, all imitate Hec-
tor’s model at some point, as does the poet, who perceives of Hector as a man of
books (much like he is himself). In Hector’s most important (if ineffectual)
speech against beginning a war with Greece, he builds his argument on bookish-
ness: “I haue herd say and red in boke” (2337). More generally, whenever the
poet discusses Hector, poetical invention is close at hand, too.
The initial invocation of the trinity reoccurs in the description of the events of
the fifth battle, relayed in Book XVIII of the Historia. Priam had ordered a one-
day repose after the death of Cassibilans and ponders the potential decapitation
of Thoas, which both Aeneas and Hector believe to be an ill-advised strategy. In
the ensuing battle, Hector’s deeds are much expanded in the Laud. For instance,
his encounter of Ortomenus is not at all important in the Historia: the two fight;
Ortomenus dies – “Rex Ortomenus aggreditur Hectorem, quem Hector protinus

52
The poet stresses the peaceful side of Hector, which is neglected in the Historia (e.g.,
3603-06); Hector also emerges as merciful. See Benson, History 84. In my opinion, this
underlines the attempt to reconcile Christian and military masks. In the Laud, complete
transparency is the ideal; translucent masking is only advocated later by Chaucer, Lydgate,
and Henryson.
282 Interchapter One

interfecit” [King Ortomenus approached Hector, who immediately kills him]

(XVIII, 156-57). The Laud expands,
To Ector rod kyng Octomene
With hate and moche tene,
He come to Ector faste fleande
With a stalworthe spere In hande,
He smot Ector, that his spere barst.
“The deuel the honge hard and fast!”
Seide Ector, “what eyles the?
Whi hastow thus smetyn me?” (7377-84)
Only then does Hector kill his adversary, severing Ortomenus’s head down to
his chin so that his teeth become visible. The expansion is notable insofar as it
associates the treacherous Greeks with the Devil, an analogy frequently made in
the Laud (see below), and insofar as it prepares the audience for Hector’s
association with Christ, which is developed in his next fight with Epistrophus
and Cedius. Guido reports that the two knights rush upon Hector, and he
mentions in passing that Epistrophus verbally abused Hector before attempting
to unhorse him (XVIII, 157). Not only does the poet alter this passage, he also
adds an almost exact quotation of the invocation of the trinity with which the
work began. Instead of simply relaying how the two kings attack Hector, the
poet first focuses on Hector’s valiant deeds in battle, again in decidedly
Christian terms: Glorious kyng lord Ihesu!
Who-so hadde sen Ector vertu,
How he the Gregeis ther reuerced,
Helmes and hauberk how he persed,
How he hem sclow by two and on, –
He wolde haue sworn by Peter and Ion,
By Marie bryõt and persones thre:
That god that is In vnite
Made neuere man that was so goode,
Ne so many schedde of mannes blode,
Ne non so strong as Ector was. (7413-23, emphases added)
The poet refers the audience back to the initial link between Hector’s chivalric
ethos and the trinity, where the poet invoked the latter to describe the former.
Here, the perspective is at once externalized and generalized. Whoever wit-
nesses Hector must come to the same conclusion, namely, that God created only
one man who was so good.53 Next, the audience learns that no-one surpasses
Hector and that he slays Greeks “thikkere” than men drive geese to “chepyng-
toun for to selle” (7428-29), which contextualizes Hector’s prowess in terms of
English country-life.

53
The rhyme of goode and blode is worth noting and may be indicative of the poet’s inten-
tion to Christianize his hero by alluding to Hector’s death caused by a charitable deed (see
below).
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 283

The transparent underpinnings of Hector’s self-fashioning are further relayed

in his fight (and accompanying verbal encounter) with Epistrophus. At this
point, the poet includes an important self-reflexive speech, allowing Hector to
articulate his prosopagraphical make-up. While Guido indicates merely that the
two exchange words, the poet imbues the reported speech with life:
Episcropus, that ape and owle,
Spak to Ector wordes foule,
He called him “fitz-a-putayn,”
And seyth: “he was a cherl velayn.”
Than seide Ector: “as I am knyõt,
Thow schalt of me haue a foul dispit,
Of me, thow kyng Episcropus, –
Thow hast defouled me thus!”
Episcropus Ector defies. (7445-53)
The poet portrays Epistrophus in an extremely negative light. The association
with an ape does not require further explanation, whereas owle is a rather
pointed, easily overlooked insult. It furthers the previous analogy between Epis-
trophus and the Devil, since oule was frequently used not only to generally rep-
resent someone’s hideousness, but is used also as “A name for Satan.”54 Addi-
tionally, Epistrophus’s insults primarily employ Anglo-Norman, that is, ‘French’
loan words. Cherl velayn is a hybrid French-English tautology with the former
being an Old English word for anyone not part of either nobility or clergy, and
the latter referring to an un-free tenant.55 It is to the second aspect, that Hector
responds:
“Fals ataynted traytor, thow lyes”;
Saide Hector, “I was neuere thral,
I am fre and my kynde al;
In al my kyn is no throle,
But kyng and duk, knyõt & erle;
My ffader is a gentil kyng,
Suche is non In thyn ospreyng!
Fyfftene kynges, genteler than thow,
Doth him omage and fewte now;
And I, his sone, knyõt, and Air,
Vndir me is man and mair,
Duke and Prince, and knyõtes strong,
And alle that euere to him long.
My moder is a gentil quene,
A trewe lady, and euere hath bene;
Sche did her lord neuere falshede,
But euere was trewe In word and dede.
It semes wel thanne, that I am fre,
I may be skyl no cherl be! (7453-72)

54
MED, s.v. oule n. 2 a) and b).
55
MED, s.vv. cherl n. a) and vilein n. a) and c).
284 Interchapter One

The poet thus introduces Epistrophus’s insults in a way that enables Hector to
present his gentil genealogy. Instead of perceiving the insult as what it is, Hector
charges Epistrophus with falsehood (lying), alluding to the duplicity of the
Greeks. Hector translates the French insult of villeinage into the English termi-
nology of thral / throle with an emphasis on Hector’s fre-dom. He further em-
phasizes the mask of knighthood twice, both times couched in the framework of
dependency. While he is the heir of his father’s kingdom (that is, he is subject to
his father’s rule), various other groups are subject to him; he occupies a mid-
dling position. His father’s wife, who is free of any falsehood (that is, she is
transparent), is subject to his father’s rule also. By elaborating on his social posi-
tion, Hector believes that he rebuts Epistrophus’s claim; he is “no cherl.” His
speech becomes a meditation on transparency, especially since the speech itself
renders transparent what remains veiled (that is, absent) in his source. The key
asset of a true knight, the audience learns, is transparency, the state of being free
of falsehoods. Hector’s speech raises problematic questions vis-à-vis national
identity as well (see below), but it should be noted here that Hector’s defense
against Epistrophus’s insult finds a structural correlative in the prologue to the
Laud insofar as Hector constructs a genealogy for future acts by placing himself
in a tradition that legitimizes future transgressions; initially, the poet likewise
provides a genealogy of romance discourse legitimizing his version of the Troy
story (and the transgressions against the tradition that informs his work). The fo-
cus of Hector’s speech, as indicated toward the end of the speech, in which Hec-
tor says that he will “slake” Epistrophus’s words (7474), is on selfhood and its
relationship to the genealogy of and one’s positioning in social groups.
Throughout the Laud, the poet embellishes Hector’s deeds of war and draws
attention to his emotional changeability, most noticeably around his death,
which sheds more light on Hector’s (and the poet’s) national importance (see be-
low). Hector’s self-reflection is stressed most poignantly when the poet turns to
the seventh battle, relayed in Book XX of the Historia. Here, Hector incurs a
wound on his face and is driven back. While retreating, Hector sees his wife and
other Trojan ladies on top of the city walls. Guido reports, “Et iam Greci Troya-
nos in tantum repulerant quod eos quasi inpulerant iuxta Troye menia ciuitatis.
Propter quod Hector multum erubuit, et ideo in furorem pudoris accensus in re-
gem Merionem irruit, [...]” [Furthermore, the Greeks were already repulsing the
Trojans to such an extent that they had driven them almost to the walls of the
city of Troy. On account of this Hector was greatly embarrassed, and so, since
he was kindled with the fury of shame, he rushed upon King Merion...] (XX,
168). The poet follows Guido as concerns the plot, but he liberally alters cause
and effect, in ways that strikingly illuminate Hector’s modified personality.
While Hector’s shame stems from his military inferiority in the Historia, the
Laud offers a complex, introspective moment. The poet embellishes Hector’s
wound, drawing attention to the hypothesis of what could have happened had
Hector not been wounded: “Hadde not his visage ben reuen, / He had not ben
bakward dreuen” (8863-64). Nevertheless, “He fauõt a-õeyn with mychel pyne”
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 285

(8865), despite the fact that he cannot really see anything – “For he myõt not se
to ffyght” (8862). Looking up at the walls, he beholds the ladies. Although the
poet, after briefly describing the ladies, retains in one line that the Greeks drive
him back even further, he grants Hector narrative space to give a short speech to
explain his emotions, in which the ladies’ presence is now mentioned as a cause
for his shame:
“Alas!” he sayde, “I am on lyue!
I wolde I were with-outen lyff!
I se be-fore me stonde my wiff
And alle these other faire ladyes,
And beholden bothe parties
And haue be-holded alle oure dedes;
And for my visage a littil bledes
Thei se now me on bak be-set,
Mi vylony it wol be ret.
What may thei wene but I be faynt,
Fals of herte, and a-taynt,
Or of the dethe that I haue drede,
That I thus fle for that I blede?
But be him that made alle thyng,
Tre to growe and gras to spryng!
I schal hem quyte her trauayle,
Iff that I be hole and hayle.” (8874-90)
Hector’s “schame” (8893) is motivated by an externalized view of his self. The
question is not what he is – he is not afraid of a little wound, and the Greeks ob-
viously outnumber Hector, so that worries about lack of prowess would be quite
misplaced; what matters is how his role might be construed in the minds of oth-
ers, the ladies in particular.56 Hector’s shame, therefore, relates in interesting
ways to Jason’s fears of being branded a coward and to Achilles’s embarrass-
ment at Hector’s offer to duel him (see below). As a truly transparent Trojan,
Hector is mainly worried that his wound might be misconstrued as a mask and
that he is not transparent enough.

4. From Individual to Genealogy: Hector to Penthesilea

Hector’s genealogical speech not only suggests a heroic anteriority for Troy but
also a heroic posteriority, since several Trojans and one non-Trojan subse-
quently adopt Hector’s transparency as a commendable hypergood. The role of
the national hero and his emotional transparency and changeability transfer to
the ‘second Hector,’ Troilus. Needless to add, he is a lesser hero than Hector,
but not by much. The Laud thus anticipates the Chaucerian framework of Troi-
lus’s ‘double sorwe,’ situated within the “decisive period in which Hector and
Troilus die, leaving the city at the Greeks’ mercy, without its chief defenders,

56
The fear that others may construe one’s actions as cowardly reoccurs particularly in Chau-
cer’s Troilus, which is generally more interested in seeming and veiling.
286 Interchapter One

and thereby vulnerable to the treason of Aeneas and Antenor.”57 I shall now out-
line the transfer of transparency from Hector to Troilus, from Troilus to Achil-
les, and from Achilles to Penthesilea.
From the beginning of the poem, Troilus is associated with his older brother.
In a list of valiant heroes losing their lives on account of Hesione, Hector is
mentioned first, followed by Troilus; in the Historia, the reader only learns that
Hesione is the cause of the war, but Guido mentions no names (IV, 42) – an-
other indication of the greater importance of individuals in the Laud. The poet
further links Hector with Troilus by means of anaphoric reference:
And gode Ector, here owne Cosyn,
And gode Troyle, and Dephebus,
And here brother Priamus,
And Hectuba the gode qwene.
And here douõter Pollexene;
And alle that to Troye longed
For hir rape the deth ther fonged. (1722-28)
If Hector is a ‘good’ hero, then, so is Troilus. Although the poet uses the adjec-
tive good less excessively with reference to Troilus, he is the only other hero
frequently characterized as good.58 Next, both writers list Priam’s noble off-
spring. Guido remarks briefly that Troilus is courageous and that his deeds will
not be omitted (V, 44-45); the poet makes explicitly the implicit association of
Troilus and Hector:
The õongest doughti Troylus,
A doughtier man than he was on
Off hem alle was neuere non,–
Saue Ector, that was his brother,
That neuere was goten suche another... (1864-68)
While this addition leaves no doubt about the relationship of the two valiant
knights, another subtle change occurs in this passage – one that touches on the
dichotomy between mind and heart. Generally, Guido’s order of Priam’s natural
sons is retained with the exception of one seemingly unimportant knight: Guido
mentions Helenus before turning to Troilus. The poet reverses this by mention-
57
Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Houndmills: Pal-
grave, 2002) 46.
58
The adjective naturally lends itself as a filler, but the usage throughout the poem is strik-
ing, as I demonstrated above with respect to Hector. Troilus appears as ‘good’ in lines
1723, 3368, 4635, 4753, 14426, and 14945. Consistent with the attribution of “godenes” to
the Trojans, there are several instances, in which the Trojans as such are ‘good’: 4489,
4726, 4735, 4755, 9969, and 18252. At one point, Cassandra refers to Priam as ‘good’
(2684). Only rarely does the poet describe Greeks as ‘good.’ Exceptions are “gode Men-
non” (4512) and Achilles with his “gode Mirmydanes” (4597), the latter being consistent
with Achilles’s adoption of ‘good’ (i.e., Trojan) transparency; Diomedes is once described
as “gode douõti Diomedes” (12929). On few occasions, Greek knights are described as a
“gode kyng” (e.g., “gode kyng Vlixes” [14436]). Here, ‘good’ refers to their titles, how-
ever, not to their merit as individuals.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 287

ing that “The fourthe hight Elenus” (1863). Then follows a more detailed de-
scription of Troilus before the Laud returns to Helenus, who is introduced as the
wisest clerk, versed in rhetoric, and knowledgeable in astronomy. The portrait
closes on a rather ambiguous, if not ironic note: “He was forsothe a wis man, /
Off alle science that any clerk can” (1873-74). These changes, unremarkable as
they may seem, become significant when Troilus and Helenus clash during the
decisive parliamentary discussion concerning the question of whether to risk a
military confrontation with the Greeks.
At Priam’s council, where Troilus clinches the argument for going to war,
Helenus’s advice is important in the Historia – thus Guido postpones the portrait
of Troilus who is an emotional and, therefore, lesser player. By changing the or-
der (first Troilus, only then the wise clerk), the poet also changes the dynamics
of the parliamentary debate. Helenus only offers the advice of a clerk, not that of
a valiant knight. In the Historia, Helenus’s speech stresses Priam’s emotional
decision making: his speech against Paris’s plan makes Priam ‘falter’ (VI, 64).
This aspect is muted in the Laud where changeability is natural. Additionally,
the poet emphasizes that Helenus is the brother of traitor Paris (2531).59 In the
Historia, Troilus’s speech is openly emotional, befitting the knight with too
broad a heart (“rupto silencio in hec uerba prorupit” [VI, 64]); in the Laud, Troi-
lus simply “seide” his piece, somewhat muting Troilus’s emotionality. Next,
Guido’s Troilus relays that Helenus’s weakness ensues from his fatuity, which is
a mental process. The poet instead focuses on Helenus’s heart: “For a caytiff
herte ffayles” (2556), he reminds his audience. Among one hundred men, “A
ffebler herte schulde õe not ffynde” (2559). Helenus’s fear of chivalry (2562,
2575-76) is also related to his heart. The main problem, however, lies in the
qualifier: his caytiff heart. The word has the conventional meaning of
wretched(ness) and cowardice, the primary connotation, especially in the con-
text of war, being enslaved or imprisoned,60 which appears to be the meaning
here. Helenus’s heart is imprisoned, is veiled by a clerkly mask that cannot be
surrendered for the greater cause. Since Helenus’s ambitions are clerkly rather
than chivalrous, it is natural that his initial description demotes his position in
favor of promoting Troilus, who, as a second Hector, will take over the latter’s
‘mask.’ The Trojans are aware of this: they praise Troilus for his speech and are
impressed by his “manhede” and believe he “was wide and good of rede” (2585-
86). In the Historia, Guido regrets that no-one listened to Hector’s, Helenus’s
and Panthus’s objections to Paris’s plan (VI, 67). The Laud does not mention
Helenus, Hector, and Panthus at this point, leaving only Cassandra’s complaints
as a counter-voice (2707-10). Naturally, the poet dismisses her complaints given
her reputation as an ill-fated prophetess. Thus, the poet’s Helenus is associated

59
The Laud identifies Paris as cause of the fall of Troy (3352-80). Benson, History 82.
60
MED, s.v. caitif n. 1. and adj. 1. Hector uses caitif later to describe Epistrophus, and Cas-
sandra employs the term, perhaps with overtones of slavery, when blaming the Trojans for
blindly celebrating Helen’s betrothal to Cassandra – favored by Troilus.
288 Interchapter One

with the treachery that leads to the ‘imprisonment’ of the Trojans by means of
associating him with Paris; he is associated with caitif-ness, that is, with the in-
ability to doff the mask.
In contrast to the Historia, in which Troilus emerges as an emotionally-
charged ‘loser,’ the Laud reverses this sentiment structurally as well. Guido’s
list of heroes in Book V includes no details concerning Troilus; the Laud like-
wise does not enumerate Priam’s offspring, postponing the list until after the de-
scription of the rebuilt Troy. Because of this slight but effective re-positioning,
the key Trojans are introduced immediately before their negotiations regarding
the “vilony” and “schame” inflicted on them.61 It is not until Book VIII that
Guido introduces Troilus as the ‘second Hector’ in a second list, allegedly to be
found in Dares (VIII, 83). First, the Greek troops are mentioned; the Trojans
come second. It is at this point that Troilus becomes ‘another’ or a ‘second Hec-
tor’ (VIII, 86).62 While Guido stresses Troilus’s ‘magnanimous’ heart, the poet
omits this ‘anatomical’ detail, instead attributing it to Helenus in Troilus’s
speech! The ‘Dares-catalogue’ is not included in the Laud at all. Rather, the poet
uses this passage to supplant the description of the knights with a further medita-
tion on Hector and Troilus (and himself), adding a brief invective against Paris
for causing Hector’s death – an apposite preface for the ensuing parliamentary
negotiations.63 The short focus on Hector and Troilus reinforces their relation-
ship. After asking the audience to listen carefully (because now he is reporting
the details of the war), the poet describes Hector as the most valiant knight of
them all (3257-62, cited below). After repeating this familiar tenet, the poet
turns to the purpose of the poem, which is not only to depict the deeds of Hector,
but also those of Troilus: “Som[what] wol I of him telle / And of other knyghtes
felle, / Off him and of Troyle, his brother” (3271-73). The Laud promotes Troi-
lus from an emotional, elegiac ‘hero’ to an emotional, epic hero. While Dares,
Joseph of Exeter, and Benoît describe Troilus as an ill-fated lover, the Laud-poet
achieves an elevation of Troilus’s status, which is usually attributed to Lydgate’s
Troy Book, which is believed to fully restore “Troilus’ epic status” for the first
time.64 Within the prosopagraphical framework, Troilus is transparent – and he

61
Priam’s crucial concern with his kidnapped sister is muted in the Laud. In this passage, the
audience encounters precisely the terms with which Jason refuses to give up the task of
procuring the Golden Fleece. He would rather die than live in such shame. The Trojan
leader admits the shame and villainy caused by the Greeks and they negotiate means of
mending it, a much stronger stance in the light of adversity.
62
Dares does indeed describe Troilus as being not any less brave than Hector (VII, 20).
Since neither Joseph of Exeter nor Benoît includes such a phrase, this is the potential
source for Pandarus’s comment in Chaucer’s Troilus II. 158 (Barney 1032n; Meek 290n).
63
The poet returns to this when Menelaus, who is blackened because he attacks a ‘naked’
Paris, is almost successful in his assault, the poet hopes that “Paris ded hadde ben, / Ne
hadde Eueas gon be-twen” (6969-70).
64
Anna Torti, “From ‘History’ to ‘Tragedy’: The Story of Troilus and Criseyde in Lydgate’s
Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Boi-
tani 174.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 289

is a hero, which the poet achieves by introducing the mentioned, minimal

changes to the portrait of the second Hector.65 Like Hector, Troilus is change-
able; yet, this changeability is part of human nature and heroic, since both he-
roes’ deaths are eventually not caused by errors of judgment.
The making of Troilus’s heroic identity proceeds further in several steps in-
volving small changes. An important stage is marked by the conversation be-
tween Hector and Troilus before engaging in battle. In the Historia, Hector re-
fers to Troilus as bellicosi, as ‘aggressive’ (XV, 128) where the Laud-poet pre-
fers “gode” (4753). Moreover, the poet mutes Hector’s worries about potential
foolhardiness on Troilus’s part: “a stulticiis declines immensis” (XV, 128). Hec-
tor’s worries about Troilus’s rashness are maintained, as is Hector’s request that
Troilus behave wisely on the battlefield (4753-66). Guido naturally stresses the
familial overtones – Hector speaks to Troilus in ‘affectionate’ terms and is con-
cerned about his brother. The poet contextualizes this speech differently, focus-
ing on Troilus’s role as a leader. The poet adds to Hector’s speech, “brother, I
the be-tak / These gode men In thi ke-pyng, / I praye oure goddis, a-õeyn õow
bryng!” (4754-56). Subsequently, the Laud-poet glorifies Troilus’s deeds.66
In the Middle English poem, Troilus’s first encounter with Diomedes is in-
troduced by the comment that Troilus “did meruayles” (6195), but the battle de-
scription remains unchanged.67 More dramatically, the Briseida story is entirely
dropped at this point, which further strengthens the pairing of Hector and Troi-
lus instead. Hector allocates 10,000 men to Troilus’s command, and adds a short
speech in which Hector wishes Troilus’s god to be supportive (8634-37). During
the battle, Troilus interrupts the fight of Achilles with Hector, which highlights
the proximity of the transparent Trojans, anticipating that they shall later be

65
The Laud also avoids the ‘duplication’ of Troilus as it occurs in the Historia, which first
postpones portraying Troilus’s warlike deeds and then, ambiguously, mentions his big
heart in the context of his popularity with women (VIII, 86).
66
When Menesteus enters battle in the Historia (XV, 136), for example, the poet focuses on
how Troilus butchers many Greek soldiers. While Guido portrays the scene as though
Menesteus encounters Troilus by accident, the Laud has Menesteus search Troilus actively
(5135-38). After Troilus’s capture, Miseres encourages the Trojans to free Troilus. In the
Historia, the familial associations are stressed (Troilus is Hector’s brother and Priam’s
son); for the Laud, Troilus as such is worthy enough of rescue – his importance for Troy is
clearly established and does not require argument (5156-58; cf. Historia XV, 136-37). Af-
ter Troilus is freed, the poet does everything to further Menesteus’s wickedness. His grief
is mentioned in the Historia (XV, 137) but is expanded in the Laud, where Menesteus
voices his anger with overtones of Achillean treachery: “He prayed hem [his men] wel
hertely: / ‘That thei schuld him helpe stalworthly, / To venge him on the kyng Troyene, /
He hadde don him schame and tene’” (5187-90).
67
Another change regarding the order in which the poet enumerates the valiant knights fur-
ther illustrates that Troilus is second only to Hector. The Historia’s list reads: Hector,
Paris, Troilus, Deiphebus, Polydamas, Antenor, and Aeneas. The Laud modifies this as
follows: Hector, Troilus, Antenor, Deiphebus, Aeneas, Paris, and Polydamas (XVIII, 155;
7069-72).
290 Interchapter One

joined by a third (albeit Greek) knight, namely, Achilles.68 Eventually, the poet
comes to the love story of Troilus and Briseida, the details of which are pre-
ceded by the encounter of Diomedes and Troilus which occurs in the process of
capturing Menelaus, when Diomedes unhorses Troilus. The Historia does not
provide many details about the battle itself and rather focuses on Diomedes’s
message to Briseida. The poet presents more battle details and portrays Troilus
in a rather advantageous light. After mentioning that Troilus is unhorsed, the
poet excuses this shortcoming:
And ther-fore was it no pris:
He hadde a spere at his deuys,
And Troyle that tyme hadde non;
Thoow he hadde broke bak and bon,
Me thynke it hadde ben litel wonder,
Off Troyle lay his hors fete vnder. (9055-60)
Troilus’s epic actions inevitably alter the audience’s perspective on the Troilus
and Briseida episode that exposes Troilus’s ill-fortune in love matters.
The Troilus and Briseida plot is one of the few episodes in the Laud that in-
cited critical commentary. The general perception is that the three references to
the story in the poem “are scarcely more than references, and the tale is nowhere
told so fully as in Guido [...].”69 R. M. Lumiansky surmises that the love story is
muted since the poet lacks interest in the “psychological interpretation of
love,”70 whereby the poet mutes Guido’s misogyny as well.71 As Gretchen Mi-
eszkowski has it, “Instead of moralizing, this author is sarcastic, and he stresses
the price Criseyde asks for her love.”72 The Laud also drops the first portraits of
the three characters and the second fight, and he mutes the courtship of Dio-
medes and Briseida in order to foreground Hector’s dealings with Achilles.
There are some additions, for instance, in the third battle, where Polydamas
gives Diomedes’s horse to Troilus, and where the poet expands on Menelaus’s
intervention on the battlefield, emphasizing Troilus’s hatred.73 One of the major
changes, however, is the changed structural position of the episode, which, Lu-
miansky argues, is motivated by the conscious creation of a Hector-romance.74

68
Additionally, Troilus is depicted again as performing marvels on the battlefield (8991-94),
and Troilus’s capture of Menelaus is also embellished, drawing attention to his prowess.
The poet further adds that Troilus intends to lead him to Helen (9030), at which point the
poet introduces the love story hitherto suppressed.
69
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 3.
70
R. M. Lumiansky, “The Story of Troilus and Briseida in the Laud Troy-Book,” MLQ 18.3
(1957): 238 n. 1, with reference to E. Bagby Atwood’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis “English
Versions of the Historia Trojana” (University of Virginia, 1932) 100, non videtur.
71
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 245; Hyder E. Rollins, “The Troilus-Cressida
Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA 32.3 (1917): 387.
72
Gretchen Mieszkowski, “The Reputation of Criseyde 1155-1500,” Transactions of the
Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 43 (1971): 113.
73
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 240-45.
74
Lumiansky, “Story of Troilus and Briseida” 245-46.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 291

The changes concerning the relationship of Troilus and Criseyde, however,

likewise reinforce the genealogy of heroic identities, condoning Trojan transpar-
ency while furthering the association of the Greeks with treachery. First of all,
Troilus takes on almost Criseydan qualities: in Benoît’s Roman, Troilus is a past
lover of Criseyde; in the Laud, Criseyde becomes a past love for Troilus when
his horse is sent to her by Diomedes – “Vn-til Cresseide, êat fair womman, /
That sumtyme was Troyle lemman” (9063-64, emphasis added). While Guido’s
antifeminism is absent, the law of “kynde” plays an important role here insofar
as Criseyde is defined through her father, ‘bishop Calchas,’ who emerges as
somewhat changed in comparison with the Latin version. In the Historia, the
gods command his defection; in the Laud, Apollo
sayde: “that Troye scholde be distroyed.”
He was therfore ful sore anoyed,
He durst not wende to Troye aõeyn
For fferd he scholde haue ben sclayn.... (9071-74)
He stays with the Greeks and urges their leaders to make Criseyde part of the
exchange of prisoners. In contrast to the Historia, he does not ask for her deliv-
ery from Priam, but explicitly from Troilus: “That thei wolde preye kyng Pria-
mus / To sende hir him ffro sir Troylus” (9083-84). These are admittedly minor
changes, but they do associate Criseyde with a cleric who fears returning to his
own country and who chooses to stay with the enemy to save his own life. Al-
though Calchas knows about his daughter’s relationship with Troilus, he never-
theless asks her to be exchanged. Hence, his selfishly treacherous behavior gov-
erns the dire ex-change of ‘female property’ in the Laud. The same goes for
Diomedes, whose desire for and attachment to Criseyde takes up more narrative
space than Troilus’s courtship of her. Troilus’s sorrow about the loss of
Criseyde, therefore, plays a minor role. The poet is rather interested in Troilus’s
valor than his emotional turmoil, which is illustrated when Troilus resumes bat-
tle after being unhorsed by Diomedes,75 and when the poet invents an episode in
which Hector and Troilus appear side-by-side:
Ector õaff to him wel gode syõt,
He saw him wel to grounde go
His stede ytaken and lad him fro;
He was ney wod for ire and tene:
He wolde meruayle, that had sene
What wonder that Ector wroght! (9100-05)76

75
After getting up from the ground, Troilus draws his sword “And rome aboute him he
made, / He sclow Gregeis with al his myõt” (9097-99) – another embellishment of his
martial deeds.
76
Hector causes the Greeks to flee in the Laud, not the Trojans as such. The Greeks are terri-
fied of Hector: “For al the gode of here Empire!” would they not inquire what ails him
(9122).
292 Interchapter One

Hector’s violence caused by the unhorsing of his brother is also an addition.

Troilus, after being re-horsed, “sclow the Gregeis doun on hepes” (9190). Sub-
sequently, Troilus is associated with Achilles, with whom he fights and whose
wounds prompt him to regard Troilus in terms of his arch-enemy Hector: “Him
were leuere than al Lubik, / That he myõt Trolye to dethe strike” (9215-16).77
Troilus indeed would have become a great king one day, had not Hector per-
ished (and with him, Troy), the poet comments (9909-44).
After more embellishments of Troilus’s prowess, the poet turns to the next
battle between Troilus and Diomedes; Criseyde is mentioned as being the moti-
vation for the encounter; however, the poet is ambiguous about who envies
whom. Troilus wounds many Greeks before beholding Diomedes:
He hadde to him wel gret envy:
He thought to do with him Maystry, –
That him were leuere then gret catel, –
That he myght scle him In that batel;
He hated him for his lemman,
Cresseida, that fair womman. (10361-66)
The reference of the personal pronoun here is unclear, although it would be
natural to attribute the envy to Troilus. And yet, the following passage suggests
otherwise:
He toke a spere stalworth and strong,
To bere doun Troyle a-mong the throng;
But Troyle saw him come ridande
And toke a stalworth spere In hande.... (10367-70)
This continuation makes it permissible, if not more likely, to assume that Dio-
medes is envious of Troilus because of his former lover. After all, the audience
approaches this passage thinking of Criseyde as Troilus’s former lover. The poet
embellishes Troilus’s deeds (he adds that Troilus would no doubt have slain
Diomedes), implicitly arguing that envy befits treacherous Greeks rather than
transparent Trojans.
Natural emotional reactions are appropriate for transparent Trojans, however.
Thus, Troilus’s emotionality is increasingly emphasized as the poem approaches
the end of the Troilus and Briseida plot. The first noticeable modification con-
cerns Troilus’s sorrow after Hector’s death (11073), which, in the Laud, marks
the substitution of Hector by Troilus. The latter is described exactly in the same
way as Hector before him: “He bar a scheld of asure fyne, / A lyoun of gold
ther-on was paynt” (12978-79).78 After again embellishing Troilus’s valor
(13345-54), the Laud considers the next duel with Diomedes, prompted by the

77
In the Historia, Hector advances to the place where Troilus and Achilles are engaged in
combat (XX, 170), while the poet has Hector intervene on account of his brother’s pre-
dicament (9219-303).
78
Hector’s shield is earlier described (as it is in the Historia) as “of Asure blewe, / In-
myddes his scheld a lyon stode” (4900-01).
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 293

latter’s butchering of Trojans. Guido immediately turns to the battle, while the
poet adds Troilus’s exclamation: “‘War the wel’ – seyde he – ‘fro me! / For thi
dedis I defye the!’” (13421-22). All of a sudden, after Troilus’s envy has been
attributed to Diomedes, Troilus’s affection for Criseyde becomes important:
“Troyle ful foule him missayd / For Brixaida that was his leff, / He reuyled him
as he were a theff” (13436-38). During the battle, Troilus clearly is in charge,
perhaps because he fights for his former lover, an emotional reaction ultimately
rendering him victorious.79 At this point, the audience beholds Criseyde for the
last time. She appears to be genuinely Greek, that is, duplicitous in the Laud,
more so than in the Historia. Guido describes her as changing her ‘heart’
(XXVI, 198); for the poet, “sche chaunged her wil & corage” (13556), rhyming
with the previous line’s mariage rather than referring to Guido’s iungenda.
Within the prosopagraphical framework of the Laud, then, Criseyde appears as a
treacherous mask-maker. Had her change been emotionally motivated, this
would be a different story – but love only features in an ambiguous context:
Sche sayde sche wolde with him dele
For any man, whan he hadde hele;
For to him sche õaff al hir talent,
For he hadde mechel on hir y-spent,
And loued hir wel, and sche him als –
As wymmen doth that offten ben fals. (13559-64)
The poet’s use of to dele suggests economic exchange, and it implies sexual re-
lations rather than love. Similarly, talent refers to weight and currency, while
additionally connoting (sexual) desire, physical urge, drive, and passion (a pos-
sible connotation also of corage).80 While Criseyde is changeable, her change-
ability is not caused by the transparency Trojans condone. She uses her mental
capacities to create a narrative, duplicitous mask. In contrast to Criseyde’s du-
plicity, Troilus’s transparency remains linked to his prowess, which, in this case,
is tied to his all-informing love of Criseyde. He is, therefore, worthy of becom-
ing a second Hector. Troilus is a transparent epic hero rather than an ill-fated
lover in the Laud. His misfortunes and his emotional turmoil are essential assets
to his knightly prowess. As the next battle commences, the poet again embel-
lishes Troilus’s deeds in analogy to his previous expansions on Hector’s

79
The Middle English poem does not add insult to injury, however; the poet does not trans-
late Guido’s report to that effect (XXVI, 197). Because of the wounds inflicted on Dio-
medes and Menelaus, Agamemnon eventually asks for a truce (esp. 13523-34).
80
MED, s.vv. delen v. 2., 3.; 6. (a) and (b); talent n. (1) – (4). The MED includes this line as
substantiating def. 4. (b) “affection, love.” Corage is the seat of the emotions, heart, and
disposition, but can also mean sexual desire and valor (s.v. corage n. [1] – [3]). The poet
knows that “Sche hoped neuere of him mariage” (13555), which implies that she never
had such intentions to begin with. Mieszkowski believes that the Laud is not a “court
poem” and that Criseyde is not a “lady.” The Laud reworks the Historia for readers of the
poet’s class, and “Criseyde, who cannot expect marriage from her men, is shown figuring
how much they can spend on her” (“Reputation” 114).
294 Interchapter One

achievement before his death (13745-801). The poet also extends the lion anal-
ogy – used for Hector, Laomedon, and Achilles – to Troilus (14243). Like Hec-
tor, Troilus is now a gentil and doghti knight (14272, 14275). As such, he inher-
its Hector’s antagonism with Achilles, whom Troilus defies as a false traitor to
be locked in hell (14245-50).
Achilles’s position in the Laud is problematic, but not more so than it was in
the Historia, where Guido associates him with the Trojan transparency he gen-
erally condemns. For the poet, the connotations are inverted, however, while the
plot itself remains unchanged. The Historia portrays an Achilles who becomes
the epitome of changeability. Initially, he is a man of duplicity. Later, he turns
transparent before again falling for treachery shortly before dying on account of
his emotion-driven hope of obtaining Polyxena. Although he is a Greek, he be-
comes a transparent Trojan ‘hero’ in the Laud. After Achilles’s death, this heroic
transparency is conferred onto Penthesilea, who combines the heroic assets of
Hector, Troilus, and Achilles. Thus, her characterization refers the audience
back to the beginning of the poem, to Hercules, who is also a transparent hero
when compared to mask-making Jason. Within this cyclic structure, Penthesilea
is only the penultimate hero in the genealogical line, the last being the poet, for
whom transparency and changeability are desirable English traits.
Achilles’s ‘Trojanness’ is insinuated already at the outset of the poem, which
complicates Benson’s observation about Achilles’s “astonishing metamorpho-
sis” after Hector’s death:
Achilles goes from skulking coward to the story’s principal hero, and much care is
now devoted to recording and expanding his exploits. One reason for this, surely, is the
poem’s romantic design, which demands there always be a hero of some sort, even if
he has to be a Greek.81
From the beginning of the poem, the Laud emphasizes Achilles’s changeability
and transparency, which, as my prosopagraphical reading has shown, are heroic
characteristics for the poet. In the prologue, Achilles emerges as the “best” of
the Greeks (61-64), at least concerning his physical abilities; the attribution of
worthiness is reserved for Hector. The second mention of Achilles in the pro-
logue is ambiguous, as I argued above: Dares and Dictys, the poet reports, relay
the truth “with-oute les / Of gode Ector and Achilles” (93-94). It is up to the
audience to extend Hector’s ‘goodness’ so as to include Achilles. Achilles’s
character, throughout the Laud, oscillates between Greek treacherous duplicity
and Trojan emotional transparency.
Long before Hector’s death, Achilles’s rampant emotionality is stressed when
he is about to slay the king of a rebellious town. Telephus successfully asks him
to exert mercy – an act of benevolence that will remind the audience of Hector’s
later acts of mercy (4033-54, and see 7217). Six hundred lines later, Achilles
butchers people without pity after Hector left the field (4625). When 10,000
Greeks attack Hector and still cannot kill him, the poet complains about Achil-
81
Benson, History 89.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 295

les’s treacherous murder of Hector, “[...] that wicked dede, / That sclow him so
in vnmanhede!” Certainly, Achilles behaves dishonorably (5411-13) and yet,
Achilles is not consistently blackened. For instance, Achilles is compared to a
“lyparde” (6096), an analogy usually used to describe Hector. In the next en-
counter with Hector, Achilles’s emotions emerge again, however, since “He
hadde to Ector a ful gret luste.” After losing his horse, “Achilles ros and gret
dele made, / For he his hors lorn hadde” (6134, 6143-44). Achilles’s duplicity is
then explored fully in relation to Hector in a long addition:
Achilles seyde: “if he lyue longe,
Here is non of vs so stronge,
That euere schal wynne fro him lyue,
Ther bees sat neuere so thikke on hyue,
Ne corn In lond is thikker sawen,
That he ne scles oure men and ouer-throwen.”
[...]
“But of this world if we mowe
Deliuere him! but I not howe:
Iff we myght be so quaynte and scly,
That we vn-armed come him by.
For iff he take vntil vs hede,
I wot wel we schal neuere spede;
Go we alle vpon a ffrushe,
Opon the erthe we schal him crusche,
We schal him scle and al to-colpen;
But we do thus, we ben not holpen.” (6291-96, 6305-14)
Achilles admires Hector’s prowess, and he is aware of the Greeks’ limitations. It
is rather telling, too, that Achilles makes transparent such thoughts in the Laud.82
In the following encounters of Hector and Achilles, the latter emerges as a
worthy adversary, although he is neither as valiant nor as virtuous as Hector
(6601-34). Hector raises Achilles’s awareness for his un-chivalrous behavior
toward Hector during their meeting in the Greek camp: “me thynke it is no cur-
tesye, / But vnmanhede & vylonye!” (8337-38), he says and alleges that Achilles
is stealthy (8357-60). Hector’s own hatred is legitimized since it would be
against kynde “In my herte if thow schold fynde / In any wyse to loue the, / That
to the dethe hates me” (8377-79), before offering to duel him:
Achilles was gretly aschamed
That Ector thus foule him defamed,
He was a-schamed many-folde
That he so litel by him tolde
Among his men ther In his halle,

82
In the Laud, Hector is aware of Greek “malice and here thynkyng” (6317), which the poet
uses to emphasize Hector’s prowess: “For Alle Achilles trecherie / Thei wolde not sen his
ffisnamye” (6327-28). The Laud adds further that the Trojans would certainly have won
had night not set in. The modification is authorized (and the poet’s changeability legiti-
mized) by means of a brief reference to Dares and Dictys.
296 Interchapter One

That he asked him fight amonges hem alle

Be-twene hem two with-outen mo. (8429-35)
This differs markedly from the Historia, in which Achilles is not ashamed or
concerned with the circumstances – he is simply enraged (XIX, 162-63).
Moreover, the passage recalls Jason’s apprehension that his refusal to obtain the
Golden Fleece may be construed as cowardice. Again, Achilles’s emotional
transparency emerges more strongly in the Laud.83 Increasingly, the poet likens
Achilles to Hector. Achilles’s embarrassment about Hector’s scolding, for in-
stance, finds a close analogue in Hector’s shame when Priam commands that he
abstain from battle:
When is ffader Priamus
Be-fore hem Alle hadde bidden him thus:
Ful vilensly his wyff he chidde
For that schame that sche him didde.... (10207-10)
Even though (or perhaps because) Achilles and Hector resemble each other,
Hector can be killed only by Achilles. As Hector’s death draws near, the duplici-
tous nature of Achilles is frequently emphasized. Achilles stays in the back-
ground to avoid Hector’s attack (10693-98), for instance, and where Guido re-
ports that Achilles muses on the dangers of enraging Hector, the poet adds that
Achilles ponders treachery (10759-84). In view of the increased emphasis on
Achilles’s deceitfulness, it is surprising how quickly the poet embraces and lion-
izes Achilles after Hector’s death: “Now of Ector lete we be, / And of Achilles
speke we! / Off that strong knyght – as I sayde” (11291-93). Achilles fills Hec-
tor’s space.
Achilles’s love for Polyxena marks the turn from duplicity to transparency
again, a fact illustrated by small, but effective changes. In the Historia, Achilles
represses his emotionality and chooses to cry in secret about his predicament
(XXIII, 185). The poet drops this passage, emphasizing the naturalness of Achil-
les’s emotions instead. Consistent with this change, the messenger sent to
Hecuba (in order to ask for Polyxena’s hand on Achilles’s behalf) is not sworn
to secrecy in the Laud (cf. Historia XXIV, 186). The poet also embellishes
Achilles’s happiness upon learning that the Trojans are inclined to accept his
proposal – never did the birds “So mery syngand In thaire note, / As he be-gan
thanne to lote” (12231-32). When the Trojans carry away one victory after an-
other due to Achilles’s unwillingness to fight because he loves Polyxena, his
stance becomes openly counter-imperial. Heber, for instance, alleges that Achil-
les’s ‘evil will’ makes him a traitor, using the word treason for the second time
in the Laud: “It is so sothe thi vilony! / Men wol say opon the tresoun, / Sithen

83
The Laud renders Hector’s challenge as a tournament: Achilles drops his glove, which
Hector eagerly picks up (8449-64). Unlike the Historia, the Laud foregrounds the Greek
(rather than Trojan) unwillingness to submit to the duel. The aspect of treachery resurfaces
with treacherous Antenor and Aeneas: the devil hang them for their treason, thinks the
narrator (8594).
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 297

thow leuest with-oute resoun” (12724-26). Achilles thus commits an offense

“against someone in political authority, particularly the king, his immediate fam-
ily, or his judicial officers.”84 He is guilty of institutional treason in that he is
disloyal to the emperor. Equally counter-imperial is Achilles’s lack of interest in
personal fame, which is relayed in a passage that describes him as persona. The
word is rarely used in the Laud, and it refers the audience back to other occa-
sions where it is employed, for instance, in the invocation of the trinity. If he
were to enter battle, a ‘sergeant’ informs Achilles, the Trojans would flee; all the
world would talk about him,
And say that õoure selff alone
Discomfited hem of Troye euerychone,
And that õoure selff In õoure persone
Did more then kynges and kynges sone.... (12791-94)
While drawing attention to Achilles’s position in the hierarchy by making him
more important to the cause than kings and their sons (thus associating Achilles
with royal genealogy), the stress falls on Achilles as an individual who literally
abandoned his imperial role; Achilles turns Trojan. Were he to resume the impe-
rial mask, he could represent Greece just as Hector represented Troy.
The resemblance of Hector and Achilles (and attendant concern with mask-
ing) is furthered in the description of the negotiations in the Greek camp. The
Greeks continue to blame Achilles for his changeability, and Agamemnon
commands his embassy to employ sleight to entice Achilles to battle again
(13045-126, 13036): within the Greek camp, everything requires masking. In his
response to Ulysses’s request, Achilles asserts that he would rather lose his
reputation, the mask of the valiant knight, than his life. As Ulysses and Nestor
are also slowly convinced that Menelaus has personal motivations for continuing
the war, Achilles’s counter-imperialism almost leads to a rebellion. After Cal-
chas’s complaint about Greek indecision, which resembles the Trojans’ com-
plaints about Helenus’s arguments, the Greeks criticize Achilles for his fear of
chivalry and inability to adopt the respective mask again, however. If he is so
afraid of fighting, he should rather read a romance, they suggest, likening Achil-
les to the poet (see below). When Agamemnon asks Achilles to ‘change’ his
disposition and fight again, the audience might be reminded of the last time
change played a role, namely, when Criseyde changed “her wil & corage.”
Agamemnon now appeals to Achilles’s “herte & wil,” which does not yet
prompt “chaunge” (13587, 13592). Nevertheless, Nestor and Agamemnon are
happy about Achilles’s “gode wil” to send the Myrmidons to battle again
(13604). Meanwhile, Achilles becomes completely transparent, wondering how
the Trojans construe his behavior: “For he hadde het trewely the quene / That he
scholde neuere helpe Gregeis.” The Trojans presumably would “sey it were a
fals couyne” (13892-93, 13899) – Achilles joins the tradition of worrying about

84
Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) 207.
298 Interchapter One

how others perceive him (as did Jason and Hector before him). Ultimately, how-
ever, a woman’s love is not worth the butchering of his people (14179-80), he
realizes, which is a rather ironic turn given his main argument against the war,
namely, that Menelaus’s love for Helen hardly legitimates Greek deaths)! Achil-
les’s faulty logic is rather interesting insofar as the seeming identity of the ar-
guments allows him to construct transparency where none exists.
At this point, the battles between Troilus and Achilles assume the vehemence
of the antagonism between Achilles and Hector. When finally joining the fray
again, Achilles actively seeks out Troilus: “Is ouõt Troyle In that place, / That
makes oure men thus to chase?” (14167-68). He is compared to a lion (14197)
and to a “deuel of helle” (14223-24) – an analogy taken up by Troilus, who
wonders, “What deuel In helle hit myõt be / That made the Troyens so to fle?”
(14235-36). As a false traitor, Troilus claims, Achilles should be locked in hell
(14245-58). Meanwhile, the Laud transfers to Troilus Achilles’s earlier assump-
tion that Hector was the one obstruction to Greek victory; Achilles becomes the
greatest threat to the Trojans (14303-08). Once the Laud reframes Troilus’s fight
with Achilles as a duel, it becomes obvious that their battle recreates the fight
between Hector and Achilles. Thus, the Greeks suggest that Troilus should be
killed like Hector (14593-94). Although the Laud does not stress Achilles’s
treachery here, the poet expands on Guido’s “per manus suas Troilus turpiter
moriatur” (XXVI, 203), reporting that Achilles is envious and thinks night and
day about ways of killing Troilus (14641-44). In order to render analogous the
opening of the battle in which Troilus will be killed and the opening of the battle
in which Hector was killed, the poet shifts the focus to the Trojan camp rather
than to the Greeks, where the Trojans patiently await doghti Troilus’s organiza-
tion of the troops (14656-70). As with Hector’s death, the report of Troilus rid-
ing to battle is similarly accompanied with an aside foreshadowing the catastro-
phe. The poet also correlates Troilus with Hector again:
Hadde destyne ben Ector frende,
Or doghti Troylus that was so hende,
The Gregeis nad not hem sclayn;
But destene turned hem aõeyn,
Destyne was here enemy
And sclow hem bothe vnhappily.
And also died alle that other kynde
Off gode men that were In mynde.
(14701-08; cf. Historia XXI, 171-73)
The poet further complains about the fatal consequences for Troy, as he had
previously before Hector’s death. Achilles’s emotionality is emphasized as well,
however. After instructing the Myrmidons to set up the duel – in a slightly aug-
mented speech delivered with “glad chere” – Achilles loses his glad demeanor
and begins to weep (14719, 14764). Achilles’s emotional changeability, which
is indeed Trojan rather than Greek, is accordingly condoned in the Laud.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 299

Subsequently, Achilles’s deeds are expanded (as were Troilus’s). Unlike

Guido, the poet foregrounds Achilles’s actions while demoting the role of the
Myrmidons in turning the battle (14809-38). Moreover, although the Myrmidons
surround Troilus, they do not attack him as cruelly as they appear to in Guido’s
version. Again, the poet chooses to reframe the final battle in terms of a duel
(14865-68).85 In the actual fight, the Laud relates that Troilus only falls from his
horse because he is weak from fighting Myrmidons all day, which is an addition
reminding the audience that Achilles impudently avoided fighting on the day he
killed Hector. The mischievous treatment of Troilus’s body is maintained also,
but Guido’s complaint about Homer’s glorification of Achilles is completely
omitted. For Benson, this describes “definite limits to his changes. Achilles’s
dragging of Troilus’s body [...] despite its implied blame of the Greek, is re-
tained in the Laud as a historical fact,” which limits the glorification of Achil-
les.86 The poet would have had no alternative, however, since the death of a
‘second Hector,’ could only be brought about by similarly treacherous acts.
Moreover, Achilles’s changeable character, his volatility, remains consistent
within the Laud. When Memnon attacks Achilles and calls him a traitor, for ex-
ample, Achilles reverts to transparency again: “Lord, that Achilles was wode! /
That alle tho chaunged his blode!” (14951-52). Memnon pierces Achilles’s
shield, which likewise prompts the appropriate sentiment: “Achilles was sore
aschamed / And of that dede foule a-gramed” (14961-62). Troilus’s death is thus
framed by Achilles’s oscillation between transparency and opacity, which leaves
no doubt about Troilus’s status as a ‘second Hector.’
The sorrow upon Troilus’s death is much expanded in the Laud, and evokes
many similarities with the Trojan reaction to Hector’s death (14999-5032). As
the bells of the temples are rung, the Trojans realize that without Troilus, they
are without help, a realization that had also accompanied Hector’s death: “Now
are we alle with-outen red! / Thei wyste tho to lese her lyues, / Bothe here chil-
dren & here wyues” (15018-20, and see 11031-33). In the absence of a wife to
mourn Troilus’s death, Polyxena “cracched hir face & al to-schent, –” (15030,
and see 11048). Moreover, while the Historia’s Trojans bewail the deaths of
Troilus as well as Hector and Deiphebus (XXVII, 206), the poet focuses on
Troilus and only Troilus. Another parallel between Hector’s and Troilus’s death
is the concomitant Greek belief that without Troilus, they will surely be victori-
ous (15045-46). Finally, Troilus’s importance as a ‘second Hector’ also emerges
in the Christianized erection of a tomb, which takes up only one line in the His-
toria (XXVII, 206-07):
A precious tombe for Troyle was wroght,
And his body ther-In was broght;
And leyde him ther-In bischopis thre

85
Benson argues that this is but a “relatively simple” change and that there is “some justifi-
cation for it” in the Historia. Benson, History 161 n. 29.
86
Benson, History 90.
300 Interchapter One

With wonder gret solempnite:

Ther was for him a riche offerynges
Off Erles, Dukes, and of kynges. (15247-52)
For the time being, then, Troilus is a worthy ‘second Hector,’ an honor he shares
with the enemy he inherits from Hector and which links the three knights. Now
that Troilus is dead, Achilles can fully emerge as a transparent Trojan hero.
Achilles’s problematic nature as fluctuating between transparency and opac-
ity is most easily discernible after Troilus’s death, when he – in very un-Greek
fashion – proves unable to discern treachery that resembles his own. Addition-
ally, Achilles’s death is emphatically set in a female framework, connecting his
character not only with Troilus as his predecessor in the genealogical line, but
also with Penthesilea. In contrast to the Historia, Hecuba devises ways and
means to kill Achilles not on account of the deaths of her sons, but rather be-
cause of the demise of Troilus only (15260-62), which again stresses the rela-
tionship of the two men. Upon receiving Hecuba’s message, Achilles ‘weighs’
the message that he can marry Polyxena in monetary terms (15328-29), which
calls to mind another character ‘weighing’ love, namely, Criseyde. In Achilles’s
‘meditation’ on Polyxena, he compares her to Blauncheflour: she is a pure
woman. In the context of the poet’s wide reading, this alludes to the mid-
thirteenth century debate poem Blancheflour et Florence, which deliberates “the
merits of knights and clerics in love.”87 Achilles does not deliberate for very
long, however, choosing rather to ride to Troy as quickly as possible. After the
porter lets him in “with fair semblaunt” (15363, see above) and without antici-
pating any treachery, Achilles is assassinated by knights who, like Hecuba, offer
Troilus’s death as legitimation for slaughtering the Greek knight (15385). Ulti-
mately, then, it is the surrender of the imperial mask that effects his death, but
the poet quickly turns this to Achilles’s advantage insofar as the poet complains
about the falsity and duplicity of women without any reference whatsoever to
Achilles’s previous mask making. Not only does Achilles die because of the fal-
sity of a woman, many other knights found themselves similarly betrayed, thinks
the poet. Like Hector, Achilles is now a “knyght with-oute fayl” (15442). Con-
sistent with the apotheosis of transparent Achilles, the description of his tomb is
expanded,88 and the loss of the “gentil knyõt” causes a reaction familiar from the
Trojan response to the loss of one of their worthies: Achilles is mourned as the
sole defender of the empire, and many Greeks believe, as they do in the Histo-
ria, that they better abandon the siege (15529). On the whole, the poet character-
izes Achilles ambivalently. While he implicitly becomes a problematically
changeable Trojan in the Historia, the poet praises Achilles for his transparency

87
Susan Crane, “Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066-1460,” Cambridge History of
Medieval English Literature, ed. Wallace 50.
88
For these additions, see also Benson, History 90.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 301

and for his willingness to fully engage in the Trojan destabilization of masks.
Thus, Achilles claims a place in the transparent genealogy,89 as does Penthesilea.
Penthesilea joins the Trojan cause at a time of dire need. The loss of Hector
and Troilus becomes poignantly apparent to the Trojans when marching into
battle (15706). The Greeks move their tents closer to the city and challenge
Priam to fight again, which he refuses. Priam is depicted as more fearful in the
Laud, since no reasons are given for his unwillingness to fight (Guido knows
that he is waiting for Penthesilea). Rather, Priam is worried about painful death:
“For he was ferd his men to tyne / And die him-selff with moche pyne” (15931-
32). As a consequence of the embellished Trojan vicissitudes, the arrival of Pen-
thesilea has the overtones of a dea ex machina. For two months, the Trojan gates
remain firmly locked,
Vntil a quene gentil & ffre
Come hem to helpe fro fer contre.
The quene was called Pantasaley,
A noble womman of Chyualry,
Sche was quene of Amazone.... (15949-53)
This short introduction already likens her to Hector. Like him, she is gentle,
free, noble, and chivalrous. Additionally, the poet directly associates her with
Hector. In the Historia, Penthesilea ‘simply’ loves Hector (“ob amorem Hec-
toris” [XXVIII, 212]); the Laud is more specific: she “loued Ector wel longe
derne / For his prowess & his noblay / That sche herde of him offten say”
(16040-42) – that is, she loves Hector on account of qualities she claims for her-
self, too, including his masculinity: “Pantasalye was quene & prince, / A doghti
Mayden & sterne” (16038-39), and the Amazons are “[...] hardi as men In dede,
/ Off lyues man haue thei no drede” (16059-64). Not only is Penthesilea a val-
iant fighter, she further becomes the leader of the Trojans when they ride out to
battle: “Sche was that day here souerayn, / Here ledere, & here cheuayntayn”
(16087-88). She literally appropriates the narrative space previously occupied by
Hector, Troilus, and Achilles.
Penthesilea’s wondrous deeds are embellishment to the same extent as are
those of Hector, Troilus, and Achilles. Accordingly, the Greek amazement about
the newcomer is expanded, too (16101-08), and the poet asks the audience to
take good note of “How sche bare that day the pris / Off alle that fauõt In that
[emp]ris” (16131-32). Like her heroic role models, Penthesilea is prone to react
emotionally rather than rationally. In one of the poet’s additions, for instance,
she is terribly upset about the liberation of Telamonius from captivity: “For
wratthe sche wax ner wode, – / So sterne sche was In hir mode” (16257-58). The
89
A few reservations about Achilles’s heroism remain in place, of course. While the poet is
careful never to alter the broad outlines of the Historia, there are other reasons that may
motivate this skepticism. Unlike Hector’s other successors, with the exception of the poet
himself, Achilles is not a future ruler as are Hector, Troilus, and Penthesilea. Achilles
would have secured himself a place in this royal genealogy, though, had he married
Polyxena.
302 Interchapter One

emotional moment passes, however, and she is described as a fulmard among

the hens (16280), causing much martyrdom among the Greeks (16290). This de-
scription interestingly points back to a time before the Trojan War, to Hercules’s
prowess. In the Historia, Hercules is naturally a hero (IV, 41), so the poet does
not have to change his portrayal of the Greek knight. And yet, like Penthesilea
later, he is described as causing great martyrdom among the Greeks and as a
fulmard: “Hit was gret del and pite, / What martirdom he made to be; / [...] /
Hercules rides oueral and rennes – / As a fulmard doth afftir the hennes” (1653-
54, 1657-58). In addition, Hercules is described as transparent (especially when
compared to Jason) and likened to Hector insofar as Hercules is “The strongest
knyõt that euere wes / That in that world was êanne levand; / No man myõt his
strok with-stand” (348-50); his prowess exceeds Jason’s, who is only second to
him (263-64, and see 374-75). Hercules’s emotional transparency emerges most
clearly when he is unable to check his tongue concerning Jason’s meekness in
his reply to Laomedon’s messenger: “He was Angered and alle a-rage,” the poet
reports, and “Him thoughte for tene his herte to-brak / That Iason then so
mekely spak, / He was not payed with his sawe” (479, 481-83). Hercules, then,
is an emotionally transparent character: he voices his own opinions and acts ac-
cordingly even if this entails opposing his superiors. The poet’s association of
Penthesilea with Hercules not only refers the audience back to the beginning, it
also invites a rereading of the work with an eye to heroic attributes, yielding a
hermeneutic structure also to be encountered in Chaucer’s House of Fame and
his Troilus and Criseyde.
Neither Diomedes, Telamonius, nor Menesteus or Agamemnon can over-
come Penthesilea (16293-303). Priam is understandably delighted about the
“gentil” queen (16350) and hosts a lavish party, thanking her for her “godeness
& noblay” (16361). Next, she valiantly slays many Myrmidons, linking her with
both Hector and Troilus, but also Achilles (16805-10). Moreover, in a short
speech to Pyrrhus, she refers to Hector as the ‘flower of chivalry’ and as “Ector
the gode” (16842-44), constructing a hybrid genealogy of transparency that in-
cludes Hercules, Hector, Achilles, and Troilus. Appropriately, the narrative of
her death overtly parallels Hector’s and Troilus’s deaths. First, the poet adds a
long passage foreshadowing the event and its consequences for Troy (17045-
60). Second, Greek duplicity is invoked. Third, in reporting her death, the em-
phasis falls on her unprotected head – which explicitly recalls Hector’s death
(17122-23). Fourth, after modifying the discussions concerning her ‘funeral,’ the
poet asserts that there remains no hope for Troy: “For now are thei with-outen
red, / Thei haue no hope to no sucour” (17232-33).90 The emphasis on red
poignantly stresses the leadership qualities of the Hectorian role model, that
seemingly perished with the last transparent hero – seemingly, since there is one

90
Benson notes the expansion concerning the Amazons and suggests that the poet expected
that the “audience will sit still for spicy details about these bizarre women and their irregu-
lar sexual arrangements.” Benson, History 68.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 303

more hero to appropriate Trojan transparency and advance it in the context of

nationhood, namely, the poet himself.

5. From Romance Self to Romance (Counter-)Nation: The Poet

In the above discussion, the poet and his inscription of the poem into public dis-
course have been implicitly, but frequently invoked. As Benson observes, the
poet “involves himself in the story and urges his listeners to do likewise. [...]
Guido’s voice is always formal [...]. How very different is the Laud-narrator,
who extols his heroes and damns the villains.” Where possible, he responds to
the gaps in Guido’s woolly “narrative style,” which become “real lacunae
which, from his deep knowledge of the history, he sets out to repair.”91 Whether
the poet consciously attempts to supplement Guido’s historical knowledge or
whether it is an unconscious re-imagination of a narrative of particular relevance
to him and his audience is a question that cannot be conclusively answered. The
poet’s alterations and additions, however, certainly would be in accordance with
available cultural models and paradigms, especially concerning the making of
selves (see above) and nations. In order to discuss the poet’s construction of na-
tionhood, it is pertinent to first acknowledge the poet’s role as the last hero of
the Laud. As a next step, the genre of the poem has to be reconsidered with re-
gard to romance nationhood.
The poet, I believe, is much less concerned with historical veracity than Ben-
son suggests. Although the poet “does bring forth Dares and Dictys as the
work’s authority” and despite the fact that the poem attempts to report all battles
and other marvelous details, following the eye-witness accounts,92 the insistence
on historical veracity is problematic, as Robert Edwards observes with regard to
the Destruction of Troy: “This double transparency – the simultaneous insistence
on historical fidelity and on the clarity of historical lessons – is an interesting, if
problematic, facet of the medieval Troy story.”93 While the poet does appeal to
the authoritative versions of the Troy story, he does so in a framework different
from that of the other two translators of Guido’s Historia. The poet warrants that
the audience will hear all that matters: “Herkenes now, and õe may here / The
werre sothe alle plenere” (65-66). The audience will hear about the ‘form’ of the
conflict, the reasons, “And – as the storie here beris recorde –” (73, emphasis
added), about the deaths of the main protagonists. Dares and Dictys are the
authorities, but he is interested in particular aspects of the Troy story, namely,
the truth about Hector and Achilles (93-94, cited above). Guido is also men-
tioned as an authority and again, the poet explicitly emphasizes that the Laud
represents his ‘take’ on the story and its contemporary relevance; Guido “wrot it

91
Benson, History 68, 92.
92
Benson, History 36.
93
Robert R. Edwards, “Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Confusion of Prudence,” The North
Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Western Europe,
ed. Thomas Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001) 52.
304 Interchapter One

faire in parchemyn / In the manere as I schal telle. / Hende, now herken to my

spelle!” (102-04, emphasis added). The generic choice further underscores the
poet’s changeability: he pens a romance of superlatives. One third into the
poem, the audience learns that romance itself is a category separate from histori-
cal narratives. In order to authorize a long addition regarding the antagonism be-
tween Hector and Achilles, in the course of which he claims that had Hector not
called back his men for the night, the Greeks would certainly have lost the Tro-
jan War, the poet explains:
So saith the noble Clerk Cuydo,
He fond her bokes bothe two
With-oute lesyng or variaunce
In siker proses and no romaunce,
And he translated wel and fyne
Bothe her bokes In-to Latyne,
Both of Gru and Troye langage:
Heuene be his heritage! (6355-62, emphases added)
Since the poet describes the Laud as a romance, it follows that it should not be
regarded as the “siker” prose of veritable history.94
While the poet’s literary-historical theorizing is often implicit, the poet’s as-
sociation with romance discourse becomes explicit again toward the end of the
poem:
And thus was Troye dryuen doun
And y-lore thorow strong tresoun,
And alle the gode lordis dede, –
As In this romaunce men may rede;
[...]
And thus endis this strong batayle
That was of Troye saunfayle,
That dured ten õere euery day, –
As the romaunce ther-of doth say.... (18637-40, 18645-48)
This prefaces an interesting self-reference that recalls the prologue insofar as it
ensues in the framework of the trinity with which the chief hero of the narrative
is crucially associated. The poet literally appropriates Hector’s narrative space:
And he that this romaunce wroght & made,
Lord In heuene, thow him glade,
And gode lyff In erthe to lede,
And heuene blysse vnto his mede;
And graunte hit mot so be!
Sayeth alle Amen, for charite! (18659-64)
Seen by itself, this ending is not remarkable. Given the introduction of the mat-
ter via the trinity and its recurrence in a description of Hector, however, this
ending allows the poet to extend the initial framework to include himself, since

94
As concerns nationhood, it is insightful that the poet draws attention to the different lan-
guages spoken in Greece and Troy.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 305

he conceives of himself in terms of the heroic task of writing a Hector-romance

in the first place.
In fact, the poet repeatedly measures his heroes (crucially Hector) and his
subject matter against other romances rather than histories. Early on, for in-
stance, he admiringly says of Hector that
Ther was no man so strong of myght,
As was Ector, that gentil knyght.
Was non so proud proued his pere,
The whiles he was on lyue here;
For I ffynde In prose and ryme,
Was non so strong In that tyme. (3257-62)
This reminder of Hector’s prowess is not a novelty, but the audience is reminded
again that he is a hero surpassing all other romance heroes. Given that the poet is
the first to pen a Hector-romance, he claims similar fame in the literary world.
Thus, whenever the poet conveys Hector’s valiant deeds, the audience is also
reminded of the poet’s valiant literary deeds; the above passage, for instance,
begins with: “Herkenes now to me and lythe! / Herkenes now! and õe may here /
Meruayles many In my matere” (3244-46, emphases added).95 The genealogy of
Trojan transparency, from Hector to Penthesilea, ultimately finds a champion in
the poet who thus sanctions his changeability – that is, his changes to Guido’s
version whenever a transparent hero steps into the realm of immortality.
The changes introduced to the narrative and the poet’s inscription into ro-
mance discourse have a national dimension, too. While the Laud does omit
Guido’s geographical and etymological excursions, the Laud-plot is recogniza-
bly located in English environs. The ‘Englishing’ of the Troy story is what even-
tually causes the inversion of Guido’s ideological program: his fickle Trojans
emerge as valiant heroes; Guido’s mask-making Greeks become associated with
the Devil. It is the narrator’s alignment with Hector and the latter’s transparency
– that is, the provision of a national model of how individuals can and should
negotiate disseminated narratives for collective identity formation – which is of
central importance, however. The nexus between person and nation that the poet
explores anticipates the Ovidian-derived model of counter-nationhood emergent
95
The poet’s references to writing and his bookishness are recurring motifs. After an ex-
panded battle scene, for instance, the poet observes that in other romances, knights may
fight for up to ten days; in “Ywayn and Wade,” for example, the heroes fight for a day or
two. Achilles and Hector, however, fight for thirty days (9357-96). The poet introduces
the battle in which Troilus dies by stating that there never occurred a battle like this “Sithe
Eue bare Caym and gode Abel” – no-one could last that long (13687-96, 13715-18). An
interesting meta-literary moment occurs when the Greek assembly discusses Achilles’s
proposal to end the siege. Eventually, the Greeks make light of Achilles’s absence: “Iff he
be ferd of any chaunce, / Lete him sitte & rede romaunce!” (13303-04). If romance is the
appropriate genre for the Troy story and if Achilles is a transparent hero, it follows that
romances indeed dispense the right ideology. As the poet approaches the end of the work,
he begins to obsess about his written sources, especially when introducing the Amazons
(e.g., 15974, 15981, 15993, 15999, 16007, and 16026).
306 Interchapter One

in Chaucer’s Troilus, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Henryson’s Testament. These

works are skeptical of a fatalistic allegorization of England as Troy, and the
most frequently employed trope throughout the Laud, the simile, also registers
some unease with such historical determinism. Through the prosopagraphical
lens, the Laud revises a widely-disseminated myth of origin, recirculating it in
its modified form, which yields insights into the workshop of Smith’s intelli-
gentsias that promulgate national myths. That such discourses are ultimately
moldable is the important lesson for audiences to extrapolate.
At the end of the nineteenth century, A. Joly commented on the idiosyncratic
character of the Laud in its personal and national physiognomy, employing a
metaphor that anticipates a prosopagraphical reading:
Du reste, il en use assez librement avec le texte latin. Il n’a pas conservé les divisions.
Il ne se croit pas obligé de le suivre pas à pas, de garder tous les embellissements que
prodigue son érudition, de répéter tous ses renvois à Ovide comme le fera le traducteur
dont nous allons parler tout à l’heure. Il donne à son imitation une physionomie plus
personnelle, plus nationale. Il semble aussi s’être lassé avant la fin. Les dernières feuil-
les de vélin du manuscrit toutes réglées sont restées en blanc.96
In present debates, Joly’s terminology might be seen as problematic in its re-
course to nation and invention as appropriate categories for the discussion of
medieval texts. And yet, the heroes of the Laud do not operate in an classical,
pagan world, but are transposed into a framework quite familiar to the poet’s
contemporary audience and their expectations of the fictional world of romance.
In Kempe’s words, “The heroes of Troy live and move in the surroundings most
familiar to their historian; he cannot conceive of them in any other. [...] The
civic constitution of Troy also, no less than its religious institutions, resembles
that of an English town.”97 Chivalric values are unquestionably applicable to the
Laud’s heroes.98 The protagonists are dressed in attire that would be deemed fa-
miliar by a fourteenth-century audience, as are the revered spare time activities,
such as hunting, feasting, and reveling.99 The implication of this modernization
is, as Nicholas Birns’s observes regarding Gawain, that the Troy story is “at its
most authoritative when it obscures the nature of the actual Troy as much as
possible in favor of the new land founded upon it [...].”100 Given the English set-
ting of the Laud, it is small wonder that the poet uses every possibility to shed
bad light on the Greeks – the dichotomy between Greece and Troy is inherent in
the Troy story, but developed with national overtones in the poet’s romance.
Recent scholarship, as mentioned in passing above, attributes an important
role to the creation of a national sense of the past. Especially in the thirteenth
and early fourteenth centuries, expressions of English nationalism in romance
literature abound. Diane Speed argues that romances concerned with English he-
96
Joly, introduction, Benoît 2: 498-99.
97
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 16-18.
98
Benson, History 79.
99
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 18-21; Speed, “Construction of the Nation” 148.
100
Birns, “Trojan Myth” 63.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 307

roes, such as Horn, Havelok, Bevis of Hampton, and Guy of Warwick (some of
which are mentioned in the Laud), increasingly develop a matter of England in
analogy to existing matters of France and Rome – an admittedly problematic
classification, that is of some heuristic usefulness nonetheless. Speed further ob-
serves other factors that “link the medieval English romance as a type with the
discourse of the nation,” for example, the exile-and-return-topos, which marks
“a return to order.” Many medieval romances also link the hero’s fortunes to the
fate of his nation.101 That individual destinies and the collective wellbeing are
mutually dependent is true of the Troy story in general, but of particular impor-
tance in the Laud (and Chaucer’s Troilus), since the focus falls more heavily on
individuals. The Laud usually moves from the individual to the collective (Hec-
tor being an important example); the inverse movement (from collective to indi-
vidual) can be grasped by means of the Laud’s national dichotomies, a crucial
feature of romances in general.
Binary oppositions are a salient feature of romances (and, as shown above, of
Guido’s Historia). Dichotomies are particularly important in what is commonly
referred to as “Type A romances,”102 a generic label referring to Kathryn
Hume’s classification system. She distinguishes between three types of ro-
mances, based on the relationship of foreground and background. Type A ro-
mances focus on the hero rather than the background, the reverse being true of
Type C texts. Type B forms the middle ground. These are romances that “dis-
play their heroes against a significant background, usually a specific swatch of
history or pseudo-history.” Among the Type C romances, she lists the major his-
torical cycles. She locates the Laud between Type B and C, since it was “de-
signed as a Hector romance: but with Hector out of the picture a little beyond
the half-way point, the course of the history is clearly not dictated by the hero,
and he is not central to the whole narration.”103 The heroic genealogy, extrapo-
lated above, suggests that the poem might also be seen as several, contextualized
Type A romances. While the background battle does play a role, it is obvious
that the central concern is with a genealogy of individual heroes: Hector, Troi-
lus, Achilles, Penthesilea, and the poet himself. Thus, the several characteristics
of Type A romance, as identified by Simpson, are partially applicable to the
Laud – and point up the national context of the work. These romances, he ar-
gues, “deal centrally with shame,” which is one of the recurring motifs of the
Laud, especially concerning the genealogical heroes. More importantly, most
romances are based on oppositions such as “daughters and fathers; non-
Christians and Christians; higher and lower nobility; provincial and metropolitan
courts; sons and fathers; sons and mothers; women and men; wild and culti-

101
Speed, “Construction of the Nation” 145-47, quotations at 146.
102
Simpson, Reform 266.
103
Kathryn Hume, “The Formal Nature of Middle English Romance,” PQ 53.2 (1974): 161,
163, 166.
308 Interchapter One

vated; human and animal.”104 The Troy story furnishes some of these dichoto-
mies, and Troy stories certainly draw on the opposition of Troy and Greece.
The dichotomy between Trojans and Greeks is carefully crafted by the poet.
Rather than following the Historia in its construction of a Greco-Trojan hybrid-
ity, the Laud depicts the changeable Trojan knights as heroes; Troy itself be-
comes the home of heroism. The poet delineates between Trojan changeability
and uncontrolled changeability, however, which is chiefly a characteristic of the
Greeks: they are often excessively joyful about the Trojans they butcher; they
are generally afraid of Hector; they are frequently ashamed of their losses;105
they are regularly described as proud;106 they employ treachery and sleight; and
their devious designs are compared to those of the Devil,107 which may remind a
knowledgeable audience that Brutus had once purged Britain of ‘devils’ when
first arriving on the island’s shores.108 Unlike the Historia, the poet is very
straightforward about his allegiances. When the Greeks are unable to kill Hector
even though he is unhorsed, he accuses them explicitly:
Fals Gregeis, to õow I speke:
If õe ben ought, now õow a-wreke!
Now may õe õure strengthe kythe
On him that greues õow offte sithe! (5393-96)
In contrast to Guido’s ambivalence and implicit commentary, the poet aligns
himself openly with the Trojan cause, blackening the Greeks whenever possible.
Although the Greeks prove to be victorious in the end, their successes are ulti-
mately only possible because of Trojan treachery. This treachery, however, is no
less a matter of fabricating opacity – and mask making is ultimately a Greek
quality.

104
Simpson, Reform 271.
105
The poet often embellishes the joys of Greek victory, especially in inappropriate contexts:
the Greeks celebrate after having butchered the inhabitants of the first Troy, including
women and children (1681-82); they dance and sing when the Trojans grant them a truce
(8209-22, 9858-59); their happiness about Hector’s and Troilus’s deaths is embellished
(e.g., 10973-78). The Greeks are overtly fearful, especially of Hector (e.g., 3277-88, and
see 4141-42, 4577, 5301-04, 5814, 6853-73, 7224-322), and are surprisingly ashamed of
their losses (e.g., 13379-80, 16328-38). Perhaps their overt emotionality at certain occa-
sions represents the price they pay for adopting the opaque mask most of the time.
106
Hebron locates Trojan pride in the construction of the new Troy (1808-11, 1815-16),
which parallels Genesis. Hebron, Medieval Siege 109.
107
The most important reference to sleight is the poet’s complaint about the Trojan traitors,
who are adoptive of Greek mask making (4672-706). Agamemnon explicitly advises
treachery rather than ‘simply’ relying on Achilles’s prowess and ‘ingenuity’ in the Laud
(6364-492; cf. Historia XVII, 151). For instances of Greek treachery, see esp. 6481-88,
13501-58, 17181-88, 4643, 4643-46, and 11829-34; for the frequent associations of the
Greeks with the Devil, see 7241, 8796, 10828, 14223, and 14235-36. At two occasions,
the Greeks describe Hector as the Devil (10817, 10823).
108
See Brut, Prol., 4, cited above.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 309

Toward the end of the Laud, the devilry of the Greeks transfers to the Trojans
in much the same way that opaque prosopagraphy transfers from the Greek
mask-makers to the Trojan traitors in Guido’s Historia. The poet stresses this at
an important moment, namely, after asserting that Hector’s death marks the end
of Troy. At this point, Antenor and Aeneas are associated with the duplicity of
the Greeks. For their treason, the poet hopes, they will be punished by the Devil:
“The deuel hem honge upon a cord! / Haue thei neuere so good pardoun, / For
thei wrouõt suche a gret tresoun” (8592-94).109 Their treason is related to matters
of rhetoric, as evinced in the references to speaking and telling:
But sicurly ther myght men se
That it myõt not but tresoun be,
Openly & discouert,
And it was tresoun riõt apert.
But thei myght speke of a pees,
Thei myght not elles speke with Gregais,
For to telle hem of here wille,
How the toun wolde thei tresoun & spille. (17275-82)
For the ‘characters,’ however, the treason remains hidden beneath the mask,
which is harshly condemned by the poet: “But her tresoun thei wol slely hele /
Thei wil not telle what thei thenke – / The deuel hem mot In helle senke!”
(17288-90).110 The poet highlights the rhetorical efficacy of Antenor’s mask
making, for instance, when adding to Antenor’s address to the Trojan burgeis
that the Greek terms are not negotiable and that he can only advise them to give
heed to what the Greeks want (17920-36). Moreover, the Trojan priest, once An-
tenor approaches him about the Palladium, is immediately persuaded and does
not initially refuse to surrender it (17940-50; cf. Historia XXX, 228-29). The di-
chotomy between Greek mask making and Trojan transparency is thus main-
tained by associating the treacherous Trojans with the equally devious Greeks.
The overall structure of the Laud is consistent with the juxtaposition of Greek
opacity and Trojan transparency as well. While the poet begins with the quest
for the Golden Fleece, he omits the ending of the Troy story as told by Dictys,
Benoît, and Guido, who all relay the ‘afterlives’ of the Greek heroes. According
to Benson, this is a conscious omission, since the poet knows about Laomedon’s
destiny, which suggests that “the truncation of the Historia in the Laud comes
not from carelessness but from a deliberate decision to concentrate on the siege
itself. He is nevertheless familiar with what has been left out, and he uses it

109
At the end of the Laud, the traitors emerge as ‘devilish’ Greeks (e.g., 17239, 17309,
17757, 17689, 17757, 17898, 18276, 18358; but cf. 5022, 6778, 6835-38).
110
The Laud implicitly stresses the association of Aeneas and Antenor with the Greeks, since
Agamemnon’s question whether the two should be kept alive is only posed in the Historia
(XXX, 234-35). The town only falls because of high treason: “That was Antenor & Eueas
– / God õeue hem an euel gras! / Come thei neuere In heuene riche, / That thei wolde so
her lord be-swyke / And al that gentil nacioun! / Schal be put In-to dampnacioun!”
(17065-70).
310 Interchapter One

when appropriate – to tell us about Laomedon’s fate [...] or about the later exile
of the Trojan traitors, Aeneas and Antenor.”111 If the poet was familiar with the
Historia’s ending, the omission has another interesting effect insofar as it fur-
thers the ontological dichotomies. Given that the poet knows about the opposing
accounts by Dares and Dictys (an opposition delineated also in Guido’s epi-
logue)112 and given that the poet frequently refers the audience to Dares rather
than Dictys, the Middle English romance structurally gives preference to the
pro-Trojan version. This national dichotomy – strengthened by the fact that the
poet delineates between Trojans (Dares) and Greeks (Dictys) in terms of lan-
guage groups – is consistent with the demotion of individual concerns character-
istic of Type A romances. Simpson argues that such romances are “only appar-
ently about individual fulfilment. A more reflective reading reveals that they are
about groups, and that individual heroes and heroines can only reaffirm their lost
identity by acknowledging and enlarging the group to which they belong by ‘na-
ture.’” While romances “address the internal, structural tensions of groups,”
tragedies, among which Simpson discusses the works of the ‘Guido tradition,’
address “the violence of external war, and the ways in which that violence can
produce evil destruction. Romances, by contrast, represent the ways in which the
controlled expression of civil violence within social groupings can serve to fi-
nally integrate them.”113 The Laud (and the Troy story in general) indeed pro-
vides the narrative space to investigate the role of the individual in relation to
the narratives disseminated for collective identification. Internal strife does play
a role in the fictional economy of the Laud, particularly with relevance to the
relatively new institution of the parliament. What Simpson suggests with regard
to romance equally applies to the Laud: the genre “is primarily designed to offer
space to the satellite figure of the knight, on whom the king is revealed to be de-
pendent; and the knight’s own position is itself revealed to be dependent on his
dealings with women [...].”114 Among Laud’s individuals, it is Hector who modi-
fies public (that is, regal) discourse. By associating himself with Hector,115 the
poet eventually indicates a viable model for adopting, altering, and recirculating

111
Benson, History 93-94, quotation at 94.
112
According to Guido, the main differences between Dares and Dictys are as follows: Dares
ends with the destruction of Troy; Polydamas went to the Greeks at night to negotiate with
them; the Greeks entered through a gate of the city on the top of which was a marble
statue of a horse’s head (adding that Virgil agrees with Dictys on the bronze horse,
though); Antenor and Polydamas awaited the Greeks at the night of the destruction; and
Aeneas hid Polyxena and Hecuba, for which he is exiled (XXXV, 273-75).
113
Simpson, Reform 275-76.
114
Simpson, Reform 283.
115
The Laud’s engagement with genealogy suggests that this romance might differ from
other works in the ‘Guido tradition,’ of which Simpson believes that “Genealogy guaran-
tees very little indeed [...], either within the Graeco-Trojan society represented, or between
the texts of that pan-European tradition and their readers.” Simpson, Reform 98. In my
opinion, the Laud actually suggests a way of allegorizing antiquity in which a genealogy
of changeable Trojans warrants the longevity of the nation.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 311

national masks – making a virtue of the problematic changeability of Guido’s

Trojans.
The poet’s association with Hector’s changeability yields insights into the
Laud’s construction of nationhood. Hector’s genealogical speech, which I dis-
cussed above in terms of the construction of individual identity and in which
Hector responds to Epistrophus’s allegation of thraldom, is important in this
context. In this speech, Hector’s striving for transparency, I think, construes per-
sonal and national masks as largely congruent, a vice in the Historia that turns
virtue in the Laud. Hector’s ‘monologue’ implicitly extends this genealogy of
transparency into the past: he is as free and transparent as his father, his father’s
father, and so on. Additionally, transparency extends well into the future, too; in
fact, the last in line of this heroic genealogy would be the present ruler of the
British Isles. Moreover, the structural position of Hector’s genealogical speech
points to a national dimension of the Laud insofar as it is framed by questions of
collective allegiances. The Laud thus constructs (consciously or not) an analogy
between the Trojan War and the present conflict with France. If the Laud indeed
engages with contemporary politics, Hector’s role in the parliamentary debates,
which in Troy as well as in fourteenth-century England are primarily related to
(costly) military expeditions, also needs to be reconsidered.
Hector’s genealogical speech occurs during the fifth battle, whereby the
poet’s liberal handling of Guido’s eighteenth book makes it a key passage in
which Hector represents Troy. It further aligns the Greeks with the French and
the Trojans with the English. In the Historia, the plot first focuses on an assem-
bly in which Priam deliberates about the destiny of the prisoner Thoas, whom he
ideally wants killed. Hector and Aeneas disagree, and the latter suggests that it
would be advantageous to hold on to Thoas in order to exchange him for other
prisoners. At this point, the poet modifies Aeneas’s speech in interesting ways.
After introducing Aeneas as wise and witty, and after observing that Aeneas is
capable of discerning, qua transparency, the reasons for Priam’s outburst
(thereby authorizing it),116 the poet conveys Aeneas’s argument that at some
point, Trojans may find themselves in Thoas’s position, too, which would be
undesirable:
Off some of oure hit myght be-tyde,
Õe wold not for al the world wyde
Se him haue suche a chaunce
For al êe lond of Spayne & Fraunce. (7175-78)
Wülfing notes that the last line quoted here is inserted in the margin rather than
in the column, but that it is written by the same hand (212n, 207n). The reason
for this later addition cannot be determined with certainty; however, it testifies
to the importance attributed to the phrase: one reader, at least, appears to have

116
In the Laud, Aeneas notices that it is the legitimate grief for Cassibilans which causes
Priam’s decision. The poet understands this emotional reaction, which is in no way ‘ex-
cessive.’
312 Interchapter One

interpreted the Trojan War with contemporary conflicts in mind. This suspicion
is reinforced by Hector’s explanation of his lineage. After stressing the latter,
Hector asserts that he will take the appropriate action regarding Epistrophus’s
(French) insults:
And that thow schalt wite, if I the take,
Thi proude wordes schal I slake.
I drede neuere man of thi nacioun,
Whi scholde I now fle a glotoun,
Suche a caytyff, suche a wrecche!
I holde the not worth a fecche! (7473-78)117
Hector, like the Laud in general, conceptualizes his adversary in terms of a ‘na-
tion’ to which he attributes several characteristics, which are consistent with
those generally attributed to the Greeks, such as a rhetoric of pride. Furthermore,
Epistrophus’s nation is implicitly associated with gluttony. Glotoun primarily
means “villain, wretch; worthless fellow, parasite.”118 The contextualization
goes far beyond this meaning, however, and is repeated in the Anglo-Saxon
framework of wrecche. Characterizing Epistrophus as a glutton falls in line with
the characterization of the Greeks as devils. The rhyme on nacioun further
equates all of Greece with the sin of intemperance, which likewise underscores
the poet’s association of the Greeks with their inability to find the right measure.
That the Laud conceptualizes the Trojan War in terms of England’s conflict
with France is not surprising, although Aeneas’s hesitation regarding the realiza-
tion of imperial fantasies (that are often associated with fourteenth-century Troy
stories)119 is noteworthy. The Hundred Years War is generally perceived as
marking a decisive period as concerns the imaginary ‘other’ in relationship to
one’s own nation.120 This does not necessitate interpreting Troy as England or
Greece as France, even though Aeneas’s comment may suggest such a reading.
117
For the use of Anglo-Saxon and French loanwords, see above.
118
MED, s.v. gluttony 2.
119
See esp. Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003).
120
Scholars come to different conclusions concerning the role of nationhood in the Hundred
Years War, but it seems uncontroversial to suggest that people increasingly conceptualize
French and English in terms of non-contingent collectives. See, e.g., Janet Coleman,
“English Culture in the Fourteenth Century,” Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero
Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983) 33. French and English intellectuals
also fought over their descent from Brutus, for which see Bernard Guenée, L’Occident aux
XVIe et XVe Siècles: Les Etats (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971) 126. For
Anglo-Norman relationships in the fourteenth century, see Beryl Smalley, English Friars
and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960) 160-
63; Peter S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (London: Macmillan, 1968) 59-77;
M. T. Clanchy, England and Its Rulers 1066-1272: Foreign Lordship and National Iden-
tity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) 248-53; Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later
Middle Ages 1348-1500 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) 131-59. Margaret L. Kekewich
and Susan Rose, Britain, France and the Empire, 1350-1500 (Houndmills: Palgrave,
2005) esp. 161-62.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 313

Additionally, at the time when the Laud most likely originates, it would have
been difficult for the audience not to read the Laud without the conflict with
France in mind. If the poem is indeed to be dated no earlier than 1343 and not
later than 1378-83, it falls into the rule of Edward III – a period of extreme na-
tional pride.121 The long war with France was regarded ambivalently, while the
great victories of Edward III and the Black Prince between 1340 and 1367 (in
Spain) probably were of much interest to romancers, since they resulted in lav-
ish tournaments, specifically the Round Table tournament in 1344 which Ed-
ward III based on Arthurian history. The war effort in France, as conducive as it
may have seemed to promoting chivalric deeds, was only possible through
heavy taxation, for which the parliament’s approval was needed. Consequently,
the parliament met in much shorter intervals and more often than ever before in
its history. Within the parliamentary debates, the commons and its speaker, the
first mention of which is attested for 1376, became increasingly important.122
Parliament, “including the commons, now came to occupy a central position in
chroniclers’ narratives, thereby adding a new dimension to English political his-
toriography.”123 The poet indeed heavily expands on Guido’s descriptions of the
parliamentary negotiations about the war effort – debates in which Hector plays
an important role (to be discussed below).124 There are other intra-textual in-
stances, however, which demonstrate that it is not too far fetched to allegorize
England as resembling Troy and France as resembling Greece.
Although France and Spain are mentioned directly in the Laud, these refer-
ences are rare.125 Allusions to Britain or England are more common, albeit often
implicit, especially considering the many references to the English romance tra-
dition at the beginning and end as well as throughout the story. Hector’s ‘tragic’

121
Kurt Kluxen, Geschichte Englands, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1991) 107. For Edward’s
rule, see further Jürgen Sarnowsky, England im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: WBG, 2002) 160-
69. Kempe draws attention to the mentioning, in Andromache’s speech, of “Õoure tresoure
& õoure florayns” (9987), which refers to a currency introduced by Edward in 1343.
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 5-6, cited above.
122
Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages 141-42, 146-50; Sarnowsky, England im
Mittelalter 205-16.
123
Given-Wilson, Chronicles 174. See further, Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England
1360-1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) 66-74.
124
The Laud frequently renders Guido’s ‘councils’ as parliaments both on the Greek and
Trojan side (e.g., 3221, 3391, 3733, 11590, 15536, 17468).
125
References to both Spain and France occur in the Laud with reference to Achilles. When
Achilles wonders about the sudden clamor in the Greek camp, he is informed that the Tro-
jans are among their tents and that they would not spare him “For al the gold of hethen
Spayne” (14151), which initiates chaunge (14157-64). After being injured, Achilles has to
remain in bed; he cannot rise “For alle the gode in that emprise” (14364). Later, he men-
aces Troilus: “He seyde: ‘when he hadde hele, / That he wolde with Troy[l]e dele, / He
wolde not lette for al Fraunce / But he tok of him vengaunce’” (14583-86). Along with his
ill-passion, Achilles nurses back his color, an indication of his regained mask: sleep and
medicine “broght a-õeyn his fair colour” (14612).
314 Interchapter One

decision to call back the Trojan army on account of recognizing Ajax as his kin,
for example, is prefaced by a narratorial addition, genealogically linking his de-
cision to that of other romance heroes, notably King Arthur. Rhetorically asking
how Fortuna fared with Arthur, the poet emphasizes that she enabled him to win
Norway, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and so on, not to forget “Bretayne, Gaskoyne,
and al Fraunce” (5937).126 Whether or not this long addition regarding Arthur’s
military exploits is an allusion to Edward III’s Arthurian ambitions, that the poet
dwells on Arthur in the context of Hector’s destiny rather than on Caesar, Alex-
ander, and Tiberius, parallels Hector and Arthur. Additionally, the reference to
Arthur’s France reinstates the legitimacy of the British claim to France.
The contextualization of Hector’s genealogical speech in an insular geopo-
litical framework – the linguistic phraseology, the reference to Epistrophus’s na-
tion, and Aeneas’s and Achilles’s counter-imperial stances – suggests that the
Laud invites a reading of the Greco-Trojan conflict in the context of England’s
military concerns. The poet’s rewriting of the Historia in terms of a national
Hector-romance is a daunting task, however, given that Guido’s Hector cannot
readily be seen as a hero. While Guido eventually bestows honor upon both
Hector and Achilles in the appended epigraphs, the historian is mostly at a loss
to explain Hector’s erratic, emotional behavior. Two scenes, that are differently
handled in the Laud, are noteworthy in this context. First, Hector abandons a
battle that would otherwise have secured Trojan supremacy because he recog-
nizes his (Greek) cousin Ajax in Book XV. Second, Hector refuses to obey
Priam’s command not to ride to battle on the day that marks his end – a com-
mand prompted by Andromache’s dream of her husband’s death. Twice, emo-
tional situations and the inability to fabricate opaque masks have dire conse-
quences for the Trojans; twice, Guido blames the fates and, by analogy, change-
ability and emotional transparency (XXI, 174-75). The poet retains the com-
plaint about the fates, but he subsequently modifies his source in ways constru-
ing Hector’s counter-national stance in a less negative or, at least, ambivalent
light. At these points, the narrator not only legitimizes Hector’s transgressions
against his father’s commands, he further exonerates his own poetic changeabil-
ity that amounts to a revision of a national myth.
When Hector ends the battle after recognizing his (distant) relative Ajax, he
makes a decision that is very unpopular with the Trojans, who are in the process
of burning the Greek fleet – and Guido leaves no doubt that the Trojans would
otherwise have been victorious. The fates obviously oppose the Trojans. The
poet begins to translate Guido’s complaint about fickle fortune, but then devel-
ops the material differently. In a narratorial move that takes the audience back to
the beginning of the poem, the poet postpones the tragic event, ‘interrupting’ the
Historia to provide a list of romance heroes who, like Hector, suffered at the
hands of Fortuna, including Arthur (5919-60, cited above). Lodged in the ro-
mance tradition, Hector decides on a whim, becomes changeable, and is unable

126
Here (and often elsewhere), Fraunce rhymes on chaunce.
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 315

to construct the appropriate opacity. Unlike Guido, though, who condemns

changeability, the poet’s own alteration of his source results in a radically re-
vised, positive stance with respect to Hector’s changeability. What is true for the
romance heroes enumerated, is also true for Hector: “For he that day his hap re-
fused” (5959). Hector is not only fre as he describes himself, he is specifically
free to choose. And he chooses in accordance with the ontological (poetological)
models that the poet provides for him.
Hector’s death occurs in a similarly revised framework in the Laud. Rather
than ‘merely’ transgressing against a collective desire, Hector disobeys his fa-
ther’s command. As in the Historia, the passage criticizes effeminate emotional-
ity, which is much expanded in the Laud – the Trojan women cry and swoon left
and right. In a dramatization added for extra effect, Hector is already on his way
to battle, when his father overtakes him and persuades Hector to return “a-õeyns
his wille” (10345). He temporarily subordinates his personal emotionality to
royal command. His “wrothful herte” naturally proves victorious in the end as
“He brak his fader comaundement, / He thoght not on his benysoun / That douõti
knyõt of gret renoun” (10540-42). Hector’s changeability is inevitable for the
national hero, and so is his death. Like other romance heroes, the poet knows,
Hector has to die:
Allas! that day he hadde no grace
To be at home, as him radde wace;
But sicurly he myght not fle
On no manere his destane.... (10547-50)
And later, the poet adds, “But he most nede that day dye; / For destane ches his
chaunce so, / That he most nede that day go to” (10680-82). Hector’s emotional
decision to disobey his father’s command becomes understandable, if not con-
doned. This toleration of an individual’s decision to challenge dominant, na-
tional discourse is only conceivable within the appropriate frameworks carefully
crafted by the poet by minor, albeit important modifications concerning Trojan
decision making in general and Priam’s ill-fated decisions in particular. Fur-
thermore, Hector’s failure to obey his father’s command is a decision the poet
motivates by means of Hector’s acts of mercy.127
In the light of Hector’s counter-national dispositions, it is instructive to re-
consider the frequent emphasis on the inclusiveness of parliamentary decisions,
an express invitation of changeability. In the debates leading to the abduction of
Helen, for instance, the poet stresses that all decided “at on acorde, / Kyng and
prince, duke and lorde, / In-to Grece for to go, / Be hit for wele or to wo” (2593-
96). When informing his citizens about the council’s decision, Priam invited
“euerychon” to come forward, addressing his “trewe lordes” and his “trewe bur-

127
While Hector approaches Achilles, the former is increasingly lifted out of the earthly
realm in the Laud: “He sclow two thousand, er he be-lan; / Thei seyde he was non erthely
man” (10895-96). This motif is taken up later, when eulogizing Hector: “So doughti a
knyõt was neuere none / In erthe made of flesch ne bone” (11001-02).
316 Interchapter One

geis” (2618, 2620).128 Everyone has to agree on the right course of action (2631-
36). He begins another meeting by reassuring everyone that he would not do
anything without consulting his people (7087-94, 8109-113, 8129-38; Historia
XVIII, 155, and XIX). When the Greeks later ask for a truce, Priam asks for his
councilors in order to make a decision, a fact not contained in the Historia
(14501-42). Even if the parliament’s decision contradicted his own will, he
would follow their advice, says Priam in the discussions about the possibility to
negotiate peace with the Greeks. The Trojans have a voice: “Thei seyde echon:
‘thei vndirstode / The pees ffor hem was fair & gode / At suche a plyght as thei
were at’” (17549-51). In the Laud, Priam’s rule is more conducive to change-
ability than in the Historia.
At the same time, the poet mutes Priam’s excessive emotionality, which had
troubled Guido. The poet uses the Historia’s lacunae in order to supplement
characteristics that one could possibly attribute to Priam if one wanted to adopt a
pro-Trojan perspective. After the first destruction of Troy, for example, the poet
follows Guido in portraying the Trojan king in the process of besieging a rebel-
lious city. While the Historia leaves the reader to conclude that leaving a siege
may be a doubtful military stratagem, the Laud-poet, unable to change the facts,
nevertheless offers an addendum lessening the problem: “He laffte the sege that
was be-gonne, – / And elles for-sothe it hadde be wonne / The castel certes,
hadde he a-byden” (1771-73). When the Trojans begin to think about ways and
means to avenge the first destruction of Troy, the overly emotional, changeable
Priam of Guido’s Historia (V, 56, and V, 50-51, 56-57) is absent from the Laud:
the poet omits these passages.129 While Priam emerges as more aggressive here,
he likewise appears to be more prudent than his counterpart in the Historia, for
example, when considering the possibility of taking a lady hostage to exchange
for Hesione (2251-56, 17300). At the end of the Historia, Priam chooses not
fight his adversaries. Unlike Guido, the poet explains Priam’s action: he retreats
into Apollo’s temple
His deth bodily to a-byde;
For he ne myght him fro hem hide,
For he was man with-oute drede –
In eche a romaunce as I rede. (18241-44)
Priam emerges as a braver individual in the Laud. He is also a more inclusive
and prudent monarch, who demonstrates the virtues of transparency.130

128
In the Laud, Priam refers to the Trojans as burgeis, which denotes “citizens with full rights
and privileges,” “an inhabitant of a town,” as well as “A magistrate or other official of a
town.” MED, s.v. burgeis n. 1. (a), 2. (a).
129
The poet further mutes Priam’s concern with his sister Hesione in this speech. In the His-
toria, the abduction of his sister is the all-informing trauma (esp. V, 49-50); the poet al-
ludes to her abduction in only three lines (1956-58).
130
Admittedly to a lesser extent than Hector, who is the upholder of Trojan virtues. On the
day preceding Hector’s death, Troy “was wel mayntened,” by which the poet primarily
 Pre-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in the Laud Troy Book 317

The last instances of Hectorian transparency, like Priam’s and the poet’s
changeability, are also linked to questions of nationhood.131 In contrast to the
Historia, the Laud motivates Hector’s decision to ride out to battle (in spite of
his father’s command to the contrary) by means of the threat Achilles poses to
the Trojan people. Upon inquiring who slew his brother,
Thei seide: “it was sir Achilles
That sclow him with-oute les,
And put vs to discomfiture,
For we myõt him not endure;
A-õeyn him may we make no defence
With-oute õoure help & õoure presence.” (10519-24)
It is in the description of Hector’s death, however, that the poet’s mythological
bricolage becomes most obvious. While Guido briefly states that in order to drag
away a captive kind, Hector fatally lifts his shield over his head (Historia XXI,
175), the poet offers a more detailed portrait of the Greek king, a “duk of gret
astate,” who yields his weapons and asks to be spared. Hector chooses to grant
this request: “And Ector sayde: ‘he wolde him saue, / But he wolde him prisoner
haue’” (10897, 10909-10). Since Hector is surrounded by knights on all sides,
Hector is unable to put his sword away and appears to be forced to move his
shield on his back. Hector’s decision is emotional, but it is also clearly consis-
tent with Christian virtues, especially mercy (which motivated earlier decisions
as well).132 In this light, Achilles’s treachery appears to be even more gruesome.
Hector’s resolution to spare a duke’s life (not a king’s life, notably) again works
toward legitimizing Trojan changeability, even if it is opposed to national inter-
ests. The most important modification occurs on the level of narrative, however.
If Hector’s genealogical speech testifies to his freedom, the poet’s double in-
clusion of poetic models in the context of heroic identity in these passages le-
gitimizes his own ‘transgression’ against his source, which entails an important
change of perspective regarding national mythology. The poet’s changeability
anticipates the translucent prosopagraphy characteristic of the fickle narrators in
later Troy stories. Like Hector, the poet develops a poetologically transparent

means Hector: “Priamus, this is the day / That thow schalt lese thi noblay, / Thi maynten-
aunce and thi defence” (9905, 9909-11).
131
In romances, the life of the hero is frequently related to the destiny of the collective. Thus,
problems arise when self-interest prevails: “Individual acts of valour undertaken rashly, or
for reasons of personal pride only, may damage the chances of collective victory, and
vengeance-taking outside the communally accepted processes of the law can set off a
chain-reaction of destruction.” Speed, “Construction of the Nation” 147. Indeed, the Tro-
jan War is set off by such acts of revenge: Jason and Hercules avenge the lack of Trojan
hospitality; Priam avenges the abduction of his sister; and Menelaus takes revenge for the
kidnapping of Helen. In Lydgate’s Troy Book, even Hector is described as proud.
132
For example, Hector supports Aeneas’s objection to killing Thoas (7213-16), and he ar-
gues against granting a truce. This objection is given more space in the Laud when com-
pared to the Historia (8151-98). Hector’s prudent disagreements with otherwise unani-
mous decisions surface again in Chaucer’s Troilus.
318 Interchapter One

mask, legitimizing his intervention on behalf of his Christianized national hero,

Hector. Where Guido adumbrates his source and rigorously advocates opacity
for his characters (and for himself), the poet indicates already how Smith’s
Myths and Memories of the Nation must be subjected to mythological bricolage.
In restructuring Guido’s Latin history as a vernacular romance pivotally inter-
ested in the creation of selves and nations, the poet suggests a heroic genealogy
for Hector, Troilus, and Penthesilea, including changeable and transparent
Greeks, such as Hercules and Achilles, as well as himself. He sets side-by-side
the emotional transparency and changeability of his heroes with his own modifi-
cations of an authoritative source. Like Hector, he recirculates a changed na-
tional myth, namely, the founding story of Britain and England. In constructing
analogies between ancient and contemporary, ‘English’ Trojans, the Laud is
admittedly somewhat hesitant; after all, the central stylistic feature is the fre-
quent employment of similes,133 most of which compare actions or persons to
animals or “common, rustic life.”134 As I argued above, simile and metonymy, as
conceptual tools, point toward likeness rather than identity. Ultimately, then, the
poem does not suggest that the English are the Trojans, but that the English are
like the Trojans, which brushes aside historical determinism. This looks forward
to a salient facet implicit in Chaucer’s Troilus, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Hen-
ryson’s Testament: England allegorizes Troy in that certain (but by no means
all) aspects are identical. As the productive narratological strategy of the pro-
sopagraphical self, mythological bricolage safeguards the necessary changeabil-
ity to continually (re)make English nationhood.

133
Kempe, “Middle English Tale of Troy” 25; Wülfing, “Das Bild und die bildliche Vernei-
nung im Laud-Troy-Book,” Anglia 27 (1904): 555-80 and 28 (1905): 29-80.
134
Benson, History 70.
 PART THREE

Deconstructing Troy:
Ovid, Virgil, and Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood
 Introduction

In the preceding chapters, I demonstrated that Guido delle Colonne’s Historia

destructionis Troiae juxtaposes Trojan transparency and changeability with a
Greek model advocating Virgilian veiling of individuality in favor of imperial
grandeur. The Laud Troy Book has emerged as reversing Guido’s emphasis on
the necessity of masking and bestows on British antiquity transparency and pu-
rity as desirable qualities, which is generally attributed to Britain in the founding
stories of the island in the sea. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Trojan works revisit ques-
tions of transparency and opacity inherent in the Troy story and come to differ-
ent results than does the fourteen-century romancer. In his examination of the
nexus between personal identity and collective discourse, more precisely, the
question of how much individuality can be preserved in the light of the circu-
lated masks for constructions of national identity, Chaucer develops a model an-
ticipated but never made explicit in the Laud Troy Book: selfhood is a matter of
reconciling transparency and opacity – individuality calls for the making of a
translucent self. Translucence can be created only, the House of Fame and Troi-
lus and Criseyde suggest, when individuals engage in acts of mythological bri-
colage, when individuals deconstruct the disseminated national discourse and
the very models it promotes for the making of selves. In turn, this prompts the
pivotal question of how much changeability is beneficial to identity (adaptabil-
ity), and at what point changeability becomes a destructive agency (instability),
which points up problems with translucence: what is the right balance between
opacity and transparency, between the archetypical adoption of circulated roles
and individual inventio by means of deconstructing these roles? As in the Troy
stories of Benoît, Guido, and Boccaccio, this ontological investigation has a poe-
tological correlative. Whereas the Historia explicitly opts for Virgilian masking
(albeit achieved by Ovidian changeability), and while the Laud favors complete
transparency, Chaucer carefully revisits the Ovidian cursus, which also suggests
that Virgilian veiling has its place in ontological paradigms – the perilous recog-
nition of an ‘error’ aligns with the loss of reputation and national identity in the
exilic poems. The predicament of the Ovidian persona, which bears a strong re-
semblance to the plight of Criseyde and the narrator in the Troilus, is instructive
for the latter since, beyond the question of balancing individuality, translucent
prosopagraphy also requires that national discourses are continually revised at
the hands of individuals capable of recirculating deconstructed national masks.
Nation has to be continuously challenged by counter-nationhood.
In order to substantiate Chaucerian counter-nationhood, numerous steps are
necessary, and since Troilus depicts individuals in interaction in greater detail
than other Troy stories, my discussion commands more space. My pro-
322 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

sopagraphical interpretation focuses on Chaucer’s House of Fame as well as his

Troilus, since the former elaborates the poetological framework which is neces-
sary for the ontological investigation of the complex interrelationship between
individual and mythology (that is, collective identity) as well as that between in-
dividuality and the perception of individuality. In the House of Fame, poetologi-
cal and ontological questions are already hard to distinguish; in the Troilus, it is
impossible. That the House of Fame is a poetological poem has been a com-
monplace. What I propose to add to existing explorations of the poem is the ex-
tent to which Geffrey articulates a poetological model which would not be ar-
ticulated as a heuristic narratological tool until five hundred fifty years later:
Lévi-Strauss’s mythological bricolage. The hermeneutic process of retelling sto-
ries emerges in the House of Fame through two interrelated blanks, both of
which are linked to questions of authority in the context of inventio. Geffrey en-
counters the first blank after the Virgilian story of Dido is balanced (if not com-
pletely derailed) by the Ovidian account of the abandoned woman in the Heroi-
des. Confused about the ensuing textual hybridity, Geffrey’s desire for authority
results in emptiness, which is related to the lacuna at the end of the manuscript
that likewise undermines the quest for authority. It prompts a hermeneutical
process of rereading – a hermeneutics of the blank that results in a recombina-
tion of available mythemes for the making of the self and Trojan historiography,
a deconstruction of the pillared authorities of Troy (and their narratives) men-
tioned toward the end of the poem.
While the blank suggests a rereading of the House of Fame itself (authorizing
Geffrey’s acts of invention), it points forward to the Troilus, which in itself
completes the mythological bricolage Geffrey offers to the audience, albeit
safely contained in a dream vision. The Troilus takes the British foundational
myth head-on, and it does so by means of the structural moves discerned in the
House of Fame. Both the House of Fame and the Troilus construe selfhood in
terms of narratives that can be adopted as masks. While the House of Fame is
not a translation, in the case of the Troilus, the raw material available to the nar-
rator in order to recombine elements from Benson’s ‘pool of narratives’ into in-
dividually fashioned masks by means of mythological bricolage should be con-
sidered. Since it is hardly possible to reconsider all of the narratives that went
into the Troilus,1 I focus particularly on the Ovidian and Virgilian sources,
which Chaucer revisits via Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. Chaucer extrapolates, par-
ticularly from the Historia, the dichotomy of Virgilian masking and Ovidian
emotional changeability and transparency. Rather than using either model to
characterize Trojan or Greek processes of identification, he transfers both mod-
els to the Trojan camp, bringing into sharper focus the interactional ramifica-

1
For systematic accounts of criticism, see Alice R. Kaminsky, Chaucer’s “Troilus and
Criseyde” and the Critics (Columbus: Ohio Univ. Press, 1980); Barry Windeatt, Troilus
and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
 Introduction 323

tions of either paradigm. In the narratorial attempt to balance Virgilian and

Ovidian texts, however, the question of the right balance is immediately posed.
Hence, the narrator and his three principal characters struggle with the problem
of finding a pilot, a problem also prevalent in the House of Fame, in which both
Aeneas and Geffrey lose their ‘sterismen.’ Il Filostrato already struggles with
the dichotomy of transparency and opacity and overcomes the juxtaposition in a
different but related way. Although the frame tale suggests that the reason for
retelling the story of Troiolo and Criseida is to make transparent Filostrato’s
emotional turmoil, the tale itself gainsays the allegorical interpretation suggested
at the outset. The narrative rather becomes a conceptual allegory, in which cer-
tain parts of the story remain opaque while others are meant to be transparent. In
a more nationalist environment, such translucent allegory would be a tenable
way of reading the Troilus, which allegorizes ancient Troy as Brutus’s Albion,
suggesting that parts of the different allegorical domains are not to be mapped,
that Trojan historiography, as represented chiefly by Troilus, must not be a de-
terministic model for nation making.
To what extent, however, can the Troilus be read as a national allegory?
While Chaucer’s other works, particularly the Canterbury Tales, have incited
investigations of national questions, the Troilus is rarely discussed in such
terms. Beyond the Trojan scene (often discussed in scholarship), two related as-
pects concerning the ending of the poem suggest that an allegorical reading is
explicitly invited. The description of Troilus’s view from the eighth sphere is
more or less directly cited from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, which was easily ac-
cessible for medieval readers because of Macrobius’s commentary. A careful
reading of the passage, and its reappearance in Dante’s Paradiso and Boccac-
cio’s Teseida, illustrates that Chaucer focuses not only on earthly vanity, but
also on a spot of earth located in Britain. This reading is further corroborated by
other instances in which writers borrow Cicero’s phraseology, specifically Geof-
frey of Monmouth’s Historia and the Brut tradition, in several versions of which
Brutus’s vision destines him to be the founder of a little spot of earth. If this
reading is correct, the question arises as to how the audience is supposed to alle-
gorize Britain as Troy. The hermeneutical structure visible already in the House
of Fame, which is replicated by the historiographical blank opened up by the
removal of Troilus from the Troilus, suggests that the three main characters con-
ceptualize different modes of allegorizing nationhood. The Troilus thus tests dif-
ferent ontological paradigms as a – primarily Ovidian – means to analyze the
nexus between self and nation in the transmission of the Troy story.
As a representation of Trojan historiography, Troilus is as emotionally trans-
parent as his counterpart in the Historia. In Chaucer’s poem, however, his trans-
parency is complicated. Moreover, by means of the emphasized Ovidian inter-
textualities, Troilus is more aware of the need to control himself. After his con-
version from a Virgilian knight who scorns lovers and subordinates his indi-
viduality to nationhood into an Ovidian lover, Troilus’s concern is with masking
and controlling the newly adopted good. Love becomes a hypergood that strives
324 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

for maximum mask intersection, for transparency; it commands his entire heart.
The conversion scene, which mirrors Achilles’s falling in love with Polyxena in
the Troy story, already stresses Troilus’s deficiencies in masking: that he falls in
love with Criseyde instead of other Trojan women is motivated by her ability to
maintain several contradictory masks without surrendering selfhood. Once the
Venerean hypergood takes over, however, Troilus is incapable of balancing Vir-
gilian arma and Ovidian amor; he can only be one persona at a time and be-
comes prototypically mono-mythological and changeable. Set adrift on the
stormy seas (or rather the English Channel), Troilus searches for and finds a pi-
lot, first in Pandarus and later in Criseyde, both ensuring Troilus’s ‘passage’
through the Ovidian cursus. Whereas Pandarus’s Ars yields the desired result
(Criseyde), loss of control becomes a perilous issue again when Troilus cannot
unhinge the Venerean hypergood after it becomes clear that his relationship with
Criseyde is doomed. Rather than adopting repressive masking strategies as of-
fered by the Remedia amoris, Troilus appropriates different mythical role mod-
els related to the Ovidian Heroides. He is unable, however, to subject the chosen
role (that is, his deterministic mono-mythology) to the processes of mythologi-
cal bricolage. In consequence, the narrative increasingly associates Troilus with
the narrator of the Tristia. The decisive difference is that Troilus only posthu-
mously recognizes his error, which lies in the inability to advance an ontological
model involving the Virgilian masking practices necessary for enabling stability.
He regrets his blind adoption of an unmasked emotionality that is typical for
Guido’s effeminate Trojans. That his Trojan transparency is meant to represent
the transparency of Trojan historiography follows logically. After all, his
apotheosis is consistent with a deterministic construction of nationhood. Eventu-
ally, by means of the narrator’s removal of Troilus, the faultlines of the domi-
nant ideology are exposed; a hermeneutical void is opened for the audience’s re-
construction of the poem in the course of which alternative historiographical
models for the making of British Trojanness are put to the test, namely, Panda-
rus and Criseyde.
Troilus realizes too late that the correlative of his transparency is his lack of
control, his inability to create opacity. In contrast to Troilus’s Ovidian transpar-
ency, Pandarus’s ‘Ovidianism’ is a matter of opacity only, which becomes all
too clear when putting Pandarus’s excessive use of proverbial knowledge into
the proper context: Pandarus is public discourse. He literally represents all narra-
tives and all knowledge circulated in Troy and is able to tailor them according to
his communicative needs. As with any multiplicity of discourses, there is inevi-
tably contradiction. Pandarus can mask contradiction, but only at a cost: the fail-
ure to combine the opaque masks into a centered self. His masking certainly has
positive attributes as well, but this does not dispute the fact that he is a non-
identity. While Troilus’s masks collapse and, therefore, exclude the possibility
for Troy(lus) to be Troilus (that is, dissolve individuality into a single transpar-
ent mask), Pandarus demonstrates that opaque prosopagraphy may have its mer-
its. Individuality, however, becomes impossible, since the masks are decentered
 Introduction 325

and lack connections to be established by transparency. Pandarus’s notion of

‘game,’ restricted to various subject positions gleaned in the Ovidian amatory
works, corresponds to the postmodern solution to the modernist aporia of Carte-
sian selfhood – the liberation of the subject by means of free play. Ironically,
Chaucer’s Troilus presents Pandarus as public discourse itself and demonstrates,
if this ahistorical perspective be permitted, the aporia of postmodern identity
theories as such. This is not to deny the short-lived successes of the ‘pleasure
principle.’ As long as Troilus requests aid in amatory matters, Pandarus is the
perfect praeceptor amoris. Additionally, it is his nature (and the nature of public
discourse) to manipulate perceptions whenever Troilus’s problematic ineptitude
concerning self-performance has to be masked. From Book III onward, how-
ever, tampering with perception alone does not suffice anymore. Pandarus be-
comes complicit in ‘making’ Troilus (and the Troilus)! Although at some point
close to the self-realization that his ‘postmodern’ game has serious conse-
quences for his subject, Pandarus always has a remedial mask to solve problems.
When suggesting to Troilus, after Criseyde has left, that the former should
successively enjoy the goods offered by several ladies, this advice is attributed
to Cicero’s Zanzis. This elucidates the Pandarian way of veiling sources (the
Remedia) which counter-point his intention: his source corroborates the opposite
of his intention, representing a Criseydan prosopagraphical model in which con-
tradictory goods can be reconciled. Once Troilus begins to reject Pandarus’s re-
medial advice, the latter vanishes as inconspicuously as he entered the poem; he
lacks the narrative strategies to resolve Troilus’s ethical dilemma. Supplanting
Troilus’s Trojan historiography with a Pandarian opacity that is diametrically
opposed to Troilus’s transparency is obviously not a viable solution.
Poised between Troilus’s transparency and Pandarian opacity, Criseyde liter-
ally treads the middle ground. Criseyde exemplifies a productive model of
changeability which, save perhaps in Benoît’s Roman, has been masked in the
Troy story. From the outset of the Troilus, Criseyde appears as a hybrid individ-
ual, managing to differentiate between private and public roles, to veil partially
her private masks from public view. Her ‘luminosity’ allows her to create opac-
ity where appropriate, while centering disparate masks by means of nodal trans-
parency; thus, she advances a translucent ontological paradigm. Her assertive
position may be surprising given her perilous position as an abandoned woman,
but it is precisely because of her multiple ‘abandonment’ that she is able to ne-
gotiate this stance. From the outset, Criseyde approaches the Ovidian game of
love from a different angle, and her journey through Ovid’s cursus is not teleo-
logical. Throughout the poem, Criseyde’s translucence nonetheless has to over-
come two important challenges. The first obstacle is Troilus’s transparent love,
which threatens her independence, and the second one is her exchange. In both
cases, she is able to navigate the contrary winds, both times by rewriting role
narratives gleaned in the Heroides and the Metamorphoses, whereby her im-
pending exchange leaves her in a predicament resembling that of the persona’s
exilic journey in Ovid’s Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto. The suspension be-
326 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

tween two worlds is inextricably linked to her ‘sliding,’ which Chaucer’s narra-
tor revisits three times, providing a carefully crafted self-analysis effecting her
eventual decision to take up the challenges of exile and to abandon abandon-
ment. This change of perspective on Criseyde’s actions rephrases the question of
whether she was indeed treacherous to: how can one maintain individuality in
the light of a lost reputation – a reputation that, like Ovid’s, is not so much af-
fected by a deed, but by a public misconception of ambiguous actions? Her
reputation, she knows, is lost even before she makes any decision. The least she
can do, she learns from Ovid’s letters, is to raise her friends’ awareness regard-
ing their (potential) misconstruction of her deed, to acknowledge the ‘error.’ Her
exilic lament is the last glimpse of her before she disappears – notably while still
alive and metamorphosed into a true individual – while her reputation remains
entrenched in literary-historical discourse until rescued by Chaucer’s narrator.
Criseyde’s translucence lends itself to fill the void of Trojan (literary) historiog-
raphy. As an ontological strategy, translucent prosopagraphy entails the
empowerment of an individual to deconstruct public discourse by means of
mythological bricolage. It legitimates writerly changeability and difference, and
it enables the renegotiation of one’s national identity in the light of (interna-
tional) discourses. Eventually, translucent prosopagraphy solves Criseyde’s apo-
ria by way of a poetological model also dear to the narrator, that of mythological
revision, of metamorphosis, and of changeability.
Chaucer’s narrator is often discussed as a fourth character or as a stand-in for
Chaucer. In view of recent narratological criticism, I believe that the narrator is
a hybrid of both. The narrator represents an individual, advancing translucent
prosopagraphy, and as a mythological bricoleur, his ‘voyage’ is no less perilous
than that of Criseyde, perhaps more so since he rewrites a myth of origins. Like
Troilus, the narrator – or rather poet – is subject to contrary winds: he is poised
between elegy and epic. Unlike Troilus, however, the poet does not require a pi-
lot despite the challenging narrative which he chooses to convey and which as-
sociates him increasingly with Criseyde. In a passage that is particularly relevant
to questions of nationhood and that exemplifies the ubiquitous influence of pub-
lic discourse, namely, the parliament’s decision to exchange Criseyde, the poet
showcases the inefficacy of any mono-mythological discourse for constructions
of national identity. A prescriptive myth of Trojan origins has to be decon-
structed – and Criseydan translucence offers itself as the model for re-making
Britain. A brief allusion to Ovid’s tale of Myrrha, which structurally resembles
the story of Troilus and Criseyde, demonstrates on the intertextual level the ne-
cessity to move beyond the Ovidian cursus as Troilus and Pandarus see it. For
Criseyde and the poet, Ovidian metamorphosis becomes the vehicle to abandon
their respective abandonments. While Criseyde must abandon Troilus, the poet
is about to abandon received notions of Trojan historiography. Before he does,
however, he incorporates the traditional portraits of Diomede, Criseyde, and
Troilus in order to raise the audience’s awareness for his changed perspective. If
her exchange is what blemishes Criseyde’s reputation, the poet increasingly
 Introduction 327

worries that his own changeability will affect his reputation as well. In an anal-
ogy to the Ovidian persona of the Tristia, he finally sends his ‘little book’ back
into the world from a vantage point that he shares with Troilus and which en-
ables a better view not only of his own creation, but also of the different alle-
gorical mode he suggests for countering the translatio imperii. Like Ovid, he
foresees that his book will be met by envy – an allusion to Geffrey’s recognition
of envy among the pillared authorities bearing the fame of Troy in the House of
Fame, evoking the central dichotomy between Virgil and Ovid. Like Ovid, the
poet abides without a “sterisman” and keeps writing, which allegorically rein-
forces the fact that individual and national identities are a matter of opacity and
transparency in a process of continual mythological bricolage. Britain is not
Troy; but Britain is like Troy. The likeness (rather than identity) allows for the
construction of difference on multiple levels and explicitly necessitates rewriting
in order to deconstruct opaque national discourses. Nationhood, which affords
stability only for limited periods of time, must continually be reconstructed; na-
tionhood must become counter-nationhood.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“And how he loste hys sterisman”:
Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame

Chaucer’s historiographical explorations are not limited to Troy, nor is his treat-
ment of Troy confined to one poem. While Chaucer’s engagement with Thebes
features centrally in the Knight’s Tale, the Trojan material surfaces chiefly in the
House of Fame and the Troilus.2 Thematically, the House of Fame deals with
questions of authority, most prominently in the promised appearance of a ‘man
of great authority’ at the end of the poem. Before the authority can be introduced
to Geffrey (and the audience), the poem breaks off mid-page in both
manuscripts (Fairfax 16 and Bodley 638), which has given rise to much specula-
tion. John M. Fyler rehearses the three most likely causes for the lack of an end-
ing: (1) bad manuscript tradition, that is, the authorial ending is lost; (2) Chaucer
ends deliberately, as possibly indicated by the manuscript evidence; and (3) the
event prompting the writing in the first place did not take place, rendering the
need for an ending superfluous (990n). Although some scholars believe that the
poem was complete, and that the scribes of the Bodleian and Fairfax manu-
scripts left some space to accommodate an ending, “most scholars seem content
to suppose that Chaucer simply ‘made no more,’ for whatever reason.”3 Derek
Pearsall remarks that it is tempting to see the poem “as not accidentally unfin-
ished,” arguing that it might be “appropriate” to leave the raised questions unan-
swered, that Chaucer makes a claim about his poetic gift “which chooses delib-
erately not to declare its own authority and finality.”4
The deliberate non-declaration of “its own authority” is a convincing claim
for several reasons, most of which are also connected to the central themes of
the Troilus. For example, both poems crucially engage with constructions of

2
Helen Cooper argues that the Troilus likely precedes the House of Fame, which was pos-
sibly written in 1384. Cooper, “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in
the House of Rumour,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 39-66; Cooper, “Chaucerian
Poetics,” New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2003) 47-50. Possibly, Chaucer was working on both poems at the
same time, which would explain the topical overlap: both poems engage with the Troy
story, oscillate between different authorities by way of mythological bricolage, and are
linked by the loss of a pilot, an Ovidian topos that relates to questions of nationhood.
3
John Burrow, “Poems Without Endings,” SAC 13 (1991): 19-20, quotation at 22.
4
Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992) 118.
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 329

selfhood, as has long been acknowledged;5 the prosopagraphical nature of self-

hood, however, especially with the attendant concerns of how collective dis-
courses shape selves and can, qua modification, create new personal and na-
tional masks, remains underappreciated. In both poems, ontological questions
are further intricately related to poetological questions, including the juxtaposi-
tion of Virgilian and Ovidian discourses. Moreover, both poems present a cen-
tral character lost on the seas of historiography: Geffrey temporarily loses his
own authority on his quest for authoritative knowledge about love on the surface
level and true historical knowledge on a deeper level – in an ephemeral world of
divergent narratives that variously seem to be authorial. In terms of intertextuali-
ties Geffrey is lost on the Mediterranean somewhere near Italy, suggestive of an
international literary scene, while the Troilus relocates Geffrey’s concerns to the
English channel and the world of courtly love. In other words, the mythologies
are different, but both are subject to the processes of remythologizing. That Gef-
frey ultimately translates himself into Troilus is deeply ironic and points to
Chaucer’s intense engagement with the problems posed by prosopagraphical
identities within the Troy story as it is translated from one authority to the next.
For the narrative construction of selfhood, individuals require authorial,
collectively circulated narratives. Authoritative narratives, however, are only
authoritative momentarily, that is, until sustained inquiry reveals that authorita-
tive knowledge is often an illusion. The nexus between self and collective is thus
a matter of continual revision within textual hermeneutics, which is represented
in the House of Fame by means of two interrelated lacunae: after losing his bear-
ings in the temple of Venus, Geffrey steps out onto a huge desert – a textual
nothingness also for the audience, which likewise awaits the authority promised
throughout the poem but comes up against a blank page at the end, itself rooted
in an ontological tradition. The hermeneutic circle opened up by these blanks
suggests that individual and national identities must be continually remytholo-
gized within a prosopagraphical framework. The question about the possibilities
of demythologizing is central to both poems and overlaps with the debate about
(the apparent impossibility of) demythologizing which has much occupied twen-
tieth-century philosophy.

1. Ovidian Dreams, Virgilian Realities: Changing Dido

The House of Fame is a dream vision that bears similarity to (‘allegorical’)
heavenward journeys or mental flights, a poetological poem that opens with a
discussion of the meaning of dreams.6 Geffrey is in doubt of what dreams sig-
5
See esp. Michael St. John’s Chaucer’s Dream Visions: Courtliness and Individual Identity
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) 63-123, and references therein.
6
For the genre of the poem, see Wolfgang Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry, trans. C. A. M.
Sym (London: Methuen, 1963) 68-73. For the different kinds of dreams bestowed on Gef-
frey, see Piero Boitani, “Old Books Brought to Life in Dreams: The Book of the Duchess,
the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls,” The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed.
330 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

nify and what their cause is, but there appears to be no authority on the correct
divination of dreams: “But why the cause is, noght wot I” (52).7 One possible
cause of dreams is the balance of people’s bodily humors: “As yf folkys com-
plexions / Make hem dreme of reflexions” (21-22). This and the other possible
causes of dreams are contingent upon the character of a dreamer, that is, the nar-
ratives of dreams are related to the narratives of the self. What Geffrey strives
for here and elsewhere is transparency – the transparency of authoritative
(dream) narratives. This search is fittingly represented by the ‘transparent’ archi-
tecture of both Venus’s temple and Fame’s palace at the end, both of which nev-
ertheless complicate notions of transparency.
Although transparency is continually promised throughout the poem, it is al-
ways introduced in contexts that question the ontological validity of it. The
dream vision only seemingly starts on a transparent note when the dreamer
awakes “Withyn a temple ymad of glas” (120), filled with images and narratives
which the dreamer immediately recognizes. Even the recognition of his where-
abouts, put forward in such self-assured terms, is complicated, “For certeynly, I
nyste never / Wher that I was, but wel wyste I / Hyt was of Venus redely, / The
temple” (128-31).8 The temple discloses its identity by means of its narratives,
in this case, a portrait of the goddess. The dreamer at once focuses on a tapestry
of the Troy story, introduced by a translation of the opening lines of Virgil’s
Aeneid: “I wol now synge, yif I kan, / The armes and also the man” (143-44).
The martial opening is appropriate for the war narrative, which immediately
transpires to be the love story of Aeneas and Dido. Thus, the opening of the
House of Fame evokes axioms easily recognizable for an audience familiar with
the Troy story, which is, as the above has shown, often concerned with the nar-
rative construction of identity. Within the scope of Guido’s and Benoît’s Troy
stories, the Trojans’ excessive emotionality results in their inscription of per-
sonal matters in collective discourses; personal masks penetrate into and ulti-

Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) 74. Rob-
ert M. Jordan remarks upon the “consensus on the idea that the House of Fame is a state-
ment about poetry,” eventually rejecting the category of ars poetica as the main theme of
the poem. Jordan, “Lost in the Funhouse of Fame: Chaucer and Postmodernism,” ChauR
18.2 (1983): 100, 107, 114 n. 1.
7
John Fyler suggests that the likely, if undeterminable, cause of the narrator’s dreams is his
bookishness, “a mirror of his reading.” Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale Univ. Press, 1979) 25, 28-29. Matthew Giancarlo observes about the Troilus that “we
as readers witness the growth of a love-malady whose causes remain, for all their explana-
tion, inscrutable.” Giancarlo, “The Structure of Fate and the Devising of History in Chau-
cer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” SAC 26 (2004): 232. The quest for (unknowable) causes is
one of many connections between both poems.
8
For J. A. W. Bennett, the glass denotes “love’s insubstantiality.” Chaucer’s Book of
Fame: An Exposition of “The House of Fame” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) 11. In my
opinion, the glass visually represents transparent identities and the changeability of narra-
tives therein contained. For a similar point, see St. John, Chaucer’s Dream Visions 109.
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 331

mately collapse the collective mask. The House of Fame depicts a dreamer,
who, after the assertion that dreams depend on personal narratives, loses his ori-
entation, which is only seemingly recovered by means of an authoritative, Vir-
gilian narrative, insofar as Virgil’s story of Aeneas and Dido is immediately
challenged by Ovid’s version and ultimately occurs in an Ovidian context:
changeability. This changeability provides yet another context for the subversive
addition of “yif I kan,” which has been frequently claimed to be un-Virgilian.9
While martial arms are not Geffrey’s foray, however, Venerean love apparently
is not either:
What shulde I speke more queynte,
Or peyne me my wordes peynte
To speke of love? Hyt wol not be;
I kan not of that faculte. (245-48, emphases added)
Geffrey’s stance is similar to that of the narrator in the Troilus who also con-
tends that love is not his metier. Geffrey consequently truncates the “long
proces” (251) of their falling in love – Aeneas and Dido quickly become lovers,
and the latter has no reason to worry about Aeneas since she deems “That he
was good, for he such semed” (264, emphasis added).10 Aeneas’s apparent
goodness brings into play an important prosopagraphical axiom, which plays a
more dominant role in the Troilus as well. Whereas Troilus, Pandarus, Criseyde,
and the narrator all strive for appearances of kinds, in the House of Fame ap-
pearance is considered a negative quality which problematizes Guido’s admired
Greek opacity: “Allas! what harm doth apparence, / Whan hit is fals in exis-
tence!” (265-66). Appearance is tolerable only when it is aligned with the all-
9
See Mario Praz, “Chaucer and the Great Italian Writers of the Trecento,” Monthly Crite-
rion 6.1 (1927): 34-35; Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry 84-85; Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid
33; Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1989) 27-28; Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to
Ted Hughes (London: Duckworth, 1999) 30; Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender,
Textuality, and the Medieval “Aeneid” (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994) 33;
James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350-1547: Reform and
Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) 165; Sylvia Federico, New Troy:
Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
2003) 49-50. Robert R. Edwards notes that the “marginal glosses [...] suggest that Chau-
cer’s undermining of Vergil’s textual authority is itself contested in scribal practice;
though the glosses add occasional moralizations [...], for the most part they quote Vergil’s
text.” Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Houndmills: Palgrave,
2002) 185 n. 11. For Joseph A. Dane, Geffrey’s Aeneid begins “with the sound and the
written letters in the first line of Vergil’s Aeneid” – the added phrase has “no thematic
relevance to the translation itself. Its significance relates only to the larger issue of the
process of translating.” Dane, “Yif I ‘arma virumque’ Kan: Note on Chaucer’s House of
Fame, Line 143,” American Notes & Queries 19.9-10 (1981): 135.
10
Bennett indicates the similarity of the connubium with “Medea’s secret union with Jason
in Gower (and in Guido)” which “would be regarded as binding by the medieval reader.”
Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame 35.
332 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

informing goods, that is, when appearances are really transparent. In musing on
Aeneas’s adoption of (Greek) opacity, Geffrey focuses briefly on language as
pivotal for the creation of appearance: “Therfore be no wyght so nyce / To take
a love oonly for chere, / Or speche, or for frendly manere” (276-78). Geffrey’s
critique of appearances notwithstanding, the poem illustrates that they are onto-
logically unavoidable.
As Aeneas’s veiling becomes unveiled, the narrator highlights his own Ovid-
ian instability, that is, his increasing modification of authoritative sources. While
he mainly turns to Ovid’s version of Dido (in Heroides VII), the narrative also
becomes a new story, one for which the narrator is responsible. Dido begins to
weep in such words, “As me mette redely– / Non other auctour alegge I” (313-
14). Dido’s assumption of a new identity corresponds to the narrator’s creation
of a new persona for himself: his translatio gives way to inventio. Dido’s speech
bears little resemblance to the attested source, the Aeneid.11 Not only does the
dreamer’s response to the story become more subjective (which parallels the
narrator’s development in the Troilus),12 Geffrey also makes a point about what
is constitutive of individual subjectivity, namely, the creation of new personae
by means of mythological bricolage. Structurally, this is ultimately the Ovidian
track, an alignment of Dido with Ovid.13 The price of creating new narratives
and characters that are not (literary) types, is, at least seemingly, the loss of

11
For Chaucer’s modification of his sources, see esp. John Norton-Smith, Geoffrey Chaucer
(London: Routledge, 1974) 49-50.
12
See, for instance, Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry 80. Fyler writes that “Book One of the
House of Fame acts out on a smaller scale the shifting position of the Troilus narrator.”
Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 39. According to Colin Burrow, Chaucer associates himself with
Virgil, and he is overwhelmed by the pathetic depiction of Dido, making him forget that
the source of his poem is Virgil. “In a poem about Fame this is a significant thing to do:
Chaucer introduces the idea that Virgil is the poet to be imitated by those who are eager to
press their own claims for a place in the House of Fame, but who fear they might belong
on its threshold.” Burrow, “Virgil in English Translation,” The Cambridge Companion to
Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) 22.
13
Ingeborg Besser discusses Chaucer’s inventive hybridity of Virgilian and Ovidian sources
in terms of pitting Ovid against Virgil. Besser, Chaucers “Hous of Fame”: Eine
Interpretation (Hamburg: Friederichsen, de Gruyter, 1941) 74. For the Ovidian bias of the
Dido episode, see Edward Kennard Rand, Ovid and His Influence (Boston: Marshall
Jones, 1925) 146; Cooper, “The Classical Background,” Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed.
Steve Ellis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005) 266; Jeremy Dimmick, “Ovid in the Mid-
dle Ages: Authority and Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) 284-86. As Christopher Baswell observes,
however, it is only in the Legend of Good Women that “Chaucer’s Dido stands alone, not
bracketed by any sort of imperial militancy.” Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figur-
ing the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1995) 271.
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 333

authority.14 Thus, poetological (sources) and ontological questions (Dido, Gef-

frey) are intricately connected.
Ge(o)ffrey’s poetological predicament has been long noted. Robert Edwards,
for instance, discusses poetological questions within the framework of medieval
faculty psychology, concluding that “it should be obvious from the definitions of
language and poetry set out in the poem that no linguistic utterance, discursive
or poetic, can claim a truth value; linguistic representation has no ontological
status in Geffrey’s dream.”15 The poetological experiment becomes the testing
ground for identity formation as such; a juncture that admits the impossibility of
truth value in language is one that fosters, in Lara Ruffolo’s words, “the multi-
plication of authorities and works.”16 The multiplicity of sources almost forces
upon author and self the necessity to engage in mythological bricolage, bringing
in line, at this point, the several masks of Dido in a new narrative. This hybrid
construction of Dido’s identity cuts horizontally through the vertical, genealogi-
cal structure of literary history available for ‘authorial’ identity formation. But
the abandonment of vertical lines of (literary) descent throughout the House of
Fame is problematic because, without the assured vertical authority, the narrator
is set adrift on an ephemeral textual ocean. When stepping out of Venus’s tem-
ple, the narrator thus searches for an authority to guide him through this new
world. Stopping short of finishing the sorrowful story of Dido’s death, he rather
points the reader to those traditions promising truthful accounts of her death and
her last words: “Whoso to knowe hit hath purpos, / Rede Virgile in Eneydos / Or
the Epistle of Ovyde” (377-79).
Although Geffrey assures his audience that he would like to continue with the
story, he takes refuge in the literary types from which he was about to depart. He
decides to follow only one of the mentioned sources at a time, first the Heroides,
then Virgil again.17 Aeneas’s misdemeanors are quickly excused, since he trav-
els to Italy only on account of Mercury’s command. At this point, an English
audience would be only too aware of the fact that Aeneas must indeed travel on
to Italy, because without Rome, there would be no Britain: “But to excusen
Eneas / Fullyche of al his grete trespas, / The book seyth Mecurie, sauns fayle, /
Bad hym goo into Itayle” (427-30). The narrator comes back to a ‘vertical’
model, adding that one book says so. Nonetheless, Geffrey continues with Vir-

14
The ‘new Dido’ loses authority over her identity and bemoans her lost reputation, as does
Criseyde in the Troilus – the reasons for the loss of reputation are different, of course.
15
Robert R. Edwards, The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in the Early
Narratives (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1989) 120. See also Thomas C. Kennedy,
“Rhetoric and Meaning in The House of Fame,” Studia Neophilologica 68.1 (1996): 21.
16
Lara Ruffolo, “Literary Authority and the Lists of Chaucer’s House of Fame: Destruction
and Definition through Proliferation,” ChauR 27.4 (1993): 326.
17
Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame 44; Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewrit-
ing the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press,
2004) 8.
334 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

gil’s book, quickly summarizing the Aeneid including one not especially central
episode of Virgil’s epic at greater length, namely, the loss of Aeneas’s helms-
man in Book V. According to Virgil, Palinurus is fighting sleep when the ‘god’
throws him overboard (Aen. V. 833-60). Geffrey chooses to include this episode:
Thoo sawgh I grave how to Itayle
Daun Eneas is goo to sayle;
And how the tempest al began,
And how he loste hys sterisman,
Which that the stere, or he tok kep,
Smot over bord, loo, as he slep. (433-38)
He also mentions that Aeneas will see Palinurus again in the underworld (443;
Aen. VI. 337-83). The significance of Palinurus’s appearance in the House of
Fame becomes apparent shortly after the summary of the Aeneid. Initially, Gef-
frey clearly recognizes that he is in Venus’s temple before engaging with the
hybrid history of Troy, a narrative which distracts the dreamer from further
wondering about his whereabouts and which gives temporary orientation. It
lends a specific, if problematic identity, for it remains un-authorized. Geffrey
claims not to know who ‘made’ the story, although it is clear that he made it
himself. He is likewise uncertain as regards his geographical location. He thinks,
But not wot I whoo did hem wirche,
Ne where I am, ne in what contree.
But now wol I goo out and see,
Ryght at the wiket, yf y kan
See owhere any stiryng man
That may me telle where I am. (474-79)
As he emerges from a self-fabricated, albeit strange narrative, the question of
where is tied up with nationhood.18 Given the Bensonian dictum that the self is a
locative system, it is noteworthy that Geffrey wants to know the name of a coun-
try. While the narrator’s disoriented self initially pries on the Troy story to lend
some familiarity to self-creation (a narrative that likewise evokes the construc-
tion of a Trojan genealogy for England), he now requires a national reference to
locate himself, implicitly arguing that selfhood requires collectively circulated
narratives. Geffrey hopes that the narrative will become a “stiryng man,” ironi-
18
According to A. C. Spearing, Geffrey “needed some ‘stiryng man’ to show him how his
encounter with the classics could become more productive.” Spearing, Medieval to Ren-
aissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) 23. Whereas – in
the medieval commentary tradition – Virgil’s Aeneid was mainly read in allegorical terms,
for Chaucer “it is more the story itself and the status Virgil carried – the nature of his
authority” rather than allegorical exegesis. Cooper, “Classical Background” 257. See also
Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on “Troilus and Criseyde”
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984) 10. In my opinion, the passage highlights how
narratives need to be shaped for personal and national purposes. The Aeneid, after all, is
closely linked to questions of British identities. In this context, it is worth emphasizing
that steresman also means ruler. MED, s.v. steresman n. (c).
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 335

cally referring back (as does the repetition of “yf y kan”) to the earlier recogni-
tion that such authorities are tricky – Aeneas does not need his helmsman to
found Rome (but he does require Mercury’s assistance).19 Selfhood, that is, does
not require authorial narratives, it simply requires narratives.

2. Steerless Aeneas, Steerless Geffrey: Filling Ontological Blanks

Unsurprisingly, the quest for a “sterisman” is met with a blank, the first of two
linked lacunae in the poem that promote a hermeneutic process of remythologiz-
ing within a prosopagraphical framework:
Then sawgh I but a large feld,
As fer as that I myghte see,
Withouten toun, or hous, or tree,
Or bush, or grass, or eryd lond;
For al the feld nas but of sond
[...]
“O Crist,” thoughte I, “that art in blysse,
Fro fantome and illusion
Me save!” (482-94)

19
Since the pilot first appears in Geffrey’s version of the Aeneid, Geffrey becomes associ-
ated with Aeneas. Several scholars have observed analogies between the two: both serve
Venus and are rewarded by Jupiter (Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 45); both are inadequate
readers of the Trojan texts, whereby Geffrey is only able to overcome Aeneas by imitating
his textual moves (Baswell, Virgil 223-30, 246); both are accomplished liars (Federico,
New Troy 51). There is also an Ovidian correlative for the quest of a pilot, however, which
connects the House of Fame with the Troilus. Being lost at sea without authorial guidance
is a central topos in Ovid’s Ars amatoria and in the Remedia amoris, where Ovid explic-
itly refers to Palinurus in a context that ironically undercuts Virgil’s imperial epic. Cupid
asks Ovid to include in his list of remedies for love-sickness that people should focus upon
their everyday worries: debts, a controlling father, or that, when waiting for someone’s ar-
rival by boat, one should worry about the changeable seas. Suddenly, though, Cupid dis-
appears and Ovid wonders: “quid faciam? media nauem Palinurus in unda / deserit: igno-
tas cogor inire uias” [What should I do? In the middle of the sea Palinurus leaves my ship,
I have to steer a new course that I do not know]. P. Ovidi Nasonis Amores, Medicamina
faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, ed. E. J. Kenney, Scriptorum Classicorum
Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961) 577-78; all further references to
the amatory works are to this edition. Ovid returns to this topos in the exilic poems (see
below). For Ovid’s stormy seas, see references in Johannes Kahlmayer, Seesturm und
Schiffbruch als Bild im antiken Schrifttum (Hildesheim: Fikuart, 1934). Virgil safely stays
his course without Palinurus, who is the one man to be sacrificed for the many (Aen. V.
814-15). For this sacrifice and its substitutional nature, see Philip Hardie, The Epic Suc-
cessors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1993) 32-33. For the episode as exemplifying Aeneas’s loss of “personal ties and
identity,” see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to
Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993) 84-93. According to Quint, “Palinu-
rus is [...] a surrogate for Aeneas in the hero’s capacity as leader, as head of the ship of
state” (86).
336 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

Geffrey cannot locate himself, finding only a desert, a textual nothingness repli-
cated at the scholarly end, given the debate about possible sources for the de-
sert.20 He also lost his bearings in terms of literary traditions.21 Whereas a ‘steer-
ing’ authority links both the narrator and Aeneas, there is yet another ‘link’ be-
tween the desert, in which the narrator finds himself at the end of the first book,
and the blank page the audience encounters at the end of the poem – a blank sig-
nifying the pressing necessity of continual remythologizing, since ontological
and epistemological authority is not to be had within the House of Fame. What
Geffrey does find are Leerstellen (‘points of indeterminacy’).22
The state of being bereft of poetical authority necessitates invention as a
means of providing orientation. At this point, another figure of authority is in-
troduced while reinforcing the temporal limitation of any such authority: an ea-
gle sweeps up Geffrey from the desert, the sand of which, “minute and as seem-
ingly infinite as in the Libyan desert, represents what he [Geffrey] is about to
uncover in a realm of ever increasing sound, where more discord and falsehood
are made ‘then greynes be of sondes’ (691).” Geffrey, supposed to learn about
the nature of love, listens to the eagle’s ‘sermon’ while he is being carried verti-
cally upwards. The eagle presupposes that speech is the means of conveying
(things about) love. The problem, however, is the connection between signifier
and signified; speech “escapes further into a realm of autonomous discourse.”23

20
See Fyler 981n. John M. Steadman argues that the passage resembles the Aeneid after
Aeneas’s shipwreck. Steadman, “Chaucer’s ‘Desert of Libye,’ Venus, and Jove (The Hous
of Fame, 486-87),” MLN 76.3 (1961): 199-200. For Fyler (Chaucer and Ovid 40), the nar-
rator’s confusion is characterized as epistemological rather than ontological.
21
Sheila Delany thus argues that “The story of Dido and Aeneas stirred the Narrator’s sym-
pathy, but it has generated no further narrative material. Furthermore, it has shown that
conflicting traditions exist, but has offered no way of reconciling them. The Narrator is at
an impasse.” Delany, Chaucer’s “House of Fame”: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism
(1972; Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1994) 59. Clemen suggests that “the desert has
symbolic value. It expresses [...] helplessness and expectancy, a search for some escape
from the present situation.” Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry 89.
22
For Wolfgang Iser’s “Leerstellen,” which literally translate into lacunae, see Der Akt des
Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (München: Fink, 1976) esp. 280-355.
23
Edwards, Dream of Chaucer 102, 108. The eagle is a Virgilian pilot: he lives with the god
of thunder “Which that men callen Jupiter, / That dooth me flee ful ofte fer / To do al hys
comaundement. / And for this cause he hath me sent / To the” (609-13). One further learns
that Jupiter is well-disposed toward the traveler, because of Geffrey’s service to Cupid and
Venus. The sources for Chaucer’s eagle – chiefly Dante’s Purgatorio IX. 19-33, borrow-
ings from Paradiso I. 61-63, Paradiso XVIII-XX, and Purgatorio X-XII, developing
“visible speech” – undermine the idea of authoritative guidance, however, for Chaucer
“uses it [visible speech] to put forth an idea of poetry quite at odds with Dante’s. From the
images of the Aeneid in Book I to the eagle and ‘tydinges’ in the rest of the poem, Chaucer
adapts Dante’s visible speech to portray a problematic poetry of the imagination.” For the
time being, though, “Dante, it seems, will guide Chaucer as Virgil had guided Dante.”
Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” 25, 31. According to Fyler, “Chaucer’s
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 337

The eagle’s sermon renders linguistic representation (that is, authority) impossi-
ble. This links the sand with the falsehoods abounding in the House of Rumor at
the end of the poem, which suggests that Geffrey ultimately does not desire truth
but wants “tidings, those tales ‘entremedled’ with lies brought over the sea by
shipmen, pilgrims, pardoners, couriers, and messengers who cram the House of
Rumor.”24 The narrator (re)quests a mythology to work with, a mythology that is
cosmopolitan in nature as Geffrey himself is caught within a web of allusions to
texts from all periods and locations.25 In fact, the internationalism of the House
of Fame harbors the nucleus of a more intense discussion of cosmopolitanism in
Troilus and Criseyde.26 The mythologically hybrid internationalism subverts
monolithic, vertical construction of identity, represented in the first book primar-
ily with an eye to the foundational Troy story.
The physical movement of the dreamer is of interest also from a pro-
sopagraphical perspective insofar as the upward journey is related to the literary-
cultural models of genealogy as they reoccur throughout the poem. In the first
book, Geffrey negotiates two ‘vertical’ traditions – a Virgilian and an Ovidian
line of descent, which Geffrey quite literally horizontalizes in that he follows the
chronological narrative to a point where he can cut across from Virgil to Ovid
and back again to Virgil. These horizontal ‘switches’ between an Ovidian and
Virgilian tradition are represented by the motif of traveling: the journey across
the sea or the description of the tapestry are horizontal movements. The eagle’s
flight abandons the horizontal movement for a vertical voyage bound up with
yielding authoritative knowledge. Eventually, however, verticality is revealed to
be an argumentative construct unable to sustain its promise, and the hermeneu-

heavenly flight becomes a sustained inversion of Dante’s vatic pretensions, and thus re-
peats the Ovidian jokes about Vergil.” Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 43.
24
Ruffolo, “Literary Authority” 335.
25
The House of Fame itself is an international ‘court.’ In the poem’s third book, Geffrey be-
holds “Of famous folk that han ybeen / In Auffrike, Europe, and Asye, / Syth first began
the chevalrie” (1338-40). He observes also a great company entering the hall of Fama “of
sondry regiouns, / Of alleskynnes condiciouns / That dwelle in erthe under the mone, /
Pore and ryche” (1529-32).
26
For Chaucer’s cosmopolitanism in the Troilus, see Robert R. Edwards, “‘The Metropol
and the Mayster-Toun’: Cosmopolitanism and Late Medieval Literature,” Cosmopolitan
Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New
York: Routledge, 2001) 33-62; for Chaucer’s internationalism generally, see Elizabeth
Salter, “Chaucer and Internationalism,” SAC 2 (1980): esp. 71; Ardis Butterfield, “Nation-
hood,” Chaucer, ed. Ellis esp. 57-58. If, in the following, I posit a Chaucerian counter-
nationhood, this is not to deny the importance of what Northrop Frye calls the “interna-
tional idiom” in his “Culture as Interpenetration,” Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Ca-
nadian Culture, ed. James Polk (Toronto: Anansi, 1982) 25. For recent discussions of
Chaucer’s engagement with the English traditions, see Andrew Cole, “Chaucer’s English
Lesson,” Speculum 77.4 (2002): 1128-67; D. Vance Smith, “Chaucer as an English
Writer,” The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ.
Press, 2006) 87-121.
338 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

tics of the blank alleviates the reading process of its own verticality. The short
vertical movement is again disrupted in favor of Geffrey’s horizontal explora-
tion of the House of Fame and the House of Rumor. By means of this move-
ment, he metaphorically horizontalizes the various authorities encountered – es-
pecially in the House of Fame, which is an Ovidian realm concerned with the
transmission of discourse.27 The second book closes (and therefore opens the
third book) with an Ovidian overture to the dreamer’s visit of Fame’s palace,
which articulates the model of prosopagraphical selfhood, emphasizing the in-
evitability of changeability: the ‘arriving narratives,’ says the eagle, assume the
appearance of the persons who uttered them:28
Whan any speche ycomen ys
Up to the paleys, anon-ryght
Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight
Which that the word in erthe spak,
Be hyt clothed red or blak;
And hath so verray hys lyknesse
That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse
That it the same body be,
Man or woman, he or she. (1074-82)29

27
Desmond, Reading Dido 33. Brown draws attention to the syncretistic agency of Ovid’s
Fama, stressing the regionalist, postcolonial sentiment of the focus on ‘little narratives.’
Chaucer reacts against the ‘medieval theory of authorship’ because of “his enthusiastic
engagement with that eminently secular, eminently entertaining overturner of auctoritees,
Ovid himself.” Brown, Metamorphosis of Ovid 25-26, 29. Simpson highlights the “impro-
vised, unstable bricolage of the House of Rumour.” Simpson, “Chaucer’s Presence and
Absence, 1400-1550,” Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Boitani and Mann 255.
28
The personification of narratives, I believe, closely resembles the depiction of Fama in the
Metamorphoses: “atria turba tenet: veniunt leve vulgus euntque / mixtaque cum veris pas-
sim commenta vagantur / milia rumorum confusaque verba volutant. / e quibus hi vacuas
inplent sermonibus aures, / hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti / crescit, et auditis ali-
quid novus adicit auctor” [Crowds throng its halls, a lightweighed populace that comes
and goes, and rumors everywhere, thousands, false mixed with true, roam to and fro, and
words flit by and phrases all confused. Some pour their tattle into idle ears, some pass on
what they have gathered, and as each gossip adds something new the story grows]. P.
Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Leip-
zig: Teubner, 1977) XII. 53-58. All further references are to this edition. I use A. D. Mel-
ville’s translation, Oxford World’s Classics (1986; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998)
with minor modifications. See also Edgar Finley Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1929) 82.
29
Mary J. Carruthers argues that the mentioned colors refer to manuscript painture and
observes that “Chaucer has peopled his House of Fame with literature that has both
painture and parole. He also gives us a precise image of how litterae, written in black and
red, are signs of voces (both ‘voices’ and ‘words’) and voces re-present in our memories
those no longer immediately present to us.” Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of
Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 255.
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 339

Geffrey’s trip through the House of Fame is thus prefaced by an inquiry into the
changeability within narrative selfhood, which calls for the abandonment of ver-
tical literary genealogy. First, however, Geffrey has to climb the rock upon
which the palace is located, the substance of which is an apposite symbol for
what he is bound to see in it. The material has the appearance of “alum de glas”
(1124); while it “shoon ful more clere,” Geffrey is uncertain “what congeled
matere / Hyt was” (1125-27). At last, he realizes that it is a rock of ice, the ici-
ness of which alludes to Bernardus Silvestris’s commentary on the Aeneid and
represents memory.30 The transparency of Venus’s temple becomes a more
appropriate hybridity that Geffrey describes as congeled, which beyond its
primary meaning of freezing entails lumping together.31 Geffrey concludes that
such a structure constitutes a “feble fundament” (1132)32 as transparency turns
into translucence, the latter representing an ontological model capable of
sustaining both, transparency and opacity.

3. Historiographical Diversity, Ontological Multiplicity: Rewriting Nation

After the ascension and his first glimpse of Fama herself,33 Geffrey beholds sev-
eral pillared historians,34 but the order in which they are grouped together seems
opaque to him (1451-53). He first notices Statius, representing Theban history,
before proceeding with the historians of Troy: Homer, Dares, Dictys, Lollius,
Guido, and Geoffrey (of Monmouth). “And ech of these, as have I joye, / Was

30
Edwards, Dream of Chaucer 113.
31
MED, s.v. congelen esp. 1., 2., and 4. (a).
32
The names written in the ice are melting away, which is to say, the cause of their decrease
of fame lies in the heat; on the other side, the shade of the castle prevents that the names
are defaced (1164). If Chaucer had in mind Bernardus Silvestris’s commentary on the
Aeneid, the heat would represent imagination while the cold would allude to memory.
Imaginative inventio and changeability (remythologizing, that is) ultimately blot out the
memory of the sources.
33
According to Boitani (“Old Books” 74), the House of Fame is characterized by de- and
remythologizing: “A principle of de-composition and re-composition seems to work
throughout the House of Fame.” On account of their metamorphoses, the House of Fame
and Fama are therefore Ovidian agencies, for which see Robert W. Hanning, “Chaucer’s
First Ovid: Metamorphosis and Poetic Tradition in The Book of the Duchess and The
House of Fame,” Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester,
Mich.: Solaris, 1986) 142.
34
Fama “is to be understood as the body of traditional knowledge that confronted the edu-
cated fourteenth-century reader. The idea of fame as tradition at large occurs in several
classical loci, all of them well-known to the medieval reader in the works of the curricu-
lum authors.” Delany, Chaucer’s “House of Fame” 3. For Taylor, “This passage, which
suggests that Chaucer was already thinking seriously about the matter that was to occupy
him in Troilus and Criseyde, explicitly frames the issues of poetic authority and truth so
important to both poems. Shrouded in antiquity, the real history of Troy is forever lost;
what remains are various tidings.” Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” 35.
340 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

besy for to bere up Troye,”35 which is a serious task: “So hevy therof was the
fame / That for to bere hyt was no game” (1471-74). The story of Fama is em-
bedded within the Troy story, as it is also in the Metamorphoses, which links
this representation of history also with the ekphrasis in Venus’s temple.36 This
doubling of Troy in a historiographical context emphasizes the importance of
collective narratives for the construction of selfhood while alluding to the con-
flicting versions represented by the various poets as well. Even national dis-
courses are subject to change, as indicated by the presence of Geoffrey.37 Gef-
frey quickly realizes the problems with monolithic historical traditions since
“Betwex hem was a litil envye.” One author even accuses Homer of telling lies
and being favorably disposed to the Greeks. Geffrey’s “Oon seyde” (1477) con-
flates several writers into one tradition, since the accusation against Homer can
be traced to Dares, Benoît, and Guido (that is, Simpson’s ‘Guido tradition’);
these historiographical accounts overlap, if only at certain points. Disharmony
can likewise be discerned between Geffrey’s sources for his account of Troy at

35
This represents another, rather subtle link to the Troilus, in which joy(e) most frequently
rhymes on Troy(e). The passage, including the following lines, is very interesting when
compared with Guido’s statement that the Troy story represents an enjoyable tale.
36
Heather James draws attention to the relationship between Ovid’s Fama and the Trojan
War within the context of competing Virgilian and Ovidian accounts. Ovid, she argues
uses Virgil’s Fama to introduce a “rivalrous version of the Trojan war. By casting Fama as
the sponsor of the translatio imperii, Ovid strips the newly canonized Troy legend of
authority.” The authority at the end of the poem, she suggests, is “possibly Vergil” mean-
ing that “for the last time, Chaucer fails to tell the story of the Aeneid.” Eventually,
“Chaucer decides not to translate Vergil’s Aeneid and, by extension, empire.” James,
Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1997) 27-29. See also Brown, Metamorphosis of Ovid 25.
37
For Bennett, the mentioning of Geoffrey alongside of Guido marks a patriotic moment.
Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame 141. For (potential) allusions to contemporary politics,
see Stephen J. Russell, “Is London Burning? A Chaucerian Allusion to the Rising of
1381,” ChauR 30.1 (1995): 107-09. Cooper questions whether ‘Gaufride’ refers to Geof-
frey of Monmouth and suggests that this might be a Chaucerian self-reference instead.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, she argues, does not tell the Troy story itself (and Chaucer also
differentiates between Troy story and narratives concerned with what happened after the
destruction). Secondly, she does not think that as a Norman from Wales writing a history
of the British kinds, Geoffrey would qualify as ‘English.’ Galfridus as Chaucer’s Christian
name, is then offered as the actual (self-)reference, dividing Chaucer “into the belittled
dreamer Geoffrey and the authoritative poet Gaufride. His omission of his own name as
the sixth of six at the end of Troilus is here made up for, where he takes his place in
Fame’s house as the sixth poet of Troy – and this time, as the poet of Troy in English.”
Cooper, “Chaucerian Poetics” 48, 49-50. While Geoffrey does not recount the story of the
fall of Troy, his version was often included in manuscripts that also include Guido’s full
version of the event. Since most of the other references to English in Chaucer are “unam-
biguously to the English language” (Cooper, “Four Last Things” 58 n. 33), English “Gau-
fride,” moreover, could also be construed as referring to an English version of Geoffrey’s
Historia as opposed to Latin or French versions available within the Brut tradition.
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 341

the outset, between Virgil and Ovid,38 whose names are listed immediately fol-
lowing those of the authorities of Troy.
Virgil is located on a pillar of “tynned yren cler,” bearing the fame of “Pius
Eneas” (1481-85), which again highlights the national subtext of Chaucer’s in-
vestigation of the interplay of personal and collective masks. As was common in
the Middles Ages, Virgil features as the poet of war and imperial conquest while
Ovid is “Venus’s clerk” (1487), residing next to Virgil on a pillar of copper,
which is highly appropriate since “copper tarnishes to green, the colour of in-
constancy.”39 Whether or not Geffrey sees inconstancy in the alteration of cop-
per’s hue, the choice of a changeable color stresses the transformational princi-
ple essential to Ovidian poetics. The Troy narratives, represented by the authors
whose descriptions precede the mentioning of Ovid and Virgil, significantly wa-
ver exactly between the poles signified by Virgil (war, empire without end) and
Ovid (love, changeability). Despite the fact that Geffrey acknowledges Aeneas’s
glory (which may be an ironic gesture toward the workings of fame), it is the
Ovidian poetological principle of changeability that eventually reigns supreme,
as becomes obvious in the arbitrary allocation of reputation at the hands of
Fama. Fama even becomes Fortuna’s sister: The individuals requesting fame are
all deserving, but “they were dyversly served; / Ryght as her suster, dame For-
tune, / Ys wont to serven in comune” (1546-48). Fama, like Fortune, is change-
able, arbitrary, and inescapable.40
The wicker cage of tidings, which Geffrey inspects last, summarizes and
crystallizes the prosopagraphical processes inherent in the transmission of narra-
tives. While Fama at least seems to exert some authority in the sense that she al-
locates reputation, the narratives Geffrey encounters now are self-determined;
the narratives literally assume their own identities. Tidings and language are in-
substantial here, and “Authority is reduced to the level of rumour, ‘fals and soth
compouned.’ The result is close to the incipient humanism of the Book of the
Duchess: an insistence on the centrality of individual experience, on personal
responsibility and the primacy of the imagination.”41 The implications are that
“those who repeat or write down something they have heard or read cannot
make wholly independent decisions about the way they do so, but must to some
extent be acting, if not precisely subconsciously, at least without complete
awareness of the preoccupations and assumptions which govern their methods.

38
See Cooper, “Chaucer and Ovid: A Question of Authority,” Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influ-
ences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles
Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988) 72.
39
Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame 142. The ‘tin’ signifies the outcome of the war and the
founding of Rome as well as the “metal of Jupiter – Aeneas’s patron deity” (142).
40
Unlike Fortune, Fama has more to do with perception insofar as fama ultimately affects
how one is perceived by others. This comes to the fore particularly with the sixth group of
petitioners who would like to see their ill-fame rectified (1727-70).
41
Cooper, “Chaucer and Ovid” 78.
342 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

The passage might also suggest the role of readers in constructing a text’s mean-
ing, which, like Chaucer’s rumours, is not dependent upon authorial intention.”42
And yet, Geffrey observes how the personified tidings consciously decide to mix
and mingle, notably in a fashion resembling that of the narrative’s own bestowal
of family relationships between Fortune and Fama. Two tidings, for instance,
fight about who should leave the cage first and finally decide to exit together as
a compound:
We wil medle us ech with other,
That no man, be they never so wrothe,
Shal han on [of us] two, but bothe
At ones, al besyde his leve,
Come we a-morwe or on eve,
Be we cried or stille yrouned.... (2102-07)
As a poetological model, this results in narratives, the sources of which are so
enmeshed that they become opaque. To Geffrey, this may seem arbitrary – but it
simultaneously does not render mythological bricolage significantly less authori-
tative than existing ‘authoritative’ discourses. Mythological bricolage becomes a
model not only for poetical invention but for the re-combination of narratives for
self-fashioning as well, whereby Geffrey focuses primarily on historical narra-
tives, notably the Troy story, which performs two important functions. On the
one hand, it circulates ‘petits récits’ (Lyotard’s ‘little narratives’), among which
one finds the stories of the tragic destinies of Dido and Medea. On the one hand,
the Troy story represents a master narrative and provides structural models for
creating collective identities which subsume stories of individuals and individu-
ality. Such master narratives, however, are subject to change.
After observing that most of the authorities in Fama’s hall are historians, Lee
Patterson suggests that Orosius’s Historiae is the source for the House of Ty-
dyngs. The wicker structure itself resembles the historical world insofar as it
seems completely stable from the inside, promising “authoritative knowledge.”
Viewed from the outside, it appears to be “founded on nothing but Aventure,”
however. With its incessant joining of true and false, Patterson argues that
The House of Tydyngs is thus the labyrinth not only of history but of the writing of
history, and in it the Chaucerian quester after historical truth discovers that the res
gestae he seeks to recover are not merely hidden or distorted by the process by which
they are mediated in their translatio from past to present […] but that they are actually
constructed by that process. The labyrinth of historical writing is an unfounded and
ceaseless process of mediation, a translatio of nothing but itself.43
The realization of the constructedness of discourse legitimizes poetical invention
(here framed within the Troy story) and provides a hermeneutical model that
demythologizes a static, vertical translatio imperii.
42
Desmond, Reading Dido 36.
43
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,
1991) 100, 101.
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 343

The necessity of ontological difference, of altering disseminated master nar-

ratives that yield the (ethical) frameworks available for making selves, is ex-
pressly emphasized in the House of Fame through the connection of the flouted
search for authority – Aeneas’s and Geffrey’s loss of pilots – and the nothing-
ness caused by the absence of authority – the desert onto which Geffrey steps at
the end of the first book. This nothingness is replicated by the blank page en-
countered at the end of the poem, which similarly creates an ontological uncer-
tainty for the audience. Issues of hermeneutic control have, of course, been al-
ready discussed in scholarship. Katherine Terrell, for instance, argues that
Chaucerian subversion lies not only in his allegiance to Ovid but also in a struc-
ture which suggests that as soon as a work leaves the author’s hands, “herme-
neutic control transfers to the reader.”44 The connection between the audience’s
‘reading process’ and Aeneas’s (and Geffrey’s) loss of guiding authorities,
which results in related blanks, not only confers the conclusions from the textual
to the meta-textual level, but more immediately promotes a revaluation of the
entire text from a new perspective. The blank page redirects the audience’s jour-
ney along the hermeneutic circle back to the first encountered lacuna45 – an on-
tological hermeneutics related to a ‘tradition’ of blank pages.
If the final lacuna of the House of Fame were indeed intended, it would eas-
ily fit into a tradition that places the blank page in the context of creating per-
sonal identities, for blank pages are a relatively common phenomenon in the
Middle Ages. Tracing the history of writing, for instance, Eric Jager illustrates
the move from reception to production, culminating in a highly individualized
reckoning of deeds. The manuscript codex quickly turned into “a supreme sym-
bol of the self,” the shift from scroll to codex encapsulating the development
from unity to divisible entities analogous to multipartite selves. The nature of bi-
foliated books delineates a “moral division in the human psyche,”46 whereby
readers record on the blank pages their evil and good deeds. The inscribed blank
also becomes a literary trope, for example, in Dante’s Vita nuova: “In quella
parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si

44
Katherine H. Terrell, “Reallocation of Hermeneutic Authority in Chaucer’s House of
Fame,” ChauR 31.3 (1997): 289, drawing on Ruffolo, “Literary Authority” 325-41. See
further Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages
(New York: Palgrave, 2000) 128-42.
45
The necessity to ‘start over again’ is likewise emphasized by the poem’s frequent new be-
ginnings, discusssed in Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory
and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2004) 205, 297 n. 84. She sees
the repeated beginnings related to a “search for causes,” which initially “appears at best
comically difficult” and is finally shown to be “futile, undercutting the possibility of con-
veying truth through language.” Thus, the poem becomes “an allegory about the impossi-
bility of writing allegory, for the allegorical writer must be able to assume that it is possi-
ble to convey figuratively an otherwise inexpressible truth through the veil of language”
(205).
46
Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (2000; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001) 57.
344 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo
scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello; e se
non tutte, almeno la roro sentenzia” [In that part of the book of my memory be-
fore the which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying ‘Incipit Vita
Nova.’ Under such rubric I find written many things; and among them the words
which I purpose to copy into this little book; if not all of them, at the least their
substance].47 This passage is one example of a relatively popular trope of the
way in which the ‘book of the self’ allows rewriting and rereading,48 promoting
a hermeneutical process, which, in the House of Fame, is initiated by linking the
last empty half-page to the blank desert. This hermeneutics of the blank is also
related to the two authorities that dominate the first book, Ovid and Virgil, the
juxtaposition of whom itself anticipates “the hermeneutic problems discussed by
Gadamer and others.”49 In fact, the hermeneutical rereading of the House of
Fame entails a Chaucerian rereading of Ovid and Virgil, horizontally challeng-
ing vertical, seemingly authoritative traditions: Ovidian changeability demy-
thologizes Virgilian stasis.50 The hermeneutics of the blank, then, empowers
(and forces) the self to deconstruct freely, qua mythological bricolage, the narra-
tives provided for making selves and nations, such as the Troy story – continu-
ally recombining mythemes into new masks.
If the House of Fame argues that the self is a book – that is, a combination of
narrative masks capable of challenging seemingly authoritative discourse by
means of changing the stories and images of the ideal selves in a hermeneutic
act of rereading and rewriting – this argument is not only directed backward
‘into’ the poem, but also forward into the Troilus. The manuscript lacuna on
which the House of Fame ends is also a narrative space into which the Troilus
can be inserted as a potential ending.51 Instead of an ending, however, constru-
47
Dante Alighieri, La vita nuova di Dante Alighieri, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Dante
1, ed. Michele Barbi (1907; Firenze: Bemporad & Figlio, 1932) 3-4. I use D. G. Rossetti’s
translation included in The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo D’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri:
1100 – 1200 – 1300 (London: George Routledge; New York: Dutton, 1908) 173.
48
For discussions of whether Chaucer knew the Vita nuova, see Spearing, Medieval to Ren-
aissance 25-26; Thomas C. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medie-
val Book (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) 120, 132, 184.
49
Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer 114. At the end of the poem, Baswell observes, “we are
brought back in a circle – as has been Geffrey himself – to a new authority.” Baswell, Vir-
gil 248.
50
According to Fyler, the “moral of the poem is Ovidian.” Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 64.
51
Patterson argues that the two poems are connected since both deal with historiographical
questions. Moreover, the House of Fame promises the coming of ‘a man of great author-
ity,’ while Troilus starts with (a doubtful) one, namely, Calchas. Patterson, Chaucer 99,
108. Wallace stresses Chaucer’s continued engagement with love, fame, and poetry in the
Troilus in “Chaucer’s Italian Inheritance,” Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Boitani
and Mann 43. Federico maintains that the House of Fame “predicts – and even provokes –
Troilus and Criseyde. [...] the end of the House of Fame turns from old stories to new ones
and from the classical world to the contemporary one.” She likewise suggests that the
 Chapter Thirteen: Historiographical Gaps in the House of Fame 345

ing the Troilus as a continuation of Chaucer’s dream vision further propels the
audience into a textual world in which various cultural narratives compete for
the (vertical) authority that lends stability to concepts such as the self and the na-
tion; and again – in a series of problematic endings – the answer is that such dis-
courses are necessarily driven by a desire for stability which in itself necessitates
a continual act of remythologizing. While the House of Fame plays out in minia-
ture the struggle between competing ontological models, between Virgilian ver-
ticality and Ovidian changeability, Chaucer’s Troilus continues his inquiry into
the prosopagraphical nature of selves and nations. This time, however, the focus
falls on the interactional side of different modes of identification, an aspect
largely absent in the self-contained dream vision: The House of Fame explores
the ontological side of the nexus between person and collective; the Troilus fo-
cuses on the epistemological problems surrounding these issues. At the same
time, the transparent ideal, represented by Troilus, who is similarly adrift on the
oceans of textuality as are his precursors Aeneas and Geffrey, is further cri-
tiqued in terms of the reconstruction of Troy in Britain. The result of this re-
newed investigation of the interplay of personal and collective identities, how-
ever, is not too different from the one in the House of Fame insofar as it ulti-
mately suggests an Ovidian counter-nationhood,52 linking Chaucer through his
‘Trojan’ followers to an Ovidian track in the Renaissance.53

wicker house “is an image from late-fourteenth-century London. It contains and fails to
contain the hustle and noise of a public place, within which discourse is generated and re-
peated and from which it is disseminated.” The evidence for these claims is then tied to
Chaucer’s audience, which, according to Paul Strohm was constituted by those within his
‘hearing’ – his “friends can laugh with him at the absurdity of his positing himself as a
‘man of gret auctorite.’” Federico, New Troy 62, 63; Strohm, Social Chaucer (1989; Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994) 45. As I suggest regarding the Troilus, concep-
tual allegory may posit correspondences between the wicker house and London; and yet,
direct correspondence between the literary and cultural domains are hard to come by.
52
The House of Fame stands Virgil on his head, since the three books of the poem invert the
order of the three Virgilian styles. Dane, “Chaucer’s House of Fame and the Rota Vir-
gilii,” Classical and Modern Literature 1 (1980): 57-75. Cf. Baswell, Virgil 390-91 n. 12.
53
This recontextualizes Simpson’s belief about the un-Renaissance notion of Chaucerian
fame: “Chaucer’s commitment to Ovid provokes him to challenge these ostensibly ‘Ren-
aissance’ ideals. Once again, commemoration, this time of a whole poetic tradition, is
shaped within the terms of Ovidian elegy, but the very rigour of the Ovidian commitment
brings Chaucer into direct conflict with ‘Renaissance’ ideals of fame, including, even,
Ovid’s own fame. This reformulation disallows the ‘Renaissance’ practice of stellifying
authors by way of apotheosis, forever abstracting them from the ‘news’ for which they are
responsible.” Simpson, Reform 164.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“We wil medle us ech with other”: Mythologizing Allegory

Coming from the House of Fame, the audience encounters in the Troilus an act
of mythological bricolage par excellence concerning individual and collective
identity formation. In this chapter, I argue that authorial bricolage in Chaucer’s
‘Troy story’ occurs in the framework of prosopagraphical selfhood, which yields
insights into an important stage in the debate about how personal and national
identities are constructed in the late medieval English transmission of the Troy
story. Troilus falls into a group with other works that “explore the imaginative
world of classical antiquity,” a framework encompassing Chaucer’s Anelida, his
House of Fame, the Consolation of Philosophy, his Legend of Good Women, and
the Knight’s Tale.54 Chaucer not only rediscovers poetic texts, he also uncovers
“the cultural and political contexts that they were designed to affirm or critique;
he was thus able to imagine them at work, as cultural forces, before translating
them into English as written or remembered texts.”55 The pillared authorities of
Trojan history at the end of the House of Fame indicate the wide array of read-
ing that went into the writing of the House of Fame and point further to the Troi-
lus, which likewise employs a plethora of sources that are decidedly interna-
tional and, therefore, seem to promise few insights into the making of nation-
hood, especially when considering Elizabeth Salter’s characterization of the
1350s and 1360s as the “cosmopolitan years,” easily expandable into the 1380s,
when the Troilus was written.56 It is precisely this cosmopolitanism, however,
that provides the important narratives for constructions of nationhood. The in-
clusion of the international discourse allows the process of a continual remy-
thologizing, the creation of a malleable national mythology that is translucent
rather than opaque or transparent.
Since it is impossible to discuss all of Chaucer’s sources in terms of pro-
sopagraphical selfhood,57 I focus on the dichotomy between Virgilian imperial

54
Robert R. Edwards, “Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track,” European Literary
Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick
A. de Armas (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002) 116.
55
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in Eng-
land and Italy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997) 10.
56
Salter, “Chaucer and Internationalism” 74-76.
57
For recent accounts of Chaucer’s sources for the Troilus, see Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and
the Tradition of the “Roman Antique” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); Weth-
erbee, Chaucer; Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde esp. 37-137. The following works I found
particularly helpful in discussing Chaucer’s classical and near-contemporary sources:
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 347

stasis and Ovidian counter-national changeability that Chaucer inherits mainly,

though not exclusively, from Benoît and Guido, transmitted pace Boccaccio’s Il
Filostrato.58 Since Guido’s Historia most incisively engages questions of opac-
ity and transparency, scholarship dealing with Guido’s influence on Chaucer has
to be revisited. In extrapolating the dichotomy of transparency and opacity in his
analysis of the role of collective discourse for making selves, Chaucer tests the
ontological models provided in the Troy story without aligning the dichotomy of
Virgilian opacity and Ovidian transparency with the antagonism of Greeks and
Trojans (which plays only a minor role). Rather, the poem tests opacity and
transparency within Trojan culture, implicitly emphasizing competing ways of
conceptualizing collective identities. The Troilus thereby advances an ontologi-
cal model that accommodates transparency and opacity, namely, translucent
prosopagraphy. The development of the latter is intrinsically related to issues of
control, which was also important in Geffrey’s Ovidian-Virgilian tale of Dido,
although the Troilus suggests that control is already a problematic issue in the
Ovidian cursus. Like Ovid and Geffrey, all characters in the Troilus strive for an
authorization of their mythological hybridity, but variously become allegories of
Trojan ideology (Troilus), constituted by Trojan mythology (Pandarus), or man-

Shannon, Chaucer; Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in
Style and Meaning (1957; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973) 124-65; Claes
Schaar, The Golden Mirror: Studies in Chaucer’s Descriptive Technique and Its Literary
Background (Lund: Gleerup, 1967); Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid; A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and
Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982);
Chauncey Wood, The Elements of Chaucer’s “Troilus” (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press,
1984); Patterson, Chaucer; John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in
Chaucer’s “Troilus” (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990); Jane Chance, The Mytho-
graphic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1995); Hagedorn, Abandoned Women. For Chaucer’s borrowings from Roman writ-
ers, see further J. Koch, “Chaucers Belesenheit in den römischen Klassikern,” Englische
Studien 57.1 (1923): 8-84.
58
Chaucer’s Italian sources have been of increasing interest in recent years. For Boccaccio’s
influence, see Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio for the Troilus and Warren Ginsberg,
Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2002) as well as
Wallace, Chaucerian Polity for the Canterbury Tales. See further Wallace, Chaucer and
the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985); Boitani, ed., Chaucer and
the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Boitani, Chaucer and
Boccaccio (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977).
For Chaucer’s Dante, see R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word:
Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books,
1983); Wetherbee, Chaucer; Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy”; Richard
Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in “The Canterbury Tales” (Ber-
keley: Univ. of California Press, 1991); Nancy M. Reale, “Reading the Language of Love:
Boccaccio’s Filostrato as Intermediary between the Commedia and Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde,” Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid through Chaucer, ed. James
J. Paxson and Cynthia A. Gravlee (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna Univ. Press; London:
Associated Univ. Presses, 1998) 165-76; Cooper, “Four Last Things.”
348 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

age to become their own pilots, as do Criseyde and the poet, for whom allegory
becomes an ontological mode encompassing transparency and opacity.
Chaucer’s advancement of translucent prosopagraphy is not only indebted to
Benoît, Guido, Ovid, and Virgil, but also to Boccaccio’s Filostrato, which is
heavily interested in veiling and unveiling. Filostrato explicitly offers his poem
as a masking strategy that highlights allegorical difference. In veiling his grief
prompted by his absent lady, he determines a contradictory guideline as to how
the poem should be read. While the ancient story should mask his grief, it makes
transparent his emotional distress to Filomena, who is asked to construe
Troiolo’s sorrow as Filostrato’s misery. This contradiction is complicated since
Troiolo himself proposes an allegorical model for reading diametrically opposed
to Filostrato’s. Lastly, the secret communication between two lovers, like the af-
fair on the plot level, is perilously public. A network of contradictions invites
the audience to use the same conceptual tools provided by Filostrato (that is,
mythological bricolage) in order to determine a mode of reading (and being) that
accommodates transparency and opacity. For Chaucer, Il Filostrato offers a
means of extending the ontological paradigm he dallied with in the House of
Fame. While the latter excludes the complex world of daily self-work, the Troi-
lus tests the prosopagraphical model in performance. Like Filostrato, the Troilus
is an allegorical poem; Chaucer’s conceptual allegory, however, is invested to a
much greater extent in the nexus between self and nation.

1. Ovidian Changeability, Virgilian Stasis: Rethinking Dichotomies

At the beginning of the last century, Guido’s Historia was still considered an
important source for the Troilus. Walter Skeat surmises that the emphasis of
Boccaccio has occluded the sustained engagement with Chaucer’s classical
sources, notably the Historia.59 George Hamilton likewise opines that Chaucer is
indebted to Guido concerning passages in the House of Fame, the Monk’s Tale,
the Book of the Duchess, and the Legend of Good Women. For him, the Historia
is the key source for Troilus.60 This conclusion was soon questioned, most emi-
nently by Karl Young, who argues that most of the borrowings from the Historia
could equally be from the Roman de Troie, given that many passages included in
both the Troilus and the Roman are absent from the Historia.61 That Chaucer
mentions Guido rather than Benoît is not too surprising in this context since the
Historia ensured Benoît’s Roman the widest possible dissemination, was better

59
Walter W. Skeat, “Introduction to Troilus,” The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed.
Walter W. Skeat, 2nd ed., 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900) 2: liii.
60
George L. Hamilton, The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” to Guido
delle Colonne’s “Historia Trojana” (1903; New York: AMS, 1966) esp. 52-66.
61
Karl Young, The Origin and Development of the Story of “Troilus and Criseyde” (1908;
New York: Gordian Press, 1968) 105-39.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 349

known, and conceived of as a more reliable historical source.62 While it is gen-

erally accepted that Chaucer is more immediately indebted to Benoît, it is
“probable,” argues Windeatt, that Chaucer and Boccaccio used both versions
and that readers would have been familiar with the generic differences, since
they knew romance versions of the Troy story because of Benoît and were fa-
miliar with the historical tradition through Guido.63
More recently, C. David Benson has observed that the narrator of the Troilus
is indebted to Guido. That Chaucer knew the Historia is evident from the works
mentioned above and the beginning of the General Prologue.64 Given that
Chaucer refers to Benoît, Dares (that is, Joseph of Exeter), Ovid, Statius, and
Virgil, Benson wonders why he should choose “virtually to ignore the standard
history of Troy, even though it was familiar to him.” Benson believes that
Guido’s importance lies in his “historical pessimism and distinctive narrator.”
For Chaucer, the narrator as historian is a new development, “and so is his in-
tense, often frantic concern for the characters and their fate.” Thus, “the basic
design is fully present in his Historia: a narrator who looks back through time
and agonizes over disasters as they begin to unfold for characters whose stories
have, in fact, ended centuries ago.”65 Beyond Chaucer’s ‘Guidoan’ narrative

62
The source for the Troilus, according to the poet, is Lollius – a name meant to warrant
authority for the subject matter. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 40, 42. For the ‘problems’
with Lollius, see further George Lyman Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Lollius,” Harvard Studies
in Classical Philology 28 (1917): 49-50; H. Lüdeke, Die Funktionen des Erzählers in
Chaucers epischer Dichtung (1928; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973) 75. Lollius has remained
a mystery to Chaucerians; in 1927 already, Praz laconically observed that “There are still
critics who rack their brains about Lollius, and Trophe, and other imaginary problems.”
Praz, “Chaucer” 136.
63
Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 90; Windeatt, “Classical and Medieval Elements in Chau-
cer’s Troilus,” The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989) 115-16.
64
C. David Benson; The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Col-
onne’s “Historia destructionis Troiae” in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Brewer; To-
towa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980) 133-42; Benson, “‘O Nyce World’: What Chau-
cer Really Found in Guido delle Colonne’s History of Troy,” ChauR 13.4 (1979): 308-15.
See further Skeat, Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 5: 1-2; Hamilton, Indebtedness.
In the Historia, this passage describes the Greeks en route to Troy on a mission that can be
characterized as imperial expansionism. As such it may well form a good overture to what
John M. Bowers describes as “Chaucer’s newly aggressive Englishness” in the Canter-
bury Tales, in which the “The road to Canterbury [...] was also the road to France.” Bow-
ers, “Chaucer at Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author,” The Post-
colonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2000; New York: Palgrave, 2001) 55,
63.
65
Benson, History 138-40. Chaucer also transfers the proverbial knowledge of Guido’s nar-
rator to Pandarus (140). This transfer is illuminating insofar as Chaucer transfers Guido’s
opaque prosopagraphy onto Pandarus, which allows Chaucer to evince the shallowness of
the narrow historiographical model favored by the thirteenth-century Italian writer. While
Guido poses as a historian, Chaucer’s poet attempts to openly reconcile the various, often
350 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

stance, he inherits a narrator who offers his audience several ontological models
as well. Chaucer discerns in Guido’s mythical bricolage – that is, his employ-
ment of an Ovidian model for the Greek purpose of masking – the nucleus of
translucent prosopagraphy, of an inscription of individuality into collective dis-
course itself, while not dispensing with masking strategies that are pivotal for
maintaining contradictions. Mythological bricolage thus functions as a model to
inquire into the possibilities of reconciling the diverging tracks – the Ovidian
and the Virgilian.
Chaucer’s extrapolation of the prosopagraphical model from Guido and Be-
noît does not deny the immediate importance of Il Filostrato, which provides the
main plot for the Troilus. Chaucer, however, went ad fontes beyond Boccaccio,
who is himself heavily indebted to Benoît and Guido (as well as to Statius, Ovid,
and Virgil).66 The Roman de Troie, for example, was disseminated in Italy
mainly via Guido and Binduccio dello Scelto, and the story of Troilus contained
in these versions functions as the thematic center of Boccaccio’s Filostrato. 67
And yet, Boccaccio’s version “seems remarkably different from all of its fore-
bears in many respects.” Boccaccio frequently revisits Ovid’s Ars amatoria, the
Remedia amoris, and the Metamorphoses, the tradition of the questione
d’amore, lyric chansons, and the Roman de la Rose, Ovid’s Heroides being of
particular importance: “Boccaccio seems to have drawn Ovid’s Heroides even
more fully than his French predecessors into the formal design of his poem.”68

contradictory roles his author has him perform. To some extent, the poet determines a syn-
thesis of both Benoît’s and Guido’s ways of conveying the matter. E. Talbot Donaldson
argues that the narrator’s interruptive strategy is indebted to Benoît. Donaldson, “Briseis,
Briseida, Criseyde, Cresseid, Cressid: Progress of a Heroine,” Chaucerian Problems and
Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, ed. Edward Vasta and Zacharias P.
Thundy (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1979) 6, but cf. his Speaking of
Chaucer (New York: Norton; London: Athlone, 1970) 65-83.
66
One particularly obvious moment in which Chaucer revisits Benoît and Guido is the ex-
change of prisoners. Chaucer adds and modifies Boccaccio’s account, aiming at historical
accuracy concerning the exchange of Antenor and Thoas, the latter not being mentioned in
Il Filostrato. For the textual changes in the exchange of ‘prisoners,’ see C. David Benson,
“King Thoas and the Ominous Letter in Chaucer’s Troilus,” PQ 58.3 (1979): 364-67;
Barney 1044-45nn; Windeatt 351-53nn, 357n. For discussion, see Giancarlo, “Structure of
Fate” 244, 246.
67
Nolan, Chaucer 133, 134-42; Vincenzo Pernicone, “Il Filostrato di Giovanni Boccaccio,”
Studi di filologia italiana 2 (1929): 93-106; C. David Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and
Criseyde” (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990) 15-19. For the narratological importance of
Guido’s Historia for Boccaccio’s Filocolo, but also for the Filostrato, see Roberto Venu-
da, Il “Filocolo” e la “Historia destructionis Troiae” di Guido delle Colonne: Strutture e
modelli della narratività boccacciana (Firenze: Firenze Atheneum, 1993) esp. 93-94.
68
Nolan, Chaucer 119, 120. For Boccaccio’s use of Ovid, see Boitani, Chaucer and Boc-
caccio 12-19; Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1977) esp. 112-16; Victoria Kirkham, Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s “Filo-
colo” and the Art of Medieval Fiction (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001) 82-86,
138-40.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 351

Unlike the House of Fame, which begins as a Virgilian project turning Ovidian,
the Troilus seems to be overwhelmingly Ovidian. In fact, the poem strives to po-
tentially reconcile the dichotomies of Guido’s Historia: emotionality vs. ration-
ality, transparency vs. opacity, emerging nation vs. empire, changeability vs.
stability – juxtapositions I refer to as Ovidian and Virgilian paradigms, respec-
tively.
Although the Troilus is certainly Ovidian,69 particularly in its elaboration of a
flexible model for making nations, the poem has its Virgilian moments, most
obviously whenever martial prowess is at stake, which frames (and forms the
background) for the Troilus.70 Jane Chance, for instance, characterizes the first
book as Virgilian, since it is modeled after Virgil’s story of Paris’s Judgment.71
The heroism of Virgilian arma extends beyond the function of providing a pic-
turesque martial background, since the narrative frequently has recourse to the
epic tradition, which is omnipresent, for instance, in isolated analogies to the
Aeneid and its epic descendants, specifically Statius and Dante.72 At the begin-
ning of the third book, for example, the poet invokes Calliope (III. 45) when
portraying Troilus at the height of bliss, and generally, the writing of the poem is
associated with epic: “In different contexts, Troilus both lays claim to and dis-
claims the status of epic. [...] Chaucer absorbs into his Troilus many intrinsically
non-epic features of action and character from the Italian poem, but he also in-
corporates motifs of presentation, action, and characterization from earlier epic
tradition with a resulting increase in complexity and richness of meaning.” 73
That the poem’s opening and ending allude to the epic tradition, recalling the
Thebaid and Aeneid, is important insofar as it creates a Virgilian frame for Ovid-
ian matter.74 The Virgilian framework stabilizes and fixes the changeability in-

69
For the importance of Virgil for Chaucer, see the Oxford Companion to Chaucer, ed.
Douglas Gray (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003) s.v. Virgil.
70
The war is also psychologized and internalized in the love plots, for which see Eugene
Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (1986; Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989) 287-92.
71
Chance, Mythographic Chaucer 110: Troilus chooses Criseyde (Venus) over Juno (fame)
and Pallas Athena (wisdom).
72
See Thomas E. Maresca, Three English Epics: Studies of “Troilus and Criseyde,” “The
Faerie Queene,” and “Paradise Lost” (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979) 143-96.
Despite the many structural analogies to classical epic, the Troilus eventually “depicts the
failure of the epic quest, the absence of epic aspiration. It shows us what happens to a per-
fectly ordinary man without grace, without a goddess mother to guide him, an average
human being at home in the world, whose intellectual (and therefore manly) failing is so
great that he does not even grasp the first and most fundamental epic truth: that the world
is not his home” (180).
73
Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 140-41.
74
For further Virgilian references, see Margaret Clayton, “A Virgilian Source for Chaucer’s
‘White Bole’” and William Frost, “A Chaucer-Virgil Link in Aeneid XI and Troilus and
Criseyde V,” both in Notes and Queries 26.2/224 (1979): 103-04 and 104-05, respec-
352 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

herent in human nature, which indicates that Ovidian changeability must employ
some Virgilian stasis to become an ontologically successful paradigm.
Virgil’s Aeneid and Chaucer’s Troilus are also linked by means of genre,
namely, (Virgilian) tragedy.75 In the second book of the Aeneid, Virgil leaves
behind Troy, shifting to the imperfect tense and back to the present. This results
in a “‘no-fault’ tragedy,” since no-one is to blame for the fall of Troy. As in the
Troilus, the narrator is implicated. Whereas Aeneid II defeats allegorical inter-
pretation in the tradition of Bernardus Silvestris, Fulgentius and so on, the fourth
book is exemplary of what Robertson calls the “old tragedy of Adam.”76 In the
Legend of Good Women, Chaucer disbelieves Venus’s clouding of Aeneas,
whereby Chaucer puts the tragedy of Dido on the same level as the tragedy of
Troy: “It is the rich understanding Virgil gives us of the value of Trojan civiliza-
tion and the worth of Priam that allows us to view their fall with profound sor-
row, and so it is with Dido of Carthage. The overarching political and historical
theme of the Aeneid requires the tragedies of Troy and Dido. In this sense, they
are tragedies because they have to be left behind [...]. Tragedy entails not simply
a perspective, but retrospective.” A “dominating gesture,” Charles Blyth con-
cludes, is that Chaucer achieves such a retrospective on antiquity and his poem
as a historical act.77 This further corroborates the generic tension between a Vir-
gilian epic framework and Ovidian elegiac matter.78

tively. See further John V. Fleming, “Deiphoebus Betrayed: Virgilian Decorum,

Chaucerian Feminism,” ChauR 21.2 (1986): 182-99.
75
Charles Blyth, “Virgilian Tragedy and Troilus,” ChauR 24.3 (1990): 211-18. Minnis ar-
gues that Chaucer pens history and tragedy, marking the emergence of “the hybrid genre
of tragical history.” Minnis, Chaucer 29. For Chaucerian tragedy, see D. W. Robertson,
Jr., “Chaucerian Tragedy,” ELH 19.1 (1952): 1-37; Monica E. McAlpine, The Genre of
“Troilus and Criseyde” (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978); Henry Ansgar Kelly,
Chaucerian Tragedy (1997; Cambridge: Brewer, 2000) 39-148.
76
Blyth, “Virgilian Tragedy” 212-13, with reference to Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy”
36. For the narrator’s Virgilian, subjective style, see Norton-Smith, Geoffrey Chaucer 104;
for Virgil’s subjective style generally, see Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) 41-96; Richard Heinze, Virgils epische Technik, 4th ed.
(1928; Darmstadt: WBG, 1957) esp. 361-66. See also Erich Poppe, “Imtheachta Aeniasa:
Virgil’s Aeneid in Medieval Ireland,” Classics Ireland 11 (2004): 83-87.
77
Blyth, “Virgilian Tragedy” 216-17.
78
Arguing that Chaucer conceives of his “privileged sources as structural wholes,” Wether-
bee suggests that “Chaucer’s perspective on Troilus is at once congruent with that of Ver-
gil and significantly at odds with it.” In both works, the heroes are caught between destiny
and lesser powers; in both poems, a dramatic storm provides the cover under which love-
making can ensue (90), and the beginning and end of the Troilus evoke the tapestry of the
Aeneid. At the same time, “the Troilus deals with precisely what Vergil leaves unspoken,
the story of the infelix puer that his spear, as it writes in the dust of the battlefield, cannot
tell, but that gives his life a significance distinct from its historical meaning as an emblem
of the vanity of Troy.” Wetherbee, Chaucer 89, 88, 90-91, 92. For Ovidian tensions be-
tween elegy and epic (tragedy) in Amores III, see Stephen Harrison, “Ovid and Genre:
Evolutions of an Elegist,” Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie esp. 80-82.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 353

The Ovidian allusions in Chaucer’s hybrid poem are more often discussed
than the poem’s reference to Virgil. The Ars amatoria is seen as the main inter-
text for the first books; in due course, allusions to the Heroides and the Meta-
morphoses increase. In studies concerning Ovidian intertextualities, the national
subtext of these analogies is regularly neglected, however, as is the exilic posi-
tion of Troilus, Criseyde, and the poet at the end of the poem. In combination
with Chaucer’s interest in pilots, Ovid’s anticipation of exile in the first book of
the Tristia also plays a role for the poem’s ontological concerns. If Chaucer’s
Ovidianism negotiates an intermediary position between complete opacity (Vir-
gil) and complete transparency – represented in the medieval perception (in the
commentary tradition) by a changeable and shameless Ovid – this does not re-
sult in a clear-cut juxtaposition of valiant Trojans and mischievous Greeks, as it
does in the Laud or Benoît’s Roman. Nor does the Troilus suggest, as does the
Historia, that Greek opacity is necessary for the longevity of empire. And yet, in
putting different ontological models to the test within the Trojan camp, whereby
the allegorical exegesis of Ovid and Virgil in the commentary tradition is of lit-
tle concern to Chaucer,79 the poem indicates that nationhood requires change-
ability and transparency as well as Virgilian stasis and opacity (control) – issues,
Ovid’s personae reflect in his exilic poetry, which at once critiques and ac-
knowledges the necessity of masking.
Ovid’s poetry mainly provides Chaucer with a heuristic tool to investigate in-
teriority, and almost inevitably, “Ovid’s love-poetry should be constantly in
Chaucer’s mind.”80 Ovid’s inquiry into notions of subjectivity is most promi-
nent, perhaps, in his Heroides, which has been seen as “an anti-epic, retelling
the story of the Trojan War through the personal amorous sufferings of
Penelope, Oeone, and Briseis; Boccaccio and Chaucer similarly choose to filter
their version of the matter of Troy through the lens of the disastrous affair of
Troiolo and Criseida, Troilus and Criseyde.”81 In direct comparison with Boc-
caccio’s Filostrato, the emotional life of the characters is much intensified in
Chaucer’s poem.82 In having his characters frequently echo Ovidian texts, Chau-
cer re-Ovidianizes Boccaccio and, as Michael Calabrese observes, “brings to the

79
Cooper, “Classical Background” 258.
80
Shannon, Chaucer 120. For Ovidianism in the Troilus, see Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 124-
47; Fleming, Classical Imitation 25-35; Michael A. Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of
Love (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1994) esp. 67-69. Besides reading the original
Latin, Chaucer filters Ovid and Virgil through the lens of French and Italian translators
and commentators, for which see John Livingston Lowes, “Chaucer and the Ovide Moral-
isé,” PMLA 33.2 (1918): 302-25; Sanford Brown Meech, “Chaucer and an Italian Transla-
tion of the Heroides,” PMLA 45.1 (1930): 110-28; Fyler, “Auctoritee and Allusion in Troi-
lus and Criseyde,” Res publica litterarum 7 (1984): 73-92.
81
Hagedorn, Abandoned Women 130-31. See further Mary-Jo Arn, “Three Ovidian Women
in Chaucer’s Troilus: Medea, Helen, Oënone,” ChauR 15.1 (1980): 1-10.
82
Windeatt, “The ‘Paynted Proces’: Italian to English in Chaucer’s Troilus,” English Miscel-
lany 26/27 (1977/78): 79, 85, 90-91, 100; Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 34.
354 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

fore a conflict that in Boccaccio’s poem is only embryonic and not specifically
Ovidian: the struggle between protean rhetorical strategy and the grievous world
of flux and mutability, in Chaucer’s terms, between ‘game’ and ‘ernest.’” This
corresponds, he argues, to the tension between Ovid’s early, amatory elegies and
his later Metamorphoses and his exile poetry, to which there are no references in
the Filostrato at all. For Calabrese, the first two books of the Troilus illustrate
the successes of the Ars amatoria, which are questioned by means of the Meta-
morphoses in the following books. “The great inconstancy of things that twist
men – this mutability constitutes metamorphosis for both Ovid and Chaucer.”83
Calabrese’s emphasis on Chaucer’s engagement with different ‘Ovids’ is in-
structive and can be substantiated from an prosopagraphical perspective and at-
tendant concerns with nationhood.
The emphasis on subjective experience in Ovid’s amatory poetry cannot only
be discerned in Ovid but also in the subsequent, Ovidian-derived French tradi-
tion, which continues Ovid’s investigations into the relationship between selves
and nations. The realm of subjective experience and the oppositions therein
(with reference to Chaucer’s dream poetry) has been particularly emphasized:
The determining opposition in Ovid and the French poets is not between reality and il-
lusion but within the economy of subjective experience. Rather than focus on an expe-
rience of the world, these writers seek to refine forms of internal perception. [...] Chau-
cer stresses poetic subjectivity, for it is both a technique for point of view narrative and
a starting point for aesthetic creation [...]. The aesthetic problem he faces [...] is to find
a means of externalizing interior experience, of transferring what exists within con-
sciousness to an intelligible form that has a social and moral existence and is thus an
object of knowledge.84
This likewise summarizes succinctly the central problem of Guido’s Ovidian
Trojans and the aporia rehearsed in many identity theories: the seemingly irrec-
oncilable contradictions between different personae. The problem, from an
Ovidian angle, becomes intelligible when considering Guido’s dichotomy of a
feminized (Ovidian) Troy and a masculine (Virgilian) Greece, which is (seem-
ingly) applicable to Chaucer’s Troy, for which scholars also posit effeminacy.85
Chaucer’s Troy, like Guido’s, represents the inability to reconcile private and
public masks, a point anticipated by Fyler’s observation that both Chaucer and
Ovid struggle with the same epistemological problem, with “the extent to which
the artist, or indeed any human being, is capable of setting up structures of per-

83
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 35, 54.
84
Edwards, Dream of Chaucer 68.
85
Maresca, Three English Epics 179. See further Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the
Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992) 178-79; Federico, New
Troy 1-28, 65-98; Diane Vanner Steinberg, “‘We do usen here no wommen for to selle’:
Embodiment of Social Practices in Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 29.3 (1995): 264-65.
Steinberg submits that the Trojans are engaged in masking while the Greeks are more
straight-forward (transparent) concerning their relation to women (270).
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 355

ception and understanding that are true, or at least sufficiently trustworthy to

permit effective action in the world.” Each poet “answers the problem by leav-
ing it unresolved. Their works are full of juxtapositions and oppositions. We re-
peatedly find thesis and antithesis, with no synthesis. We encounter elaborate
systems that collapse as soon as they are built, playing off order against energy,
stasis against flux.”86 Chaucer’s act of remythologizing Ovidian and Virgilian
frameworks results in confusion and disorientation. Both Ovid and Chaucer, the
latter in analogy to Geffrey, require a “sterisman,” that is, authorial narratives
that authorize their departure from authority.

2. Geffrey’s Aeneid, Chaucer’s Remedia: Steering the Troilus

Viewed through the prosopagraphical lens, the Troilus appears indeed to be of-
fering systemic collapse as the solution to the poem’s and the character’s con-
tradictions. Ovid’s interest in subjectivity (and changeability), however, is con-
comitant with an interest in masking. His poetry investigates ontological ques-
tions in a prosopagraphical framework and further analyzes how selves can inte-
grate and modify collective discourses that are constitutive of selfhood. Change-
ability in the amatory poetry, chiefly the Amores and the Ars amatoria, is related
primarily to the masking of intention, to the performance of (often) contradic-
tory roles. What is at stake, as exemplified by Amores I. v, is the play with “light
and half-light, hiding and sight, covering and uncovering”87 – the ingredients of
prosopagraphical selfhood. The narrator’s masks are especially important, and
find a Chaucerian analogue in the “sterisman” of the House of Fame which is
multiplied into many different pilots in the Troilus.
Most characters in the Troilus describe themselves (or are described) as ‘sail-
ors lost at sea,’88 which makes the Ars amatoria a pertinent intertext for the
poem. Not only does the narrator of the Ars and Remedia argue both sides of a
question while maintaining the illusion of self-consistency,89 but Ovid himself
appears to occasionally lose control of the poem: “The poem too, by ancient
convention, is a ship; and Ovid’s ship runs wildly out of control (II. 429-30),

86
Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 20-21.
87
Alison Sharrock, “Ovid and the Discourses of Love: The Amatory Works,” Cambridge
Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie 151.
88
The characters’ loss of pilots in the poetological (and ontological) context of Ovid’s and
Virgil’s works has rarely been studied. Martin Stevens, however, draws attention to the
fact that the major characters are subject to a “favorite medieval metaphor in which a ca-
pricious Fortune blows her winds against the sails of a boat traversing the sea of life.” Ste-
vens, “The Winds of Fortune in the Troilus,” ChauR 13.4 (1979): 286. For this poetologi-
cal metaphor, see also Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990) 128-30.
89
Robert M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1965) 43: “The Ars and the Remedia are primarily an elaborate literary
game, and it is for precisely this reason that the figure of the Poet – in its protean role – is
so central to them.”
356 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

with Palinurus the helmsman swept overboard (Remedia 577). Just as Ovid the
teacher loses control of his lessons and his students, so Ovid the poet repeatedly
shows himself losing control of his poem.” In contrast to Virgil’s farmer, the
‘helmsman’ of the agricultural ship of the Georgics, Ovid’s purpose is different:
“What in Vergil is threatened loss of control becomes the comic reality in
Ovid.” Ovid’s journey thus is perilous in ways Virgil’s is not, since “Poetry it-
self shows the taint of its human maker, and has difficulty in setting up struc-
tures that are permanent and stable. Accordingly, Ovid’s poetry directly opposes
Vergil’s.”90 In the House of Fame, the loss of the Virgilian pilot does not affect
Aeneas’s travels or Chaucer’s poem adversely. Aeneas completes his imperial
task without Palinurus, but he cannot abide entirely without steering. Thus, Gef-
frey recognizes the necessity of mythological bricolage in order to authorize his
own stories. The pilot becomes an important but highly problematic agency,
however. The lover of Ovid’s elegies, for instance, evidently does require
authoritative guidance if he is not versed in the art of loving already. For Chau-
cer’s lover, Troilus, guidance is always external, out of his control, whereas
Pandarus and Criseyde are frequently able to control others. Only Criseyde is
able to expand upon the narrative strategies developed in the House of Fame and
find an appropriate means of ‘self-control,’ while Pandarus finally disappears in
the plethora of decentered roles he adopts. Another character is also in need of a
pilot: Chaucer’s poet asks for narrative control before realizing that he cannot
avoid being in control of his own mythological bricolage. While Chaucer’s two
‘Trojan narratives’ appear much less troubled by the out-of-control ship – ini-
tially, Ovid is not concerned about the playful loss of control either – Chaucer
nonetheless asks the perilous question, namely, who steers the ship when it is
(seemingly) out of control? This is also a pertinent question for Ovid’s narrator
in the Tristia when his inability to control his own destiny (his reputation) leads
him to ponder the interaction between private and public discourses in a national
context – questions that are anticipated in Ovid’s poetic exploration of aban-
donment in the Heroides.91
Ovid’s changeability very well illustrates the malleability of public discourse.
Since public narratives provide the stories for making selves, controlling the self
becomes difficult – the right balance between private and public is the central

90
Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 126, 16-17. Hermann Fränkel believes this to be one of Ovid’s
weaknesses. Fränkel, Ovid: Ein Dichter zwischen zwei Welten (Darmstadt: WBG, 1970) 3.
91
The persona’s poetic journey is seemingly interrupted mid-sea (Pont. II. iii. 223-30). Gen-
erally, control over his own (literary) reputation is central in the Tristia, whereby the nar-
rator does not blame or revoke his works. What annoys him is the lack of control over the
way in which his poetry is construed (or rather misconstrued), if it indeed had even been
read by Augustus. See Trist. II; Gareth Williams, “Ovid’s Exile Poetry: Tristia, Epistulae
ex Ponto and Ibis,” Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie 240-41. For the Heroides
as epistulae ex exilio, see P. A. Rosenmeyer, “Ovid’s Heroides and Tristia: Voices from
Exile,” Ramus 26.1 (1997): 29-56.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 357

quandary of Troilus (and the Troilus).92 If Ovid’s selves, like Richard Lanham’s
rhetorical selves, continually create new masks from the (moldable) masks that
are publicly circulated among the public Roman discourses, poetry would be an
important source – and for Ovid, this means primarily Virgilian works and pub-
lic (read imperial) masks. Ovid’s articulation of alternative views of empire, his
attempt at reconciling personal and national discourses, exacts a high price – an
‘error’ that medieval commentators usually see as the consequence of Ovid’s il-
licit affair (with Caesar’s wife) or his amatory verses. This would seem to corre-
spond to Ovid’s loss of (poetic) control in his quest for writing interiority into
public discourse. The staged withdrawal from the world of public affairs in
Ovidian elegy,93 replicates the pressures of that world in other domains and,
therefore, corroborates Ciarán Benson’s belief that the psychology of nations
and persons is of one piece. Ovid’s elegies indeed “put private life on display,”
or rather demonstrate “how private life is always already on display, a fiction
played out for real, a reality fantasized.”94 In ironizing Virgil’s Georgics, the Ars
announces at its beginning a didactic function related to issues of nationhood –
the education of the Roman people in love matters: “Si quis in hoc artem populo
non nouit amandi, / hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet” [Whoever, among
this people, does not know the art of loving should read this poem. Adeptly he
should love afterward] (I. 1-2). The implication is that one should be knowl-
edgeable in love, that love is as much a civic duty as the farmer’s tending of the
crops and – an analogue that recurs throughout the Ars – as the duties of war.
Aphoristically, love is a ‘military,’ public service: “Militiae species amor est”
(II. 233; and see Amores I. ix. 1-2: “Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra
Cupido; / Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans” [Everyone who loves is a
soldier, Amor himself has his camp. Atticus, believe me, everyone who loves is
a soldier]). Moreover, the persona’s advice to women as concerns their outer ap-
pearance, to mention only one other incidence, is embedded within a discourse
of cultivation that contributes to the civilization of Rome generally (esp. Ars III.
121-28).95

92
See Allen J. Frantzen, Troilus and Criseyde: The Poem and the Frame (New York:
Twayne; Don Mills, Ont.: Maxwell Macmillan, 1993) 88. For Ovid, interiority is inevita-
bly linked to exteriority, the private is always linked to the public. See Sharrock, “Ovid”
153.
93
Simpson, Reform 130-31.
94
Sharrock, “Ovid” 150.
95
The medieval accessus ad auctores record this public function of the Ars, if not exactly in
the same sense. Ovid’s praise of Augustus in the Metamorphoses, for example, was per-
ceived of as an attempt to appease the emperor after the publication of the Ars. See Vin-
cent Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century to c. 1450,” The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, Volume 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) 189-90, 195. According to the Tegernsee accessus (and
other commentaries), Ovid was exiled because the Ars was not well-received by the em-
peror. See Accessus ad auctores: Bernard D’Utrecht, Conrad D’Hirsau; Dialogus super
358 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

This characterization of Ovid’s elegies is often seen as allowing medieval

writers room for critique, as enabling poets like Gower and Chaucer to “forge a
distinctively English poetic identity based on subjective and amatory discourse
that nevertheless engaged in the public world.”96 Chaucer’s Troilus, like Ovid’s
amatory poetry, indeed focuses on the role of veiling and unveiling in a world in
which the ability to veil intentions and emotions is ultimately advantageous –
but at a high cost. Secrecy is as important an issue in Ovid’s poetry as it is in the
Troilus. With respect to Ovid, critics have rightly wondered to what extent a se-
cret can possibly stay a secret, how a lover can hide being in love when every-
one knows the rules of the game and the signs manifesting participation in it.97
This question might be asked of love-sick Troilus, too, who, as I demonstrate
below, remains a transparent character. While he represents the pitfall of
Guido’s transparent Trojans, he laudably strives for a different ontological
model that can maintain his two disparate personae: the martial Troilus of Vir-
gilian epic and the Venerean Troilus worthy of Ovidian love poetry. The most
pertinent Ovidian question in Chaucer’s investigation of prosopagraphical self-
hood, however, concerns the extent to which individuality can be flexible while
remaining centered. Ovid’s life, is an important reminder of how (fictionalized)
unveiling can lead to public misconceptions – misperceptions of Ovid’s Ars af-
fecting his public identity and propelling the loss of citizenship. Ovid’s youthful
adherence to a poetics of changeability had dire consequences; in his late works,
a fictional Ovid re-enacts the roles provided by his fictional, abandoned women,
who, despite their marginalized existence, were capable of determining alterna-
tive paradigms. Chaucer’s Troilus can be instructively read within such a ca-
nonical Ovidian frame and offers a critique of two rivaling models of selfhood,
both of which are inflexible and mono-mythological. In representing not only
Trojan history, but Troy itself (as does Priam in both Benoît’s and Guido’s
works), Troilus becomes the receptacle of whatever collective discourse pro-

auctores, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1970) 35-36, trans. in Medieval Literary
Theory and Criticism c. 1100 – c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition, ed. and trans. A. J.
Minnis and A. B. Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 26-27. In the Tristia, the persona
comments, “altera pars causae superest, qua carmine turpi / arguor obsceni doctor adul-
terii” – a passage suggesting that Ovid’s exile was a consequence of his amorous verses.
P. Ovidi Nasonis Tristia, ed. John Barrie Hall, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Stuttgart: Teub-
ner, 1995) II. 211-12. All subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition. Ovid un-
questionably criticizes the Augustan laws concerning marriage and adultery throughout
the Ars (I. 31-34; II. 157-58, 597-600; III. 483-85, 613-16). For the Ars as parodying the
Georgics (and Lucretius’s De rerum natura), see Niklas Holzberg, introduction,
Liebeskunst / Ars amatoria, Heilmittel gegen die Liebe / Remedia amoris: Lateinisch –
deutsch, ed. and trans. Niklas Holzberg, 4th ed. (Düsseldorf: Artemis und Winkler, 1999)
277-79; Sharrock, “Ovid” 159.
96
Maura Nolan, “‘Now wo, now gladnesse’: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes,” ELH 71.4
(2004): 552. See further Simpson, Reform 161-75.
97
Sharrock, “Ovid” 155-56.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 359

vides – a public discourse largely structured by Pandarian wisdom. The result is

the adherence to a static value system that eventually fails Troilus (and Troy)
because of this very inflexibility. Pandarus, on the other hand, appropriates any
role, in keeping with the Ovidian personae of the Amores and the Ars. He is un-
able to stabilize these roles and cannot identify mutually shared goods. While he
can accommodate contradictions in ways Troilus cannot, he becomes a non-
identity, since contradiction can be contained only at the loss of any unity. Two
other ‘characters’ are capable of reconciling contradictions without surrendering
selfhood: Criseyde and the narrator/poet formulate a viable model for the suc-
cessful creation of personae; they further envision a national historiography that
does not inevitably result in Brutus’s Albion, but simply in Albion, by means of
transcending the Ovidian cursus.
The Troilus imports the dichotomy between opaque and transparent pro-
sopagraphy. In carefully revisiting the Ovidian cursus, however, Chaucer ex-
trapolates the possibility of synthesizing the two prevalent modes of making
selves within the Troy story. By means of oscillating between Ovidian change-
ability and Virgilian stability,98 Chaucer ‘horizontalizes’ vertical, opaque pro-
sopagraphy allowing for a “momentary stay against confusion”99 – with the em-
phasis on momentary. The juxtaposition of Virgilian and Ovidian models inher-
ent in Benoît’s Roman, and brought into focus by Guido, in itself cannot be
traced to any one source. But the cited scholarship leaves little doubt that Chau-
cer was well familiar with Virgil and Ovid as well as Benoît and Guido. Moreo-
ver, the dichotomy of Virgilian and Ovidian models is present in Chaucer’s im-
mediate source, Boccaccio’s Filostrato as well. For all the shared interest in
questions of selfhood and poetics, however, there are also decisive differences
between these works, some of which affect Chaucer’s construction of counter-
nationhood. While my aim is to discuss the English transmission of the Troy
story, this is not the place to provide a comprehensive account of Boccaccio’s
narrative masking. Nevertheless, I would like to highlight at least some impor-
tant aspects of veiling in Boccaccio’s Filostrato, since the poem already pro-
poses a model of unified selfhood that simultaneously accommodates opacity
and transparency.

98
Wetherbee likewise senses an opposition between Ovidian and Virgilian frameworks in
the Troilus. Within a Virgilian frame, “allusion to figures from the Metamorphoses serves
both to universalize and to isolate Troilus’s experience amid the flow of events and to set
off the private and spiritual nature of his love.” Both poles emerge as an “opposition of in-
dividual and history.” Wetherbee, Chaucer 88.
99
Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Selected Prose by Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox
and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966) 18.
360 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

3. “L’antiche storie [...] cui io potessi fare scudo”: Veiling in Il Filostrato

The advancement of translucent prosopagraphy in the Troilus is indebted to a
similar proposition of translucent masking in Boccaccio’s Filostrato.100 The Ital-
ian poem is centrally concerned with masking, with the creation of opacity and
transparency. The Proemio, a text immediately characterized as written rather
than orally performed, underlines the ontological dimension of the narrative that
follows insofar as Filostrato searches for stories that remedy his lovesickness.
Instead of acknowledging the sources for his poem, including Benoît’s Roman
and Guido’s Historia,101 Filostrato talks about materials contained in ‘ancient
stories.’ At the same time, he positions himself vis-à-vis his sources in terms of
opacity and transparency:
E conoscendo assai chiaramente che, tenendo io del tutto come proposto avea la mia
concetta doglia nel petto nascosa, era impossibile che delle molte volte che essa ab-
bondante e ogni termine trapassante sopravveniva, alcuna in tanto non vincesse le
forze mie, già debolissime divenute, che morte sanza fallo ne seguirebbe e poi per
conseguente non vi vedrei, da più utile consiglio mosso, mutai proposto e pensai di
volere con alcuno onesto ramarichio dare luogo a quella e uscita del tristo petto,
acciocché io vivessi e vi potessi ancora vedere e più lungamente vostro dimorassi
vivendo. Né prima tal pensiero nella mente mi venne, che il modo subitamente con
esso m’occorse; del quale avvenimento, quasi da nascosa divinità spirato, certissimo
augurio presi di futura salute. E il modo fu questo: di dovere in persona d’alcuno
passionato sì come io era e sono, cantando narrare li miei martiri. Meco adunque con
sollicita cura cominciai a rivolgere l’antiche storie per trovare cui io potessi fare scudo
verisimilmente del mio segreto e amoroso dolore.102

100
Janet Levarie Smarr highlights the complexity of Boccaccio’s early works and stresses
that Chaucer learned many of the tricks of the trade from the Italian writer in her Boccac-
cio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986) 7.
101
Obviously, there is a wide array of other sources on which Boccaccio drew in writing Il
Filostrato, notably Dante’s works, for which see Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta 21-33.
She convincingly demonstrates that Boccaccio frames quotations from the Commedia with
allusions to the Vita nuova; unlike Dante’s ‘pellegrino,’ “Filostrato remains at Dante’s
Chapter 12, praying for ‘salute’ from a lady who has left him in order to enjoy herself
elsewhere” (32). Boccaccio’s “particular kind of playfulness is one of the important les-
sons learned by Chaucer from his much-imitated master. For Boccaccio, in turn, the idea
may have come from Ovid’s Metamorphoses [...]” (33). Nick Havely also discerns a
consistent pattern of allusions to the Commedia in the first four parts resulting in quasi-
allegorical mappings, representing “Boccaccio’s Criseida as a reluctant and unstable Bea-
trice, his Pandaro as a disingenuous Virgil, and his Troiolo as a pilgrim of love who
climbs from hell to paradise only to plunge down again into a hell of deprivation and de-
spair.” Havely, “The Italian Background,” Chaucer, ed. Ellis 322.
102
Giovanni Boccaccio, Filostrato, ed. Vittore Branca, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio,
gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 12 vols. (Milano: Mondadori, 1964) 2: Proemio 25-28; all paren-
thetical references are to this edition. Translations from the Filostrato are from The
“Filostrato” of Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beck-
with Myrick (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1928), sometimes slightly modified or
amended with R. K. Gordon’s translation in The Story of Troilus as Told by Benôit de
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 361
And knowing very clearly that if, as I had proposed, I held the grief I had conceived
altogether hidden in my breast, it was not possible that out of the thousand times it
came forth, abounding and overrunning every limit, it should not sometime so
overcome my powers, already very much weakened, that death would follow without
fail and I should in consequence see you no more, moved by a more useful counsel, I
changed my mind and decided to give it issue from my sad heart in some suitable
lamentation, in order that I might live, and might be able to see you once more, and
might by living remain the longer yours. Nor did such a thought enter my mind before
the means, together with it, occurred to me. As a result of which event, as though
inspired by a secret divinity, I conceived the surest augury of future well-being. And
the means was this: in the person of some impassioned one, such as I was and am, to
relate my sufferings in song. I began therefore to turn over in my mind with great care
ancient stories, in order to find one that would serve in all color of likelihood as a mask
for my secret and amorous grief.
Filostrato’s heart, the lady learns, is excessively emotional, and an outlet is re-
quired to render these emotions transparent to Filomena. As with Ovid’s aban-
doned women, Filostrato’s hope of transforming his grief (by writing) results in
change, entailing a conversion – a motif that reoccurs at the beginning of the
Troilus. The means of conquering his emotionality suggest themselves at once:
he needs a productive diversion such as stories. He needs a narrative, a lament,
that functions as a role model for him – he needs a mask (literally, a persona):
“della persona di lui e de’ suoi accidenti ottimamente presi forma alla mia in-
tenzione” [from his person and from what happened to him I obtained in excel-
lent wise a form for my intentions] (Proemio 29). While earlier views, which
likened the situation depicted in the Proemio to Boccaccio’s own plight, have
hitherto been questioned,103 they do testify in their own way to the relevance of
Filostrato’s account of veiling and unveiling, however fictional it eventually is.
More importantly, the work offered to Filomena (the audience) is initially char-
acterized as a matter of narrative roles, in this case specifically the narrative
form of the Ovidian epistle, constructed along the guidelines of “the manuals of
the medieval ars dictaminis.”104 The book is not meant to provide an actual role
for the narrator, that is, as a veritable book of the self intended to unveil the
mask. Rather, a secret has to be veiled while it is simultaneously disclosed to
one particular reader (that is, for an audience of ideal readers). Filostrato veils
his ‘secret and amorous grief,’ which Griffin and Myrick capture appositely in

Sainte-Maure, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson (1934; Toronto:

Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978).
103
Older criticism constructs a potential analogue of Boccaccio’s situation vis-à-vis his mis-
tress Maria d’Aquino. See Griffin, introduction 13-24; Mieszkowski, “The Reputation of
Criseyde 1155-1500,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 43
(1971) 95; but cf. Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, trans. Richard
Monges (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1976) 29; Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta
3-4, 231-34 nn. 5-6, 236 n. 16; Piero Boitani, “Boccaccio,” Oxford Companion to Chau-
cer; Stillinger, Song 131.
104
Nolan, Chaucer 124.
362 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

their translation of scudo as mask,105 which corroborates the identity of mask and
person. The beginning of Il Filostrato thus gestures toward an extrapolation of
prosopagraphical selfhood along the dichotomies elaborated in Benoît’s Roman
and Guido’s Historia and therefore continues the ontological reflection inherent
in the Troy story. Although Boccaccio’s poem seems to argue both sides of the
question,106 the Proemio heavily emphasizes the necessity for veils, for masking
emotionality.107
Boccaccio’s engagement with the structural oppositions within the Troy story
reaches beyond the ‘Guido tradition’ and is emphasized from the beginning, for
instance, in the abandonment of the epic mode in favor of elegy (‘lament’).
Troiolo may seem to be an epic hero, but his actions belie his ambitions which
are limited to the realm of love.108 The more severely he suffers, the more does
Troiolo remove himself from the public sphere:
Troiolo falls in love with Criseida and learns of her restoration when in the presence of
the Trojan community, from whom, on both occasions, he wishes to hide his feelings.
But whereas on the first, ‘in order to hide his amorous wounds better, he mocked those
who loved for a good while,’ on the second he falls into a swoon, ‘pierced by profound
grief.’ However, these different emotional reactions are followed by the same behav-
iour: he escapes to give vent to his feelings, ‘all alone,’ ‘without wishing for anyone’s
company,’ to his own ‘locked and darkened room,’ when he needs to express his grief.
This transformation of a widely publicized story into a tale of secrecy is note-
worthy.109 If the Filostrato is primarily about how to remedy excessive grief,
then Troiolo’s sorrow after learning about Criseida’s exchange is particularly
insightful insofar as he considers solving the problem by flight even if he must
be disloyal to his king (Fil. IV. 144). Criseida rejoins – with Ovid’s Ars – that
their love must remain a secret at all costs (IV. 153), which entails not only the
end of their affair but also the end of Troiolo.110 In the Filostrato, both sides of a
question can be heard: “argument and counter-argument can both seem equally

105
Stillinger translates scudo as shield, alluding to the war unfolding in the background;
Gordon has cloak; Havely prefers disguise in his Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for the
Study of “Troilus” and the “Knight’s” and “Franklin’s Tales”; Translations from the
“Filostrato,” “Teseida” and “Filocolo” (1980; Cambridge: Brewer, 1992) 23.
106
See Warren Ginsberg, The Cast of Character: The Representation of Personality in An-
cient and Medieval Literature (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1983) 101.
107
The following is not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of Boccaccian prosopagraphy,
which, in its Ovidian, Virgilian, and Dantean dimension, requires further study.
108
Giulia Natali, “A Lyrical Version: Boccaccio’s Filostrato,” trans. Mark Peter Eaton,
European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Boitani 53. See also Pernicone, “Il Filostrato di Gio-
vanni Boccaccio” 107-15.
109
Natali, “Lyrical Version” 61, 67. She stresses that “Whereas the relationship between
Troilus and Briseide was common knowledge, the characters in the Filostrato are deter-
mined to keep theirs a secret.” See also Windeatt, “Classical and Medieval Elements” 117.
110
For Criseida’s pleas for Ovidian secrecy as original with Boccaccio, see Nolan, Chaucer
135-36.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 363

valid.” And yet, the ability to argue for either side is restricted to Criseida and
Pandaro. But it does not affect the “obsessive need for secrecy, which every
character emphasizes, and the devious furtiveness of the assignations inevitably
lend to the lovers’ movements a sense of shame, the feeling that the quality of
their affection could not bear the light of day.”111 The irony regarding the debate
about secrecy between Troiolo and Criseida is mirrored in the irony of the narra-
tive situation in that in both cases, the argument extends into the public arena.
Everyone in Troy appears to know as much about the relationship of the lovers
as the audience knows about the intentions of a story that is allegedly intended
only for Filomena. Hence, the narrator is capable of maintaining contradictory
sentiments without surrendering selfhood, which is true also of the allegorical
interpretation implicitly invited by the story itself.
The Ovidianism manifest in the changeability of people and discourse in the
Filostrato testifies to “Boccaccio’s deep, academically inspired interest in
rhetorical dissimulation and treachery.”112 Yet, not every act of treachery is also
an act of dissimulation; both are ultimately verbal manipulations effecting dif-
ferent ends. The unresolved crux in Boccaccio’s poem can perhaps be seen most
clearly when considering the Ovidian frame which ‘doubles’ the Virgilian frame
of the ongoing war, which is important in the Filostrato – albeit much less so
than in the Troilus. In the context of the poem’s borrowings from the Ars, the
beginning of the Filostrato reads like an Ovidian journey with Filomena as the
guiding star of the narrator’s poetic journey: “Tu donna se’ la luce chiare e bella,
/ per cui nel tenebroso mondo accorto / vivo” [You, lady, are the clear and beau-
tiful light under whose guidance I live in this world of shadows]. She is the
lodestar which he will follow to the port, his anchor of safety (I. 2). The opaque
day-to-day existence is enlightened by her transparent clarity. The narrator thus
finds himself in a position similar to Troiolo, who sets out to “cast anchor in
Criseida’s bed, a port toward the like of which Filostrato is also headed” (see
Fil. III. 129).113 This is unsurprising, since the narrator offers his story to
Filomena as an allegory. In the Proemio, Filostrato asks Filomena to construe
Troiolo’s emotionality as his emotionality. Whenever he cries due to the depar-
ture of Criseida, Filomena should depict Filostrato as crying, too. Moreover,
whenever something praiseworthy is said about Criseida, she should read this as
praise for her. This suggests a one-to-one correspondence between the two nar-
rative levels and notably, Filostrato does not immediately address the problem of

111
Ginsberg, Cast of Character 101, 105. Criseida becomes a literal equivalent of ‘in
utramque partem.’ When reflecting about Troiolo’s love and her own position in the sec-
ond part of the Filostrato, she appears to be virtuous with reference to her deceased hus-
band. At the same time, she also recalls (the Virgilian) Dido and a history of illicit passion
and desertion: “Beneath Criseida’s probity, then, there is an inescapable suggestion that
she is changeable as well” (105).
112
Nolan, Chaucer 139.
113
Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta 30.
364 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

the difference between the domains. In all other matters, he refers her to context
and convention: “Dell’altre cose che oltre a queste vi sono assai, niuna, sì come
già dissi, a me n’appartiene né per me vi si pone, ma perciocché la storia del no-
bile e innamorato giovane ciò richiede” [As to the other things, which in addi-
tion to these are many, no one, as I have already said, relates to me, nor is set
down here on my own account, but because the story of the noble young lover
requires it] (Proemio 35).114 This slanted view of allegory, however, draws atten-
tion to a striking difference between Troiolo and Filostrato concerning the map-
ping of domains, namely, their views as to the necessity of veiling. Filostrato of-
fers an allegorical lens akin to conceptual allegory (outlined above), a layering
of narratives in which intersection and difference likewise pertain.
Troiolo’s interpretation of the dream about Criseida’s encounter with the boar
demonstrates different ways of allegorizing texts:115
Questo cinghiar ch’io vidi é Diomede.
per ciò che l’avolo uccise il cinghiaro
di Calidonia, se si può dar fede
a’ nostri antichi, e sempre poi portaro
per sopransegna, sì come si vede,
i discendenti il porco. Oh me, amaro
e vero sogno! Questo l’avrà ‘l core
col parlar tratto, cioè ‘l suo amore. (VII. 27)

[This boar that I saw is Diomede, since his grandfather slew the boar of Calidon, if we
may give credence to our ancestors, and ever afterward the descendants, as it is seen,
have borne the swine as a crest. Alas, how bitter and true a dream! He must have
robbed her of her heart, that is her love, with his speech.]
Pandaro challenges Troiolo’s interpretation, arguing that there is no external evi-
dence for Troilus’s conjecture. Moreover, dreams are but dreams (VII, 39-40):

Così potrebbe addivenir di questo:

forse che là dove tu l’animale
al tuo amore interpreti molesto,
ti fia egli utile e non farà male
sì come stimi.... (VII. 41)

114
Nolan comments: “As if to alert his readers to the possibility of alternative arguments,
other readings of his classical exemplary tale, however, he admits that certain aspects of
Troiolo’s story differ from his own situation. And it is partly these differences that will in-
vite alternative interpretations from readers, judgments other than the narrator’s, on the is-
sues raised by the question and by the story” (Chaucer 129). For a similar doubling of nar-
rative perspectives (in the Teseida), see also Ginsberg, Cast of Character 108.
115
According to Natali, “Boccaccio adopts the guise of ‘Filostrato’ in the Proem, but he
could equally well be Troiolo, who in the foreword to the work is presented as ‘van-
quished by love by fervently loving Criseida and then again by her departure.’” Moreover,
Troiolo is a singer and a letter-writer – as is Filostrato. Natali, “Lyrical Version” 51, 62.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 365
[So might it turn out in respect to this. Perhaps where you interpret the animal as hos-
tile to your love, it will be beneficial to you and will do you no harm, as you think....]
Pandaro appositely identifies the problems of reading allegorically in the sense
of constructing one-to-one correspondences. The passage, however, only seem-
ingly represents a textual mise en abîme of the allegory Filostrato has in mind.116
The audience, especially the ‘intended’ audience (Filomena), would only too
quickly be aware of the interpretive crux that Filostrato refuses to address,
namely, “the obvious problem that his story as a whole is a very odd compli-
ment to send a lady. Criseida, as a character, is flawed by moral doubleness; as a
sign for Filomena, she is semiotically double.”117 Thomas Stillinger argues that
Filomena occupies several different roles (as does Criseida) – a multiplicity of
masks that cannot be reconciled: “The Other is divided and degraded, while the
authority of the self is self-authenticating. In the Filostrato, Boccaccio writes the
author who writes himself.”118 Chaucer’s Troilus, I believe, expands on this self-
authentication in a sustained investigation of acts of masking and unmasking
that takes into account to a greater extent the role of public, national discourses.
Like Boccaccio’s, Chaucer’s allegorical reading of Trojan nationhood suggests
that transparency (the illusionary unity of the subject) does not always entail
complete identity but can encompass likeness as well as difference. Thus, both
poets ultimately elaborate a translucent model.
The doubling of Filomena as Criseida, despite all of the duplicity bestowed
upon the latter, works the other way as well. Filostrato does not instruct his ad-
dressee to read all the negative aspects as pertaining to her. Whether Criseida’s
doubleness, that is, her Ovidian ability to negotiate public and private masks and
write herself into public discourse, is one of her flattering attributes is uncertain,
even if much appears to speak in favor of such a reading. After all, the aban-
doned narrator shares specific Ovidian traits with Criseida, notably the ability to
simultaneously veil and unveil his self. Criseida’s masking is indeed Ovidian in

116
In Chaucer’s version of the scene, Troilus does not know whom the boar is meant to rep-
resent at all, he only has inklings of betrayal (V. 1246-53). Even Cassandra only arrives at
a qualified “This ilke boor bitokneth Diomede” (V. 1513) after a long genealogical expla-
nation (see below).
117
Stillinger, Song 128. For the “notoriously incomplete” allegory, see Robert W. Hanning,
“Come In Out of the Code: Interpreting the Discourse of Desire in Boccaccio’s Filostrato
and Chaucer’s Troilus,” Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde”: “Subgit to alle Poesy”; Es-
says in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Studies, 1992) 129.
118
Stillinger, Song 129. The Filostrato is often seen as capable of linking and unifying issues
on the narrative level, “imagining the fusion of lyric and narrative, the physical union of
lover and beloved, and the identification of writer and text. It foregrounds the self-
construction of the new author” (130). For Boccaccio’s narrative hybridity in the context
of authorship, see further Vittore Branca, “Boccaccio’s Role in the Renewal of Literary
Genres,” Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti
(Tübingen: Narr; Cambridge: Brewer, 1984) 36-37; Branca, Boccaccio 43-44.
366 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

its changeability and corresponds to the paradoxical, but successful model for
the narrator to truly remedy his sorrow – unlike Troilus. Filostrato and Boccac-
cio are able to change the ancient story (literally veiling the fictional source) and
invite the audience to similarly modify the story, to make it fit with specific con-
texts. They thereby indicate the necessity of both masking and unmasking as on-
tological strategies. In a narratorial stance later to be inverted by Chaucer, Filos-
trato (Boccaccio) uses a veiled (unveiling) mode to communicate with Filomena
(the audience), whereby the love affair in the poem is known to all. As A. C.
Spearing notes, “There is an obvious paradox in the public recitation of a poem
about a secret love affair. Chaucer could have suppressed this paradox, by as-
suming for his narrator [...] a Godlike omniscience. But he does not usually do
this: [...] his narrator emphasizes that his knowledge of the story comes from
‘Lollius,’ not from personal experience.”119 This paradox can nevertheless be
contained easily. As with the Ovidian narrators caught in bad weather on their
respective voyages, this particular Boccaccian journey is also exceedingly
stormy. But Filostrato arrives unscathed.
Boccaccio’s Filostrato advances mythologized prosopagraphy as an ontologi-
cal strategy. He construes roles as narrative masks which can be, and indeed
must be, moldable. Qua mythological bricolage, the audience is explicitly in-
vited to deconstruct the narrative as it is unveiled, to participate in a hermeneuti-
cal process of rereading and of remythologizing. Filostrato is able to accommo-
date the differences and contradictions in the several personae by constructing
‘horizontal’ links based on ethical principles that in themselves remain happily
semi-transparent. He therefore reinvents allegorical readings as conceptual alle-
gorical readings – as does Chaucer. Chaucer, however, addresses similar ques-
tions – regarding the reconciliation of contradictory masks, the possibility of be-
ing transparent and opaque at the same time – from a different angle. For one,
Chaucer more particularly involves historiographical questions;120 for another,
Chaucer is more concerned with questions of national historiography, that is,
British historiography.

4. Boccaccio’s Veils, Chaucer’s Unveiling: Conceptualizing Allegory

A less elaborate but crucial difference between Boccaccio’s Filostrato and
Chaucer’s Troilus is literary-historical in nature. Chaucer’s Troilus has incited
much critical interest concerning questions of identity. That Chaucer’s poetry in
general is invested in questions of subjectivity has become a critical common-
place. Chaucer’s historical circumstances, occupying a marginal position vis-à-
119
A. C. Spearing, Chaucer: “Troilus and Criseyde” (London: Edward Arnold, 1976) 33-34.
120
Chaucer’s narrator presents himself as a historian, much like Joseph of Exeter and Guido
(and much unlike Benoît or Boccaccio). Minnis, Chaucer 24. While Guido neglects to
mention Benoît as a source, Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio. Eventually, however, the
historian turns romancer, following Boccaccio’s “cantare-like account of Troiolo’s
death.” Wallace, Chaucer 140.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 367

vis clear-cut group identities,121 perhaps relate in interesting ways to his proposi-
tion of translucent prosopagraphy and the concomitant incorporation and modi-
fication of collectively disseminated historiographical discourse. Chaucer’s dis-
cussion of selfhood is weighed slightly differently than in the House of Fame.
Structurally, the Troilus expands on the nature of narrative selfhood as ‘theo-
rized’ by Geffrey, but the focus in the Troilus falls on the performance of self-
hood and the way in which self-performance may appear to others and be judged
by them, how it changes their masks. This interest in the perception of role per-
formance overlaps with similar interests in the Canterbury Tales,122 but the so-
cial interaction in the Troilus is more immediate.
As in Boccaccio’s Filostrato and in the House of Fame, selfhood is a matter
of narratives in the Troilus. Issues of reading, that is reading the self and reading
others, are crucial to the poem. Observing that the word rede appears forty times
in Troilus, Laurel Amtower contends, for instance, that in the fictional universe
of the poem, “monologue, verbal explanation, and written letters transmit both
character and motive both to the readers of the text and to other characters
within the story. Actors may put on a semblance that signifies falsely, knowing
that the text of their intention will be read by others – a process helped by the
willing readers themselves, whose own thoughts, hopes, and fears make them
believe in a false reality.”123 As in his immediate source, narratives are constitu-
121
See esp. Patterson, Chaucer 39: “Not bourgeois, not noble, not clerical, he [Chaucer]
nonetheless participates in all three of these communities. Surely this sense of marginality,
of participating in various groupings but being fully absorbed by none, is related to the
sense of subjectivity, the sense of a selfhood that stands apart from all community, that we
recognize throughout his writings and especially in the Canterbury Tales.” See further
Glending Olson, “Geoffrey Chaucer,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Litera-
ture, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999) 569, 575.
122
For accounts of subjectivity in the Canterbury Tales, see Patterson, Chaucer; H. Marshall
Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the “Canterbury Tales”
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990). Leicester argues that Chaucer’s pilgrim-
narrators are subjects constructed by various discourses but also autonomous individuals
engaged in a narrative performance of their selves (esp. 21-26). For a succinct discussion
of these accounts, see Frantzen, Troilus and Criseyde 31-34. Social roles obviously play
an important role in the Tales, whereby the poem variously challenges and/or critiques
role mentality. A recent study that discusses role performance in terms of ‘masquerade’ is
Laura F. Hodges’s Chaucer and Costume: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), which highlights Chaucer’s play with the distinction between
interior and exterior. See further Chance’s argument concerning counterfeiting in the
Tales. Chance, Mythographic Chaucer esp. 264.
123
Amtower, Engaging Words 150. For reading as a gendered activity in the Troilus, see
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989)
39: “The narrator, Pandarus, and Troilus, too, all characterized as readers of feminine
texts, turn away at last from the disruptive feminine toward orderly, hierarchical visions of
divine love in which desire is finally put to rest.” Richard A. Lanham argues that Chaucer
“conceived the self in rhetorical rather than serious terms” in the Troilus, while emphasiz-
ing that “The reality of the game is serious, like everyday life, in its concern for the goal or
368 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

tive of roles, of masks, the tenacity of which is either reaffirmed or questioned,

as it is in Tales. Moreover, the roles in Chaucer’s Troilus are in many ways
mythically constructed insofar as classical divinities characterize the individuals
as types: widow (Pallas, Criseyde), sensuality (Venus, Pandarus), servant of love
(Cupid, Troilus). Yet, “in each case the mythical label is only part of a particu-
larized, individual mixture; it stands for only one idea in each of the fictional
creations who grow more ambiguous and complex as the story proceeds.”124 Fi-
nally, this hybridity of masks and the complexities of masking also affect the
way in which readers construe the narrative – whether they choose to participate
emotionally in the narrative or abstain from such a subjective literary-critical
venture.125 While Boccaccio’s Filostrato obviously makes possible similar
reader-involvement, a crucial difference to the ‘realism’ of Boccaccio and
Dante’s Commedia lies in the fact that Chaucer’s characters are “also more en-
gaged with one another”126 – an engagement that has dramatic qualities (and
dramatic consequences).
The interaction between the characters and their masks demonstrates the per-
formative side of selfhood – the extent to which masks and narratives are not as
static as Guido hoped they would be. As the above survey of medieval masking
practices has shown, “a pervasive theatricality was characteristic of the Middle
Ages, to the extent that it often renders excessively difficult, and sometimes fu-
tile, our efforts to distinguish and categorise poetic texts and genres that share
fundamentally homogeneous techniques of performance.”127 Chaucer’s texts

result of behavior.” Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renais-
sance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1976) 66, 67.
124
John P. McCall, Chaucer among the Gods: The Poetics of Classical Myth (University
Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1979) 28. While McCall observes that the mythical
allusions are evenly spread across the narrative, he believes that “broad, mythical analo-
gizing or ‘allegorizing’ did not really interest him when he wrote the Troilus” (36). As in-
dicated above and to be argued below, I believe that there is an allegorical dimension to
Chaucer’s investigation of selfhood, which McCall anticipates in his observation regard-
ing the complexities in Chaucer’s mythical allusions. As Benson suggests, each character
is “his or her own particular mixture of type and individuality.” Benson, Chaucer’s “Troi-
lus and Criseyde” 87.
125
These opposing reading strategies are best embodied in the interpretive practices of Don-
aldson and Robertson. Donaldson advocated the emotional involvement of the reader, spe-
cifically in his Speaking of Chaucer, while the latter view originates with Robertson’s A
Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1962). Both are found in agreement concerning the wish to impose “firm control on
the dangerous ‘slydyng’ – women and texts – in constructing their readings of Troilus and
Criseyde.” Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 28-39.
126
Peggy A. Knapp, “Chaucer Imagines England (in English),” Imagining a Medieval Eng-
lish Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004) 142. For
Chaucerian ‘realism,’ see Muscatine, Chaucer esp. 133.
127
Enrico Giaccherini, “Theatrical Chaucer,” European Medieval Drama, ed. Sydney Hig-
gins (Camerino: Centro linguistico di Ateneo, 1997) 97.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 369

have been frequently associated with performance and theatricality, although the
discussion remains controversial. For George Lyman Kittredge, the Canterbury
Tales was a unified work in that it is dramatic, the characters part of a dramatis
personae.128 While Kittredge appears to have in mind a staged performance, re-
cent scholarly work on the Tales reinterprets the performance aspect rather in
terms of “the multifarious forms of medieval cultural performances.”129 Often
pushed into the background in ‘dramatic’ approaches to the Tales is the actual
performance of the text, which embeds the performance of the characters in a
social setting. It links the individual ‘performer’ to the present audience. Al-
though many of Chaucer’s narrators are private readers, Joyce Coleman con-
cludes her ‘ethnography of reading’ in Chaucer with the comment that for all of
“Chaucer’s proto-modernity, or proto-postmodernity, then, a close reading or
‘ethnography’ of his views on reading sends us firmly back to the medieval
sense of literature’s embeddedness within a community, and a community of
hearers.”130
In case of the Troilus, scholars often suspect an immediate interaction be-
tween audience and writer/reciter – a suspicion often based on an illumination,
namely, the Troilus-frontispiece of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 61.
The widely reproduced image depicts an elevated person gesturing to the audi-
ence, which, it has been suggested, is “perhaps the court of Richard II itself.”131
128
George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1927) esp. 154-55.
129
John M. Ganim, “Drama, Theatricality and Performance: Radicals of Presentation in the
Canterbury Tales,” Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the “Canterbury Tales,” ed. Wendy
Harding (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003) 70. See further Ganim,
Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990) and, with refer-
ence to Chaucerian subjectivity, Ganim, “Identity and Subjecthood,” Chaucer, ed. Ellis
229-33. For aspects of performance and drama, see also R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry
Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the “Canterbury Tales” (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press,
1955) esp. 3-28; Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in “The Canter-
bury Tales” (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988); for dramatic irony, see Germaine
Dempster, Dramatic Irony in Chaucer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press; London:
Humphrey Milford, 1932) 27-82. For a complication of ‘dramatic’ approaches, see Ben-
son, “Trust the Tale, Not the Teller,” Drama, Narrative and Poetry, ed. Harding 21-33;
Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983); Derek
Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (1985; London: Routledge, 1993) esp. 40-45. Narratorial
performance in Chaucer has been more generally discussed in David Lawton, Chaucer’s
Narrators (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985).
130
Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and
France (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996) 178. For textual performance as crea-
tion of a double reality, see Terry Gunnell, The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (Cam-
bridge: Brewer, 1995) esp. 12.
131
Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 15. The illustration is often featured and discussed in in-
troductory textbooks and literary histories: Lillian M. Bisson, in Chaucer and the Late
Medieval World (1998; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), believes that the scene
shows “the bearded poet” in the lower right “reading to elegantly attired men and women
370 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

Whereas the frontispiece is doubtful evidence for making any claims about ac-
tual performance, textual criticism provides more convincing arguments for a
potential staging of the Troilus. Reviewing the many manuscripts of the Troilus,
Windeatt emphasizes that scribes added “in the margin the names of those who
are speaking in the text, especially where speakers are alternating in rapid ex-
changes of dialogue,” sometimes creating the “appearance of a play-text” re-
flecting “a sense among contemporary readers of Troilus of the dramatic nature
of the poem in its substantial use of dialogue.”132 Moreover, “Much of the first-
person narratorial intervention in Troilus directs our attention specifically to the
performance of the work: not least in the large number of appeals to the audi-
ence.”133 Within the Troilus, acting is generally an important element immedi-
ately related to questions of veiling and transparency. Saul N. Brody, for exam-
ple, concludes that the lovers’ encounter early in Book III “contains the key
elements of a play: it has an author, director, and producer (Pandarus), its re-
hearsal, its setting and props (the bedroom and the bed), its actors (Pandarus and
Troilus), its lines and acted gestures (Troilus’s seeming to weep, perhaps his
kneeling, Pandarus’s tears), and its audience (Deiphebus, those who gather at his
house, and, most importantly, Criseyde).” Some of these dramatic elements re-
cur in the second meeting of Troilus and Criseyde. For Brody, these references
to the dramatic staging of events are a means for Chaucer to reflect “on the art of
making poetry. [...] Chaucer is dramatizing the problematic interaction between

who manifest varying degrees of attentiveness.” In the upper half, she discerns “the cli-
mactic moment of Criseyde’s departure” (25); Kendrick argues that the Troilus is per-
formed during the recital in her Chaucerian Play (166, 174); Simpson sees in the back-
ground, how Criseyde “is swapped for Antenor outside the gates of Troy” (Reform 148,
149); but cf. Derek Pearsall, “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience,” Year-
book of English Studies 7 (1977): 73; Andrew James Johnston, Clerks and Courtiers:
Chaucer, Late Middle English Literature and the State Formation Process (Heidelberg:
Winter, 2001) 251-61. For an interpretation in the light of fifteenth-century theories of
authorship, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-
Medieval England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993) esp. 53-56.
132
Windeatt, “Classical and Medieval Elements” 123; Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 161-
63. The glosses are systematically presented by C. David Benson and Barry A. Windeatt,
“The Manuscript Glosses to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 25.1 (1990): 33-53.
Moreover, “Chaucer seems to have given much thought to the construction of expressive
dramatic scenes.” Oxford Companion to Chaucer, ed. Gray, s.v. drama 144. See also John
McKinnell, “Letters as a Type of the Formal Level in Troilus and Criseyde,” Essays on
“Troilus and Criseyde,” ed. Mary Salu (1980; Cambridge: Brewer, 1991) 76. Further evi-
dence for Chaucer’s employment of dramatic conventions comes from the set-up of Pan-
darus’s house, for which see Saul N. Brody, “Making a Play for Criseyde: The Staging of
Pandarus’s House in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Speculum 73.1 (1998): 129-33.
133
Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators 83. For aspects of rhetorical performance in an ontological
framework, see James J. Paxson, “The Semiotics of Character, Trope, and Troilus: The
Figural Construction of the Self and the Discourse of Desire in Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde,” Desiring Discourse, ed. Paxson and Gravlee 206-26.
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 371

an artist and his audience.”134 More importantly, however, Chaucer’s Troilus re-
flects upon the interaction between characters, focusing more specifically on the
construction and perception of masks – a new development in the Troy story
that finds an early champion in Hector’s reflection on how his actions are per-
ceived in the Laud Troy Book (see above).
If aspects of performance and perception are more strongly accentuated in the
Troilus, another difference, given Filostrato’s instruction of how to read and
perceive his poem, lies in the absence of any explicit guideline as to how to con-
strue the plot at the outset of the Troilus.135 Nonetheless, Chaucer’s Troilus of-
fers itself for allegorical interpretation; and like Il Filostrato, it does so in terms
of conceptual allegory. The conceptual allegory of Troilus, however, moves be-
yond questions of personal identity, inquiring more specifically how selves and
nations engage in processes of mutual ‘self-fashioning,’ enabling the modifica-
tion of the discourses that are only seemingly imperative in the construction of
individual and collective identities. While this conceptual allegorical framework
has to my knowledge not been discerned in the Troilus, scholarship occasionally
points to allegorical aspects in the poem. Thomas Maresca, for instance, antici-
pates a cognitive-psychological allegory when observing that “What allegory
exists in Troilus and Criseyde functions as an extension of psychology, giving
the reader a grid against which to measure the characters’ personal develop-
ment.”136 Likewise, Robert Jordan stresses that while it is “possible to over-
psychologize the Roman [de la Rose] – as I think C. S. Lewis does in The Alle-
gory of Love [...], it is possible to under-allegorize Troilus. Although this poem
is obviously less allegorical than the Roman – using human figures and being
more dramatic and less pictorial – it nevertheless shares with the Roman the im-

134
Brody, “Making a Play for Criseyde” 133-35, quotations at 134, 139. In arguing that
Chaucer medievalizes Boccaccio, C. S. Lewis emphasizes that “the greater part of our at-
tention [regarding the relation between Boccaccio and Chaucer] has been devoted to such
points as specifically illustrate the individual genius of Chaucer as a dramatist and a psy-
chologist.” Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” Chaucer Criticism II:
“Troilus and Criseyde” & the Minor Poems, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor
(Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1961) 17, 16.
135
Windeatt, identifying both epical and allegorical aspects in the Troilus, draws attention to
the proem to the first book, in which the audience’s lovers are asked to allegorize the un-
folding story. Such allegorization is not as explicitly invited as it is in the Filostrato, how-
ever. Eventually, Windeatt concludes that this is insufficient “to make Troilus and alle-
gorical poem, any more than some of the other noted echoes and motifs of style and con-
tent turn Troilus into an epic, or a drama, or an opera, or a history book.” Windeatt, “Clas-
sical and Medieval Elements” 116, 130-31, quotation at 131. For Chaucerian allegory in
general, see C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936;
London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938) 157-97, esp. 176-97; Akbari, Seeing through the Veil
178-33. Spearing contends that Chaucer generally “shows no sign of wishing to allegorize
classical material.” Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance 43.
136
Maresca, Three English Epics 155.
372 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

pulse to anatomize its subject, and in both cases the subject is love.”137 Lanham
comes closes to articulating the allegorical displacements within prosopagraphi-
cal selfhood. For him, Chaucer’s characters are neither realistic nor allegorical.
Rather, they “work very hard, as we do, at being the types society demands that
they be. They are ‘real’ in the sense that Chaucer has created, self-consciously, a
series of characters most of whom are themselves self-consciously attempting to
be ‘types’ of one kind or another. Their attempt is organized and their goal is set
by whatever game Chaucer chooses to engage them in.”138 Public discourse, that
is, circulates roles that can be potentially altered. As in conceptual allegory, sev-
eral domains can be ‘horizontally’ linked while others remain separate.139 Thus,
the Chaucerian poet, to speak with Whitman, can “contain multitudes.”140
The Troilus, in other words, investigates to what extent individuals can avoid
becoming ‘allegories of the universal.’ In this context, it is important to note that
“The philosophical problem that Chaucer elaborates from Boccaccio preserves
free will within providence and destiny. The poem itself presents its defining
historical frame in a way that preserves a place for intention in public and per-
sonal destiny.”141 This “place for intention,” although elements thereof are to be
found in Guido and Benoît, is greatly expanded in Chaucer’s poem and, at least
partially, transferred to the arena of fourteenth-century politics. Marion Turner,
for instance, situates the poem in fourteenth-century politics, arguing that the
fragmentation of Trojan society in Chaucer’s poem is analogous to London’s
fragmented society. The poem thus centers on “the inevitability and omnipres-
ence of social fragmentation and betrayal” in the city of London:142 everyone is

137
Robert M. Jordan, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inor-
ganic Structure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967) 81, 99. He concludes that
“Chaucer’s art [...] is historically very much closer to mimetic allegory than to modern re-
alism, and for this reason his characters are generally to be read more as personified illus-
trations of broad, abstract meanings than as self-limiting centers of interest.”
138
Lanham, Motives of Eloquence 80-81. See further Chance, Mythographic Chaucer 110-
67, and passim.
139
I differ with Lanham as regards the difference between a postmodern ‘game for the
game’s sake’ and the potential unification of roles by horizontally linking (game-)selves to
the serious self. Lanham argues, for example, that Pandarus “can play many roles, but is
fooled by none. He has risen above his social environment enough to try to control it but
not so much as to renounce its values. His ends are his own but his means determined by
society.” Lanham, Motives of Eloquence 78-79. I argue below that Pandarus represents
public discourse. While he indeed occupies many (contradictory) subject-positions, he ul-
timately lacks an identity of his own.
140
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan
(1982; New York: Library of America, 1996) 87.
141
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 47-48.
142
Marion Turner, “Troilus and Criseyde and the ‘Treasonous Aldermen’ of 1382: Tales of
the City in Late Fourteenth-Century London,” SAC 25 (2003): 227. See further Andrew
Lynch, “Love in Wartime: Troilus and Criseyde as Trojan History,” A Concise Compan-
ion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006) 125-27. That the
 Chapter Fourteen: Mythologizing Allegory 373

involved in a game of masking their intentions, there is no unanimity in the par-

liamentary debates, and so on. “In Troilus and Criseyde,” she concludes, “the
consistent depiction of fragmentary social groups implies that there is no possi-
bility of escape from a social antagonism that proves to be relentless: the text of-
fers no hope of an alternative society, it contains no social group or relationship
that is undivided or nondestructive.”143 This argument complies with the time-
worn historical determinism that destines London to the same plight as Troy.144
Such accounts implicitly acknowledge a conceptual allegorical underpinning,
since the mere availability of choice emphasizes difference. Chaucer’s allegori-
cal representation of individuals capable of masking individuality, while at the
same time remaining true to specific ethical goods (goods individuals choose to
adopt rather being imposed), entails precisely “the hope for an alternative soci-
ety.” It demonstrates the possibility of modifying public discourse,145 the possi-
bility of altering seemingly deterministic narratives, and of creating new narra-
tive models for others to adopt in turn. The Troilus, as demonstrated in the next
chapter, invites the audience explicitly to allegorize England as Troy, emphasiz-
ing how public discourse can be modified in order not to mask individuality. In-
stead of an allegory of the universal, Chaucer offers an allegory of chaunge.

‘Old Troy’ and the Troy story provide a contemporary political context for the poem is
obvious, especially when considering the plethora of contemporary references to London
as the ‘New Troy.’ For the popularity of Troy in the 1380s, see Patterson, Chaucer 93-94;
Sylvia Federico, “A Fourteenth-Century Erotics of Politics: London as a Feminine New
Troy,” SAC 19 (1997): 121-55, reprinted, with slight modification, in Federico, New Troy
1-28. For contemporary references in the parliamentary debate, see Carleton Brown, “An-
other Contemporary Allusion in Chaucer’s Troilus,” MLN 26.7 (1911): 210.
143
Turner, “Troilus and Criseyde” 248, 250-52, 257.
144
See, e.g., D. W. Robertson, Jr., Chaucer’s London (New York: Wiley, 1968) 3.
145
Stressing the pressure of the public world in Troilus, Stephen Knight observes that medie-
val people saw a “crucial tension between the social unit that was necessary for security
(both in terms of food production and defence) and the separate people who comprised the
crucial togetherness. That tension is one of the major issues of early literature, whether it
deals with the need to socialize the warrior hero or to sublimate the drives of physical pas-
sion.” Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 34.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Êat Ile is bycompassed al with êe se”: Chaucerian Nationhood

The narratives available to the characters, the poet, and the author of the Troilus
as the raw material for remythologizing their prosopagraphical selves are gener-
ally authoritative narratives. Since the Troilus develops “a social psychology
which comprised a profound contribution to the understanding of interactions
between individual and community,”146 it is helpful to analyze in detail what ex-
actly is entailed by this ‘profound contribution,’ that is, how the poet and the
characters conceptualize their selves by means of available public discourses –
and how they recirculate new masks and models for conceiving selfhood. Before
this can be shown, and as a means of transition between my investigation of
selves and nations in the Troilus, it is pertinent to ask to what extent Chaucer’s
poem does address issues of nationhood. Although Chaucerian nationhood is in-
creasingly discussed, the debate centers primarily on the Canterbury Tales and
is far from uncontroversial. Prominent Chaucerians believe that there is little of
national resonance to be had in Chaucer’s works. An initial characterization of
such ‘national’ criticism opens this chapter and is followed by an investigation
of the notion of nationhood in the Troilus. Does Trojan history merely feature as
a deterministic background, or does Troilus metaphorically (or allegorically)
represent Troy? In which way do Trojan culture and Trojan politics invite a con-
temporary reading, be it in terms of allusions, structural similarities, or immedi-
ate references? I believe that beyond the structural analogies between four-
teenth-century England (London) and ‘ancient’ Troy, the Troilus is fundamen-
tally interested in questions of English nationhood. Not only is Troilus’s per-
spective from the eighth sphere contextualized in a Virgilian epic tradition with
national overtones, furthermore the “litel spot of erthe” (V. 1815) he beholds
specifically refers to Britain. Troilus not only looks at a country but also a nation
engaged in the historiographical construction of national genealogies that his
name typifies. His laughter represents the self-realization of a limiting, mono-
lithic construction of nationhood that is based on a metaphorical rather than al-
legorical mapping of Troy onto England.147 Hence, the audience is invited to re-
146
David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430
(London: Routledge, 1988) 118. See further Aers, “Chaucer’s Criseyde: Woman in Soci-
ety, Woman in Love,” Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Rout-
ledge, 1980) 123.
147
See Vance, Mervelous Signals 266-67, who wonders whether “Chaucer might have seen
in the relationship between the Trojans and the besieging Greeks some deep analogy with
the relationship between English and a more prestigious Continental eloquence, or, even
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 375

embark on a hermeneutic journey, revaluating models of selves and nations of-

fered by the central characters. This revaluation indicates that Trojan historiog-
raphy amounts to a mythical rather than mythological concept of nationhood – a
problematic historiographical construct since nationhood can be made by means
of a polysemous usage of international discourses in a continually recreated na-
tional mask. Trojan historiography is a different (allegorical) domain from
which central mythemes can be mapped onto England, but it is not an histori-
ographical imperative.

1. Chaucer’s Canterbury, Chaucer’s Troy: Representing Collectivity

Reacting to the many publications on medieval nationalism in the 1980s and
1990s, Derek Pearsall distinguishes between different kinds of Englishness,
which Chaucer encounters in terms of exclusion, that is, by that which does not
belong to one’s group, class, and nation. Chaucer’s poetry lends itself to con-
structions of Englishness; the “idealisation of Chaucer as the poet of a particular
kind of Englishness makes his poetry serviceable to deriving forms and manifes-
tations of national consciousness.” And yet, “this idealisation of Chaucer as the
poet of Englishness has little or no basis in his poetry.”148 Earlier scholarship,
however, not only talked confidently of Chaucer as the ‘father of English po-
etry,’ but as representing England in person. Thus, G. K. Chesterton observes:
There is something personal about England. Rome or France or Bolshevist Russia or
Republican America, each in its own way is a principle; but England is a person. And
it is very like the very indescribable sort of person this book has to describe. [...] we
may agree that if the country called by the poets Albion could be conceived as a single
figure, it would be a giant. And when I think of Chaucer in this primary and general
fashion, I do not think of a Court poet receiving a laurel from the King [...] but of some
such elemental and emblematic giant, alive at our beginnings and made out of the very
elements of the land.149

more specifically, between the competing languages of English and French in his own
country.”
148
Derek Pearsall, “Chaucer and Englishness,” Proceedings of the British Academy 101
(1999): 86. See further Pearsall, “The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century,” Na-
tion, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen
Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001) 17-18. For Chaucer’s ‘emplotment’ as an ar-
chetype of Englishness, see Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagi-
nation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000) esp. 58-79.
149
G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber, 1962) 216, cited also in Ellis, Chaucer at
Large 74. Chaucer’s importance as a national poet is heavily emphasized in John Dry-
den’s “Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, Translated into Verse from Homer, Ovid,
Boccace, and Chaucer, with Original Poems,” Of Dramatic Poetry and Other Critical Es-
says, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1962) 2: 269-94. Af-
ter setting Chaucer and Ovid side-by-side, Dryden turns to Chaucer, the “father of English
poetry” (280), whose Tales illustrate “the various manners and humours [...] of the whole
English nation in his age” (284). Interestingly, Dryden problematizes the comparison of
Chaucer with Ovid: While Chaucer sometimes “runs riot, like Ovid, and knows not when
376 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

While from a contemporary perspective, such statements seem amusingly anti-

quated, Chesterton’s reference to the giants (and the Galfridan history of Eng-
land) also has some relevance for the ending of Troilus which likewise alludes
to the Brut tradition and its emphasis of English insularity – and it does so pre-
cisely with reference to the elements ‘making up the land.’ The ending of the
Troilus, I argue below, presents precisely the kind of national reference Pearsall
believes to be absent from Chaucer’s poetry.
Pearsall mainly targets the perennialists insofar as he questions whether me-
dieval phenomena of collectivity can be characterized as national identity. Ac-
cordingly, he challenges Turville-Petre’s findings by pointing out that historians
such as Robert of Gloucester and Robert Mannyng and others “are evidence
only of fragmentary, sporadic, regional responses to particular circumstances,
not a wave of English nationalism sweeping the country. These writers are cul-
turally under-capitalised: this is not where great changes will be initiated.”150 I
agree with his argument concerning the usage of English, which does not imme-
diately place Chaucer in a national context, but rather in an international one.151
What I find more problematic is Pearsall’s claim that “Of national feeling or a
sense of national identity – whether it has to do with ideas of national or racial
history, with England as a land, with ideas of national character, or with opposi-
tion to some hostile national other – I find nothing or little in Chaucer.”152
Chaucer’s relationship to discourses of nationhood is complex, after all, he
“is the originator of a national literature in a culture that lacks both the concept

he has said enough” (286), he is more like Virgil and Horace, whereby Dryden posits a
similar relationship between Augustus and his court poet as well as the British monarchs
and Chaucer.
150
Pearsall, “Chaucer and Englishness” 88-89. Nevertheless, because Gloucester and Man-
nyng represent an elite rather than a mass view of England, they belong to precisely those
institutions that, according to Anthony Smith, are pivotal in shaping national sentiments:
the elites and intelligentsias circulating the myths and memories of the nation. Generally,
the absence of public debates about nationalism does not bespeak the absence of national-
ism per se.
151
Pearsall, “Chaucer and Englishness” 90; Salter, “Chaucer and Internationalism.”
152
Pearsall, “Chaucer and Englishness” 90. He acknowledges Henry V’s striving for national
unity by encouraging the use of English in the Chancery and by asking Lydgate to trans-
late the Troy story into English. Pearsall argues that Lydgate’s and Hoccleve’s attributions
of importance to English as a literary language were “to embody the aspirations of nation-
hood” (92). For Lydgate’s construction of (counter-)nationhood, see Chapter Twenty.
Hoccleve stresses the use of English in The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth,
Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999): “The
firste fyndere of our fair langage / Hath seid, in cas semblable, and othir mo, / So hyly wel
that it is my dotage / For to expresse or touche any of tho. / Allas my fadir fro the world is
go, / My worthy maistir Chaucer – him I meene; / Be thow advocat for him, hevenes
queene” (4978-84).
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 377

of literature and a social identity for those who produce it.”153 While Chaucer
does not single-handedly construct a national literature, his works reflect upon
the construction of authorial, social identities as much as upon the shape of col-
lective discourses that determine individuality in turn. One important aspect here
is that of ordering, of categorizing the world. One of the principal ontological
questions, as I have argued above, is not who one is, but where one is. In this
context, Suzanne Conklin Akbari observes in the Canterbury Tales, which
marks Chaucer’s imposition of an order onto the world both in terms of the
frame and the individual tale, a “twofold system” that partakes of a “discourse
that, in spite of its geographic component, is less the discourse of Orientalism
than the discourse of the nation.” She believes that nation can be used in two
senses of imposing order: hierarchy and estrangement, as separating one group
from another.154 Even within the modernist framework of nationhood, as repre-
sented by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Chaucerian Englishness
can be gleaned. Peggy Knapp argues, for example, that the Tales can be under-
stood as an ‘imagined community’ that could only be imagined “because in
some measure such a community was already in existence.” This community is
not one founded on mutual agreement, “but one that shares distinctive beliefs
and distinctive controversies over belief.” The pilgrims, as they are outgrowing
the estate satire types, are actually citizens, some of whom share somewhat anti-
monarchical sentiments.155 Likewise, Glenn Burger, who stresses that the nation
of the Tales precedes the modern nation-state, argues for a rather protean, com-
plex collective imagination: “The Tales’ organization of an imagined commu-
nity of ‘gentils’ anticipates the later centrality of a London-Canterbury axis that
defines a national center founded on a national language, a national polity, and a
national religious practice. But the Tales simultaneously reveal the complex set
of material factors informing and often interfering with the creation of such a
social imaginary.”156 Concerning the Canterbury Tales, then, arguments for
Chaucer’s engagement with questions of nationhood can be easily grounded in
Chaucer studies.

153
Lee Patterson, “‘What Man Artow’: Authorial Self-Definition in ‘The Tale of Sir Thopas’
and ‘The Tale of Melibee,’” SAC 11 (1989): 135. For Chaucer’s construction of English
(national) poetry, see further Wallace, “Chaucer’s Italian Inheritance” esp. 47-48, 37;
Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity,
1290-1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 116, cited below.
154
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Orientation and Nation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Chau-
cer’s Cultural Geography, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch (New York: Routledge, 2002) 103, 120-
22.
155
Knapp, “Chaucer Imagines England” 133, 148-49.
156
Glenn Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003)
xx.
378 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

The case is different with the Troilus. Few recent accounts grapple with na-
tional matters in Troilus directly.157 If Pearsall argues for a general nonexistence
of national sentiments in Chaucer’s oeuvre, Helen Cooper is more specific as
concerns the Troilus: “Chaucer does not write any great national epic, like Virgil
or Lucan; nor any great Christian epic, like Dante. Troilus and Criseyde may
call on the great Classical matter of Troy, but it focuses on the human scale, not
on the fate of nations.”158 Analogues, however, between characters and the col-
lectives they represent as well as the stark contrast between public and private
(not unimportant in approaching the poem from a national perspective), not to
mention the question of whether what is depicted is ancient or more or less con-
temporary, have always concerned critics. At the beginning of the last century,
Kittredge observed that the forces of public life generally prevail in the Troilus,
that the larger predicament of Troy affects the individuals therein. After
Criseyde’s exchange is settled, it is “the impendent doom of Troy that parts the
lovers; and from this time forward, there is no separating their fate from the fate
of the town.”159 The role this argument bestows on the war in the background
was quickly challenged, however. Robert D. Mayo, for example, quibbles such
an association of Troilus with Troy, arguing that “if Chaucer had intended to
convey a similar impression of Troy’s doom, [...] the idea, certainly, is not
voiced either at the beginning or at the close, and receives scant attention during
the greater part of the poem.”160 Mayo emphasizes the scarcity of references to
the war throughout the poem, the least of which can be discerned in the central
third book.161 This observation, however, indicates an important structural fact,
namely, that the references to the Trojan War literally frame the plot and that
Chaucer expands on the Trojan background as he found it in Boccaccio’s poem.
Moreover, a reference is something else than an allusion – and the medieval
audience would probably have been in little need of direct references to the
overall Troy story which was widely disseminated.
Even if the Trojan War frames the Troilus and even if the war plays a more
important role in the Troilus than in Il Filostrato, this does not necessarily sug-
gest that the Troilus is a poem about nationhood. When considering that Chau-
cer does his utmost to make ancient matter cohere with contemporary customs,

157
But cf. Vance, Mervelous Signals 264-69, partly cited above; Anna Torti, The Glass of
Form: Mirroring Structures from Chaucer to Skelton (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991) 62,
drawing on Robertson’s “Concept of Courtly Love” 169. Federico discusses the Troilus in
terms of providing possible alternatives for the ‘New Troy’ in the ‘Old Troy,’ contextual-
izing the poem in the historical framework of Ricardian rule. Federico, New Troy 65-98.
158
Cooper, “Chaucerian Poetics” 46-47.
159
Kittredge, Chaucer 119-20.
160
Robert D. Mayo, “The Trojan Background of the Troilus,” ELH 9.4 (1942): 246.
161
McCall argues that references to the Trojan War are absent since the poem foregrounds
Troy’s “good fortune” (Chaucer 98).
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 379

whereby the war effort in France would have offered itself as an analogy,162 it is
likely that nationhood does play a role, however. Many scholars agree that
Chaucer transposes the Trojan setting onto London, the new Troy. A central
passage for such criticism is the narrator’s explanation of changing customs and
linguistic change, which does not function to historically distance the readers
and characters, but “asserts that, beneath the superficial diversity of human cus-
toms, the reality of the heart is essentially the same.” The disparity of a ‘thou-
sand years,’ then, “is shown to be the same in kind with differences between
contemporary cultures and, in stanza 7, with differences between individuals
within the same society.”163 Morton Bloomfield sees in Chaucer’s description of
the Trojan scene a strong realistic element in which “The ‘I’ of Troilus and
Criseyde is constantly bringing us into the present, authenticating the story by
the pose of the historian. The narrator is bound by history.”164 Furthermore,
various scholars have shown that many details in the depiction of Troy and its
inhabitants are taken from Chaucer’s contemporary world,165 which sets Chau-
cer’s version further apart from Boccaccio’s. The Filostrato scarcely pays hom-

162
For analogies between the Trojan matter and the antagonism between France and England
in Chaucer’s Troilus, see esp. Josephine Bloomfield, “Chaucer and the Polis: Piety and
Desire in the Troilus and Criseyde,” MP 94.3 (1997): 291-92.
163
Durling, Figure of the Poet 52. Dieter Mehl argues that one should, therefore, empathize
with the lovers rather than dismiss their genuine subjective experience. Mehl, Geoffrey
Chaucer: Eine Einführung in seine erzählende Dichtungen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1973)
93. The difference between customs and habits also harbors the nucleus of an exegetical
argument pertinent for Chaucerian historiography. In negotiating the intentions of the
classical writers, to which most of the poets of Troy mentioned in the Troilus and the
House of Fame belong, commentaries on complex oeuvres, such as Ovid’s, recognized
that “the intentions of the author were historically determined and specific to the period in
which he lived, and that it was legitimate to distinguish between the immediate intention
of an author and the long-term effects of his text. [...] Such a separation between historical
intent and contemporary effect had a (perhaps unintended) liberating effect on the kinds of
commentaries that might be produced.” Gillespie, “Twelfth Century” 149.
164
Morton W. Bloomfield, “Chaucerian Realism,” The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed.
Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986) 184-85. Minnis
acknowledges that although “One could not trust the pagans on tricky metaphysical mat-
ters, [...] in the area of ethics they were acknowledged experts.” He qualifies this, though,
since in the Troilus, Chaucer “makes little appeal to the principle of the ethical expertize
of the pagans, a principle which is of the first importance in other poems with an antique
setting, namely The Knight’s Tale and The Franklin’s Tale.” Minnis, Chaucer 62, 68.
165
See McCall, Chaucer 92, with reference to Francis P. Magoun, A Chaucer Gazetteer 160,
non videtur. Architectural details, especially Pandarus’s house, are consistent with London
mansions of the fourteenth-century, argues Brody, “Making a Play for Criseyde.” As con-
cerns the sartorial rhetoric in the Troilus, Hodges comments that “Although the setting for
this poem is ancient Troy, the narrator follows customary procedure in medieval literature
by dressing his characters in the costumes of his own period.” Hodges, “Sartorial Signs in
Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 35.3 (2001): 225. For Chaucer’s ‘realistic’ depiction of
Troy, see Spearing, Chaucer esp. 55; Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 60-83.
380 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

age to the exotic setting and the background of the war,166 and “the social worlds
portrayed by both poets are essentially those of their own time and place, not
that of ancient Troy.”167 In this context, it is particularly relevant that, as C. S.
Lewis noted, the poem is addressed to an audience “interested not only in the
personal drama between his little group of characters but in that whole world of
story which makes this drama’s context.”168 Remarking on the fact that Lewis’s
observation is often overlooked in the debates about the Troilus as a poem of
courtly love, Edwards stresses that Chaucer “shows antiquity not just as an ana-
logue for courtly life, but as a cultural world buckling under pressure. As in the
Knight’s Tale, he reconceives Boccaccio’s text to examine the central problems
of destiny and choice in a world where history has already taken shape.” In en-
gaging with the determinism prevalent in the Troy story, Chaucer “elaborates
from Boccaccio” a philosophical model that “preserves free will within provi-
dence and destiny. The poem itself presents its defining historical frame in a
way that preserves a place for intention in public and personal destiny.”169 This
element of free choice is one particularly dramatized by Troilus, who chooses
not to choose. This (non-)decision has consequences for Troilus’s construction
of a collective identity – an identity that slavishly follows the traditional Troy
story. And yet, as John Finlayson notes, “Chaucer, faced with roughly the same
story [as were Benoît, Guido and so on], the inevitability and known nature of
the end, nevertheless presents us with the sense of possibility of other endings,
and with the vitality of actions lived outside the unalterable knowledge of their
outcomes. He even makes the dilemma of the poet faced with the unalterability,
the historical inevitability of his action, a vibrant part of his poem.”170 Chaucer
thus offers his audience an alternative to deterministic constructions of nation-
hood.

2. Cicero’s Rome, Troilus’s Troy: Rewarding Statecraft

In view of Chaucerian articulations of nationhood in the Tales and in the light of
the presentism of the Troilus, it is surprising that scholars have not considered in
greater detail the national context of the Troilus, particularly at the end of the

166
James H. McGregor, The Image of Antiquity in Boccaccio’s “Filocolo,” “Filostrato” and
“Teseida” (New York: Lang, 1991) 169; Stillinger, Song 133; Lewis, Allegory of Love
178.
167
J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2002) 116.
168
Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato” 20.
169
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 45-47. “Chaucer’s ancient pagans are historical agents
whose choices give shape to their destiny, both by what they do and what they elect not to
do” (62). For the possibility of choice, see also Mehl, Geoffrey Chaucer 115.
170
John Finlayson, “Guido de Columnis’ Historia destructionis Troiae, The ‘Gest Hystorial’
of the Destruction of Troy, and Lydgate’s Troy Book: Translation and the Design of His-
tory,” Anglia 113.2 (1995): 152.
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 381

poem, which heavily emphasizes the potential of change through individual

choice. According to Turville-Petre, Chaucer emerges as the “first writer in Eng-
lish to claim status as a national poet [...] at the end of Troilus and Criseyde.
Boldly Chaucer offers his book to the nation as a whole, with the hope that it
will be able to surmount the dialectical variety of English.”171 Although I believe
Chaucer’s version of nationhood to rather be a counter-nationhood, insofar as
changeability and difference rather than homogenization lies at the heart of
Chaucer’s nation, the poet certainly does claim the status of a poet theorizing
and critiquing models of national identity, especially at the much discussed end
of the poem. Like the House of Fame, the ending of the Troilus initiates a her-
meneutic process that prompts the audience to revisit the way in which the char-
acters reconcile (or are incapable of reconciling) individual with public roles.
The crucial passage is Troilus’s view from the eighth sphere which, even in per-
ceptive intertextual analyses, is not usually seen in terms of nationhood. The im-
portant question, I think, is what Troilus actually sees when gazing down on the
world from his lofty position on the eighth sphere.172 Troilus sees the spot where
he was slain by Achilles:
And down from thennes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe that with the se
Embraced is, and fully gan despise
This wrecched world, and held al vanite
To respect of the pleyn felicite
That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
Ther he was slayn his lokyng down he caste,

And in hymself he lough right at the wo

Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste,
And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so
The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste,
And sholden al oure herte on heven caste;
And forth he wente, shortly for to telle,
Ther as Mercurye sorted hym to dwelle. (V. 1814-27)
Troilus’s view of himself is externalized and he beholds an absence: the empty
self that he always already was (see below). He represents not only a view on
Trojan historiography (an outdated model of ‘transparent’ Trojan historiogra-
phy, that is), he also looks at a particular, historically situated place for which
Trojan historiography is pivotal, namely, England. On the one hand, I read this

171
Turville-Petre, England 116. For a qualified view of English as a national language in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see W. M. Ormrod, “The Use of English: Language,
Law, and the Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England,” Speculum 78.3 (2003):
750-87.
172
For a summary of the astrological implications, see Chauncey Wood, Chaucer and the
Country of the Stars: Poetic Uses of Astrological Imagery (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1970) 180-91.
382 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

passage, commonly seen as a descendant of the Somnium Scipionis, in terms of

dream interpretation. Following the theory of dream interpretation represented in
the Troilus by Cassandra, it is almost impossible not to acknowledge a public
function of Troilus’s ‘vision.’ On the other hand, the Brut tradition, which like-
wise takes its cue from Cicero’s De re publica, very concretely interprets the
“litel spot of erthe that with the se / Embraced is” as insular Britain.
Troilus’s view from the eighth sphere, which marks the transition from the
ending of the plot to the ending of the poem, is often regarded as a repudiation
of worldly vanity, a topos identified by most commentators as being indebted to
the Somnium Scipionis pace Boccaccio’s Teseida.173 The ‘national’ context of
Scipio’s dream and its contextualization in Macrobius’s Commentarii in Som-
nium Scipionis is often overlooked,174 especially when considering that Chaucer
“treats the original story and the commentary material as separate entities.”175
During the Middle Ages, the Somnium Scipionis was the most widely dissemi-
nated part of Cicero’s De re publica – of which it is the sixth book – “one of the
formative books of the Middle Ages.”176 De re publica mainly discusses the
benefits of different constitutions for the state, the Roman Republic. Beginning
with a meditation on various constitutional forms of organization, followed by a
discussion about the ideal state, the book delineates several branches of justice,
culminating in Books V and VI in conversations about good examples of states-
manship and the apotheosis of Scipio’s family. The sixth book opens with a de-
piction of the fickleness of the crowds and the permanence and stability of
marriage – passages absent in the versions of Scipio’s dream in the medieval
commentary tradition. Nonetheless, Macrobius’s Commentarii is concerned with
the duties of individuals in serving their countries.
The Commentarii, by discussing the context of Plato’s Republic as compared
to Cicero’s work on statesmanship – “hoc interesse prima fronte perspeximus,
quod ille rem publicam ordinavit, hic rettulit; alter qualis esse deberet, alter qua-
lis esset at maioribus instituta disseruit” [the former drafted plans for the organi-
zation of a state, the latter described one already in existence; the one discussed
an ideal state, the other the government established by his forefathers]177 – im-

173
Root 562n. Other sources for the passage include Lucan’s Pharsalia IX. 1-14; Dante’s
Paradiso XXII. 100-54; the commentary on Isaiah XL in the Somme le Roi. See Wood,
Chaucer 183-84; Alfred L. Kellogg, “On the Tradition of Troilus’s Vision of the Little
Earth,” Mediaeval Studies 22 (1960): 204-13.
174
Most editions and scholarly accounts discuss Cicero and Macrobius as immediate sources
for Chaucer. The sources are of further interest to determine Chaucer’s astrological
knowledge. See Windeatt 559-560nn and the above mentioned studies.
175
As Cooper observes about Chaucer’s extended treatment of the dream in the Parliament of
Fowls. Cooper, “Classical Background” 259.
176
John Livingston Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934) 90.
177
Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. Jakob Willis, Bibliotheca Teubneriana
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1963) I. i. 1. I further make reference to the respective passages in
Cicero’s De re publica / De legibus, ed. and trans. C. W. Keyes, LCL 213 (Cambridge,
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 383

parts the political and national framework of the ancient text to medieval read-
ers. Cicero’s reason for including the dream at the end, Macrobius surmises, is
to show his disapproval of those who criticize Plato and to reveal the benefits of
serving the state: “postquam in omni rei publicae otio et negotio palmam iusti-
tiae disputando dedit, sacras immortalium animarum sedes et caelestium arcana
regionum in ipso consummati operis fastigio locavit, indicans quo his perven-
iendum vel potius revertendum sit, qui rem publicam cum prudentia, iustitia,
fortitudine ac moderatione tractaverint” [after giving the palm to justice in all
matters concerning the welfare of the state, he revealed, at the very end of his
work, the sacred abodes of immortal souls and the secrets of the heavens and
pointed out the place to which the souls of those who had served the republic
prudently, justly, courageously, and temperately must proceed, or rather, must
return] (Commentarii I. i. 8). The original context of the dream, Cicero’s mus-
ings on the ideal state and the benefits of serving the collectivity, is retained in
the medieval tradition.
Scipio’s dream itself is introduced by a brief topographical explanation.
Scipio resides in Africa with the fourth legion and converses for an entire day
with King Massinissa, who recollects his memories of Africanus. Once he is
asleep, Africanus appears to Scipio in a dream, which he believes – as does Gef-
frey in the House of Fame – is related to his waking thoughts (VI. ix. 9 - X. x; I.
4). Africanus prophesies that within two years, Scipio will conquer Carthage, a
city presently besieged – sieges being probably on Chaucer’s mind when writing
the Troilus. Later on, he will be elected consul a second time and enjoy many
military successes. Upon his return, though, he will find the state disturbed by
Tiberius Gracchus. Africanus promises that in due course, the Romans will turn
to Scipio for his wisdom; he will become the supreme role model for Roman
identity, the only support of the Roman Republic: “tu eris unus, in quo nitatur
civitatis salus, ac, ne multa, dictator rem publicam constituas oportet, si impias
propinquorum manus effugeris” [upon you alone will the safety of the state de-
pend; and, to be brief, as dictator you must needs set the state in order, if only
you escape death at the hands of your wicked kinsmen] (VI. xii. 12; II. 2). It is
after praising Scipio’s future merits as a statesman that the vision of the afterlife
of the great men of the state is included: “omnibus, qui patriam conservaverint,
adiuverint, auxerint, certum esse in caelo definitum locum, ubi beati aevo sempi-
terno fruantur” [all those who have preserved, aided, or enlarged their fatherland
have a definite place marked off in the heavens where they may enjoy a blessed
existence forever] (VI. xiii. 13; III. 1). The place in the heavens, however, is
solely reserved for those who served the state. This includes territorial expan-

Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1928) – here, VI. ii. 2. I follow this edition in matters of
punctuation. Translations of both commentary and dream are from Commentary on the
Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl, Records of Western Civilization (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1952), occasionally modified with Keyes’s translation.
384 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

sion, a task Scipio is about to undertake and which also provides a suitably im-
perial context for the medieval Troy story.
Initially anxious about his potential death at the hands of his own kinsmen,
Scipio begins to worry about death itself and inquires whether the great states-
men of the past, his father Paulus included, are still ‘alive.’ His father appears
and, after learning about the bliss of posteriority, Scipio wants to know why he
should wait his turn to join them. The importance of serving the state again takes
prominence, this time in a prosopagraphical framework – the genealogical imita-
tion of his father and grandfather: “sed sic, Scipio, ut avus hic tuus, ut ego, qui te
genui, iustitiam cole et pietatem, quae cum magna in parentibus et propinquis,
tum in patria maxima est” [But, Scipio, cherish justice and your obligations to
duty, as your grandfather here, and I, your father, have done; this is important
where parents and relatives are concerned, but is of utmost importance in mat-
ters concerning the fatherland] (VI. xvi. 16; III. 5). At this point, Scipio intro-
duces his observation concerning the smallness of the world. Often overlooked,
however, is that he distinguishes carefully between the world in general and the
Roman Empire in particular: “iam ipsa terra ita mihi parva visa est, ut me im-
perii nostri, quo quasi punctum eius attingimus, paeniteret” [From here the earth
appeared so small that I was ashamed of our empire which is, so to speak, but a
point on its surface] (VI. xvi. 16; III. 7). Then follow detailed explanations re-
garding the heavenly abode before Africanus subsequently turns to the lowly
sphere of the earth, where fame cannot be gained (VI. xix. 20; VI. 1). There are
northern and southern zones, the former belonging to the Romans. And yet,
“Omnis enim terra, quae colitur a vobis, angustata verticibus, lateribus latior,
parva quaedam insula est circumfusa illo mari, quod Atlanticum, quod magnum,
quem Oceanum appellatis in terris, qui tamen tanto nomine quam sit parvus, vi-
des” [The whole of the portion that you inhabit is narrow at the top and broad at
the sides and is in truth a small island encircled by that sea which you call the
Atlantic, the Great Sea, or Ocean. But you can see how small it is despite its
name] (VI. xx. 21; VI. 3). It follows that Cicero’s ‘spot of earth’ specifically re-
fers to the comparatively ‘small’ expansion of the Roman Empire.
Macrobius comments on this Ciceronian passage and delineates between the
whole earth and portions as encircled by the ocean: “illud quoque non sine per-
fectione doctrinae est, quod cum aliis nos non patitur errare qui terram semel
cingi oceano crediderunt. [...] sed adiciendo, quae colitur a vobis, veram eius di-
visionem, de qua paulo post disseremus, nosse cupientibus intellegendam reliq-
uit” [The completeness of his knowledge is also demonstrated in his not permit-
ting us to fall into the common error of those who believe that Ocean encircles
the whole of the earth. [...] but by qualifying his words, The whole portion that
you inhabit, he revealed to the attentive reader the actual divisions of the earth, a
matter which we shall discuss a little later] (Commentarii II. v. 6, see also IX. 5-
10). Given the geographical limitations of the Empire, it is evident that earthly
fame does not amount to much. Scipio consequently voices his willingness to
spur himself on, to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. He men-
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 385

tions in passing that from boyhood on he had already striven to imitate his father
(VI. xxiv. 26; VIII. 1), indicating that he will continue the family tradition of
serving the Republic. The dream closes on Africanus’s reminder that the best
service is the defense of the state: “sunt autem optimae curae de salute patriae,
quibus agitatus et exercitatus animus velocius in hanc sedem et domum suam
pervolabit” [The noblest efforts are in behalf of your native country; a soul thus
stimulated and engaged will speed hither to its destination and abode without de-
lay] (VI. xxvi. 29; IX. 2). Macrobius’s Commentary acknowledges this turn to
public duty in Cicero’s Republic, making Scipio’s dream an intertext for dis-
cussing Trojan historiography: “quoniam igitur Africanus noster, quem modo
avus praeceptor instituit, ex illo genere est quod et de doctrina vivendi regulam
mutuatur et statum publicum virtutibus fulcit. ideo ei perfectionis geminae prae-
cepta mandantur. sed ut in castris locato ac sudanti sub armis primum virtutes
politicae suggeruntur his verbis” [since our younger Scipio Africanus, who has
just been receiving instructions from his grandfather, belongs to that group of
men who both mold their lives according to the precepts of philosophy and sup-
port their commonwealths with deeds of valor, he is charged with upholding the
highest standards of both modes of life. Of course the virtues of a public career
were called to his attention first, for he was at that time stationed in a military
camp, enduring the hardships of a campaign] (Commentarii II. xvii. 9-10). Fi-
nally, then, Scipio’s dream is framed by musings on a military career in the con-
text of territorial expansion and imperial fame, whereby – notably – the geo-
graphical spot of earth is not the world, but the Roman Empire.

3. Italian Scipio, Galfridan Brutus: Prophesizing Insularity

The Somnium Scipionis is not the only source for Troilus’s view from the eighth
sphere. Another possible source is Dante’s Paradiso XXII. 127-54, which itself
is reminiscent of the Dream of Scipio,178 but which seems to be less concerned

178
The Dantean overtones demonstrate that Chaucer uses Dante “as he uses the classics: at-
tending to the narrative surface; treating fictions as histories; developing heuristic but
complicated analogies from his sources.” Fyler, “Auctoritee and Allusion in Troilus and
Criseyde” 85. For Giancarlo, this passage “recapitulates the structure of Troilus and
Criseyde as well as the pattern of the degressus and ingressus of the story’s structural and
historical elements.” Giancarlo, “Structure of Fate” 259. For the Somnium Scipionis as a
source for Dante, see Charles S. Singleton, ed. and trans., The Divine Comedy, 3 vols. in 6,
Bollingen Series 80 (1980; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989) 6: 66-70nn. An-
other possible source is Lucan’s Pharsalia, which also has an imperial underpinning. The
lines I believe to clearly embed Troilus in a national context, however, do not appear in
Lucan; Pompey rather smiles “at the mockery done to his headless body,” beholding “the
thick darkness that veils our day” [vidit quanta sub nocte iaceret / Nostra dies, risitque sui
ludibria trunci]. The Civil War, ed. and trans. J. D. Duff, LCL 220 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1928) IX. 13-14. Statius stresses Lucan’s role for the Roman Repub-
lic in his Silvae, praising him for boldly unsheathing a Roman epic – the Aeneid should
pay him homage (II. vii. 52-53, 79-80). He ends with a heavenly flight similar to Pom-
386 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

with questions of collective identity. Generally, however, “no one is more con-
cerned with civic duty than Dante.”179 Chaucer was certainly familiar with Boc-
caccio’s version of Scipio’s dream, contained in the Teseida rather than the
Filostrato. Boccaccio’s twelve-book epic tells the story of Arcita and Palemone
who, rescued by Theseus, both fall in love with Emilia, the sister of the queen
they are serving.180 The apotheosis of Arcita occurs at the end of the Teseida, af-
ter Arcita and Palemone duel with each other – the winner of the combat, which
is supervised by Theseus, will ‘win’ Emilia. Arcita is victorious but subse-
quently falls from his horse and dies of the injury after ensuring that Emilia
marry his friend Palemone. The fight is not restricted to the earthly realm but
finds an analogue in the world of the gods: Arcita begs Mars for assistance; his
fall is caused by Venus’s intervention – a dichotomy that lends itself to Chau-
cer’s appropriation, especially since the Teseida is a Virgilian epic, enriched
(and sometimes derailed) by Ovidian borrowings.181 This aspect is important in
the context of Warren Ginsberg’s argument that both knights ultimately repre-
sent aspects of one individual: “Just as the narrator and the poet are subsumed in
the figure of Boccaccio, so the knights in the Teseida represent two aspects of a
single literary love, which has two interrelated objects: the lady, and poetry.
Palemone and Arcita are, in fact, two aspects of Boccaccio’s fictional self.”182
Thus, Arcita’s ascent to the eighth sphere represents the ascent of one aspect
(one persona, that is) rather than one individual.
Chaucer alters Arcita’s initial ascent minimally insofar as in the Troilus, the
protagonist’s rise is blissful. In the following stanzas, Chaucer introduces impor-
tant changes in terms of the present argument. He adds the ‘plain felicity’ of the
heavens to the first stanza and refers to ‘our work’ in the second. More impor-
tantly, Troilus’s laughter is differently situated. In fact, Chaucer creates “a far
more abstract scene” by removing the body: “there is no corpse but only a place
[...]. His last sight of himself, like his first sight of Criseyde, penetrates to an
empty locus.”183 In Boccaccio’s Teseida, Arcita’s body remains: “ma poi al loco
/ là dove aveva il suo corpo lasciato / gli occhi fermò alquanto rivoltato” [But
then, looking backward for a while, he let his eyes linger upon the place in

pey’s in the Pharsalia: “terras despicis et sepulcra rides” [thou lookest down upon the
earth and laughest at sepulchres] (II. vii. 110). Statius with an English Translation, ed. and
trans. J. H. Mozley, 2 vols., LCL 206, 207 (1928; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1982).
179
Josephine Bloomfield, “Chaucer and the Polis” 298-99.
180
For Boccaccio’s intention to pen a classical epic, see Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio 10.
181
Mars emerges as both inspiration for epic and as the rage of war as well as desire for it.
Venus represents both love and sexual appetite. For this and Boccaccio’s Ovidian borrow-
ings, see Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio 12-19; Ginsberg, Cast of Character 112-16.
182
Ginsberg, Cast of Character 109.
183
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 73-74.
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 387

which his body remained] (Tes. XI. 2).184 This shift also redirects the reader’s
attention back to those texts, in which the body itself is absent (that is, the re-
spective passages in Dante’s Paradiso and the Dream of Scipio, the latter giving
prominence to the territory of the Roman Empire). In view of the backdrop to
this ascent in the Somnium Scipionis with its emphasis on collectivity and ideal
rule, I am tempted to argue that Arcita represents not a complete ideal, but only
one aspect of that ideal. Something of Arcita, his body, remains in the world.
This is different with Troilus, who does not leave anything behind at all. What
Chaucer achieves by this modification is to remove Troilus’s transparent Tro-
janness from the available models for the construction of nationhood. Unlike
Scipio, Troilus will not be reintroduced into the world to defend the common
good of his empire. More concretely, Chaucer removes Troilus (and the tradi-
tional Troy story) from British constructions of nationhood. If the Dream of
Scipio introduces a national context, there is a specific subtext to Britain here,
one that abolishes a deterministic Trojan historiographical model from national,
English discourse.
My reading of the “litel spot” as representing Brutus’s Albion differs from
most scholarly accounts concerned with Troilus’s view, a view of a specific
‘spot’ rather than the earth. With the universals of Christianity and not its re-
gional diversity in mind, however, many scholars see the reference to the ‘spot
embraced by the ocean’ as a representation of medieval mappae mundi. Thus,
Sylvia Tomasch suggests that the ‘quotation’ from Scipio’s dream represents a
“misunderstood instance of geographical reference.” Chaucer, she maintains,
“seems to be more deliberately pictorial, presenting a large, foregrounded Troi-
lus and a small, distanced earth – an important variation on the usual hierarchi-
cal imbalance. [...] What he sees accords with standard medieval cartographical
practice: this earth has a central core surrounded (‘embraced’) by water; the
three massed continents are ringed by the circumfluent ocean.” In short, Chau-
cer’s Troilus beholds a T-O mappa mundi.185 Since Chaucer generally relishes
the multiplicity of allusions kindled by the reference to classical texts, this is

184
The narrator continues, “e seco rise de’ pianti dolenti / della turba lernea, la vanitate / forte
dannando dell’umane genti, / li quai, da tenebrosa cechitate / mattamente oscurati nelle
menti, / seguon del mondo la falsa biltate, / lasciando il cielo; e quindi se ne gio / nel loco
che Mercurio li sortio” [And he smiled to himself, thinking of all the Greeks and their
lamentations, and greatly deplored the futile behavior of earthly men whose minds are so
darkened and befogged as to make them frenziedly pursue the false attractions of the
world and turn away from Heaven. Then he departed to the place that Mercury allotted
him]. All quotations are from Alberto Limentani, ed., Teseida della nozze d’Emilia, Tutte
le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 12 vols. (Milano: Mondadori,
1964) 2: XI. 3; quotations are from Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio.
185
Sylvia Tomasch, “Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Geography of Power, the
Technology of Control,” Literature and Technology, ed. Mark L. Greenberg and Lance
Schachterle (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses,
1992) 73-76.
388 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

very well possible. It seems no less probable, however, that Chaucer thinks
about his island rather than the world, since Britain is often described in terms
similar to Scipio’s view of the Roman Empire. Moreover, in the Parliament of
Fowls, where Chaucer ‘translates’ the Somnium Scipionis, he more concretely
refers to the “the lytel erthe that here is” rather than a litel spot (PF 58, and see l.
64) – an emendation that suggests a different contextualization.
I suggested above that the political underpinnings of the Somnium Scipionis
resonate in the Troilus. Unsurprisingly, many historiographical works – in the
Brut tradition – discuss the Trojan origins of Britain in terms of topographical
descriptions of Britain, emphasizing its insularity. Furthermore, the story of
England’s Trojan origins also refers to Brutus’s vision of his future role as a
conqueror, a context recalling the dream motif with the promise of imperial ex-
pansion in Scipio’s dream.186 Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of
Britain, for example, opens with a description of what he deems the best of all
islands, situated in the Western Ocean between France and Ireland.187 The trope
of an island embraced by the sea occurs again when Geoffrey describes Brutus’s
vision, in which the ‘goddess’ enlightens him about his final destination:
Brute, sub occasu solis trans Gallica regna
Insula in occeano est undique clausa mari:
Insula in occeano est habitata gygantibus olim,
Nunc deserta quidem, gentibus apta tuis.
Hanc pete: namque tibi sedes erit illa perhennis;
Hic fiet natis altera Troia tuis.
Hic de prole tua reges nascentur, et ipsis
Tocius terre subditus orbis erit.

[Brutus, beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there lies an island in
the sea, once occupied by giants. Now it is empty and ready for your folk. Down the
years this will prove an abode suited to you and your people; and for your descendants
it will be a second Troy. A race of kings will be born there from your stock and the
round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them.]188

186
According to Frantzen, Troilus’s view from the eighth sphere “recalls the dreams of the
poem.” Frantzen, Troilus and Criseyde 128.
187
“Britannia insularum optima quondam Albion nuncupata est: in occidentali occeano inter
Galliam et Hyberniam sita” [Britain, the best of islands, is situated in the Western Ocean,
between France and Ireland]. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The “Historia regum Britannie” of
Geoffrey of Monmouth II: The First Variant Version; A Critical Edition, ed. Neil Wright
(Cambridge: Brewer, 1988) 1. I use Lewis Thorpe’s translation, The History of the Kings
of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).
188
Historia 11. The description of Britain, which is a salient feature of the Brut tradition, is
reminiscent of Nennius’s Historia Brittonum and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Thus, the
prophecy in the Metrical Chronicle, to give but one example, explicitly refers to Britain as
an island: “An yle god & riche inou . êe se geê al aboute.” Robert of Gloucester, The Met-
rical Chronicle, ed. William Aldis Wright, 2 vols., Rerum Britannicarum Medii Ævi
Scriptores (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887) 1: 332.
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 389

The Brut tradition retains this imagery,189 which in the Galfridian version sug-
gests an interesting doubling: first the little island in the ocean, then the circle of
the world. Note further that Britain itself appears in this description as an empty
locus, a potential correlative to the empty spot left by Troilus and the mytho-
logical bricolage that it prompts on the part of the audience. In the Brut, the im-
age of the island encircled by the sea stands out more clearly and bears similar-
ity both to the Dream of Scipio and Chaucer’s Troilus: “êat Ile is bycompassed
al with êe se, & no man may come êer-In but it be by schippes.”190 This passage,
the Chaucerian handling of which is an important intertext for John of Gaunt’s
famous speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II,191 ironically subverts such an impe-
rial outlook, at least from Troilus’s perspective. With Chaucer’s removal of
Troilus’s body (Trojan historiography) from Troy, he eradicates the seemingly
only plausible model of English national identification which inevitably, like all
Troy stories, harbors the nucleus of failure. Troilus is not a viable model for the
construction of national identities; he is not the maintainer of an imperial model
as is Scipio; he is not afforded with a view of imperial longevity, but with an in-
vocation of a changeable, brittle world. The narrator leaves behind two other

189
Wace’s Brut, for example, also has Brutus fall asleep and ‘dream’ the prophecy of Diana,
who says “Ultre France, luinz dedenz mer / Vers Occident, purras trover / Une ille bone e
abitable / E a maneir mult delitable” [Beyond France, far away in the sea towards the
West, you can find a fine island, fit to live in and delectable to dwell in] (ll. 681-84).
Wace’s “Roman de Brut”: A History of the British; Text and Translation, ed. and trans.
Judith Weiss, rev. ed., Exeter Medieval English Texts and Translations (Exeter: Univ. of
Exeter Press, 2002). The reference to the island is not as prominent here as it is in other
works, largely due to the fact that Wace omits the topographical descriptions of Britain
that ‘preface’ the accounts of Gildas, Bede, Nennius, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey
of Monmouth. See Wace’s “Roman de Brut” 3 n. 1.
190
The Caligula manuscript of Laõamon’s Brut has “Bi-õende France i êet west! êu scalt fin-
den a wunsum lond. / Êat lond is bi-urnan mid êære sae! êar-on êu scalt wryêan sæl.” Brut,
ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, 2 vols., EETS, o.s. 250, 277 (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1963, 1978) 1: 618-19. See also The Brut or The Chronicles of England, ed. Frie-
drich W. D. Brie, 2 vols., EETS, o.s. 131, 136 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner,
1906, 1908) III, 8.
191
Given the Metrical Chronicle’s and other texts’ emphases on the pristine purity of the
English, Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II has among its antecessors the chroni-
cle tradition and Chaucer, an intertext that, to my knowledge, has not been acknowledged
in Shakespeare studies. The passage is usually read as referring to the Somnium Scipionis.
See The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, ed. Matthew W. Black, New Vari-
orum Edition of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott, 1955) 101-02n; Alois Brandl,
Shakespeare: Leben – Umwelt – Kunst, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Ernst Hofmann, 1923) 199.
Brandl places the speech in the context of the emergence of national sentiments in Eng-
land, supposing an imperialist attitude on Shakespeare’s part; but cf. Thomas Metscher,
“‘And make poor England weep in streams of blood’: Nationale Geschichte und irenischer
Humanismus in Shakespeares Historien,” Nation und Literatur im Europa der Frühen
Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Garber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989) 482-85, 487. The Chaucerian in-
tertextuality would reinforce a counter-national reading.
390 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

characters, however, who could be enlisted among the mourners seen by Troi-
lus: Criseyde and Pandarus. Pandarus’s or Criseyde’s afterlives may not be dis-
cussed in the Troilus, but the narrator carefully develops their characters in
terms of providing models for conceiving nationhood prosopagraphically. Even-
tually, the poet himself, who illustrates best how international discourses can be
nationalized qua translucent prosopagraphy, offers a flexible model for making
selves and nations.
In construing Troilus’s elevated view of the “litel spot of erthe” from the
eighth sphere in terms of a ‘Cassandrian reading’ of its sources, I hope to have
revealed the national context inherent not only in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis,
Macrobius’s Commentarii, but – to a lesser extent – also in Lucan’s Pharsalia
and Boccaccio’s Teseida. The Brut tradition, which was one of the most widely
disseminated version of Britain’s Trojan origins, and its depiction of Britain has
to be likewise considered as an intertext with ‘national’ relevance. On this view,
the critical commonplace that Troilus represents Troy with the implication of an
allegorical reading of the moral, spiritual decline of the Trojan world,192 gains
another dimension. Troilus does not only represent Troy, he gestures toward a
specific tradition of Trojan historiography which is essential for the construction
of nationhood. That Troilus’s demise is a two-fold example, has already been
suggested: Troilus serves as a warning to the young lovers, on the one hand, and
points to “rejecting antiquity in its manifold cultural practices (rituals, gods, and
the substance of its poetry) for Dante’s hymn of praise to the trinity,” on the
other hand.193 There is, however, a third level that marks the transition, as Bow-
ers puts it, from polis to patria.194 This presents a double necessity of another
kind: nationalism becomes a substance that can be mediated through a multiplic-
ity of guises – a view that the Laud-poet underscores by framing the work with a
meditation on the three masks of the trinity, which becomes a key exemplifica-
tion of prosopagraphical selfhood. Both the negotiation of different masks
within the same substance and reconciling personal goods with the collective –
being an (Ovidian) lover and a (Virgilian) knight – are the preconditions for
healthy constructions of individuality and nationhood. Troilus’s attempt at con-

192
Even other characters, McCall argues, are aware of the equivalence of Troilus and Troy.
McCall, Chaucer 101-03. McCall hesitates to take this association further into the domain
of allegory for discussing the dissemination of narratives for the making of national
selves, although he does allow that “Chaucer apparently thought that his story of Troilus
and old Troy would recreate a past which might have a special impact upon the ‘New
Troy’ of England’s London and on its ‘yonge, fresshe folkes’” (104). See further Maresca,
Three English Epics esp. 194; Malcolm Andrew, “The Fall of Troy in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight and Troilus and Criseyde,” European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Boitani 86;
Boitani, “Antiquity and Beyond: The Death of Troilus,” European Tragedy of Troilus, ed.
Boitani 4-7; Stillinger, Song 159; Torti, Glass of Form 54, 56; Chance, Mythographic
Chaucer 107-08. See also Steinberg, “Embodiment” 262; cf. Patterson Chaucer 111-14.
193
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 74.
194
Bowers, “Chaucer” 57, with reference to Armstrong’s Nations before Nationalism.
 Chapter Fifteen: Chaucerian Nationhood 391

structing a mono-mythological, transparent Trojan identity necessarily fails, for

it is incapable, in its determinism, of providing balance. Troilus’s laughter marks
a laughter of the petty Trojan tradition likely to go on in the very place that he
has just left.195 As he enters the realm of transcendence, there is no need for Tro-
jan realpolitik anymore – as Karla Taylor has it, “Troilus’s transcendence leads
to a silence that cannot generate the poem; it can only end it.”196 While Troilus’s
exit does indeed end the poem, the historiographical authority of the Troy story
is removed, leaving a lacuna much like the empty page encountered at the end of
the House of Fame, which invites a re-reading of Chaucer’s Troy story.197 This
hermeneutic process invites the search for alternative models of constructing
selves and nations – models to be found in Pandarus, Criseyde, and the poet.

195
For Chaucer’s attempted side-stepping of Trojan history, which results in the impression
of a de-historicized Troy, see Patterson, Chaucer 104-14. Patterson further argues that in
the Troilus “the private stands wholly apart from and seeks to efface the public, just as, at
the level of genre, romance, a story focused on the fate of a single individual, seeks to pre-
empt tragedy, a story about (in the definition of Isidore of Seville) res publicas et regum
historias” (107). Everyone, including the narrator, the characters and the audience desire
to “suppress the historical consciousness” (113). For the repression of history, see further
Nolan, Chaucer 206; Federico, New Troy 72. My argument, which rephrases the two poles
of private and public as Ovidian and Virgilian, respectively, suggests that the solution lies
not in a correspondence of both domains but in the individual’s ability to connect the two
domains at the level of ethical goods (mythemes) that similarly hold in both realms.
196
Taylor, Chaucer Reads the “Divine Comedy” 175, 187.
197
“The reader of Troilus and Criseyde would do well to follow suit and to open another
book, perhaps one of Chaucer’s. My own impulse is to go back to its beginning, where the
narrator’s prayer leads us.” Frantzen, Troilus and Criseyde 132.
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Whi nyl I helpen to myn owen cure”: Transparent Troilus

Troilus illustrates the plight of historiography in general and of Trojan historiog-

raphy in particular. As represented in Chaucer, Trojan historiography is not dif-
ferent from its counterpart in the ‘Guido tradition’: it is a matter of Ovidian fick-
leness, of passivity, effeminacy, and of un-maskable emotional turmoil prevent-
ing prudent decision making. Troilus’s passivity, established first and foremost
in Guido’s Historia,198 results in the inability to maintain multiple masks, to veil
his excessive emotionality, which has been often noted,199 and which aligns him
with Guido’s Trojans, particularly with Priam, who becomes a foil against
which Trojan desires are projected. Troilus is not merely a ‘mock hero’ strik-
ingly at odds with the Virgilian heroism that enables knights to reach their goal
without pilots,200 he further becomes an Ovidian character reminiscent of the
abandoned women in the Heroides, fittingly underscoring the parallel plight of
Guido’s effeminate Trojans.201 Tison Pugh’s apt remark concerning Troilus’s
entrapment “between private desires and public roles,”202 however, indicates that

198
Writes Windeatt, “What receives more emphasis in Chaucer’s narrative is the ‘feere’ and
‘drede’ of the hero in love, fearful of confessing his love [...], and fearful of his lady’s re-
sponses to him and his love,” and so on. Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 276. Guido’s
Troilus, although not initially thus introduced, makes for an interesting precursor of Chau-
cer’s Troilus’s submissiveness. For Spearing, Troilus’s passivity and submissiveness “is
not really a matter of literary or amatory convention: he is imagined by Chaucer not sim-
ply as the mouthpiece of a certain conception of love, but as the sort of person he would
have to be, if he were truly committed to that conception.” Spearing’s suggestion that
Troilus does not only “pay lip-service to an idea of love, he really believes in it” antici-
pates my argument for Troilus as representing a mono-mythological construction of na-
tionhood. Spearing, Chaucer 41.
199
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 68; Muscatine, Chaucer 137; Corinne Saunders, “Love
and the Making of the Self: Troilus and Criseyde,” Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed.
Saunders 139; but cf. Kittredge, Chaucer 122-23. Some scholars are less worried about
Troilus’s self-control, e.g., McCall, Chaucer 95, 99.
200
Maresca stresses “the ludicrousness of Troilus as an epic hero: in many respects, he pre-
figures the heroes of mock-epic.” Maresca, Three English Epics 164.
201
Hagedorn, Abandoned Women 130-58. At the end of the poem, “Troilus rather than
Criseyde metamorphoses into a forlorn letter writer begging for the return of the beloved.
Chaucer’s narrative strategy allusively cross-dresses his characters, so that Criseyde be-
comes identified with the false Paris while Troilus resembles the weeping Ariadne, and
more importantly Briseis” (157).
202
Tison Pugh, “Christian Revelation and the Cruel Game of Courtly Love in Troilus and
Criseyde,” ChauR 39.4 (2005): 384. For the dividedness of Troilus, see also Boitani, The
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 393

Troilus is not quite as transparent as his historiographical precursor in the Histo-

ria. Troilus, as opposed to many Trojans in the Historia, is aware of the several
masks to be adopted, but he strives nonetheless for a model that reconciles the
realms of Venerean courtly love and martial responsibility. Unlike Pandarus or
Criseyde, he is incapable of maintaining contradictions, since in his attempt to
do this, he falls back on the Trojan model of transparency which he desires in
the first place.203 The attempt at transparency is marred, though, since he has to
navigate the dichotomy of Ovidian and Virgilian models (which Chaucer dis-
cerned in the Troy story). Troilus is hopelessly adrift on an Ovidian ocean, sub-
ject to two contrary winds, two seemingly exclusive ethical goods: Ovidian love
and Virgilian knighthood. After adopting love as his hypergood,204 Troilus be-
comes ‘religiously’ mono-mythological. Unable to engage in the mythological
bricolage to be discerned in many of Benoît’s and Guido’s women, Troilus re-
mains narratorially inflexible regarding the unification of the two mythical sys-
tems; his mono-mythological Trojan historiography is doomed to failure.
In the following, I illustrate that Troilus’s ‘self-fashioning’ is chiefly a matter
of attempting to construe narrative masks in order to veil the all-informing
Venerean good. He espies this ontological principle in Criseyde, who is attrac-
tive to him for that very reason. Ultimately, however, all his masks collapse be-
cause the hypergood ultimately renders all masks identical; masking turns into
unmasking.205 This already problematic creation of selfhood becomes even more
perilous in the public realm. Once Troilus has adopted the new good, his charac-
terization is reminiscent of Geffrey (in the House of Fame) who is likewise lost
on a textual ocean. Being the narrator of his own story, of course, Geffrey exerts
some control over his text, whereas Troilus is lost upon the seas of love-lore
from the beginning and subsequently adopts an Ovidian principle of emotional
changeability. Unlike Guido, Chaucer delineates different kinds of Ovidianism,
distinguishing between characters who are excessively changeable and un-

Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989)
69-74. This dividedness exemplifies “the paradox of life, the tragic gulf that separates and
joins the ‘contraries’” (74).
203
I refer to Troilus as transparent since he is transparent to the reader, a point made also by
Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 98. This outward transparency correlates with
Troilus’s own desire to render his selves completely transparent despite his awareness of
the contradictions inherent in any process of identification.
204
Consequently, the love (that is, erotic) interest takes precedence over everything else in
the poem. See Robertson, Preface 472-502; Vance, Mevelous Signals 283-310; Wether-
bee, Chaucer 118; Patterson, Chaucer 106 n. 64.
205
With reference to the ‘frenzy scene’ in Book Four (after Troilus has learned that Criseyde
is going to be exchanged), Paxson observes that “Troilus’s ontological reduction or reifi-
cation is concomitant upon figurative stripping away, unmasking, de-facement; it provides
an occulted micronarrative of the negation of facement or prosopopoeia while it also nar-
rated the building up of containers and their secret contents.” Paxson, “Semiotics of Char-
acter” 213-14.
394 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

centered, and an Ovidian poet yielding the means necessary for textual control.
Belonging to the former rather than the latter, Troilus requires a praeceptor am-
oris to steer him through the storm. He is therefore strongly associated with the
sailor/soldier/lover of the Ars amatoria, which also places him in a national con-
text. The Ars, as seen above, poses as a national work negotiating the issue of
control within a system of prosopagraphical selfhood that enables the adoption
of multiple masks (Lanham’s rhetorical selves), generated by a centered agency.
This model, then, includes both Virgilian stasis and Ovidian changeability. Both
are important for self-fashioning and for national historiography.
Troilus adopts either one good (Venus) or, less often, the other (Mars). Cru-
cially, he is not in control of the masks he appropriates, or rather, the masks that
are imposed on him by collective discourse.206 He therefore represents a collec-
tive opportunism which appositely renders his identity analogous to that of
Troy: he is what others want him to be, while being ‘postmodernly’ confused
about the various narratives vying for appropriation. His Venerean desire finally
becomes so entrenched that he is unable to remove or alter it, even when it is
obvious that both opacity and transparency are required to maintain a healthy
personality, in order to live.207 Troilus moves forward within the Ovidian cursus,
but is unable to put into action the advice of the Remedia amoris. Instead, he
chooses the topos of abandonment, the Heroides, as a vehicle to cope with his
grief. His appropriation of role models remains mythically inflexible rather than
mythologically productive. Despite the fact that the narrative increasingly asso-
ciates Troilus’s position with that of Ovid’s persona in the Tristia, the realiza-
tion of his error – that is, the inability to recombine available narratives in order
to accommodate both opacity and transparency – comes too late. In terms of the
historiographical model for making nationhood in fourteenth-century England,
this is only conclusive: His apotheosis does not contradict his military insuffi-
ciency, for it is consistent with a deterministic construction of collective identity
based on the un-questioned implementation of a mono-mythological, transparent
Trojanness208 – a paradigm the poet removes with Troilus’s body, making way
for alternative models for the construction of selves and nations.

206
The masks are primarily imposed on him by Pandarus, Criseyde, and his family who im-
part the martial responsibilities. Pandarus, however, is merely a whirlpool of public narra-
tives, of public myths, rendering him a non-identity (see below).
207
“Desire, too, has gone somewhere else, past capacity and will in a paradoxical liberation.”
It is a liberation since “Troilus escapes not just the circumstances of his historical moment
but the circumstances of history itself,” but he “does not escape the textuality that releases
him from history.” Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 72, 73.
208
That Troilus’s self-fashioning is deterministic is captured in F. Anne Payne’s reference to
Troilus as an unsuccessful determinist in her Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1981) 124.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 395

1. “What may I nat stonden here?”: From Virgilian Epic to Ovidian Elegy
Troilus’s transformation from scorning courtly love to being excessively in love
is often discussed in terms of conversion models.209 Love ‘hits him’ – in the
temple of Pallas210 – and ‘it’ does so precisely at the moment he comments on
his rhetorical abilities rather than love:
And with that word he gan caste up the browe,
Ascaunces, ‘Loo! is this naught wisely spoken?’
At which the God of Love gan loken rowe
Right for despit, and shop for to ben wroken.
(I. 204-07, emphases added)
Troilus’s pride, which is often seen as a version of Trojan pride, lies not only in
deeming himself superior to the lovers, but also in voicing pride about his rhe-
torical abilities. Troilus, though, is a particularly incompetent rhetor, and the re-
venge of the God of Love ensues promptly – by taking away Troilus’s abilities
to rhetorically reconcile contradictory roles. At the outset, Troilus joins the lov-
ers without being in love, which is already a ‘contrary’ that indicates a fascina-
tion contradicting his aloofness from what is happening around him.211 Moreo-
ver, he already exemplifies one of his chief characteristics, namely, the inability
to mask his emotions – in this case, he openly ridicules his friends. More spe-
cifically, he fails here to mask his pride about his abilities. His point of view vis-
à-vis a particular good, which he does not understand because he has not experi-
enced it (that is, has not tested it experientially), is further a matter of narrative.
As in the Laud Troy Book and the Historia, the Trojan self is a narrative self
striving for transparency. Notably, the superiority that Troilus attempts to por-
tray is in need of confirmation, of mirroring. In fact, his search for approval
from ‘above’ suggests that he is insecure and self-conscious about his ‘prudent’

209
See Nolan, Chaucer 201; Dabney Bankert, “Secularizing the Word: Conversion Models in
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 37.3 (2003): 199-202. If Troilus’s falling in love
with Criseyde is analogous to Achilles’s sudden obsession with Polyxena (see below), one
has to stress the differences of this conversion. While Achilles temporarily converts from
Greek to Trojan, Troilus converts from regular Trojan to orthodox (Guidoan) Trojan.
210
This setting, also found in Boccaccio’s Filostrato, may be ultimately reminiscent of the
places listed in the Ars amatoria, which lend themselves to meet women. See Nolan,
Chaucer 147. For Patricia Orr, the temple of Pallas Athena constructs an analogue to the
judgment of Paris and the potential choice of Venus (pleasure), Juno (the active life), or
Pallas (the life of contemplation) – a choice that sets in motion the tragedy of Troy. Orr,
“Pallas Athena and the Threefold Choice in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” The Mytho-
graphic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England,
ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1990) 165. See further Robertson,
“The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval
Texts,” The Meaning of Courtly Love, ed. F. X. Newman (Albany: State Univ. of New
York Press, 1968) 11-12.
211
Hollander remarks upon Troiolo’s “amorous disposition that was to be reawakened” in
Boccaccio’s Two Venuses 50.
396 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

words. In turn, this indicates that Troilus’s self-fashioning is always a matter of

narratives provided by others, of searching for narratives that appropriately ex-
press what he thinks he is feeling; Troilus, like Geffrey in the House of Fame,
needs a “sterisman.”
The Troilus begins with the problem of not having any pilot – an aporia that
conjoins Virgilian epic and Ovidian elegy in much more intricate and complex
ways than in the House of Fame. The poem opens as the tragedy of Troilus and
not only places Troilus on Fortuna’s wheel, but, in a sense, also at the beginning
of the Ovidian cursus. Besides the emphasis on the didactic aspects of the poem,
featuring prominently in the Ars (in a national context), the background of the
poem – calling for the conveyance of heroic action, which according to the nar-
rator should be read elsewhere – and the manner in which Troilus is wounded by
Amor’s arrow explicitly recall the opening of the Amores (especially I. i-ii).212
With a view to Guidoan historiography, this becomes a rather transparent move:
the Troilus investigates the Ovidian realm of changeability itself and is, there-
fore, less concerned with the strong Virgilian Greeks and their deeds of arms.
Aspects of collective identification are not absent, however, as is implicitly em-
phasized by a comparison of Troilus and Bayard that is absent from the Filos-
trato.213 Not only does the homely image of the horse transpose the events of
Troy into markedly English environs, the analogy of Troilus and the horse fur-
ther yields (psychological) insights into Troilus’s personality:
“Though I praunce al byforn
First in the trays, ful fat and newe shorn,
Yet am I but an hors, and horses lawe
I moot endure, and with my feres drawe....” (I. 221-24)
Although he is the son of a king and believes himself to be aloof, he now joins
his companions and adopts a similar good – perhaps Chaucer remembered Troi-
lus’s “corde magnaminus” in Guido’s Historia.214 The proud knight who sup-

212
Windeatt (99n) sees in the image of a vengeful Cupid primarily an allusion to Met. I. 452-
73. The entire opening of the Troilus, however, rather seems to share many aspects with
the opening of the Amores.
213
The horse has been variously seen as representing fleshly lust or reason (Windeatt 101n).
214
Guido’s embellishment of Benoît at this point has been discussed above. Joseph of Exe-
ter’s description, although not emphasizing Troilus’s heart, nonetheless stresses Troilus’s
inexperience, which likewise renders him impressionable: “Troilus in spacium surgentes
explicat artus, / Mente Gigas, etate puer nullique secundus / Audendo virtutis opus, mixto-
que vigore / Gratior illustres insignit gloria vultus” [Troilus was broad and tall. In spirit he
was a giant, but in age he was a boy. He was second to none in venturing upon brave
deeds. Pride graced his noble features, more pleasing because it was blended with manly
vigor] (IV. 61-64). Joseph Iscanus, Frigii Daretis Yliados libri sex, Werke und Briefe, ed.
Ludwig Gompf, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1970), trans. by Gil-
das Roberts as The Iliad of Dares Phrygius (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1970). Note,
however, that Troilus is depicted as a ‘blend’ of different, even contradictory traits rather
than the transparent ‘anti-hero’ of Guido’s Historia. As Windeatt has shown, Troilus
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 397

posed that “nothing hadde had swich myght / Ayeyns his wille that shuld his
herte stere,” now finds out “That he that now was moost in pride above, / Wax
sodeynly moost subgit unto love” (I. 227-31); love enthralls the “fredom of
youre hertes” (I. 235). The poet’s description of love leaves no doubt that this
hypergood strives for transparency, that it literally subordinates all other social
roles, collapses all masks in binding them together into one: “For evere it was,
and evere it shal byfalle, / That Love is he that alle thing may bynde, / For may
no man fordon the lawe of kynde” (I. 236-38).215 If ever there was something in-
dividual about Troilus, he now adopts a common good of his culture, a good that
tragically informs all of his future decisions and actions and, therefore, renders
him transparent and helpless despite his laudable attempt of negotiating two
diametrically opposed domains: Virgilian arms and Ovidian love.
In the light of Troilus’s attempts to link contradictory roles, it is interesting to
speculate what Troilus finds so immensely attractive about Criseyde. I believe
that an answer can be found in the general framework of masking within the
Troy story, which includes an analogue to the way in which Troilus falls in love,
namely, Achilles’s sudden infatuation with Polyxena, which subjects the valiant
‘Homeric’ Achilles to the same destructive hypergood prevalent in Troy –
Achilles becomes a Trojan. Moreover, Achilles’s obsession with Polyxena was
caused in no small part by the fact that she proved able to reconcile divergent
qualities, a talent Benoît offers as a productive alternative to Greek opacity (later
condemned by Guido). There are many instances in the opening of Troilus that
justify a comparison of the two love-stricken heroes: both Troilus and Achilles
are attending a ceremony (in Achilles’s case the anniversary of Hector’s death,
while Troilus attends the festival of Pallas); both are suddenly subject to love;
both women are shown to be mourning (Polyxena mourns the death of her
brother Hector, Criseyde mourns her late husband); and both Achilles’s and
Troilus’s sudden passions prompt a narratorial warning about the risks of love,
in this case with the poet liberally borrowing from Benoît’s Roman.216 This is

emerges as a more emotional character compared to the Filostrato. Windeatt, “Italian to

English” 82.
215
According to Aers, observance is a good Troilus lacks: “He ‘needs’ a woman as marker of
his own subjectivity.” Love, in the context of the poem and in the fourteenth century in
general, is a craft, “a major strand in the constitution of masculine identity.” Love, moreo-
ver, “is certainly a powerful way of binding the individual into the class.” Aers, Commu-
nity 120, 122, 124. Love is indeed a good capable of linking several masks. In Troilus’s
case, however, love becomes an all-informing good that does not allow for competing
goods to provide other ‘horizontal’ cores.
216
After Troilus has become ‘subject to love,’ the narrator asks the audience to take good
heed of this example (I. 232-52). Benoît similarly offers this situation as instructive: “Qui
est qui vers Amors est sage? / Ço n’est il pas ne ne puet estre: / En Amors a trop grevos
maistre; / Trop par lit grevose leçon. / Ço parut bien a Salemon” (ll. 18448-52). See also
Windeatt 101n; Guido, Historia XXV, 192-93. In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower
makes much of the fact that both Troilus and Achilles fall in love with their respective la-
398 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

where important differences have to be acknowledged, since both women are

portrayed differently in this situation. Polyxena, of astounding beauty, is crying.
The tears are rolling down her cheek, her face has the color of ivory, and yet her
cheeks are rosy. Criseyde, portrayed as outdoing nature in terms of beauty,217
appears to be more composed when Troilus notices her.218
The most important trait that both Polyxena and Criseyde share is their indi-
viduality, by which I mean their ability to reconcile personal and public roles.
Guido has been shown to modify Benoît’s focus not only on Polyxena’s general
outer appearance but also her breasts, a sexual aspect muted in Guido’s por-
trayal. This emphasizes the stance of the portrayed women rather than merely
their physical attributes. Polyxena is able to reconcile personal and public roles,
illustrating the literary processes required to do so. The contradiction of grief
(ivory) and passion (roses) is literally written on her face (tabula). The same ap-
plies to Criseyde, whose immaculate physical appearance is described also in
terms of writing: “Right as oure firste lettre is now an A” (I. 171). Like Polyx-
ena, her combinatory abilities make Criseyde stand apart from the crowd, and
she physically creates her individual space. That she is a widow is almost over-
emphasized (I. 97, 109, 170, 177) as is the fact that she is alone. She has lost her
husband, she was abandoned by her father, and now she is spatially on her own,
too: “And yet she stood ful lowe and stille allone, / Byhynden other folk, in litel
brede” (I. 178-79).219 For an abandoned woman, she appears to be rather strong
and self-assertive: “Simple of atir and debonaire of chere, / With ful assured lo-
kyng and manere” (I. 181-82). Not only is Criseyde described in terms of en-
compassing contradictory traits,220 she is likewise able, as is Guido’s Polyxena,
to reconcile her personal masks (her widowhood and the problematic actions of
her father) with a public role, that is, she is not entirely immersed in public Tro-
jan discourse, as one would expect given her ‘history.’ Troilus appears to be par-
ticularly impressed by this assertiveness, which is very differently handled in the

dies in a ‘church’: “And ek tak hiede of Achilles, / Whan he unto his love ches / Polixena,
that was also / In holi temple of Appollo, / Which was the cause why he dyde / And al his
lust was leyd asyde. / And Troilus upon Criseide / Also his ferste love leide / In holi place,
and hou it ferde, / As who seith, al the world it herde; / Forsake he was for Diomede, /
Such was of love his laste mede.” The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay,
2 vols., EETS, e.s. 81, 82 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900-01) V. 7591-7602.
217
Criseyde represents the ideal of beauty as defined by the Greek painter Zeuxis, who is
mentioned by Pandarus in a passage that discusses different ways of reconciling contradic-
tions inherent in individuals in terms of prosopagraphical selfhood (see below).
218
At her first reported action, Criseyde is also crying (“In widewes habit”), begging Hector
for mercy and protection (I. 106-112).
219
There is no equivalent for these lines in Boccaccio’s Filostrato (Windeatt 97n).
220
As Spearing has it, “Criseyde is made up of contradictory elements from beginning to end:
an innocent widow, of uncertain age, who loves deeply and yet slips into treacherous infi-
delity. [...] The contradiction between shyness and self-possession immediately arouses in-
terest. [...] Once she leaves Troy, the contradictions multiply.” Spearing, Chaucer 48.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 399

Filostrato.221 Troilus is struck by her ‘haughtiness,’ a kind of arrogance which I

see, in the context of Kiril Petkov’s work, as the anticipation of an alternative
value system.222 Troilus likes her appearance “Which somdel deignous was, for
she let falle / Hire look a lite aside in swich manere, / Ascaunces, ‘What, may I
nat stonden here?’” Never had he seen “so good a syghte” (I. 290-94).223
In analogy to Guidoan Troilus, the heart of Chaucer’s anti-hero assumes a
life of its own, one that controls Troilus’s entire being.224 The narrator does men-
tion that even the strongest knight could be thrown off-course by love – “This
was, and is” (I. 245). The adopted hypergood, however, takes over Troilus’s
heart completely: “Therwith his herte gan to sprede and rise” (I. 278), and (the
image of) Criseyde becomes literally imprinted in his heart (I. 295-301); the nar-
rator commends love for its power to convert people: “Blissed be Love, that kan
thus folk converte!” (I. 308). Not exactly the model rhetor to begin with, Troilus
is now without a narrative as “He neither chere made, ne word tolde” (I. 312).
At the same time, an emerging need becomes pertinent since “His woo he gan
dissimilen and hide” (I. 322). Troilus attempts to mask his emotions, here de-
scribed (qua dissimuler) in terms of hypocrisy associated with the Greek camp
in the Troy story. He is, in fact, capable of maintaining as a mask the old per-
sona of the cynic speaking out against love: “Al feyneth he in lust that he sojor-
neth, / And al his chere and speche also he borneth” (I. 326-27). This remedy is
effective only for a short while, though, before Troilus has to dissimulate again,
221
In Il Filostrato, Criseida becomes completely transparent since she removes her veil: “e
col braccio il mantel tolto davanti / s’avea dal viso, largo a sé faccendo, / ed alquanto la
calca rimovendo” [With her arm she had removed her mantle from before her face, mak-
ing room for herself and pushing the crowd a little aside] (Fil. I. 27). Although Criseyde is
slightly more objectified in Troilus, Edwards’s discussion of the hybrid use of the Roman
de la Rose and the Consolation of Philosophy suggests that “The source of the image [of
her], as the poem makes clear, is not in itself passive, for Criseyde strikes a confident pose
and asserts her right to stand where she wishes.” Edwards, “Pandarus’s ‘Unthrift’ and the
Problem of Desire,” Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” ed. Shoaf 80. The veil becomes
an important asset in prosopagraphical terms insofar as it represents translucent rather than
completely transparent identities (see below).
222
Deignous may not immediately appear to be a positive quality. Criseyde’s haughtiness is,
however, qualified by a ‘somewhat.’ Moreover, Petkov suggests that in French fabliaux,
arrogance represents the development of an alternative value system (which can be seen as
corresponding to acts of individualization). Petkov, “‘Hom orgoilloz ne puet longues du-
rer’: Mobility, Arrogance, and Class in the Old French Fabliaux,” Exemplaria 18.1
(2006): 137-74.
223
Cf. Gretchen Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,” ChauR 26.2 (1991): 121.
She wonders, “What does Chaucer’s Troilus love about Criseyde? He loves her beauty,
her womanliness, and her ‘bounte,’ and that exhausts his account of her attractions. Troi-
lus’s love for Criseyde is not grounded in her qualities; in fact, nothing in Troilus and
Criseyde suggests that Criseyde has qualities that could ground a love like Troilus’s.”
224
Paul Strohm indicates that Troilus “moves and acts at a lower velocity than Pandarus and
Criseyde, betraying an inertia in his actions that always tends toward stasis.” Strohm, So-
cial Chaucer 119. See further Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 276-77.
400 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

this time pretending that he has to attend to important business (I. 354-55). His
ability to mentally fabricate a mask is short-lived. Once he has left the temple,
the image of Criseyde reaches his mind. From this moment on, her image –
metaphorically representing her – controls not only his emotions but also his
thoughts: “Thus gan he make a mirour of his mynde / In which he saugh al holly
hire figure, / And that he wel koude in his herte fynde” (I. 365-67). As the image
is transferred from his heart to his mind, the hypergood (Criseyde) almost liter-
ally maps itself onto all other masks to the point of collapse.225 That a new hy-
pergood is in place emerges most forcefully in the Petrarchan Canticus Troili,
but before Troilus sings his song, he acknowledges the need for the masking
practices that are increasingly beyond his reach: “What for to speke, and what to
holden inne” (I. 387), he wonders as love bursts forth in an act of inventio that
Chaucer attributes to the authority of Lollius, that is, a narrative mask.
The Canticus Troili brings to the fore, couched within Petrarchan (Virgilian)
ideals of stasis and fixed meanings,226 precisely the problems of changeability,
of accommodating contradictory goods. The song is also a transparent outburst
of Troilus’s emotionality, one which foregrounds the motif of being adrift, of
being without a “sterisman.” The notes in most editions point out that the pilot is
a conventional poetological motif (I. 416, Barney 1028n). In a poem in which
the central character is educated by an Ovidian praeceptor amoris, Pandarus,
who almost embodies the steering of both Ars and Remedia, however, there
might be more to the allusion. Complains Troilus, “Al sterelees withinne a boot
am I / Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, / That in contrarie stonden evere
mo” (I. 416-18). Despite its proverbial character, it is noteworthy that Chaucer
thought fit to include this passage, for which there is no equivalent in the Filos-

225
Hence, the Troilus continues the dichotomy of heart and mind prevalent in Guido’s Histo-
ria. Slightly later, Chaucer reverses this translation of heart into mind, by translating mind
into heart when Troilus’s heart becomes the eye of his breast, focusing on Criseyde only,
who is described as being fairer than Helen – the woman whose very beauty was the cause
of the war (I. 453-55).
226
For the relationship between Petrarch and Chaucer, see David Wallace, “‘Whan She
Translated Was’: A Chaucerian Critique of the Petrarchan Academy,” Literary Practice
and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1990) 156-215. Petrarch was a poet of stasis given his desire “to escape history en-
tirely: Petrarch dreamed of producing finalized texts of permanent value” (161, and see
163). Moreover, poetical ideas were often aligned with political ideas: when traveling to
Italy from Provence in 1353, for instance, “Petrarch figures himself as an Aeneas, carrying
a precious burden on his back; this patrimony is his library, which includes some of his
own compositions (Fam. 15.3)” (172). Wallace further draws attention to Petrarch’s sus-
picion of masking, which is a debased form of the function of rhetoric (180-82). In con-
trast to Petrarch’s worries about his textual afterlife, Chaucer’s concerns “are lightened by
an edge of humor that accepts physical decay as the inevitable future of both texts and the
people who make them” (215).
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 401

trato at this point.227 Troilus’s loss of guidance further recalls a central moment
in the House of Fame, and it points forward to another instance of being set
adrift at the end of the poem, when beholding the island encircled by the sea. In
the House of Fame, the dreamer describes how he sees Aeneas lose his pilot,
who falls overboard, en route to Italy (HF 436-38, cited above), an incident that
takes up little space in the Aeneid (V. 8-22). While in the House of Fame, the
loss of authority is contextualized on the plot and narratorial levels in terms of
two competing textual authorities, Ovid and Virgil, Troilus is caught between
two competing goods as well: Virgilian arma and Ovid amor. Finally, though, it
is the martial, collective responsibility which Troilus surrenders, evinced in an-
other visualization of changing goods, this time of adopting the spirit of the God
of Love – “O lord, now youres is / My spirit, which that oughte youres be” (I.
422-23) – in favor of his royalty: “For myn estat roial I here resigne / Into hire
hond, and with ful humble chere / Bicome hir man, as to my lady dere” (I. 432-
34).228 Given Troilus’s Petrarchan borrowings, “perhaps in some metaphorical
way the Canzoniere itself is part of Troilus’s psyche, the very inscription of the
courtly lover’s discourse, and he composes well only when he translates
well.”229 Or, for that matter, he can exist only when the narratives that are pro-
vided by others allow it.
With the adoption of the new good, the dreadful siege retreats into the back-
ground (I. 463-64), and Troilus loses the Virgilian prowess that should form a
large part of his public persona. Ironically, his amorous inclinations peaceably
coexist with his military duties, if only on different planes of perception.230 The
deeds of war “Ne made hym only therfore ones meve; / And yet was he, where
so men wente or riden, / Founde oon the beste” (I. 472-74). Chaucer maintains
Boccaccio’s emphasis on the report of witnesses by means of people finding him
to be such a vengeful knight. This less certain phraseology emphasizes the act of
perception (“color che stesser ciò forse a mirare” [Fil. I. 45]) and points up the
central importance for the other-imposition of masks which gains momentum in
the depiction of Troilus. Troilus indeed appears to be a valiant knight, but this

227
For nautical imagery, see further: I. 969; II. 1-6, 1104; III. 1291; IV. 282; V. 641-44; and
Windeatt 125n. For a comparison of the nautical imagery in Troilus’s first and second
songs, see Stillinger, Song 165-206. Robertson draws attention to a parallel passage in
Prov. 23. 33-34. Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy” 15. Knight believes that the steerless
boat is “an ultimate image of helplessness, used in Old English poetry of that desperate
solitary, the lordless man.” Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer 43.
228
The humbler cheer is appropriate, since Troilus loses his ‘hewe’ no less than sixty times in
the course of a day (I. 441).
229
Stillinger, Song 187-88.
230
On account of his love for Criseyde, Troilus becomes “more noble, more courageous, a
better leader, a better friend, in every way a better member of the polis.” Josephine
Bloomfield, “Chaucer and the Polis” 296. See further Saunders, “Love” 137. The problem,
though, is that of perception: Troilus may be a better knight, but he is certainly none the
happier for it.
402 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

opaque prosopagraphy leaves him fragmented. At the same time, Troilus gains
confidence through the attempted construction of the lover’s mask, fabricating
“argumentes to his conclusioun: / That she of him wolde han compassioun” (I.
466-67). Martial prowess, in other words, is not a good in itself anymore, but
becomes a means to an end:231
But for non hate he to the Grekes hadde,
Ne also for the rescous of the town,
Ne made hym thus in armes for to madde,
But only, lo, for this conclusioun:
To liken hire the bet for his renoun.
Fro day to day in armes so he spedde
That the Grekes as the deth him dredde. (I. 477-83)
This almost counter-Virgilian sentiment finds an analogue in other attempts to
make an actual emotion seem to be something else.
After thus manipulating the audience’s perception of Troilus, the poet reports
that whoever would pay attention to Troilus could notice a change of hue in him
in the mornings and evenings, which exemplifies Troilus’s lack of success in
masking his feelings. While Troiolo is perceived as afraid of the war (Fil. I. 47),
Troilus searches for an excuse for his emotional transparency and finds one in
sickness: “Therfor a title he gan him for to borwe / Of other siknesse, lest men
of hym wende / That the hote fir of love hym brende” (I. 488-90).232 Further-
more, the poet adds that Troilus “seyde he hadde a fevere and ferde amys” (I.
491). That this masquerade is poorly executed is obvious, since the poet is be-
wildered about the fact that Criseyde does not notice that Troilus suffers on her
account; the only explanation is that she might be acting. If she were to be act-
ing, however, her masking is effective (I. 492-94). Troilus’s title notwithstand-
ing, he continues to be worried about his public persona primarily because he is
afraid of potentially contradicting himself (I. 505-18). Unable to create a narra-
tive that rationalizes his change to others (not to mention himself), he rather
wants to be dead, which he metaphorizes, as does Troiolo, in terms of the famil-
iar nautical imagery: “God wold I were aryved in the port / Of deth” (I. 526-27).
Unable to sail without a pilot (like Aeneas and Geffrey), Troilus requires a prae-
ceptor amoris, Pandarus, to save his life.233
231
Robertson, “Concept of Courtly Love” 13-14; Richard A. Lanham, “Opaque Style and Its
Uses in Troilus and Criseide,” Studies in Medieval Culture 3 (1970): 174.
232
The word title has a wide range of meanings, including inscription, particularly the “su-
perscription on Christ’s cross,” sections in a book, and designating an office. Most impor-
tantly, it refers to “A name under which an activity or condition is sanctioned, esp. one
used to conceal the true nature of the activity or condition.” MED, s.v. title n. 1. (a) and 4.
The ambiguities arising from these multiple meanings ironically undercut Troilus’s ability
to mask his intentions, especially when considering the reference to books. After all, Troi-
lus is as bad a reader as he is a veiler.
233
Pandarus and Troilus are Ovidian characters, but both are contrasted with the Ovidian nar-
rator of the Ars insofar as they represent the extremes of prosopagraphical selfhood: Troi-
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 403

2. “Wol ye be my steere”: From Troilus to His Praeceptores Amoris

Pandarus’s helpfulness underlines yet again that Troilus’s mask is not as effec-
tive as either Troilus or the poet appears to think.234 Pandarus, arriving unan-
nounced and overhearing Troilus’s moaning, only seems worried about his
friend’s all-too obvious sickness – the audience learns later that he suspects
Troilus’s love from the beginning (II. 505-53). And yet, Pandarus approaches
the subject through the lens of Boccaccio’s Trojans, attributing Troilus’s
changes of hue to the threat of Greek victory (I. 553). Obviously, however, it is
love that troubles Troilus, that prompts his heart to ‘sail to death,’ and that ren-
ders the thought of death dearer “To me than kyng of Grece ben and Troye” (I.
609), an astounding assertion absent from Il Filostrato. Moreover, Troilus “an-
ticipates death more passively but more eagerly” than Troiolo (Windeatt 125n):
Troilus does not attempt to sail the seas; rather, he can be found wherever the
wind of love blows him. He does not intend to change the course, that is, the
narrative model he has chosen for himself. He passively chooses death rather
than productively reconciling individual desires and collective duties, and rather
than hybridizing Greece and Troy into a Trojan nation that accommodates the
different ontological strategies of both camps. Ironically, it is this hybridity of
both masks, the intersection of a military and amorous masks that would warrant
his personhood. Troilus, however, chooses not to steer himself, and leaves the
steering to Pandarus.
Troilus’s passivity is such that Pandarus grows increasingly alarmed during
his speech, suspecting the addressee has died (I. 624-728) – twice, he cries
“Awake!” (I. 729, 751).235 While Troilus is still alive, he is not inclined to share
his plight with Pandarus, since love matters should remain “secree” (I. 744).
Troilus would not be Troilus, however, if the brittle masks were not to eventu-
ally give way to complete transparency. But first, he attempts to demythologize
(Pandarus’s) public discourse, attempting to mask his emotionality. He harshly
reprimands Pandarus for his “olde ensaumples” and rejects the roles offered as
tenable ontological alternatives:
“For I have herd thi wordes and thi lore;
But suffre me my meschief to bywaille,
For thy proverbes may me naught availle.

Nor other cure kanstow non for me;

Ek I nyl nat ben cured; I wol deye.

lus does not learn that masking is pivotal for processes of identification, and Pandarus in-
dicates that masking without mask intersection is likewise problematic. Criseyde is the
only character providing a tenable model not only for self-fashioning, but also for ade-
quately delineating personal and national masks and determining their intersection.
234
See Alan T. Gaylord, “Friendship in Chaucer’s Troilus,” ChauR 3.4 (1969): 242; Windeatt
121n.
235
The cry is reminiscent of the House of Fame 556, 560.
404 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

What knowe I of the queene Nyobe?

Lat be thyne olde ensaumples, I the preye.” (I. 754-60)
Finally, Troilus’s endeavor to demythologize public discourse results in a
wholesale mythologizing of his own situation. At this point, as Calabrese notes,
Troilus demonstrates how little he knows about Ovid.236 Generally, Troilus dis-
likes bookish activities, which is related to his future failures of putting himself
into someone else’s position, to assume masks of others even for a moment – he
is simply not interested in other systems of thought.237 Only when Pandarus re-
minds him that Criseyde will never hear of his love and that his death would be
naturally attributed to fear of arms, does Troilus lend an ear to Pandarus (I. 936-
38). He fully embraces the mode of courtly love that he had adopted already
when the Cupid’s arrow hit him. At the same time, he adopts Pandarus as his
guide, as his “sterisman.”238 Troilus’s life therefore depends equally on Criseyde
and Pandarus, the latter promising him to procure Criseyde: “My lif, my deth,
hol in thyn hond I leye” (I. 1053). The first book, then, opens with public con-
cerns and how individuals can reconcile these with their own desires. While
Criseyde exemplifies that personal and collective myths can be synthesized,
Troilus exemplifies the perils of transparent prosopagraphy.
Troilus’s first appearance in the second book, though, is Virgilian (in a pas-
sage original with Chaucer): Troilus’s horse is wounded, but the rider is beam-
ing with prowess.239 Troilus turns Virgilian and bears little resemblance to the
Ovidian Venus which he believes to be in charge of his destiny: “But swich a
knyghtly sighte trewely / As was on hym, was nought, without faille, / To loke
on Mars, that god is of bataille.”240 Troilus, the narrator adds with further Virgil-

236
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 37, with minor qualifications at 58.
237
This expands upon Calabrese’s notion that all characters in the poem belong to the species
of homo rhetoricus outlined by Lanham. Calabrese argues that because of his belief that
Apollo speaks from the laurel tree (and not, as would be correct, Daphne), Troilus displays
“his amateur rank as a verbal artist.” Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 37. Victoria War-
ren highlights Troilus’s self-absorption and self-interestedness, which result in a misread-
ing of Criseyde. Warren, “(Mis)Reading the ‘Text’ of Criseyde: Context and Identity in
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 36.1 (2001): 1-15.
238
Troilus’s dependence on Pandarus can be seen in a queer framework, in which Pandarus
“does not win Troilus’s love in a sexual manner, but [...] does gain Troilus’s dependence
upon him.” Pugh, “Queer Pandarus? Silence and Sexual Ambiguity in Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde,” PQ 80.1 (2001): 17-35, quotation at 30.
239
Windeatt notes the similarity to Hector’s return from battle in the Roman de Troie (183n).
240
In the Aeneid, a triumphant Aeneas paces the ‘hall’: “ipse iugis Cynthi graditur mollique
fluentem / fronde premit crinem fingens atque implicat auro, / tela sonant umeris: haud illo
segnior ibat / Aeneas, tantum egregio decus enitet ore” [But the god walks the Cynthian
ridge alone and smoothes his hair, binds it in fronded laurel, braids it in gold; and shafts
ring on his shoulders. So elated and swift, Aeneas walked with sunlit grace upon him]. P.
Vergili Maronis Aeneidos liber quartus, ed. R. G. Austin (1955; Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1982) IV. 147-50. All parenthetical references are to this edition; I use Robert Fitzgerald’s
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 405

ian echoes, “So lik a man of armes and a knyght / He was to seen, fulfilled of
heigh prowesse” (II. 628-32).241 Crossing the threshold between battlefield and
town, the mask turns out to be brittle even at such a heroic moment. Troilus’s
emotionality is visible as he “wex a litel reed for shame” (II. 645) when the peo-
ple’s praise him.242 Notably, the sentiment is mirrored by Criseyde who also
“wex al reed” (II. 652) when watching the entry of the bold Trojan knight, not-
ing his excellent prowess, his estate, his renown (all masks) before moving ‘in-
ward’ to his more private personae: his wit, his shape, his “gentilesse,” but
mostly his distress on account of her (II. 660-65).243 After the audience learns
about Criseyde’s worries, Antigone’s song, and her subsequent change of heart,
they find Troilus at home, impatiently calling for authoritative guidance since
his world is falling to pieces.244 While the Trojan people (and the audience) be-
held a Virgilian-style warrior only moments before, now the audience witnesses
a man turned completely Venerean (II. 972-73, II. 684-85). Pandarus’s report of
his successful mission makes Troilus feel better and ‘whole’ insofar as Criseyde
and Pandarus fill his heart again:
And seyde, “Lord, al thyn be that I have!
For I am hool, al brosten ben my bondes.
A thousand Troyes whoso that me yave,
Ech after other, God so wys me save,
Ne myghte me so gladen; lo, myn herte,
It spredeth so for joie it wol tosterte!” (II. 975-80)
Troilus’s martial armor (mask) breaks down again given that he implicitly re-
jects his civic mask, which is shattered by his emotional transparency. On the
level of conceptual allegory, Trojan historiography collapses as well – necessar-
ily so since Troilus severs with a genealogical construction of Trojan identity,
one Troy after another.245 Ironically, Pandarus is aware of Troilus’s mono-

translation, The Aeneid (1983; New York: Vintage, 1990), with minor modifications.
Chaucer’s Virgilian reference is recorded in Barney 1033n.
241
Troilus appears like a man of arms rather than being a man of arms – simile rather than
metaphor – which is a further reference to Troilus’s neglect of his martial duties since he
fights in order to impress his lady rather than in order to conquer the enemy.
242
A passage that prompts the annotator of MS R to add a “Nota” next to this line (Windeatt
183n).
243
Benson observes that “Despite the introduction of a definite point of view, it remains un-
clear who it is that is supposed to be looking at this ‘sighte.’ Presumably it is the towns-
people, whose observation of the prince has been previously emphasized, or perhaps it is
the narrator himself, though his observation could only be an act of the imagination.” Ben-
son, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 137.
244
Interposed between the descriptions of Virgilian and Ovidian Troilus is Criseyde’s telling
remark that she is her “owene womman, wel at ese” (I. 750), which implicitly suggests
that Troilus is not his own man.
245
The ‘thousand Troys’ literally leave his heart in Book IV, anticipating the final rejection
of Trojan historiography in Troilus’s apotheosis. Upon learning the parliament’s decision
to exchange Criseyde, the narrator describes Troilus in terms of “A thousand sikes, hotter
406 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

mythological way of thinking. When Troilus inquires when he will see Criseyde
again, Pandarus says, “Al esily, now, for the love of Marte” (II. 988) and sug-
gests writing her a letter.
The epistolary episode again highlights Troilus’s impoverished narrative
identity, here reported by the poet – Troilus does not speak for himself. He also
cannot be a good writer, since he is, in the first place, “not a good reader of
texts. Indeed, he seems capable of perceiving the world only through flat stereo-
types based on the way he thinks things ought to be.”246 This notion is immedi-
ately corroborated by the narrator, who tells the audience how Troilus calls
Criseyde his lady and uses “ek thise other termes alle / That in swich cas thise
loveres alle seche” (II. 1067-68). Troilus is restricted to conventional discourse;
nonetheless he requires Pandarus, whose mediation of stereotypical narratives is
yet another indication that he represents public discourse (see below). Although
Troilus is able to invent (that is, lie), his ‘invention’ is restricted to the medieval
modesty topos (II. 1077-78). Not surprisingly, Chaucer’s Criseyde, in contrast to
Boccaccio’s Criseida, has little by way of positive commentary to offer on the
letter: she finds ‘no lack’ (II. 1178; Windeatt 215n). Likewise, Troilus’s poor
reading skills, his inability to interpret her letter, are illustrated when he receives
it. Apparently, after much debate (“But finaly”), he decides to take it “al for the
beste” (II. 1324), despite the fact that “Al covered she tho wordes under sheld”
(II. 1327), further evincing her masking practices.247
The third book, suitably prefaced by a prayer for Venus, is least concerned
with the war and foregrounds Troilus’s several attempts at masking, leading up
to the consummation scene. Troilus, feigning that he is sick (and his apparent
love-sickness can be easily mistaken as real sickness if Pandarus is to be be-
lieved), rehearses his lines while waiting for Criseyde at Pandarus’s house:
“Thus wol I pleyne unto my lady dere; / That word is good, and this shal be my
cheere; / This nyl I nought foryeten in no wise” (III. 53-55). In a further passage,
which recalls Agamemnon’s advice to Menelaus as concerns the invention of
opaque masks in Guido’s Historia, Troilus literally fabricates a narrative mask.
Upon hearing Criseyde praise him, his emotional turmoil is mapped onto his
face: “And sire, his lessoun, that he wende konne / To preyen hire, is thorugh his
wit ironne” (III. 78-84, quotation at 83-84). Criseyde likes this “nevere the

than the gleede, / Out of his brest ech after other wente” (IV. 337-38, the verbal similarity
is recorded in Windeatt 199n).
246
Amtower, Engaging Words 156.
247
As the fire burns hotter, epistolary activities become a daily routine, although it remains
doubtful to what extent Criseyde would discern Troilus (rather than Pandarus) in ‘his’ let-
ters: “Fro day to day he leet it nought refreyde, / That by Pandare he wroot somwhat or
seyde” (II. 1343-44). Moreover, he continues to worship one myth only, “And dide also
his other observaunces, / That til a lovere longeth in this cas,” whereby the central agency
for his creation of narrative was and is Pandarus: “But to Pandare alwey was his recours”
(II. 1345-46, 1352).
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 407

lasse” (III. 86), which means that she knowingly accepts that Troilus becomes
whatever narrative means he is equipped with. That he is truly hers (or Panda-
rus’s) is emphasized time and again in Book III, which portrays Troilus at his
happiest, probably because he is controlled by others.248 Pandarus suggests keep-
ing the love affair private. Troilus concurs, and thereafter his sickness disap-
pears faster than it does in Boccaccio’s Filostrato (III. 349-50; Windeatt 267n).
He swears that he will never reveal his love for Criseyde – with a rare allusion to
the ongoing war, not included in Il Filostrato. If he were to reveal his love, Troi-
lus says, Achilles should split his heart in two or he should become Agamem-
non’s prisoner (III. 374-85). The first instance is particularly ironic, since Troi-
lus will be killed by Achilles, who metaphorically splits Troilus in two (see be-
low). Although Troilus never intends to make his love for Criseyde public, this
proleptic reference is further testimony to Troilus’s transparency.249
In the context of the emphasis on secrecy, the poet and Troilus explicitly ad-
dress issues of feigning. Although Troilus is not entirely able to mask his emo-
tions (except when removed from the public sphere), he chooses a particular
kind of masking based on a model close at hand and used before in Book I.250
Troilus becomes a Pandarian veiler, unable – where Pandarus is unwilling – to
synthesize divergent hypergoods:
But in hymself with manhod gan restreyne
Ech racle dede and ech unbridled cheere,

248
In response to Criseyde’s acting (for which see Brody, “Making a Play for Criseyde” 135-
38), Troilus frequently changes his voice and his color (III. 92, 94-95). In the course of
their tête-à-tête, Troilus reassures Criseyde that he has been and will be entirely hers. In
his first sentence, he addresses her as his heart and asks for mercy. Next, he tells her “God
woot, for I have, / As ferforthly as I have had konnynge, / Ben youres al” (III. 100-02). He
reiterates that he will do her service, that he is hers, that she should command him (III.
133-147). After Troilus is reassured of her love, Helen and Deiphebus are about to arrive.
Troilus has to act, since the Trojan nobles believe him to be sick: “so thanne gan gronen
Troilus, / His brother and his suster for to blende” (III. 206-07). He apparently does man-
age to fool them; in comparison with Pandarus’s and Criseyde’s acting, however, his
groaning must appear rather crude. Furthermore, the mask does not need to be consistent
for long, since Troilus only spends very little time with Helen and Deiphebus (III. 220).
249
See, in this context, Cassandra’s interpretation of Troilus’s dream, which shows that she is
able to read more into Troilus than Troilus believes to be readable from the outside. In the
following sentence, Troilus further underlines his narrative dependency on Criseyde: “I
kan namore, but that I wol the serve / Right as thi sclave, whider so thow wende, / For
evere more, unto my lyves ende” (III. 390-93). To what extent Pandarus controls him is
evident when Troilus offers him one of his sisters in exchange for his ‘services’: “Tel me
which thow wilt of everychone, / To han for thyn, and lat me thanne allone.” Finally, he
asks Pandarus to ‘perform’ the “grete emprise”; he will follow all his commands (III. 412-
13, 416-20).
250
The audience witnesses Troilus’s split self before, since the narrator explicitly recalls the
earlier dichotomy of Troilus’s daily (martial) and nightly (Venerean) activities: “By day,
he was in Martes heigh servyse –” (III. 437).
408 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

That alle tho that lyven, soth to seyne,

Ne sholde han wist, by word or by manere,
What that he mente, as touchyng this matere.
From every wight as fer as is the cloude
He was, so wel dissimilen he koude. (III. 428-34)
It is tempting to see the narrator’s comment on Troilus’s masking as an ironic
aside. The comparison of veiling with the distant clouds is a back-handed com-
pliment at best, since it implies that Troilus keeps away from the company in
which acting is to become an artful necessity (Pandarus, Criseyde). Supposing
that the poet is sincere, Troilus appears as less transparent than before, but like-
wise fails at finding intersections between the two disjunct personae, rendering
him a decentered individual. In the course of the Troy story, Achilles is afflicted
with a similar problem, since he, too, is unable to reconcile amatory and public
masks. Troilus, at this point, has become a postmodern Pandarus.251 As a result
of this inability to be transparent, Troilus becomes isolated and stays away from
the Trojan public. His Venerean self can be brought into the open only in
Criseyde’s or Pandarus’s presence. Hence, the lovers remain unhappy about the
arrangement (III. 460). Only semi-transparency is able to make Troilus happy,
for example, when he is ‘closeted’ during the dinner at Pandarus’s house; seeing
Criseyde while being hidden from view (III. 600-02).252
Increasingly, Troilus’s incapacity to maintain masks is dramatized. He does
not want any martial qualities to interfere with his Venerean business,253 espe-
cially concerning lovemaking (or possible failures therein) – Troilus turns Ovid-
ian. Troilus begs Venus to ‘inspire’ him (III. 705-707, 712-14), and prays:
And if ich hadde, O Venus ful of myrthe,
Aspectes badde of Mars or of Saturne,
Or thow combust or let were in my birthe,
Thy fader prey al thilke harm disturne
Of grace, and that I glad ayein may turne,
For love of hym thow lovedest in the shawe –
I meene Adoun, that with the boor was slawe. (III. 715-21)

251
In a different framework, Robertson similarly observes that on account of his offer of his
‘sisters’ to Pandarus, “Morally, Troilus has descended to the level of Pandarus, who, at the
outset, offered to get his own sister for Troilus.” Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy” 26; see
also Spearing, Chaucer 46.
252
Troilus agrees with the narrator of Il Filostrato, who at first believes that being able to
meditate on his love yields the most pleasure until the sudden absence of his lady con-
vinces him that seeing her is what proves most pleasurable (Proemio 1-14). Criseyde does
not find Troilus lacking in secrecy and compares him to her wall in a metaphor familiar
from the Historia, in which the citizens of Troy compare Hector to their wall – posthu-
mously, when everyone already has an inkling of the impending doom (III. 479-80).
253
In effect, the Venerean goings-on at Pandarus’s house are framed by a Virgilian narrative:
the lovemaking of Aeneas and Dido ensues during a wild storm (Aen. IV. 160-72).
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 409

Troilus’s prayer alludes to the tale of Venus and Adonis, as narrated in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, in the course of which Venus tells Adonis the story of Hip-
pomenes and Atalanta. The latter avoids marriage by challenging her suitors to a
race. If they lose, they lose their lives. Troilus’s prayer to Venus to aid him in
love matters recalls Hippomenes’s prayer to Venus in order to outrun her (Met.
X. 640-41, 673). Hippomenes, whose ingratitude enrages Venus, is transformed
into a lion, which sets up Venus’s warning to Adonis to abstain from hunting;
Adonis, not heeding Venus’s advice, is naturally killed while hunting. While
Troilus prays for Venus’s assistance for unchecked desire, he does so with refer-
ence to two mythological instances in which unbridled desire causes death.254
Hence, Troilus brushes aside Mars for a second time: “O Mars, thow with thi
blody cope, / For love of Cipris, thow me nought ne lette!” (III. 724-25).255 In
terms of prosopagraphical selfhood, Troilus aims at completely separating the
two domains. In the light of the ongoing war, as the audience would well know,
the erosion of public prudence can only result in chaos.
Troilus is able to rid himself of all martial responsibility and to become the
transparent being he desires to be. And yet, issues of veiling gain prominence
again at the end of his prayer (which frequently makes reference to the Meta-
morphoses) when Troilus appeals to the fates, who shaped his destiny before he
was born: “O fatal sustren which, er any cloth / Me shapen was, my destine me
sponne, / So helpeth to this werk that is bygonne!” (III. 733-35). In other words,
he yearns for the unveiling of his destiny, to regain ‘prelapsarian’ purity. As
Troilus becomes transparently naked, Pandarus, concerned about Troilus’s ex-
cessive emotionality, offers garments to cover up the affair: “Don this furred
cloke upon thy sherte, / And folwe me” (III. 738-39). Laura Hodges lists numer-
ous possibilities for the cover-up of Troilus by Pandarus: that the cloak might be
a “gratuitous costume detail”; that it is Pandarus’s cloak; that a cover-up is nec-
essary since Troilus’s near nudity is emphasized; that Troilus is freezing; or that
he is in need of “social comfort,” a sign of his estate, since lovers should be ele-

254
Desire forcefully overcomes Hippomenes (Met. X. 689-90); Adonis dies because he can-
not check his desires, whereby Ovid emphasizes his disobedience (Met. X. 709).
255
Windeatt (287n) and Barney (1040n) point out the borrowing from Statius’s Thebaid VII.
69-71. The Chaucerian allusion to this scene is appropriate, since Troilus asks Mars not to
interfere in his love life. And yet, following the description of a meddling and vengeful
Mars in the Thebaid (VII. 62-63), the reader learns of Mars’s anger about the sluggishness
of the Greeks to go to war – another apposite context for Troilus’s shedding of his martial
garments at night: “nec longa moratus, / sicut anhelabant, iuncto sudore volantes / Mars
impellit equos, resides in proelia Graios / ipse etiam indignans” [Nor does Mars long de-
lay, but drives forward his flying steeds, all panting as they were and sweating together
beneath the yoke, himself indignant that the Greeks were sluggish to begin war] (VII. 81-
84). For the Statian intertextualities, see Paul M. Clogan, “The Theban Scenes in Chau-
cer’s Troilus,” Medievalia et Humanistica ns 12 (1984): 168-85, esp. 175-80; Catherine
Sanok, “Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid: Women and the Theban Subtext of Chau-
cer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” SAC 20 (1998): 41-71.
410 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

gantly dressed.256 All of these are conclusive, and all further underscore Troi-
lus’s transparency. Naturally, it is Pandarus who provides the garments, which
again indicates Troilus’s inability to determine his own narratives, his own
masks. Likewise, Troilus again accepts whatever is imposed upon him.257
Metaphorically and actually veiled, Troilus feels rather uncomfortable, espe-
cially when he realizes Criseyde’s pain on account of his ‘jealousy,’ that ‘his’
lies (dissimulation), which were fabricated to bring about a meeting between the
lovers, injure her. In fact, this is one of the few moments, in which Troilus ex-
presses doubts about Pandarus’s pandering: “‘O Pandarus,’ thoughte he, ‘allas,
thi wile / Serveth of nought, so weylaway the while!’” (III. 1077-78). His imme-
diate actions belie his claim for autonomy. Although Ovidian advice (pace the
Ars amatoria) is increasingly cast into doubt by Chaucer’s poem,258 the principal
problem of self-fashioning abides. Without an agency like Pandarus, there is no
Troilus – and Troilus continues to lack the verbal means of constructing an al-
ternative narrative: “What myghte he seyn? He felte he nas but deed” (III.
1081). Not knowing what to do, he settles for the truth: “God woot that of this
game, / Whan al is wist, than am I nought to blame” (III. 1084-85). If he is not
to blame for the ‘game,’ questions concerning his true sentiments regarding
Criseyde inevitably arise, as duly rehearsed by Criseyde only moments before.
The situation calls for Pandarian mending, which allows Troilus to settle for his
old passivity when questioned about the jealousy he does not feel: “And for the
lasse harm, he moste feyne” (III. 1158).259
Up to the middle of the poem, Troilus has been dallying with the idea of hy-
bridity, or rather doubleness, also with respect to the agencies controlling him.
Criseyde was the hypergood firmly entrenched in his heart, while Pandarus pro-
vided the verbal means of obtaining that good. Now Criseyde takes over the role
of the ‘steriswoman’ for Troilus’s tumultuous Trojan trip. God has made him to
serve her, he says, “[...] he wol ye be my steere, / To do me lyve, if that yow
liste, or sterve – / So techeth me how that I may disserve / Youre thonk [...]” (III.
1291-94). As Troilus becomes ‘her knight,’ he discovers a new text in

256
Hodges, “Sartorial Signs” 234.
257
In fact, a manly mask is what is most needed in the bedroom scene. As Hansen observes,
“the role reversal of courtly love, the softening and unmanning of Troilus, must be un-
done; Troilus must be made to feel like a man before he can perform like one.” As in the
initial temple scene, she observes, “romantic or courtly love, as experienced by these char-
acters and in the conventional code by which they are shaped, is a complex performance in
which traditional masculine and feminine roles are confused and the problematic instabil-
ity and provisionality of gender thereby enacted.” Hansen, Chaucer 150, 151.
258
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 52-53.
259
His attempts to explain his jealousy speak volumes about his inability to invent a narra-
tive: he alleges that she did not smile at him at a Trojan festivity. For Troilus, masking
only seems to work whenever Pandarus instructs him beforehand, providing the exact ver-
bal means for him to – often imperfectly – reiterate.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 411

Criseyde’s eyes, an important textual metaphor added to the Filostrato

(Windeatt 317n):
This Troilus ful ofte hire eyen two
Gan for to kisse, and seyde, “O eyen clere,
It weren ye that wroughte me swich wo,
Ye humble nettes of my lady deere!
Though ther be mercy writen in youre cheere,
God woot, the text ful hard is, soth, to fynde!
How koude ye withouten bond me bynde?” (III. 1352-58)
Despite the clarity of her eyes, the female text remains a mystery to Troilus.260
Likewise, Troilus never realizes that he is bound to Criseyde by means of texts,
the public myths manipulated and mediated by both Pandarus and Criseyde.
The eventual parting of the lovers stresses the dichotomy of transparency and
veiling and again underlines Troilus’s neglect of his martial duties, whereby the
aube (III. 1422-1533) fittingly reverses the gender roles, as R. E. Kaske ob-
serves. Whereas her wish for the night to last longer is a commonplace, other
references to the night “seem more characteristically assigned to the lover than
the lady.” Troilus’s final appeal to the god for a speedy reunion is “more natural
to the lady’s stationary and comparatively passive situation.”261 In terms of pro-
sopagraphical selfhood, this reversal emphasizes their different attitudes to veil-
ing as well: Criseyde, very apt to reconcile masks containing contradictory
goods, cherishes the night for its masking; Troilus loathes the day, which in the
Troy story generally is spent on the battlefield. Troilus’s heart is thus melting in
tears of blood as his hypergood is being torn apart from him (esp. III. 1445)262 –
the coming day is appropriately described in martial terms. With the overtones
of treachery and the advent in Troy, in fact, the day becomes near identical with
the Greek threat to Troy: “O cruel day, accusour of the joie / That nyght and
love han stole and faste iwryen, / Acorsed be thi comyng into Troye.” Moreover,
day is equated with the pain of hell, “For many a lovere hastow slayn, and wilt”
(III. 1450-52, 1458-59), Troilus included.263 Much more so than for Criseyde,

260
The equation of Criseyde’s eyes with a text is discussed by Dinshaw in the context of
Troilus ‘reading like a man.’ Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 50-51.
261
R. E. Kaske, “The Aube in Chaucer’s Troilus,” Chaucer Criticism II, ed. Schoeck and
Taylor 172, 175.
262
Remarking that the image of the “heart bleeding for sorrow is a not uncommon idea,”
Windeatt argues that Chaucer “has gone one better in making it more distinctively and ve-
hemently forceful. He merges the ideas of a bleeding and a weeping heart into a heart that
weeps blood for sorrow, although the tears are visualized to melt out in that gradually ex-
uding way that often marks Chaucer’s imaginative presentation of the feelings.” Windeatt,
“Italian to English” 87. This passage illustrates Troilus’s (unsuccessful) attempt to know
the ‘other,’ which causes his anxiety. Aers, Community 142-43.
263
Although the association of the coming day with the coming Greeks may seem forced, it is
consistent with Chaucer’s geographical understanding. The day approaches from the East,
where Chaucer locates Greece, as shown by Robert A. Pratt, “A Geographical Problem in
412 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

day and night are absolute and exclusive categories for the transparent lover. In
addition, Troilus voices the inferiority of military enterprise in comparison with
winning Criseyde yet again. As her humble servant, he wishes to be firmly set in
her heart – “the which thyng, trewely, / Me levere were than thise worldes
tweyne” (III. 1489-90).264 Troilus does not play the lion among the Greeks.
Anticlimactically,265 he rather goes home “To slepe longe, as he was wont to
doone” (III. 1535-36).266

3. “It nedeth naught this matere ofte stere”: From Ars to Tristia
Troilus increasingly eschews Pandarian veiling as a ‘steering authority.’ After
Troilus has thanked Pandarus for what he has achieved (III. 1601-02), Pandarus
warns Troilus of treacherous Fortuna by means of many Ovidian borrowings
(III. 1621-37, and see below). Troilus blows Pandarus’s well-meant Ovidian ad-
vice in the wind, literally abandoning his steering agency: “It nedeth naught this
matere ofte stere” (III. 1643).267 At the same time, he burns hotter than ever and
relishes the “newe qualitee” (III. 1654). He becomes truly Trojan, celebrates all
day and surrounds himself with “A world of folk, as com hym wel of kynde, /
The fresshest and the beste he koude fynde” (III. 1721-22). It would only be
natural for the Trojans to conjecture that Troilus is in love since he suddenly
hosts the people heretofore looked down upon – an addition to the Filostrato
which mutes Troilus’s public display of happiness. Troilus’s reputation for love
is such that it reaches the heavens. Troilus’s song, which has been seen as “a
monotheistic vision of divine harmony,”268 is in fact a hymn attesting to the ‘uni-
fication’ of contraries by means of transparency. The contraries bound by love
are submerged and dissolve in stability rather than effect changeability and pro-

Troilus and Criseyde,” MLN 61.8 (1946): 541-43. He traces the description of the rising
sun to Guido’s placement of Colchis as eastward of Troy. The (mis)conception that Troy
lay east of Greece may indeed stem from Guido’s Historia, of course. The reference can
also be seen as an ironical reversal of the westward moving empires. For Troy’s location
in the medieval cartographical imagination, see Hartmut Kugler, “Troianer allerorten: Die
Stadt und ihre Ausstrahlung im kartografischen Weltbild des Mittelalters,” Troia: Traum
und Wirklichkeit, ed. Barbara Theune-Großkopf et al. (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2001) 226-38.
264
I assume, as do most editors of the Troilus (Barney 1043n; Windeatt 325n; Robinson
827n), that Troilus here means “the realms of both Troy and Greece,” which is consistent
with the earlier passage; but cf. Root 490n.
265
Kaske, “The Aube in Chaucer’s Troilus” 175: “In courtly aube, the curtain falls discreetly
on the lover’s departure, preserving around it an air of ardor undiminished and heroism
somberly undaunted in the face of the undescribed separation and hardships ahead.”
266
In this context, the sluggishness of Statius’s Mars, implicitly attributed to the Greeks in
the passage alluded to in Troilus’s prayer to the gods (in order for them not to not obstruct
his wooing of Criseyde), is an appropriate characterization of ‘valiant’ Troilus.
267
Barney glosses stere as stir in the Riverside Chaucer; Windeatt has steere, which suggests
that Troilus alludes to the imagery of being adrift at sea, now rejecting the Ovidian guid-
ance that would keep his boat from crashing. See MED, s.v. steren v. esp. 1. (a).
268
Minnis, Chaucer 94.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 413

ductivity. In that love “knetteth lawe of compaignie” (III. 1748), it allows for
‘synthesis,’ albeit in mono-mythological terms:
“That, that the world with feith which that is stable
Diverseth so his stowndes concordynge,
That elementz that ben so discordable
Holden a bond perpetuely durynge....” (III. 1751-54)
One mask subsumes all other masks, an issue that is brought to the fore espe-
cially in Troilus’s apostrophe to “God, that auctour is of kynde.” He becomes a
stand-in for all the agencies that so far have taken control over Troilus’s life
(such as Pandarus and Criseyde) and have deprived him of his individuality,
since “with his bond Love of his vertu liste / To cerclen hertes alle and faste
bynde, / That from his bond no wight the wey out wiste” (III. 1765-68, and see
Boece II. metr. 8). To use an important term of the Laud Troy Book and its nego-
tiation of personal and collective identities, the heart becomes the caytif of a sin-
gle external agency.269 Conceptually, this is a metaphorical mapping of one do-
main onto another in which the source domain disappears within the construc-
tion of a transparent allegorical ideal. This contrasts with Criseyde’s advance-
ment of translucence, which suggests that within allegorical systems, domains
can co-exist side-by-side.270
The transparent ideal of love articulated by Troilus immediately comes up
against problems in the parliamentary scene: Troilus’s stable adherence to one
adopted myth threatens his identity and Trojan identity in general, since he
masks his emotions and, therefore, flouts the general sentiments just rehearsed –
in sharp contrast to the unrestricted emotionality with which Troilus advocates
the kidnapping of Helen in Guido’s Historia.271 Whereas in the Roman and the
Historia, Troilus has a public voice that is respected by the people, Chaucer’s
Troilus does not engage in public acts since they contradict his central good. He
crucially also lacks a narrative with which to give voice to his dissent because

269
Like Troilus, the poet is bound to love in the same way that Chaucer, at least on the plot
level, is bound to literary tradition and historical fact. Morton W. Bloomfield appropri-
ately speaks of Chaucer’s “bondage to historical fact” in his “Distance and Predestination
in Troilus and Criseyde,” PMLA 72.1 (1957): 21, 18. Lanham refers to Troilus as a “pris-
oner of courtly convention” in “Opaque Style” 173. For this passage and the hybrid image
of Venus at the opening of the third book, see also Ida L. Gordon, The Double Sorrow of
Troilus: A Study of Ambiguities in “Troilus and Criseyde” (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1970) 30-40.
270
At the end of Book III, Troilus appears as a fierce knight again. The audience encounters
the familiar notion, however, that Troilus does not primarily fight for his patria but for his
lady: “And this encrees of hardynesse and myght / Com hym of love, his ladies thank to
wynne, / That altered his spirit so withinne” (III. 1776-78; Windeatt 343n).
271
Troilus’s silence “is a pointed contrast to his decisive argument at Priam’s council in the
chronicle histories in favor of the war.” Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 54.
414 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

his narrative-providing agencies, Pandarus or Criseyde, are absent.272 Conven-

iently, Troilus is not in charge of his own self, but Criseyde evidently is in
charge, for he first wants to find out her thoughts on the matter (IV. 169-75).
Thus, Troilus speeds home, minimizes exposure to the public, and shuts himself
in his room to bemoan his destiny (rather than talking to Criseyde as intended
earlier).273 His complaint refers the audience to the role of steering again, in the
context of finding narratives that help him understand (and resolve) his plight:
“If that Criseyde allone were me laft, / Nought roughte I whiderward thow
woldest me steere.” Given his lack of self-control, without Criseyde he remains
adrift: “Thus am I lost; ther helpeth no diffence” (IV. 281-82, 287). Troilus’s
prosopagraphical inability now results in the adoption of another role model,
foreclosing any alternatives: he chooses to be a tragic hero unable to mold his
destiny: he chooses abandonment. He literally becomes Oedipus surrendering
what remains of his self (that is, his body since his soul is Criseyde’s [IV. 260-
329]). In a passage, which echoes Ovid’s Tristia, Troilus wishes other lovers to
be blessed with a stability he himself lacks: “God leve that ye fynde ay love of
stiel, / And longe mote youre lif in joie endure!” (III. 325-26).274 Ars and Reme-
dia give way to Heroides and Tristia.
Troilus’s self-fashioning becomes progressively problematic. On the one
hand, Troilus could be shown as striving for transparency, for metaphorical
mappings within an allegory of love. Consistent with his increasing skepticism

272
The poet ironically underscores Troilus’s passivity. Within the Troy story, Trojans are
usually too emotional and decide on a whim. At this point, Troilus is able to mask his
emotions and manages not to say a word. According to the narrator, Troilus acts ‘manly’
(IV. 154). Hector does speak out, which leaves one to question what manly entails. I be-
lieve that Troilus does not contain his emotions because he is manly but because he is un-
able to fabricate a narrative mask to convince others of his point of view. Neither does
Hector succeed, but he is able to provide a lucid argument for not exchanging Criseyde.
273
Unlike Boccaccio, Chaucer omits any explanation for this change in attitude (Fil. IV. 23-
25; Windeatt 363n). Chaucer’s Troilus gives as a reason for his rash departure from par-
liament that he is tired and wants to sleep (IV. 223).
274
The similarities between Troilus’s speech in IV. 323-29 and Ovid’s epitaph to Tristia III
(iii. 73-76) have been noted by Calabrese: “Both Troilus and Ovid undergo the pain of
separation; Troilus from his only love, and Ovid from the sweet joys of his beloved Rome.
Troilus’s exile on account of the Ars Amatoria can thus be regarded, at least in part, as a
‘medieval’ or ‘Chaucerian’ version of Ovid’s. Chaucer makes the connection powerfully
stark by giving Troilus a lament that recalls Ovid’s proposed epitaph from Tristia III.”
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 74. This analogy anticipates an argument that sees nar-
rative possibilities in the exilic situation which enables the reconciliation of masking and
unmasking, of Virgilian opacity and Ovidian transparency. Put differently, Troilus’s loss
of a “sterisman” occurs between Ars and Remedia. Criseyde and the narrator are caught in
their respective ontological crises when remedial matters give way to metamorphosis and
exile. In view of Troilus’s failure to synthesize different narratives and change them ac-
cording to circumstance, it is not surprising that Troilus cannot comprehend Calkas’s syn-
thesis of Trojan and Greek models, that he can live among the Greeks as a Trojan.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 415

of Pandarian masking (opacity) is his rebuke of Pandarus for his Ovidian advice
to find a new love (IV. 486-90). On the other hand, he begins to adopt the role of
the abandoned woman for himself – and in doing so has recourse to masking (as
he did in the parliamentary debate). In his final attempts to ‘rescue’ Troilus,
Pandarus suggests that he should ravish Criseyde, in line with the presumably
masculine Trojan decisions in Benoît and Guido. At this point, Troilus’s true
reason for abstaining from interference becomes obvious.275 Ravishing, he says,
has caused this war in the first place – ironically, within the scope of the Troy
story, largely due to him – and Criseyde is exchanged for the well-being of
Troy: “Syn she is chaunged for the townes goode” (IV. 553). His decision not to
interfere is thus based on a model of nationhood – that is, the Trojans’ stable
disposition to excessive emotionality – which Troilus himself represents. Troi-
lus’s ontological contradictions could not be more pronounced and again emerge
in terms of two domains Troilus proves unable to reconcile.276 The corollary of
this position is the predicament of being steerless: “Thus am I with desir and
reson twight: / Desir for to destourben hire me redeth, / And reson nyl nat; so
myn herte dredeth” (IV. 572-74).277 Neither Ovidian advice (find a new lover)
nor Virgilian, martial advice (ravish her) appears to be helpful;278 the only option
left, therefore, is to act in accordance with the historical imperative that renders
synonymous Troilus’s failure and Troy’s fall. Conveniently, (t)his destiny can
be blamed on the duplicity of Criseyde, whose wish is Troilus’s (and Troy’s)
command.279 Pandarus is again called upon to make Troilus’s choices (IV.

275
Hagedorn argues that this reason betrays – despite of Troilus’s (silent) disapproval of the
parliament’s decision – that he “tends to think of Criseyde as a commodity that can be
purchased.” Hagedorn, Abandoned Women 154. For the analogue between change and
economic transaction, see Shoaf, Dante 107-57.
276
“He may not, it seems, both exert his free will and perform his social duty.” Josephine
Bloomfield, “Chaucer and the Polis” 296.
277
The first line cited refers the reader back to the opening line of the stanza: “Thus am I lost,
for aught that I kan see” (IV. 567). This underlines that being lost translates into having to
choose between two (seemingly) exclusive domains.
278
He only seemingly accepts Pandarus’s advice to ravish her, insofar as he qualifies that she
has to consent: “Frend, graunt mercy, ich assente” (IV. 632). The sentiment is Trojan.
Given the fact that Helen also consented (in a sense) to her abduction, Troilus would want
Criseyde to do the same.
279
The corollary of Troilus’s decision making is the (un-)Boethian meditation (see Boece V.
pr. 2 and pr. 3) on necessity which leaves out Boethius’s defense of free will (Barney
1048n). Again, Troilus has to decide between two diverging opinions: “For ther ben grete
clerkes many oon / That destyne thorugh argumentes preve; / And som men seyn that
nedely ther is noon, / But that fre chois is yeven us everychon” (IV. 968-71). For Troilus,
unlike Boethius, is faced with two mutually exclusive categories: “Wherfor I sey, that
from eterne if he / Hath wist byforn oure thought ek as oure dede, / We han no fre chois,
as thise clerkes rede” (IV. 978-80). Troilus concludes that “this suffiseth right ynough,
certeyn, / For to destruye oure fre chois in every del” (IV. 1058-59, and 1072-78). If there
is no free choice, Troilus has to do what he must do – a track that implies accepting Pan-
416 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

1122).280 If Troilus represents Trojan historiography as appropriated for the con-

struction of nationhood, Troilus’s ‘predestinarian bias’ in matters of choice ex-
emplifies a passive, deterministic model for making national identity. Myths are
ultimately unproductive and should yield to flexible mythologies. Troilus’s
monotheism, however, amounts to a mono-mythological, deterministic construc-
tion of English nationhood.281
Troilus’s failure to fabricate effective, self-maintaining masks features
prominently in Book V, too, for instance, when Troilus is waiting for Criseyde’s
exchange:
He gan his wo ful manly for to hide,
That wel unnethe it sene was in his chere;
But at the yate ther she sholde out ride,
With certeyn folk he hoved hire t’abide,
So wo-bigon, al wolde he naught hym pleyne,
That on his hors unnethe he sat for peyne. (V. 30-35)
The narrator’s optimism vis-à-vis Troilus’s ability to mask his woe is ironically
undercut in the second line already: his emotionality is only hardly visible. Con-
trary to what is expected of valiant knights, Troilus further has problems remain-
ing on his horse on account of his distress, which suggests that his anguish is ac-
tually on display. When greeting Antenor, the mask completely collapses as “He
peyned hym with al his fulle myght / Hym to withholde of wepyng atte leeste, /
And Antenor he kiste and made feste” (V. 75-77), which contrasts with

darus’s wisdom despite the fact that many of Pandarus’s sentiments are adverse to his own
inclinations.
280
The same is true of the Filostrato: “Tu parli bene, ed io così vo’ fare” [Thou say well and
it is my will to do so] (Fil. IV. 113). Notably, the context is different since Troilus’s
lengthy lament (preceding his compliance) is absent from Boccaccio’s version. Moreover,
Pandarus appears in a different light due to his suggestion that Troilus’s sighs do not
match hers. For Pandaro, the situation the lovers face is useful in that it demonstrates how
much Criseida is in love with Troilus; the promise that there is hope is not as explicit here
(Fil. IV. 110-12).
281
Troilus is not only skeptical of Pandarus’s advice, he also voices concerns about Criseyde,
for instance, when she tries to convince him that she will find a way of returning to him:
“Tho sleghtes yit that I have herd yow stere / Ful shaply ben to faylen alle yfeere” (IV.
1451-52). He recapitulates that her father is an artful deceiver, and she may not be able to
persuade him to let her go (IV. 1456-63). Calkas’s talent in mask making is the first prob-
lem that comes to Troilus’s mind, and it is much expanded compared to the Filostrato
(Fil. IV. 141-42). Troilus’s depiction of Calkas’s ability to deceive others – and it is Cal-
kas’s rhetorical talent that Troilus dreads most – makes masking such a prominent issue
that it almost appears as though Greek masking in general is what makes them more so-
phisticated and colorful than the ‘rude’ Trojans (IV. 1489-90). If Troilus represents Trojan
historiography, his acknowledgment of the impoverished Trojan rhetorical arsenal corre-
sponds to a characterization of the weaknesses of mono-mythical constructions of nation-
hood. This Trojan track is predictably inflexible and, in contrast to rhetorically sophisti-
cated mythologies of origin, diminishes national pride.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 417

Troiolo’s ability to put on a ‘face’ for the reunion (Fil. V. 11; Windeatt 451n).282
Subsequently, Troilus is less and less in control of his emotions, and “For ire he
quook, so gan his herte gnawe, / Whan Diomede on horse gan hym dresse” (V.
36-37). Troilus muses briefly on whether to kill Diomedes or abduct Criseyde,
but he does neither, wondering instead “Whi nyl I helpen to myn owen cure?”
(V. 49). The question elucidates Troilus’s ontological predicament succinctly.
Obviously, he cannot act this way for fear of hurting Criseyde (V. 50-56), who
still controls his actions. Troilus is helpless also because he has no control over
the narratives that constitute him, because of his passivity. Moreover, the scene
further illustrates that in negotiating opacity while attempting to become com-
pletely transparent, Troilus is capable of engaging with one narrative at a time
only – he adopts goods sequentially rather than simultaneously. While this
would surely have been one of the situations in which his love for Criseyde
should have inspired the martial deeds for which the Greeks feared him earlier,
Criseyde is immediately present and reinforces Venerean goods, precluding any
martial deeds of arms.
What is needed to resolve such a predicament is self-criticism which leads to
the rewriting of masks. Once Criseyde is with the Greeks, Troilus complaints
about everyone, save his Criseyde. In contrast to Boccaccio’s Troiolo, however,
Troilus emerges as much less self-critical. Troiolo complains – very loudly (V.
16) – about himself:
Esso se stesso ancor maladicea,
che sì l’aveva lasciata partire,
e che ‘l partito che preso n’ avea,
cioè con lei di volersi fuggire,
non l’avea fatto, e forte sen pentea,
e di dolor ne voleva morire;
o che almen non l’avea domandata,
che forse gli saria stata donata. (Fil. V. 18)

[He also cursed himself for having let her so depart and for not having carried out the
decision that he made, that is, to try to take flight with her. Bitterly did he repent of it,
and he would willingly have died of grief because of it, or for not having at least asked
for her, for perchance she might have been granted to him.]
This eight-line complaint takes up two lines in the Troilus. The poet rather
stresses Troilus’s assumption of yet another mythical identity, that of Ixion. Af-
ter invoking Criseyde’s attractiveness,283 he emphasizes that he misses his pilot:

282
It is worth emphasizing that in all references to Troilus’s manhood listed in Windeatt’s
edition (443n), the trait is externally attributed to Troilus either by Pandarus, Criseyde, or
the poet.
283
Troilus wonders, “Wher is myn owene lady, lief and deere? / Wher is hire white brest?
Wher is it, where?” (V. 218-19). Boccaccio likewise mentions Criseida’s white breast, but
motivates these thoughts: he kissed it last night (Fil. V. 19). The modification is slight but
effective insofar as Troilus reduces his lady to an object of masculine (sexual) desire – a
418 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

“Who seth yow now, my righte lode-sterre?” (V. 232). Almost naturally, Troilus
turns to Pandarus, who happens to be with the king. When he finally arrives at
Troilus’s house, the latter muses on his funeral rites, in which Pandarus should
offer his steed, his sword, and his helmet to Mars, his shield to Pallas (V. 306-
08). For a second time, the audience would be reminded of Agamemnon’s ad-
vice to Menelaus, to abstain from overt emotionality since Pandarus advises
Troilus to ‘keep up his face’ and to party with his fellow Trojans. In contrast to
the Historia, Troilus’s plight is bathetic: Criseyde is not Troilus’s wife – and
Troilus, unlike Menelaus, firmly believes he has the right to cry all day (V. 414-
20). Pandarus’s suggestion to visit Sarpedon – which Troilus suggests in the
Filostrato (V. 430-31; cf. Fil. V. 38; Barney 1051n) – is accepted, but Troilus’s
heart is set on Criseyde. In fact, his identity is ‘locked’ since only Criseyde has
the key to his heart (V. 460-62). In quest of her narratives for his self-
fashioning, he turns to her letters,284 which, according to the Remedia is a bad
idea. The passage thus illustrates Troilus’s distrust of Ovid’s Remedia285 – Troi-
lus moves from Remedia to Tristia.
Rejecting the Remedia after enjoying the happiness made possible by the Ars
is a serious problem since being a prisoner of one’s own desires is precisely the
situation the Remedia aims to cure:
me duce damnosas, homines, conpescite curas,
rectaque cum sociis me duce nauis eat.
Naso legendus erat tum cum didicistis amare;
idem nunc uobis Naso legendus erit.
publicus assertor dominis suppressa leuabo
pectora: uindictae quisque fauete suae. (Rem. 69-74)

[Me, you human beings, take as a guide and constrain your desires – then the ship and
its crew can take a straight course. You had to read Ovid when you learned how to
love, now, likewise, Ovid should be your reading. As a liberator of the people, I will
relieve the hearts of the enslaved lords. Help me so that you will be free.]
Ironically, the loss of control attendant upon unrestraint emotionality is of piv-
otal concern also for Ovid himself in that his loss of control, his error, results in
the turbulent voyage from Rome to the imperial hinterland. The persona of the
exilic poetry finds himself in a situation which Ovid describes more than once in

Pandarian disposition anticipated by Troilus’s offer of his sisters to Pandarus in exchange

for his pandering. For a different reading of this scene, cf. John Hill, “Aristocratic Friend-
ship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love and Ciceronian Brotherhood in
Troy,” New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Benson and Ridyard 165-82.
284
Chaucer does not translate Troiolo’s worries that his lady could return prematurely and not
find him. Pandaro offers to place a guard at his house so that they would be informed
about such an event (Fil. V. 38-39).
285
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 67-68; Remedia 717-18. Similarly, Ovid warns about
revisiting the places of lovemaking (Rem. 725-30). See further Lawrence Besserman, “A
Note on the Sources of Chaucer’s Troilus V, 540-613,” ChauR 24.4 (1990): 306-08.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 419

his fictional works. Troilus would be well advised to avoid this problem and
heed the Remedia, but he decides against a pilot, against Pandarus. With
Criseyde gone, he is uncontrollably emotional. Troilus casts himself in the role
of the abandoned women, who, as Ovid points out (with reference to Dido and
Medea, for example), would still be alive had the Remedia been available to
them (Rem. 57-60). He visits Criseyde’s empty palace, which becomes an ap-
propriate image for his empty heart, as evinces itself in his intoned ‘paraclau-
sithyron.’286 His heart is “empty and disconsolat,” a lantern without a light. The
palace, representing status and authority, has lost these attributes in the same
way Criseyde lost authority over his heart since she cannot provide any more
narratives for him. Accordingly, Troilus addresses Criseyde’s (former) home as
“O paleis, whilom crowne of houses alle, / Enlumyned with sonne of alle blisse”
(V. 542, 547-48). Not only is worldly authority lost, spiritual authority is absent,
too, since the house is a shrine without the saint.287 In his mind, Troilus aim-
lessly revisits the places of his love (V. 562-64) and thus reconstructs an amo-
rous historiography, which, appropriate to the amorous causes of Trojan histori-
ography itself, is a history of unbridled emotionality and trauma.288
The problem of lacking control continues to occupy Troilus. He turns to Cu-
pid and prays for Criseyde’s return (V. 596-97), whereby he articulates the de-
sire for historiographical alternatives: Cupid should not be as cruel “Unto the
blood of Troie, I preye the, / As Juno was unto the blood Thebane, / For which
the folk of Thebes caughte hire bane” (V. 600-02). The allusion to Statius’s
Thebaid is instructive insofar as Juno, according to the Aeneid (and Chaucer’s
reading thereof [Aen. I. 4; HF 198-208]), was ill-disposed toward Thebes and
Troy, not to mention that her speech itself is an invective against open emotion-
ality.289 Troilus becomes ever more worried about how the public will perceive
286
For a highly informative and entertaining review of criticism of what, according to its
author, is not a paraclausithyron in the context of the ambiguous queynt, see Fleming,
Classical Imitation 1-44, esp. 10-11.
287
For the intricacies of Chaucer’s literary allusions, see Robert R. Edwards, The Flight from
Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer (New York: Palgrave, 2006) 147-64. The “empty
shrine,” Edwards argues, “is iconically the architectural structure that Jean de Meun uses
to represent the rose’s genitalia as the dreamer symbolically penetrates the aperture of the
castle. In some measure, Troilus’s sterile worship re-enacts the dreamer’s joyless con-
summation in the Rose” (163).
288
Troilus remains true to his ‘orientational system,’ invoking Cupid and his control over
him. Troilus’s suggestion that “Men myght a book make of it, lik a storie” (V. 585), I read
as a self-reference to the Troilus itself, which – as far as Troilus is concerned – amounts to
a story of the Amor vincit omnia-kind, more precisely Amor vincit Troilus.
289
In the Thebaid, Juno is described thus: “ast illi saucia dictis / flammato versans inopium
corde dolorem / talia Iuno refert” [but wounded by his words and nursing sudden wrath in
a heart aflame Juno thus makes answer]. Regarding amorous activities, Juno asserts that
“mentitis ignosco toris: illam odimus urbem, / quam vultu confessus adis, ubi conscia ma-
gni / signa tori tonitrus agis et mea fulmina torques” [concealed amours I pardon you: that
city I hate where you go undisguised, where you sound the thunders that proclaim our
420 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

him, imagining himself as pale, as changing his color, prompting others to won-
der about his state of mind (V. 616-21, 624-30).290 Finally, he vocalizes again
the lack of his pilot – in a Chaucerian addition:
O sterre, of which I lost have al the light,
With herte soor wel oughte I to biwaille
That evere derk in torment, nyght by nyght,
Toward my deth with wynd in steere I saille;
For which the tenthe nyght, if that I faille
The gydyng of thi bemes bright an houre,
My ship and me Caribdis wol devoure. (V. 638-44; cf. Fil V. 62-66)
Troilus’s ship is bereft of its guidance in the second of the two songs Troilus
composes.291 The song recalls Petrarch’s Sonnet 189 as well as the Ovidian con-
text in which the “sterisman” appears in the House of Fame and the Troilus,
namely, Ovid’s perilous voyage from Rome to Tomis described in the Tristia292
– the “unmeasured description” of which “represents a lack of balanced focus in
his traumatized persona.”293 Concerning its allusion to Statius and Petrarch,
Stillinger observes, “The song departs from its source, the text that is supposed
to guide it [...], to engage ambiguously, other intentions and other texts. It is like

high union, and wieldest the lightnings that are mine] (Theb. I. 248-50, 256-58). In other
words, Juno speaks out against transparency.
290
The scene has been seen as a “splendid description of the way in which Troilus’ psyche is
now split, projected outside himself, looking at Troilus with the eyes of the crowd.” Boi-
tani, Tragic 70. Although the poet has the audience believe that Troilus’s ‘fantasies’ stem
from his melancholy (V. 622-23), this is not very reassuring considering that Pandarus no-
tices Troilus’s emotionality all the time. Windeatt (479n) argues that Troilus’s worries are
“unfounded suspicions” which “are diagnosed more carefully” in Troilus. The poet is
much less reassuring, however, as is Boccaccio’s narrator, who states as a fact that “Color
che ‘l dimostrassono, e non era, / ma sospica chi sa la cosa vera” [There was none that
pointed at him, but he who knows the truth is suspicious] (Fil. V. 60). Moreover, the poet
draws attention to the visibility of Troilus’s pain. For instance, preceding the above, he
observes that Troilus almost fell down seeing the closed doors of Criseyde’s palace; that
the shut windows cause his pale face; that, when addressing the house, his face ‘changes’
again and is “pitous to biholde”; that when relaying his sorrows to Pandarus, he does so
“with so ded an hewe / That every wight myghte on his sorwe rewe”; and that Troilus
rides around aimlessly (V. 529-61, 605).
291
Stillinger, Song 166. The first canticus is a close translation of Petrarch; the second song
blends Boccaccio and Petrarch by means of mythological bricolage.
292
Rosenmeyer, “Ovid’s Heroides and Tristia.” Moreover, “The format of the exilic corpus –
elegiac letters from afar – calls to mind the frustrated effusions of the heroines of the
Heroides, separated from the male figures who guarantee their well-being.” Concerning
empire, Ovid’s poetry “valorizes a psychology of honour that negates the possibility of
love: conquer or be conquered, penetrate or be penetrated. Here and throughout his works,
Ovid lays bare not only the politics of empire but also the psychology that sustains it.”
Thomas Habinek, “Ovid and Empire,” Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Hardie 59, 61.
293
Williams, “Ovid’s Exile Poetry” 236.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 421

Criseyde; it is like the Troilus.”294 And as with the Ovidian loss of control, there
is always more at stake in the voyage than one individual.
The Troilus frequently alludes to Ovid’s exilic quandary at the end of the
poem, particularly regarding Criseyde. Criseyde’s voyage to the Greeks is a
structural analogue to Ovid’s journey insofar as both are exiled from their re-
spective nations and lose control over their respective reputations. Troilus’s in-
creasing isolation and inner immigration can be read in terms of exile as well.
Like Ovid’s persona, he laments the removal from specific goods and loses con-
trol of himself in turn – which contrasts with Criseyde who does control herself,
heeding the Ovidian lessons of the Remedia and the Tristia. Both, Troilus and
Ovid’s persona lack a pilot at an important stage of their respective ‘journeys’;
both are concerned about the separation from a woman (esp. Trist. I. ii, vi, III.
iii, IV. iii, and V. xiv); both frequently muse on their impending deaths (esp.
Trist. I. v); both (mentally) revisit locations related to their loss (esp. Trist. III. ii,
viii, ix), which in both cases is caused by what is perceived of as an error.295
More importantly, both journeys are crucially concerned with nationhood.296
Ovid perceives his work in terms of national education. This national dimension
is also discernible in Petrarch’s sonnet, where, according to Stillinger, the image
of the ship analogizes ship and state, a medieval topos. Chaucer’s employment
of Petrarch thus represents political commentary, subsequently turning to the
parliament and the Peasants’ Rising of 1381.297 In view of the poet’s reference to
the Somnium Scipionis, the Brut tradition, the Petrarchan analogy of ship and
state, and the Ovidian structural parallel of an out-of-control ship during a jour-
ney into exile, it would be hard not to see a national subtext to Troilus’s actions
in Book V. Troilus’s error, however, does not lie in invention – which in Ovid’s

294
Stillinger, Song 195, after arguing that the song alludes to Petrarch’s sonnet 189 and The-
baid III. 22-32. Beyond Petrarch and Statius, the passage recalls Virgil’s and Ovid’s ver-
sions of Aeneas’s trip past Scylla and Charybdis (Aen. III. 413-40; Met. XIV. 68-81).
295
Ovid’s earlier warnings notwithstanding, revisiting the locations associated with one’s
love affords some relief: “The loss of centre in Ovid’s exilic self is partially redressed by
his mental travels back to Rome.” Williams, “Ovid’s Exile Self” 237.
296
Ovid frequently refers to himself as the poet of Rome, and his exile takes precedence over
all other losses (see Trist. I. i). In the course of coming to terms with his exile, Ovid often
alludes to the Troy story. For instance, Ovid compares the mourning among his family,
friends, and slaves upon learning about his exile to the besieged city: “si licet exemplis in
paruo grandibus uti, / haec facies Troiae, cum caperetur, erat” [If it is permissible to use
for a small event such a mighty example, it looked like an image of Troy during the siege]
(Trist. I. iii. 25-26).
297
Stillinger, Song 195-206. Stillinger doubts whether the Troilus alludes to the ship of state.
He does mention contemporary sources, however, that do compare England to a ship with
Edward III as a rudder, especially the first book of Gower’s Vox Clamantis. The descrip-
tion of the Peasants’ Rising of 1381 in Vox Clamantis is echoed in the second song of
Troilus. For the metaphor of the ship of the state, see further Kahlmayer, Seesturm und
Schiffbruch. For allusions to contemporary politics in the parliament-scene, see Chapter
Nineteen.
422 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

works is the means to forge counter-imperial discourse – but in the lack thereof.
If Ovid engaged too much in mythological bricolage, Troilus’s mistake lies in
appropriating a deterministic model for constructing self and nation, which ulti-
mately results in destruction. Troilus cannot go beyond Troy.298
Troilus’s historiographical determinism is subsequently highlighted by his
letter to Criseyde, in which he laments not only his own destiny but also that of
the Trojans, and his attempts to interpret his dream about Criseyde and the boar.
At the beginning of his letter to Criseyde, Troilus laments that she left him
(rather than complain about the circumstances), which causes him to live in mis-
ery. The letter draws attention to his conception of himself as an abandoned
woman. Not only does he intend to complain about his ever-increasing woe, he
also stresses his tears “That wolden speke, if that they koude, and pleyne” (V.
1337), a direct allusion to Briseis’s letter to Achilles (Her. III. 3-4).299 Many al-
lusions to the Heroides follow: his assertion that if anyone has a right to com-
plain about his lady, it would be him; intimations of impending death; yearning
for the return of the lover; and wishing her the well-being he lacks. Casting
Troilus in the role of the abandoned woman brings into play also issues of na-
tionhood. Thus, Lawrence Lipking suggests that the articulation of abandonment
extends beyond the individual destiny to include also that of oppressed people
everywhere,300 in this case, the destiny of an entire nation that needs to negotiate
abandonment. Troy literally needs to abandon self-chosen abandonment; it

298
The audience never glimpses Troilus outside Troy. In Book V, Troilus, although confined
to Troy, assumes a liminal position that, in the Troy story, is reserved for the ladies. Like
Boccaccio’s Troiolo, Troilus looks at the Greek camp from the city walls and senses a
calming wind coming from that direction (V. 670-79). While Troiolo’s attitude to the
Greeks changes – “e come già turbarsi / vedendoli, solea, così mirati / con diletto eran”
[And as formerly, he was wont to be disturbed when he saw them, so now were they
looked upon with pleasure] (Fil. V. 70) – Chaucer’s Troilus remains trapped in the Vene-
rean system, hearing the wind ‘wondering’ “Whi twynned be we tweyne?” (V. 679). The
setting is borrowed from Boccaccio, with an important change: Troiolo successfully feigns
other concerns that bring him to the city walls (Fil. VII. 1); Pandarus and Troilus, ‘play’
on the walls, that is, they ‘amuse’ themselves there.
299
According to Lawrence Lipking, the Troilus asks: “is Criseyde or Troilus the more aban-
doned?” He believes that “Whatever the answer, the question could not have been raised
without the hero’s conversion to the heroine’s code of values. Men seldom discover such
intelligence by themselves.” Moreover, “stereotypes about abandoned women also passed
down to the least and dullest of men. Fortified by the charm of the tradition, even a foolish
Flute thinks Thisbe within his grasp. Men take some pride in their roles as abandoned
women.” Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1988) xx, 135. See further Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 48.
300
Lipking suggests that the popularity of songs of abandonment may be owed to the fact that
“they speak for the oppressed people everywhere. The poetry of abandoned women flour-
ishes wherever those who hear it are reminded of their own subjection and alienation, of
everything that is missing from their lives.” Lipking, Abandoned Women 11.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 423

needs to abandon Troilus’s (and Trojan historiography’s) determinism in order

to advance alternative ontological models.
Troilus’s determinism is further underscored by Chaucer’s handling of Troi-
lus’s dream in which the latter beholds Criseyde in the arms of a boar. Chaucer
omits Boccaccio’s mentioning of the exchange of hearts, which he moves into
Criseyde’s dream (Troilus II. 925-31; cf. Fil. VII. 24), underlining Criseyde’s
capacity to accommodate change; for Troilus, changeability remains inconceiv-
able. Unlike Troiolo, who allegorizes Diomede as the boar and the heart as her
love (Fil. VII. 27-28), Troilus reads change and betrayal into the dream, ponder-
ing on all possible reasons for the breach of trust (V. 1254-60). Troiolo emerges
as the better analyst of his own actions, since he wonders why he did believe in
Criseyde’s council and why he did not break their agreement not to kidnap
her.301 Troiolo questions the mythical system he has appropriated for himself
and critiques the tenacity of public discourse. In pondering the possibility of
change, Troiolo conceives of Criseyde’s words as “santa” (Fil. VII. 31), whereas
Troilus construes them in terms of a complete narrative, a “gospel” (V. 1265).
Only Troiolo realizes that what is at stake is the manipulation of narratives, of
ambiguity: “e tu parlavi ambiguo e coperto” [But thou didst speak to me am-
biguously and covertly] (Fil. VII. 31).302 Cassandra provides clues as to how to
interpret the dream narratives in both poems. In the Filostrato, Cassandra’s im-
portance is diminished since Troiolo interprets his dream correctly. Moreover,
she is a clever deceiver in that her knowledge, stemming from hear-say, appears
as divine prophecy, at least to Troiolo, who is angry with his sister for insulting
Criseida, who would wear the crown better than Cassandra (Fil. VII. 90-92, 94-
102). After a while, Troiolo takes out his anger on the Greeks: “e sì ancora per
l’animo ardente / che contro a’ Greci aveva di mostrare / la sua virtù” [And also
on account of the ardent desire he had of displaying his valor against the Greeks]
(Fil. VII. 104). Chaucer’s Cassandra appears more prudent and bookish.303 She

301
“Perchè credetti al tuo consiglio rio? / [...] / Perchè i patti fatti non guastai, / Come nel
cuor mi venne, allora ch’ io / Ti vidi render?” [Why did I believe in your bad counsel? ...
Why did I not break the agreements made, as it came into my heart to do, when I saw you
surrendered] (Fil. VII. 30).
302
Troilus flatly utters “But who may bet bigile, yf hym lyste, / Than he on whom men
weneth best to triste” (V. 1266-67). This divests him of all responsibility, despite the fact
that he, too, noticed that Criseyde’s first letter was ‘difficult’ and open to multiple inter-
pretations. Just as to further underscore his restricted rhetorical abilities, he writes a letter
to Criseyde, filled with conventional phrases reminiscent of guidebooks for letter-writing.
See McKinnell, “Letters” 73-89; Windeatt 523n; Barney 1054n. More concretely, Troilus
shapes his identity on a model that lends the appropriate verbal means, that of Briseis’s
letter in Heroides III. Hagedorn writes that “it is almost as if Troilus has deliberately de-
cided to use the Heroides as a model for how to win his lady back.” Hagedorn, Abandoned
Women 146.
303
For Minnis, Troilus and Cassandra “provide the norms of virtue and knowledge against
which we may measure the other characters.” Minnis, Chaucer 77.
424 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

locates the boar’s head in the tradition of the fall of great men, as settling the
destiny of Thebes. She is “an admirable editor of the ‘olde bokes’; she is capable
both of sifting through the sources for relevance and truth and of recasting them
through her own sense of historical readability.”304 And, she is the only character
in the Troilus who does not lie to herself.305 In effect, Cassandra relates the en-
tire genealogy of the boar and its significance starting with Thebes as the earliest
fallen city, “And so descendeth down from gestes olde / To Diomede, and thus
she spak and tolde” (V. 1511-12):
This ilke boor bitokneth Diomede,
Tideus sone, that down descended is
Fro Meleagre, that made the boor to blede;
And thy lady, wherso she be, ywis,
This Diomede hire herte hath, and she his.
Wep if thow wolt, or lef, for out of doute,
This Diomede is inne, and thow art oute. (V. 1513-1519)
In this sophisticated genealogical construction of Diomede’s ancestry, Cassan-
dra anticipates Troilus’s historiographical determinism and propels it onward in
kindling envy between Diomede and Troilus on the battlefield, which, in turn,
causes the destruction of the city. Ironically, his anger at Cassandra causes him
to forget his predicament for the time being and cures him “As though al hool
hym hadde ymad a leche” (V. 1537). His recovered transparency has the effect
he desires, since genealogical necessity unfolds. As Fortuna begins to kill the
valiant Trojans, the translatio imperii is set in motion (V. 1541-47, cited fully
below). Scholars point to Inferno VII. 73-82 as a source for this passage,306 and
fittingly, Inferno VII closes on those souls overcome with anger – “Figlio, or
vedi / l’anime di color cui vinse l’ira” (VII. 115-16). This places Troilus’s re-
gained transparency into the appropriate context, reminiscent of the death of
Hector in the Troy story, who also dies on account of his unchecked emotional-
ity, his transparency.307 That Troilus has become fully transparent is even more
apparent in his rejection of any kind of disguise. Often, the poet reports, Troilus
intends to see her by means of pretending to be a pilgrim, “but he may nat con-
trefete / To ben unknowen of folk that weren wise, / Ne fynde excuse aright that

304
Amtower, Engaging Words 157.
305
Nolan, Chaucer 208.
306
Windeatt 543n; Barney 1055n.
307
L. Staley Johnson observes that Chaucer changes the sequence of events regarding Hec-
tor’s death. In the ‘Guido tradition’, Andromache’s dream precedes Hector’s death. In the
Troilus, Troilus’s dream precedes the death of Hector. Johnson believes that the dream
evokes not only the dream of Andromache, but also Cassandra’s interpretation of Troilus’s
dream. “Chaucer also links the final incapacities of Hector and Troilus, who is ‘Hector the
secounde,’ in a way that illuminates both figures.” Johnson, “The Medieval Hector: A
Double Tradition,” Mediaevalia 5 (1979): 176.
 Chapter Sixteen: Transparent Troilus 425

may suffise / If he among the Grekis knowen were” (V. 1576-81). Physical or
rhetorical disguise are not Troilus’s forte.308
After Troilus receives a letter from Criseyde, “Hym thoughte it lik a kalendes
of chaunge” (V. 1634). The ‘change,’ if change is the right word, renders Troi-
lus completely transparent and engenders the unbridled aggression that seals his
and Troy’s destiny.309 Troilus goes out to battle, intending to take revenge on
Diomede – and search out his own death (V. 1702, 1718, 1756-57). The poet,
however, is apparently uninterested in furnishing any details about his death and
rather focuses on the above-cited apotheosis, in a passage that makes nationhood
a crucial context. In the course of the poem, then, Troilus is changeable – like
Guido’s Trojans, he is overly emotional and incapable of masking. That he often
tries to mask his emotions safeguards his life – but also unnecessarily compli-
cates it, particularly in those moments, in which transparent emotionality would
have been called for. When to mask or not to mask is one of the central ques-
tions that Troilus fails to answer. What he lacks is self-control. In this context, it
is important to note that some readers have seen his apotheosis as the realization
of “the foolishness of Ovidian game,”310 as the foolishness of an Ars that led first
to abandonment and thence to exile. In contrast to the Tristia, the realization of
Troilus’s error ensues only post-mortem. Incapable of being his own “steris-
man,” of engaging in a process of mythological bricolage that reconciles per-
sonal emotions with civic duties, Troilus chooses as his ontological model the
Troy story. In an allegorical reading, Britain chooses for itself a deterministic
historiographical model that is not viable for constructions of nationhood. Ap-
propriating Trojan lore results in Trojan catastrophe.
If Troilus’s self-fashioning is unsuitable for constructing a model of nation-
hood that accommodates individuality and if his behavior as a statesman is prob-
lematic, especially when compared with Scipio, it is odd that the poet nonethe-
less bestows upon Troilus the elevated perspective from the eighth sphere.311 In
its reference to the Somnium Scipionis, one might argue that Troilus is partially
deserving insofar as he imitates his father’s transparency. And yet, Chaucer does

308
For the successful concealment of emotions on Troilus’s part, cf. Florian Schleburg,
“Role-Conformity and Role-Playing in Troilus, Pandarus and Criseyde,” Of Remem-
braunce the Keye: Medieval Literature and Its Impact through the Ages; Festschrift for
Karl Heinz Göller on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday, ed. Uwe Böker (Frankfurt/Main:
Lang, 2004) 81. Schleburg acknowledges, however, that “no soothsaying seems to be re-
quired to see through his disguise and recognise the endemic Trojan love-sickness in his
condition.”
309
Troilus is literally purged from Criseyde’s mind, which reverses the mirror image with
which the poem began. In other words, Troilus’s hypergood is gone (V. 1695). In “the first
case Troilus’ mind is a positive mirror, reflecting as it does his idea of love; in the second
Criseyde’s mind, as Troilus sees it, is an empty mirror, because it no longer reflects love
for him.” Torti, Glass of Form 60-61.
310
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 72.
311
Josephine Bloomfield, “Chaucer and the Polis” 301-04.
426 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

not clearly indicate Troilus’s final destination,312 which falls into Mercury’s re-
sponsibility (who is, incidentally, in charge also of Aeneas’s destiny in the
Aeneid [HF 427-30]). Troilus is thus primarily awarded with a particularly
transparent, exilic view. Death “frees his mind for the Boetheian ascent,” as
Troilus is liberated from his vision of deterministic Fortune.313 That is, Troilus
beholds the catastrophic results of his deterministic Trojan historiography as
well. According to Lanham, “Troilus laughs at his sufferings and, finally, so
should we, for what he has attained there is that perspective on man as a prisoner
of his own conventions and of his own language, which he cannot gain on
earth.”314 Troilus indeed suffers from his own conventions, especially from Tro-
jan customs and typical Trojan transparency, which for Troilus entails a contra-
diction-free existence that renders him “hool.”315 If the mono-mythological con-
struction of nationhood, by means of the Troy story, is not tenable, the poem
poses the following question: how can one make selves and nations beyond the
foundational myth of Britain? Since Troilus’s “last sight of himself, like his first
sight of Criseyde, penetrates to an empty locus,”316 this lacuna, like the blank at
the end of the House of Fame, invites a hermeneutical rereading of the poem
that takes into consideration the vexing question of self-control. A narrative
space opens for the investigation of other ontological models for reconciling
personal and national masks – models represented by Pandarus, Criseyde, and
the poet.

312
Chaucer is vague about the destination of Troilus; his “perfection may be shadowy, but
certainly it is impressive.” Minnis, Chaucer 107.
313
Wood, Chaucer 188; Klaus Stierstorfer, “Markers of Transition: Laughter in Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 34.1 (1999): 18-37. See further Shoaf, Dante 151. For Troi-
lus’s transparent outlook, see Boece V, pr. 2: “Forwhy in the sovereynes devynes sub-
staunces (that is to seyn, in spiritz) jugement is more cleer, and wil nat icorrumped, and
myght redy to speden thinges that ben desired.” With reference to the allusion to the Som-
nium Scipionis in the Parliament of Fowls, Wood argues that Troilus rests in a place
“more like the Christian purgatory than either the Christian hell of the Christian heaven,” a
place for ‘likerous’ folk such as Troilus (189-90).
314
Lanham, “Opaque Style” 175.
315
Other characters are very aware of Troilus’s desire to ‘be whole’: Pandarus points to Troi-
lus’s incompleteness, anticipating the hour in which Criseyde will be his – “al hool” (II.
587-88, cited above); Helen, concerned about Troilus’s health, hopes that he will be “al
hool” (II. 1670); and Criseyde echoes this phrase shortly after, when she intends to know
his emotions and wills his transparency (III. 168, cited below). Troilus feels whole at two
important moments. At the end of the second book, he thanks Pandarus for making him
whole. Finally, it is the anger caused by Cassandra’s prophecy which makes him tempo-
rarily forget his predicament and allows him to be the excessively emotional Troilus again
(II. 975, V. 1537, both cited fully above).
316
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 74.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Here bygynneth game”: Opaque Pandarus

Chaucer’s Troilus is in many ways not Ovidian enough since he remains unable
to ‘invent’ narratives to synthesize and control multiple mythical systems (and
contradictory goods therein). He remains trapped in the Ovidian lament, in the
Heroides and, to a lesser extent, the Tristia. In contrast, Pandarus is too Ovidian
and too Virgilian. Although he is certainly an Ovidian character,317 he is less in
control of himself than in control of other people’s emotional lives.318 I believe
that his identity, consisting of various Ovidian subject positions, ultimately
amounts to a non-identity because he radically decenters his personae. His no-
tion of game, quintessentially a narrative game, demands the invention of new
opaque masks in order to keep on playing.319 Therefore, he becomes a multitude
of rhetorical selves, of vertical masks, which do not intersect at any point. Pan-
darus “is constantly hiding behind different masks, playing different roles in the
poem all of which seem calculated to further his grand design, the union of Troi-

317
In the early books of the Troilus, Pandarus is “an Ars Amatoria incarnate that provides the
necessary advice and stratagems for the young lover to win the woman.” From Book III
on, Pandarus shifts to the Remedia. As Calabrese notes further, there are minor differences
between Pandarus’s and Ovid’s arts of love in that “Chaucer toys with Pandarus’s Ovidian
roots to create a less assured doctor amoris, working in a less secure world, and teaching a
more passionate and ultimately less malleable young man.” Eventually, Pandarus disap-
pears from the poem in an un-Ovidian way: “Here the Remedia Amoris confesses that he
is out of his depth; game has become earnest, and he can do no more for Troilus. Pandarus
must do what Ovid would not – give up the battle and fall into vengeful verbal attacks on
the woman.” Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 39, 46, 70. For Pandarian Ovidianism,
see further Amtower, Engaging Words 160; Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 63-68.
318
But cf. Stevens, “Winds of Fortune” 297.
319
The notion of game is much emphasized in the Troilus. Ovidian eloquence is bestowed on
Pandarus qua Ovid, who uses Ulysses in the Ars to substantiate the point that men need to
be cultivated to win love. Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 40-41, 43; Ars II. 121-44.
Pandarus’s frequent musings on game may further remind the reader of the eagle in the
House of Fame who tells Geffrey to “Take yt in ernest or in game” (HF 822). Pugh argues
that, eventually, the game of courtly love “is then transformed into a pedagogical experi-
ence of Christian revelation.” Pugh, “Christian Revelation” 379. In this sense, Troilus is a
godgame, that is, a game staged by an (often) unknown agency, usually with an educa-
tional purpose. For godgames, see R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explora-
tions in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1990); El-
len McDaniel, “Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s
Woman,” MFS 31.1 (1985): 31-42; Martin Kuester, “Godgames in Paradise: Educational
Strategies in Milton and Fowles,” Anglia 115.1 (1997): 29-43.
428 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

lus and Criseyde.”320 In terms of identity theory, Pandarus corresponds to the

many masks that White and Hellerich deem appropriate for postmodernity’s
‘new social drama.’ His liberatory performance can only ensue, however, be-
cause his personhood disperses into a multiplicity of unrelated masks. Beyond
several stereotypical masks, there is no Pandarus to be unveiled.321 This ‘Pandar-
ian postmodernity,’ which has often been insinuated in scholarship and which
extends beyond mere pragmatism,322 relates to the creation of English nation-
hood as well. To my knowledge, criticism has rarely adequately noted that Pan-
darus himself represents almost the complete public discourse available for all
Trojan processes of signification.323 Pandarus is the key provider of available

320
Charles S. Rutherford, “Pandarus as Lover: ‘A Joly Wo’ or ‘Loves Shotes Keene’?,” An-
nuale Mediaevale 13 (1975): 5. My account is indebted to Rutherford’s two central obser-
vations: 1) that “We do not see Pandarus solus; [...] When upon one occasion we do
glimpse his thoughts (e.g. II, 267 ff.), they are never self-directed, but always seen in ref-
erence to the immediate context, always colored by his immediate desires for Troilus or
his niece”; 2) that “Pandarus’s self-appointed function as prime mover in the love affair, in
short, demands that he play many parts. [...] He is, in other words, a public figure, a cha-
meleon, a consummate actor adopting one posture towards Troilus another towards
Criseyde” (5). Robertson draws attention to Pandarus’s masking: “He is externally pleas-
ant, somewhat commonplace, and a little unctuous. But this deceptiveness is part of Chau-
cer’s artistry. His ‘devel,’ as Troilus once calls him (I, 623), is convincingly decked out in
sheep’s clothing.” Robertson, “Chaucerian Tragedy” 17. See also Mary Wack, “Pandarus,
Poetry, and Healing,” SAC 2 (1987): “One fact underlies this multiplicity of masks: Pan-
darus mediates, and this enables his various roles to be aligned and compared [...]” (127).
For the role of Pandarian artifice and the creation of fictions more generally, see E. Talbot
Donaldson, “Chaucer’s Three ‘P’s’: Pandarus, Pardoner, and Poet,” Michigan Quarterly
Review 14.3 (1975): 282-301; John M. Fyler, “The Fabrications of Pandarus,” MLQ 41.2
(1980): 115-30. Since Pandarus never manages to connect disparate personae, he is more
(or rather less) than a split self, a point implicit in Chance’s observation concerning analo-
gies between Pandarus and Janus (Mythographic Chaucer 122); Pandarus is an empty self.
321
Pandarus is frequently characterized negatively as bawdry or as a pimp. My view of Pan-
darus is offered not as a value judgment but in terms of a Chaucerian exploration of a spe-
cific model of identification, one bordering on postmodern notions of fragmentation.
Thus, my view of Pandarus is occasionally skeptical since I am unconvinced of many ten-
ets in the formation of such theories. For a succinct summary of Pandarus’s reputation
with his critics, see Hill, “Aristocratic Friendship” 166-68. Hill believes that Pandarus is a
Ciceronian friend, feeling genuinely for his niece and Troilus. See also Minnis, Chaucer
101, 175 n. 112. Aers discerns an aggressive streak in Pandarus and compares him to Dio-
mede. Aers, Community 127-30. In Boccaccio’s poem, Pandarus leaves little doubt about
how far he will go to satisfy Troilus’s lust: “Sempre son succinto / a far non sol per te ciò
che conviene, / ma ogni cosa” [I am ready always to do for you not only what is fitting,
but all things] (Fil. II. 90). See Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta 18.
322
Minnis, Chaucer 94: “Pandarus is essentially a pragmatist.”
323
Many accounts anticipate this, most poignantly Lanham’s “Opaque Style.” He contends
that “The continual proverb-mouthing [...] really stands as the shorthand expression for a
culture’s commonsense adjustment to its characteristic problems. This is Pandarus’ role.
He embodies conventional wisdom, articulate middle-class common sense” (171). Mark
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 429

masks, not only for Troilus and Criseyde, but for all (emotional) Trojans alike:
he is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s mythology or Ciarán Benson’s “pool of narratives.”
Pandarus eventually disappears in the discourses he himself has created, or
rather, in the discourses that constitute him in the first place. Once his game is
over, no masks are left. Like public discourse, which is sustained by continuous
re-enactment and cannot generate itself, Pandarus is unable to make himself.324
If Troilus represents a monoglossic myth of origins informed by one determinis-
tic (historiographical) hypergood, Pandarus ultimately epitomizes a way of in-
venting new masks, personal and national, which is entirely arbitrary and oper-
ates without any goods, save that of changeability itself.
Pandarus’s first appearance in the Troilus ensues as abruptly as Troilus’s
conversion to Venus. Since Troilus becomes a lover in a town of lovers, Panda-
rus is a suitable guide for Troilus. With the help of the Ars amatoria, Pandarus
can convince Troilus to place his trust in him. Troilus gives up all narrative con-
trol; Pandarus will now offer the ‘appropriate’ opaque masks. Since Troilus has
yielded his narrative tools and is thus unable to make the necessary masks him-
self, Pandarus is frequently concerned with the perception of Troilus’s ‘masks.’
The audience learns about Pandarus’s rhetorical strategies when he persuades
Criseyde, whereby the poet points up the limits of Pandarian invention in that it
is confined to the opaque mask making of the Ars and Remedia – Ovidian
metamorphosis and hybridity can be achieved only when public discourse is ac-
tively molded. Nevertheless, Pandarus is able to convince Criseyde, chiefly be-
cause she relies to a much greater extent on the perception of her acts in public
discourse than does Troilus. While Pandarus is initially easily able to alter the
perception of his actors and their intentions, he increasingly needs to intervene
and assist in the actual performance from Book III on, particularly with Troilus.
The perception of individuality gives way to the necessity to make ‘individual-
ity.’ At the same time, the retreat into the private sphere entails Pandarus’s loss
of control over the lovers, which prompts the ‘almost-realization’ of his error,
namely, that love is more than a rhetorical game: his pandering destabilizes ethi-
cal goods which are not his domain. The problem calls for an already well-
known Pandarian solution, the imposition of an opaque mask. Pandarus’s turn to
the Remedia substantiates that Pandarian selfhood is only a matter of opaque
masks, for instance, when he advises Troilus to enjoy one particular good at a
time rather than simultaneously. In a sense, Pandarus becomes the postmodern
aporia of ‘schizophrenic’ identity writ large. At an important narrative juncture,
Pandarus literally occludes the source of his ancient wisdom according to which

Lambert points out that Pandarus “stands in loco parentis” and is introduced in the poem
almost as “Human Resourcefulness itself.” Lambert, “Troilus, Books I-III: A Criseydan
Reading,” Essays on “Troilus and Criseyde,” ed. Salu 106, 109, 111.
324
“Pandarus delivers no lonely lyric; and Chaucer never entrusts to him the highly conven-
tional philosophical monologue or introspective self-debate that he gives occasionally to
Troilus and Criseyde.” Muscatine, Chaucer 144.
430 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

a new love should replace the old. Ironically, the source to which he attributes
Ovidian wisdom offers a productive model for reconciling different goods and
contradiction by means of mask intersection. This becomes clear when Panda-
rus, unable to keep Troilus constricted to the Ovidian amatory works or, more
perilously, to keep Criseyde from assuming an exilic, counter-national stance, is
unable to pander further. Pitying his friend and ashamed of his niece, he stands
between ‘causes’ which can be linked only by purging himself of any responsi-
bility – the ontological blank of the empty self. His ontological collapse, how-
ever, is a faultline which offers itself for yet another investigation into tenable
alternative models for making selves and nations.

1. “A fool may ek a wis-man ofte gide”: From Personal to Public Voice

When Pandarus appears for the first time in the poem, he does so unbeknownst
to Troilus: “A frend of his that called was Pandare / Com oones in unwar, and
herde hym groone” (I. 548-49).325 Pandarus, aware of Troilus’s problem (as the
audience learns later [II. 505-53; Windeatt 121n]), provokes Troilus by first sus-
pecting that the latter is troubled about the Greeks before offering a potential
second reason, a “remors of conscience” (II. 554), invoking the pervasiveness of
public opinion. The manner of Pandarus’s first appearance is characteristic inso-
far as Pandarus is ‘always already there.’ He has access to every household, in-
cluding Priam’s,326 is as omnipresent as public discourse itself,327 and he always

325
The manner in which Pandarus enters the room (and Troilus’s mind) is already somewhat
devious when one considers the role of catching people unawares within the larger scope
of the Troy story. Both Benoît and Guido make much of the killing of Hector, who, had he
but noticed Achilles, would have certainly prevailed. In the Laud, Achilles kills Hector
“Er he were war” (10937). Lydgate’s Troy Book likewise has Achilles slay Hector “Al
vnwarly, or Hector myõt aduerte” (III. 5395). The Destruction of Troy prefers “Vnpersa-
yuit of the prince” (XXI. 8657). See John Clerk, The ‘Gest Hystoriale’ of the Destruction
of Troy: An Alliterative Romance Translated from Guido de Colonna’s “Hystoria
Troiana,” ed. G. A. Panton and D. Donaldson, 2 vols., EETS, o.s. 39, 56 (1869, 1874;
London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968).
326
At the beginning of Book V, Troilus calls for Pandarus in order to ease his sorrow, but
Pandarus is delayed, “For with the kyng Priam al day was he, / So that it lay nought in his
libertee / Nowher to gon –” (V. 284-86). Boccaccio does not specify any reasons for Pan-
daro’s absence (Fil. V. 22). Pandarus does not play a political role in the Troy story. In the
Troilus, however, he apparently not only has easy access to Priam’s household, but must
have some political importance if he spends the entire day in the company of the king.
Within the chronology of the events, his encounter with Priam occurs between the deci-
sion to exchange Criseyde and the parting scene, in which Hector’s visit to the Greek
camp takes place as does the potential duel between Achilles and Hector. The fight is pre-
vented by Agamemnon and Priam’s intervention. It is conceivable that Chaucer imagined
Pandarus accompanying Priam on this trip.
327
Pandarus talks more than any other character in the Troilus. Sanford B. Meech, Design in
Chaucer’s “Troilus” (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1959) 9.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 431

pries into personal affairs.328 Scholarship occasionally (and implicitly) acknowl-

edges this, chiefly with respect to proverbial language.329 As has often been
noted, nowhere does Chaucer use as many proverbs as in the Troilus, most of
them in Pandarus’s discourse.330 Naturally, proverbial knowledge has a quintes-
sentially ‘postmodern’ quality in that it represents a highly moldable, contradic-
tory discourse, allowing the assumption of multiple angles and perspectives on
any given situation or predicament.331 Assuming that Pandarus represents Trojan
mythology, including the changeability associated with the Trojans in the Troy
story, Pandarus eludes the discussion of whether he is well-meaning or a violent
male aggressor; he creates whichever role is called upon. Given Pandarus’s
knowledge of Trojan discourse, it is futile for Troilus to even attempt to hide his
plight – worries are to be shared among friends (I. 584-88). After learning about
Troilus’s amorous affliction, Pandarus emerges as a particularly ill-suited prae-
ceptor amoris, since, unlike his Ovidian counterpart, he is not versed in the arts
of love himself. Although he proclaims that “A fool may ek a wis-man ofte
gide” (I. 630), which is reminiscent of Ovid’s Ars (II. 547-48; Windeatt 125n;

328
Troilus’s complaint in the privacy of his chamber is a scene commonly witnessed in the
courtly literature of the Middle Ages. Pandarus’s rebuke can be seen in the context of a
medieval association of loneliness with secrecy, sexuality, magic, and so on. Goodall,
“Being Alone in Chaucer,” ChauR 27.1 (1992): 5-6. In the light of Troilus’s attempts to
craft his own story, it is notable that the most successful endeavors are conducted when-
ever Troilus is by himself. Pandarus’s interruptions, then, can be seen in terms of collec-
tive discourse striving for the dominance of the private sphere. Perhaps Criseyde’s
strength lies precisely in the fact that collective discourse (that is, the audience) is never
able to pry too deeply into her affairs.
329
Knight, for instance, wonders if Pandarus is “an agent of the public world” or “a more re-
alistic figure of the manipulative fixing that operated in and around the public world so
that its figures should have just what they privately wanted in their ‘competitive assertive-
ness’ and never suffer their valuable honour to be breached? The threadbare proverbial
character of Pandarus’s language and the frenetic insistence of his helpfulness suggests the
latter, negative role, but his position will not become clear until his part has been played
out in full in the context of Criseyde and her responses, a process which dominates Book
II.” Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer 44-45.
330
Benson, History 140, with reference to Whiting, Chaucer’s Use of Proverbs, non videtur.
331
See Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 291: Pandarus’s “conversation also alludes to a range
of matters from geometry to dream theory and philosophy, so that his talk holds together
and seems the outcome of a range of observation and reading, from folk wisdom to book-
ish allusion. [...] Of the characters, it is Pandarus who has views on books and writing,
who refers to his reading, who cites books as authorities, and who picks up a book to pass
the time,” wherefore he has been compared to Chaucer. See also J. A. Burrow, “Another
Proverb for Pandarus,” ChauR 38.3 (2004): esp. 294-97. Pandarian language use, whether
in his proverbial or literary borrowings, is rather slippery, as Lynn Staley notes, focusing
on the use of political language in Troy: “Chaucer uses it to indicate a type of political in-
adequacy that is fundamental to the courtly mode of Troy.” Staley, Languages of Power in
the Age of Richard II (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2005) 8. By com-
parison, Hector’s straight-forward language remains without effect.
432 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

Barney 1028n), the context is markedly different: Ovid’s narrator admits that he
has not completely mastered the art of handling a rival: “hac ego, confiteor, non
sum perfectus in arte; / quid faciam? monitis sum minor ipse meis.” Pandarus
cannot rely on his own experiences, but has to draw on other people’s experien-
tial accounts, on the available narratives and their potential manipulation – and
the narrative leaves no doubt that Pandarus knows his romances.332 In this realm,
there is little that is beyond Pandarus’s capabilities. Not only does he indicate
that contraries can be seen as related, if only in the trivial observation that with-
out bitterness one would not know sweetness (I. 637, 645), he is also able to de-
contextualize narratives from their original context, suiting the immediate com-
municative purpose.
Oënone’s letter to Paris is a good example, Pandarus suggests, of how igno-
rance does not preclude the ability to help. Phebus, he reports, has invented
medicine, but he could not heal himself (I. 659-65; Her. V. 151-52).333 What
Pandarus neglects to mention is the context, namely, that he cites a letter written
by an abandoned woman which includes Cassandra’s prophecy of Troy’s de-
mise. This is one of two important instances in which Pandarus ‘educates’
Troy(lus) while deflecting attention from those parts of the narratives that are
potentially relevant for present public issues.334 Pandarus’s momentary suppres-
sion of the destruction of Troy contrasts sharply with the emphasis he places on
the role of the public only moments later, when reminding Troilus that an

332
“The metaphoric parallel between Pandarus’s own reading and the acts of authoring he
undertakes deflates the claims of the auctor to auctoritas. Insofar as Pandarus’s careful
study of fiction is crafted itself by lying and deceit, his character devalues the claims of
poetry to lies. He conflates the position of the pandarer and the author: the motivations are
spurious at best, immoral at worst.” Amtower further draws attention to the fact that
“Whereas the Greeks prove themselves to be consistently adept at reading signs, listening
to Calchas’s prophecies when the Trojans do not and paying attention to the lessons they
read from books [...], the Trojans frequently prove themselves incapable of reading char-
acter. They make rash and indiscreet decisions as a result.” Amtower, Engaging Words
158, 160.
333
For Pandarus’s role as a physician, see Wack, “Pandarus.”
334
For instances in which “Pandarus uses the events of the war as stage props for his private
drama,” see Fyler, “Fabrications of Pandarus” 116. Simpson stresses Pandarus’s deflection
of public goods in favor of engineering the relationship between Criseyde and Troilus.
Simpson, Reform 139-40. For the misquotations from Ovid, see Hagedorn, Abandoned
Women 132-36. Hagedorn further observes a gender-switch in Pandarus’s account and
draws attention to his embellishments of Apollo’s love service. Pandarus “chooses to iden-
tify himself with Apollo, Oenone’s rapist,” which suggests his aggressive, sexual potential
(135-36). Arn’s discussion of the letter highlights Pandarus’s inefficacy as a physician:
“Troilus resembles both Oënone, who cannot heal herself, and Paris, who in his single-
minded pursuit of Helen will bring himself and his country to destruction.” Arn, “Three
Ovidian Women” 8. Fleming argues that while the passage alludes to Heroides V, the
lines in question “actually come from the first book of the Metamorphoses.” Fleming,
Classical Imitation 122-23.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 433

autonomous position is not to be desired: Troilus needs a friend. Pandarus

makes sure that Troilus remains securely linked to public discourse (I. 694-
95).335 He literally subsumes Troilus’s position by suggesting that the two are
really one person, which illustrates how ably Pandarus appears to put himself in
Troilus’s shoes and to adopt the Venerean hypergood (I. 711-14). Troilus rightly
complains and rejects Pandarian “lore.” He is soon persuaded, though, when
Pandarus raises his awareness of exactly how a death for love would be con-
strued in the public sphere, namely, as a loss of Troilus’s martial attributes, his
military prowess: “But that for feere is yolden up thy breth, / For Grekes han bi-
seged us, iwys? / Lord, which a thonk than shaltow han of this!” (I. 801-03).
This notion, tantamount to rejecting Troilus’s estate, clinches the argument for
Troilus, along with the realization that his lady would not even know about him
should he die of love now (I. 820-26). Aptly, Pandarus perceives Troilus’s com-
pliance with his pandering as the beginning of his game: “Here bygynneth
game” (I. 868). As the plot unfolds, the game at stake is the appropriation of
other people’s roles in order to furnish them with new roles aiding the require-
ments of dominant Trojan ideology.336 Pandarus’s Ovidian game is a matter of
rhetoric: he is a collection of rhetorical selves without the support of a homo se-
riosus.337 The only good, if one wants to use that term, is his changeability and a
contradictoriness that serves the interest of dominant public discourse.
Pandarus continues to adopt Troilus’s subject position. Like Troilus, he
praises Criseyde’s virtues (I. 890-966) and is pleased with the object of Troilus’s
desire – “But wel is me that evere that I was born, / That thow biset art in so
good a place” (I. 904-05). Pandarus also revisits Troilus’s conversion in rehears-
ing how Troilus mocked love before becoming subject(ed) to love himself (I.
908-924). Pandarus almost becomes Troilus in ridiculing him in the same way
Troilus gibed at the servants of love (I. 925-31). When advising Troilus as con-
cerns the necessity of manufacturing masks, he voices a sentiment about unity
and fragmentation that indicates his own desire for completeness in the light of
his fragmented existence: “But he that departed is in everi place / Is nowher hol,
as writen clerkes wyse” (I. 960-61). Hence, he conceives of Troilus as having
attained the very stability he himself lacks – Troilus has already arrived at a safe
port: “Stond faste, for to good port hastow rowed” (I. 969). And indeed, the
metaphor fittingly grasps that Troilus will not ever have to compose a line him-

335
Pandarus finds a (problematic) mythical analogue for Troilus’s sorrow in Niobe’s tears.
Troilus cries because he is in love; Niobe cries after her seven sons and seven daughters
are slain on account of her pride (Met. VI. 146-312).
336
Cf. Hill, “Aristocratic Friendship” 171.
337
Wack characterizes Pandarus’s Ovidianism as a rhetorical game: “The fiction of the
Remedia is that poetry has the power to make and unmake human love, that it is a neutral
but effective tool in the service of pragmatic goals. [...] I suggest that this essentially rhe-
torical conception of poetry subtends Pandarus’s healing activities throughout Troilus.”
Wack, “Pandarus” 129.
434 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

self. Public discourse poses as an end in itself, contradicting Troilus’s experien-

tial actuality of being adrift. Pandarus, in his appropriation of Troilus’s narra-
tives, attempts to assume a stable identity, a selfhood he himself lacks as evinces
itself at the end of the narrative, when he perishes along with Troilus’s Venerean
mask.338 This inherent changeability is already indicated at the beginning of
Book II, when love-sick Pandarus is awakened by Procne in one of the few mo-
ments in which the audience gains insight into Pandarus’s own affairs,339 a mo-
ment that associates Pandarus with Ovid’s Metamorphoses.340
The poet’s brief mentioning of Procne is one of the few occasions in which
Chaucer refers to a human-bird metamorphosis, a transformational process the
likes of which he allegedly beheld with suspicion.341 Regardless of whether this
is true, it is notable that he chooses to include this transformation, which some-
what complements his Legend of Philomela in the Legend of Good Women,
where Chaucer not only omits the transformation itself, but also fails to mention
the gory meal preceding it (Tereus unknowingly eats his son, who was killed
and cooked by Procne). Instead, his version ends with a sorry reunion of the sis-
ters (LGW F 2228-393). Admittedly, Procne is not shown in the act of metamor-
phosis in the Troilus, but she is depicted as conveying in song the story of her
transformation, explaining, “Whi she forshapen was” (II. 66). While the “allu-

338
Pandarus’s plan of achieving Troilus’s ends is relayed by means of an architectural meta-
phor, alluding to Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s employment of the same analogy for the creative
process. Pandarus’s borrowing, with references to the dichotomy of mind and heart, refers
to the opening of the Troy story, too, specifically to Peleus’s musings on how to convince
Jason to quest the Golden Fleece. The passage is usually seen as a reference to poetical in-
vention as well, for which see Chapter Nineteen.
339
Rutherford, “Pandarus as Lover” 8. Rutherford – mistakenly, I believe – argues that this is
one of the few moments in which Pandarus “simply drops the mask he wears before the
world and reveals the private man behind the public actor.” Pandarus’s emotions, how-
ever, are relayed exclusively through the poet’s voice, not Pandarus’s own. Without a
voice, moreover, he still remains an agent rather than an individual. Furthermore, the
Ovidian story that informs Pandarus’s waking is again intrinsically related to the task at
hand: Pandarus’s identity is contingent on Troilus.
340
For a reading of the Procne episode that emphasizes the similarities and dissimilarities of
Procne and Criseyde, see Hansen, Chaucer 158-60. One striking dissimilarity, in her opin-
ion, is that Criseyde remains much less powerful than her Ovidian counterpart(s). Accord-
ing to Whetherbee, Pandarus’s mission is contrasted here with Virgil’s spiritual enterprise.
Wetherbee, Chaucer 155-56.
341
Cooper argues that “The avoidance of human metamorphosis is so consistent as to indicate
that Chaucer had some radical objection to the whole idea.” Cooper, “Classical Back-
ground” 260. “There is change in Chaucer’s Ovidian world, but no true metamorphosis,”
observes Wetherbee, Chaucer 93. Chaucer reinterprets Ovidian metamorphosis in terms of
the changeability of narratives, the malleability of mythology. Calabrese qualifies Wether-
bee’s statement: “Equally important, however, is the poets’ shared vision of change, for
often in the Metamorphoses itself, there is ‘no true metamorphosis,’ no mythic escape or
liberation. Instead, Ovid focuses on the same type of instability and flux that fills the Troi-
lus, the movement from woe to weal to woe.” Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 53.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 435

sion introduces an ominous note,”342 one might well consider in greater detail
the relevance of this second inclusion of a story from Metamorphoses VI. The
story of Philomela and Procne (told in Met. VI. 412-674) is primarily a tale of
illicit desire and intra-familial violence. Chaucer’s inclusion of the narrative in
the Legend indicates which parts of this much abbreviated story were particu-
larly of interest to him. There are many parallels to the Troilus in the Ovidian
account: an abduction, a rape, masculine violence (conspicuously associated
with Mars), and female dependency, the latter without the ultimate victory of the
wronged women over Tereus. One important addition to the Ovidian material,
probably gleaned in Chrétien’s Philomela (which was incorporated into the
Ovide moralisé), is the narrator’s extension upon Philomela’s ability to weave,
which is only implicitly suggested in Ovid’s version (Met. VI. 576-78).343 In the
Legend, however, Chaucer emphasizes Philomela’s narrative weaving:
But letters can she weve to and fro,
So that, by that the yer was al ago,
She hadde ywoven in a stamyn large
How she was brought from Athenes in a barge,
And in a cave how that she was brought;
And al the thyng that Tereus hath wrought,
She waf it wel, and wrot the storye above,
How she was served for hire systers love. (LGW 2358-65)
This addition to Ovid’s text, in which the focus is on cannibalistic revenge, and
in which literacy plays no role, draws attention to Philomela’s and Procne’s ca-
pacities to ‘articulate’ themselves and tell their tales. Moreover, it highlights the
inventiveness of the sisters in giving shape to their narratives and their lives. In
the Troilus, the story is contextualized by Pandarus’s need for inventiveness to
win Criseyde for Troilus, the necessity to poetically reinvent narratives in the
same way in which the Ovide moralisé itself restructures the Ovidian original
with its emphasis on transformation, of weaving, and unraveling different ele-
ments. On the one hand, the Troilus alludes to the hybridity medieval commen-
tators saw realized in Ovidian transformations (see Chapter Seven); it also
evokes the narrator of the Book of the Duchess, on the other hand, who awakens
to the sounds of birds after reading about (Ovid’s) Ceyx and Alcyone, which in
turn prompts his act of metamorphosis, that is, the invention of the dream narra-
tive.344 For all his inventiveness, however, Pandarus loses his own voice at the
342
Windeatt 155n. For Shoaf, this underlines Pandarus’s violent streak (Dante 119).
343
See M. C. E. Shaner and A. S. G. Edwards’s explanatory notes (1073nn).
344
That Pandarus’s awakening to birds possibly alludes to the dreamer in the Book of the
Duchess has been observed by Muscatine, Chaucer 236 n. 24. Chaucer’s dreamer omits
the transformation of the two Ovidian lovers into birds. The narrator, however, interrupts
the story since it is too long and would distract the audience from his “first matere” (218),
which is introduced by his prayer to Morpheus for sleep. In a sense, the dreamer’s trans-
formation replicates Alcyone’s dream and the apparition of her ‘husband’ therein. After
awaking in the dream (“[...] for I was waked / With smale foules a gret hep / That had af-
436 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

end of the Troilus when he becomes unable to exert any further control over his
subjects. Pandarus’s invention is further belated since, in comparison with the
narrator of the Book of the Duchess, he only awakes after a metamorphosis has
already occurred.345 Unlike Philomela and Procne, he consequently does not find
a way to inscribe himself in the narrative, which thus offers a potential faultline.
Within Pandarian public discourse, for all its inventiveness, metamorphosis is
problematic. In terms of the Ovidian cursus, Pandarus is confined to the Ars and
the Remedia. As the above implicitly illustrates, Pandarus eschews hybridity and
instead offers opaque masks – to bring about metamorphosis, that is, public dis-
course needs to be actively molded.
If Pandarus is capable of adopting Troilus’s position, he is likewise able to
put himself in Criseyde’s shoes in order to figure out how to approach the task at
hand. Initially, he converses about the siege of Thebes with her and rises to the
occasion when Criseyde inquires about Hector, the central hero of the Troy
story. Pandarus associates Troilus with Hector, as do Benoît and Guido, he in-
troduces him as “Ector the secounde” (II. 155-61) with many appealing attrib-
utes. Hector, Criseyde’s protector, is amply rendered by her as the “townes wal
and Grekes yerde” (II. 154). He figures as a macro-protection of Troy in com-
parison with which Troilus becomes, in Pandarus’s discourse, a “sheld and lif
for us” (II. 201). Subsequently, Pandarus moves on from describing Troilus’s
public tasks to his personality (esp. II. 204).346 His well-crafted arguments pro-
ceed along prosopagraphical lines. First, he establishes that Criseyde is bound to
no-one and that he is her best friend, prompting her to mirror the sentiment: “I
am to no man holden, trewely, / So much as yow” (II. 241-42, 306). Only then
does he reflect on how to approach her, suggesting that he knows very well how
she would respond to him (II. 267-73). Having already established his impor-
tance for her as best friend (and as the public discourse important to her survival
in Troy), he now easily couples his identity with Troilus’s. Since Troilus is
‘deadly’ in love with her, she can choose whether to let him live or die – “But if

frayed me out of my slep” [294-96]), on account of the singing birds that might as well
represent the metamorphosed lovers from Ovid’s tale, the poet himself engages in a proc-
ess of mythological bricolage, of metamorphosis.
345
Pandarus’s inventiveness has a history of narrative models in romance and fabliaux: “But
one must insist, for the sake of what history can suggest of the meaning of Pandarus, on
his long genealogy in literature. The conjunction of the clever intermediary with an aura of
practical realism is not far to seek, even in romance.” Muscatine, Chaucer 139.
346
One of the main motifs of their conversation is Criseyde’s identity as a widow. Time and
again, Pandarus asks her to dance and to remove her garb so as not to “disfigure” herself
(II. 221-22). When Criseyde later praises her own beauty, it becomes obvious that this ap-
peal to her vanity is well-placed and effective. In fact, after Criseyde inquires of him how
to deal with the situation, he reminds her, invoking proverbial knowledge, of her fading
beauty (II. 393-406). The act of removing her garb would render her analogous to the
transparent Troilus – the ideal condition for public discourse to do its work.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 437

ye late hym deyen, I wol sterve” (II. 323).347 In order to prevent this, Pandarus
advises her to employ masking strategies similar to his own:
Swych love of frendes regneth al this town;
And wre yow in that mantel evere moo,
And God so wys be my savacioun,
As I have seyd, youre beste is to do soo.
But alwey, goode nece, to stynte his woo,
So lat youre daunger sucred ben a lite,
That of his deth ye be naught for to wite. (II. 379-85)
Criseyde should cloak the affair and pretend to like Troilus somewhat, primarily
in order to save Pandarus’s life, that is, Pandarus explicitly offers a public mask
for her identity – the prototypical Trojan mask, that is. In terms of acting and
pretending, Criseyde illustrates best how Pandarus assumes any mask necessary
for achieving his ends. Should she have fallen in love with Troilus, Achilles, or
Hector, she observes, “Ye nolde han had no mercy ne mesure / On me, but al-
wey had me in repreve” (II. 418-19). Despite her hesitation, however, Pandarus
is nevertheless able to settle the argument through his final reminder that not
only Troilus’s life is in her hands, but also his. Should she remain adamant about
not loving Troilus, both will perish (II. 430-41); most importantly, though, he
will die – “But sith it liketh yow that I be ded” (II. 442).
Pandarus can now begin to invent a new Troilus for Criseyde, literally impos-
ing on the absent knight the mask of the ideal lover in a double act of literary in-
vention: on the one hand, the poet expands Boccaccio’s Filostrato considerably
at this point and, on the other hand, Pandarus mythically rearranges the narrative
in order to assume Troilus’s perspective. He blends Troilus’s ‘first’ lament in
the garden with his complaint in the chamber. After elaborating on Troilus’s
pains on account of her, Pandarus hopes that “Whan ye ben his al hool as he is
youre; / Ther myghty God graunte us see that houre!” (II. 587-88). Criseyde is
shocked, while Pandarus – tellingly – swears by Mars that he only means well.
He might merely refer to his own hastiness (Windeatt 181n), but the invocation
of Mars refers back to the Virgilian ability to maintain opaque masks, veiling
other emotions as well. This is particularly prevalent in Troilus’s actual reinven-
tion, since Criseyde obviously requires little training to maintain a mask.348 Pan-
darus, as the audience has just witnessed, is capable of manipulating the percep-
tion of Troilus, but Troilus himself is almost a hopeless case in terms of invent-

347
Pandarus’s weeping at this occasion can be seen as his appropriation of Troilus’s effemi-
nate role, as is his request that she behave friendlier toward Troilus and smile at him occa-
sionally (II. 358-64, 379-85). He naturally knows that Troilus interprets such gestures in a
different way than it might be intended.
348
Pandarus covertly points out to Troilus that Criseyde is only acting by alluding to Troi-
lus’s ‘borrowing’ of the ‘title of sickness’ in order to quickly leave the temple. Says Pan-
darus, “Hire love of frendshipe have I to the wonne, / And therto hath she leyd hire feyth
to borwe” (II. 962-63).
438 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

ing masks. Pandarus assists him in writing a letter, a task for which Pandarus
himself liberally borrows from the Ars amatoria, and therefore exploits public
discourse again – a discourse which in itself condones shaping every event to
love’s end.349 Moreover, he stages Troilus’s ride-by. For this, Troilus receives
instructions which matter little in the light of the fact that Pandarus will be with
Criseyde to ensure that Troilus’s attempt at appropriating the mask fabricated
for him is correctly interpreted, since he shapes the public perception of Troilus
not only for Criseyde but for the audience as well.350
It is not Troilus but public discourse that insists upon the re-appropriation of
role models. Thus, as in Troilus’s staged performance in the window scene,
Pandarus himself ensures that the letter from ‘Troilus’ is received and read. This
is a matter of Pandarus’s persistence, persistence being strongly advised by the
Ars amtoria, which Pandarus happens to omit.351 This brings to the fore an im-
portant and related aspect of the Ars, mentioned at the beginning of his counsel
regarding writing letters, namely, that the Ars is a work meant to educate the
Roman public. Unlike Pandarus (or rather seemingly unlike Pandarus), Ovid
does not have a specific individual in mind but addresses his remarks to the Ro-

349
The letter yields further insights into how Pandarus manipulates public goods, anticipating
collective inertia – the only state of affairs in which Pandarus can flourish. Pandarus’s ad-
vice regarding the letter begins with the Ovidian suggestion that one’s rhetorical sophisti-
cation should remain invisible: “sed lateant uires, nec sis in fronte disertus; / effugiant uo-
ces uerba molesta tuae” [But what you are capable of, should be hidden; how eloquent you
are should not be discernible. In what you relay, beware of affected speeches] (Ars I. 463).
Pandarus reassures Troilus of his own rhetorical limitations, stating that “I woot wel that
thow wiser art than I”; later, he asserts that “Towchyng thi lettre, thou art wys ynough.”
Eventually, he advises Troilus that he “Ne scryvenyssh or craftely thow it write” (II. 1002,
1023, 1026). To mention this is probably unnecessary given Troilus’s limited epistolary
‘talents.’ These reassurances, however, maintain Troilus’s impression that he is in charge
of the matter. Troilus further learns that repetition is bad, that he needs to obey the rules of
the genre, which entails not mixing discordant things (II. 1037), but rather portraying a
complete, unified image unlike the painter who intends to draw a fish with “asses feet, and
hedde it as an ape” (II. 1042). If Troilus partakes in a monoglossic discourse with little
room for originality or invention, this passage underscores that Troilus does not exclu-
sively shape his monoglossic destiny himself – his passivity propels the problem.
350
With respect to the window scenes, Jill Mann comments that “The scope of human agency
is correspondingly restricted; Pandarus, fondly imagining himself the omniscient and om-
nipresent director of the drama, is in fact merely a contributor to, not the controller of, the
dynamics of the narrative. The chance which he carefully simulates in the second window-
scene has already been independently at work, making his own effort superfluous. His
skilful manipulations begin to look less like vital contributions, and more like baroque
flourishes on an independently worked design.” Mann, “Chance and Destiny in Troilus
and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale,” Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Boitani and
Mann 95.
351
While Ovid asks that students practice patience and self-confidently try over and over
again, Pandarus will take care of it: “What sounds so hopeful in Ovid’s poem becomes
ironic and ominous in Chaucer’s.” Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 45.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 439

man youths: “disce bonas artes, moneo, Romana iuuentus, / non tantum trepidos
ut tueare reos” [learn the belles lettres, I admonish you, Roman youth, not only
for the protection of those fearful in court] (Ars I. 459-60). Pandarus is also
aware of the different domains involved in letter writing, particularly with re-
spect to language. What is wanted in love letters, according to Ovid, is stereo-
typical language and certainly not poetical invention. Again, an opaque mask
adopted from public discourse (Pandarus) is all that is needed: “si tibi credibilis
sermo consuetaque uerba” [your language should be credible, use everyday
words] (Ars I. 467). Pandarus’s discourse, saturated as it is with proverbial
knowledge and stereotypical narratives, represents this rather well, and it is with
heavy irony that Pandarus, in explicating the epistolary arts to Troilus, con-
demns the painter who mixes genera in his picture by endowing a fish with the
feet of a donkey (II. 1042, cited above) – an Ovidian strategy which Pandarus
discusses again later with reference to Cicero’s Zeuxis. The mythical, stereo-
typical phrases and masks have to be persistently reiterated, says Ovid, since
eventually the addressee will read and respond to the letters, even if the letter is
rejected at first. Troilus follows this advice closely, as the narratorial summary
reveals: he uses “thise other termes alle / That in swich cas thise loveres alle
seche” (II. 1067-68). Ovid lists numerous examples, not mentioned in the Troi-
lus, which preach patience to the lover whose letters are not read: horses will fi-
nally accept the fence, iron rings wear off with time, usage of the plough like-
wise results in the disappearance of the iron, and a steady trickle of water will
eventually shape even a stone. It is noteworthy that in his suggestions concern-
ing persistence, Ovid finally refers to the destruction of Troy again – a topic ha-
bitually neglected by Pandarus: “Penelopen ipsam, persta modo, tempore uinces:
/ capta uides sero Pergama, capta tamen” [persist, with time you will win over
Penelope herself. Troy fell late, as you know, but fall it did] (Ars I. 477-78). At
this point, then, Pandarus actually accelerates this process insofar as he makes
redundant a multiplicity of unread letters; Criseyde, he knows even before Troi-
lus sets pen to paper, will read it.352 Pandarus’s Troilus, and Pandarus’s Troy,
will therefore fall more quickly, too, not because life on earth is vain and transi-
tory, but because public discourse and the concomitant provision of stereotypi-
cal masks, which are reiterated until they become meaningless, provide a myth
of origin for Troilus that is bound to fail – unless modified.
While Criseyde usually rejects Pandarus’s first suggestions to do one thing or
another, she is always reminded that public discourse, literally speaking, has a

352
Criseyde rejects the letter at first, claiming that it does not befit her estate to accept it. In
contrast to the Filostrato, where Criseida accepts the letter smilingly, Pandarus more ag-
gressively “in hire bosom the lettre down he thraste” (II. 1155; cf. Fil. II. 113; Windeatt
213n). Unsurprisingly, Criseyde is not too impressed by Troilus’s epistolary arts. Her re-
mark that she “fond no lak, she thoughte he koude good” (II. 1178) is telling and under-
scores the conventional nature of the letter. Criseida’s excitement concerning Troilus’s let-
ter in Filostrato is entirely muted in the Troilus.
440 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

voice of his own. If she does not write the letter to Troilus, for example, Panda-
rus makes it clear that he will (II. 1162) – the impression arises that he could
send letters back and forth without any of the lovers ever writing a word them-
selves. Her refusal to meet Troilus is likewise grudgingly accepted, “As for the
tyme” (II. 1301). Nevertheless, Pandarus engineers a situation that would
achieve his (and Troilus’s) ends anyway, and his help in love matters is appro-
priately relayed in martial terms: “Som of his wo to slen, and that as faste” (II.
1358). Pandarus will “shape it so, / That thow shalt come into a certeyn place, /
There as thow mayst thiself hire preye of grace” (II. 1363-65), invoking the
formulaic knowledge usually furnished by love poems: “But tho that ben expert
in love it seye – / It is oon of the thynges forthereth most” that the lover has op-
portunity to speak with his lady alone (II. 1367-68). That Criseyde goes along
with Pandarus’s suggestions despite her initial worries certainly is also related to
her need to be protected by male Trojans. More importantly, Criseyde depends
on the public perception of her, that is, a perception shaped partially by Panda-
rus. In contrast to Troilus, her state of abandonment has taught her valuable les-
sons about masking, whereas Troilus requires all the assistance he can get, espe-
cially when the one-to-one encounters make more difficult Pandarus’s manipu-
lations of perception.

2. “Thow shalt the bettre pleyne”: From Perception to Mask Making

At the first meeting of the two lovers, Pandarus anticipates Troilus’s transparent
needs when telling him not to keep any of his emotions from Criseyde, since
“Somtyme a man mot telle his owen peyne” (II. 1501). Pandarus continues to
appropriate Troilus’s role, is knowledgeable about his worries: “Thow thynkest
now, ‘How sholde I don al this? / For by my cheres mosten folk aspie / That for
hire love is that I fare amys’” (II. 1506-08). He should not agonize over this,
since there is a mask for every occasion: “For I right now have founden o man-
ere / Of sleyghte, for to coveren al thi cheere” (II. 1511-12). It is rather ironic
that Pandarus praises himself for this invention, when Troilus has long discov-
ered that this is an un-mask-like mask, because it is only a matter of manipulat-
ing the perception of something rather obvious – and which, as the Troilus sub-
tly suggests, does not ultimately keep from the public gaze that Troilus is love-
sick, rather than ‘merely’ sick. Yet, Troilus rejoins, “Iwis, thow nedeles / Con-
seilest me that siklich I me feyne, / For I am sik in ernest, douteles” (II. 1527-
29). The differences between Pandarus’s and Troilus’s perceptions of masking
are instructive here: Troilus believes that his transparent emotions need not be
veiled: he should not lie for he is sick. Pandarus concedes the point, but believes
his disposition lends itself for better acting: “Thow shalt the bettre pleyne, / And
hast the lasse need to countrefete” (II. 1531-32, emphases added). For Pandarus,
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 441

counterfeiting is indispensable for making selves,353 which is unsurprising in a

world where public discourse enforces role conformity.
With the third book and the lovers’ increasing withdrawal into the private
sphere, Pandarus’s influence slowly begins to lose its hold on his ‘characters,’354
although he still finds ways of infiltrating individuals’ choices and the percep-
tion thereof. Pandarus’s role in orchestrating the bedroom scene is well-known,
whereby Pandarus’s provision of verbal means to quench Troilus’s “manly
sorwe” (III. 113) is particularly notable.355 Once the match is made, Pandarus
construes this in civic terms, since, as the narrator declares in the proem to the
third book, love governs the civic order of Troy, which is reminiscent of Panda-
rus’s earlier observation that the love of friends rules the city – and it is also
reminiscent of the Troy story’s excessively emotional Trojans. Pandarus be-
lieves he hears the town’s bells toll for the lovers (III. 188-89). The near-
completion of his task affords Pandarus some time to reflect upon his occupation
as a go-between. Initially, he was so affected by Troilus’s love “That I, with al
my myght and al my loore, / Have evere sithen don my bisynesse” (III. 243-44).
For the second time, Pandarus refers to his lore here, which is genuine popular
mythology rather than his lore, the material for everyone’s game of love, as it
was in Ovid’s Rome (III. 250-52). He continues to inform Troilus that “for the
am I bicomen, / Bitwixen game and ernest, swich a meene / As maken wommen
unto men to comen” (III. 253-55). Pandarus thus alleges that he occupies a mid-
dle ground, a hybrid position. From the audience’s perspective, however, it is
clear that Pandarus has so far exclusively seen his pandering in terms of a game,
even if he now begins to muse on the seriousness of his actions: “But wo is me,
that I, that cause al this, / May thynken that she is my nece deere, / And I hire
em, and traitour ek yfeere!” (III. 271-73). Positioned as it is (in the third book
that opens with the assertion that love orders all), Pandarus’s perception of his
actions in terms of treachery is peculiar. It is, however, precisely within such a
civic context, audiences familiar with the Troy story would remember, that
counterfeited identities and Pandarian mask making become the covetise that ul-
timately causes the destruction of the city. Pandering between Troilus and
Criseyde, between earnest and game, becomes tantamount to ‘going-between’
Troy and Greece, which is implicitly highlighted by Pandarus’s self-description
353
The first bedroom scene underscores Pandarus’s enjoyment of seeming. As he leads
Criseyde toward Troilus’s bed, “Therwith it semed as he wepte almost” (III. 64). This
“feigned illness” episode is reminiscent of Samuel 2:13, for which see Fleming,
“Deiphoebus” 186-88.
354
Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 294.
355
Pandarus urges Criseyde to respond to Troilus’s suicidal outbursts unless she intends to
“sle us both at ones er ye wende.” Criseyde does not proclaim that she does not know how
to respond. Rather, she declares that she does not know what Pandarus wants her to say:
“I not nat what ye wilne that I seye.” Pandarus suggests she should let him know “That ye
han on hym routhe,” which Criseyde almost does: “‘Now than thus,’ quod she, ‘I wolde
hym preye / To telle me the fyn of his entente’” (III. 118-25).
442 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

as traitor.356 His predilection for game over earnest, Lanham’s homo seriosus,
can be seen as structurally similar to Antenor’s betrayal of Troy. As in the other
tales of Troy, it is the inability to find points of intersection between personal
and national narratives – while at the same time allowing a degree of opacity –
that causes the fall of the city.
Pandarian pandering connects to the Heroides at this point, for he realizes
that if it were known that he had his niece submit to Troilus’s lust, “al the
world” will say “that I the werste trecherie / Dide in this cas” (III. 277, 278-79).
The fear of being publicly known as what he is in turn prompts his warning to
Troilus to keep his role in the affair a secret, a passage that occurs much earlier
in the Filostrato (Fil. III. 9). Compared to Boccaccio’s poem, Pandarus’s em-
phasis on secrecy in love is also much expanded (Windeatt 263n). The kind of
treachery Pandarus believes himself to be guilty of is a bookish kind, and is
rooted in the Heroides – “I koude almoost / A thousand olde stories the allegge /
Of wommen lost through fals and foles bost” – and proverbial knowledge:
“Proverbes kanst thiself ynowe and woost / Ayeins that vice” (III. 296-98, 299-
300). This passage is particularly important since the audience witnesses Panda-
rus in one of the few moments in which he senses contradiction: on the one
hand, he is following proverbial and Ovidian knowledge in bringing together
Troilus and Criseyde; on the other hand, Ovidian and proverbial knowledge
condemn his actions. It only takes Pandarus a very short while to straighten out
the matter: the boasting endemic to public discourse is not to be believed, he
says (being quite a boaster himself), because boasters are liars. The contradic-
tion cannot be resolved except in terms of masking. All that is necessary is to
impose a mask on the matter, which, in contrast to Troilus, poses no pangs of
consciousness for Pandarus,357 who is not concerned with his actual wronging of
356
As Richard Firth Green observes, “the overriding political issue in the last two decades of
the fourteenth century was the legal definition of treason.” The important distinction be-
tween personal and institutional treason is reflected in the Troilus as well, especially when
Pandarus wonders whether he is a traitor, “for not only does the treason here run counter
to a hierarchy based on seniority but also to one based on gender.” According to Green,
the term traitor is generally used to describe men who have abandoned the women to
whom faithfulness had been sworn. Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ri-
cardian England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) 213-14, 219. Later,
Pandarus refers to Criseyde as a traitor, or rather as committing treason (V. 1738).
357
Marion Turner argues that Pandarus initially defends social ideals, which he later contra-
dicts effortlessly (esp. III. 294-99). Pandarus’s earlier definition of friendship implies “that
these words and ideas are deployed to mask internal selfishness and corruption – as dem-
onstrated in the episode in Deiphoebus’s house.” Turner, “Troilus and Criseyde” 256. It
takes much less effort for Pandarus to negotiate his business with Criseyde, who more ac-
tively partakes in the game. Arriving at her house “he gan anon to pleye” (III. 554). Later,
Pandarus draws attention to his game-making again to prevent Criseyde from leaving in
the rain: “I sey it nought a-game” (III. 636), a phrase Criseyde echoes soon after, pro-
claiming she only jested when voicing her intention to leave. Pandarus sets about his
“werk” knowing “Th’olde daunce, and every point therinne” (III. 697, 695). When visiting
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 443

Criseyde, but with the public perception thereof. His advice to Troilus puts it
succinctly: “And kep the clos, and be now of good cheere” (III. 332).
After the Troilus addresses the issue of secrecy and appearance with Troilus,
the same topic is discussed with regard to Criseyde. Awakening to Pandarus’s
entry into her room, Criseyde is immediately told to keep his coming secret (III.
755-56). If she were to call someone, he says, “They myghte demen thyng they
nevere er thoughte” (III. 763). The secret space he constructed for Troilus and
Criseyde’s meeting is notably a literary space. He will leave the room as quickly
and as secretly as he came in, he explains, once his “tale” has come to an end
(III. 769). His tale begins with the inventive hoax that Troilus learned from a
friend that Orestes has fallen in love with her (III. 796-98). Again, Criseyde
must be reminded of how it is perception rather than anything else that matters.
Pandarus ignores her questions as to the origin of the rumor, instead adopting
another outside perspective on her, one which concerns a possible delay in
‘quenching’ the fire: if Criseyde suffered Troilus all night, it seems as though
“ye hadde hym nevere lief” (III. 864). With one word, Pandarus insists, she
could ‘steer’ his heart, which is to say that she will take over Pandarus’s role of
steering Troilus358 – as a praeceptor amoris (III. 910), the mediator of that part
of love-lore alien to Troilus. Once Criseyde takes over, Pandarus interrupts his
tale, but he does not leave the room as promised. Rather, he “fond his conten-
aunce, / As for to looke upon an old romaunce” (III. 979-80). He “reads the
characters in a script he has himself written – reads them as if they constituted
‘an old romaunce.’”359 Pandarus has shaped their identities according to romance
conventions and continues to impose these masks onto ‘his’ characters. When
Troilus swoons because he begins to doubt the Pandarian set-up and proclaims
that he is not the maker of the game, Pandarus has been listening and promptly
questions Troilus’s masculinity: “is this a mannes herte” (III. 1098)?360
Pandarus’s help is required beyond the lovemaking, however, since now
Troilus faces the task of keeping what he has ‘won.’ This move from Ars to
Remedia, to ensue in Book IV, is prefaced by an appropriative Pandarus again,
who furnishes advice contained in the Ars. After winning the lady with the help
of my poetry, Ovid’s persona says, you should also use my art to keep her; it is
as difficult to keep the desired object as it is to obtain it (Ars II. 11-13). Pandarus
translates the last line and adds another: “As gret a craft is kepe wel as wynne. /

Criseyde the next morning after the lovers’ blissful night and, in a passage that is some-
times construed as Pandarus’s rape of Criseyde, she forgives him – “and with her uncle
gan to pleye” (III. 1578).
358
Stevens observes that “At the end of Book III, then, we find a Troilus, who, in terms of the
implicit imagery, sees himself as afloat at sea with Criseyde at the helm and Venus the
controlling force of all the elements.” Stevens, “Winds of Fortune” 289.
359
Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 49.
360
Slightly later, Criseyde takes up this Pandarian sentiment, wondering if this is a “mannes
game” (III. 1126). See Hansen, Chaucer 150-51, cited above.
444 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

Bridle alwey wel thi speche and thi desir” (III. 1634-35). The second line, inter-
posed between a quotation from Ovid and the proverbial sentiment that worldly
joy does not last, stresses the necessity of repressing certain aspects of Troilus’s
personality, of inventing opaque masks. This is to say, Pandarus’s masking serv-
ices are further needed, especially after the fateful parliamentary decision to ex-
change Criseyde. Troilus’s woe on account of the latter increases Pandarus’s
distress. He appropriates Troilus’s narrative space again, weeping as tenderly as
the Trojan prince himself (IV. 363-64, 369) – “For in this world ther is no crea-
ture, / As to my dom, that ever saugh ruyne / Straunger than this, thorugh cas or
aventure” (IV. 386-88). In appropriating Troilus’s transparent emotionality,
Pandarus can better suggest a cure, which lies in the adoption of the remedial,
Ovidian mask. What works toward Pandarus’s disadvantage is that he forgets
that Troilus cannot as easily assume Pandarus’s position. Unlike Troilus, Panda-
rus did not obtain the object of his desire: “But I, that nevere felte in my servyse
/ A frendly cheere or lokyng of an eye, / Lat me thus wepe and wailen til I deye”
(IV. 397-99). If Troilus were willing to concede that Pandarus’s woe was worse
than his own, he potentially could have found solace in the public discourse of
love, at least, in the way Pandarus constructs it – there are so many other beauti-
ful women in town, so many other masks to appropriate:
What! God forbede alwey that ech plesaunce
In o thyng were and in non other wight!
If oon kan synge, an other kan wel daunce;
If this be goodly, she is glad and light;
And this is fair, and that kan good aright.
Ech for his vertu holden is for deere,
Both heroner and faucoun for ryvere. (IV. 407-13)
This passage marks the splendidly ‘postmodern’ aspect of Pandarian advice
since he rejoices in one particular good at a time. This represents the postmod-
ern appropriation of divergent goods, one role at a time, which does not solve
the contradictions except in quick temporal succession. In a sense, Pandarus is
as mono-mythological as is Troilus, only that he is able, unlike Troilus, to live
with opacity. Whereas Troilus emerges as pivotally concerned with linking sev-
eral masks, Pandarus suggests enjoying one at a time (that is, severing them),
rejecting individuality and personhood alike. The lack of mythemic intersection
comes to the fore in Pandarus’s subsequently cited sentiment that “the newe love
out chaceth ofte the olde” (IV. 415), which he attributes to Zanzis.
Pandarus avoids mentioning the Remedia as the immediate source for this
sentiment.361 Attributing the quotation to a different source, Pandarus cleverly
renders opaque translucent prosopagraphy. With Donald Fry, I believe that Pan-
darus goes beyond Boccaccio’s Filostrato (IV. 49) and alludes to Zeuxis, the

361
Praz, “Chaucer” 134.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 445

Greek painter mentioned in Cicero’s De inventione.362 Zeuxis, according to

Cicero’s widely-circulated work, was commissioned by the people of Croton to
enhance the temple of Juno with paintings. Having in mind a portrait of Helen,
Zeuxis demands that the most beautiful women should be assembled so as to
have models for capturing surpassing beauty.363 He chooses five, Cicero ex-
plains, “Neque enim putavit omnia, quae quaereret ad venustatem, uno se in
corpore reperire posse ideo quod nihil simplici in genere omnibus ex partibus
perfectum natura expolivit. Itaque, tamquam ceteris non sit habitura quod largia-
tur, si uni cuncta concesserit, aliud alii commodi aliquo adiuncto incommodo
muneratur” [because he did not think all the qualities which he sought to com-
bine in a portrayal of beauty could be found in one person, because in no single
case has Nature made anything perfect and finished in every part. Therefore, as
if she had no bounty to lavish on the others if she gave everything to one, she
bestows some advantage on one and some on another, but always joins with it
some defect].364 Nature, in other words, endows every individual with specific
contradictions: beauty mixed with blemishes. Zeuxis intends to represent an
ideal in which the negatives are entirely suppressed, in which no contradiction
maintains and divergent goods are synthesized. The crucial problem lies in the
separate domains since the ideal cannot be maintained in nature but only in art.
In short, contradiction is intrinsic to selfhood.
In this context, Pandarus’s advice puts on display his own organizational
principles. In abandoning his earlier Ovidian advice that it is as hard to keep the
‘girl’ as it is to obtain her, he now switches to the Remedia, according to which a
new lover should substitute for the old one. Zeuxis’s combinatory ideal – which
Pandarus adheres to rhetorically insofar as he synthesizes Ovid and Cicero –
notably does not work in Pandarus’s world, where the Trojan women are likened
to those mentioned in Cicero, locating one particular good in one individual
only. That is, Pandarus reduces each woman to one mask. In contrast to Troilus,

362
Donald K. Fry, “Chaucer’s Zanzis and a Possible Source for Troilus and Criseyde, IV,
407-413,” ELN 9.2 (1971): 81-85. He correlates the appearance of Zeuxis with another
occurrence in the Physician’s Tale ll. 16-18. Opposed to other commentators on the Zan-
zis-problem, Fry believes that the allusions suggests that “Chaucer would be pretending to
quote a real source by simply using an appropriate name [...]. But it seems more likely that
Chaucer wove an elaborate joke around pretended authority [...]. In this Zanzis reference,
he quotes a well-known proverb from Ovid, comically attributing it to the central character
of the source of his previous stanza” (84-85).
363
Cicero, De inventione, De optimo genere oratum, Topica, ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell,
LCL 386 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949) II. i. 2: “Nam Zeuxis ilico
quaesivit ab eis quasnam virgines formosas haberent” [For Zeuxis immediately asked
them what girls they had of surpassing beauty].
364
Cicero, De inventione II. i. 3. The poets take note of the selection since they believe
Zeuxis to be the supreme judge of beauty. In other words, Zeuxis sets a role model not
only of a particular process by which to invent, pictorially or poetically, he also sets stan-
dards of beauty itself, which is to say that he modifies and shapes public discourse.
446 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

he advocates an ideal that exists in temporal succession – one good after an-
other. Troilus, however, as indicated above, might be especially interested in
Criseyde because she is a complex individual able to maintain different masks,
of living with contradictions without sacrificing personhood:365 she is a mirror
image of Guido’s Polyxena, attracting Achilles’s attention for being able to
combine several, contradictory roles. Although the narrator tells the audience
that Pandarus’s advice went in one ear and out the other, Troilus nevertheless
rebuts the arbitrariness of love, and the attendant ontological strategy according
to which one mask is appropriated after another: “But kanstow playen raket, to
and fro, / Nettle in, dok out, now this, now that, Pandare? / Now foule falle hire
for thi wo that care!” (IV. 460-62). Besides pointing out to Pandarus that he is
incapable of following his own advice, Troilus contends that what is lacking is a
good to center the contradictions – experience and passion: “O, where hastow
ben hid so longe in muwe, / That kanst so wel and formely arguwe?” (IV. 496-
97).366 Whereas Pandarus does cite Cicero, he evidently misses the ethical con-
cerns central to the text.367
Pandarus would not be a good representation of public discourse if he did not
have in store a different solution for Troilus’s predicament. All Troilus needs to
do is to bring in line his masculinity with his personal ill-feelings, in ways not
dissimilar to Priam’s restitutional action on behalf of Hesione. If he were a ‘true’
man, Troilus should “Go ravysshe here! Ne kanstow nat, for shame?” (IV. 530).
Chaucer changes the Boccaccian text, in which Pandaro suggests following the
example of Paris’s ravishment of Helen.368 Pandarus is more forward about the
ravishment and less explicit about the historical precedent. A reminder seems
scarcely necessary, however, since an audience familiar with the Troy story
would surely remember that Troilus is the one to conclude the argument in the
parliamentary debate about Paris ravishing Helen. Chaucer’s omission empha-
365
Edwards emphasizes that the narrator attempts to save Pandarus’s speech, “a curious in-
tervention, for the narrator seeks to regulate the meaning of a speech that the poet has ren-
dered and then consciously amplified. The speech thus creates a moment in which the text
breaks the illusion of seamless representation to uncover its contradictions, its multiplicity
of voices, its conflict of perspectives.” Edwards, “Pandarus’s ‘Unthrift’” 77.
366
Troilus wonders why Pandarus – despite his suggestion to change the object of love – is
not able “To chaungen hire that doth the al thi wo” (IV. 487). This question, which
Troiolo does not pose in the Filostrato, is indeed justified and suggests, perhaps, that Pan-
darus’s lover is a fictional, that is, rhetorical construct.
367
Schleburg argues that Pandarus’s contradictions “are no worry to” Troilus. Schleburg,
“Role-Conformity” 85. The narrator construes Pandarus’s remedial arts as helpful advice,
since Pandarus merely searches for a means to appease his friend rather than seriously en-
tertaining these thoughts (IV. 428-31), which underlines the appropriation of different
roles for different purposes.
368
In Il Filostrato, Pandaro proves to be an good reader of the Troy story: “Paris andò in
Grecia e menonne / Elena, il fior di tutte l’altre donne” [Paris went into Greece and
brought thence Helen, the flower of all other ladies] (IV. 64). The proposed ravishment
almost insinuates a contrast to the ambivalent complicity of Helen in her abduction.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 447

sizes the differences between Chaucer’s Troilus and Guido’s Troilus, underlin-
ing especially Troilus’s inability to reconcile martial with Venerean selves, thus
adhering to the deterministic meta-narrative of Troy (see above). Pandarus, in
the meantime, emphasizes the Trojan sentiment yet again: “Artow in Troie, and
hast non hardyment / To take a womman which that loveth the / And wolde
hireselven ben of thyn assent?” (IV. 533-35). Despite this truly Trojan advice,
Pandarus loses control over Troilus, whose determining lodestar is now
Criseyde (IV. 581-630).
Although Pandarus has lost some control, he continues to ‘shape’ the envi-
ronment for Troilus and Criseyde in which to negotiate a solution (IV. 652).
Pandarus thereby constructs the illusion of a Trojan ‘heart,’ a hypergood. First
of all, Pandarus advises Criseyde to restrain better her emotionality in Troilus’s
presence in order to focus on a cure (IV. 925-31). To Troilus, he represents what
the transparent Trojan wants to hear, namely, that she will determine a solution
with her heart rather than her mind (IV. 1111-13), not to mention that “Myn
herte seyth, ‘Certeyn, she shal nat wende.’ / And forthi put thyn herte a while in
reste, / And hold this purpos, for it is the beste” (IV. 1118-20). As in Guido’s
Historia, the stress on the heart as the location of all emotions is typically Trojan
and, of course, particularly apposite as concerns Troilus, who readily concurs
with Pandarus’s wisdom (IV. 1122). According to the narrator, Troilus grows
more hopeful toward the end of Book IV. The illusions regarding Criseyde’s re-
turn, then, have to be maintained by the middle-man. But Pandarus’s appearance
at the beginning of Book V is delayed since he is with Priam (V. 281-87). When
he finally arrives, he is somewhat aggravated by Troilus’s persistent emotional-
ity and offers much proverbial advice about the ensuing period of separation
from Criseyde. He also scolds Troilus for his blind belief in dream lore after
Troilus’s vision of Criseyde in the arms of the boar. Not far off from the truth,
perhaps, Pandarus suggests that “thorugh impressiouns, / As if a wight hath faste
a thyng in mynde, / That therof cometh swiche avysiouns” (V. 372-74), with
which Pandarus insinuates that Troilus wills his own end. Eventually, however,
he points out the “lusty lif in Troie / That we han led, and forth the tyme dryve; /
And ek of tyme comyng us rejoie” (V. 393-95), in addition to the fact that “This
town is ful of lordes al aboute, / And trewes lasten al this mene while” (V. 400-
01). Thus constructing Trojan public life (and the love-life therein embedded),
Pandarus hammers home the point: there is little honor in weeping in bed, since
if he stayed in bed for three days, “The folk wol seyn that thow for cowardise /
The feynest sik, and that thow darst nat rise!” (V. 412-13). Toward the end of
the poem, then, the sentiment that Troilus’s love would be mistaken as fear, as
cowardice, as excessive fear of the enemy, reoccurs. But Troilus rejects Ovidian
advice. During the party at Sarpedon’s house, he begins to peruse old letters,
while Pandarus cannot but feign that he is convinced in his heart that the lady
will return: “But natheles, he japed thus, and pleyde, / And swor, ywys, his herte
hym wel bihighte / She wolde come as soone as evere she myghte” (V. 509-11).
The reiterated belief in his heart illustrates fittingly that Pandarus’s locus of
448 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

emotionality, his heart, is indeed a rhetorical construct; the plethora of rhetorical

selves constructs the illusion of a serious self, a core.369
That Pandarus lacks core(s) becomes clearest in Pandarus’s last appearance
in the poem, after Troilus’s final realization that Criseyde was not true to him.
Pandarus is depicted as pitying his friend and as being ashamed of his niece,
whose infidelity he expected all along. Pandarus “stant, astoned of thise causes
tweye, / As stille as ston; a word ne kowde he seye” (V. 1727-28). In other
words, Chaucer mutes Pandaro’s inability, in Boccaccio’s Filostrato, to decide
whether to stay with Troilus or leave him. The two causes are linked to two
separate ethical choices, that is, choices that Chaucer’s Pandarus does not
face.370 For a moment, Pandarus is silenced until finding two narratives, relayed
in two different stanzas, that seemingly reconcile the two ‘causes’: in assuming
Troilus’s perspective, he hates Criseyde and offers to help Troilus if only he
knew how. Interposed, as a transition from the hatred of Criseyde and the desire
to help Troilus, Pandarus purges himself of any misdemeanor – he did his ut-
most for his friend: “And that thow me bisoughtest don of yoore, / Havyng unto
myn honour ne my reste / Right no reward, I dide al that the leste” (V. 1734-36).
What links these ‘causes’ is precisely the lack of any ethical values of his own.
Between the hatred of his niece and the love for Troilus, then, there is only a
gap, the empty self. Pandarus is a homo rhetoricus, completely opaque, and as
contradictory and seemingly arbitrary as public discourse itself.

369
While Pandarus and Troilus are awaiting Criseyde’s return, Pandarus agrees with every-
thing Troilus says, “And held with hym of al that evere he seyde” (V. 1171). Boccaccio is
much more forward about Pandaro’s slyness: “E per non farlo di ciò più dolente / Che el si
fosse, sembiante facea / Di crederli” [And in order not to make him more sorrowful on
that account than he was, he made a semblance of believing] (Fil. VII. 10). In the subse-
quent interpretation of Troilus’s dream, the reader witnesses Pandarus’s qualities as a
mask maker yet again. He reminds Troilus, as he has done at a previous occasion, that
dreams “many a maner man bigile” (V. 1277) and that “thow kanst no dremes rede” (V.
1281). As a good manipulator of narratives, he suggests allegorizing the boar as
Criseyde’s dying father and everything else as an expression of her endless sorrow (V.
1282-88). In order to find out her genuine feelings, Troilus should send a her a letter. Pan-
darus’s plot is thus framed by two letters, for which see William Provost, The Structure of
Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1974) 107-08.
In the Filostrato, Pandaro does not interpret the dream; he simply alludes to different lev-
els of signification; Chaucer offers an alternative interpretation (cf. Fil. VII. 40-41).
370
Cf. Fil. VIII. 22: “E d’una parte a star quivi il tirava / dell’amico l’amor, d’altra a partisi /
vergogna spesse volte lo ‘nvitava / pel fallo die Criseida, e spedirsi / qual far dovesse seco
non sapea, / e l’uno e l’altro forte di dolea” [on the one hand, love of his friend inclined
him to remain here; on the other, shame for Criseida’s transgression did often invite him
to depart. And he knew not in his own mind how to decide what he ought to do, and either
alternative did grieve him sore]. This leads to the depiction of Pandaro in tears in Fil. VIII.
23, a sentiment also absent in Chaucer’s version, in which Pandarus appears to be less
emotional about his friend’s predicament.
 Chapter Seventeen: Opaque Pandarus 449

At the end of the poem, then, Pandarus loses his rhetorical ability for good. “I
kan namore seye.” As quickly and slyly as he entered the Troilus (and Troilus),
he disappears from Troilus (and Troy[lus]). Without the rhetorical ability to con-
struct masks, there is nothing left of Pandarus. After trying his (Ovidian) knowl-
edge on Troilus, and after increasingly losing hold over Troilus, that is, after re-
alizing that his knowledge cannot guide someone who has accepted the deter-
mining force of Trojan historiography, Pandarus ceases to exist. Pandarus’s “I
kan namore” correlates with the attempt of the narrator of the House of Fame –
“yf I kan” – to transform a Virgilian narrative into an Ovidian narrative that re-
sults in the construction of a new narrative, a new mask and a new ontological
model. Troilus is unable to change the deterministic force of Trojan historiogra-
phy. Pandarus likewise fails in effecting a changeable narrative for Troilus,
which is neither his desire nor his function. He represents the existing narratives
of amatory Trojan culture, offered to ‘individuals’ for self-fashioning. Panda-
rus’s departure from the plot, his disappearance into the discourses that consti-
tuted him, marks his disintegration into contradiction, since there is no core ca-
pable of linking his masks. Pandarus is not in control of himself and, therefore,
fails as much as an Ovidian praeceptor amoris as he fails as an individual. He
runs out of narratives, of opaque masks. In terms of conceptual allegory, Panda-
rus likewise illustrates Guido’s attested instability of Trojan discourse to balance
its effeminate, amatory tendencies with the martial task at hand, a collective in-
ertia dangerously combined with decisions on the spur of the moment in which
remedial advice (of mask making) is shunned. As with the discursive formation
of any dominant ideology, there are faultlines – in Pandarus’s case literally the
gap opening between his opaque masks, which like the disappearance of Troi-
lus’s body, prompts a hermeneutical circle to further test alternatives to balance
personal and national discourses. Both Criseyde and the poet engage in mytho-
logical bricolage and negotiate a space between Troilus’s mono-mythological
construction of selfhood and the ‘postmodernly’ opaque arbitrariness of Panda-
rus.
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“It nedeth me ful sleighly for to pleie”: Changeable Criseyde

If Pandarus is a ‘postmodern’ character, who frequently assumes opaque roles

and is capable of mythical bricolage without ever determining any centripetal
transparency, and if Troilus strives for mono-mythological transparency but
lacks the narrative means to create masks when necessary, Criseyde presents a
middle ground in terms of masking and unmasking. In the course of the Troilus,
she metamorphoses from a heroic, abandoned woman (doubly so, since she is
without her father and is a widow [I. 97-98]), from an Ovidian Helen (Her.
XVII)371 into an exilic self, much like that of the persona of Ovid’s exile poems,
regretting the lack of narrative stability, the lack of a Virgilian mask. Although
critics have variously described her as ambiguous and contradictory,372 and de-
spite the warning that modern scholars too easily misread the narrator’s sympa-
thy for her (which is to say that she represents female fickleness in the poem),373
it is hard to overlook the productive potential of changeability that Chaucer ex-
trapolates from Benoît’s Roman,374 in which Briseis anticipates translucent pro-

371
Helen is frequently alluded to in Criseyde’s discourse and signifies “doom; a source of
verbal power and art; and also an example, according to the accessus, of ‘corrupt desire’
[amor incestus].” Like Helen, Criseyde “is a player in the game of love and change, a
competent Ovidian, a true niece of Pandarus, and rhetorically far beyond Troilus [...].”
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 46, 48. See further Shannon, Chaucer 160-67. I see a
striking difference between Pandarus’s and Criseyde’s Ovidianism, which is linked to
Calabrese’s observation that unlike the Troilus, the Heroides is still set in a world of
‘game,’ not in a world of epic seriousness (49). For Helen’s depiction in Met. XVII, see
Arn, “Three Ovidian Women” 4-6. As sources for Criseyde, both Medea and Helen per-
form specific functions: “Medea lends Criseyde an apparent innocence and a pattern of
wholehearted loving” – a view which, in the light of the Guidoan Medea, would require
clarification. Helen imparts to the Chaucerian woman “a subtler trait of character: the abil-
ity to decide without deciding. She provides the model for a beautiful, sophisticated
woman who combines strength and intelligence with fear and self-deception” (6).
372
Muscatine, Chaucer 164. For Criseyde’s contradictoriness, see also my discussion of Troi-
lus’s affection for her. For Criseyde’s reputation with critics, see Lorraine Kochanske
Stock, “‘Slydyng’ Critics: Changing Critical Constructions of Chaucer’s Criseyde in the
Past Century,” New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Cindy L. Vitto and Marcia Smith
Marzec (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 2004) 11-36.
373
“With the narrator’s sympathy qualified, Chaucer’s fickle Criseyde is not objectively dif-
ferent from the traditional Criseyde.” Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 126.
374
Sally Mapstone observes a gap between what is said about Criseyde and what she says
about herself, a phenomenon reminiscent of Benoît’s Briseis. “There are also things to
suggest that Chaucer himself looked back to Ovid’s own Briseis, perhaps encouraged by
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 451

sopagraphy. Criseyde’s reading skills, her interpretive expertise,375 and her use
of language (according to the conversational requirements)376 offer a narrative
changeability enabling the negotiation of translucence rather than transparency
(Troilus) or opacity (Pandarus). Moreover, on account of the multiple narratives
describing Criseyde, a writerly process ensues377 – one that resembles the her-
meneutics of the blank in the House of Fame.
Criseyde’s continual re-creation of translucence is the subject of this chapter.
As with the ontological paradigms offered by Troilus and Pandarus, Criseyde’s
translucence is exemplified by her confrontation of several challenges, which
require her to revisit several stages of the Ovidian cursus. Unlike Troilus, her
movement through Ovidian works is not teleological, indicating already her
flexibility in terms of mythological bricolage. Her Ovidianism does not begin
with the amatory works, and it extends well beyond the Tristia and the Epistulae
ex Ponto. Nor does Criseyde approach the amatory game as a novice, for she is
characterized from the beginning in terms of the abandonment that characterizes
the Heroides. Her abandonment is indeed ‘heroic’ insofar as she is able to craft
her own space in the light of an environment that is at best indifferent to her.
Her translucence, introduced on multiple levels but primarily by means of her
‘haughty’ appearance and her layered identity, which make her so attractive to
Troilus, cannot be taken for granted and requires continual renegotiation.

connections he picked up in Boccaccio and Benoît. The intense fearfulness of his Criseyde
parallels the anxiety of the Herodian Briseis.” The boar episode, in which Criseyde be-
comes an active partner in the embrace, represents a link to the Meleager story. In both
Troilus and the Heroides, “the association of Briseis and Criseyde with the Meleager story
does not bode well for either woman, but also suggests that neither of them can be read in
a straightforward way.” Mapstone, “The Origins of Criseyde,” Medieval Women: Texts
and Context in Late Medieval Britain; Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-
Browne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000) 143, 146. For Mapstone, the medieval Briseida is
possibly a hybrid of Benoît’s Briseis and the classical Chryseis (134).
375
See Bankert, “Secularizing the Word” 202-03; Nolan, Chaucer 236-43.
376
“In terms of style, she speaks in both idioms. In terms of the poem’s pattern of meaning,
she represents the many-sided complexity of the earthly fact whose mixture of qualities
provides to each beholder the abstraction that he takes for the thing itself. Seen dynami-
cally, in the alternating dominance and recession of each of her various qualities as sur-
rounding conditions evoke them, she represents earthly instability.” Muscatine, Chaucer
153-54.
377
Benson describes Criseyde “as a supreme example of a scriptible rather than lisible text.
She does not represent a unified or even complex authorial statement whose meaning we
must passively accept, but instead a stimulating figure that challenges each reader to make
her new.” The (open) textuality of Chaucer’s Criseyde may stem from the Roman de
Troie, in which “Benoît has her utter a series of contradictory statements, which he makes
no attempt to resolve. [...] the words he gives to his heroine suggest an infinite number of
narratives. Chaucer does not himself write these stories [...], but he empowers each reader
to attempt such rewriting.” Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 111-12. For read-
erly and writerly texts, see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1974).
452 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

Criseyde, aware of the necessity of being at once transparent and opaque, per-
ceives that her translucence is primarily challenged by Troilus’s love for her,
which threatens her independence. Both the Heroides and the Metamorphoses
lend themselves to the mythological bricolage necessary to negotiate a middle
ground, which enables the relationship between Criseyde and Troilus.
Two related challenges form on the horizon, however, and make necessary
the re-creation of translucence by means of mythological bricolage. Troilus is
completely transparent and has adopted her as a pilot, which becomes problem-
atic when the inevitability of her exchange not only requires Criseyde to re-
navigate her course, but also forces her to keep Troilus’s ‘journey’ in mind. At
this point, her personal prosopagraphy turns national. Criseyde is literally poised
between two worlds, finding herself in the stormy seas Ovid’s persona has to
negotiate in the Tristia. Her ensuing ‘sliding,’ which the poet conveys three
times, becomes a careful self-analysis into the causes of her actions and their in-
evitability. In this context, the most important (Ovidian) question the narrative
poses is not whether Criseyde is treacherous, but how she can live with a reputa-
tion which she knows will be lost even before deciding in favor of Diomede.
Partially, the Ovidian answer lies in making one’s friends aware of the public
misconception of one’s actions while, at the same time, continuing the narrative,
ontological processes and accommodating change. This is where Criseyde
leaves behind the Ovidian lament to disappear in the opacity of literary history –
her blackened reputation, however, is ‘rescued’ by Chaucer’s poet, who is aware
of how her changeability affects his reputation. The poem suggests filling the
historiographical lacuna opened up by the removal of a Trojan myth of origin
with Criseydan translucence, which emphasizes the necessity of veiling, the ne-
cessity to establish intersections of the masks individuals frequently appropriate
– as do Ovid’s exilic poems. The Troilus thereby turns Trojan myth into Trojan
mythology, highlighting the continual renegotiation of national discourse for
making selves and the necessary recourse to all available mythological models
for the construction of selves and nations. The best of both worlds, the Troilus
suggests, lies in the combination of Trojan transparency and Greek opacity.

1. “I am myn owene womman”: Making an Ars of the Heroides

Troilus’s desire for Criseyde, I argued above, is similar to Achilles’s admiration
for Polyxena. Both men discover in the object of their affection an ontological
model that allows the synthesizing of contradictory roles, the reconciliation of
mourning with celebration, and the reconciliation of Trojanness with Greekness.
I will now investigate Criseyde’s elaboration of an alternative value system in
greater detail. Important in this context is the emphasis on appearance and lumi-
nosity discernible in her initial portrait, in which she already stands apart from
Trojan society. The reader learns about her ‘angelic’ beauty: “That lik a thing
inmortal semed she” (I. 103). Furthermore, the poem touches on her fearfulness
on account of her father’s actions and her problematic position in Trojan society,
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 453

which prompts her to seek out Hector’s protection – a character of “judicious-

ness and rationality.”378 In the course of the description, the narrative frequently
stresses her attire, her widow’s “habit,” the blackness of which is infinitely more
interesting to Chaucer than to Boccaccio.379 An explanation of the poet’s fasci-
nation with Criseyde’s ‘darkness’ is the contrasting luminosity attributed to her
in the Troilus. In her sartorial reading, Laura Hodges explains that Criseyde’s
outfit “was composed of a black veil covering a white veil, white wimple or
barbe, and a dark brown or black robe,” which implicitly calls attention to mul-
tiple layers. Moreover, the material, “samyt” (not mentioned in Boccaccio),
evokes a specific luminosity that results from her description, which is implied
in Chaucer’s portrayal: “Chaucer creates the impression of the luminous tran-
scendence embodied by the ‘so fair’ Criseyde, and although her silk mourning
garments testify to the reality of human mortality and mutability, they neverthe-
less exhibit a sheen associated with celestial beings”380 – hence, the comparison
with light penetrating through dark (“Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre”
[I. 175]) and the expansion of Troilus’s piercing look (“His eye percede, and so
depe it wente” [I. 272]).
The elaboration of Criseyde’s luminosity and Troilus’s ‘piercing look’ is ne-
cessitated by a striking difference between Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Criseyde.
In the Troilus, Criseyde remains a multi-layered, luminous individual, whereas
in the Filostrato, Criseida removes her veil: “e col braccio il mantel tolto davanti
/ s’avea dal viso, largo a sé faccendo, / ed alquanto la calca rimovendo” [with
her arm she had removed her mantle from before her face, making room for her-
self and pushing the crowd a little aside] (Fil. I. 27). Although Chaucer’s
Criseyde veils her identity and is, according to the narrator, an expert in appear-

378
Johnson, “Medieval Hector” 172. Johnson explains that Hector’s name is used in Book II
to effect the meeting between Troilus and Criseyde; the name signifies honor. His honor,
however, is completely ineffectual in Troy (172-73). In choosing Hector as her protector,
Criseyde chooses not only the most valiant knight, but also the most prudent character – a
male version of herself. Hector and Criseyde share an important character trait: she is of
“pitous vois”; he is “pitous of nature” (I. 111, 113). Hector’s rational, prudent stance fur-
ther correlates with Criseyde’s later invocation of Pallas as ‘her lady’ (II. 425). Like her-
self, Chaucer’s Hector is capable of resolving the contradictions between private and pub-
lic spheres. On the one hand, he is Troy’s wall; on the other hand, he can indulge in the
‘fantasy’ of arguing against the exchange of women in the parliamentary debate. In this
context, Criseyde’s fearfulness should not be construed as unheroic, as it is by Lewis (Al-
legory of Love 185-90) since historical evidence suggests that her fears “are more than jus-
tified.” Louise O. Fradenburg, “‘Our owen wo to drynke’: Loss, Gender and Chivalry in
Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” ed. Shoaf 98. For qualifica-
tions of Lewis’s argument, see further Lambert, “Troilus, Books I-III” 106; Alastair Min-
nis and Eric J. Johnson, “Chaucer’s Criseyde and Feminine Fear,” Medieval Women, ed.
Wogan-Browne et al. 210-11.
379
The blackness of Criseyde’s apparel is particularly emphasized in I. 177, 181, 309; cf. Fil.
I. 12, 19, 26, 30.
380
Hodges, “Sartorial Signs” 225, 226.
454 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

ances (seeming), she is not entirely opaque.381 Her apparel is constitutive of her
attractiveness for Troilus insofar as it indicates her capability of maintaining in-
dividuality in the light of immense public pressure. Moreover, her beauty – her
multiple, contradictory personae – is likened to the first letter of the alphabet,
stressing the narrative nature of selfhood: “Right as oure firste lettre is now an
A, / In beaute first so stood she, makeles” (I. 171-72).382 The complexity of her
character becomes a matter of fabricating narrative layers, that is, masks. These
masks, as mentioned above, suggest Criseyde’s strong position in Trojan soci-
ety, which is reflected in her frequent withdrawals to rethink situations, to nego-
tiate her needs and her narrative space383 – especially considering that she is an
abandoned woman. In the words of the poet, and with reference to appearance
rather than essence, she is “mannysh in semynge” (I. 284).384 It takes some time
for Criseyde’s narrative mask making to unfold, since the first book is devoted
mainly to Troilus. In the second book, the audience eventually gains a compre-
hensive perspective on Criseyde, notably, in the book that shows “the least bor-
rowings from Boccaccio” throughout the poem.385
After the prohemium to the second book, with its emphasis on the change-
ability of customs and language, the audience finds Criseyde reading the Siege
of Thebes when Pandarus approaches her (II. 84).386 Pandarus’s perception of his

381
Criseyde’s opacity has been often stressed: For Donaldson (Speaking of Chaucer), she is a
mysterious character; Minnis likewise stresses her elusiveness, arguing that, while it is
easy to say what Criseyde is not, it is difficult to say what she is: “She is not Benoît’s ex-
ception to the courtly rule, or Guido’s example of faithless womankind, or Boccaccio’s
self-determining and forceful wanton, or Holcot’s idol of incontinence and enticing dispo-
sition.” Minnis, Chaucer 91; Benson argues that the “exact nature” of Criseyde’s “inner
self [...] is often tantalizingly hidden from the reader,” although the audience is provided
with many different perspectives on her. Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 104.
All of these perspectives are, after all, points of view provided by the poet, who himself, is
most uncertain about Criseyde. The poet thus creates, as A. C. Spearing suggests, a ver-
sion of Criseyde “far more complex and interesting than the stereotype of female decep-
tion in the versions his audience could have known.” Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The
Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2005) 85, 96-97, quotation at 97.
382
John Livingston Lowes argues that the comparison of Criseyde’s beauty with the first let-
ter of the alphabet alludes to the betrothal of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II in 1382.
Lowes, “The Date of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” PMLA 23.2 (1908): 285-306.
383
If Pandarus, as a representation of public discourse, had complete access to Troilus’s pri-
vacy and his private thoughts, this is not the case with Criseyde, who, as Goodall empha-
sizes, prefers solitude, her “meditative nature” being among “her most notable characteris-
tics.” Goodall, “Being Alone in Chaucer” 10.
384
Later, her seeming becomes problematic for the poet in that he is not sure if Criseyde does
not understand the cause of Troilus’s actions (his proclaimed ill-health) or if she feigns not
to comprehend them (I. 491-94).
385
Shannon, Chaucer 160.
386
For the role of Statius and the difference of versions perused by Criseyde and Pandarus,
see Clogan, “The Theban Scenes in Chaucer’s Troilus.”
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 455

niece further corroborates the similarity of actual and rhetorical veiling, neither
of which flatters her: “Do wey youre barbe, and shew youre face bare; / Do wey
youre book, rys up, and lat us daunce” (II. 110-11)387 – a scene not contained in
Il Filostrato. Her barbe, her widowhood, is an important mask for Criseyde for
which she resists the unmasking: dancing is for young maidens and young
wives, but not for widows. She knows that Pandarus is a jester, but when he in-
timates that he has good news to share, Criseyde is shown to be occupied with
the siege. In contrast to other characters, the war is constantly on her mind, as is
also evident in her question about her protector Hector (II. 153-54). In other
words, Criseyde is intensely aware of national concerns. Learning about the
well-being of both, Hector and Troilus, she describes Hector in terms of his
combinatory abilities, “For gret power and moral vertu here / Is selde yseyn in o
persone yfeere” (II. 167-68),388 a comment (borrowed from Lucan’s Pharsalia)
that can be read as a negative reflection on her own father, if not also ironically
pointing to Pandarus’s ‘lack’ of such qualities. Before Pandarus mentions Troi-
lus’s love to her, he attests to the dislike of hybridity in his renewed obsession
with her attire: “And cast youre widewes habit to mischaunce! / What list yow
thus youreself to disfigure, / Sith yow is tid thus fair an aventure” (II. 222-24).
She refuses again. Not only does her refusal suggest that Criseyde is less
changeable than in the Historia, the passage casts an interesting light on Panda-
rus, too, who prefers to speak to a woman who will transparently do his bidding.
Criseyde is far from being happy about Troilus’s love for her. She wonders
how she should deal with the situation and asks Pandarus, who is nominally
adopted as her pilot (II. 387-89), for help. The inevitable suggestion is that she
should love Troilus, which is met with incredulity and sadness on her part since
she knows that her uncle would have been censorious should she have fallen in
love with Troilus, Achilles, or Hector (cited above).389 Given her fearfulness in
the light of Pandarus’s (Troilus-like) threat to kill himself, Criseyde is forced to

387
For Dinshaw, this passage evinces that “feminine reading seems to male readers to be ex-
cessive: it goes beyond illicit or proper awareness; it is potentially disruptive of orderly,
logical, linear narratives that have well-delimited boundaries.” Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual
Poetics 52-53. It should be emphasized that Criseyde does read and that she most likely
knows the text, the reading of which she chooses to interrupt. Her refusal to dance further
underlines her transcendence of gender stereotypes. Ultimately, Criseyde’s reading acts
“suggest – just hint at – a positive alternative to constricting masculine reading.” Dinshaw,
Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 54.
388
This anticipates Pandarus’s later musings on each Trojan woman representing one aspect
of beauty rather than one woman encompassing a combination of all beautiful attributes.
See also Edwards, “Pandarus’s ‘Unthrift’” 76 (and 76 n. 5).
389
The mentioning of Hector and Achilles is an interesting Chaucerian addition for it reminds
the audience that there was indeed a Trojan lady who once fell in love with Achilles,
namely, Polyxena (see above).
456 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

make a decision,390 and she chooses to play along: “It nedeth me ful sleighly for
to pleie” (II. 462). The death of her uncle, after all, would threaten her reputa-
tion: “Yet have I levere maken hym good chere / In honour, than myn emes lyf
to lese” (II. 471-72). The caveat is that she is not inclined to love a man against
her will (II. 484-90). Criseyde emerges as a very assertive character here, since
she is able – amidst all Pandarian rhetoric – to reflect and rationalize her deci-
sions. Once Pandarus has left, she sits down “stylle as any ston” (II. 600), not
yet able to articulate a new role for herself. The situation, however, does not af-
ford much time to meditate on the matter, because the crowds cheer Troilus
coming in from battle, and Troilus’s appearance prompts changes in her. Upon
first seeing him, “she wex al reed” (II. 652) – as did he a couple of lines earlier –
before remarking upon several masks of his, from outside to his inner being: ex-
cellent prowess, estate, renown, wit, shape, ‘gentilesse,’ but mostly, his distress
on account of her (II. 660-61).
Criseyde’s deliberations,391 as Mary-Jo Arn demonstrates, are reminiscent of
the Jason and Medea episode in the Metamorphoses.392 While her contempla-
tions evoke the Ovidian tale of a strong and revengeful Medea, they also allude
to the Ovidian Medea as described in Guido’s Historia which, in turn, is in-
debted to Benoît and Heroides XII and which emphasizes both Medea’s aban-
donment and Jason’s perfidy. In the Historia, the reader only potentially dis-
cerns underneath the Guidoan veil (that is, his indictment of female mutability) a
productive ontological model that empowers Medea to live with contradiction
and negotiate her own narrative space (see Chapter Seven). Likewise, Criseyde
performs contradictory roles without threatening selfhood as such. She adopts a
mask she can reconcile with her own position and with the circumstances, that
is, the suicidal tendencies of Troilus and her uncle. Borrowings from the begin-
ning of Metamorphoses VII and from Guido’s Historia additionally evoke ques-

390
See Derek Pearsall, “Criseyde’s Choices,” SAC 2 (1987): esp. 20: “What she is doing is
constructing a world for herself in which she can contently live, identifying what she
wants to do and securing the freedom to do it without assuming the responsibilities that
are consequent upon the exercise of free choice. She has discovered the great principle of
survival, and the solace of the survivor: true freedom is the ability to convince yourself
that you have no choice but to do what you want to do.”
391
Criseyde has a choice, but being prepared by Pandarus, the situation is contextualized in a
way that severely delimits her options. The process of Criseyde’s slydynge marks Chau-
cer’s extension of Boethius’s Fortuna, who in the latter is external and in the former be-
comes an internal mechanism. Criseyde’s deliberations provide an “extraordinarily realis-
tic presentation of the complicated responses and decisions of human beings.” Jill Mann,
“Chance and Destiny” 102; Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature
of Social Classes and the “General Prologue” to the “Canterbury Tales” (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973) 199-200. Cf. Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde”
136, rpt. in “The Opaque Text of Chaucer’s Criseyde,” Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,”
ed. Shoaf 22-23.
392
Arn, “Three Ovidian Women” 1-4.
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 457

tions of nationhood. Guido emphasizes Medea’s disobedience vis-à-vis her fa-

ther and her kingdom. This is likewise true of Medea’s deliberations in the
Metamorphoses: “quid in hospite, regia virgo, / ureris et thalamos alieni concipis
orbis?” [why, virgin queen, do you burn for a stranger and muse on marriage in
an alien world] (VII. 21-22)? Furthermore, Ovid’s Medea reinterprets (and per-
ceives) her exilic predicament positively insofar as it entails a certain cosmopol-
itanism: she is leaving behind a barbarous country and thus does not relinquish
much; rather, she gains a ‘better’ country, the cities of which, she heard, are full
of art and beauty – not to forget her husband (Met. VII. 53-60). Neither Chaucer
nor the ‘Guido tradition’ explicitly retains this sentiment of Medea as a national
go-between, but in the tale of a woman forced to give up one nation in favor of
another, it is implicitly preserved and prefigures Criseyde’s ability to synthesize
different ways of life once she is exchanged for Antenor.
Watching Troilus ride by her window, Criseyde continues to reflect upon her
position in terms of reconciling personal emotions and public pressure after the
poet conveys that he does not think that Criseyde fell in love rashly (II. 666-79).
Her heart, waxing hot and cold, remains the locus of emotional turmoil, but her
mask making is a mental process: “So she gan in hire thought argue / In this ma-
tere” (II. 694-95, and see 701). The poet quickly abandons the Filostrato after
reporting her thoughts about Troilus’s “persone” in order to highlight Criseyde’s
main concern which – analogous to Briseis’s concern in the Roman de Troie – is
to find intersections between Troilus’s desire and her needs: to deal with Troilus
would be honorable since it guarantees his ‘health’ and her estate, which would
be threatened should she ‘flee his sight’ (II. 705-14). Moderation should be prac-
ticed, however; emotional decisions need not be either completely transparent
nor completely opaque. There is the risk, after all, that the affair would be public
knowledge.393 Even if the Trojans divined their relationship, it would not dis-
honor her, she believes (II. 715-35). Falling in love with Troilus is therefore
reconcilable not only with the public sphere, it would be natural in Troy where
she “alday heere and se, / Men loven wommen al biside hire leve / And whan
hem leste namore, lat hem byleve” (II. 733-35). Moreover, her speech enables
her to link Troilus’s social position to her own, in a passage that Chaucer bor-
rows from the beginning of Criseida’s soliloquy in the Filostrato: he is the wor-
thiest in Troy (save Hector), “And yet his lif al lith now in my cure” (II. 741),
which leads her to conclude that “I am oon the faireste, out of drede, / And
goodlieste” (II. 746-47). Hence, “What wonder is though he of me have joye?”
(II. 749). The corollary of finding a ‘platform’ on which to engage with Troilus,
a basis of commonality that amounts to a ‘horizontal’ stabilization of her masks,

393
She thinks she has good reason to believe that he would not boast. Yet, the audience
would have reason to suspect that Troilus’s excessive emotionality would quickly make
sure that people would know that he is in love.
458 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

is that she is as free to choose a lover as is Troilus: “I am myn owene womman,

wel at ese –” (II. 750).
Her ability to reconcile personal and public masks enables her to divine the
potential negative outcome of her position, too, as her thoughts quickly turn on
the Wheels of Fortuna, much more quickly than Troilus’s, whose wheel moves
at a slower pace throughout the poem. Just like “In March, that chaungeth ofte
tyme his face” (II. 765), the bright sun shining on Criseyde is overcast, “So that
for feere almost she gan to falle” (II. 770). She realizes that loving Troilus im-
perils the individuality she has just negotiated for herself (II. 780-81).394 How-
ever much she would be able to control her own masks and reconcile her own
emotions with public opinion, she cannot control the perception of her masks (II.
785-805). Finally, her argument is clinched by her recognition that “He which
that nothing undertaketh, / Nothyng n’acheveth” (II. 807-08). This un-Trojan
(somewhat Pandarian) sentiment underlines her favorable disposition toward
change since it recalls Ovid’s Medea, who wants to tread new paths as well. The
ensuing conversion occurs in oscillation with narrative masks circulated in Troy,
for example, with Antigone’s song, printed in her heart so “That she wex som-
what able to converte” (II. 900).395 Antigone’s transparent Trojan song, with its
reference to the lover as “mirour of goodlihed,” becomes a narrative model
quickly adopted by Criseyde. As Mary Borthwick asserts, “Upon a first reading,
the song may seem no mirror but transparent crystal through which shines the
pure joy of love expressed by the song’s composer [...] but the dark, opaque
backing is necessary to give it its reflective quality.” The song rebuts every one
of Criseyde’s rehearsed objections to a relationship with Troilus,396 and it repre-
sents a (semi-transparent) narrative model for Criseyde that she created herself
and that is ready for adoption, albeit in need of constant modification.

2. “Ye shal namore han sovereignete”: Metamorphosing the Ars

After mentally negotiating the various obstacles to and possibilities of loving
Troilus, Criseyde can receive him into her heart,397 whereby she conceives of
394
Criseyde’s musing on her liberty can also be seen in terms of a liberation from her mourn-
ing persona, which dominates Book I.
395
Bankert argues that the narrator’s meditation on this scene highlights that the conversion is
not immediate. Moreover, the Augustinian role of the song for her conversion is only fully
realized later. Bankert, “Secularizing the Word” 205-06.
396
Mary Charlotte Borthwick, “Antigone’s Song as ‘Mirour’ in Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde,” MLQ 22.3 (1961): 227, 232-33.
397
Criseyde visualizes this in a dream in which an eagle, betokening Troilus (Windeatt 197n),
exchanges her heart: “And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte” (II. 931). This ex-
change of hearts is the end-result of a long decision-making process: “she has yielded
emotionally if not actually. Her resistance in subsequent scenes is driven chiefly by the
desire to retain control [...].” Bankert, “Secularizing the Word” 206-07, 208. Kara Doyle
argues that the exchange of hearts is more of a “heart transplant” by means of which
Criseyde now has the “heart of a man, a clear indication that the song has conclusively
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 459

herself as the port to which Troilus (and Pandarus) will have to sail.398 At the
end of Book II, Criseyde is firmly in charge of her masks and plays along as re-
quired by the rules for the Ovidian game of love, as shown, for instance, in her
initial rejection of Troilus’s letter. Unlike Troilus, and despite her own protesta-
tions (analogous to Helen’s in the Heroides), she is able to pen a suitable re-
sponse to Troilus – one in keeping with her emphasis on moderation and one
that is neither completely transparent nor entirely opaque: she promises to love
him like a sister (II. 1219-25). This contrasts markedly with Boccaccio’s verba-
tim report of her letter (II. 121-28), of which Muscatine notes that “The ambigu-
ity of her feminine responses to her suitors is designedly transparent.”399 Once
the second ride-by of the Trojan ‘hero’ has been staged,400 Criseyde is very
pleased with Troilus’s “persoun, his aray, his look, his chere, // His goodly man-
ere, and his gentilesse” (II. 1267-68). When stepping out of Book II into Book
III (from ‘her’ book into that of Troilus and Criseyde), she has fully integrated
Troilus into her life. Now, she intends to learn his true intentions and dons the
mask: henceforth, she “nyl nought feyne. / Now beth al hool; no lenger ye ne
pleyne” (III. 167-68). And yet, she does not surrender control: “Ye shal namore
han sovereignete / Of me in love, than right in that cas is” (III. 171-72). Conse-
quently, the narrator transfers onto Troilus the protective responsibilities for-
merly attributed to Hector: “That wel she felte he was to hire a wal / Of stiel,
and sheld from every displesaunce” (III. 479-80, emphases added). Quickly,
however, rumors (of her love for Orestes) threaten her reputation (III. 804-05),
reminding her that she may be in control of herself, but cannot sway public dis-
course. The result is a hybrid perception of the self, in which a Boethian happi-
ness is never a true happiness since it is mixed with bitterness: “so worldly sely-
nesse, / Which clerkes callen fals felicitee, / Imedled is with many a bitter-
nesse!” (III. 813-15; see HF 1125-27, 2102). Troilus’s jealousy pains her,401 and

changed her view of herself.” Criseyde’s “preexisting concept of herself as an object,”

however, prevents her from the advantages of a subject position. Doyle, “Criseyde Read-
ing, Reading Criseyde,” New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Vitto and Marzec 87-88.
398
She greets Pandarus, wondering “What manere wyndes gydeth yow now here?” (II. 1104).
399
Muscatine, Chaucer 125.
400
Criseyde, however, does not really see anything, but rather infers. See Elizabeth A. Dobbs,
“Seeing through Windows in Chaucer’s Troilus,” ChauR 32.4 (1998): 413-14.
401
Criseyde emphasizes the duplicity of jealousy, which is discussed in the framework of
wholeness. Criseyde frequently refers to Troilus as her ‘heart’ (III. 988, 1003, 1039, 993),
and her heart (which is his) has always been ‘wholly’ true to him (III. 1001). The image of
unity gives rise to diversity, since love is mixed with jealousy, personified as a snake that
crept into Troilus’s heart (which is, following her logic, also hers). She intends to ‘erase’
this jealousy from his heart, ridding Troilus of contradictoriness, which she has previously
defined as an essential human predicament (III. 1015). Criseyde knows that public dis-
course often defines jealousy as love and believes this to be excusable if jealousy is kept
in balance (III. 1023-25). Ultimately, jealousy is excusable and to some extent necessary.
The purity and transparency Troilus’s heart strives for, and which she attempts to recon-
struct, does not represent a viable ontological model.
460 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

the potential public misperception of her actions creates a situation familiar to

Criseyde from the outset of the poem. Relying on male protection as concerns
her public masks, she now has to additionally guarantee Troilus’s happiness.
She turns to Troilus and Pandarus:
Is on yow two, and ye ben bothe wise,
So werketh now in so discret a wise
That I honour may have, and he plesaunce:
For I am here al in youre governaunce. (III. 942-45)
That she turns to both of them underlines Criseyde’s syncretistic selfhood inso-
far as heart and mind are linked: emotional goods (Troilus) co-exist with public
goods (Pandarus) in the creation of a self that is transparent and opaque.
As the lovers’ first night together comes to a close, the sorrow of the lovers is
conveyed in a traditional, albeit inverted Ovidian “aube” (III. 1422-1533), which
is expanded from Chaucer’s source, and further underscores the importance of
veiling, while drawing attention to the lovers’ different perspectives thereof. For
Criseyde, night and day are symbiotically related insofar as the night literally
becomes a Venerean cloak, veiling the world of daily responsibilities: “O blake
nyght, as folk in bokes rede, / That shapen art by God this world to hide” (III.
1429-30). In contrast to Troilus, her concern is with the departure of night, not
the coming of the day.402 Since she worries neither about Troilus’s love nor her
survival, it is conclusive that she speaks the male part of the Tagelied rather than
the female part, spoken by Troilus.403 Bearing in mind the Guidoan dichotomy
of heart and mind, further differences between the lovers emerge. Criseyde ulti-
mately argues for a hybridity of domains. Upon Troilus’s question as to whether
he is as firmly set in her heart as she is in his, she replies that “The game, ywys,
so ferforth now is gon / That first shal Phebus fallen fro his speere / [... / ...] / Er
Troilus oute of Criseydes herte” (III. 1434-38). The premise of the argument is
that of a rhetorical, Pandarian game.404 Heart (Troilus) and mind (Pandarus) are
interrelated rather than separate domains (which they are for Troilus). Further-
more, she addresses Troilus’s missing balance of heart and mind explicitly, re-
questing “that ye me wolde han as faste in mynde / As I have yow, that wolde I
yow biseche” (III. 1506-07). Love for her and for Troilus should be as much an
exercise of the heart as an exercise of the mind. Both domains are separate, but
they are mutually constitutive nonetheless. Problematically, mind is a category
suspiciously absent from Troilus’s speech.
The hybrid sense of selfhood determined by Criseyde is seen in its genealogi-
cal construction at the outset of Book IV, which foregrounds the historical back-

402
Geographically, Criseyde’s night flees westward; Troilus is worried about that which ap-
proaches from the East, namely, the Greeks (see Chapter Sixteen, above).
403
Kaske, “The Aube in Chaucer’s Troilus” 172, cited above.
404
On the following morning, Criseyde acknowledges Pandarus’s ‘authorship’ of their bliss-
ful night, brought about by his verbal art and his ‘game’ (esp. III. 1564-68).
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 461

drop of the love story. The book begins with a depiction of the Greek host and
touches on the prisoners taken on this day, reinforcing the reality of the siege. A
truce is negotiated and affords the narrator with the opportunity to reintroduce
Criseyde’s treacherous father Calkas – the opening of Book IV thus mirrors the
beginning of Book I. This introduces a genealogical perspective on Criseyde’s
translucent self. The narrator relates how Calkas approaches the noisy Greek as-
sembly and, “with a chaunged face,” asks them “For love of God, to don that
reverence, / To stynte noyse and yeve hym audience” (IV. 68-70).405 From the
beginning, he appears as well-versed in the art of self-presentation: “I am Cal-
kas, / That alderfirst yaf comfort to youre nede” (IV. 73-74), reminding the
Greeks of their prophesied victory. Truly Greek, he will do whatever the collec-
tive decides (IV. 78-79). On account of his great affection for them,406 he gladly
left everything behind in Troy, “Save of a doughter that I lefte, allas, / Slepyng
at hom” (IV. 92-93) – his cruelty to his family is attributed to “so hard an herte”
(IV. 95). Referring to himself as an “olde caytif in destresse” (IV. 104; that is,
literally as a ‘prisoner’ of the Greeks), he eventually introduces the upcoming
prisoner exchange, which would allow for the reunification of his family. Calkas
ends his speech by reassuring the Greeks that Troy will fall soon (IV. 113-26).
The rhetorical abilities that allow Calkas at once to sacrifice his daughter and
then ask for her restoration, underline his facility for the creation of opaque
masks. Rhetoric allows him to inscribe his personal desires into the collective
mask, to reconcile Trojanness with Greekness, a fact that Troilus is unable to
comprehend.407 Calkas is literally double, and his duplicity (actually, duplicity in
general) betrays Troy. The revered priest of Guido’s Historia is blackened in Il
Filostrato and the Troilus, where the description of the pagan is a “thorough as-
sassination of the character of this priest of Apollo.” Even the Greeks have res-
ervations about the Trojan traitor,408 whose mask making represents a Virgilian,
imperial paradigm. Later, Diomedes questions the genuineness of Calkas’s
prophecies by equating words with faces (masks): “And but if Calkas lede us
with ambages – / That is to seyn, with double wordes slye, / Swiche as men
clepen a word with two visages –” (V. 897-99).409 Criseyde is not Calkas, even

405
The Greek council is much less frayed with ‘noise’ (controversy) than the Trojan parlia-
ment, where popular dissent abounds. At the end of Calkas’s speech in the Filostrato, the
Greeks are noisy in their assent (Fil. IV. 12). This is muted in the Troilus, corroborating
the impression of the Greeks as organized and efficient. The calm and prudent Greek way
of solving conflict is a Guidoan motif.
406
He even contends that he likes the Greeks very much (IV. 82-84), his affection for the
Greeks being a novelty with Chaucer (Windeatt 353n). An audience familiar with the Troy
story knows that he defected to the Greeks on account of Apollo’s command that he do so.
407
“O oold, unholsom, and myslyved man – / Calkas I mene – allas, what eiled the, / To ben
a Grek, syn thow art born Troian?” (IV. 330-32).
408
Minnis, Chaucer 80, 82.
409
For the pragmatic layering of Diomede’s ‘ambages,’ see Christopher Cannon, “Chaucer’s
Style,” Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Boitani and Mann 246-47.
462 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

though, like her father, Criseyde is able to reconcile public and private masks. In
so doing, however, she avoids Troilus’s transparency (death) or Pandarus’s and
Calkas’s opacity (decentered selfhood).
In the light of her impending exchange, Criseyde is forced to reinvestigate
the narrative models for the creation of translucence. Her reaction to the devas-
tating news, however, is postponed (or rather prefaced) by Troilus’s lengthy and
ineffective complaints. Furthermore, Criseyde’s feelings about her exchange are
doubly removed from the audience’s view: first, the poet reports what he thinks
she is thinking (IV. 666-79); second, he relays how the Trojan public perceives
her predicament, that is, the reaction of her Trojan friends (IV. 680-707). The
poet’s belief that Criseyde is crying on account of Troilus (IV. 708-14) is as
speculative as are her friends’ convictions that she is weeping for lack of ability
to ‘play’ with them (IV. 715-21). After this double view of how different groups
read her, which emphasizes the role of public performance, Criseyde laments
her predicament, appropriating the role of an abandoned woman: Ovid’s Ari-
adne.410 The loss of regional (national) identity takes prominence over the sepa-
ration from Troilus, since her soliloquy opens with the observation that she is
cast “out of this regioun” (IV. 743). This view on what she will leave behind –
rather than what to expect411 – remotely alludes to Ovid’s Tristia, which begins
with a last view of Rome and the subsequent meditations on the loss of his repu-
tation in the imperial city. Criseyde’s father, it emerges, is to blame for her
plight (IV. 761), which removes her from one of her most important orienta-
tional narratives, from Troilus. She wonders, “To what fyn sholde I lyve and
sorwen thus?” (IV. 764), beginning to rehearse available narrative models. She
quickly brushes aside suicide, the locus classicus for abandoned women, as a
possibility, which is anticipated by the narratorial comment that she goes to bed
“In purpos nevere thennes for to rise” (IV. 734). She is too afraid of death, how-
ever, and would rather observe a nun’s rules of lament in the future (IV. 771-
84).
The role of the abandoned woman – heroic lament and/or suicide – does not
represent a mask for Criseyde, who gleans an alternative in another Ovidian

410
Hagedorn, Abandoned Women 138.
411
In Il Filostrato, Criseida does not look back at what she is going to leave behind but wor-
ries about where she is headed (IV. 88). If the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
has to be read in a national context (which qua its allusion to the departure of the Greeks
in Guido’s Historia seems permissible), Criseyde’s tears, compared here to an April
shower, may indicate that Criseyde’s exchange does entail more than spiritual renewal –
perhaps, national renewal is what is at stake. This is underlined by Criseyde’s reference to
her mother as “Argyve” (IV. 762), “which is also the name Cassandre uses for Argia, the
Greek wife of the Theban prince Polynices.” Sanok, “Criseyde” 69. Genealogically, this
corroborates Criseyde’s Greco-Trojan hybridity. For the structural importance of the ref-
erences to the seasons, see Provost, Structure 105-07. Troilus first sees Criseyde in April,
too, for which see Frantzen, Troilus and Criseyde 87.
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 463

text: the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.412 While this narrative model has a
happy ending, it is a decidedly illusionary ending, as she well knows. Troilus’s
heart is too tender, and the ending of their story will inevitably be different:
“But, herte myn, foryete this sorwe and tene, / And me also; for sothly for to
seye, / So ye wel fare, I recche naught to deye” (IV. 796-98). In the search for
narrative models to mold her identity, Criseyde eventually goes beyond the
Heroides and, in a sense, beyond the Metamorphoses – if only by means of the
process of metamorphosis itself. Again, she has to shape her own story,413 has to
modify existing narrative models. This modification renders Criseyde’s situation
analogous to that of the dreamer in the House of Fame, who, after leaving Ve-
nus’s temple, approaches a desert (482) which represents the first inkling of the
ontological necessity of remythologizing in view of the absence of authoritative
guidance. Accordingly, Criseyde critiques Pandarus’s role in the entire affair
(IV. 828-33) and implicitly rejects Troilus’s advice, too, when wondering “what
wordes may ye brynge? / What wol my deere herte seyn to me” (IV. 857-58).
She doubts that her ‘pilots’ have any feasible narrative models to offer. Rather
than following their advice, she dismisses their ‘steering’ in favor of reorganiz-
ing the narratives of grief into the re-making of a translucent self. This process is
literally mirrored in her appearance, which assumes a new quality: “Hire face,
lik of Paradys the ymage, / Was al ychaunged in another kynde” (IV. 864-65).
Criseyde’s advancement of an assertive stance vis-à-vis her exilic predica-
ment is also illustrated by her intention neither to give up nor to settle for Pan-
darian cynicism. In contrast to Troilus’s self-centered lament, she takes into
consideration Troilus’s plight when inquiring about Troilus’s feelings regarding
the exchange. Upon learning that Troilus wants to confer with her about possible
remedies, she agrees to see him, emphasizing that she pities him more than her-
self (IV. 899-900, 795-98), which “makes Criseyde seem morally superior to
Troilus: she is notably more concerned with the pain he must be feeling than he
is with the pain she must feel.”414 After she swoons and after Troilus’s ‘at-
tempted suicide’ at the beginning of their meeting, she resumes the leading role,

412
For a Boethian reading of the allusion to the tale of Orpheus, see Phillipa Hardman, “Nar-
rative Typology: Chaucer’s Use of the Story of Orpheus,” MLR 85.3 (1990): 545-54.
413
Ariadne’s destiny parallels that of Troilus, as noted by Hagedorn, Abandoned Women 139-
41, with reference to V. 218-25. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid provides the end of Ari-
adne’s story, naturally left out of her letter in the Heroides. Ariadne is ‘rescued’ by Bac-
chus who promotes her into the celestial sphere: “desertae et multa querenti / amplexus et
opem Liber tulit, utque perenni / sidere clara foret, sumptam de fronte coronam / inmisit
caelo” [abandoned, in her grief and anger she found comfort in Bacchus’s arms. He took
her crown and set it in the heavens to win her there a star’s eternal glory] (Met. VIII. 176-
79).
414
Mark Lambert, “Telling the Story in Troilus and Criseyde,” Cambridge Companion to
Chaucer, ed. Boitani and Mann 90. For the role of ‘entente’ and Criseyde’s problematic
mismatch between intention and act, see Elizabeth Archibald, “Declarations of ‘Entente’
in Troilus and Criseyde,” ChauR 25.3 (1991): 190-213.
464 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

rehearsing several opportunities for them to be alive and together. Whereas

Criseida’s discourse in the Filostrato begins with the assertion that she only
cares about Troiolo rather than city, gold, or palace (Fil. IV. 128), Criseyde’s
version opens with an important reminder, namely, “That if a wight alwey his
wo compleyne / And seketh nought how holpen for to be, / It nys but folie and
encrees of peyne” (IV. 1255-57). For an audience familiar with the Troy story,
this opening recalls Agamemnon’s advice to Menelaus on account of the latter’s
sorrow concerning the abduction of his wife. Criseyde thus stresses the necessity
of manufacturing opaque masks – intemperate emotionality only increases eve-
ryone’s pain.415 Opacity and transparency are required.
Subsequently, Criseyde offers several possibilities of making the separation
less problematic for the two of them. There are many options, she thinks, and in
a couple of weeks, she will be back in Troy (IV. 1275-81). Notably, the sugges-
tions are hers and not Pandarus’s, although her advice is prefaced by the Pandar-
ian sentiment that she “wol gon to my conclusioun” (IV. 1284; Windeatt 423n).
The latter only serves to underline that opaque mask making, prevalent with
Guido’s Greeks, is necessary in order to manage the lovers’ grief. The exchange
itself, of course, is inevitable, and her return to the Trojan camp is unlikely. In
contrast to Il Filostrato, the Troilus emphasizes the pressure of public opinion
against which Criseyde cannot transgress: in Boccaccio’s poem, Criseida would
disobey only her father’s command (Fil. IV. 130); in the Troilus, she would defy
the voice of the people. Having recognized already that she cannot alter other
people’s perception of her, not obeying a parliamentary decision is therefore out
of the question. This national dimension of Criseyde’s decision to go along with
the exchange is not only highlighted by the Guidoan framework (in which the
main concern is the longevity of empire) and the nation’s decision to exchange
her, but emerges also in her musings on possible solutions. Among the various
remedies offered to mend the situation – geographical proximity, he will fre-
quently hear of her, she will return within ten days, her father will send her back
(IV. 1303-44) – the final conclusion is that “Men trete of pees” (IV. 1346).
Helen might be restored to Menelaus, and if peace ensued, Trojans and Greeks
would have dealings with one another again (IV. 1345-58). At this point of de-
spair, “Criseyde futilely but authentically injects the alternative of reconciling
the conflict and ending the repeated cycle of violence over lost women.”416 By
means of likening her situation to Helen’s, Criseyde implicitly argues that her
exchange for Antenor is pivotal to the survival of Troy. If peace were not to be
negotiated, she again would have to engage in a game of opacity – a Pandarian

415
The Troilus also retains Agamemnon’s second piece of advice, namely, that revenge is
neither to be sought with the sword nor with murmurs of complaint. Criseyde says, “For
ther is art ynough for to redresse / That yet is mys, and slen this hevynesse” (IV. 1266-67).
Redress and revenge are different modes of correction; however, the noun carries the
meaning of punishment as well (MED, s.v. redresse n. b).
416
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 51. See further Aers, “Chaucer’s Criseyde” 132.
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 465

sentiment absent from the Filostrato – with her father: “And I right now have
founden al the gise, / Withouten net, wherwith I shal hym hente” (IV. 1370-
71).417 She would deceive him by means of opacity, “For goddes speken in am-
phibologies, / And for o soth they tellen twenty lyes” (IV. 1406-07).
Troilus is only appeased for a short time by her suggestions and asks her to
run away with him while there is still time. Being abandoned in multiple ways
already, Criseyde quickly recognizes that this would entail yet another dimen-
sion of abandonment for her. First, in a passage alluding to the Metamorphoses,
Criseyde swears that she will be truthful, thereby quoting the Heroides. Ad-
dressing River Symois, she says, “That thilke day that ich untrewe be / To Troi-
lus, my owene herte fre, / That thow retourne bakward to thi welle” (IV. 1551-
53). She alludes to Oenone’s letter to Paris, in which the former reminds the lat-
ter that he inscribed in a tree his vow that Xanthus would flow back to its well
were he to leave her (V. 29-30). On the one hand, this borrowing accentuates the
reversal of masculine and feminine roles in the Troilus.418 On the other hand, it
brings into play Criseyde’s trauma of abandonment, which she attempts to tran-
scend. An audience familiar with the Ovidian epistle would instantly recognize
this inverted analogy: like Troilus, Paris is one of Priam’s relentlessly emotional
sons. Moreover, Paris’s desire is partially to blame for the Trojan War. If Troilus
and Criseyde did flee, neither she nor he would be awarded the protection of any
collective;419 they would solely depend on a Trojan prince. Hence, both of them
would be abandoned and lose their honor, as she claims in the following stanza
(IV. 1555-61). Besides, running away entails the risk of her being further aban-
doned – by Troilus. It is the abandonment of Oenone, Dido, Medea, and so on,
that Criseyde attempts to avoid. If, in writing Book III, Chaucer had in mind
Book IV of the Aeneid in engaging with “a theme rather rarer in literature than
in life: the Wronged Man,” as Fleming suggests, it is not inconceivable that this
forms the backdrop of this scene in the Troilus. The feminization of Troilus – as
“a palimpsest or subcutaneous appearance of Dido [...] in Chaucer’s text”420 –
does not tip the balance exclusively in favor of an interpretation of the Troilus as
the history of a ‘Wronged Man.’ Criseyde emerges at least as concerned with his
reputation as with hers. It is precisely because she speaks as an abandoned
woman that she is able to imagine male abandonment. In contrast to Dido (and
other abandoned women), she is concerned with her reputation: if she went with
Troilus, her name would be forever lost (IV. 1576-82). In order to avoid new
forms of abandonment, Criseyde rather decides for the abandonment with which
she is already familiar and which she has learned to navigate.

417
Gise covers a semantic range from dress to disguise. MED, s.v. gise n. 3b and 3c.
418
Fleming, Classical Imitation 174.
419
Since Troilus’s destiny is important to her, she reinstates his sense of nationhood: if he
were to run away, people would think of him as a coward, suspecting that he left Troy for
lust, not love (IV. 1569-75).
420
Fleming, Classical Imitation 172-79.
466 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

3. “For thise bokes wol me shende”: Abandoning Abandonment

Criseyde’s exilic journey to the Greek camp is not dissimilar from Troilus’s as-
cent to the eighth sphere from which he beholds the vain world (that is, Eng-
land). Unlike Troilus, Criseyde recognizes the importance of veiling while she is
still alive. In contrast to Boccaccio, Chaucer’s poet portrays Criseyde as capable
of muting her emotionality at the occasion of the exchange. In the Filostrato,
she curses her destiny and asks Diomede to proceed quickly with the exchange
of a dreaded knight for ‘merely a woman’ never to return to Troy (Fil. V. 6-9).
The Troilus rather focuses on the inevitability of the exchange: “Ful sorwfully
she sighte, and seyde ‘Allas!’ / But forth she moot, for aught that may bitide; /
Ther is non other remedie in this cas” (V. 58-60). Troilus’s emotionality is fur-
ther stressed in Chaucer’s poem, as is Criseyde’s self-control: in contrast to
Boccaccio’s overly angry and emotional Criseida, Criseyde appears to be more
in control of her performance.421 Yet, the Troilus maintains one emotional mo-
ment from the Filostrato, namely, Criseida’s tears, which make her the more at-
tractive to Diomede: “And Lord, so she gan wepen tendrely!” (Troilus V. 82;
Fil. V. 12). While Chaucer does not explicitly motivate Diomede’s affection by
means of her crying, the fact that it is retained despite the general omission of
Criseyde’s anger points to the larger issues of veiling again. First, Criseyde liter-
ally becomes translucent, since the narrator mutes aspects of Criseida’s person-
ality in the Filostrato, while her emotionality is nevertheless visible; in other
words, Criseida’s emotionality is not veiled, but is only partially masked. Sec-
ond, the poet chooses to retain the image of a weeping Criseyde, this time not
mourning for a deceased husband, but for a lost lover, prompting a man’s (Dio-
mede’s) reaction. This replicates Troilus’s attraction to a mourning Criseyde in
Book I, which in turn replicates Achilles’s attraction to a mourning Polyxena in
Guido’s Historia.422
Among the reasons for Diomede’s successful ‘persuasion’ of Criseyde, na-
tionhood (and ‘loss’ thereof) plays an important, albeit generally underappreci-
ated role. Diomede is a combination of opaque Pandarus and transparent Troi-
421
Mieszkowski argues that Chaucer’s reworking of the Filostrato showcases his heroine’s
passivity. Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde” 116-17. I see in Criseyde’s
ability to respond to collective mythologies by means of engaging in narrative bricolage –
her ability to be simultaneously opaque and transparent – the exploitation of a faultline.
Her translucence offers a productive alternative to seemingly deterministic ontological
narratives.
422
Diomede himself explicitly emphasizes her sorrow after resolving to woo her “With al the
sleghte and al that ever he kan” (V. 773), the latter being a Greek mask-making sentiment.
He subsequently rehearses the difficulty of wooing a woman in sorrow: “But whoso my-
ghte wynnen swich a flour / From hym for whom she morneth nyght and day, / He myghte
seyn, he were a conquerour” (V. 792-94). Diomede thus equates being victorious in love
matters with being victorious in military conflicts. If Criseyde appears to be in close prox-
imity to Hector in Book I, she now voices an opinion – “bityde what bityde” (V. 750) –
that likewise appears in Diomede’s discourse as “Happe how happe may” (V. 796).
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 467

lus. Like Pandarus, he represents commonsense and proverbial knowledge, and

he is also much less emotionally involved than Troilus. Love itself, he knows,
should not be mentioned when approaching Criseyde – transparency does not
befit the situation. Speaking of ‘this and that,’ he promises to do her bidding,
when offering a sentiment that would make Criseyde feel at home, “[...] Iwis, we
Grekis kan have joie / To honouren yow as wel as folk of Troie” (V. 118-19). It
is surely difficult to abandon Troy, but “A Grek ye sholde among us alle fynde /
As any Troian is, and ek as kynde” (V. 125-26). He will be a friend, even a
brother.423 Eventually, he returns to questions of collective identities, determin-
ing a link between Troy and Greece. Although the Trojans hate the Greeks,
O god of Love in soth we serven bothe.
And for the love of God, my lady fre,
Whomso ye hate, as beth nat wroth with me,
For trewely, ther kan no wyght yow serve
That half so loth youre wratthe wold disserve. (V. 143-47)
Having thus minimized cultural difference, he transparently confesses that he
has never spoken to a woman in this fashion before, but people do fall in love at
first sight. Criseyde, the narrator reports, has not been listening (V. 184) – and
yet, Diomede’s musings on cultural similarity prompt Chaucer’s Criseyde to
think about cultural difference, while Boccaccio’s narrator introduces her new
lover (Fil. VI. 7-8). Changing one nation for another turns out to be highly com-
plex for exiled Criseyde.
In her exilic predicament, perception becomes the key problem for Criseyde.
She realizes that her father will probably not allow her to return to Troy, where-
fore Troilus will think her untrue – not because she is untrue, but because it
seems that way: “My Troilus shal in his herte deme / That I am fals, and so it
may wel seme” (V. 697-98). Hence, she has the “unthonk on every side” (V.
699). Even if she were to leave the Greek camp, she would appear as a spy or
could be kidnapped (V. 701-07). Like Troilus, she revisits the locations associ-
ated with their relationship at night (V. 715-21), but unlike Troilus, who still has
access to a pilot, she has no audience for her lament: “And this was yet the wer-
ste of al hire peyne: / Ther was no wight to whom she dorste hire pleyne” (V.
727-28). Like Troilus, Criseyde engages in self-criticism: had she followed Troi-
lus’s “loore” (V. 736) by fleeing at night, she would not presently be suffering
as much (V. 736-42). Criseyde’s position is therefore analogous to that of
Ovid’s persona in the Tristia, who is exiled on account of an error of perception.
Criseyde becomes A Woman between Two Worlds, to modify the title of
Hermann Fränkel’s book on Ovid. Like Troilus, she immediately wants to mend
the error. She yearns for the restoration of the status quo ante in resolving to run
away the next night, momentarily forgetful of the forces of public opinion (V.
757-63; cf. Fil. VII. 7). Famously, she does not run away, “For bothe Troilus

423
Criseyde had offered herself earlier to Troilus as a friend and sister (II. 1219-25).
468 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

and Troie town / Shal knotteles thorughout hire herte slide; / For she wol take a
purpos for t’abide” (V. 768-70). In Boccaccio’s poem, it is Diomede who drives
forth thoughts on both Troy and Troilus; in the Troilus, Criseyde is not per-
suaded but rather remains her own pilot and – applying common sense and logic
– ‘decides’ to remain with the Greeks.424
After her decision is made, the poet provides three short character sketches
(in which Criseyde is literally poised between Diomede and Troilus) and reiter-
ates Troy(lus)’s ‘knotless sliding’ through Criseyde’s heart as her “slydynge of
corage” (V. 825). At this point, Diomede appears once more, bringing into play
musings on nationhood again, which thus frame Criseyde’s decision to remain in
the Greek camp. Pretending to have business with Calkas, Diomede visits
Criseyde to talk to her. He introduces the conversation by alluding to the siege
in a situation that recalls Pandarus’s approach of Criseyde (on Troilus’s behalf)
in Book II. Unlike Pandarus, Diomede at least pretends to be interested in her
opinion (V. 858). Moreover, he wonders “[...] if that hire straunge thoughte /
The Grekis gise and werkes that they wroughte” (V. 860-61). Criseyde is re-
ported to answer as she might, but without comprehending Diomede’s intentions
(V. 868). Changing his strategy, Diomede openly voices his belief that she is in
love with a Trojan, which, in his opinion, is futile since Troy will fall. Framing
Criseyde’s sorrow about the separation from Troy(lus) with the reminder that
she is with a different, most likely victorious nation, the poem illustrates that
Criseyde’s scope of action is as limited as the leverage of the Trojans, who are
“In prisoun” (V. 884)425 – a phrase reminiscent of Troilus’s (and Troy’s) status
as prisoner of his (its) heart in the medieval Troy story. Eventually, Diomede
becomes pushy:
Lat Troie and Troian fro youre herte pace!
Drif out that bittre hope, and make good cheere,
And clepe ayeyn the beaute of youre face
That ye with salte teris so deface,
For Troie is brought in swich a jupartie
That it to save is now no remedie. (V. 912-17)
Diomede would be willing even to renounce his nationhood for her. He would
rather have her than be the king of twelve ‘Greeces,’ but he does not appear to
be entirely serious. After all, he somewhat regretfully claims that he is as noble
as any Trojan, since he would be “Of Calydoyne and Arge a kyng,” if it had not
been for his father’s death at Thebes (V. 934).426

424
Her decision is entirely logical. As she realized earlier, and forgot only for the moment,
fleeing at night is perilous and may be construed as spying, that is, treachery.
425
As Steinberg suggests, “the habitus of the Trojans has become characterized by structures
that limit and curtail their actions.” Steinberg, “Embodiment” 261.
426
According to Edwards, Diomede’s construction of a genealogy implies a future alternative
to what Cassandra interprets, seemingly transparently, as Troilus’s place in a long line of
fated types. Diomede “looks to a future in which his actions can prevail over circum-
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 469

Diomede’s speech on Greek cultural superiority and nationhood anticipates

Criseyde’s sliding for the third time, but Criseyde disagrees with Diomede. She
knows that the Greeks hate the Trojans, and she is aware of the fact that they
might be victorious; after all, her father brought her to Greece for the reasons
described by Diomede. She increasingly minimizes cultural differences, how-
ever. Concerning his assertions that “ye shal in Grekis fynde / A moore parfit
love, er it be nyght, / Than any Troian is, and more kynde,” (V. 918-20) and that
“I am, al be it yow no joie, / As gentil man as any wight in Troie” (V. 930-31),
she comments:
That Grekis ben of heigh condicioun
I woot ek wel; but certeyn, men shal fynde
As worthi folk withinne Troie town,
As konnyng, and as parfit, and as kynde,
As ben bitwixen Orkades and Inde.... (V. 967-71)
Honor, on this view, becomes an international discourse without qualitative na-
tional differences. For Criseyde, the question is not so much whether one nation
is superior to another (whether it be in martial or Venerean terms), the problem
is how to reconcile her individuality with her exilic position. Since it would be
certainly unwise to offend Diomede, her responses are ambiguous: “If that I
sholde of any Grek han routhe, / It sholde be youreselven, by my trouthe!” and
“I say nat therfore that I wol yow love, / N’y say nat nay; but in conclusioun, / I
mene wel, by God that sit above!” (V. 1000-04). Although she describes her
heart as being in ‘tribulations’ (V. 988), she remains her ‘own woman’ in craft-
ing a win-win situation: she wins time to think and to determine new connec-
tions between the contradictory narratives she faces. At the same time, she has
compromised neither Troilus nor Diomede.
Finally, Criseyde’s changes her heart, which is relayed by the poet rather than
by her. She ponders Diomede’s words, his estate, and the peril of Troy,
And that she was allone and hadde nede
Of frendes help; and thus bygan to brede
The cause whi, the sothe for to telle,
That she took fully purpos for to dwelle. (V. 1026-29)
Her change of heart is not quite as sudden as may appear at first. After all, she
needs to find ways of warranting her individuality and freedom in a culture that
demands subjection. This is possible only when engaging with communal narra-
tives (rather than rejecting the latter, as does Troilus, who consequently dies). In
hostile Greece, Diomede performs an important function insofar as “He refte

stances. He envisions and claims possibilities wholly different from fatalistic acceptance
or despair.” Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 55. In effect, Diomede constructs his indi-
viduality using Guido’s Virgilian Greek track, while incorporating his own personal affec-
tions without falling for types, as does Troilus.
470 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

hire of the grete of al hire peyne” (V. 1036),427 and satisfies her desire for friend-
ship (see below). I am therefore not convinced that Criseyde is adoptive of “the
final Ovidian remedy,” accepting, as a protean character, Pandarus’s advice that
“lovers can be exchanged.”428 Criseyde’s plight appears to be less comparable to
the characters of the Remedia amoris than to Ovid’s personae in the Tristia and
the Ex Ponto. I believe that Criseyde’s sliding illustrates “the psychological
pressures bearing upon an individual isolated from the native land [...],” which
are characteristic of Ovid’s exilic poems. Here, an individual’s isolation is “po-
tentially compounded by a secondary form of exile: either isolation from his
new cohabitants, or yet further alienation from Rome if he learns, however re-
luctantly, to adapt to his foreign circumstances.”429 Criseyde’s predicament is
also exacerbated by the fact that she can be certain that her reputation in Troy
will be damaged, an issue to which the report of her sliding frequently alludes.
In conveying Criseyde’s sliding, the poet emphasizes heavily that he relies on
ultimately unreliable and contradictory sources.430 He reports, from Benoît, that
Criseyde gave Troilus’s steed to Diomede as well as a brooch and her sleeve,
and that she nursed Diomede after he had been unhorsed and wounded by Troi-
lus, wherefore “Men seyn – I not – that she yaf hym hire herte” (V. 1050). This
comment and the reference to the sources, I believe, serve to legitimize the
poet’s own changeability. After all, he invents a Criseyde whose reputation has
already been severely blackened, especially in Guido’s Historia. At the same
time, the poem draws attention to Benoît’s Roman, in which Briseis emerges as
a productive model for reconciling national and personal masks. The Troilus
preserves Briseis’s worries about her exile among the Greeks and important
moments of her self-reflection as regards her ‘error’ of not fleeing at the right
time and of her sorrow on account of having “falsed Troilus” (V. 1053). Per-
haps, one should say perceived as having ‘falsed’ the Trojan knight, for
Criseyde immediately turns to the literary account of herself which reports a
simplistic outside view of her complex negotiations:
Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.
O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!
Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge!
And wommen moost wol haten me of alle.
Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle! (V. 1058-64)

427
Diomede becomes a “second Troilus, who not only uses art and self-discipline to take
Troilus’s place as Criseyde’s lover but also takes his place in chronicle history as the
city’s defender after its destruction.” Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 68.
428
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 67.
429
Williams, “Ovid’s Exile Poetry” 234; Fränkel, Ovid.
430
See esp. Simpson, Reform 147; Shoaf, Dante 139.
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 471

While Criseyde “dishonorably survives [...] she is powerless to affect her reputa-
tion.”431 Insofar as she realizes her error but is unable to alter the perception of
her actions, she assumes the position of Ovid’s persona in the exilic works. Al-
though Chaucer’s Criseyde accepts Troilus as a past lover – in an expanded
farewell (V. 1072-85) – the Troilus does not directly maintain Briseis’s wish to
forget her Trojan past which leads to a hybrid Greco-Trojan self-fashioning
(Roman ll. 20321-336, cited in Chapter Nine).432 Criseyde transcends the pre-
dicament of abandonment by managing to make a living among the Greeks.
Unlike the abandoned women of the Heroides, Criseyde does not send a let-
ter to Troilus, yearning for his return (or rather for her return to him). Nor does
she reproach her father, as does Briseis in both Roman and Historia. Rather, she
is faced with the lament of an abandoned (wo)man, that is, she receives Troi-
lus’s letter. Although Chaucer uses material from the previous epistolary ex-
changes in the Filostrato for Criseyde’s letter (Barney 1055n), there does not
seem to be a clearly identifiable source for it, which underlines Criseydan inven-
tiveness. If one were to look for models for Criseyde’s seemingly duplicitous
letter – one of “the most poisonously hypocritical letters in the annals of litera-
ture, one in which, with exquisitely selfish cruelty, she refuses to admit to him
that she no longer loves him or intends ever to come back”433 – one can espy
structural overlaps with the way in which men would write back to their aban-
doned women. Moreover, the letter corroborates Criseyde’s Ovidian exilic
stance. After greeting Troilus, Criseyde describes herself as heartless, sick, and
in distress (V. 1594). She knows he wants her to come back, but that is impossi-
ble for unmentionable reasons and her fear. She asks him not to be “wroth” with
her (V. 1614). Next, she turns to rumors that their secret (love) has been un-
veiled, for which she does not blame him (V. 1611-17). Although she intends to
return to Troy, she stands in such ‘disjoint’ that she cannot say when this will
happen. Therefore, she prays for his “good word and of youre frendship ay; / For
trewely, while that my lif may dure, / As for a frend ye may in me assure” (V.
1622-24), recalling her earlier realization that no-one will say “a good word”

431
Fradenburg, “Loss” 95. “Her reputation has been shaped and reshaped by a procession of
male writers, just as within the text she is passed from one man to another – from father,
to uncle, to lover, to father; from Trojan to Greek.” Saunders, “Love” 144-45. Criseyde
literally becomes an analogue to the translatio imperii itself.
432
For Mieszkowski, the “contexts and proportions of the two speeches are completely dif-
ferent,” because Briseis responds to a blackening of her reputation that has already ensued,
while Criseyde predicts her future “even before the Trojans and the Greeks are supposed
to know that she has betrayed Troilus, or [...] that Troilus was her lover.” Criseyde’s
speech is “surprisingly inappropriate for her situation.” Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 103-
04. In my opinion, the speech mainly undercuts Troilus’s illusion that the affair remained
a secret, since Criseyde does mention rumors about her, which may have been in circula-
tion before she decided in favor of Diomede. Moreover, given her position between two
worlds, Criseyde is aware of the fact that choose she must.
433
Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer 82.
472 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

about her (V. 1060). The letter closes with the (Pandarian) sentiment that
“Th’entente is al, and nat the lettres space” (V. 1630).434 This is certainly not a
letter penned by an abandoned woman, but one hears remote echoes of the way
in which men, who have abandoned women, respond to their former lovers. If
Troilus is a ‘Wronged Man,’ as Fleming has it, one may think, for instance, of
Aeneas’s meeting with Dido in the underworld – where he is much concerned
with changing her disposition toward him, attempting, unsuccessfully, to explain
his behavior to her (Aen. VI. 456-76) – as an analogue to this letter.
Ovid’s epistle to his wife – in Ex Ponto – is structurally a more significant in-
tertext, however. The letter begins by describing the persona’s fear, sickness,
and distress (Pont. I. iv. 9-12, 22) and subsequently compares his destiny to Ja-
son’s, which pales in comparison: Ovid was penalized by the Emperor rather
than rewarded (27-30); Jason’s trip was shorter than Ovid’s, and Jason had the
best of the Greeks as companions, whereas everyone turned away from Ovid
(31-35); Ovid’s ship was less well built, and he did not have Tiphys or Agenor
as a pilot – “nec mihi Tiphys erat rector, nec Agenore natus / quas fugerem do-
cuit quas sequererque vias” (37-38);435 Jason was blessed with the knowledge of
the secret arts of the God of Love, while Ovid now wishes Amor would never
have attained this knowledge from him (41-42); Jason returned home, whereas
Ovid is left to die in exile (43-44). Criseyde is in a similar situation: she is sick
(a regular plight in the Tristia [e.g., III. iii, and IV. vi]), she is in distress, and
she is without a pilot and, therefore, has to navigate the unknown oceans herself,
only to find herself poised between two worlds. Like Ovid, she is not thrown
overboard. Ovid keeps writing, which initially furthers the storm, but ultimately
warrants his survival (Trist. I. xi). Criseyde’s deconstruction of available masks
is by no means as explicit as is Ovid’s; as has been shown, however, the Troilus
recurrently emphasizes her engagement in continual acts of self-writing, of re-
mythologizing personal and national discourses.
The most important echo of Ovid’s exilic poems in Criseyde’s letter is the
procurement of loyal friends in the light of a severely blackened reputation,
which is anticipated by her recognition that “she was allone and hadde nede / Of
frendes help” (V. 1026-27). Criseyde’s ‘prayer’ for Troilus’s friendship may
seem odd, but it appears to be perfectly natural when contextualized in the
framework of Ovid’s Tristia and the Ex Ponto. In both poems, Ovid is con-
cerned with reassuring and maintaining his Roman friendships in an effort to

434
See Evan Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,”
PMLA 94.1 (1979): 59.
435
P. Ovidi Nasonis Tristium libri quinque, Ibis, Ex Ponto libri quattuor, Halieutica Frag-
menta, ed. S. G. Owen, Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1915). This and all following references to the Epistulae ex Ponto are to this
edition.
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 473

live in both worlds.436 The maintenance of friendship is frequently connected to

the persona’s defense of his behavior, for instance, when he tells his readers that
the rumors circulated about him misrepresent the intentions he had when pen-
ning the Ars amatoria, which caused friction with Augustus. The work was only
a youthful game, not laudable, but certainly not meant to be harmful. He will not
defend his misdemeanor, but it can surely be excused; whenever you can, he
asks his reader and friends, excuse the book and do not abandon your friend:
“ergo ut defendi nullo mea posse colore, / sic excusari crimina posse puto. / qua
potes, excusa, nec amici desere causam” (Trist. I. ix. 63-65; and see Trist. III. vi.
15-26; IV. v. 17-24; V. iii. 43-48 etc.). In offering these passages of the Tristia
and the Ex Ponto with regard to the simultaneous acknowledgment of an error
(or a misconception of one’s reputation) and the attempt to ensure the loyalty of
one’s friends at home, I do not suggest that Criseyde’s entire relationship with
Troilus should be seen as a youthful game (although it is possible to argue that
Criseyde eventually becomes what she has promised Troilus at the outset: to be
a friend).437 The main overlap I see between Criseyde’s and Ovid’s positions lies
in their blackened reputation on account of an error of perception.438 Although
both are able to control their situation and find means of surviving among ‘ene-
mies,’ their reputations are firmly outside of their control. Criseyde’s worst fears
about what might be said about her have come true with their relationship hav-
ing gone public. Her reputation would notably have also been in Troilus’s con-
trol, but his inertia and the suicide with which he responds to the “kalendes of
chaunge” (V. 1634) only underscore her blemished reputation. Despite her
blackened reputation, however, she is able to survive.

436
The Tegernsee accessus defines the subject matter of the Ex Ponto as follows: “materia
sua amici sui sunt, ad quos scribit, mittens singulis singulas epistolas, vel ipsa verba, qui-
bus precatur. [...] Ethicae, id est morali scientiae, subponitur, quia in unaquaque epistola
agit de moribus” [The author’s friends, to whom he writes, are its subject matter – he
sends each of them a different letter – or else the words he uses to plead with them. […] It
pertains to ethics, that is, moral science, for in each letter, he discusses behavior]. Acces-
sus ad auctores, ed. Huygens 35, trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and
Criticism 26. See also Fränkel, Ovid 124; Gareth D. Williams, Banished Voices: Readings
in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994) 116-24; Williams,
“Ovid’s Exile Poetry” 242.
437
For a similar point, see Lambert, “Troilus, Books I-III” 121-22.
438
The Tristia and Ex Ponto mainly discuss the persona’s turbulent journey in the context of
his reputation. While the ‘error’ remains unknown, much is made of the problematic re-
ception of the Ars, which Augustus may (or may not) have read. The circulating rumors,
addressed in a letter to Cotta, cause the poet to waver between opacity and transparency:
“cum tibi quaerenti, num verus nuntius esset, / attulerat culpae quem mala fama meae, / in-
ter confessum dubie dubieque negantem / haerebam, pavidas dante timore notas” [when
you inquired if truthful was the bad news that rumor brought about my error, I doubtfully
vacillated between confession or negation, in showing signs of fear because of my anxie-
ties] (Pont. II. iii. 85-88).
474 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

What Criseyde negotiates in her sliding is an ontological mode of translu-

cence. In her engagement with Ovid’s exilic poems, she realizes the importance
of masking, of opacity. By means of metamorphosis – that is, the modification
of public discourse – she is able to transcend the Ovidian cursus and negotiate a
new role for herself without falling for the conveniences of Pandarian opacity,
resulting in empty selfhood (that is, non-identity of domains), or Trojan (emo-
tional) transparency. Criseyde’s changeability is not as ‘postmodernly’ arbitrary
as has been argued in criticism, which attests to her lack of fixity, which, some
scholars allow, represents the changeability of the world. Lanham, for example,
sees nothing special about Criseyde’s changeability, but perceives of her
changeability in negative terms nonetheless, since
she is fully ‘herself’ only with a supporting context, and when this context changes, the
‘self’ changes. This kind of character is not so unusual in life as people seem to find it
in literature. We all have friends who are, as we say, ‘simply different people when
they are with that crowd.’ [...] She can change conventions skillfully, but she cannot
make one convention her own; she cannot choose which game to play, but must play
the one which surrounds her, whichever it is.439
Criseyde is able to quickly adapt to new situations, but without sacrificing her
self. That is to say, she is Criseyde – not Pandarus. This distinction is familiar
from accounts of behavior in groups, which to some extent substantiate Lan-
ham’s argument, albeit only up to a point. Bernard Carl Rosen, for instance, ob-
serves that “Surely everyone at some time or other has played the chameleon. It
is a price we pay for getting along with others.” And yet, “for some people, it is
only a temporary expedient. It does not become embedded in the personality, as
it does with chameleons who engage in deception as a matter of course when-
ever danger threatens them.”440 Pandarus is a chameleon; Criseyde is not.
Criseyde commands her own fictional space and emerges as changed in rela-
tion to the narrative role model gleaned in Guido’s Historia and Boccaccio’s Il
Filostrato. What enables her changeability is the distinction between her own
sphere (self-knowledge) and that of the public (reputation).441 This Criseydan
achievement has to be seen in strong relation to Ovid’s negotiation of two
worlds in the Tristia and the Ex Ponto. It is this liminal position that allows
Criseyde to speak both cultural idioms: the national, transparent language of the
Trojans – who fatally attempt to construct self and nation in terms of metaphor,

439
Lanham, “Opaque Style” 173. Similarly, Schleburg observes that, although Criseyde is
capable of performing many roles, her actions are determined by one hypergood: “self-
interest.” Schleburg, “Role-Conformity” 89.
440
Bernard Carl Rosen, Masks and Mirrors: Generation X and the Chameleon Personality
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001) 15.
441
This is anticipated by Marion Turner, who argues that Criseyde “acknowledges the valid-
ity of two different semantics of truth; in one sense it refers to public honor and permanent
integrity, or appearance of integrity, in the other meaning, it refers to a changing, but hon-
estly meant intent.” Turner, “Troilus and Criseyde” 243.
 Chapter Eighteen: Changeable Criseyde 475

that is, in terms of complete identity – and the imperial, opaque language of the
Greeks. Once Criseyde steps outside the walls of Troy, which, in a sense, im-
prisoned her,442 she occupies the translucent middle ground and becomes a hy-
brid Greco-Trojan individual. She is able to synthesize different mythological
systems by means of hybrid mask making.443 Instead of imposing an opaque
mask on Trojan genealogy and settling for an imperial model, as does Guido in
his Historia, and instead of the completely transparent nationhood favored by
the Laud-poet, Chaucer’s Criseyde demonstrates the necessary flexibility in the
construction of both self and nation, whereby the latter is a matter of considering
the ‘international idiom.’ Far from being blameworthy, Criseydan changeability
becomes the only feasible ontological model. Troilus’s control of her reputation
is, therefore, not as important as is that of her best friend, who, in a sense, re-
mains with the Trojans: Chaucer’s poet stalwartly defends ‘his’ exiled friend
and is able, by means of her example, to argue hermeneutically for a counter-
national model, for the necessary deconstruction of Britain’s Trojan origins.

442
See Steinberg, “Embodiment” 263-64.
443
This adds a national dimension to Muscatine’s observation of Criseyde’s hybridity. Re-
garding her first conversation with Pandarus about Troilus, he contends that “This scene
contains the seeds of two old theories of Criseyde’s character: Criseyde the calculating
woman, and Criseyde the innocent seduced by treachery. She is neither, but has rather
some proportion of both, ambiguously mixed.” Muscatine, Chaucer 157. For similar rea-
sons, J. S. P. Tatlock speaks of “two Criseydes.” Tatlock, “The People in Chaucer’s Troi-
lus,” PMLA 56.1 (1941): 100-01.
 CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Hym thoughte it lik a kalendes of chaunge”:
Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood

The most decisive change from Boccaccio’s Filostrato to Chaucer’s Troilus lies
arguably in the metamorphosis of the narrator from an experienced lover to a
self-proclaimed novice in love matters.444 Chaucer’s narrators increasingly at-
tracted critical attention in the late nineteenth century, when Chaucer was par-
ticularly praised for the development of the narrator in the Troilus. Chaucer
separates the narrator from the plot, makes him autonomous, and depicts him as
joining the audience. This dramatization of the persona was seen as excep-
tional.445 Nascent in these observations is a debate that concerns scholars to the
present day, namely, if the narrator is a fourth character of the Troilus, which in
turn has caused controversies as to whether the narrator represents Chaucer. In
what follows, I offer a view of the poet as neither. The poet, who may or may
not represent Chaucer, is a mythological bricoleur who engages with a narrative
that he not only offers for the audience but also mines for his own purposes in a
poetological enterprise that, qua prosopagraphical selfhood, is also an ontologi-
cal endeavor. Like Lévi-Strauss’s mythologies, the Troy story becomes an or-
chestral score through which the narrator moves horizontally and vertically at
the same time, literally determining links between individual traits of different
characters while maintaining the differences in the multifarious narratives about
them. He approsopriates the masks of his characters in order to make anew his
own person, determining a new perspective on the Troy story. The journey to-
ward this end is as stormy and problematic as Ovid’s quest for a pilot throughout
his (however fictionalized) poetic career. Chaucer’s poet offers a hermeneutical
model in which he himself finally supplants Troilus’s (blank) perspective with
Criseyde’s, whose translucence becomes his adopted model for negotiating the
problematic nexus between self and nation.
First, I recapitulate the history of the ‘shady narrator,’ who appears as part of
the narrative code and seems to be less a unified person than several personal
masks. While the poet may not readily give the impression of a unified individ-
ual, I see his approsopriation of his characters’ masks as a representation of his
negotiation of a unified self, whereby the audience witnesses a striking act of
mythological bricolage. The narrator synthesizes the archetypal masks circulated
by public discourse into a unified, translucent self by means of deconstructing
444
Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 213.
445
Lüdeke, Funktionen des Erzählers esp. 12, 129-35.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 477

available role models. He is set adrift on a Trojan textual ocean, but he does not
lose control although he is naturally confused. The negotiation of a self that ac-
commodates contradiction without turning into a fragmented self requires both
of Guido’s ontological modes – transparency and opacity. This is replicated
generically by the poet’s wavering between epic or elegy. While the poet is con-
stantly switching between Virgilian epic and Ovidian elegy at the beginning, the
poem eventually becomes a hybrid of both. The poet’s frequent, direct audience-
address further suggests that he expects either guidance or correction from his
listeners and readers which fictionally find themselves in the same position as
the poet himself.
In the first three books, the exploration of the nexus between selves and na-
tions is implicit insofar as the narrative subjected to the poet’s mythological bri-
colage happens to be crucial in the making of nations; Book IV makes particu-
larly explicit problems with opacity in processes of collective decision making.
The parliamentary debate about Criseyde’s exchange suggests that the public is
incapable of making the right choice. The reference to Juvenalian satire compli-
cates this straight-forward reading, however. For Juvenal, erroneous decision
making is not exclusive to ‘the people,’ it is inherent in human nature. In having
the people voice their desire for a seemingly rational mask (they have suffered
many losses, Antenor is one of the best fighters), public discourse and its drive
for opacity appear as extremely ambiguous agencies. On the one hand, the im-
balance of desire and reason is characteristic of the Trojans, as is the emotional-
ity with which they adopt opaque, martial masks that are somewhat inconsistent
with the Trojan nation of lovers. On the other hand, the Juvenalian context for
the parliamentary debates indicates that the Pandarian and Greek paradigm of
opacity is insufficient and dangerous. Like Troilus’s Venerean outlook, the Tro-
jans’ voiced martial outlook is likewise mono-mythological; it suppresses indi-
vidual goods and literally becomes a ‘cloud of error.’ Opaque public discourse
must be deconstructed, in ways not dissimilar to the poet’s own deconstruction
of a prescriptive Trojan myth of origins.
How the Trojans’ opaque, national mask can be deconstructed concerns the
poet in Books IV and V, particularly with reference to Criseyde’s exile in the
Greek camp and her erroneous changeability, which is analogous to the poet’s
changes to the Troy story. Pace Ovidian metamorphosis, both find a feasible ex-
ilic paradigm in Ovid’s Tristia and the Ex Ponto for dealing with their respective
‘errors.’ The brief allusion to Myrrha in the description of the lovers’ silent grief
allows the poet to evoke a complex network of analogies to an Ovidian tale of
transformation in the Metamorphoses. These allusions ultimately corroborate
Troilus’s inability to change narratives, resulting in suicide, and emphasize the
potential of metamorphosis to overcome the fallacy of either/or dichotomies,
just like Myrrha searches for a middle ground between living with an eternally
damaged reputation in either life or death. Notably, the tale of Myrrha in the
Metamorphoses not only revises Ovid’s earlier depiction of the incestuous
woman, it is likewise set in a national context. Chaucer’s poet promptly revises
478 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

traditional literary-historical accounts of his heroine, borrowed from an account

particularly close to home: Joseph of Exeter’s De bello Troiano. Unlike Myrrha,
both Criseyde and the poet begin to transform Metamorphoses into Tristia. The
portraits of the three characters are offered as if to refresh the audience’s mem-
ory about standard versions of Diomede, Criseyde, and Troilus before conveying
Criseyde’s highly ambiguous ‘sliding,’ which thus prepares the audience for the
poet’s own sliding. Joseph’s portraits contradict the image of the characters as
they have emerged throughout the Troilus, particularly with reference to
Criseyde: Joseph’s portrait does not find any fault with her. The poet himself,
however, begins to contradict himself openly in his indecision concerning
Criseyde’s “lak.” While he finds no lack with her pity, this good becomes cen-
tral to his assumption of a new perspective on her character, one that necessi-
tates that he stays his own pilot on what is essentially an exilic journey.
The re-emergence of the war at the outset of the Book IV brings to the fore
again the poet’s generic problems prevalent at the beginning of the poem. Syn-
thesizing Troilus’s emotional transparency with Criseyde’s capability of veiling
becomes the only feasible paradigm to excuse the poet’s changeability. His
status as a witness, moving horizontally along the various characters, now gives
way to a vertical ascent (with Troilus), enabling a better perspective on the Troi-
lus while taking Trojan determinism out of the equation. The poet thus empow-
ers the audience to test various alternatives to Troilus’s problematic way of mak-
ing selves and nations – alternatives that challenge the determinism of the trans-
latio imperii signified by Troilus’s death. On the one hand, the poet’s change-
ability reflects upon his transgression against received literary-historical ‘type-
dom.’ On the other hand, his changeability turns over hermeneutic control to the
audience. In offering the poem especially to wronged women, the poet’s revi-
sion of Criseyde’s reputation is thrown sharply into relief. Her wrongdoing is
what moves him most, he claims, adopting a good also central to Criseyde, who
lacks no pity. While it is possible to argue that Troilus is the ‘wronged woman,’
the poet’s turn to the Heroides points up historiography’s abuse of Criseyde,
since she does not intentionally betray Troilus. Instead of only relaying Troilus’s
double sorrow, the poet is thus increasingly moved to pity on account of
Criseyde. Her abandonment becomes his abandonment, marking the passage
from Heroides to Tristia as he sends his ‘little book’ to the audience (of lovers),
asking for their correction. With reference to Statius, the poet worries that his
book may incite envy which, in the House of Fame, prevails among the histori-
ans of Troy, thus evoking the dichotomy of Ovid and Virgil again. The poet’s
worries are understandable since he is dependent on the work of a scribe to relay
his message so that his emphasis on the necessity of changeability can be appo-
sitely transmitted. Only on the level of conceptual allegory can the problem be
mended. Britain, like Criseyde, must appropriate a translucent mode of writing
Trojan historiography, and must advance an ontological model in which contra-
diction (opacity) and identity of domains (transparency) can be preserved, which
threatens a decentered selfhood that can be prevented as long as one keeps writ-
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 479

ing. He subjects Trojan historiography to a process of continual mythological

bricolage with recourse to all available discourses. Unlike Troilus, the poet ac-
cordingly does not find a safe harbor, for write he must. He does not lose con-
trol, however, and offers the Christian paradox of the trinity as a shorthand for
the translucent prosopagraphy he has advanced: multiplicity in unity, transpar-
ency in opacity.

1. From “Shady Narrator” to Chaucerian Masks

The history of the narrator has been memorably characterized by Derek Brewer
as the “History of a Shady Character.”446 In 1915, Kittredge argued that the Troi-
lus does not distinguish between Chaucer and the narrator,447 wherefore criticism
largely continued to discuss the narrator as though he represented Chaucer. 448
From the 1950s onward, however, the narrator was increasingly discussed as
separate from Chaucer, as a fourth character,449 if not the true hero of the
poem.450 Present-day scholarship has largely taken for granted that “the first per-
son [...] refers to a fictive individual clearly distinct from the poet”451 – and criti-
cal interest has shifted toward defining his stance. Variously, the narrator is
characterized as a historian, as being naïve, ironic, ambivalent, and fallible.452
Many scholars, however, voiced concerns about the persona-theory, emphasiz-

446
Derek Brewer, “The History of a Shady Character: The Narrator of Troilus and Criseyde,”
Modes of Narratives: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, ed. Rein-
gard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990) 166-78.
For summaries of criticism concerned with the narrator, see Richard Waswo, “The Narra-
tor of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” ELH 50.1 (1983): 1-25; Benson, Chaucer’s “Troi-
lus and Criseyde” 112-17; Spearing, Textual Subjectivity 68-77.
447
Kittredge, Chaucer 50.
448
Robertson, Preface 472-502. A. C. Spearing identifies Root, Kean, Lowes, and Knight as
other proponents of this line of thought in “A Ricardian ‘I’: The Narrator of Troilus and
Criseyde,” Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis,
Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 2-3.
449
See E. Talbot Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, 2nd
ed. (New York: Riley & Sons, 1975) 1129-34. For the narrator as a character, see Morton
Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination” 21-22; Shoaf, Dante 143-57. For discussion,
see Spearing, Textual Subjectivity 69-71.
450
For Robert Jordan, the narrator is the “real subject of the poem.” Jordan, “The Narrator in
Chaucer’s Troilus,” ELH 25.4 (1958): 249; Jordan, “Metafiction and Chaucer’s Troilus,”
Chaucer Yearbook 1 (1992): 141-42; Shoaf, Dante 105. Wetherbee argues that the narra-
tor is the “the figure in which the poem’s meaning is most fully realized” (Chaucer 46).
451
Spearing, Textual Subjectivity 72.
452
For the narrator as a historian, see Morton Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination” 14-
26; Minnis, Chaucer 67-74. The naïve narrator is a product of Donaldson’s work, esp.
Speaking of Chaucer 84-101. For the narrator as ironic or ambivalent, see Richard H. Os-
berg, “Between the Motion and the Act: Intentions and Ends in Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde,” ELH 48.2 (1981): 257-70. McAlpine problematizes the fallibility of the narra-
tor in Genre 124.
480 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

ing different subject positions, in which Chaucer’s presence is variously felt; the
poet becomes part “of the narrative code.”453 For Spearing, the narratorial
agency “is no particular person, neither the inspired creator of poesy nor the
‘self-styled objective’ [...] compiler of historical material, but simply the mouth-
piece of what Barthes [...] calls ‘a collective and anonymous voice originating in
traditional human experience.’”454 The narrative, that is, offers itself to the audi-
ence (and the poet!) as a plurality of tentative narrative models for adoption and
modification, which necessitates a personae-theory or rather a prosopagraphical
approach. The narrative’s voices, then, represent multiple masks that neverthe-
less make up an individual insofar as they are variously connected. Termino-
logically, this individual is a poet, if it not necessarily the poet Chaucer.455 The
masks the poet adopts represent a (poetic) self caught in the act of identification
and the attendant processes of mythological bricolage. The poem becomes sub-
ject to narratorial instability, generic changeability and, perhaps, indeterminacy,
particularly toward its end.456 It thus presents an aporia of self-fashioning not
dissimilar from that attested by postmodern theoretical approaches to identity,
particularly the narrative self. In order to determine a healthy relationship be-
tween personal and national masks, the poet turns to a narrative, the Troy story,
which is pivotally concerned with this problem and which circulates (as it also
investigates) archetypal modes of making selves and nations.
The reconciliation of selves and nations is literally a multi-faceted problem
that, in the Troy story, requires a careful examination of sources. The choice of
the Filostrato as an immediate source underlines the poet’s disposition to ap-
proach the problem from a personal rather than a national perspective. And yet,
his investigation requires going beyond his immediate source to include other
versions of the Troy story which likewise negotiate the nexus between personal
and national identities. The account that brings these diverging perspectives
most clearly into focus is Guido’s Historia, wherefore it is not surprising that
Chaucer fashions his poet after Guido’s persona, that is, as C. David Benson ar-

453
Edwards, Dream of Chaucer 43. For discussion, see Spearing, Textual Subjectivity 75-76.
454
Spearing, Textual Subjectivity 93. The quotation is from Roland Barthes’s S/Z 18. See fur-
ther Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators 87-89.
455
Poets, however “need not correspond at all to the people their friends or even themselves
know,” while they reveal “something about the nature” of their art. Donaldson, “Chaucer’s
Three ‘P’s’” 296.
456
The narrator changes the genre at least seven times in the last eighteen stanzas, represent-
ing almost every possibility available for a medieval author to finish a poem. Evans,
“‘Making Strange’: The Narrator (?), the Ending (?) and Chaucer’s Troilus,” Critical Es-
says on Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” and His Major Early Poems, ed. C. David
Benson (Milton Keynes: Open Univ. Press, 1991) 165. For the general fluidity of the
poem, see also Donaldson, Chaucer’s Poetry 966. For a critique of Donaldson’s argument,
see Dinshaw’s “Reading Like a Man: The Critics, the Narrator, Troilus, and Pandarus,”
Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” ed. Shoaf 49, 54-55.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 481

gues, after a narrator who agonizes over his subjects’ destinies.457 Guido’s
choice of an Ovidian, elegiac narratorial agency ultimately does not derail his
epic and imperial ambitions, however. Rather, it provides a faultline which
Chaucer’s poet chooses to exploit. While Guido condones a Virgilian view on
individualism – exemplified by Greek opacity – Chaucer’s poet tends toward
Trojan transparency which he reinterprets in terms of translucence. This Crisey-
dan translucence is hard to negotiate and is only suggested for adoption after the
poet has evaluated other ontological modes provided by his sources, all of which
are deconstructed into the poet’s own poetological model, which reflects aspects
(mythemes) of all actors presented in the poem.
Recent scholarship tends to see the many perspectives adopted in the course
of the poem as complicating unity as such, often by drawing analogies between
the narrator and Pandarus. Richard Waswo, for instance, argues that “there is no
way to distinguish some separate and clearly identifiable author above or behind
the sum total of masks, pretenses, and disguises that constitutes the narrator.”
Moreover, he points out the many parallels between Chaucer and Pandarus both
of which serve a class to which they do not belong.458 Most likely, Chaucer
would have known how to veil and unveil aspects of his personality at court –
and the prosopagraphical approach substantiates such strategies for the poet of
the Troilus. Ultimately, the poet finds alternative models also offered in other
characters, as a brief look at narratological studies of the poem evinces. Accord-
ing to these, the poet is like Troilus or Criseyde.459 These various and varying
masks, in Benson’s opinion, result in a fragmentation that excludes the poet
from the other characters: “Although his many comments on the action provide
some justification for linking him with Troilus, Criseyde and Pandarus,” Benson

457
See Benson, “What Chaucer Really Found in Guido” 308-13; Benson, History 138-43.
458
Waswo, “Narrator” 12. For the Pandarian qualities of the narrator, see: Lowes, Geoffrey
Chaucer 144; Morton Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination” 26 n. 14; Donaldson,
Speaking of Chaucer 65-83; Donaldson, “Chaucer’s Three ‘P’s’” 282-301; Stevens,
“Winds of Fortune” 297; Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 128, 195-95 n. 6; Fyler, “Fabrications
of Pandarus” 116; Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 47; Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The
Divine Comedy” 50-52, 129; Giancarlo, “Structure of Fate” 237; Nolan, Chaucer 213-16.
For the role of lying in rhetorical invention, see Ulrich Ernst, “Lüge, integumentum und
Fiktion in der antiken und mittelalterlichen Dichtungstheorie: Umrisse einer Poetik des
Mendakischen,” Das Mittelalter 9.2 (2004): 73-100.
459
For the poet’s proximity to Criseyde, see Lowes, Geoffrey Chaucer 152-54; Donaldson,
Chaucer’s Poetry 966-68; Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer 9, 53, 64-69, 84; Mi-
eszkowski, “Reputation” 144-46; Hansen, Chaucer 142-43. Wetherbee sees the narrator’s
uneasy involvement with Criseyde in terms of an underlying Christian framework, the
emergence of a “Christian poet.” Wetherbee, Chaucer 20. For similarities between the
narrator and Troilus, see Stevens, “Winds of Fortune” esp. 294; Osberg, “Between the
Motion and the Act” 263. Torti suggests that “the narrator has a little of Criseyde in him
when he smiles at Pandarus’ games and when he delights in the lovers’ happiness, and is
to some extent Troilus when he introduces references to malevolent or uncertain destiny.”
Torti, Glass of Form 48.
482 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

writes, “he never becomes a fully developed, independent human character.”460

This corroborates Waswo’s claim that Chaucer may be closest to Pandarus: if
Pandarus illustrates the aporia of decentered selfhood, one would have to as-
sume that the poet himself plays a ‘postmodern’ rhetorical game.
I do not believe that the poet equates his own art with Pandarian (rhetorical)
inventiveness. While it splits the poet into a multiplicity of narrative voices, a
‘postmodern’ plethora of decentered personae is, as exemplified by Criseyde’s
decision making, inherent to any process of identity formation. The important
question is when a chameleonesque selfhood becomes pathological. From the
perspective of medieval aesthetics, the notion of a decentered self as the narra-
tive agency is problematic, too, as Marianne Børch points out with an eye on
poststructuralist approaches: “While modern critical trends have undoubtedly
contributed to the rediscovery of, or perhaps rather the maintenance of interest
in, medieval aesthetics, with which they have a great deal in common, a Derrida-
inspired approach that discards the notion of the author risks ignoring the me-
dieval focus upon authorial intention in the context of a goal-oriented aes-
thetic.”461 This is an important caveat – and one that points up problems within
the Troilus. Moreover, and in contrast to Pandarus, the poet never disappears but
is present until he has fully relayed the plot, ending with Troilus’s death,462
which is not to deny that the poet shares Pandarian traits and is inventive – not
least in his rewriting of Pandarus himself. Pandarian invention within the plot,
however, ensues in a different framework than the poet’s retelling of the Troy
story insofar as the poet’s exploration of the lacunae and faultlines of his mate-
rial is curtailed by that very material. In fact, the poet expostulates about his in-
ability to alter the plot.463 Pandarian changeability on the level of narration thus
has clearly defined limits. In fact, the realization of these limits likens the poet’s
position to that of Ovid, who, in the course of his (fictionalized) career, has to
pay a high price for what is ultimately a rhetorical game in the Amores, the Ars,
and the Remedia, which constitute the most frequent framework of reference for
Pandarus. Since Chaucer’s poet would like to provide an alternative perspective,
he has to exploit changeability within the limits that are staked off by the avail-
able literary and historical texts and the lacunae therein. As Shoaf contends, and
460
Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 112.
461
Marianne Børch, “Poet and Persona: Writing the Reader in Troilus,” ChauR 30.3 (1996):
219.
462
Reale observes that throughout much of the poem, “it is largely the action of Pandarus that
Chaucer’s narrator describes (and admires) even as he proclaims his interest in the pas-
sions of the lovers.” However, “After establishing the centrality of Pandarus’s art, the
poem undermines precisely what it so carefully asserts, first as it eliminates Pandarus [...],
next as it demonstrates the failure of the love affair, and finally as it presents in the envoi a
narrative voice that desperately seeks the assurances available only through faith in Christ
and Mary as divine intermediaries.” Reale, “Reading” 166.
463
Morton Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination” 14-26; Patterson, Chaucer 107-10;
Nolan, Chaucer 206; Federico, New Troy 72.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 483

as is reflected in the figure of the narrator, the poet shares both Dante and Chau-
cer’s predicament in determining “a personal position which is not in opposition
to reality or an imposition on others.”464 If the poet does not represent a Pandar-
ian multitude of voices, it is worth considering whether other characters offer
poetological strategies that bear a greater resemblance to the poet’s histori-
ographical strategies.
It has long been noted that the narrator sympathizes with Troilus, and to a
certain extent even emphasizes with him. Since Troilus represents the Trojan
model, this is not surprising given that the poet is a Briton presumably descend-
ing from the same Trojan stock. Troilus represents a deterministic model for
constructing selves and nations (uncontrollable emotionality, lack of prudence,
passivity, and so forth), and he represents an ontological model that the poet im-
plicitly rejects, but not without adopting certain traits from his ‘hero.’ The artis-
tic correlative for the poet’s changeability, however, is Criseyde, who encom-
passes traits central to both Troilus (compassion, pity, transparency) and Panda-
rus (rhetoric, premeditation, opacity). On account of the poet’s fluctuations be-
tween these traits, many critics conclude that the poet does not resemble a fully
developed human being. Notably, the allegations leveled against the poet – that
he “changes just as everything else in the poem changes,”465 that he is fallible
and unreliable – are the very faults for which Criseyde is condemned as a proto-
typical, fickle woman. If it is possible, then, to convincingly argue that the poet
sympathizes with all three characters and is involved with them on their level, as
it were, it makes sense to assume that he attempts to solve the ontological di-
lemma the Troilus sets out to investigate by testing all available models pro-
vided by the Troy story – even if this negotiation does not seem to render the
poet a centered individual.
The poet’s seeming lack of a center or a core, however, may merely demon-
strate a more or less universal predicament. As the story unfolds, the poet be-
comes increasingly confused. Confronted with a new problem or attempting to
resolve a long-standing predicament, the poet, just like any other individual,
needs to determine an apposite theoretical or practical model in order to resolve
the problem – based on the available models. The more narratives vie for the in-
dividual’s attention, the more difficult this becomes, especially if the different
tracks contradict one another or if the issue in question becomes a matter of ide-
ology. Confronted, then, with very different narratives that potentially resolve
his plight, the poet is caught in the same ‘contrary winds’ faced by Troilus and
Criseyde. And like Ovid’s persona in the Tristia, the poet is aware of the fact
that his own changeability, the newly acquired perspective that warrants a
greater degree of individual agency in the construction of nationhood, is in itself

464
Shoaf, Dante 15.
465
James Dean, “Chaucer’s Troilus, Boccaccio’s Filostrato, and the Poetics of Closure,” PQ
64.2 (1985): 175-84.
484 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

problematic. Just as Criseyde knows that her reputation will be blackened before
making any decision, the poet knows that his changes may damage his reputa-
tion as well. Hence, he frequently asks the audience for correction. His request
for assistance and his careful act of crafting a space in the literary tradition at the
end of the poem enable the metamorphosis of the narrative itself – and of the
audience.466 Unlike Pandarus, who is restricted to the rhetorical games to be dis-
cerned in Ovid’s amatory poetry, and unlike Troilus, who remains stuck in a fa-
talistic ideology of abandonment, Criseyde and the poet keep living and writing.
Hence, they negotiate, with Ovidian self-criticism, an ontological model that al-
lows greater individual agency, including the potential to recirculate the new
narrative as a counter-national mythology for others to adopt; they determine
translucent prosopagraphy.

2. The “sorwful instrument”: Sailing between Virgil and Ovid

The poet’s problems in relaying his changed version of the Troy story are re-
lated to his search for authority and guidance, which inevitably complicates the
poet’s function as a guide for the audience: “Chaucer invented the narrator of
the Troilus as a guide (unreliable though he may be) in the reader’s search for
meaning, and as a device in his own exploration of how this story means.”467
Accordingly, the Troilus begins with the poet providing the audience with the
‘entente’ of the poem, with a brief plot summary. The poet intends to relay the
double sorrow of Troilus, son of Priam, king of Troy. The double sorrow is a
doubling on multiple levels, however, because it not only describes Troilus’s
movement up and down on Fortuna’s Wheel, it alludes to the double fall of
Troilus and Troy. Moreover, it does so in an epic framework given the Virgilian
reference to the son of Priam and the allusion to Dante’s Purgatorio (XXII. 55-
56), which in itself tacitly refers the audience back to Statius’s Thebaid468 – an
association immediately furthered by the allusion to Tesiphone. While this does
establish an epic framework, it is subverted by the poet’s report that “Thise wo-
ful vers [...] wepen as I write” (I. 7). The image of the weeping verse is not only
reminiscent of Boccaccio (Fil. I. 6), it further conjures up the image of Ovid’s
weeping book, particularly (in) the Tristia.469 The reference to Ovidian elegy is
466
McAlpine argues that the imperfections of the narrator make possible the progress of the
audience (Genre 133-36). For Chaucer’s audience, see Dieter Mehl, “The Audience of
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of
Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowland (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974) 173-89. For
the intended audience involvement, see further Spearing, Textual Subjectivity 85.
467
Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” 85.
468
Windeatt, “Classical and Medieval Elements” 129-30. The discussion of avarice refers the
audience back not only to the Thebaid, but also to Virgil’s Aeneid. See Singleton’s com-
mentary on Pur. XXII. 40-41 (Divine Comedy 4: 521-24n).
469
At the beginning of the Tristia, the poet sends his book to Rome. The book, however,
should be ‘dressed’ for the occasion – in mourning: “neue liturarum pudeat; qui viderit il-
las, / de lacrimis factas sentiet esse meis” [You need not be ashamed of your stains, since
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 485

facilitated by the poet’s own position vis-à-vis his audience of lovers, since he is
removed both from the discourse of love and from the literary tradition that he
subsequently modifies.
The poet’s perilous position between Virgilian epic (or Virgilian tragedy) and
Ovidian elegy further compounds the search for (literary) authority, that is, for a
viable path through the contrary winds. The poet’s modest interjection of ‘as I
can’ in his prayer to become “the sorwful instrument, / That helpeth loveres, as I
kan, to pleyne” (I. 10-11) likens his predicament to Geffrey in the House of
Fame, who faces a similar historiographical aporia. The problem is doubled,
however, since the poet’s lack of guidance would affect his audience, too, who
should be instructed in love matters and who, given the language of the poem
and Troilus’s final view of the ‘blessed isle,’ can be assumed to consist of Brit-
ish lovers. The context in which this instruction should ensue is notably – and
appropriately – Ovidian (I. 22-52) insofar as it recalls Ovid’s Amores II. i. 5-10
(Barney 1025n). And yet, the reference to Ovidian love poetry is in itself com-
plicated since Ovid’s address to his lovers in the first elegy of the second book
engages with generic questions as well. Relaying his aborted attempts to pen
epic, Ovid’s persona bids good-bye to the ancient heroes, particularly Achilles,
whose goodwill he does not believe suits him – “non apta est gratia uestra mihi”
(Amores II. i. 36). If this intertextual reference is an ultimately counter-epical
move on the part of the poet, the promise to go straight to his matter reverses
this claim, at least for the time being. Instead of continuing in the elegiac mode,
the poet turns to Virgilian arma: “Yt is wel wist how that the Grekes stronge / In
armes with a thousand shippes wente / To Troiewardes” (I. 57-59).
As mentioned above, the poet’s sailing between Virgilian epic and Ovidian
elegy likewise affects the audience (which he aims to ‘instruct’) and the question
of sources, which, unlike in other Troy stories, are not discussed in the ‘pro-
logue.’ Dieter Mehl notes that the role of the audience is important in this con-
text. The poet’s mode of address to the audience, he argues, does not set up the
poet as an authority figure but rather turns over interpretive control to the audi-
ence.470 The poet explicitly asks the blissful lovers to remember the ‘bad days’
and pray for those lovers in Troilus and Criseyde’s situation, that is, those “that

everyone who beholds them will see that I wept while I was writing] (Trist. I. i. 13-14).
The first poem of Tristia III is told by the book itself, which declares that “littera suffusas
quod habet maculosa lituras, / laesit opus lacrimis ipse poeta suis” [If my writing is tainted
by stains or smeared, it is because the writer himself cried tears on his work] (Trist. III. i.
15-16). Harrison observes that “As the title Tristia, ‘sad things,’ suggests, the books from
exile naturally share with the Heroides the quintessential elegiac theme of lamentation
[...].” Harrison, “Ovid and Genre” 89-90. He further notes that the Tristia’s initial negotia-
tion of the epic mode is manifested in many analogies to Aeneid II (90-91). Like Ovid’s
Tristia, Chaucer’s poem opens in-between epic and elegy.
470
Mehl, Geoffrey Chaucer 85.
486 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

falsly ben apeired / Thorugh wikked tonges, be it he or she” (I. 38-39).471 In ef-
fect, this entails that the audience is meant to measure the to-be-related events
against their own experiences. This simultaneously invites the addressee’s emo-
tional involvement in his or her respective interpretation, which does not, of
course, absolve the poet of his responsibility vis-à-vis his sources, which the
poet mentions shortly before his verbatim report of Troilus’s Petrarchan lament.
Having established in the House of Fame already that Lollius is an authority as
regards the Troy story, the poet assumes Lollius’s position and literally appro-
priates his masks: “and whoso list it here, / Loo, next this vers he may it fynden
here” (I. 398-99). Chaucer, as Dinshaw indicates, however, knows more in this
instance than he could possibly find in his source: the poet “works as a cover for
his deeper involvement, his deeper substitution: it masks his identification with
the lover of the woman, Criseyde.”472 In this first reference to the poet’s
‘authoritative’ source, the problems of literary authority and the poet’s and
reader’s responsibilities for reconstructing the text surface again in a histori-
ographical (ontological) framework similar to that of the House of Fame.
At the end of Book I, the poet returns to problems of imagination and inven-
tion when conveying Pandarus’s thoughts on how to win the love of Criseyde
for Troilus. The poet has recourse to Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s architectural meta-
phor for writing poetry:
For everi wight that hath an hous to founde
Ne renneth naught the werk for to bygynne
With rakel hond, but he wol bide a stounde,
And sende his hertes line out fro withinne
Aldirfirst his purpos for to wynne.
Al this Pandare in his herte thoughte,
And caste his werk ful wisely or he wroughte. (I. 1065-71)473

471
The inclusion of he is odd. If anyone suffers from the works of wicked tongues, it is
Criseyde. I believe that the line furthers the analogous situation of Criseyde and the poet,
who eventually muse on their respective ‘errors.’ In view of the overwhelming literary
evidence against Criseyde, the poet’s error lies in his attempt to excuse her and in the at-
tendant modification of historical and literary tradition. Interestingly, the exact phrase also
occurs in Reason’s discourse on love and delight in the Romaunt of the Rose: “But hou
that evere the game go, / Who list to have joie and mirth also / Of love, be it he or she, /
High or lowe, who it be, / In fruyt they shulde hem delyte; / Her part they may not elles
quyte, / To save hemsilf in honeste” (5027-33).
472
Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 43. She also notes that the poet “imitates the emotions
of the characters and echoes their exclamations and prayers” (44). He becomes better at
the game of approsopriation.
473
Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria nova, Les arts poétiques du XIIe e du XIIIe siècle: Recher-
ches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen age, ed. Edmond Faral (1924;
Paris: Champion, 1958) I. 60-61, translated as Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf by
Margaret Nims (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967) 16-17. See also
Barney 1030n; Benson, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 92-93; Jordan, Chaucer 76;
Spearing, Textual Subjectivity 86.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 487

Pandarus is here depicted in the process of devising a fiction within a fiction.

This poetological reflection also yields insights into the poet’s own conception
of narratives, insofar as this passage not only recalls the Poetria nova, but also
an early scene in the Troy story that establishes the dichotomy of opacity and
transparency: Peleus’s and Jason’s self-fashioning in the Historia. Peleus
searches his heart for strategies to convince Jason to win the Golden Fleece,
while ‘shrewdly’ constructing a public mask to conceal these intentions. This
process eventually leads to the fabrication of a narrative mask that allows him to
align his heart with his mind. Pandarus presently also needs to find a narrative
mask that Criseyde would easily appropriate, a mask that corresponds to his
heart’s desire to aid Troilus as a lodestar. The poet is in a similar position: he
needs to align his heart’s desire – that is, altering the characterization of
Criseyde – with his sources and the story he is telling. In contrast to Pandarus’s
invention, the poet’s is not a matter of game. His inventio needs to unfold along
the lines of his available sources: he needs to connect ‘horizontally’ several
masks; he literally has to determine intersections between different personae.
The problems with invention, suspended between Ovidian elegy and Virgil-
ian epic, between personal interpretation and ‘authoritative’ sources, put the poet
in a position analogous to Troilus at the beginning of Book II.474 Caught in con-
trary winds, he hopes for change:
Owt of thise blake wawes for to saylle,
O wynd, o wynd, the weder gynneth clere;
For in this see the boot hath swych travaylle,
Of my connyng, that unneth I it steere.
This see clepe I the tempestous matere
Of disespeir that Troilus was inne;
But now of hope the kalendes bygynne. (II. 1-7)
The sentiment is reminiscent of Dante’s Purgatorio I. 1-12 and recalls the Ovid-
ian (and Virgilian) problems with pilots.475 The difference between the poet’s
journey and Troilus’s inability to navigate his contrary winds for lack of a “ster-
isman” is that the poet has become his own pilot. It is difficult for the poet to
write, but write he will – an analogue to Ovid’s decision to keep writing en route
to Tomis even though it was the act of writing that initially caused the perilous
journey (Trist. I. xi). As in the Tristia, the creative process is equated with in-
474
The poet “thus joins Troilus as a wayfarer at sea waiting for a favorable wind to steer him
out of the waters of despair.” Stevens, “Winds of Fortune” 294.
475
For the Ovidian parallels, see Windeatt 153n; for the Dantean parallels, see Havely, “Ital-
ian Background” 324-25. Singleton appropriately highlights the Virgilian context – after
all, Dante does not have any difficulties in steering (Divine Comedy 4: 3n, Pur. I. 1-3).
Neither does Virgil, who arrives safely at his port in the Georgics: “Atque equidem, ex-
tremo ni iam sub fine laborum / uela traham et terris festinem aduertere proram” [Indeed,
were I not furling now my sails in sight of the end of my task and hastening to turn my
prow to land]. Georgics, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) IV. 116-
17, trans. L. P. Wilkinson’s (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
488 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

cipient change. And yet, the poet’s assumption of literary and historical author-
ity is problematic, as he notices quickly. Invoking Clio (the muse of history
reminiscent of Statius’s epic),476 the poet ensures his audience that he is not in-
volving his own experiences; he merely translates his Latin source. Hence, he is
not to blame, which does insinuate – emphasized by repetition (“I nyl have nei-
ther thank ne blame” and “Disblameth me” [II. 15, 17]) – that there is something
inherently blameworthy were he to differ from his source. In contrast to Pandar-
ian invention, which ensues ab ovo and allows him to argue any point, the poet
is bound by his sources.
The poet accordingly turns to briefly discuss his source, the contents of
which may appear old-fashioned to a contemporary audience, since language
changes as do customs (and poetological ideals):
Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry ben usages. (II. 22-28)
In the light of Troilus’s view of an island in the sea at the end of the poem, I
read this passage, for which exists “no parallel in any earlier English poem,”477
not only as emphasizing cultural relativity,478 but also as rejecting cultural and
historiographical determinism. It is explicitly “How Troilus com to his lady
grace” (II. 32), with which the narrator believes the audience may potentially
find fault. And indeed, the ending of the poem underlines that Troilus’s trans-
parent approach to love is doomed to failure. The poet thus explicitly asks the
audience to find fault with Troilus’s actions which are in and of themselves in-
tricately related to his own mode of self-fashioning. What explains Troilus’s be-
havior is, proverbially, that “Ecch contree hath his lawes” (II. 42). Troilus’s ac-
tions – and the historiographical determinism they represent – are culturally pre-
determined and must not necessarily result in an mono-mythological construc-
tion of Britishness. Speaking with Spearing, and ultimately with Dante’s De
vulgari eloquentia, the past is a different country, a different domain,479 which
liberates other characters to test alternatives.

476
McAlpine calls the poet a “historian of love” in Genre 124. See also Thebaid I. 41.
477
Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance 31.
478
See Morton Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination” 17. Butterfield, though, empha-
sizes that under the surface, “lies the memory of book 2 of the Consolation” in which
“Lady Philosophy’s bleaker point was that the diversity of language and custom among
the many peoples of the world causes misunderstanding and ignorance.” Butterfield, “Na-
tionhood” 62-63.
479
Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance 31-32.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 489

Nation and person appear to be explicitly linked in the narrator’s poetological

reflection. After becoming his own pilot and ironically invoking his sources only
to then argue that the latter are subject to change, and after arguing that Troilus’s
way of loving (and constructing nationhood) is not culturally deterministic, the
poet implicitly manages to defend his own changeability, that is, his deconstruc-
tion of the Troy story. From the collective discourse of nationhood, from the
‘laws,’ he switches to individual identities, which should also be changeable:
“Ek scarsly ben ther in this place thre / That have in love seid lik, and don, in al”
(I. 43-44). Individuality, that is, is not a matter of types, which is emphasized in
two ways. On the one hand, with Troilus’s Trojan transparency, the poet pre-
sents the audience with a type attempting to reject ‘typedom’ – a process to be
rejected in (future) retellings of the Troy story. On the other hand, Criseyde’s
status as a representation of fickle women is open to renegotiation and can be
challenged in the framework of changeability that the poet has constructed for
himself.480 Consequently, Criseyde’s sudden change in Boccaccio’s Filostrato –
“E sì subitamente presa fue” (Fil. II. 83) – transforms in the Troilus into: “For I
sey nought that she so sodeynly / Yaf hym hire love” (II. 673-74). By the time
Criseyde has fallen in love with Troilus, the poet is not only in control of his
poem again, he has likewise legitimized his own changeability.
The poet’s own identity as a lover becomes tangible again at the beginning of
Book III. It opens with an invocation of Venus (III. 1-3), in which hybridity and
balance are the main topics. The two Venuses – one of conjugal love, the other
of illicit love – “blur into one, just as the several kinds of love are confounded
by those within the poem who speak of love, as also the several kinds of friend-
ship.”481 The poet emphasizes that love’s power is felt everywhere and no crea-
ture could live without it. Most importantly, the poet stresses that love is capable
of appeasing the god of war: “Ye fierse Mars apaisen of his ire, / And as yow
list, ye maken hertes digne” (III. 22-23). Not only does Venus balance Mars, she
constitutes community as “Ye holden regne and hous in unitee; / Ye sothfast
cause of frendship ben also” (III. 29-30). The poet becomes a servant of love,
and his prayer recalls Troilus’s earlier acknowledgment of the God of Love’s
power. In other words, the poet approsopriates Troilus’s masks – or rather
Troiolo’s masks, since he adapts Troilus’s song which, in the Filostrato, occurs

480
At this point, the audience is reminded that there are different historiographical models
available for constructing identities, for instance, the siege of Thebes is available both as
epic and romance.
481
Gaylord, “Friendship” 252. Bernard Silvestris, Commentum Bernardi Silvestris super sex
libros Eneidos Virgilii, ed. Wilhelm Riedel (Greifswald: Abel, 1924) I. p. 9. See further
Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid 35; Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses.
490 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

after the consummation scene (Fil. III. 74-79).482 He, too, wants to adopt the
hypergood of love, “Ye in my naked herte sentement / Inhielde, and do me
shewe of thy swetnesse” (III. 43-44). There is one important difference,
however. The poet asks for the adoption of the hypergood rather than being
subjected to it.483 He thus constructs a ‘horizontal’ link between several domains
and creates translucence. Love constitutes communities by connecting several
domains, but only when it is bounded, when it does not take over all masks.
Venus is therefore able to appease Mars, but she cannot overcome him. The
poetological correlative is that the Ovidian Ars has to be narratively balanced.
Instead of continuing an entirely Ovidian journey, the poet thus invokes Cal-
liope, the muse of epic poetry, at the end of the prohemium so as to convey Troi-
lus’s “gladnesse” (III. 47).484 By embedding the Ovidian acts of Book III within
a Virgilian framework, the poet hopes to bestow on his hero (and on Trojan
historiography) the necessary balance.
Unfortunately, the poet’s balancing act only seemingly centers Troilus’s self.
The latter’s resolution to act the part that he had carefully rehearsed for the first
meeting with Criseyde, only precipitates his speechlessness (III. 50-56, 78-84).
Troilus further promises Pandarus again not to let anyone know about their se-
cret and Pandarus’s part in it – an act of dissimulation which, in view of Troi-
lus’s transparency, is most likely inefficient as well. The poet, however, veils
Troiolo’s transparency that characterizes the Filostrato at this point. Chaucer’s
poet also adds a stanza which reinforces that Troilus is able to restrain his emo-
tionality successfully (III. 428-34, cited above), which consequently buttresses
the dichotomy of martial day and Venerean night (III. 435-41). After the long
and often modified conversations about secrecy and masking, it is far from acci-
dental that the poet again highlights his own invention (in this case, omission) in
saying that he is not going to report every word, sound, look, cheer, and so on of
Troilus (III. 492-97). He omits an epistle allegedly contained in his source and,
like Pandarus, settles for “the grete effect” (III. 505) of his narrative. In fact, he
neglects to mention that Criseida was very distressed about Troiolo’s absence
due to important, war-related business (Fil. III. 21-22). This, however, remains

482
Like Troilo’s song, the “Proem is an invocation to Venus praising her beneficent powers,
and in it there is an apparent confusion, or blending, of the pagan goddess [...] with the
planet Venus [...].” Gordon, Double Sorrow of Troilus 31. See Hollander, Boccaccio’s
Two Venuses 50-51.
483
Edwards implicitly draws attention to love’s function as a hypergood: “Venus’s power
works transparently through the political and personal structures of male attachments –
regne, hous, frendship. [...] It is only when Boccaccio and Chaucer come to the topic of
their poem, the intersecting passions of man and woman, that Love’s coercive power is
covered and rendered opaque.” In short, Love “compels obedience from all the characters,
and choice therefore amounts to consent.” Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 59, 63.
484
Cf. Donald W. Rowe, O Love, O Charite! Contraries Harmonized in Chaucer’s “Troilus”
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1976) 159.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 491

opaque to the audience of Troilus: “Nought list myn auctour fully to declare /
What that she thoughte whan he seyde so” (III. 575-76).
The poet further ‘cloaks’ the ensuing consummation scene in keeping with
the epic frame of Book III. When Criseyde wants to leave Pandarus’s house,
“swych a reyn from heven gan avale / That every maner womman that was there
/ Hadde of that smoky reyn a verray feere” (III. 626-28, and see 662). Some
scholars have suggested that the weather conditions propelling the consumma-
tion scene allude to a similar setting for Aeneas and Dido’s lovemaking in the
Aeneid (IV. 160-62), referred to also in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women
(1281-21).485 Ovidian lovemaking emerges again as a narratologically framed
allusion to the epic tradition. In a speech that recalls the poet’s syncretistic
mythological-astrological prohemium to Book III, Troilus desires Venus to in-
tervene with Jupiter on his behalf so that the evil influences of Mars and Saturn
are kept at bay – a passage that underlines his propensity toward transparency
(III. 715-28, cited above). Unlike the poet, Troilus remains unbalanced.486 Troi-
lus’s ‘astro-mythological’ speech may ultimately draw on the same Boethian
source as does the poet’s prohemium, but the poet does not arrive at the “same
conception of love” in Book III.487 The narratorial balance achieved here is
complicated by the unfolding plot, since the audience learns that the poet “kan
namore” (III. 1314); as he did earlier, he settles for the “sentence” (III. 1327).
Between these two moments, the poet “experiences a very poignant sense of the
good he has missed,”488 which nevertheless emphasizes his inexperience in the
plot he just relayed. The tale is accordingly offered for the audience’s correction,
and a modified account invites further modification, turning hermeneutic control
over to the audience again (III. 1331-37).

3. The “cloude of errour”: Erroneous Juvenalia

The collective dimension of hybridity and translucence takes dominance from
Book IV onward, which also marks the poet’s turn toward matters of exile, and
toward the Tristia. In relaying the substitution of Diomede for Troilus, the poet
invokes Fortuna in order to assist him with the painful task of reporting the de-
tails of the ‘affair.’ In a sentence that recalls the weeping verse of the first book,
the poet’s heart begins to bleed and his pen “Quaketh for drede of that I moste
endite” (IV. 14). The narratorial stance is Ovidian, as is further evinced by the

485
See Maresca, Three English Epics 180-83, but cf. Barney 1039-40n. For the astrological
framework of the poem, see also Robert Kilburn Root and Henry Norris Russell, “A
Planetary Date for Chaucer’s Troilus,” PMLA 39.1 (1924): 48-63.
486
The passage underlines Troilus’s transparency in an appropriate inversion of his ‘martial’
persona: “Instead of depicting this customary ensemble for a noble lover [several layered
garments], the narrator describes a Troilus who has prepared for intimacy by disrobing
down to his underwear – a ‘sherte.’” Hodges, “Sartorial Signs” 233.
487
McAlpine, Genre 128.
488
McAlpine, Genre 129-30.
492 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

assumption of a perspective reminiscent of the Heroides, for the narrator has to

convey “how Criseyde Troilus forsook – / Or at the leeste, how that she was un-
kynde” (IV. 15-16). The phraseology underlines the poetological abandonment
of his sources: “As writen folk thorugh which it is in mynde. / Allas, that they
sholde evere cause fynde / To speke hire harm!” (IV. 18-20). The poet is aware
that he sets himself up: given the overwhelmingly negative associations with
Criseyde, it would appear that either the entire literary tradition is wrong (save
Benoît’s Roman, perhaps) or the poet himself is to be blamed for not telling the
truth. To balance the elegiac subject matter, the poet therefore invokes the three
Furies and Mars, who, as the daughters of the night (Met. IV. 451-52; Aen. XII.
845-47) and the father of Quirinus (Met. XV. 863; Aen. I. 274; Thebaid VII.
703), respectively, create an Ovidian-Virgilian hybridity. The Virgilian dimen-
sion further characterizes the beginning of Book IV insofar as it reminds the
audience of the war that has been repressed in the poet’s mind.
The fourth book restores the general outline of the Troy story, and relates de-
tails of the fifth battle, in which “The folk of Troie hemselven so mysledden /
That with the worse at nyght homward they fledden” (IV. 48-49), and a truce is
negotiated. Unlike Boccaccio, the poet reports that Priam readily grants the truce
without inquiring the opinion of his council. What the poet chooses to omit,
however, are the negotiations among the Trojans as to whether Thoas should be
killed – a debate in which Aeneas suggests that exchanging Thoas would be ad-
visable and in which Hector prudently (and vehemently) argues against granting
a truce. While Hector anticipates the treachery of the Greeks, he eventually ac-
quiesces in the communal decision (Historia XIX, 160, cited above).489 The poet
instead focuses on Calkas’s reasoning with the Greeks on behalf of his daughter,
which implicitly establishes a genealogy for Criseydan opacity. When the poet
finally mentions the parliamentary negotiations, these are not about Thoas but
rather about the possible exchange of Antenor for Criseyde and Thoas. This al-
tered placement of the parliament scene is consistent with the general dichotomy
of Ovidian Trojans and Virgilian Greeks as it emerges in the Historia. The Tro-
jans negotiate about the destiny of a woman, who in the Historia and Roman de
Troie is more or less immediately exchanged (if not entirely without debate). Al-
though Guido does not explicitly relay that the Trojans disagree with the ex-
change, he does mention the Trojans’ hatred of treacherous Calchas, who de-
serves death. Priam, Guido continues, decides to exchange her anyway (Historia
XIX, 161), suggesting that Priam overrules the voice of the people. In the Troi-
lus, it is Hector, who, in a sense, takes over the role of the Trojans insofar as he
proposes not to exchange Criseyde; ironically, he is overruled by the people: “O
Ector, lat tho fantasies be!” (IV. 193). When incorporating Chaucer’s version
489
This passage anticipates Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hector in Troilus and Cressida: Hec-
tor prudently argues – in twenty-seven lines – that Helen should be returned only to then
settle for the opposite in no more than five lines. Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Beving-
ton, Arden Shakespeare (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998) II. ii. 163-93.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 493

into the general outline of the Troy story, Hector is first overruled by the people
when arguing against the truce, which is nonetheless granted. At the next par-
liament, Hector apparently has learned about the power of the people and sides
with Guido’s Trojans, who implicitly reject the idea of exchanging Criseyde, al-
beit for different reasons. Again, Hector’s leadership is problematic.490 In the
Troilus, the people concur with the exchange, again for different reasons: they
want to exchange a woman for ‘one of the greatest of the town’ (IV. 192).491
Hector is one of the few characters in the Troilus to publicly voice dissent. In the
poet’s opinion, which somewhat replicates Guido’s complaint about the errors
of the masses, the noise of the people is ill-advised, because they ask for the de-
liverance of the very individual who will eventually betray them: “For he was
after traitour to the town / Of Troye [...]” (IV. 204-05).492
In view of the political background of the poem and given the poet’s refer-
ence to the “noyse of peple” – with its potential reference to Jack Straw – many
scholars have tried to espy in the parliament debates possible insights into Chau-
cer’s political sentiments, which ultimately remain a matter of speculation.493
John McCall and George Rudisill, for instance, discuss the parliamentary de-
bates in relation to the 1386 parliament, the outcome of which could hardly have
thrilled Chaucer, especially since it entailed the death of many of his friends.
Such references, they argue, are necessarily muted because of Chaucer’s pre-
carious position. Chaucer therefore reverses Guido’s rendition of Priam as an
autocratic ruler. On the whole, however, the poem does not represent “strict his-

490
Johnson, “Medieval Hector” 174.
491
Troilus, who has a strong (political) voice in the Roman and the Historia, remains strik-
ingly silent. While his emotional transparency is written on his face – “ful soone chaungen
gan his face” (IV. 150) – he is ironically capable of somewhat masking his emotions: “But
natheles he no word to it seyde, / Lest men sholde his affeccioun espye; / With mannes
herte he gan his sorwes drye” (IV. 152-54). By means of this addition to the Filostrato,
“Chaucer intensifies the theme and portrays it in explicitly Ovidian terms whenever he
can, in these lines and throughout the final two books.” Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts
59. The valiant Trojan subsequently retreats into his mono-mythological chamber. His si-
lence emerges as particularly pronounced since the narrative suggests that there is room
for dissent (IV. 215).
492
Treachery and duplicity are a pervasive themes at the beginning of Book IV: both Fortuna
and Calkas are introduced as traitors; now, Antenor is a traitor.
493
With specific reference to Troilus’s apotheosis, Josephine Bloomfield argues that the
poem appears to suggest that “polities at times blindly advance the wrong set of values,
demanding sacrifice in areas where such sacrifice actually hinders rather than furthers
their goals.” And yet, “Despite all the hard questions Chaucer poses about the ability of
the members of a ruling hegemony to see what is actually good for them [...], a number of
very important signs point to Chaucer’s political and moral judgment against Troilus’s be-
havior in books 4 and 5.” Bloomfield, “Chaucer and the Polis” 296, 299. See further
Fradenburg, “Loss” 94-95. According to Patterson (Chaucer 94), Chaucer remained loyal
to “his beleaguered monarch” during the factional 1380s. For the Troilus as reflecting the
demise of Richard II’s court, see Federico, New Troy 90-98.
494 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

torical allegory” but rather indirect allusions.494 Besides the potential reference
to the 1386 parliament, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 has been regarded as a po-
tential event reflected in the Troilus.495 The disagreement of the people is an
interesting facet in this respect, and it would surely be absurd to assume that
Chaucer wrote in a political vacuum, unaffected by contemporary politics when
writing about parliamentary negotiations,496 especially since the noise of the
people raises historiographical questions as well: “Whereas courtly restraint is
represented almost as an attempt to resist or deny history, popular voicing is rep-
resented as one of history’s several agents.”497 The people’s articulation of their
opinions propels change and accelerates the translatio imperii. The parliamen-
tary debate itself emerges in a different light, however, when compared to the
Troy story to which it alludes.498 The question is not so much whether Chaucer
would have agreed that “mass, popular, or even democratic action” is unfavor-
able, but rather whether the Troilus
subsumes its values to that of its aristocratic, even royal, central figures. [...] History it-
self is perceived through the filter of our and the narrator’s reconstruction of the per-
spective of the noble characters. Chaucer allies himself with this focus of values, even
as the work itself reveals the limitations of those values against the disorienting forces
of time, society, and nature, which no longer seem to align themselves with the ideol-

494
John P. McCall and George Rudisill, Jr., “The Parliament of 1386 and Chaucer’s Trojan
Parliament,” JEGP 58.2 (1959): 281, 283-84, quotation at 284-85 n. 25.
495
The (potential) allusion to the Peasant’s Revolt was first observed by Brown, “Another
Contemporary Allusion” 210 n. 6. Scholars quickly denied the relevance of the Peasant’s
Revolt, as does J. S. P. Tatlock, “The Date of the Troilus: And Minor Chauceriana,” MLN
50.5 (1935): 277-78. Ganim believes that it is well possible that by means of oblique ref-
erences, Chaucer may “have conflated into this image two expressions of group action,
politically very different, but both hostile to his political position, indeed, to his position in
general.” Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality 111.
496
Robertson analogizes the noise of the people in Troy and “passionate popular outbursts,”
which for Chaucer would have been “an inversion of the natural order of sovereignty in
the commonwealth.” Robertson, “Concept of Courtly Love” 16. See further William H.
Brown, Jr., “A Separate Peace: Chaucer and the Troilus of Tradition,” JEGP 83.4 (1984):
492-508. Stillinger maintains that the parliamentary scene “drifts between the interpretive
contexts (here, contemporary events) it evokes.” Stillinger, Song 203. Jim Wheeler con-
textualizes the passage within the prisoner and monetary exchanges frequent during the
Hundred Years War, whereby Chaucer appears to distrust the people and emphasizes the
culpability of government. Wheeler, “‘Peple’ and ‘Parlement’: An Examination of the
Prisoner Exchanges Depicted in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Giovanni
Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato,” ELN 37.3 (2000): 11-24, esp. 15, 22.
497
Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality 109.
498
Ganim further suggests that “Chaucer is associating a dangerous popular blindness with a
certain Langlandian tone”: “Moreover, these echoes [...] may underline the twist that the
very conception of the Troilus offers to its own tradition, for many of the other great late
medieval versions of Troy either are in or call upon alliterative verse and at the same time
more prominently highlight the aspects of public experience that the Troilus renders only
rarely.” Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality 112.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 495
ogy of the protagonists. [...] The official and expressed approval of heroic aristocratic
action is set against much more powerfully disruptive chthonic forces, and [...] the
power of poetic imagery tends to stress the gaps, fissures, and limitations of
hegemonic culture.499
Ganim’s emphasis on the importance of faultlines that enable individuals to
change and inscribe themselves into public discourse is instructive. The admit-
tance of the public’s capacity to exploit the faultlines of dominant aristocratic
ideology notwithstanding, however, the poet believes that the people make the
wrong decision, which decries the validity of ‘democratic’ decision making:
O Juvenal, lord, trewe is thy sentence,
That litel wyten folk what is to yerne,
That they ne fynde in hire desir offence;
For cloude of errour let hem to discerne
What best is. And lo, here ensample as yerne.... (IV. 197-201)
The ‘cloud of error’ is a quotation from the Juvenal’s Satires. The phrase occurs
in the tenth satire, which discusses the ill-advised desires of men for the wrong
things, such as wealth, political power, rhetorical talent, famous military deeds,
long life, and beauty. It is important to note, though, that the allusion to the sat-
ire problematizes the literal meaning of the poet’s statement about the erring
Trojan people and critiques the Trojan public as much as their leaders.
In the Troilus, the public cannot discern the right course of action for a cloud
of error. In Juvenal’s satire, all humans alike are prone to err: “Omnibvs in ter-
ris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque / Auroram et Gangen, pauci dinoscere possunt /
uera bona atque illis multum diuersa, remota / erroris nebula” [In all existing
countries from Gades to Aurora and the Ganges, only few are capable of distin-
guishing, free of the clouds of error, the true goods from those very different
from the latter] (X. 1-4).500 Juvenal continues, “quid enim ratione timemus / aut
cupimus?” [What do we fear or desire with reason?] (X. 4-5). The cloud of er-
ror, that is, separates two domains that are mutually veiled – one domain (desire)
remains disconnected from the other (reason). This lack of balance between Tro-
jan desire (military success) and Hector’s prudence (Criseyde is not a prisoner)
is a Trojan sentiment not unlike Troilus’s incapacity to link martial prowess and
courtly love. The poet now inverts the goods in question, however: the Trojans,
perhaps not as irrationally as the poet would have us think, choose to gain
through the exchange a military leader, whose aid they believe would be instru-
mental in bringing about victory, rather than keep a ‘mere’ woman.

499
Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality 112-13.
500
A. Persi Flacci et D. Iuni Iuvenalis Saturae, ed. W. V. Clausen, Scriptorum Classicorum
Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (1959; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). All parenthetical refer-
ences are to this edition.
496 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

There is another level to the poet’s allusion to Juvenal, when considering the
tenth satire as a whole,501 which emphasizes much graver errors of judgment,
compared to which the people’s desire for Antenor must appear as a minor mis-
take. In discussing the desire for a long life, Juvenal argues that had Priam not
prayed for a long life, he would have been buried by Hector and his brothers. He
would have been mourned by the women, first among them Cassandra and
Polyxena, had he died at a time before Paris began to build ships. Since he did
not, he had to witness all of Asia in flames and died in an unworthy fashion (X.
258-70). In the light of Guido’s frequent emphasis on Priam’s old age in the
Historia and Juvenal’s description of an old man desiring the wrong goods in
the tenth satire, it may not be accidental that the poet, when discussing the par-
liamentary negotiations, inverts the attributes of ‘king’ and ‘old’: “The cause
itold of hire comyng, the olde / Priam, the kyng, ful soone in general / Let her-
upon his parlement to holde” (IV. 141-43, cf. I. 2). Within this ‘Juvenalian’
framework of desire, Trojan goods appear to be imbalanced – as they are gener-
ally in the Troy story. The people mainly mirror the ill-fated characteristics of
their rulers, such as Priam’s desire for his sister (Hesione) or Troilus’s emotional
rejection of opacity, rather than desiring prudent actions (Hector’s advice). In
this context, the people’s noisy determination to exchange Criseyde must appear
rational and intelligible,502 and it also (ironically) undercuts the literal message
that the people usually err.503 The collective – actually most of the collective
since there is space for dissent (IV. 215) – adopts a prudent strategy, albeit too
late, too mono-mythological, and too one-sidedly determined by martial ideals.
The Trojans’ ill-fated adoption of opacity, that is, reinforces that opacity needs
to be tested and ultimately reconciled with individual desires – a process exem-
plified by the poet.

501
Juvenal’s Satires was a widely-read school text. See Curtius, European Literature 49-50,
260-64; Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text
(1996; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) 7-16; Gillespie, “Twelfth Century” 223-
33; but cf. Koch, “Chaucers Belesenheit” 63-64. Chaucer refers twice to Juvenal’s tenth
satire, wherefore it is “unlikely” that he knew only “extracts in florilegia.” See Oxford
Companion to Chaucer, ed. Gray, s.v. Juvenal.
502
As Sheila Fisher observes, “the war that is the reason the exchange needs to occur in the
first place shows that, if the Trojans are not accustomed to selling women, they have some
track record at stealing them.” Fisher, “Women and Men in Late Medieval English Ro-
mance,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) 157.
503
This claim is further corroborated by the people’s outrage in Book I, when Calkas’s ac-
tions are unanimously condemned (I. 85-91) – incidentally, the people describe the ‘priest’
as “worthi for to brennen, fel and bones” (IV. 91). With consequences for the beginning of
Book IV, Juvenal’s satire concludes that Fortuna would have no divine power if humans
had reason: we, he says, are the ones who make Fortuna a goddess and place her in the
heavens: “nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia: nos te, / nos facimus, Fortuna, deam cae-
loque locamus” (X. 365-66).
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 497

4. “I fynde ek in stories elleswhere”: Toward Exilic Translucence

With Criseyde’s exchange settled, the poet withdraws slightly from the center
stage in ‘merely’ reporting the respective speeches of Pandarus and Troilus –
until the scene shifts to Criseyde again. The transition is achieved by a short
passage on the intricate workings of Fama, appropriately introduced – as con-
cerns the ensuing examination of masking – by means of the Virgilian phrase
“preste wynges” (IV. 661), reminiscent of Virgil’s “pernicibus alis” (Aeneid IV.
180). This transition is appropriate not only because of its characterization of the
swift distribution of rumor – a central theme in the House of Fame (Barney
1047n) – but also since it draws attention to the role of public perception, of
masks and masking. Virgil’s description of Fama notably occurs in conveying
Dido’s resolution to bid good-bye to secrecy, to don a seemingly transparent
mask: “neque enim specie famave movetur / nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur
amorem: / coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam” [Dido had no further
qualms as to impressions given and set abroad; she thought no longer of a secret
love but called it marriage. Under that name, she thus hid her fault] (Aen. IV.
170-72). Chaucer’s poet is more immediately concerned with the circulation of
reports about the parliamentary debate. And yet, by means of the Virgilian refer-
ence, the poet reminds the audience of the secret relationship between Troilus
and Criseyde. In fact, Criseyde’s reaction to receiving the news of her exchange
is met by her resolution not to give away the real reason for her torment. She is
veiling her emotions in ways similar to Hamlet’s later construction of an “inky
cloak” to mask his ‘woe’ (in Hamlet I. ii. 76-86). The poet’s description of
Criseyde’s reaction to the news that settles her reputation anticipates her Ovid-
ian changeability which literally takes on a Virgilian dimension – and she is able
to mask the reason for her sorrow in ways Boccaccio’s Criseida is not:
Tho wordes and tho wommanysshe thynges,
She herde hem right as though she thennes were;
For God it woot, hire herte on othir thyng is.
Although the body sat among hem there,
Hire advertence is alwey elleswhere,
For Troilus ful faste in hire soule soughte;
Withouten word, on hym alwey she thoughte. (IV. 694-700)504
Although Criseyde is primarily concerned about Troilus, the evoked destiny of
Dido foreshadows the loss of Criseyde’s reputation on account of her ‘error.’
She carefully avoids Dido’s transparency, however, which afflicts Boccaccio’s
Criseida: “né poteva celar la faccia bella / gli alti pensier ch’avea d’amor gentili,
/ venuti in lei per l’udita novella” [her fair face could not conceal the high gentle
thoughts of love which she had, inspired by the news she had heard] (Fil. IV.

504
Hamlet’s famous speech focuses on his outer appearance, which does not match his in-
ward woe; Criseyde likewise appears to be listening here, while musing on something en-
tirely different, namely, a tormenting woe she is unable to show or articulate.
498 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

82). Criseyde’s avoidance of transparency additionally recalls Ovid’s handling

of Dido’s letter in the Heroides, foreshadowing Dido’s and Criseyde’s inabilities
to control their disrepute, which is based on misconceptions (esp. Her. VII. 93-
100). The poet literally uses Criseida’s inability to mask her emotionality in or-
der to pry into Criseyde’s mind in his portrayal of a faithful lover, who first
thinks upon her lover’s destiny (and his reputation) and, second, realizes that she
is so deeply in love that no-one could possibly ‘unbind’ her affection. The poet’s
changeability renders him as guilty of doubleness (rather than duplicity) as
Criseyde, who subsequently changes into “another kynde” (IV. 827-47, 865,
cited above) in her meditations on suicide and her progression from Heroides to
Metamorphoses and Tristia. By means of a complex network of intertextual al-
lusions, the poet begins to complicate a seemingly straightforward dichotomy of
Virgilian masking and Ovidian transparency.
Criseyde and the poet’s movement beyond Troilus’s fatalistic enactment of
abandonment toward the Metamorphoses and the Tristia becomes focal at the
end of Book IV and in Book V. Once the lovers meet to discuss their plight, they
are unable to utter any words for their sorrowful crying. After the poet character-
ized Criseyde’s first reaction to the exchange by means of a Virgilian reference
that tacitly points to her later-voiced (Ovidian) concerns with her reputation, the
lovers’ sorrow now occurs in an Ovidian context. The woeful Myrrha, the poet
relays, did not weep tears as bitter as those of Troilus and Criseyde (IV. 1139).
The story of Myrrha, the end of which the poet alludes to, begins with an impor-
tant theme in Ovid’s works in general and in Chaucer’s Troilus in particular:
control. In Ovid’s tale, Myrrha is fully aware of her unspeakable, incestuous de-
sire for her father. The story relays Myrrha’s struggles to control her excessive
emotionality (Met. X. 319-55), in the course of which she entertains the thought
of leaving her country to avoid committing incest (Met. X. 341-42); Ovid
stresses that her father is yet unaware of her desires. Yet, the veil which masks
her illicit desire is rather thin; when her father asks her what kind of husband she
would like, for instance, she says he should be like him: “similem tibi” [like
you] (Met. X. 364). Not knowing what to do – and in a moment structurally
analogous to the problem faced by the Chaucerian lovers – she ponders suicide.
Her nurse saves her at the last moment (Met. X. 379-88), however, and in a
rather Pandarian fashion forces her to disclose her predicament, threatening her
to otherwise reveal her attempted suicide to her father. The nurse helps Myrrha
to achieve the desired end.505 During a black night, in a setting resembling that
of the Chaucerian consummation scene (esp. Troilus’s lament in III. 1429-42),506
the deed is done. Once her father, Cinyras, finds out that he slept with his daugh-
ter, he intends to kill her, whereupon she flees and, before their child is begotten,
asks to be transformed as a punishment for her crime.

505
See Wetherbee, Chaucer 98-101.
506
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 55-56.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 499

Calabrese interprets the allusions to the story of Myrrha as deflating the lov-
ers’ “lofty language and hopes, particularly Troilus’s, during their night of inde-
scribable bliss.” He also points out “Ovid’s own deflated version of the ‘art of
love’” in comparison to earlier accounts of Myrrha in his amatory works. By
means of the allusion, Chaucer focuses on “the movement from youthful desire
to incest and exile.”507 And indeed, the story of Myrrha exemplifies the prob-
lems of domains and hybridity, prompting the transformation. It thus provides
an important analogy to the advancement of translucent prosopagraphy. If the
allusion to Myrrha points backward to Pandarus’s fabrications in aiding Troilus,
it also points forward to Criseyde’s deliberations about an act that will certainly
incriminate her. The resulting exile leaves both Myrrha and Criseyde faced with
a juxtaposition that seemingly does not allow the arbitration of a middle ground.
In Myrrha’s explicit demand that she be punished for her sins, she discusses her
reputation in terms of mutually exclusive categories: “sed ne violem vivosque
superstes / mortuaque extinctos, ambobus pellite regnis / mutataeque mihi vi-
tamque necemque negate” [But lest I outrage, if I am left alive the living, or, if I
shall die, the dead, expel me from both realms] (Met. X. 485-87). The poet’s ex-
plicit reference to Myrrha’s metamorphosis foreshadows Criseyde’s position be-
tween Troy and Greece, which likewise calls for a transformation. Qua the
Metamorphoses, Criseyde transforms her heroic abandonment; a short relapse
into suicidal thoughts notwithstanding (IV. 1238-39), she eventually abandons
abandonment, negotiating an exilic position similar to Ovid’s persona in the
Tristia, which encompasses a rewriting of his own life in terms of Heroides and
Metamorphoses.508
Meanwhile, the poet continues his voyage, ‘inventing’ a version of the Troy
story that reconciles different views of his heroine and thus challenges the pre-
dominant (patriarchal) perspective of a literary tradition by exploiting its lacunae
and counter-narratives, embedded, for example, in Benoît’s Roman. For the pur-
poses of complicating reductive views of Criseyde, he adds a long catalogue of
her plans to deceive her father as does Briseis in the Roman (ll. 13768-72;
Windeatt 427n). Criseyde’s intentions, the poet says, are truthful (IV. 1415-
21).509 At the same time, his delight in not knowing her thoughts exactly trans-
507
Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 52-59, quotations at 56, 55. As with Wetherbee’s
discussion, the emphasis falls on what the Myrrha episode reveals about Troilus’s rather
than Criseyde’s situation.
508
As concerns the relationship between the Metamorphoses and the Tristia, Calabrese ob-
serves that “From exile Ovid writes [in Trist. I. i. 117-22] that his own life story is fit to be
in his book of ‘bodies changed,’ since his freedom and renown have been transformed into
exile and despair. He too is a victim of rerum inconstantia; he too has fallen ‘out of joie’”
(Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 54).
509
Amtower observes that while it appears that the poet suggests “that lying is justified when
the motivations are good [...], the narrator’s words can only be taken as an ironic or terri-
bly naive reading of Criseyde’s character, which completely disintegrates into lies once
she meets Diomede.” Amtower, Engaging Words 155.
500 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

forms the opening stanzas of Book V into “dark pools where doubts spawn.”510
While the poet draws on Benoît and Guido for the details of the exchange itself,
he couches the entire affair in contemporary terms – Troilus, hawk in hand, ap-
proaches the Greek host in ways familiar to contemporary readers from truce
negations.511 If nationhood does play a role in the exchange, as it probably
would on such occasions, the reference does more than simply underline Troi-
lus’s passivity. In the poet’s account of the exchange, Troilus appears for the
first and only time throughout the poem as the “sone of Ecuba the queene” (V.
12), which, on the one hand, underscores the absence of Priam, who is in charge
of the exchange in the Filostrato (Fil. V. 1) and is mentioned by Benoît and
Guido at this point, and, on the other hand, underlines the effeminacy of the Tro-
jan inability to keep up masks.
The depiction of a seemingly ‘manly’ Troilus in itself is somewhat translu-
cent insofar as the ambiguities in Troilus’s portrait allow audiences to construct
more or less transparent versions of the Trojan knight. While his grief is hardly
visible, the observation that he is hardly able to stay on his horse – suspiciously
introduced by a “But” – challenges this interpretation. After the exchange, the
poet proclaims to be unable to describe Troilus’s sorrow (V. 270-71), but gives
Troilus room to assess his grief himself, which culminates in the statement that
“Whan I the proces have in my memorie / How thow me hast wereyed on every
syde, / Men myght a book make of it, lik a storie” (V. 583-85). This self-
referential observation, absent from the Filostrato, corroborates the didactic
function of the “Book of Troilus,” which is, after all, a “Book of Troy.” Al-
though Troilus solipsistically believes that Cupid has warred on him, it is hard to
overlook that Troy itself is warred upon from all sides. Troilus at least implicitly
sees his destiny connected to that of Troy in that he asks Cupid not to be as cruel
to ‘the blood of Troy’ as was Juno to the Thebans (V. 599-602, cited above).
According to Troilus’s deterministic transparency, however, the city must fall in
order to ensure the birth of Britain. In turn, the poet undercuts this determinism
by changing the story. While Troilus’s deterministic view, underlined by the
emphasis on blood ties (see also HF 201, 207), dictates that changeability is im-
possible, the poet exemplifies the possibility of change since Troilus’s self-
referential sorrow is original with the poet. In other words, the poet engineers a
description of Troilus that unmasks the latter’s determinism which strives for
change while paradoxically corroborating stability.
After reinforcing Troilus’s inability to change his destiny by changing the
Troy story, the poet turns to Criseyde again. The principal fact about her re-
mains unchanged: Criseyde stays with the Greeks. The poet does change the
perspective on her changeability, however – a perspective made possible by the
lens of Ovid’s exilic poems, which pit changeability against stasis. This perspec-

510
Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 45.
511
Staley links the exchange to the truce negotiations of 1375 in Languages of Power 3-6.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 501

tive (elaborated above) also affects the inclusion of three brief portraits of Troi-
lus, Criseyde, and Diomede at the end of the poem, adapted from Joseph of Exe-
ter’s De bello Troiano – in the Troilus, Criseyde is notably positioned between
the two men.512 Introduced as a preface to Criseyde’s final sliding, it appears as
though the character sketches are meant to refresh the audience’s memory about
the standard representations of Troilus, Criseyde, and Diomede in (literary) his-
tory – significantly minus the inventive Pandarus. The poet’s changeability is
obvious again insofar as the portraits are notably at odds with the way the poet
has heretofore characterized his ‘actors.’ Diomedes’s portrait in De bello
Troiano stresses his prowess and violence, paying little attention to his devious-
ness (stressed in Guido’s Historia). His rhetorical abilities (admired by Guido)
are reduced to his “tonge large” in the Troilus (V. 804). At the same time, the
poet heavily emphasizes that Diomede argues “With al the sleghte and al that
evere he kan” (V. 773). The poet’s depiction of Troilus likewise differs from Jo-
seph’s portrait. Joseph describes a valiant Trojan knight, in age a mere boy, but
in “Mente Gigas” [in spirit, a giant] (IV. 62).513 The hero of the Troilus is rather
noted for his constant crying and his inactivity, which is consistent with the
‘Guido tradition,’ where Troilus is endowed with a “corde magnaminus” (Histo-
ria VIII, 86).
While the portraits of the two males differ slightly from Joseph’s descrip-
tions, Criseyde’s portrait is more complex. First of all, it is significant that by
choosing to include Joseph’s portrait of Criseyde, the poet refers audiences to a
representation of Criseyde that does not emphasize her changeability. In fact,
Joseph has only positive things to say about Criseyde: “Diviciis forme certant
insignia morum, / Sobria simplicitas, comis pudor, arida numquam / Poscenti
pietas et fandi gracia lenis” [The riches of her beauty were rivaled only by the
excellence of her character – sober simplicity, courteous modesty, never-failing
compassion, and a kindly and gentle manner of speech] (IV. 160-63). In charac-
terizing Criseyde as “slydyng of corage,” then, the poet restores Guido’s nega-
tive characterization of her;514 in Benoît, she is less vehemently criticized (Ro-
man 5286, cited above; Historia VIII, 85). The poet’s changeability at this point

512
Joseph of Exeter introduces Troilus, Diomedes, and Criseyde in a catalogue of the princi-
pal ‘actors.’ Troilus is mentioned after Helenus and Deiphebus and before Paris, Dio-
medes after Ulysses and before Nestor; Criseyde follows last, positioned between Merion
and Castor and Pollux (IV. 61-64, 124-27, 156-62). For Elizabeth Allen, “The conspicu-
ously belated pictorial descriptions, as many have noted, interrupt the narrative and serve
more to raise questions than to clarify the characters’ actions by reference to types.” Allen,
False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Pal-
grave, 2005) 139. See further Robert Kilburn Root, “Chaucer’s Dares,” MP 15.1
(1917/18): 3-4.
513
Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde 142. Later, Joseph comments: “Utque omnes claudam
titulos brevis, Hectore maior” [To put his glory in a nutshell, he was greater than Hector]
(VI. 191).
514
Young, Origin 111-12.
502 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

corroborates the possibility, if not necessity of change. At the same time, the
poet retains a certain degree of ambiguity by referring to Benoît and Guido, who
agree that Criseyde is changeable while they disagree concerning the evaluation
thereof: for Guido, she is duplicitous; for Benoît, her doubleness enables her to
reconcile contradictory roles – an ambiguity that is inherent in sliding.515 The
ambiguity is further compounded by the poet’s self-contradiction. On the one
hand, he asserts that “Ther nas no lak” in Criseyde, echoed in his observation
that she “Ne nevere mo ne lakked hire pite,” which is then followed by his re-
port of her ‘sliding’ (V. 814, 824). If the poet frequently excuses her behavior,
which underlines the fact that, in his opinion, she ‘lacks’ less than the dominant
tradition holds, he might similarly hope that his own transgression against liter-
ary and historiographical traditions is also excusable. If anything, Joseph’s per-
spective on Criseyde emphasizes that different times call for different perspec-
tives and for a revaluation of the ‘facts.’ If customs and language change along
with one’s perspective on the texts in which these alterations are manifested in
the first place, changeability is inevitable.
Having (implicitly) substantiated the inevitability of changeability, the poet
continues to excuse Criseyde, whereby his excuses for her – often relayed in
Criseyde’s discourse – increasingly touch on issues of nationhood. Not only is
her heart set on Troilus “So faste that ther may it non arace” (V. 954), she de-
fends her nation and her national identity in an addition to the Filostrato (V.
967-73, cited above). With regard to Diomede’s courtship, the poet mentions
sources that contain different versions of Criseyde’s ‘sliding’ at the beginning of
three consecutive stanzas: “And after this the storie telleth us,” “I fynde ek in
stories elleswhere,” and “But trewely, the storie telleth us” (V. 1037, 1044,
1051). It is in the second stanza that the narrator openly disagrees with the tradi-
tional view: “Men seyn – I not – that she yaf hym hire herte” (V. 1050). Struc-
turally, then, the poet’s variance occurs within information gathered from a sin-
gle source into which he interposes multiplicity, just like Criseyde’s portrait is
positioned between the portraits of two men. With Minnis, I believe that the poet
is less concerned with the moral implications of Criseyde’s changeability (Min-
nis has “infidelity”) rather than with the “historical facts and temporal situation”
of it.516 And yet, the poet is concerned not only with the historical facts but with
515
The MED entry for slide lists “slydyng of corage” among the quotations corroborating def.
1 (d): “to slide out of position.” Changeability is offered as an alternative reading by def. 3
(f). Corage is defined as “The heart as the seat of emotions, affection, attitudes, and voli-
tion; heart, spirit; disposition, temperament” (def. 1 [a]), using the phrase from Troilus as
evidence. It can also mean valor, courage, and sexual desire. The wide scope of meaning
of these words can yield very different readings; the phrase oscillates between a change of
attitude and a heart sliding out of position, implying a lusty change of lovers.
516
For Minnis, the narrator’s excuse for Criseyde is a “standard comment by a Christian nar-
rator who in general is concerned to emphasize the historical facts and temporal situation
of Criseyde’s infidelity rather than the moral implications thereof.” Minnis, Chaucer 71-
72.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 503

the inherent ambiguities in ‘factual’ accounts of Criseyde. After relaying

Criseyde’s speech verbatim, the poet unsurprisingly reconsiders his sources
again (V. 1088-92): Her name has been widely blackened, he says, “And if I
myghte excuse hire any wise, / For she so sory was for hire untrouthe, / Iwis, I
wolde excuse hire yet for routhe” (V. 1097-99). In other words, the poet adopts
a central good earlier attributed to Criseyde, ironically by means of her reputa-
tion with (literary) history: “Ne nevere mo ne lakked hire pite” (V. 824; De bello
Troiano IV. 162-63). His changes to the Troy story, that is, are caused by an
ethical sentiment that likewise plays a role in Criseyde’s ‘sliding.’ The poet’s
approsopriation of Criseyde’s masks is a matter of emphathy rather than sympa-
thy.

5. The “gret diversite / In English”: Counter-National Hermeneutics

At the end of the poem, the poet’s changeability again causes his wavering be-
tween Ovidian elegy and Virgilian epic, between transparent Troilus and trans-
lucent Criseyde, the only characters left. Opaque Pandarus is unable to follow
the narrator, whose ‘if I can’ becomes ‘I can no more say’ for the Trojan pan-
derer. Allegorically speaking, public Trojan discourse is unable to adapt to a
narrative that changes the seemingly inevitable. The poet continues to write and
offers historiographical hybridity to the audience as a solution to the various
(ontological) dilemmas, whereby he empathizes with Criseyde and Troilus: “we
see the hero beginning to imitate his narrator and the narrator, his hero, and the
distance set up between the two begins to lessen and almost disappear.” As the
narrator increasingly attempts to liberate himself from received opinions, Chau-
cer assumes a godlike position, beholding his own creation, at least, analogi-
cally: “because he is dealing with history, and, we must remember, to the me-
dieval Englishman his own history, he can parallel somewhat his Maker.”517
While the poet’s interest lies with individuals and their potential to revise collec-
tive discourse, it is an interest that is nonetheless framed by the Latinate, epic
dimension of a national myth of origins. At the end of the poem, the necessity to
legitimate his changeability, which amounts to the transformation of a national
into a counter-national myth, becomes pressing. Extending upon Bloomfield’s
comments, I believe that the poet indeed assumes a new perspective on the
translatio imperii with Troilus. If Troilus represents Trojan historiography, the
audience and the poet assume an equally transparent view vis-à-vis their na-
tion’s history. From this angle, a changeable, but excusable Criseyde represents
an alternative model that heavily draws on the hermeneutics of the blank ad-
vanced in the House of Fame. Since this new view on Criseyde can be estab-
lished only by means of adopting a Criseydan poetological (that is, ontological)
model, the circularity of the argument becomes obvious and requires explana-
tion.

517
Morton Bloomfield, “Distance and Predestination” 26, 22.
504 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

After Troilus realizes that Criseyde will not return, questions of nationhood
gain prominence again. The narrative takes an epic turn, significantly by associ-
ating Troilus’s wrath with the translatio imperii:
Fortune, which that permutacioun
Of thynges hath, as it is hire comitted
Thorugh purveyaunce and disposicioun
Of heighe Jove, as regnes shal be flitted
Fro folk in folk, or when they shal be smytted,
Gan pulle awey the fetheres brighte of Troie
Fro day to day, til they ben bare of joie. (V. 1541-47)
It is almost as if Troilus’s transparency has turned into Fortuna’s Wheel, as his
destiny becomes inextricably linked to that of Troy, especially since Hector’s
death is about to occur. Change and changeability, though, are necessary after
all: “Swich is this world, whose it kan byholde; / In ech estat is litel hertes reste”
(V. 1748-49). For a brief moment, the epic/tragic framework is suspended again
for the duration of Troilus’s last complaint unto Pandarus, and then Troilus be-
comes the valiant knight he rarely was throughout the Troilus: he finally testifies
to his knighthood, his fearlessness, his ire. And yet, the poet somewhat abbrevi-
ates Troilus’s sudden valor. He will not take the Virgilian path, he says, since “if
I hadde ytaken for to write / The armes of this ilke worthi man, / Than wolde ich
of his batailles endite.” His subject is not Virgilian epic, but love – a topic diffi-
cult to keep in focus: “I have seyd as I kan” (V. 1765-67, 1769). Importantly, the
familiar phrase is now shifted from Virgilian arma to Ovidian amor – and the
seemingly mutually exclusive domains now appear to be closely related.
Next, the poet begins to justify his own changeability concerning Criseyde’s
malleability. The assembled ladies should not be angry with him, he says, “al be
that Criseyde was untrewe.” While Criseyde’s guilt is inscribed in a literary-
historical tradition – “Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se” (V. 1774, 1776), he be-
lieves her behavior is excusable, especially from a woman’s point of view; after
all, he is not talking to the present men, “But moost for wommen that bitraised
be / Thorugh false folk – God yeve hem sorwe, amen!– / That with hire grete wit
and subtilte / Bytraise yow.” It is the betrayal of women by men that “com-
meveth” the poet (V. 1780-83), which is a Trojan sentiment that links “pitous”
Criseyde, who is easily emotionally affected and therefore changeable, and
transparent Troilus. This passage raises the following question: who is betrayed
by whom? For the literary tradition preceding Chaucer, Troilus was wronged by
Criseyde. The turn toward betrayed women rather than men, however, evokes
more than anything the women of Ovid’s Heroides, which – in a sense – in-
cludes Troilus, who, in turn, represents an effeminate Troy destined to be de-
stroyed by its excessive emotionality; transparent Troy is betrayed by Greek
treachery, that is, mask making. And yet, the poet emphasizes, Criseyde has
been betrayed as well – by a historiographical tradition that never bothered to
adopt her perspective. Although the poet determines the link between Troilus
and Criseyde qua their betrayal, such a mutually shared destiny of the lovers is
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 505

based on a false premise. Even if Criseyde was betrayed by an antifeminist,

male tradition, she does not (at least not intentionally) betray Troilus. Hence, the
poet legitimately admonishes his audience to “Beth war of men, and herkneth
what I seye!” (V. 1785). More or less explicitly, the Troilus replicates the her-
meneutics of the blank central to the House of Fame, since the poet himself re-
considers the purpose of his work and admits that he is ‘moved’ to changeabil-
ity, offering a changed perspective on the Troy story. While he began with the
‘double sorrow’ of Troilus in order to instruct the assembled lovers, he ends
with the betrayal of a woman by an entire literary-historical tradition. This
changed focus also prepares the audience for the ensuing removal of the histori-
ographical imperative represented by transparent Troilus. Troilus’s (absent)
body has to be supplanted with an ontological paradigm that enables (rather than
precludes) a multiplicity of perspectives – Criseyde’s perspective included.
The poet’s emphasis on his own emotional changeability is subsequently
placed into an explicitly poetological context, which furthers his association
with the exiled Criseyde. As has been noted a long time ago, the phrase with
which the poet sends his book out into the world – “Go, litel bok” (V. 1786) – is
reminiscent of the opening of Ovid’s Tristia (I. i. 1),518 the weeping book sent
back from exile to which the poet alluded at the beginning of the Troilus (see
above).519 Like Ovid, the poet later reflects upon the loss of interpretive control
over the contents of the book. First, however, he mentions a future work, a com-
edy to balance his tragedy – perhaps, the Legend of Good Women (Barney
1056n), which opens with poetological questions not unlike those posed by the
poet at the end of the Troilus. Second, the poet hopes that his ‘little book’ will
not provoke any envy. This topos is conventional, but in the context of the
poet’s frequent references to Ovidian-Virgilian dichotomies – the loss of pilots,
goods envisioned as guiding lights, and an exilic progression from Heroides to
Tristia and beyond – the reference again appears to fuse Virgilian epic and
Ovidian elegy. The mentioning of envy is verbally closest to the ending of the
Thebaid: “vive, precor; nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, / sed longe sequere et
vestigia semper adora” [O live, I pray! nor rival the divine Aeneid, but follow
afar and ever venerate its footsteps] (XII. 816-17). In the present context, how-
ever, it is important to keep in mind that, on the one hand, Statius places the

518
John S. P. Tatlock, “The Epilog of Chaucer’s Troilus,” MP 18.12 (1921): 627-18. Accord-
ing to Tatlock, similar passages appear in Tristia II. 1, III. i. 1-16, and Ex Ponto IV. v. 1-4.
Notably, Ovid’s usage cannot be taken to be conventional: “But no one who reads the po-
ems can think Ovid following a mere convention or using an artifice. His interest is fixed
on his book’s destination, and he shows his hope that it may get him called back” (116).
See also Barney 1056n; Windeatt 557n.
519
The Ovidian reference is furthered by the poet’s mention of “litel myn tragedye” (V.
1786). In Tristia II. 381-82, the persona writes that tragedy is victorious over any other
kind of poetry, but the topic is still always love: “omne genus scripti grauitate tragoedia
uincit: / haec quoque materiam semper amoris habet.”
506 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

Thebaid in a national context: the great Caesar claims to know the Thebaid al-
ready and the youth of Italy are learning its verses (XII. 812-15). On the other
hand, the way Statius’s persona phrases his worries suggests that he has reason
to expect others to be envious: “mox, tibi si quis adhunc praetendit nubila livor, /
occidet, et meriti post me referentur honores” [Soon, if any envy as yet
o’erclouds thee, it shall pass away, and, after I am gone, your well-won honors
shall be duly paid] (XII. 818-19). Chaucer’s poet most likely also has reason to
fear envy. By means of his changeability, he joins the pillared authorities in the
House of Fame who uphold the fame of Troy – which to bear is “no game” (HF
1474) – and among whom Geffrey espies envy.520 A few lines later, Geffrey
mentions Ovid and Virgil, recalling the hybrid Virgilian-Ovidian tale of Dido
with which the poem began.
Toward the end of the Troilus, the poet is (again) mainly concerned with an
abandoned woman. While Criseyde has been shown to abandon abandonment
from the beginning of the Troilus, the poet, too, the audience learns at the outset,
is abandoned from the audience of lovers. At the end of the poem, as Criseyde is
forced to leave for Greece, the poet also abandons abandonment insofar as he
bids good riddance to a literary tradition (which, as a translator, he is meant to
replicate) by advancing Criseydan hybrid translucence as a viable means of rec-
onciling individual and collective identities. His abandonment of the historical
tradition thereby finds a correlative in his abandonment of Troilus. The poem
thus invites the audience to conceptually allegorize the Troy story, employing
the same hermeneutic strategies at work in the House of Fame. On this view,
England is not Troy – England is like Troy. While certain Trojan mythemes can
be mapped onto England, others remain opaque. Most importantly, however, al-
legorizing Troy ensues from an individual rather than collective perspective.
Once Troilus’s absent body leaves a blank for the insertion of alternative para-
digms, a more benevolent reconsideration of Criseyde’s translucence becomes
thinkable and offers the opportunity for individuals to recreate their own trans-
lucent Greco-Trojan, ‘multicultural’ Britain which structurally overlaps with the
poet’s establishment of a hybrid literary text.521 To the same degree that
Criseyde willingly engages with foreign, Greek narratives, the poet’s mytho-
logical bricolage amply employs the ‘international idiom,’ suggesting that mak-
ing national myths should perhaps not be restricted to native traditions. After all,
it is Criseyde’s capacity to be both transparently Trojan and opaquely Greek

520
Cooper argues that Chaucer’s “omission of his own name as the sixth of six at the end of
Troilus is here [in the House of Fame] made up for, where he takes place in Fame’s house
as the sixth poet of Troy – and this time, as the poet of Troy in English.” Cooper,
“Chaucerian Poetics” 49-50. On Chaucer as the sixth of six, see further Cooper, “Four
Last Things”; Wallace, Chaucer 46-53.
521
Chaucer’s use of poesy at the end of the poem “marks the very first emergence in English
of a category approximating what we now call ‘literature.’” Spearing, Textual Subjectivity
79. See also Wallace, “Chaucer’s Italian Inheritance” 47-48; Turville-Petre, England 116.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 507

which warrants her translucent selfhood that neither collapses on account of its
overall transparency (the allegory of the universal) nor suppresses individuality
underneath an imposed mask. Appropriating Trojan transparency for construct-
ing collective identity fails for two reasons: on the one hand, mono-mythological
historiography is too inflexible to accommodate the diversity that is English (or
England); on the other hand, a transparent Trojan genealogy for England would
not set the insular nation apart from other European nations with different
emerging literatures and customs, rendering Britain merely an allegory of the
universal. The poet instead challenges universals insofar as he advocates the
continual rewriting of national mythologies in order to remake nationhood in the
first place. Virgilian imperial stasis (within a translatio imperii) transforms into
an Ovidian-derived counter-nationhood.
In this context, the poet’s desire for stability and his worries about potential
misapprehensions of his poem are a foregone conclusion. Since there is as much
diversity in English as there is, as Boethius has it, diversity of people and mod-
els within one culture,522 his prayer that his poem should not be misconstrued
follows logically: “And for ther is so gret diversite / In English and in writyng of
oure tonge, / So prey I God that non myswrite the” (V. 1793-95). While change-
ability is inevitable, it should not affect the dissemination of the poem itself
since, eventually, the changeability of the Troilus itself must be maintained. This
includes the necessity of the audience to subject the poem to the same writerly
strategies of mythological bricolage the poet has practiced all along. Within the
poetological framework of the Troilus, the poet’s worries therefore extend be-
yond the scribal maintenance of meaning toward the necessary modification of
his work in the future.523 This view on his own work marks a decisive change of
perspective. Up to this point, the poet has been mainly a witness of the Trojan
War, located on “almost the same plane as the actors, downstage and to the side,
so close and so responsive that occasionally he cannot restrain his identification
with them.”524 To the multiple perspectives thus afforded by the partial identifi-
cation with the individuals whose story he tells, he now adds the lofty view from

522
For Boethius’s discussion of fama in the context of (national) diversity, see Hanning,
“Chaucer’s First Ovid” 144.
523
Linne R. Mooney emphasizes the aspect of the authors’ “quality control over the ‘publica-
tion’ of their work,” citing Chaucer’s lines to Adam in the Troilus. Pynkhurst, who was
employed by Chaucer over a long period of time to produce the author’s fair copies, “ap-
pears to have taken this bond of trust seriously, since the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manu-
scripts show him struggling on his own or with a knowledgeable supervisor to impose a
logical order and an illusion of completeness onto the text of Chaucer’s unfinished Can-
terbury Tales.” Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81.1 (2006): 122. In a poem that
offers the necessity of changeability as a message, the preservation of authorial intention
may have been especially important for Chaucer, for, as Shoaf observes, “if he could as-
sume that understanding would come naturally to all readers, he would feel the less com-
pelled to pray for it.” Shoaf, Dante 150.
524
Muscatine, Chaucer 161.
508 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

the eighth sphere: with Troilus, he journeys upward, testifying to his capacity to
move along horizontal as well as vertical axes – like Geffrey in the House of
Fame.525 While this vertical movement creates the narrative blank that necessi-
tates the revaluation of alternative ontological models, it also exiles the poet. His
exilic vantage point also brings into focus the way in which the poet has (not)
been ‘translating’ Lollius, an error that somewhat likens the poet’s exile to
Criseyde’s (and Ovid’s). Thus, the poet has good reason to muse on the recep-
tion of his work which most likely could also lead to a blackening of his reputa-
tion – a legitimate fear when considering Henryson’s question as to whether
what Chaucer wrote was actually true. On the one hand, the poet is afraid of the
potential loss of his reputation on account of his own acts of changeability, of
promoting a perspective on Trojan origins that does not accord with that favored
by dominant ideology. On the other hand, suggested by his turn to a “different
audience,”526 that is, by offering the work to Gower and Strode for their respec-
tive correction of his ‘material’), worries emerge about a misunderstanding of
his literary changeability, that is, the necessary exploitation of faultlines in the
formation of collective discourses available for self-fashioning.
This is not the ending proper of the poem, however, but only one of many.527
The various speeches at the end rather act out “various figures for endings”; the
entire ending becomes an authorial act of defamiliarization. “If we avoid the pit-
fall of ‘presence,’ of turning his voice into a character instead of regarding him
as a ‘predicate,’ acted out in his speeches, his apostrophes – there is his voice
which we cannot help hearing even though we all reconstruct it a little, or a lot,
differently.”528 At the very end of the Troilus, the poet’s voice becomes Chris-
tian, emphasizing the dichotomy of a pagan past and a Christian present. Troi-
lus’s condemnation of earthly vanity and ‘blind lust’ reiterates, in a Christian
framework, the desire for a transparent, mono-mythological ideal comparable to
Jauss’s characterization of medieval individuality as a mere ‘allegory of the uni-
versal.’ Seemingly, the poet encourages transparent prosopagraphy, since God
“nyl falsen no wight, dar I seye, / That wol his herte al holly on hym leye” (V.
1845-46). This is followed by a conventional repudiation of pagan rituals. At the
very end of the poem, however, the poet argues that there is diversity and differ-

525
The “narrator-role may be said to define a horizontal as well as a vertical order in the
poem. When the speaker draws attention to the rhetorical organization of the narrative [...]
he is at the same time asserting a point of vantage from which he (and the reader) can ob-
serve and evaluate the action.” Jordan, “Narrator in Chaucer’s Troilus” 238.
526
Shoaf, Dante 156.
527
For summaries of critical work on the ending of the poem, see Steadman, Disembodied
Laughter; Wetherbee, Chaucer 224-43; Kaminsky, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” 49-
51, 65-68; Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy 130-39.
528
Evans, “‘Making Strange’” 222, 227.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 509

ence, most of all a difference in terms of appearance,529 within a mythology that

only seemingly makes individuals allegories of the universal:
Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve,
That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon,
Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive,
Us from visible and invisible foon
Defende, and to thy mercy, everichon,
So make us, Jesus, for thi mercy, digne,
For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne. Amen. (V. 1863-69)
The trope of the three-in-one is too conventional to be easily construed as an
intertextual reference to the beginning of the Laud Troy Book. Nevertheless, it is
interesting to see the differences and similarities which corroborate my reading
of the Laud as suggesting a transparent Trojan genealogy and of the Troilus as
advancing translucent prosopagraphy instead. While the Laud primarily deals in
transparency and eschews mask making of any kind, Chaucer’s phraseology
suggests a stronger differentiation between the three personae that make up (or
rather are made up by) one substance. The role of veiling and luminosity is es-
pecially emphasized by the direct quotation of the first lines from Dante’s Para-
diso XIV. 28-33.530 Instead of speaking of three personae as does the Laud-poet,
Chaucer’s poet enumerates the individual masks and delineates their different
realms.531 The reminder that foes come in two classes – transparent and opaque

529
Ginsberg observes that the narrator “designates these prayers [...] metaphorically, as the
heart’s visage; his meaning, one supposes, is that the pleadings we give voice to are the
outward expression of inner love and devotion. Yet to put it this way unavoidably raises
the question of whether the things we say truly reflect our intentions or motives. In Middle
English visage also means ‘disguise,’ ‘assumed countenance,’ and these senses cannot be
ruled out of play.” Ginsberg, “Aesthetics sine nomine,” ChauR 39.3 (2005): 238.
530
Dante’s invocation of the trinity in the Paradiso occurs after his question as to whether the
luminosity of the sapienti, with which their substance ‘blooms,’ will always remain. See
also Par. XIV. 37-60.
531
For Shoaf, the invocation of the trinity is related to the enactment of roles: “Roles remain.
Humans have only roles – faith being the ultimate and most difficult role to play. And
playing that role, the Narrator is content with the role of translator, even here in his per-
sonal prayer. That role, his faith has helped me see, is the role which most becomes the
human author since it is farthest from usurping the Authority of God. God is
‘uncircumscript and al maist circumscrive’; a translator, however, is ‘circumscript’ – by
his original – and his only hope is to break the circle of writing and thus break out of the
circle of writing to a position, not the only position, from which to see the point which en-
circles all the circles.” Shoaf, Dante 157. I rather see the reference to the trinity in terms of
the many roles the poet has learned to appropriate through the act of composition, the les-
son being that translation involves many a role, since it necessitates holding together mul-
tiple, contradictory perspectives.
510 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

– likewise differentiates appearances. The final part of the poem, then, presents
a movement that unifies and diversifies at the same time.532
While the poet’s textual performance can be obviously characterized as di-
versified, unity seems to be a more problematic term. Lack of unity has thus
loomed large in scholarly and aesthetic accounts of the poem, encapsulated suc-
cinctly in Ian Robinson’s claim that the poem is a “great failure,” since “There
are many great parts but they don’t cohere into a great whole.”533 What in the
1970s was thus conceived as an awkward trait has been hailed as laudable from
the 1990s onward in keeping with the turn to a postmodernist aesthetics of
fragmentation. After commenting on the fact that the Troilus’s translatio ver-
borum “proved to be as errant as the line of descent posited by the translation of
empire itself,” Patterson contends that the self-reflexive conceptualization of
history amounts to a
total form of being, history as a transhistorical idea rather than as a material reality.
[...] This is precisely the moment of modernism, the moment that absorbs the past into
a fully present selfhood from which an equivalently self-present significance can issue.
Reality is founded in, and controlled by, the self [...]. But [...] Chaucer was not in fact
able to rest with the modernist moment, to proclaim the dominion of the transcendent
mind. On the contrary, Troilus and Criseyde everywhere proclaims the fragmentation
of subjectivity, both that of its protagonists and of its author.534
A prosopagraphical approach corroborates this view for transparent Troilus and
opaque Pandarus. Criseyde, however, advances a more multifaceted perspective
on selfhood which transcends the self’s fragmentation into unrelated roles inso-
far as she is able to link various masks at the mytheme-level, enabling a self that
is fragmented and centered at the same time. Her translucent prosopagraphy ex-
acts a high price: the loss of her reputation. Although historical determinism
holds sway over her reputation for centuries to come, it does not control her self,
however. As indicated by the invocation of the trinity – which defines as a uni-
fied multiplicity a substance or constitutive good that connects various, some-
times contradictory masks – the poet appropriated Criseydan translucence.535

532
Calabrese believes that the reference to the trinity implicitly pits Ovid’s “protean, rhetori-
cal world” against the “Trinity, unchanging and eternal.” The poet’s address to the lovers
at the end of the poem, “becomes a new version of Ovid’s paternal address to the youth of
Rome (iuvenes) in the Ars and the Remedia. [...] Chaucer turns to his young audience,
teaching them about a love beyond Ovidian art, one that will never ‘falsen’ them.” Cala-
brese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts 79. In my opinion, the trinity is not a static, unchanging
agency. For discussion, see J. Engemann et al., “Dreifaltigkeit” as well as P. Plank and F.
Courth’s “Trinität,” LexMA 3: 1374-77 and 8: 1011-14, respectively.
533
Ian Robinson, Chaucer and the English Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1972) 73.
534
Patterson, Chaucer 85, 85-86.
535
According to Dinshaw, the invocation of the three-in-one “suggests that Chaucer means to
represent this movement towards unity, solidity and closure and intense, emotional ur-
gency.” Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics 47.
 Chapter Nineteen: Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood 511

With regard to the critical aporia concerning the poem’s multiple endings, I
would opt, with the poet, for a hybrid solution – paradoxically with recourse to
older accounts of Chaucer’s narrator. I neither believe that the poet serves “as a
unifying presence despite the variousness of attitude [...] and the concomitant
diversity of style,”536 nor that he holds “steadfast to his intention,” arriving at the
port, which translates into caritas for himself and the audience alike.537 If Chau-
cer had intended for the poet to safely arrive at an (English) harbor, he would
only have had to continue translating Boccaccio’s Teseida or the Filostrato. In
the former, the narrative ends with Fiammetta becoming the ‘Bear,’ the lode-star
by means of which the self-assured narrator finds safe harbor (Tes. XII, 86).538
In Boccaccio’s version of the Troy story, Filostrato lands at a safe harbor (Fil.
IX. 3-4), too, prefaced by the recognition that women are duplicitous. If Chau-
cer’s poet, who initially sets sail in accordance with poetological conventions –
evoked qua the Ovidian-Virgilian “sterisman” – neglects to mention a safe har-
bor, it appears logical to conclude that he remains a sailor at sea, albeit not a
sailor lost at sea. In view of the ontological blank opened by the removal of
Troilus’s Trojan transparency, this would imply that individuals will have to sail
the seas over and over again in order to reconcile contradiction and synthesize
divergent masks; neither poetological nor ontological voyages are ever consis-
tent and transparent.539 They can be translucent, however. Required for this en-
deavor is the Ovidian ability to stay one’s course in bad weather by a continued
compositional process, but also by the acknowledgment of error – Troilus’s ‘er-
ror’ as much as the ‘misconception’ of an entire historiographical tradition un-
able to go beyond the surface manifestations of Troilus’s story, that is, a tradi-
tion that never pried into that which was underneath the mask. This relates the
Ovidian pilot (and his implicit changeability)540 to his Virgilian counterpart, em-
phasizing the necessity to be one’s own “sterisman,” to partially mask individu-
ality. Making selves is a matter of negotiating both opacity and transparency,
yielding short-lived periods of stability, always subject to change. On the histo-
riographical level, individuals must continually rewrite their foundational my-
thologies, testing their experiential expediency and historical veracity: myth
must be turned into mythology; transparent allegory must be turned into translu-
cent allegory; and nationhood must always be counter-nationhood.

536
Meech, Design in Chaucer’s “Troilus” 374.
537
Osberg, “Between the Motion and the Act” 264-266, quotation at 264.
538
See Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio 8-9.
539
Commenting on Book II, Lawton argues that the search for transparency (“consistency”)
is an ill-advised interpretive endeavor. Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators 78. Waswo believes
that any cultural narrative is inevitably contradictory. Waswo, “Narrator” 4-5.
540
Fränkel, Ovid 3.
 Conclusion

In the foregoing, I hope to have illustrated that Chaucer’s House of Fame and
his Troilus are intrinsically related insofar as they pose similar, pressing ques-
tions: if poetology and ontology are a matter of narratives, how can these narra-
tives be altered? Who authorizes such changes? How is changeability perceived?
And finally, what is the relation between personal and collective narratives?
Both poems answer these and related questions by revisiting Ovidian and Virgil-
ian poetological models, transmitted in the Troy story in terms of a juxtaposition
of transparency and opacity. Where previous reconstructions of the Troy story
opted for retaining this dichotomy – either by advocating opaque prosopagraphy
in the service of resurrecting the Hohenstaufen empire (Guido’s Historia) or by
recasting transparent prosopagraphy as a Christian paradigm (the Laud Troy
Book) – Chaucer, like Boccaccio before him, decides in favor of hybridity. Ex-
tending upon the hermeneutics of the blank in the House of Fame, the Troilus
likewise suggests that selfhood is a matter of mythological bricolage, enabling
individuals either to appropriate complete masks circulated in the public sphere
or, more perilously, to deconstruct these narratives in order to articulate (onto-
logical) alternatives. In the Troilus, a hermeneutical process is prompted by the
implicit removal of Trojan historiography from renewed reconstructions of the
Troy story, by leaving void the place where Troilus’s body should have been.
This hermeneutic blank occurs in a predominantly national context: the ‘little
spot of earth’ where Troilus is slain represents that island in the sea which in the
Brut tradition is Britain – a particularly small plot of land of what once was part
of the Roman Empire.
Chaucer’s deflation of empire indicates already that in the course of the her-
meneutic process initiated by Troilus’s apotheosis, national discourse is chal-
lenged from an individual’s perspective, resulting in the recirculation of an al-
tered national myth that the audience literally beholds in its unfolding. In terms
of conceptual allegory, the audience is invited to reconsider the characters’ dif-
ferent strategies of engaging with public discourse. While Troilus’s Trojan
transparency is doomed to failure on account of its deterministic, mono-
mythological understanding of the translatio imperii, Pandarus’s paradigmatic
mask making does not necessarily represent a viable alternative, at least none
that remains centered in terms of personhood: his excessive appropriation of
masks destabilizes personal identity to the extent that personhood becomes un-
thinkable. Pandarian masking is instructive, however, in that it replicates the
workings of public discourse itself. It suggests further that the mere adoption of
publicly circulated discourse is favorable to creating subjects, but detrimental to
making individuals. Criseyde offers an alternative to Troilus’s transparency and
 Conclusion 513

Pandarus’s opacity. By carefully rereading the Ovidian cursus, particularly the

Tristia and Ex Ponto, she recognizes that masking and unmasking are processes
essential to making selves. The translucent prosopagraphy she endorses is capa-
ble, like conceptual allegory, of maintaining contradiction (opacity) by means of
identity (transparency). Yet, this structural model necessitates the continual re-
consideration and rewriting of (other) subject positions, suitably represented by
a poet who is in close proximity with his characters at different points of the nar-
rative. By exploring and deconstructing these narrative selves, the poet also ad-
vocates translucent prosopagraphy, arguing for the continual remaking of his
own story – notably, with recourse to all available (that is domestic and interna-
tional) narratives. Ultimately, individuals like the poet (and Chaucer) recirculate
within the public sphere alternative models for making selves and nations. Na-
tionhood turns into counter-nationhood.
His historical determinism notwithstanding, Troilus intuits (and articulates)
with great precision a “kalendes of chaunge,” which operates across multiple
levels in the poem: it points to the wholesale reinvention of Troilus’s transparent
prosopagraphy; it prompts Pandarus to (re)invent masks that will not, and cannot
be appropriated, since they do not link up with Troilus’s grief; it points to the
poet’s own changeability, which likewise suggests that narratives, personal or
national, continually need to be in flux in order to accommodate change; and,
probably primarily on Troilus’s mind, it points to Criseyde’s changeability. Crit-
ics often emphasize that Criseyde represents the changeability of the world
rather than the changeability of women.541 More importantly, it is through
Criseyde’s changeability that the inevitability of changeability is emphasized.
The “kalendes of chaunge” are imperative to all constructions of individual and
collective identities – the idea of an ‘empire without end’ appears laughable in
the light of the Troilus. My prosopagraphical reading of Chaucer’s poems thus
confirms Jill Mann’s argument that through the narrative suspense created by
the fluidity of chance in the Troilus, “Chaucer makes us alert to the possibility
of a different story – that is, a different destiny. For this destiny is realized only
through the confluence of contingent events; it is not fixed in advance, but in
retrospect, when the pattern of ‘temporel ordenaunce’ (Boece IV pr. 6) has been
worked out.”542 Sylvia Federico likewise opines that the Troilus “on the one
hand returns to the past, the matter of Troy, and retells what had to happen; but
it also imagines the city before its fall and considers what may have happened in
a different future.” The poem “imagines (impossibly) that Troy and London
must be one.”543 It is tempting to locate the search for alternatives in Chaucer’s

541
See esp. Muscatine, Chaucer 165; Dean, “Chaucer’s Troilus” 175.
542
Mann, “Chance and Destiny” 100.
543
Federico, New Troy 66, 89. What is at stake in the poem, she argues, is the predestined
end of Richard II’s court. With the dedication to Gower, the poet transforms into Chaucer
in 1380s London, “a voice of some authority. But these translations, the necessary
marches of empire, are far from joyful. They are here, at the end of this most imperial, ca-
514 Part Three: Deconstructing Troy

contemporary world, situating the poem’s plot within a turbulent Ricardian

London – the Peasants’ Revolt, the Merciless Parliament, and so on.544 Indeed,
the Troilus falls into a period, in which “Change was experienced as loss, devel-
opment understood as reformation.”545 It is unlikely, I believe, that Chaucer’s
works are untainted by contemporary political events, and I certainly do not aim
to dispute recent, persuasive new historical readings of fourteenth-century po-
etry. What I hope to add to such interpretations is another perspective on Chau-
cer’s reinterpretation of change as development. Beyond offering the possibility
of change, the Troilus posits a rather sophisticated model not for the construc-
tion of nationhood, but for the creation of an Ovidian counter-nationhood.546
Chaucerian counter-nationhood further marks an interesting ‘pre-modern’ mo-
ment in the history of the self and the nation – a moment that has much to offer
for contemporary debates about the postmodern liberation of the Cartesian sub-
ject, empire building, European nationhood, and globalization alike. Most im-
portantly, Chaucer’s account of personal and national identity casts a long
shadow over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Writers such as John Clerk,
John Lydgate, Robert Henryson, William Caxton, Gavin Douglas, William
Shakespeare, John Dryden, and John Milton all appear to struggle in one way or
another to come to terms with Chaucer’s allegories of change.

nonical text, narratives of almost unbearable loss as the fantasy of a brilliant and youthful
court gives way to the history of its fall” (96).
544
Besides Federico, see further Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) 95-103.
545
Patterson, Chaucer 85, with reference to Ladner’s The Idea of Reform (1959).
546
As mentioned above, I borrow the term counter-nationhood from Cheney’s work on
Renaissance career models. Cheney himself revisits Chaucerian nationhood in his
discussion of Spenser’s Februarie Eclogue, the Virgilianism of which is complicated by
“the superimposition of a Chaucerian matrix.” Chaucer’s career, Cheney stresses, is
“organized around a set of generic practices important to the nation.” What Spenser sees
in Chaucer is a triadic model – “three divisions that Dante had outlined for medieval
French and Italian vernacular poetry in De vulgari eloquentia” – that “intersects with the
Virgilian triad of pastoral, georgic, and epic in a striking way” (242). For Chaucer, this
triad is constituted by love poetry, didactic poetry, and heroic poetry, whereby the Troilus
is listed – with a qualifying “perhaps” – among heroic poetry (245). Cheney, “‘Novells of
his devise’: Chaucerian and Virgilian Career Paths in Spenser’s Februarie Eclogue,”
European Literary Careers, ed. Cheney and de Armas 231-67. Chaucer is certainly not a
poet/playwright, who pens counter-nationhood in the Renaissance sense as defined by
Cheney. Nonetheless, I hope to have pointed up an Ovidian dimension that emphasizes
performance and invites the active ‘re-performance’ and modification of selves and
nations in ways that counter dominant ideologies. The Troilus itself, I argued, reenacts the
Ovidian corpus – elegy, drama (performance), tragedy, (counter-)epic – which is
somewhat framed and enriched by Virgilianism. Chaucer’s Ovidian counter-nationhood, I
believe, is mainly located in Chaucer’s recourse to an Ovidian changeability in the
reorganization of national models, which always ensues with a (subversive) view to the
Virgilian cursus.
 CHAPTER TWENTY
Interchapter Two:
Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book

In the proverbially dull fifteenth century,1 two poems particularly take on the
legacy of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae and Chaucerian
counter-nationhood: John Lydgate’s Troy Book and Robert Henryson’s Testa-
ment of Cresseid.2 Moreover, Lydgate’s translation of the Historia is one of the
main sources of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and was highly esteemed
by many contemporaries throughout the fifteenth century, so that William Cax-
ton, for instance, finds it unnecessary to translate the respective passages from
Raoul Lefèvre’s The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.3 Both Lydgate’s Troy
Book and Henryson’s Testament engage with the masking and unmasking of in-
dividuality and explore possibilities of linking selves and nations. Furthermore,
both works tacitly reaffirm an Ovidian/Chaucerian counter-nationhood, ulti-
mately arguing for the necessity of changeability – poetologically, histori-
ographically, and ontologically. The mythological bricolage advocated by these
writers portrays in a very different light fifteenth-century accounts of nation-
hood, variously seen as imperial or absent, insofar as they empower individuals
to reshape national mythologies in order to enable a greater degree of individual-
ity than is arguably possible in the prescriptive ideology of the nation-state usu-
ally seen as emerging in Renaissance England.
Lydgate’s Troy Book, often seen as a dull rewriting of Guido’s Historia in
keeping with Lancastrian imperial politics, is a translation into English of Brit-
ain’s myth of origin, available already in Latin and French, at the behest of
Henry, Prince of Wales who, by the time of the completion of Troy Book, was
King Henry V. Lydgate is thus one of the mythmakers of the nation, an intellec-
tual disseminating the Myths and Memories of the Nation.4 The central interest

1
For a (more positive) evaluation of fifteenth-century dullness, see David Lawton, “Dull-
ness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 54.4 (1987): 761-99.
2
C. David Benson, “Critic and Poet: What Lydgate and Henryson Did to Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde,” Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. A. S. G. Ed-
wards, spec. issue of MLQ 53.1 (1992): 23.
3
See The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, trans. William Caxton, ed. H. Oskar Sommer
(1894; New York: AMS Press, 1973) 502. For fifteenth-century praise of Lydgate, see
Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s “Fall of Princes”: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and
Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) 3-11.
4
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 1991) 93; Myths and
Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999) 9. See also Chapter Five.
516 Interchapter Two

of Troy Book is the link between person and nation, the question of how indi-
viduality can be reconciled with a national discourse threatening to suppress in-
dividuality. Like Benoît, Guido, Chaucer, and the Laud-poet, Lydgate ap-
proaches questions of selfhood and personhood theoretically with a model of
narrative masks. In Troy Book, linguistic veiling is couched in what has been
singled out as one of Lydgate’s main additions to his source, namely, his reflec-
tion on prudence, which is his “principal moral concern.”5 While Troy Book ex-
tols prudence, it “simultaneously charts its confusion,” the latter meaning “mis-
understanding and undoing.”6 Colin Fewer, also interested in Lydgate’s pru-
dence, has recently emphasized the ontological dimension of prudence, which
“counters the movements of history, and because the historical process origi-
nates in ‘casuel mocioun,’ prudence becomes not just the skill of anticipating the
future but a principle of self-control and indeed of self-fashioning.”7 Lydgatean
prudence, I believe, structurally corresponds to masking within prosopagraphical
selfhood, which is the issue under investigation in Troy Book.
The analysis of Lydgate’s interest in the overlap of prudence and masking
unfolds in three steps. On the one hand, an initial investigation into the realm of
political and martial prudence reveals the care with which Lydgate extrapolates
the dichotomy between opacity and transparency from Guido’s Historia. On the
other hand, Lydgate – with equal care – modifies his source regarding masking
strategies, indicative of Lydgate’s predicament of having to reconcile Guido’s
pro-Virgilian, but ethically problematic opacity with the morally ‘pure’ Trojan
transparency. Agamemnon’s prudence, for instance, reigns supreme in the His-
toria and in Troy Book, but Lydgate’s embellishments suggest that such an ideal
may be unattainable. At the same time, Lydgate’s admiration for Agamemnon’s
masking intimates that masking is necessary, even if it is ethically problematic.
Thus, Lydgate frequently embellishes Trojan veiling, especially with Priam and
Hector. Their improved masking abilities, however, are often counteracted by

5
“Mars is the appropriate deity to preside over the siege of Troy, but Prudence [...] is
Lydgate’s principal moral concern in the poem.” C. David Benson, “Prudence, Othea and
Lydgate’s Death of Hector,” American Benedictine Review 26.1 (1975): 117.
6
For Lydgate, “the capacity for foresight and nimble adjustment threatens to become indis-
tinguishable from cold calculation and treachery. Language, in a repeated image, is poi-
soned by hidden venom.” Robert R. Edwards, “Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Confusion of
Prudence,” The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of
North-Western Europe, ed. Thomas Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2001) 53, 57.
7
Colin Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Ideology of Prudence,” ChauR 38.3
(2004): 235. Fewer concludes that “The ideological project of Troy Book is [...] to ‘fashion
a gentleman’ capable of precisely this degree of self-control, control that is everywhere as-
sociated with prudence in the narrative” (241). My account of Lydgate’s masking-
practices may offer a modest qualification insofar as self-control is a matter of changeabil-
ity, of continually determining new intersections between personal and public masks in
order to renegotiate selfhood.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 517

expansions on the Trojan inability to maintain masks. This alteration, related to

the task of translating a pro-Trojan myth, paints a very Chaucerian picture of the
Trojans insofar as the they – like Chaucer’s Troilus – struggle harder to recon-
cile personal and collective masks. This is particularly true of Hector, whose so-
phisticated understanding of prudence remains confined to the realm of theory.
With reference to Hector’s encounter with his cousin Ajax, Lydgate, whose in-
vestigation of masking never strays far from poetological concerns, appears to
suggest that successful mask making requires the inclusion of other ontological
frameworks, whereby changeability is inevitable. The necessity of ‘othering’
Trojan mask making can be increasingly discerned in the masking strategies of
the Troy Book women, especially Medea, Helen, and Criseyde.
While male veiling – with the exception of Agamemnon’s masking – gener-
ally fails in Troy Book, Medea, Helen, and Criseyde, who are usually con-
demned as fickle in the Troy story, emerge as successful mask makers. They are
capable of remaining changeable (an ontological imperative, according to
Lydgate) and able to veil this changeability by means of opaque masks that are
more durable than Priam’s or Hector’s. Medea is the first women to exemplify
this. Although Medea, like other women, is portrayed as encompassing a rheto-
ric of “couetise,” as changeable, as a snake hidden among the flowers, and so
on, Lydgate bestows upon her a hybridity previously gleaned in Guido’s Polyx-
ena. Ethically problematic is her ability to construct opaque masks that veil her
changeability, that is, the construction of a seemingly transparent, opaque mask.
In the course of Troy Book, Lydgate’s antifeminism yields to the realization that
both transparency and opacity are ontologically necessary, which implicitly
points up Lydgate’s own changeability. The description of Helen, which initially
seems to be in keeping with Guido’s antifeminist stance, heavily emphasizes her
rhetorical abilities, her opacity. During her courtship of Paris, however,
Lydgate’s Helen emerges as capable of masking her emotionality and making
transparent her predicament, verbal echoes suggesting that she finds herself in a
position not unlike that of Troilus. Eventually, Criseyde becomes the example of
translucent prosopagraphy. While critics usually stress the reductiveness of
Lydgate’s handling of Chaucer’s heroine, Troy Book conceives of Criseyde in a
way that foregrounds her exilic predicament. Criseyde’s worries as to how she
should live alone among her enemies are answered in Troy Book by Medea and
Helen’s masking strategies, their ability to be transparent and opaque in order to
center selfhood – and to inscribe individuality into public discourse. Lydgate
himself approximates Criseydan changeability – the best excuse yet provided for
Chaucer’s heroine – in that he, adrift between Chaucerian Ovidianism and
Guidoan Virgilianism, uses her changeability to legitimize his own.
Lydgate primarily advances translucent prosopagraphy in his descriptions of
female acting, but translucent prosopagraphy is also anticipated in his portrayal
of theatrical productions in the second Troy – in a passage that yields insights
into Lydgate’s poetological program. At the outset of the poem, Lydgate ex-
plains that, in order to rescue facts from fiction, he decided to choose the most
518 Interchapter Two

reliable source, the Historia, which he aims to translate from point to point, that
is, in the same manner in which, according to Lydgate’s discussion of ancient
theatrical practices, actors translate text into performance. And yet, with Guido,
Lydgate chooses a source that recommends Virgilian, imperial opacity. While
Lydgate does invoke Mars, this mono-mythological sentiment soon replicates
the ‘sham prudence’ attributed to the Troy Book women, chiefly Criseyde. Al-
ready in his Virgilian Prologue, Lydgate subverts martial authority by including
Ovidian amatory material, namely, Mars’s love for Venus. In extrapolating the
central dichotomies of the Troy story, Lydgate ultimately turns to Chaucer in
order to synthesize poetical traditions. Criseydan translucence once again
emerges as a means to bridge the dichotomies that inform Troy Book: Virgil vs.
Ovid, opacity vs. transparency, Guido vs. Chaucer. In terms of constructing na-
tionhood, Lydgate’s lip service to Lancastrian imperialism only thinly disguises
the necessity to reconcile individual and national masks by means of a herme-
neutics of mythological bricolage, by means of changeability. In ultimately
choosing not to choose one guide, Lydgate rewrites nationhood from his own
perspective. In Lydgate’s version of the translatio imperii, the reconstruction of
Troy in Brutus’s Albion is a matter of Chaucerian counter-nationhood.

1. The “Ethik of false couetise”: Troy Book’s Masked Men

Lydgate’s embellishes prudence whenever his source affords the narrative space
or textual lacunae. Moreover, prudence becomes a matter of masking, introduc-
ing an ontological dichotomy into Troy Book that is familiar from Guido’s His-
toria: opacity versus transparency. In the following, I briefly provide examples
of the interlock of prudence and prosopagraphy in the political and martial world
of Troy that highlight differences between masking in Troy Book and the Histo-
ria. Lydgate’s modifications of Guido’s Historia primarily raise ethical ques-
tions: the goods informing the inescapability of masking are foregrounded.
While Agamemnon’s impeccable opaque masking (despite its employment of an
ethically problematic structure) becomes an (unattainable) ideal, Achilles’s
Ovidian, transparent leanings are indicted in an attempt to underscore the expe-
diency of veiling while balancing Lydgate’s embellishment of Priam’s and Hec-
tor’s masking. Unfortunately, the Trojans’ recognition of the necessity of mask-
ing cannot be translated into prudent military actions. Hector’s fight with his
cousin Ajax becomes a key example of the Trojan inability to construct masks.
In a speech added to the Historia, Ajax spells out the divergent attitudes to
masking in Greece and Troy, indicating the Trojans’ transparent determinism.
Given the conceptual overlap of masking and rhetoric, Ajax’s reminder that na-
tional identity is not a matter of kynde or blood further reflects upon Lydgate’s
translation of a national myth, the determinism of which had been pointed up al-
ready by Chaucer’s Troilus. While opacity is necessary, so is changeability. This
realization informs Lydgate’s interest in female masking which turns out to be at
the core of Lydgate’s poetology.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 519

At the beginning of the poem, the dichotomy between transparency and opac-
ity (and Troy Book’s complication thereof) is exemplified by Peleus and Jason.
As in the Historia, Jason is initially portrayed as a transparent hero, who com-
pletely trusts his uncle Peleus, “So that in chere nor in countenaunce, / Inwarde
in herte nor outwarde in shewyng, / To his vncle ne was he nat grucchyng” (I.
174-76). What threatens transparency is the potential incongruence of heart and
mind, epitomized by Peleus, for whom interior and exterior are clearly two dif-
ferent domains: “Vn-to whom Pelleus dide his peyne / Ageyn[es] herte falsely
for to feyne, / To schewen other than he mente in herte” (I. 181-83); Peleus
keeps himself covered (“cloos”). The rhetorical abilities, which allow Peleus to
veil his intentions, are described in a metaphorical framework recurrent in
Lydgate’s Troy Book but absent from Guido’s Historia:
Lyche an addre vnder flouris fayre,
For to his herte his tonge was contrarie:
Benyngne of speche, of menyng a serpente,
For vnder colour was the tresoun blente,
To schewe hym goodly vn-to his allye;
But inwarde brent of hate and of envie
The hoote fyre, [and] yit ther was no smeke,
So couertly the malys was y-reke,
That no man myght as by sygne espie
Toward Iason in herte he bare envie. (I. 185-194)
Peleus’s veiling of his emotions and intentions is a matter of rhetorically fabri-
cating a mask, which, given the comparison with a serpent, has negative conno-
tations.8 Lydgate emphasizes this rhetorical procedure, since Peleus’s veiling is
mentioned excessively when compared to Guido’s Historia – and the equation
of rhetorical masking with venomous snakes (and with changeable, duplicitous
women) reoccurs frequently throughout Troy Book. Since Lydgate’s task is to
translate a text related to the Trojan origins of Britain, it is not surprising that
Lydgate frequently depicts the Greeks in a negative light. His initial equation of
veiling and ‘rhetorical’ serpents is complicated by Agamemnon’s prudence,
8
Peleus is characterized as a lion posing as a lamb with “Galle in his breste and sugre in his
face” (I. 218). His hatred “was conceled [and] closed in secre, / Under the lok of pryve
Enmyte” (I. 225-26), which associates rhetoric with colorful flowers, by means of which
“His felle malys he gan to close and hide, / Lyche a snake that is wont to glyde / With his
venym vnder fresche floures” (I. 209-11). In order to convince Jason, he “pretend[s] a col-
our fresche of hewe, / I-gilt outward so lusty and so newe, / As êer wer no tresoun hydde
with-Inne” (I. 379-81). Transparent Jason learns quickly to adopt opaque masks. Upon the
ill-reception of the Argonauts in Troy en route to Colchis, he shows signs of emotional
turmoil, “he gan chaunge cher.” Nonetheless, he “kepte hym cloos, with sobre conten-
aunce.” While his masking is not perfect – since “in his face he gan to wexe pale” (I.
1016-17, 1020) – he makes his anger known only to his men, before confronting the Tro-
jan messenger “With manly face and a sterne chere” (I. 1091), informing the latter that he
will “enprente” the Trojan offence in his “mynde” (1107). Hercules, who is unable to
mask his emotionality, is rebuked by the messenger for his lack of prudence (I. 1180-85).
520 Interchapter Two

however, which is likewise a matter of rhetorical mask making. In another addi-

tion, and possibly in order to delineate between Peleus’s duplicity and Aga-
memnon’s doubleness, Lydgate introduces ethics. Peleus’s mask making, he re-
ports, is based on an “Ethik of false couetise,” which “cause hath ben, syth[en]
goo ful õore, / That many a rewme hath a-bouõt ful sore / The dredful venym of
couetyse, allas!” (I. 241-43). Lydgate’s incorporation of ethics as informing di-
vergences (and intersections) of masks in prosopagraphical selfhood already
stresses the inevitability of masking.
Before Lydgate considers Agamemnon’s prudence, Troy Book turns to the
transparent Trojans. Peleus’s opacity contrasts sharply with Laomedon’s trans-
parency. Lydgate emphasizes Laomedon’s recklessness, willfulness, and hasti-
ness in decision-making processes, which questions the slightly pro-Trojan bias
that emerged in the depiction of duplicitous Peleus. Learning about the Greek
arrival, Laomedon hastily sends a messenger to the Greeks, commanding them
to leave Troy (I. 959). Unlike Guido, Lydgate reports that Laomedon’s actions
are motivated by “fals envy” in the reports of the Trojan people about what they
perceive to be a threat to their community (I. 927). In other words, their behav-
ior becomes the cause of the entire conflict.9 Ultimately, however, the Trojans
are not any less reckless and willful in their belief that the Greeks have ulterior
motives than is Laomedon’s immediate resolve to attack them (I. 4064, 4077-
80). Lydgate’s modifications lay heavy emphasis on Trojan recklessness gener-
ally, and the reason for the Trojan War is more explicitly contextualized by the
Trojan inability to mask their emotionality.
After the destruction of the first Troy, Lydgate briefly portrays Priam, who at
first seems to be able to evade the genealogical imperative of transparency. He is
a ‘manly man’ and a ‘prudent’ ruler. Moreover, Lydgate much expands Priam’s
martial abilities in relaying the Trojans’ siege of a rebellious town with which
Laomedon’s son is occupied when receiving the dreadful news of his father’s
death and his sister’s kidnapping (II. 209, 224-30). Hector, his oldest son, is also
prudent and the flower of knighthood (II. 251), transforming Guido’s aggressive
fighter into a prudent knight. Lydgate also praises Priam for his prudent decision
to rebuild Troy after his initial sorrow has passed – in a long embellishment of
Guido’s admonishment to mask one’s sorrow (II. 476, 450-78).10 Priam dons the

9
Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book” 232. Laomedon’s deficiencies in masking are some-
what balanced by his martial prowess (I. 4117-31). Interestingly, Lydgate transforms
Laomedon’s and Priam’s outwardly visible grief into inward sorrow (I. 4248, 4269-71; cf.
Historia IV, 40). While Lydgate thus ‘rehabilitates’ Laomedon, he likewise criticizes his
murderer, Hercules, who slays Laomedon “With-oute pite or any reuerence” (I. 4310). Ul-
timately, however, Laomedon is punished for his lack of hospitality, that is, for not being
able to mask his emotionality. Since the destruction of the first Troy thus ensues “For litel
cause, and for a êing of nouõt” (II. 75), the lesson is to put on a good face for strangers:
“Doth hem good chere of õour curtesye” (II. 98).
10
For Priam’s prudence in rebuilding Troy, see Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book” 237-38.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 521

garb of prudence and thus spells out potential change concerning Trojan trans-
parency. While this initial description paints the British forbear(s) in a better
light than does the Historia, this impression does not last long. Rather, Priam
quickly becomes a negative role model, illustrating how one should not conduct
political and military business, as Fortuna prompts Priam’s decision to attack
Greece (II. 1080-84, 1090). This adoption of a Virgilian hypergood in Troy
Book recalls and parallels Troilus’s affliction with the overpowering Ovidian
good of love, which will firmly remain in place – Priam is “Stondyng in purpos,
êat no man chaunge may” (II. 1107). Priam’s steadfastness becomes a public
good since Priam “Gan êus to schewe his hertis mocioun” (II. 1144) to his peo-
ple, although this good is immediately (and prudently) questioned by Hector:
Wher-as he myõt in esy wyse trete
For to reforme êinges smale & grete;
For lothe he was, êis noble worêi knyõt,
For any haste to execute ryõt,
Or causeles by rigour to condempne. (II. 1133-37)
Despite Hector’s prudent, Ovidian changeability, Priam resolves to keep to his
purpose and asks his people “êat we be in hert[e], wille, and êouõt / Of on
acorde, and ne varie nouõt” (II. 1211-12). In Lydgate’s opinion, Priam is
“Ouermaystred with êi passiouns, / For lak of resoun and of hiõe prudence” (II.
1810-11). Moreover, Lydgate imports from Chaucer’s Troilus the notion of a
pilot or guide, whom Priam is lacking: “Wher was êi guyde, wher was êi mais-
tres, / Discrecioun, so prudent and so sad.” A pilot could have kept Priam “From
êe tracis of sensualite” (II. 1820-24).11 Not being able to mask his emotions,
Priam becomes subject to unreliable Fortuna (II. 1857-902). Priam is an inverted
‘mirror’ for the audience, reinforcing the need of a controlling agency, while
Lydgate himself takes many liberties with his source, that is, his guide Guido.12
Hector is the voice of reason in the Trojan discussions about whether to at-
tack Greece. While Hector certainly hates the Greeks – “For Ire of hem I brenne
as doê êe glede” – his anger is contained: “I-fret with-Inne, iustly of knyõthood”

11
With respect to the steering discussed later in Troy Book (IV. 2154-77), Benson asks:
“Would it be too much to claim that Lydgate is thinking of the stilnovo images of sailing
that run through Troilus?” Benson, “Critic and Poet” 33. The lack of guidance is as much
a concern for Lydgate’s subject matter as it is ultimately for himself (see below).
12
A long expansion about the necessity of unanimous actions, rather than discord and divi-
sion, ironically undercuts Priam’s own (lack of) guidance regarding his people (II. 1957-
66). The following parliamentary negotiations are fraught with discord and excessive
emotionality, whereby Priam even criticizes the chief Trojans’ lack of emotionality: “I am
pure sory êat õe list delaye / Õow to conferme vn-to my desyre” (II. 2124-25). Where the
Laud Troy Book constructs a heroic genealogy that excludes Priam, Lydgate’s Priam of-
fers his emotional rashness as a genealogical model, by reminding his councilors to which
ends he has educated them: “As tenderly as I koude or myõte,” to “remedien myn aduer-
site, / Whiche toucheê õou al so wel as me” (II. 2137, 2141-42).
522 Interchapter Two

(II. 2221, 2225). Unlike Guido, Lydgate explicates the means by which Hector
manages to restrain his emotionality: “Wherfore I rede, by dissymulacioun, /
With-oute more êat we oure wo endure.” In this fashion, the Trojans can
“wirkyn as êe wyse” (II. 2294-95, 2297). The term dissimulation does not nec-
essarily imply treachery and simulation, as it does in the Laud Troy Book; it may
simply refer to the necessity to create masks, to “internalize suffering.”13 And
yet, the term is ambiguous, especially in the context of Lydgate’s own dissimu-
lation (see below). Hector’s Virgilian suggestion, however, cannot compete with
Paris’s Ovidian advice,14 which again points up important structural parallels be-
tween Priam’s and Troilus’s predicament. Paris’s much expanded dream enables
Priam to replicate Paris’s (and Troilus’s) choice of Venus over Pallas.15 In a pas-
sage that recalls Pandarus’s anger at Troilus’s faith in dreams, Lydgate repri-
mands the Trojan monarch for trusting dream-lore:
But seye, Priam, allas! where was êi witte,
Of necligence for to take kepe,
Êi trust to sette on dremys or on slepe!
Ful êinne was êi discrecioun,
To take a grounde of fals illusioun,
For to procede liche êi fantasye
Vp-on a sweuene meynt with flaterye!
Allas! resoun was no êing êi guyde! (II. 2812-19)
The introduction of Ovidian poetics into the realm of military conquest can only
have disastrous consequences. And again, it is the ability to question and negoti-
ate scenarios beyond either/or which is, in Lydgate’s opinion, the most problem-
atic aspect of Priam’s personality. Moreover, Priam’s unguided rule and inabil-
ity to make masks begins to affect his underlings, including Hector. Witness, for
instance, the Trojans upon their arrival in Cythera. While in the Historia, the
Trojans manage to arrive very discreetly, Lydgate’s Trojans

13
Edwards, “Lydgate’s Troy Book” 62.
14
As James Simpson observes, Hector presents a chivalric argument, according to which
Troy should avenge the first destruction of the city. He subsequently dismisses the chival-
ric for a prudent track, the main objective of which is survival. “Having articulated the
chivalric position by speaking like a knight, [...] Hector looks to the future and speaks as a
secular cleric. The first ethical system is restricted to a particular class, whereas the second
can be practised by anyone with the wit to perceive possible futures. The miles-clerus
(knight-scholar) opposition runs deep through the Troy Book [...].” Simpson, The Oxford
English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) 255-56, 256-57.
15
Later, Paris is also afflicted with (Priam’s and Chaucer’s Troilus’s) emotional changeabil-
ity. Upon first seeing Helen, he is immediately overwhelmed by her appearance – in a pas-
sage that evokes the temple scene at the outset of the Troilus: Paris is hit by Cupid’s dart,
admires her “womanhed, hir port, & hir fairnes,” is smitten with her “aungillyk” beauty,
and sees paradise in her eyes: “With-Inne êe cerclyng of hir eyen bryõt / Was paradys
compassid in hir siõt” (II. 3648, 3651, 3671-72). For verbal echoes, see Edwards 378n.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 523
prudently [...] kepte hem euerychon,
Êat no êing was openly espyed
In her answere, so êei han hem guyed,
Êat euery êing kepid was secre,
Eueryche of hem was so avisee;
Al-be êat somme oppenly declare
What êat he was, & ne list not spare,
But tolde pleynly êe cause of his commyng... (II. 3494-501)16
The manner in which they surrender the mask clearly evinces that discord and
transparency are generally characteristic of the Trojans.17
The Greeks’ opaque prosopagraphy contrasts readily with the Trojans’ emo-
tional disorder. Lydgate closely follows the Historia in retaining the dichotomy
between heart and mind (II. 4292, 4301, 4305), and he also leaves unchanged
the outline of Agamemnon’s central speech, in which he reprimands Menelaus
for being too visibly emotional about the kidnapping of Helen. As in Guido’s
Historia (and in contrast to the Laud), Agamemnon – described as “wise” – sug-
gests the necessary masking strategies with overtones of dissembling. Agamem-
non reassures Menelaus that his sorrow is justified:
Õet, me semeth, by iuste prouidence,
Õe schulde sliõly dissymble õoure offence –
Sith eche wiseman in his aduersite
Schulde feyne cher & kepen in secre
Êe inward wo êat bynt hym in distresse –
Be manly force rathest êer compesse
Êe sperit of Ire and malencolie,
Where êe peple it sonest myõt espie.
It is a doctrine of hem êat be prudent,
Êat whan a man with furie is to-rent,
To feyne chere til tyme he se leyser
Êat [he] of vengaunce kyndle may êe fer;
For sorwe oute-schewid, õif I shal nat feine,

16
The Trojan inability to keep secrets recalls Guido’s reminder that every secret will be in-
evitably revealed (XXIX, 222). It is worth noting that the city of Troy itself, Hector’s
opaque protection notwithstanding, is completely ‘transparent’ and egalitarian. It is hard to
differentiate between the estates, since “So egaly of tymbre and of stoon / Her housis wern
reysed euerychon” (II. 649-50). The city is generally pure, partially due to the River Xan-
thus, which, in Troy Book, purges Troy of all odors and filth (II. 748-68).
17
Lydgate himself wavers between excusing and blaming the Trojans for their lack of pru-
dence. In Book IV, for instance, Priam exerts prudence in considering Achilles’s offer to
marry Polyxena. He first thinks about the situation and only then discloses his inward
thoughts: “And at êe last, siõynge wonder sore, / He discloseth êe conceit of his herte”
(IV. 832-33). Ambiguities also abound in Lydgate’s characterization of the Trojan leader
in Book II, where Priam wants to hear amorous poetry: “specialy he was most desyrous /
To heren songis êat wern amerous” (II. 4783-84). Lydgate himself, of course, is no less
desirous for amorous tales; after all, he expands the love stories muted in his source.
524 Interchapter Two

Who-so take hede, it doth êinges tweyne....

(II. 4343-56, emphases added)
After this expanded discourse on feigning, Agamemnon’s advice follows Guido
more closely again: outwardly discernible sorrow worries one’s friends and
gladdens one’s enemies. Therefore, Menelaus should feign happiness and
“Make êer good face & glad in port êe feine” (II. 4366).18 Opaque prosopagra-
phy maintains the Greek empire. Lydgate’s expanded remarks on the nature of
masking are prefaced by a likewise expanded passage on Fortuna (II. 4255-75),
particularly her masking of intentions and her fondness of wrapping “hir clernes
vnder cloude.”19 The correspondence between Fortuna’s and human masking
practices suggests that Fortuna’s masking describes practices that are ultimately
human – and not vice versa.20 The fact that Agamemnon’s prudent advice to
mask emotional turmoil is preceded by an extended explication of Fortuna’s
masking of changeability indicates that Agamemnon’s prudent statecraft like-
wise entails an ontological ambivalence (as did Hector’s dissembling).21 Aga-

18
Although Agamemnon frequently advises the Greeks to act prudently (e.g., IV. 84-86), his
concept of prudence is an ideal that even the Greeks do not always live up to. Following
the Historia, Palamedes articulates his dissatisfaction with Agamemnon’s rule, which en-
ables Lydgate to illustrate the fatal consequences of donning the imperial mask. While
Palamedes hurls his ‘usual words’ at Agamemnon in the Historia (XXII, 179), Troy Book
stresses his emotionality: “Ful inly fret with Irous passioun, / He gan breke oute, & his
rancour shewe / By certeyn signes, êouõ he spak but fewe” (IV. 118-20). Agamemnon
calls a council to deal with the situation: “He nat to hasti nor to rek[e]les, / But longe abid-
ing, êoruõ prudence & resoun, / With-Inne êe boundis of discrecioun – / Whos tonge was
only of sapience / So restreyned êat no necligence / Of hasti speche, sothly, for no rape /
Miõt make a word his lippes to eskape, / Vn-avised for no êing hym asterte, / But it were
first examynd in his herte” (IV. 134-42). Like at other occasions, Agamemnon’s speech is
conceived “Vnder êe rene of wit and hiõe prudence” (IV. 145, and see IV. 146-48, 3269,
3285, 3352, 3355). Lydgate criticizes the people’s changeability manifested in their accep-
tance of Agamemnon’s resignation and the election of a new leader. People desire
“chaunge and transmutacioun, / Selde or neuer stondyng hool in oon / – To-day êei loue,
to-morwe it is gon –” (IV. 306-08). The ideal of prudence and unanimous action is, there-
fore, always balanced by mutability and changeability.
19
The Laud reduces Agamemnon’s advice to Menelaus in keeping with the poet’s skepti-
cism of masking (see Chapter Twelve). In the Destruction of Troy (VIII. 3586-600), the
aspect of veiling is likewise muted in comparison with Lydgate’s Troy Book. Agamem-
non’s speech is not prefaced by extended musings on Fortuna in either the Laud or the De-
struction.
20
Fewer similarly argues that “a significant part of Lydgate’s project is to demystify the
operation of Fortune, locating the origins of historical processes in the contingent sphere
of human action and motivation [...].” Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book” 231. See
further Lois A. Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston: Twayne, 1985) 43.
21
Agamemnon’s political prudence remains positively connoted throughout Troy Book and
Lydgate greatly expands upon the death of his hero, perpetrated by Clytemnestra (and
prefaced by a long complaint about Fortuna). While Lydgate wonders why God does not
punish the murderer of a king like Agamemnon (V. 1046-76), he reports, after prudent Or-
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 525

memnon’s recommended feigning and sly feigning do little to efface entirely the
primary, negative meaning of dissembling.22 This is problematic for Lydgate and
his task at hand, since feigning and dissembling are rhetorical operations also
inherent in the writing of poetry, as emerges in the story of Castor and Pollux,
who drown in the pursuit of Paris and are subsequently deified. The story,
Lydgate relays, was feigned by the poets (II. 4484, 4502), which is but one of
the many associations of poetic craft with feigning that pierce at the heart of
Lydgate’s poetology. Perhaps Lydgate’s own worries about poetical masking
were so much on his mind that he neglected to mention, in the enumeration of
the valiant Greeks, the duplicity of Achilles. Instead, he focuses on the rhetorical
doubleness (rather than duplicity) of the Greeks’ foremost rhetor. In Ulysses’s
portrait, doubleness and prudence are complementary categories, since he is:
Ful of wyles and sleiõty at assayes,
In menyng double and riõt deceyueable,
To forge a lesyng also wonder able:
With face pleyn he coude make it towe,
Merie wordid, and but selde lowe,
In conseillynge discret & ful prudent,
And in his tyme êe moste elloquent,
And halpe to Grekis often in her nede. (II. 4600-07)
Merely sixty lines later, Criseyde affords the next opportunity for Lydgate to
muse on rhetorical veiling and poetic craft – in a portrait of Criseyde that be-
comes a eulogy of Chaucer and a reflection on Lydgate’s own changeability.
Lydgate continues to contemplate notions of masking and duplicity. In the
second round of ‘public’ negotiations at the end of Book II, and before the
commencement of the siege, Agamemnon’s speech to the assembled Greeks
clarifies that the stability of the imperial mask is threatened by pride and pre-
sumption (II. 6531-33). As the case of Palamedes later reveals, the inscription of
personal (or collective) pride into the imperial mask threatens opacity. Rather
than pride, truth should guide the Greeks (II. 6560). In order to avoid pride, the
Greeks send an embassy to the Trojans demanding the restoration of Helen.
Ulysses and Diomede approach a wise and prudent Priam (in Troy Book II.
6806) with their request. They do so transparently, arguing that it is not suitable

estes (V. 1491, 1510) has avenged Agamemnon’s murder, that God justly punished the
wrongdoers: “And for êe mordre of Agamenoun, / Êe myõti Lord, whiche is most
souereyn God, / Made his mynvstre of êe same blood” (V. 1482-84). Although the re-
venge is particularly gory, further animosities are prevented by a ‘prudent’ marriage ar-
rangement; the consequence of imperial mask making is that “Eche in his regne lyve in
pes & reste; / For al strif was cessid in êis cas” (V. 1770-71).
22
In his glossary, Bergen differentiates between sliõe, sliõly, glossed as wily, cunning, and
cunningly, stealthily, and the less negatively connoted sleõty, glossed as crafty, subtile.
According to Bergen, dissymble means to conceal by giving a feigned appearance, but
more likely refers to the act of forgetting.
526 Interchapter Two

for them to cover “wiê feyned fals affecciouns” their burning hearts (II. 6830).
Agamemnon’s emphasis on unity, his attempt to avoid arrogance, and the
‘transparent’ embassy to Priam are surely prudent, but also involve the change-
ability characteristic of many Troy Book women – and Lydgate himself. Priam’s
reaction to the transparent embassy is predictably unwise. In the Historia, Priam
replies without consulting his councilors; in Troy Book, “Of hasty Ire he myõt[e]
nat abide / Of êe Grekis whan he sawe êe pride, / Êe grete outrage and presump-
cioun” (II. 6879-81). The ‘recognition’ of Greek pride spells out an epistemo-
logical difference entailed (but muted) in the Historia, insofar as Priam’s rejoin-
der illustrates that the ethical goods informing acts of masking are locally differ-
ent: what appears prudent to some people, appears as imperious to others.
Priam’s reaction itself is motivated by unbridled emotionality – and pride! First,
Priam does not learn from past mistakes, as did Agamemnon in the preceding
Greek assembly. Second, Priam is convinced that the Greeks do not really pose
a threat to his empire (II. 6910-14). Third, his (hurt) pride propels his transpar-
ency, which he notices himself: “Êe fret of Ire put me in swiche distres, / Êat, in
good feith, I may it nat sustene” (II. 6962-63).23 While Lydgate’s slight modifi-
cations of the two ‘parliamentary’ sessions highlight ethical questions, the
changes likewise reinforce the dichotomy between transparent Trojans and
opaque Greeks. At the same time, Lydgate structurally complicates pro-
sopagraphical selfhood by drawing attention to the expediency of manipulating
public appearances, including the fabrication of seeming transparency.
The (ethical) problems with masking are also attendant upon the battles, most
prominently concerning the fights between Achilles and Hector, the latter being
the principal hero of Book III. As in the Historia, Achilles is portrayed as an
emotional character, who implicitly challenges Greek opacity. His emotional
changeability is first introduced (earlier than in the Historia), when Telephus
and he war on Teuthras in Messina in order to procure provisions for the cam-
paign (II. 7248) – a campaign that suggests that masking hatred in the service of
“knyõtly rouõêe” (II. 7340) is problematic.24 Lydgate’s Myrmidons are “So en-

23
Lydgate changes the depiction of Diomede in keeping with Troy Book’s juxtaposition of
Trojan transparency and Greek opacity. Instead of bursting into laughter (Historia XII,
108), Diomede only smiles in Troy Book (II. 6966); his speech causes outrage among the
Trojans: “But êan in haste ageyn êis Dyamede, / Surquedous and most ful of pride, / Êer
rose vp some be êe kinges syde / With swerdis drawe, & on hym han falle” (II. 6992-95).
Again, the mentioned pride cuts two ways. Because of the ambiguous syntactical con-
struction, either Diomede or the ireful Trojans can be seen as proud. Ironically, Priam
manages to adopt the mask of prudence at this point, arguing that “A wys man moste suf-
fre paciently,” since only fools make public their foolishness (II. 7006). Priam prefers to
suffer rather than kill a messenger.
24
As Achilles is about to slay Teuthras, Telephus intervenes, asking him to exert “gentilles”
vis-à-vis the distressed enemy (II. 7314). Achilles eventually concedes when Telephus re-
iterates his request for “knyõtly” and “manly rouêe” (II. 7340, 7310), at which point
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 527

vious of hate to desyre / Newe & newe for to schede her blood” (II. 8588-89),
and Achilles becomes a “fel cruel knyõt,” who slays children in the sight of their
fathers; Achilles becomes a “chivalric antitype.”25 While Lydgate stresses Achil-
les’s (Ovidian) changeability and emotionality, he also embellishes Hector’s
prudence. Thus, Hector enters the Trojan War as the son of Mars (III. 397, 490,
504), the epitome of knighthood, and – in a phrase recalling Criseyde’s role as a
pilot – he is “Of worêines [..] êe lode-sterre” (II. 8476). Hector, an aggressive
knight nevertheless troubled by his command of the army in the Historia (XV,
127), transforms into “Worêi Ector, whiche in êe cite / Next Priam had of alle
souereinte” (III. 21-22) in Troy Book. Moreover, Hector’s prudence is increas-
ingly stressed (e.g., III. 124, 312, 490). This allows Lydgate to muse more ex-
tensively on the lack of prudence of other knights, for instance, Troilus.26
Given the broad outline of the Troy story, there are limits to Lydgate’s modi-
fications regarding Hector’s prudence – or lack thereof. Hector’s problematic
desire becomes visible after his killing of Patroclus, whose weapons the Trojan
would like for himself (III. 796-98; Historia XV, 134, cited above). Lydgate
motivates Hector’s desire by means of a detailed description of the ornamented
weapons absent from the Historia (III. 800-11; see Laud 4991-96). Merion at-
tacks Hector before he can despoil Patroclus, however.27 Later on, Hector retali-
ates when coming across Merion on the battlefield. In the Historia, Hector is en-
raged by the fact that Merion interrupted him (XV, 145), but Lydgate liberally
adds that Merion was so bold “To lettyn me of my riche praye,” when despoil-
ing Patroclus, “Êat for cause êou were presumptuous / Me to distourbe, êou

Teuthras has been mortally wounded. Telephus’s “gentilles” contrasts sharply with Achil-
les’s cruelty (see II. 7509, 7532), and the former condemns the latter’s fury and unre-
strained desire, which suggests that it was ‘knightly ruth’ that incorporated Messina into
the empire. And yet, would Messina become Greek without Achilles’s rampant emotional-
ity? The slaying of Hector and Troilus is accomplished by opacity; only momentarily does
Achilles subject “the concerns of the country to his personal desire.” Ebin, John Lydgate
46.
25
Edwards, “Lydgate’s Troy Book” 64.
26
While Hector is worried about Troilus’s lack of prudence in the Historia, these worries are
expanded in Troy Book insofar as Lydgate greatly emphasizes Troilus’s “hasty wilfulnes,”
which should be restrained by a mask: “But late prudence kepe êe in a mene, / And wis-
dam eke holden aõen êe rene / Of êin hert & êi ferce corage, / Êat fired han êi grene tendre
age.” Subsequently, Hector asks Mars to protect Troilus (III. 211-14, 218-21). Like Aga-
memnon, Hector is able to learn from past mistakes, especially as concerns avoiding Tro-
jan “reklesnes” (III. 447, 451-52).
27
Lydgate appears to be troubled by the fact that Hector, on account of Merion’s attack, has
to bend down on one knee and adds “As seith Guydo” (III. 837). Hector also reacts emo-
tionally after Teucer attacks him only to then withdraw from the battle immediately. In
both works, Hector cannot control his anger and goes after Teucer, risking his life. In a
speech expanded by Lydgate, Theseus admonishes Hector for his inability to control his
emotions: “But wilfully, where most is to drede, / Êi lif iupartist, and take list noon hede, /
In mortal pereil how êou arte be-set” (III. 1307-09; and see III. 1317-18).
528 Interchapter Two

schalt anon be ded” (III. 1900-03). In Troy Book, despoiling Patroclus therefore
increasingly emerges as Hector’s right rather than a whim. Although this ex-
cuses Hector’s culpability to a certain extent, Trojan procrastination, pride, and
foolish ruth prevent Trojan victory. After an invocation of changeable Fortuna,28
Lydgate again ostracizes Trojan willfulness and lack of prudence (III. 1967-68,
1977-78, 1998). A particularly vexing moment occurs when Hector recognizes
that he is dueling one of his relatives: Ajax. As in other passages, Lydgate modi-
fies his source in order to excuse Hector’s changeability – after all, Hector’s (at-
tempted) modification of public discourse is analogous to Lydgate’s changeabil-
ity. Lydgate thus wonders whether it is not natural that Hector should exert
mercy when facing his kin – “For naturelly blod wil ay of kynde / Draw vn-to
blod, wher he may it fynde, / Whiche made Hector kyndly to aduerte.”29 Hector
acts like a true knight: “To be mevid and sterid in his herte, / Bothe of knyõthod
and of gentilnes, / Whan he of Aiax sawe êe worêines” (III. 2071-76; cf. Histo-
ria XV, 146). In a further addition, Hector becomes Lydgate’s vehicle to deline-
ate Trojan and Greek domains. Ajax declines Hector’s offer to join him (and his
Trojan family in Troy) for a civilized tea time and elucidates an imperial senti-
ment that is latent in Guido’s history: since he was born and raised in Greece,
And taken had êe ordre and degre
Of knyõthood eke amongis hem a-forn,
And, ouer êis, bounde was and sworn
To be trewe to her nacioun,
Makyng of blood noon excepcioun,
He swore he wold conserven his beheste... (III. 2100-05)
In other words, there is an important epistemological difference between the
Trojan and Greek system of knighthood, both of which operate on different
principles: familial genealogy (blood ties) among the Trojans and the adoption
of an imperial hypergood, unrelated to personal relationships, among the
Greeks. Ajax adheres to the latter in his appeal to Hector’s “manfull gentilnes.”
If he “Wolde of knyõthood and of worêines / Shewe vn-to hym so gret affec-
cioun” to stop the war for the time being, he would be very grateful (III. 2108-
09). Unwittingly, Hector acts like Priam, complying with a familial model that,
in the light of the Greek acclamatory model, must appear as outdated. Where
Hector doffs his martial mask, the Greek imperial mask remains firmly in place
and prevents personal issues from interfering in public matters. Where Ajax
ponders the long term consequences of his actions, Hector inclines to accept
Ajax’s proposal “of hasty wilfulnes” (III. 2123). Although Lydgate excuses

28
While Lydgate stresses the role of the fates, he also echoes Chaucer in that “Fortune’s fa-
vor must be answered by a willingness to accept Fortune in her beneficent aspect and to
act on her favors when they are offered.” Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio 50.
29
Lydgate himself would naturally be drawn to his kynde, that is, to Brutus’s Albion (and his
patron), too, which may motivate his justification of Trojan fickleness.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 529

Hector’s changeability by making it a matter of blood,30 he modifies his source

indicating that national identity, at least from a Greek perspective, is not a mat-
ter of blood. This suggests – also in the light of Lydgate’s characterization of
female masking and his own rhetorical performance – that Trojan (histori-
ographical) determinism can be avoided by adopting an ontological model that
is capable of maintaining a degree of transparency (Troy) and opacity (Greece).
The protector of Troy ultimately falls on account of his Trojan willfulness,
which is increasingly stressed.31 For example, Andromache dreams about Hec-
tor’s death and hopes “Êat hir lord nat distroyed be / Of rekleshede, nor of wil-
fulnes” (III. 4983). Priam, who prudently organizes the troops that day (III.
5014-16) is nevertheless incapable of keeping Hector from fighting, the latter
believing that his place is on the field – “So hool in manhod was his hert[e]
sette” (III. 5045). Like Chaucer’s Troilus, Hector cannot mask an overpowering
good that prevents him from assuming multiple roles at the same time. At first,
Priam manages to convince Hector to stay in Troy “In swiche wyse, he durst it
nat withseyn” (III. 5128). Eventually, however, Priam’s ‘prudence’ is no match
for Hector’s emotionality. Where Guido reports that Hector reluctantly obeys his
father, Lydgate adds that he stays behind “Al-be êat he felte his herte rive / Of
malencolie and of hertly Ire,” feeling like an angry tiger or lion lacking prey,
“liche a bore êat his tusshes whette” (III. 5134-35, 5141). Upon receiving news
of Margariton’s death, Hector’s sorrow in the Historia – “multo dolore torque-
tur” (XXI, 174) – transforms into hatred and vengeance in Troy Book: “Of ver-
ray Ire his herte gan to colde, / And seide, platly, with-oute more delay, / He
wolde avenge his deth êe same day” (III. 5238-40).32 In sum, Hector’s prudence
remains effective only in the realm of theory.
The duel between Achilles and Hector is one between two over-
emotionalized knights. Although Achilles begins to ponder quickly “Be what
engyne Hector myõt[e] deye” (III. 5284),33 his first attempt to kill him fails,
since he is too emotional: “For Ire he wexe in his herte as wood / As boor or ti-
gre in her cruel mood” (III. 5297-98). Hector’s recklessness is also expanded. In

30
Lydgate later praises Hector’s lack of willfulness, when offering Achilles a one-to-one
combat to settle the Trojan War. Lydgate reports that Hector acts “nat to hastely” with a
sober countenance: “As he êat was in no êing rek[e]les” (III. 3870, 3873).
31
Hector’s portrait in Book II already alerts readers to rhetorical weaknesses which, in Troy
Book, correlate with political and martial deficiencies. Lydgate emphasizes that Hector is a
man of “wordis fewe” and that despite the fact that he does not lack anything, “in his
tongue he was let a lite” (II. 4827, 4846).
32
At this point, Lydgate describes Hector as cruel, an adjective usually reserved for devious
Greek knights, and as merciless (III. 5267, 5272), that is, as knowing no restraints.
33
In the Historia, Achilles should kill the sole defender of Troy by means of his strength and
ingenuity (Historia XVII, 151). Cleverness turns into treason in Troy Book: Hector should
be killed by “som sleiõt,” so that when Hector is surrounded by (too) many Greeks, Achil-
les can do his “besynes, / With al his myõt vnwarly him to assaille” (III. 2705, 2708-09).
530 Interchapter Two

an addition to the Historia, Hector takes captive an unnamed Greek king (XXI,
175) whose armor glistens in the sun and is beautifully ornamented with diverse
jewels (III. 5334-43; cf. Historia XXI, 175). This inevitably prompts a familiar
behavioral pattern on Hector’s part, showcasing his inability to learn from past
mistakes – Hector’s earlier criticism of Priam’s inability to do so notwithstand-
ing (III. 5344). In Troy Book, Hector slays the Greek knight and moves the
corpse to the side of the battlefield in order to, “At good leiser, pleynly, õif he
may, / To spoillen hym of his riche array, / Ful glad & liõt of his newe emprise”
(III. 5351-53). Lydgate complains about Hector’s “couetyse” which does not
behoove a knight and which settles Hector’s death: “For of desire to hym êat he
hadde, / On horse-bake oute whan he hym ladde / Reklesly, êe story maketh
mynde”; Hector removes his armor, practically inviting Achilles to slay him
from behind (III. 5373-75, emphases added). Hector’s imprudence could not
stand out more sharply.34 Again, these minor but effective alterations regarding
changeability are related to poetological issues. After reporting Hector’s death,
Lydgate proclaims that he “can no more” (III. 5419), appropriating a Chaucerian
narratorial strategy that calls into question his point-to-point translation. In Book
III of the Troilus, Chaucer’s poet uses the phrase to describe his inability to con-
vey the lovers’ bliss (III. 1314); at the end of the poem, opaque Pandarus
stresses how much he has come to loath Criseyde, before ending his last speech
on “I kan namore seye” (Troilus V. 1743).35 Lydgate’s use of a phrase that
prominently recalls the rhetorical inability of someone otherwise adept at con-
structing opacity, signals Lydgate’s inability to remain entirely opaque, to adopt
fully the imperial point of view advocated by his source. Not knowing how to
proceed with the story after Hector’s death, he witnesses, as does Guido, the
Trojan retreat from the battlefield (III. 5423), and complains about the absence
of a muse capable of aiding him in expressing his mourning. In this context, he
contends that the muses are ill-suited for conveying woe, “As tragedies, al to-
tore and rent, / In compleynynge pitously in rage / In êe theatre, with a ded vis-
age” (III. 5440-42). Lydgate’s reference to tragedy points to another important

34
Hector’s death is caused by “a lapse from noble prudence [...].” Nicholas Watson, “Outdo-
ing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid as Competitive
Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde,” Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A
“Festschrift” for Dr Elspeth Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994) 94. See
further L. Staley Johnson, “The Medieval Hector: A Double Tradition,” Mediaevalia 5
(1979): 171; Benson, “Prudence.” Achilles’s actions, which Guido does not blacken at this
point, are ethically complicated in Troy Book insofar as Achilles was lying in wait for an
opportunity to treacherously kill Hector (III. 5385-86). Accordingly, he is described as
cruel and venemous (III. 5389), which suggests that Achilles’s opacity corresponds to that
of the serpents hiding under the flowers, Lydgate’s favorite metaphor for discussing the
rhetoric of veiling.
35
The “I can no more” also recalls the end of Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, in which the per-
sona turns over hermeneutic control to the audience (V. 1621-24).
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 531

element in his investigation of masking, of changeability, and of Chaucerian

translucence – an element that later evolves as central to the poem and to
Lydgate’s poetic project. It is Chaucerian translucence that Lydgate is unable to
contain here. In due course, however, it emerges that Lydgate has no intention of
suppressing Chaucerian changeability and hybridity.
Hector’s death prompts further poetological reflections that are couched in a
Chaucerian framework and engage the generic dichotomies inherent in the Troy
story. First, Lydgate turns to the furies, notably Thesiphone, who is also invoked
in the Troilus (I. 6-7, cited above); in fact, Lydgate mentions all of the three fu-
ries invoked by Chaucer’s poet (Megera, Thesiphone, and Alecto, in IV. 24).
The invocation thus points back to a Chaucerian passage which, in turn, alludes
to the weeping verses of Ovid’s Tristia – an allusion that undermines Virgilian,
epic grandeur. Moreover, Lydgate also echoes the poet’s further observation in
the Troilus that it is appropriate for “A woful wight to han a drery feere, / And to
a sorwful tale, a sory chere” (Troilus I. 14, and see IV. 14-15; Troy Book III.
5455). These allusions suggest that Lydgate ultimately tends toward an Ovidian
narrative stance, a translucent rather than opaque or transparent poetics. Second,
Hector’s death is seen as tantamount to the loss of the Trojans’ (guiding) light,
with overtones of Troilus’s lament upon facing Criseyde’s empty palace: “Allas,
allas! for now êi briõt[e] sonne / Eclipsed is, and êou stanst desolat / Of al com-
fort, and discounsolat,” complains Lydgate (III. 5486-88; Troilus V. 540-42). 36
The loss of authoritative guidance for the Trojans analogizes Lydgate’s occa-
sional ‘loss’ of his guide Guido. Lydgate’s added agonizing about Troy’s des-
tiny (III. 5419-503) unveils his increasing inability to relieve his own emotional
distress, and it demonstrates Lydgate’s ineptitude to impose a Virgilian veil on
the changeable Book of Troilus.37 Lydgate’s mentioned discussion of the theatri-
cal world is important in this respect, since it spells out the problems of point-to-
point translation and of changeability. A much clearer view on Lydgate’s dis-

36
These allusions are recorded by Edwards (399nn).
37
Achilles’s mask likewise brittles in a Chaucerian framework, especially when he attends –
“With-oute wisdam or discrecioun” (IV. 548) – the Trojan festivities honoring the anni-
versary of Hector’s death. After returning from the Trojan camp, he reclines to bed, makes
a mirror of Polyxena, and laments that she conquered him with “êe stremys of hir eyen
tweyne” which “percid hath and corve[n] euery veyne / Of myn hert, êat I may nat asterte /
For to be ded, êoruõ constreint of my smerte!” (IV. 640-46, 673-76). For Chaucerian allu-
sions, see Edwards 402-03nn. Achilles’s attempt to convince the Greeks to stop the siege
tellingly ends, like Lydgate’s lament concerning Hector’s death, on “I can no more” (IV.
1134), wherefore Achilles’s rhetorical ability parallels Lydgate’s failure to mute his own
Ovidian tendencies. Achilles transforms into an Ovidian lover: he is fully controlled by
Venus (IV. 1550-56), while Lydgate’s Troilus, ironically, adopts Mars as a guide (IV.
1649). Prudent Ulysses (IV. 1698-700) complains about Achilles’s changeability and de-
viance from Greek ideology (IV. 1725, 1714-16), standing the ideology of prudence on its
head insofar as Ulysses argues that “rek[e]les” Achilles’s clouds his shining glory (IV.
1779-85).
532 Interchapter Two

cussion of (his own) rhetorical performance, which replicates rather than sup-
presses Chaucerian translucence, can be obtained after an examination of female
masking in Troy Book. Female veiling meanders between prudence and the eth-
ics of covetousness and represents the most intricate engagement with masking
in Lydgate’s Troy Book.

2. “I, [...] my silf allone”: Medea, Helen, and Criseyde

Lydgate’s discussion of male veiling emphasizes the necessity to veil personal
emotionality by means of opaque masks while implicitly suggesting that change-
ability is unavoidable. The masking practices exemplified by the Troy Book
women offer a solution as to how the dichotomy between transparency and
opacity can be resolved. Medea, the first example of female inconstancy, is in-
troduced as a far more complex character than in the Historia insofar as her por-
trait recalls the hybridity of Guido’s Polyxena and Chaucer’s Criseyde. Moreo-
ver, Lydgate’s transformation of Medea indicates his own Ovidian changeability
and his attempts to legitimate the latter.38 While Medea is changeable, she is also
depicted as capable of masking her changeability with an opaque mask that has
all the appearance of transparency. Although Lydgate initially condemns this
‘female’ duplicity, it nonetheless represents the only tenable path for her sur-
vival – and provides a viable poetological model for Lydgate, who pressingly
needs to resolve the increasing tension between Chaucerian Ovidianism and
Guidoan Virgilianism. In the case of Helen, Lydgate initially expands Guidoan
antifeminism, whereby her rhetorical talents are problematized. It is only by
means of her eloquence, however, that she is able to mask and unmask herself as
appropriate and thus requires no go-between in a situation that resembles Troi-
lus’s courting of Criseyde in the Troilus. The prosopagraphical translucence an-
ticipated in the characterizations of Medea and Helen is foregrounded in
Lydgate’s handling of Criseyde, which emphasizes her exilic predicament.
Wondering how she could possibly survive among the Greeks, she finds a solu-
tion in the rhetoric discerned already in the two other women; by means of
changeability, individual desires and public necessities can be reconciled.
Lydgate’s modifications and his expanded antifeminist passages – allegedly to
be found in the Historia – underscore his fabrication of an opaque mask that
veils his Chaucerian Ovidianism: Lydgate discovers in Criseyde a way of link-
ing Virgil and Ovid, Guido and Chaucer, opacity and transparency – that is, he
finds a way of authorizing a poetics of changeability.
Lydgate’s depiction of Medea’s appearance immediately emphasizes the hy-
bridity which Guido attempts to veil. Lydgate focuses on her “rosene hewe” and
her “lyle white” which are “So entermedled” that “finally excesse was êer noon”

38
According to Lynn Shutters, the Troy Book women are not only equated with rhetorical
(dis)guise but pose ontological questions as well. Shutters, “Truth, Translation, and the
Troy Book Women,” Comitatus 32 (2001): esp. 78-83.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 533

(I. 1578, 1579, 1580, 1585). From this balanced outward appearance, Lydgate
moves on to her surpassing intellectual abilities. Like the muses, “At Elicon sche
drank so of êe welle / Êat in hir tyme was êer noon semblable” (I. 1612-13).
Muting Guido’s stress on her ‘scientific’ disposition,39 Lydgate makes explicit
what is implicit in the Historia: as with Polyxena and Criseyde, Medea’s hybrid-
ity of masks – that is, her balanced individuality – is a matter of narrative, asso-
ciated with Ovidian poetics. Medea’s transformations, all reported by Master
Ovid, are irreconcilable with Christian doctrine – Ovid must have lied (I. 1707-
1800). The one-to-one translation of individual desire onto nature (and collec-
tive discourse) can be achieved only by God. Only under His “disposicioun / Is
lawe of kynde constreyned, soth to seie, / From point to point lowly to obeye” (I.
1768-70). In other words, Medea is not able to transform her environment ac-
cording to her desires. This acknowledgement parallels Ovid’s (persona’s) reali-
zation at the end of his career that he cannot translate his intentions – from
point-to-point – into discursive strategies that are readily decoded either. It is
important to note here that Lydgate himself bases his poetic project on the con-
struction of one-to-one correspondences between source and target domains.
Like Lydgate, then, Ovid and Medea are incapable of making their desires and
emotions entirely transparent.
Medea’s balanced outer appearance gives rise to further considerations of
masking. Thus Lydgate discusses Medea’s attire, as does the Destruction of
Troy, the emphasis falling on women’s capacity to veil their blemishes, of
which, in the case of Medea there are none: “Õif ouõt be mysse, êei can it close
and hide, / For al êe foule schal couertly be wried, / Êat no defaute outward be
espied” (I. 1812-14).40 This passage recalls Ovid’s advice to women to make
sure to veil their deficiencies (Ars III. 251-80). While it thus seems as though
Lydgate wants to resurrect Benoît’s and Chaucer’s emphases on the necessity of
changeability, Lydgate’s embellishment of Guido’s already harsh antifeminism
calls this strategy into question – at least seemingly. Medea’s ability to linguisti-
cally mask her intentions becomes a matter of plurality, of threatening duplicity.
Women in general, Lydgate argues, are “double & ful of brotilnesse.” From
birth onward, they have “alliaunce / With doubilnes and with variaunce” (I.
1850, 1853-54), their hearts are unstable and mutable so that clerks who write
about them “(Al-be êat I am sori it to write) / Êei seyn êat chawng and mutabilite
/ Appropred ben to femyn[yn]yte” (I. 1858-60). In contrast to the transparent
mappings attributed to God, a woman’s “herte acordeth ful selde with her tonge”
39
Guido specifies that Medea gave herself to the study of the liberal arts, “so completely
drinking in the Helicon of science with eagerness of heart that no man or woman could be
found in those days who was more learned than she” [sic totum cordis auiditate scientie
inbibens Elycona ut nullus uel nulla ea doctior posset illis temporibus reperiri] (II, 15).
40
Neither the Destruction (II. 433-36) nor the Historia (II, 17) emphasizes the aspect of veil-
ing to the same extent as does Lydgate. Like the detailed description of Medea’s hybrid
face, the excursus is original with Troy Book.
534 Interchapter Two

(I. 1864).41 Not only are women unstable and lack any goods, they further flout
the maxim of transparency since they do not ‘translate’ from point to point –
their innate ‘plurality’ is hidden and does not penetrate the surface:
For êei be nat content with vnite:
Êei pursue ay for pluralite,
So of nature to mevyng êei be thewed;
Al-êouõ amonge, by signes outward schewed,
Êei pretende a maner stabilnes;
But vnder êat is hid êe dowbilnes
So secretly, êat outward at êe eye
Ful harde it is êe tresoun to espie.
Vnder curteyn and veil of honeste,
Is closed chaunge and mutabilite;
For her desyr is kepte ful cloos in mewe;
And êing êei hadde leuest for to sewe,
Only outward for to haue a laude,
Êei can decline with feynyng and with fraude.
(I. 1891-904, emphases added)
If Agamemnon’s masking is prudent, Medea’s (and women’s) creation of the
illusion of unity (and transparency) by means of veiling multiplicity amounts to
“sham prudence.”42 Lydgate harshly indicts this strategy and refers to Medea’s
masking as treasonous disloyalty, foreshadowing her shameful neglect of her
country. Problematically, however, (sham) prudence represents the only suc-
cessful strategy to warrant survival in Troy Book insofar as it reinterprets
changeability as adaptability, as the capacity to reconcile personal with collec-
tive goods: sham prudence makes individuality – and incisively characterizes
Lydgate’s poetics. What Lydgate ‘learns’ from the Troy Book women is encap-
sulated in the Ovidian dictum that “uir male dissimulat, tectius illa cupit” [men
badly dissimulate; her desire is better veiled].43
Lydgate’s alterations of his source implicitly emphasize his own changeabil-
ity, his wavering between different positions and perspectives on Medea.
Moreover, in Troy Book, Medea evaluates her own actions as well. In her opin-

41
Lydgate, qua Guido, translates into English Andreas Capellanus’s De amore III, 345-47.
The passage is cited in Chapter Seven.
42
Edwards, “Lydgate’s Troy Book” 59.
43
P. Ovidi Nasonis Amores, Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris,
ed. E. J. Kenney, Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1961) I. 276. Lydgate makes Medea seem even worse than she appears already in
the Historia. In Troy Book, Medea not only behaves disloyally toward her country and her
father, she also steals her father’s treasure (I. 1945-48). Medea’s courtship of Jason bears
similarities to Troilus’s affliction with love in the Troilus. Medea imprints Jason’s image
both in her thought and her mind (her “remembraunce” [I. 1972-74, 1989]), whereby
Lydgate invokes Love as the controlling agency (I. 1990-96). In comparison to Medea,
Troilus’s inability to veil his emotionality stands out starkly.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 535

ion, her behavior is based on transparency, moral purity, and, therefore, is

“With-oute fraude or any doubilnes – / So clene and pure is myn entencioun!”
(I. 2070-71). Subsequently, Lydgate embellishes Guido’s quibbles about (fe-
male) masking, however, employing his familiar metaphors vis-à-vis (rhetorical)
duplicity.44 And yet, he explains that he only touches on this since it is included
in the source he (allegedly) translates from point to point. Most women, he says
– not translating the Historia from point to point – are perfect: “Êei ben so gode
and parfyte euerechon” (I. 2105). Even though women constantly take new lov-
ers, they do so only because their role models are men: “For ofte tyme êei se
men do êe same” (I. 2110).45 Significantly, his desire to excuse women is
Chaucerian, and Troy Book suitably echoes the frequent Chaucerian wish (‘if I
could’) to excuse Criseyde: “õif I koude I wolde hem excuse,” “õif I myõt it
schul[de] ben amendid” (I. 2112, 2122). Lydgate’s wish to exonerate Medea
goes beyond his source, and Medea’s distress on account of her uncontrollable
love for Jason, mentioned by Guido in passing, is explicated allegorically by
Lydgate – an allegory that anticipates the outcome of the Trojan War.
Medea’s predicament resembles that of Troilus, Criseyde, and Chaucer’s
poet, despite Lydgate’s allusion to Pandarian opacity in the initial description of
Medea’s plight. Love and Shame, he observes in an addition, are violently at
war in Medea, “And êis contek, in ernes and no game, / Iuparted was betwixe
Loue and Schame” (I. 2163-64).46 This contest is not a Pandarian game, how-
ever. Rather, it has serious ethical implications, the more so since the war be-
tween Love and Shame structurally corresponds to the dichotomy between
transparency and opacity that informs the conflict between Troy and Greece.
Love and Shame ‘meet’ at an unfixed time and, “êe felde was nat parted evene,”
since Love is bold and hardy, fierce as a lion, undaunted by spear, sword, or
knife, hot and hasty, arrogant, stout, and full of pride. He has cost many people
their lives, “For of pereil Loue taketh noon hede / To gete hym honour by excel-
lence of fame” (I. 2166, 2178-79). In contrast, Love’s adversary is spiritless and
heartless like a coward. He is as fearful of the consequences as a child and often
lacks courage; however, “For Drede and Schame, whan êei ben allied, / Of on
assent haue pitously denyed / Vn-to Loue, herte and hardines, / Êat he ne durst
out a worde expres.” Thus, Shame is “froward and contrayre, / Êoruõ help of
44
Women, Lydgate writes, “can her fraude with florissyng wel diffende.” They hide their
deceit “Vndre êe sugre of feyned clene entent” and “vnder floures depeint of stabilnes, /
Êe serpent dareth of newfongilnes” (I. 2082, 2086, 2091-92).
45
Lydgate indeed blames Jason, who is “false and eke vnkynde” (I. 3603, and see 3611,
3694, 3704). See further Alain Renoir, “Attitudes Toward Women in Lydgate’s Poetry,”
English Studies 42.1 (1961): 11; Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1967) 86-90.
46
The phrase faintly recalls Pandarus’s self-description, according to which he is “bicomen,
/ Bitwixen game and ernest, swich a meene / As maken wommen unto men to comen”
(Troilus III. 253-55).
536 Interchapter Two

Drede, Lovis folk to fere” (I. 2191-94, 2202-03). In other words, if Shame were
not to mask Love partially, the latter would be completely out of bounds. As a
consequence, women fall – like castles:
For ne were Schame pleinly êe wardeyne
Of êis wommen, by writyng of êis olde,
With-out assaut êe castel were y-õolde;
It were no nede a sege for to leyn:
For in swyche case longe trete were in veyne;
For of nature êei loue no processe. (I. 2218-23)
Whenever Love was threatening to “declare hem oute, / Cam Schame anoon,
and put him in [a] doute; / And Drede was redy his lust for to denye” (I. 2237-
39). The introduction of Shame and Dread’s attempt to ward off Love is a
Lydgatean addition that recalls Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman
de la Rose. In the latter, Shame and Dread are ultimately defeated by Love,
whose art Jean de Meun’s continuation “recasts [...] as the craft of duplicity and
guile.”47 By means of duplicitous rhetoric, Love attacks a castle which turns out
to be insufficiently guarded by Shame and Dread – a fit (allegorical) analogue to
the fall of Troy. After all, Shame’s inefficient masking practices correlate with
Trojan changeability and emotional transparency, which cause the first and sec-
ond destruction of the city. Among other things, it is Priam’s lack of Dread, the
lack of respect for the Greek empire criticized by Hector, that results in the kid-
napping of Helen and, eventually, in the final destruction of Troy.
In the course of Medea and Jason’s rendezvous, another agency is structur-
ally aligned with Love and Medea, namely, Lady Fortuna. She aids Love in
conquering Shame and thus provides time and space for Medea to approach Ja-
son. Like Peleus and many Troy Book women, Fortuna trades in opacity. She is
a “lady of transmvtacioun,” “vnstable,” and she “Can vnder sugre schrowden

47
Robert R. Edwards, The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer (New York:
Palgrave, 2006) 106. In the Roman de la Rose, Honte, one of the keepers of the Rose, is
unable to control Bel Acuel (3568-600). As a consequence, Jalousy builds a presumably
invincible castle and imprisons the Rose and Bel Acuel (3601-37). Eventually, the castle
does fall and Honte is overcome: “Aprés Delit et Bien Celer, / Iront por Honte escerveler”
[Thanne shal Delit and Wel-Heelynge / Fonde Shame adown to brynge] (10729-30, trans.
Chaucer, Romaunt of the Rose 5857-58). After the castle is almost taken and Honte is im-
prisoned, the God of Love intervenes and a truce is granted (15630-58). Venus, however,
joins the war on Chastaé (15772-890) and assaults the castle. Honte defends the fortifica-
tion, if necessary, on her own: “Certes, Venus, ce est neens. / Ja ne metrés le pié ceens. / –
Non voir, s’il n’i avoit que moy, / Dist Honte, point ne m’en esmoy” [“Venus,” said
Shame, “that is clearly impossible. You will never set foot in here, not even if it were only
me. I shall never fear”] (20715-18, trans. Dahlberg). When Venus sends a fiery arrow into
the tower, Dangier, Poor, and Honte flee (21273-76) – no masks are left. Guillaume de
Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1974), trans.
by Charles Dahlberg, The Romance of the Rose, 3rd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1995).
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 537

her poysoun.” She is double insofar as her “fayr chere and face of flaterie” mask
her contrary intentions (I. 2258, 2259, 2262, 2265).48 Coming from the Historia,
readers would expect to see Medea enlisted in this genealogy of female incon-
stancy. Lydgate, however, emphasizes Jason’s duplicity instead: underneath his
“faire chere was feynyng [and] fallas” (I. 2879).49 Medea, in contrast, is trans-
parent during their rendezvous and is doomed to lose her “good[e] fame” as a
consequence of her eventual choice of exile (I. 2897). Where Guido is surprised
about Medea’s inability to foresee her own destiny and accordingly hypothesizes
that she would claim to have been carried away by love, Lydgate simply asserts
that “Loue hadde hir put out of gouernaille, / Êat al hir crafte ne miõt her not
availle” (I. 2923-24). Her emotional changeability conquers prudence: because
the masks of Shame and Dread have been penetrated by Love, Medea becomes
transparent, whereby Lydgate (unlike Guido) appears to waver between feeling
sympathy and antipathy for Medea.50
Lydgate’s indecision is understandable given his general confusion about
masking, which in and of itself is unproblematic. It is the informing ethics, how-
ever, that complicates opaque prosopagraphy. In every central episode of Troy
Book, Lydgate more or less explicitly considers the dichotomy between trans-
parency and opacity that plays the crucial role in the Historia. Especially in his
descriptions of female duplicity, masking is related to the (Ovidian) issue of
control. Medea’s changeability is a matter of instability and of abandoning self-
interest – that is, her choice of exile – placing Jason’s wellbeing above her own
and that of her kingdom. A brief allusion to Fortuna in her portrait links
Medea’s inability to control her emotions with the fate of Troy, which is over-
powered by Greek opacity. A little later, Lydgate retains and expands Guido’s
passing mention of the fates as responsible for the destruction of Troy.
Lydgate’s Fortuna is “fals and flekeryng,” “fikel, and vnstable,” as well as “ful
mutable.” Her face “êat partid is on tweyne / Schewen most hool, whan sche is
leste to triste” (II. 2, 5, 6, 10-11). The threat of Fortuna, Lydgate’s comments
suggest, lies in her uncontrolled, unbalanced veiling, the description of which is
48
Jason and Medea reassure each other of their mutual transparency (I. 2305-06, 2385,
2410).
49
Lydgate appears to be ambivalent about Jason’s newly-acquired opacity. On the one hand,
Jason prudently adopts imperial opacity and thus appears, in his quest for the Golden
Fleece, as a ‘manly man’ (I. 3205-06, 3228, 3297). On the other hand, Jason’s opacity en-
tails the duplicity associated with Peleus. Despite his opacity, Jason is unable to espy
Aeëtes’s feigning, which is emphasized in Troy Book (I. 3446, 3448-50, 3468-84, 3468-
69). Medea is emotionally transparent: her anger finally results in the slaughtering of her
two sons who looked like their father. Moreover, Lydgate reports about Jason “How
falsely he, I can hym not excuse, / Loued another êat called was Ceruse” (I. 3709-10).
50
Lydgate explicitly offers the Medea episode as a warning to women: “Be exavmple of
whiche, wommen myõt[e] lere / How êei schulde truste on any man” (I. 2918-19). Lydgate
also mutes Medea’s sexual enjoyment in comparison with Guido (I. 2936-65; cf. Historia
III, 25).
538 Interchapter Two

reminiscent of his earlier characterization of Medea. Fortuna is “vn-evene pei-

syng in balaunce / With conterfet and feyned contenaunce” (II. 17-18), a “fals[e]
lady of transmutacioun,” a “quene of variaunce,” and a “double lady of mutabil-
ite” (II. 30, 67, 72). Lydgate’s excuses for Medea notwithstanding, then, “the
Ethik of false couetise” associated with Peleus is prevalent not only among the
Greeks and the Trojan traitors, but also among women like Medea – and Helen.
Female duplicity emerges more immediately in Lydgate’s description of
Helen. Helen learns about the arrival of Paris and the Trojans chiefly because
the latter are incapable of masking their identity. Helen, however, is able to
mask her rapidly changing desires. By means of her rhetorical abilities – her
colors – she is able to attend the festival of Venus in order to see Paris: “Vnder
colour of holy pilgrymage, / To êe temple sche takeê hir viage” (II. 3527-28).
While Guido is skeptical about festivals since men practice their craft there to
‘ensnare the hearts of women’ (VII, 70), Lydgate’s women assemble at festivals
“Wher êei may finde opportunyte / To her desyre” (II. 3540-41) to ensnare the
hearts of men – “With arm or foot to cache vp in her les / Whom êat hem list, al-
be he fre or bonde” (II. 3548-49). This Ovidian topos, reminiscent of Ovid’s list
of places to meet women (Ars I. 67-268), is designed to further Guido’s antifem-
inism, whereby Guido, who actually accuses men at this point, is to blame for
this. Lydgate condemns Guido for his “cursid fals delit” (II. 3555-68) and moves
on to pity Helen for her unwise decision to give free reign to her desires. Adding
insult to injury, Lydgate – allegedly loath to tell Guido’s tale – continues to in-
dict women: “O mortal harme, êat most is for to drede! / A, fraude y-cast be
sleiõt of wommanhede.” Once lust has driven the nail into a woman’s heart, she
burns with fervent desire, “Wher-êoruõ, allas, ful many man was lorn, / Of cruel
deth embracid in êe cheyne / With-oute pite!” (II. 3575-76, 3586-88). In Guido’s
description of the festivals, women – Helen included – are clearly the victims,
while Lydgate’s portrait suggests that Helen is actively misbehaving. Guido em-
phasizes that she is the cause of the Trojan War.51 Lydgate thus greatly expands
Guido’s advice that women should never stray too far from their homes, men-
tioning only in passing that her seeing of Paris is the venom infecting Greece
(VII. 70-71). Lydgate then turns to matters of masking, admonishing Helen who
“schust a kepte êi closet secrely” and who could not mask her desires: “êi desyre
koudist not compesse; / For êou êi lust list nat to refreyne” (II. 3595, 3604-05). 52
51
In Book XIII, Guido asks his readers to remember the ‘trivial cause’ for the war (118).
Lydgate translates: “And for a woman, õif I schal nat lye, / Gan al êis strif [...]” (II. 7860-
61, and see III. 362-75).
52
Lydgate here alludes to Troilus’s attempt to veil his emotionality in the Troilus (Edwards
377n) and thus refers to a passage in which the poet establishes an effeminate, Ovidian
genealogy for Troy. For the Chaucerian echoes in the description of Helen, see also Chris-
topher Baswell, “Troy Book: How Lydgate Translates Chaucer into Latin,” Translation
Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval
Institute Publications, 1997) 229.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 539

The repression of desires correlates with confinement, the desirable state of af-
fairs with women: “It sit hem bet hem siluen for to kepe / Clos in her chaumbre,
and fleen occasioun” (II. 3608-09). These slight changes of agency and perspec-
tive belie Lydgate’s efforts at one-to-one translation, the transparent translation
of cultural narratives. Like Guido, he fabricates a Virgilian mask that has all the
appearance of transparency. And yet, Lydgate’s masked changeability eerily
parallels the rhetorical masking of Guido’s (and Troy Book’s) women.
Given Lydgate’s Virgilian dispositions at this point, it is unsurprising that he
omits Guido’s lengthy description of Helen’s beauty. Instead, Lydgate professes
his lack of the appropriate rhetorical abilities to do so – “For my colours ben to
feble and feynt” (II. 3683) – while emphasizing her rhetorical talents in a
Chaucerian context. In the early stages of Paris and Helen’s ‘courtship,’ Paris,
like Chaucer’s Troilus, often changes his countenance and his cheer (II. 3697),
whereas Helen, like Chaucer’s Criseyde, seems to be in control of her masks:
“And ageynward êe fresche quene Eleyne / As hote brent in herte pryuely, / Al-
be no man it outward koude espie” (II. 3700-02). Like Troilus,53 though, she ac-
tually is not entirely in control of her masks, “For hym sche felt so inly gret dis-
tres, / Êat ofte sche chaungeê countenaunce & hewe” (II. 3712-13). This fluctua-
tion between successful and unsuccessful acts of veiling anticipates similar con-
tradictions in the characterization of Criseyde, not to mention Lydgate himself.
Ultimately unlike Troilus, however, Helen ponders ways and means of address-
ing Paris (II. 3708-09) without a mediator. In other words, Helen, like Troilus,
has to negotiate transparency and opacity – and unlike Chaucer’s transparent
‘hero,’ she manages to reconcile the two. Her conscious choice of exile, moreo-
ver, anticipates Criseyde’s exile among the Greeks. Helen is notably less con-
cerned with the separation from her husband and kinsfolk, which takes promi-
nence in the Historia, than with being alone among the enemy: “Hir vnkouêe
lyf, to dwelle with straungers, / Al dissolat among[es] prisoners, / Fer sequestrid
a-weye from hir contre, / Solitarie in captiuite” (II. 3903-06). Despite Paris’s ef-
forts to highlight the advantages of being among the Trojans, she laments her
plight; it would be “aõen[e]s kynde” (II. 4055) not to do so. Lydgate emphasizes
the psychological effects of exile here, which prepares his audience for the por-
trait of Criseyde which opens with the latter’s question as to how to live among
her enemies. As an answer, Lydgate offers Chaucerian translucence.54
Like Medea and Helen, Criseyde is introduced in a passage abounding with
references to masking strategies. Lydgate first comments on Fortuna’s masking,
53
“Lydgate ascribes to Helen the dissembling that Chaucer makes a feature of Troilus’s re-
sponse to first seeing Criseyde” (Edwards 378n).
54
Lydgate’s description of Helen’s sorrow essentially reinforces Guido’s antifeminism.
Women naturally weep, but they are also quick to “ouer caste” their grief; “men may hem
conuerte / From wo to Ioye” (II. 4082, 4084-85). While Helen’s grief might be converted
to joy – as is Troilus’s grief in the first three books of the Troilus, it is not impossible that
Helen’s joy turns to woe again – as does Troilus’s joy in Book IV.
540 Interchapter Two

before mentioning Agamemnon’s ‘dissembling’ and briefly referring to the

feigning poets, who tell the story of Castor and Pollux. After touching upon
Ulysses’s rhetorical doubleness, Lydgate intends to describe Criseyde, but ends
up talking about Chaucerian rhetoric: his pen stumbles at Chaucer’s diligence in
describing Criseyde’s beauty (II. 4679-81), and he claims to be unable to add
anything to Chaucer’s description of Criseyde.55 Accordingly, he eulogizes
“Noble Galfride, poete of Breteyne, / Amonge oure englisch êat made first to
reyne / Êe gold dewe-dropis of rhetorik so fyne” (II. 4697-99). Whether one
reads this passage as being prompted by respect for the poetic predecessor or as
an attempt to outdo him (or a mixture of both), Chaucer’s craft, represented by
Troilus, throws Lydgate off course. Instead of continuing with his translation of
Guido’s Historia, Lydgate prays that God will have Chaucer’s soul,
After whos help of nede I most[e] crave,
And seke his boke êat is left be-hynde
Som goodly worde êer-in for to fynde,
To sette amonge êe crokid lynys rude
Whiche I do write; as, by similitude,
Êe ruby stant, so royal of renoun,
With-Inne a ryng of copur or latoun,
So stant êe makyng of hym, dout[e]les,
Among oure bokis of englische per[e]les:
Êei arn ethe knowe, êei ben so excellent;
Êer is no makyng to his equipolent... (II. 4702-12, emphases added)
Since it is impossible to “counterfet” Chaucer’s style, Lydgate’s eulogy ends
with his renewed stumbling insofar as his stumbling pen becomes an analogue
of Troilus’s stumbling in Chaucer’s poem when Lydgate resolves to “ben as
bolde as Baiard is, êe blynde, / Êat cast no peril what wey[e] êat he fynde, / Riõt
so wil I stumble forêe of hede” (II. 4731-33). His reference to Bayard, the proud
horse that is nevertheless subject to “horses lawe” (Troilus I. 223), recalls Troi-
lus’s sudden subjection to love, which poetologically represents Troilus’s pre-
dicament of facing two seemingly irreconcilable masks: martial war and Vene-
rean love. Lydgate himself is presently poised between two divergent, authorita-
tive sources – Guido and Chaucer – which threatens to derail his poetical enter-
prise. While Lydgate bows to Chaucer, he does so by employing the language of
55
Simpson observes that Lydgate, in fact, adds substantially to Chaucer’s description: he
places her among the Greeks, he abbreviates the long and sympathetic description of her,
and thus offers “a powerful critique of that sympathy.” Simpson, “Chaucer’s Presence and
Absence, 1400-1550,” The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill
Mann, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) 260. Baswell argues that
Lydgate’s “translation of ‘history’ constantly finds itself crossing with and echoing Chau-
cer, pulled almost to a standstill by Lydgate’s emotional attachment to Criseyde.” Baswell,
“Marvels of Translation and Crises of Transition in the Romances of Antiquity,” The
Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 2000) 42.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 541

Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (F 76-66), echoing “Chaucer’s mock-

deference to courtly lovers who compose (‘make’) as amateur poets” (Edwards
379n), which, in turn, becomes Lydgate’s mock-deference to Chaucer. At the
same time, the mentioned ruby recalls the ruby in Troilus’s ‘paraclausithyron,’
in which Troilus compares Criseyde’s palace to a ring from which the ruby has
fallen (Troilus V. 549), the loss of the ruby representing Troilus’s loss of
Criseyde as a lodestar. For all the potential outdoing of Chaucer, Lydgate none-
theless puts himself into Chaucer’s (poet’s) shoes, insofar as he encounters a
Venerean good threatening to capsize a Virgilian narrative. Once Lydgate
reaches Guido’s description of Criseyde, his allegedly transparent translation of
Guido’s Historia is unveiled and brings to the Virgilian surface Lydgate’s Ovid-
ian changeability.56
Chaucerian quotations and allusions are numerous in Troy Book, particularly
in the Troilus and Criseyde plot.57 Accordingly, many scholars have investigated
Lydgate’s complex relationship with his poetic forebear and his patrons. In this
context, however, Lydgate’s intricate considerations of masking in both onto-
logical and poetological frameworks has perhaps been under-appreciated.
Lydgate does not always focus on masking strategies explicitly, but reflections
about transparency and opacity are often implicit and occasionally frame spe-
cific episodes. Troilus’s sorrow, for example, is introduced by a combination of
two short passages that refer the reader to the Troilus and touch upon change-
ability and masking. In order “To telle of Troylus êe lamentable wo,” Lydgate
‘invokes’ unstable and changeable Fortuna with her “stormy face” (III. 4075,
4079). Lydgate further stresses Troilus’s transparency by drawing attention to
his incapacity to mask his emotionality and by setting up the plot in terms of a
de casibus tragedy, beginning with the second turn of the wheel anticipated at
the opening of the Troilus – “Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie” (Troilus I. 4).
Lydgate asks his audience to “Record on Troylus, êat fro êi whele so lowe / By
fals envie êou hast ouer-êrowe” (III. 4083-84).58 Subsequently, Lydgate inter-

56
Lydgate’s changeability is obvious when considering his many (Chaucerian) additions to
Guido’s portrait of Criseyde. Moreover, Lydgate embellishes Calchas’s scheming (III.
3688, 3687-711) as well as the Trojans’ outrage about the latter.
57
For Lydgate’s familiarity with and allusions to the Chaucer canon, see Derek Pearsall,
John Lydgate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 80 n. 28; David R. Carlson,
“The Chronology of Lydgate’s Chaucer References,” ChauR 38.3 (2004): 246-54. For the
Chaucerian echoes in this passage, see Elmer Bagby Atwood, “Some Minor Sources of
Lydgate’s Troy Book,” SP 35 (1938): 40-42; Gretchen Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much
Loved Criseyde,” ChauR 26.2 (1991): 116-17; Edwards 389-95nn.
58
Lydgate alters Guido’s initial description of Troilus, for example. Troilus’s “corde ma-
gnaminus” disappears as Troilus becomes a ‘manly man’ (II. 4862), who is “trewe as any
stele, / Secre and wys, stedefast of corage” (II. 4874-75) in love matters. Lydgate also
characterizes him as being “With-oute chaunge, & of on hert entere. / He was alwey
feithful, iust, & stable, / Perseueraunt, and of wil inmvtable / Vp-on what êing he onys set
his herte” (II. 4878-81). Eventually, Troy Book corroborates Troilus’s changeability.
542 Interchapter Two

sperses lines and episodes from Chaucer’s Troilus, pushing Guido’s Historia
further into the background. Lydgate’s mixing and mingling of Guidoan and
Chaucerian narratives, results in a hybrid Guidoan-Chaucerian version that ulti-
mately sides with Chaucer as concerns Criseyde – in passages that centrally en-
gage with questions of masking.
Lydgate introduces the story of Troilus and Criseyde with an expanded ver-
sion of Criseyde’s lament regarding the impending separation from her lover –
in Criseyde’s rather than the narrator’s words. Guido is chiefly concerned with
the outside manifestations of Criseyde’s pain: her never-ending flood of tears
drenching her clothes, her torn-out hair, and her scratched face (XIX, 163).
Lydgate’s Criseyde mainly wonders fearfully how she could live among the
Greeks, “my cruel foon? / [...] / Howe shulde I êer, in êe werre endure – / I, wre-
che woman, but my silf allone” (III. 4148-51).59 That is, Lydgate emphasizes
Criseyde’s exilic predicament. Although he also begins to report the sorrow of
the lovers, he quickly breaks off, since “Fro point to point it to specifie / It
wolde me ful longe occupie / Of euery êinge to make mencioun” (III. 4191-93).
Instead of following Guido, who begins to heap insults at women, he “im-
proves” on his sources – but not simply in the sense of multiplying lines.60
Rather, Lydgate extrapolates Chaucerian translucence. At first glance, Lydgate’s
‘summary’ of the Troilus – which begins with Troilus’s transformation into a
lover, mentions Pandarus’s assistance, and quickly moves on to the condemna-
tion of false felicity at the end of the poem (III. 4224-28) – seems to neglect
Chaucer’s counter-national Criseyde entirely, although it is worth noting that the
summary is primarily concerned with changeability – an aspect that, in the Troi-
lus, is of importance chiefly with regard to Criseyde. Lydgate’s audience is then
encouraged to read the Troilus, since he can only half as well describe “êe proc-
esse” (III. 4236). In view of Lydgate’s focus on changeability and his different
contextualization of Criseyde’s lament, the argument that her predicament is
psychologically reduced or absent – although somewhat consistent with
Lydgate’s own comments61 – risks falling prey to a rhetorical game. By intro-
59
In Troy Book, Troilus is capable of consoling Criseyde (III. 4163). In a sense, Troilus as-
sumes Hector’s place insofar as he appropriates the pity characteristic of Hector in the
Troilus: Criseyde’s “pitous noyse” lasts the entire day until, finally, Troilus “pitously vn-
to hir wente” (III. 4155, 4161; Troilus I. 111, 113; see also Chapter Eighteen). Lydgate
follows Guido’s Historia while emphasizing Troilus’s masking by equating Troilus with
Hector, who is one of the most adept Trojan mask makers.
60
Pearsall, John Lydgate 126. Lydgate’s “tedious prolixity” has also been criticized by Wal-
ter F. Schirmer (John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E.
Keep [London: Methuen, 1961] 46) and is in line with nineteenth-century accounts, such
as Joseph Ritson’s harsh comments in his Bibliographia Poetica (1802). For discussion,
see Renoir, “Attitudes Toward Women” 1-2; Mortimer, John Lydgate’s “Fall of Princes”
1-24.
61
“Lydgate seems to have captured nothing of the psychological depth, imaginative empa-
thy, tragic intensity, or literary power of his model.” On account of this, Benson believes
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 543

ducing Criseyde’s worries about her future among the Greeks before providing
an abbreviated account of Chaucer’s Troilus, Lydgate interpolates Troilus’s
story between Criseyde’s legitimate worries about her future and Lydgate’s anti-
feminism,62 which is only seemingly in compliance with Guido’s portrait of a
fickle and duplicitous Criseyde.
In Troy Book, Criseyde is implicitly likened to Medea and Fortuna insofar as
she is “outward farsed with many a fals[e] lye; / For vnder hid was al êe
variaunce, / Cured a-boue with feyned contenaunce” (III. 4274-76). This is fol-
lowed by the ‘usual’ attributes: Criseyde is a serpent hidden under flowers,63
represents poisoned sugar, et cetera. And yet, where Guido condemns her
chiefly for her changeability, Lydgate begins to muse on questions of ontologi-
cal (in)stability. In fact, he observes that it is changeability that centers
Criseyde’s character:64
And her colour euer is meynt with raies:
For vp-on chaunge and mutabilite
Stant hool her trust and [her] surete,
So êat êei ben sure in doubilnes,
And alwey double in her sikernes,
Semynge oon whan êei best can varie,
Likest to acorde whan êei be contrarie.... (III. 4294-300)
Their constant changeability warrants womankind’s effectiveness in the games
they play with men, which subsequently concerns Lydgate: women are never
satisfied with one man; they cannot be trusted even though they make every
lover believe that he is their favorite; they are always ‘available’; and they are
steadfast as the moon. Three times, Lydgate assures his audience that he trans-
lates – point to point – Guido’s antifeminism (III. 4322, 4329, 4343); in the His-
toria, however, many of the mentioned antifeminist sentiments cannot be found
at this point. Lydgate adds insult to injury when he claims that he is translating a
source that he, given Guido’s (absent) antifeminism, is unwilling to translate:

that “It might be [...] appropriate for us to think of Lydgate not so much as a poet but as a
critic. He often recognizes what Chaucer has done, even if he cannot do it himself.” Ben-
son, “Critic and Poet” 26.
62
The reorganization of the narrative has been noted by Anna Torti, “From ‘History’ to
‘Tragedy’: The Story of Troilus and Criseyde in Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s
Testament of Cresseid,” The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989) 173: “Lydgate’s handling of the narrative is very interesting: the
first event to be mentioned is in fact the end of the love story – the lovers’ parting.”
63
Mieszkowski argues that Lydgate’s comparison of Criseyde with serpents recalls his
“Amor vincit omnia mentiris quod pecunia.” While Guido does not compare women to
serpents at this point (Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 119), Guido does discuss (Biblical) ser-
pents in a context that aligns changeability and women (see Chapter Ten).
64
Structurally, the notion that changeability can constitute stability is reminiscent of Chau-
cer’s description of the House of Rumor in the House of Fame, notably the place of origin
of many a narrative.
544 Interchapter Two

“For Ire of whiche, êe latyn to translate, / Inwardly myn herte I felte blede, / Of
hiõe dispit, his clausis for to rede” (III. 4350-52) – a Chaucerian topos.65
Lydgate immediately contradicts his source, adding that most women are really
genuine models of stability and virtue, whereby his embellishments – such as
the report of the eleven thousand virgins in Cologne, who are eventually pro-
moted to the ninth sphere, where one later also finds Henry V (III. 4382,
V.3602) – are so exaggerated that they underline rather than undermine his anti-
feminism.66 This is likewise true of Lydgate’s refutation of his own elaborate de-
fense. Even if, as Guido says, women “han of kynde / To be double, men shulde
it goodly take.”67 Women, that is, are naturally changeable. It is impossible to
restrain a woman, “For she wil nat be guyed be no reyne” (III. 4398-99, 4404).68
It is worth noting that Lydgate has been ‘off the leash,’ too, ever since he began
to discuss Criseyde, leaving the side of his reliable guide Guido (near homo-
graphs, if not homophones). Rather, Lydgate situates himself happily between
Chaucer and Guido as he, in fact, anticipated in the initial portrait of Criseyde:

65
Shutters, “Truth” 80, 80-81 n. 20.
66
The “pseudo-defenses of women,” Mieszkowski argues, are “part of Lydgate’s stock in
trade. This is one of his favorite jokes and he uses it throughout the Troy Book, ironically
praising women for lechery or adultery while pretending to be aghast at Guido’s antifem-
inism.” Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 123. For Lydgate’s antifeminism (here and else-
where), see Pearsall, John Lydgate 134-36, 236-39; Pearsall, “Chaucer and Lydgate,”
Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed Ruth Morse and Barry
Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 48-49; Benson, “Critic and Poet”
31-33; Benson, “True Troilus and False Cresseid: The Descent from Tragedy,” European
Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Boitani 156; Torti, “From ‘History’ to ‘Tragedy’” 176-79; Barbara
Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the “Roman Antique” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1992) 283; Shutters, “Truth.” Shutters points out the commendable alternatives to
the false women recurrently discussed in critical discourse, namely, Penthesilea, Penelope,
Cassandra, Hecuba, and Polyxena. Renoir espies in Lydgate’s description of women “an
uncommon versatility of talent, ranging from the most satirical to the most deeply mov-
ing.” Renoir, “Attitudes Toward Women” 14.
67
See also Lydgate’s comment on the story of Mars and Venus caught in bed by Vulcan in
Book II, in which Lydgate mocks Vulcan for fussing over female inconstancy (II. 5796-
825). The sentiment stems from Ovid’s Ars amatoria, where the persona launches a simi-
lar complaint about male envy (II. 561-600). Benson believes that the above passage illus-
trates Lydgate’s sense of humor and “suggests that the monk is cleverer and more self-
aware than is usually thought.” Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature:
Guido delle Colonne’s “Historia destructionis Troiae” in Medieval England (Wood-
bridge: Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980) 104. See also Atwood, “Some
Minor Sources” 31-32.
68
The description of Fortuna’s role in a storm besetting the Greeks on their way to their re-
spective homes in Book V further strengthens the link between changeable Fortuna and
changeable Nature (V. 585-643), emphasizing the similarity of both agencies. Change is
natural and unavoidable – and necessitates self-steering.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 545

“So am I sette euene amyddes tweyne” (II. 4693).69 Intertextually, then, Lydgate
liberates Chaucer’s translucent Criseyde from Diomede’s rein, that is, from a pa-
triarchal (literary) tradition.70 Criseyde’s changeability and self-authorization not
only ensure her survival but also represent a tenable strategy to reconcile per-
sonal and public discourses without either collapsing individuality (transpar-
ency) or suppressing it entirely (opacity).
Whether or not Lydgate means to blacken Criseyde’s reputation – the textual
evidence remains ambivalent at best – his portrayal of Criseyde suggests, I be-
lieve, that Troy Book captures the depth of Chaucer’s sympathy for his translu-
cent heroine. Moreover, Criseyde’s portrait yields important insights as regards
Lydgate’s interest in masking. First, he describes Criseyde as an extremely ca-
pable actress, masking her intentions and desires whenever necessary. Next, the
related (but masked) changeability is described as natural and uncontrollable. If
women therefore cannot be guided, they (implicitly) can abide without pilots
and guide themselves – and so can Lydgate.71 Although frequently proclaiming
to follow his ‘guyde’ ‘Guydo,’ Lydgate refuses to be guided in more ways than
one. While appearing to transparently translate his source, he not only exagger-
ates passages (amplificatio), he also changes and expands his source (inventio).
Under the cover of point-to-point translation, Lydgate changes the narrative ac-
cording to his desires and intentions, inscribing his individuality into a national
myth of origin. Particularly blunt in this context is Lydgate’s advice to skip over
Guido’s antifeminist passages “Til õe come where êat Dyomede / For hir was
sent in-to Troye toun” (III. 4418-19), passages readers would not find in the His-
toria. This rhetorical strategy literally veils Lydgate’s changeability by means of
an opaque mask that is seemingly transparent. He authorizes his changeability
by referencing a changeable nature, which, like women, cannot be controlled.
However much Lydgate blames women,72 he cannot avoid (structurally) repli-
cating Criseyde’s (Medea’s, Chaucer’s) ontological and poetological strate-
gies.73 Like Chaucer’s poet, Lydgate finds himself in Criseyde’s company; he
becomes Criseyde.74

69
This line also illustrates Lydgate’s distinction between truth and rhetoric. Shutters,
“Truth” 75.
70
When Criseyde is exchanged for Antenor in Chaucer’s Troilus, Diomede “by the reyne
hire hente” (V. 90). For Chaucer’s use of the rein, see McKay Sundwall, “Criseyde’s
Rein,” ChauR 11.2 (1976): 156-63.
71
Lydgate earlier excused Medea’s (and women’s) behavior on the grounds that their role
models are men (see above).
72
Mieszkowski observes that Lydgate is much less ambiguous about Criseyde as a woman
of damnable duplicity in other poems, such as “Amor vincit omnia mentiris quod pecunia”
and the Fall of the Princes. Mieszkowski, “Reputation” 117-18.
73
Perhaps, it is the realization (however conscious) that he is replicating a Criseydan model
that furthers his unhappiness with a female changeability that has become his own.
74
Some scholars have noted Lydgate’s proximity to Criseyde. After arguing that Lydgate
earlier “casts himself as Troilus,” later Lydgate is “also Criseyde, set at an impossible
546 Interchapter Two

If this prosopagraphical proximity of Lydgate, Criseyde, and Chaucer sug-

gests that Lydgate retains Criseydan translucence, such hopes seem to be
quickly flouted when Lydgate returns to the plot again. He omits Guido’s al-
ready truncated story of Diomede’s courtship, which includes Criseyde’s initial
refusal of the Greek’s proposal. In Troy Book, Criseyde forsakes Troilus imme-
diately, and her complaint about her father’s actions and his changeability is
omitted with a brief reference to Chaucer’s version (III. 4433; cf. Historia XIX,
164-65). In another (Chaucerian) move, Lydgate can think of no other excuse
for Criseyde “But only kyndes transmutacioun, / Êat is appropred vn-to hir na-
ture” (III. 4442-43). Criseyde’s initial worries concerning her future among the
Greeks, however, resurfaces when Lydgate reports, following Guido, how Dio-
mede gives Criseyde Troilus’s horse. Where Guido’s Briseida believes that she
can hardly refuse a gift from someone who loves her with such purity of heart,
Lydgate’s Criseyde thinks that she cannot refuse someone “Êat was to hir, êere
in straunge place, / So kynde fo[u]nde, and so counfortable / In euery êing, [...]”
(III. 4648-50; cf. Historia XX, 169). In a sense, this modification answers
Criseyde’s question as to how she could make a living among the enemy – she
must play along. While Lydgate grants Criseyde space to muse on her exilic
predicament, he transforms Chaucer’s Diomede, the clever mask maker, into an
incompetent masker, whose predicament recalls that of Troilus. Being caught in
contrary winds, “With Louys dart woundid to êe herte,” Diomede frequently
changes his hue and is willing to die for Criseyde’s sake (III. 4821-38). While
Diomede emerges as an effeminate Trojan, Criseyde’s clever whiles are embel-
lished, furthering her talent for acting, for creating opaque masks. She intends to
keep Diomede more firmly in her service “in ful sleiõty wyse,” by means of
mask making, which almost verbatim recalls the manner in which the Greeks
kill Hector (see III. 2705, 2708-09, cited above). Diomede’s predicament, the
conflict between “hope and despair,” which resembles the inward war also af-
flicting Chaucer’s Troilus (III. 4843; Troilus V. 630, 1207), is thus exacerbated,
recalling Lydgate’s characterization of Troy Book women (III. 4839, 4842-69).75

choice between authorities. Baswell, “Troy Book” 234. Shutters sees in female adaptability
a similarity to the process of translation: “the infamous sliding of Helen and Criseyde sug-
gests the changes that a capable translator must execute in order to render an old work
meaningful and pertinent in a new cultural context.” Shutters, “Truth” 94. Against the
prevalent view that Lydgate amplifies Guido’s antifeminism, reduces Criseyde’s psycho-
logical predicament, and does not capture Chaucer’s sympathy for her, I submit that
Lydgate feels sympathetic toward Criseyde and appropriates her ontological strategies.
75
For quotations from and allusions to Chaucer’s description of Criseyde, see Pearsall,
“Chaucer and Lydgate” esp. 41; Edwards 395n, 407nn. The structural and verbal echoes of
Troilus and Criseyde’s courtship insinuate that Diomede will not fare better than Troilus
on account of Criseyde’s changeability. Lydgate likewise embellishes Diomede’s martial
assets, frequently referring to him as “cruel.” While Lydgate quibbles his source as re-
gards Diomede – “I can nat seine wher it was doubilnesse” (V. 1225) – Diomede eventu-
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 547

Lydgate’s Criseyde becomes both Trojan and Greek, incorporates martial as

well as Venerean personae. The intermingling of Ovidian love and martial war
prompts a short excursus, which further illustrates Lydgate’s poetological
changeability. After Criseyde is exchanged, Troilus’s martial fervor, his
“knyõthod [and] êe hiõe prowes” (IV. 2088) terrify the Greeks, wherefore Aga-
memnon decides, governed by wisdom and prudence, to ask for a truce (IV.
2109-31). Lydgate reports how Priam quickly grants the truce, which does not
meet general agreement, and he includes another antifeminist passage about
Criseyde before turning to another changeable Greek. Achilles is unwilling to
purge himself of the Ovidian hypergood, his love for Polyxena. Unlike Criseyde,
Achilles cannot readopt an opaque mask as required, however: “From his purpos
platly chaungeê nouõt” (IV. 2190). Like Troilus, he is torn between loyalties (to
his men and Polyxena, respectively) conceived of as a “double wer” (IV. 2361).
Martial duty is ultimately victorious, and Lydgate explicitly invokes Mars be-
fore translating Achilles’s killing of Troilus.76 The passage also draws attention
to Lydgate’s “double war” of reconciling British Trojan ancestry with successful
Greek opacity. Thus, Achilles’s mask making, which results in the death of
Troilus, is lamented as treasonous and lacking knighthood (IV. 2668-92). Guido
only complains about this (or rather about Achilles’s problematic deviation from
the Greek norm) after Troilus has been killed. Lydgate, while embellishing Troi-
lus’s vigor and his knightly deeds (esp. IV. 2724-36), indicts the Myrmidons and
Achilles, and the latter even attacks Troilus from behind (IV. 2737-55, 2761-
73). Lydgate retains Guido’s invective against Homer, but uses the passage
mainly to muse on poetological questions:
Certis, Omer, for al êin excellence
Of rethoryk and of eloquence,
Êi lusty songes and êi dites swete,
Êin hony mouêe êat doth with sugre flete –
Õet in o êing êou gretly art to blame:
Causeles to õeue hym [Achilles] swiche a name.... (IV. 2791-96)
Homer masks the truth by means of his sweet rhetoric. While Lydgate under-
stands that Homer sides with the Greeks, he adds that Homer should neverthe-
less have kept to “êe trouêe pleinly, & ben indifferent, / And seie êe soêe clerly
of entent” (IV. 2807-08). By the same token, Lydgate’s own ‘translation’ is not
any less problematic. This also concerns Lydgate’s slightly different handling of
the death of Memnon. In Troy Book, it appears as though the Myrmidons are ac-
tively involved in the fight (IV. 2966) and Achilles’s treason is invoked twice

ally becomes “Êat gilt[e]les worêi Diomede” (V. 1306). Prudence ensures that he can re-
turn home and “lyve in felicite!” (V. 1433).
76
“The cruel force & êe mortal Ire / Of Martis myõt, alweie set a-fire” the warring factions.
Fortuna is turning her face away from the Trojans (IV. 2401-02, 2413-18). This invocation
doubles Lydgate’s initial request for Mars’s help in his translation of Guido.
548 Interchapter Two

(IV. 2940, 2973). The episode ends again with a passage on treacherous rhetoric,
which – in an act of Lydgatean mask making – veils Guido’s interesting ques-
tion as to whether there may have been a reason for Homer to extol treachery.
Despite Homer’s ability to paint with colors of gold and azure,
In êi writyng his [Achilles’s] venym nat enclose
But as êe êorn hid vnder êe rose,
Whos malys ay dareth by êe rote,
Êouõ êe flour a-boue be fayr & sote,
Êat men êe fraude vnder may nat se –
Of his tresoun êe gete no more of me. (IV. 2985-90)77
While Lydgate accuses Homer of circulating a Virgilian model for constructing
selfhood, he likewise adds a long complaint about the absence of such rhetorical
mask making among the Trojans, whose sorrow threatens to implode Troy.
Lydgate includes a catalogue of historical and mythical ‘mourners,’ whose sor-
rows pale in comparison with that of the Trojans. Notably, the catalogue in-
cludes numerous abandoned women from Ovid’s Heroides (IV. 2998-3075). In
other words, Trojan emotionality corresponds to collective suicide. Lydgate,
who ‘invents’ this long catalogue, rebuts his own inventive strategy, however,
criticizing his “chantepleur.”78 Recalling Agamemnon’s advice to Menelaus, he
argues that sorrow does not accord with his martial narrative: “In êis mater what
shulde I pleyne longe? – / It vailleth nat alweye so to mourne” (IV. 3074-75).
While Lydgate increasingly oscillates between Guidoan (Virgilian) and
Chaucerian (Ovidian) domains, he progressively adopts the translucent pro-
sopagraphy characteristic of Troy Book women,79 veiling his changeability with
a seemingly transparent mask. Unlike Guido, however, Lydgate’s mask is not
entirely opaque. Rather, Lydgate emphasizes his own changeability by explicitly
inviting the audience to compare Troy Book to Guido’s Historia. Lydgate’s

77
Hecuba eventually kills Achilles “By som engyn” (IV. 3117). She is already characterized
in terms of Greek mask making in her initial portrait insofar as “Sche was in soth êe
most[e] womanly, / Êe best avised, and most prudently / In hir dedis koude hir silfe
gouerne” (II. 4967-69). Lydgate has no reservations about Hecuba’s ‘treachery,’ which
makes Lydgate open “to the same charge of partiality which he so often levels at Homer.”
Renoir, Poetry of John Lydgate 99. Lydgate ‘celebration’ of the death of Achilles (IV.
3210-12) underlines Lydgate’s narrative instability because his eye-for-an-eye logic is the
same logic that caused the conflict in the first place.
78
Maura Nolan, “‘Now Wo, now Gladnesse’: Ovidianism in the Fall of Princes,” ELH 71.4
(2004): 531-58.
79
One of the last women introduced in Troy Book is Penthesilea. She is virtuous, wise, dis-
creet, honest, and well-versed in arms, but also almost excessively emotional, for instance,
upon learning about Hector’s death. And yet, revenge is sought with the sword, not with
tears (IV. 3814-16, 3852-58). Pyrrhus’s slaying of Penthesilea is, as usual, prefaced by a
short account of Fortuna’s fickleness (IV. 4270-80). Lydgate extols her virtues (IV. 4313)
and complains about the manner in which Pyrrhus kills her (IV. 4341). After Penthesilea’s
death, the Trojans have “leder noon nor gyde” (IV. 4369).
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 549

translucence eventually points up the faultlines inherent in any ideology. More

importantly, it reinforces the potential exploitation of these faultlines – the con-
tinual remythologizing of nationhood). It reinforces Chaucerian counter-
nationhood.

3. “Disfigurid her facis with viseris”: Lydgate’s Translucence

In the above account of masking in the realms of politics, martial prowess, and
female inconstancy, Lydgate’s own veiling strategies vis-à-vis his translation of
Guido’s Historia and his loss of guidance have been frequently broached. With
regard to Lydgate’s own poetical project, Robert Edwards’s observes that
“Lydgate uses the same images for poets that he applies in the narrative to char-
acters who employ deceitful language to mislead others and subvert just libera-
tion.”80 In fact, Lydgate not only uses the same language, he also uses the same
masking strategies witnessed in seemingly problematic women, such as Medea,
Helen, and Criseyde. Instead of the transparency of a “Spitzerian lyric ego” or a
Jaussian ‘allegory of the universal,’81 which one would expect from the medie-
val monk, one encounters layered, variously opaque masks instead. Lydgate
flouts his own maxim of point-to-point translation in favor of advancing translu-
cent prosopagraphy.
Unlike the Historia, Troy Book explicitly discusses masks in the context of
the theatrical practices to be found in the second Troy. Lydgate praises masked
actors for their ability to translate – from point to point – the rise and fall of fa-
mous men, the main theme of ancient tragedies. Notably, the masks appear to be
neither opaque nor transparent, since the expressions of the individual actors
‘shine through’ the masks, which are accordingly translucent. The analogies to
Lydgate’s poetical enterprise – translating Guido’s Historia from point to point
– are obvious. Lydgate discounts poets like Virgil and Ovid, because they do not
translate from point to point, because their (personal or national) sympathies dic-
tate a particular bias. Rather than embarking on a potentially perilous journey
across a turbulent textual North Sea, Lydgate adopts Guido as his guide.
80
Edwards, introduction, Troy Book 4. Shutters believes that Lydgate’s depiction of duplici-
tous poets speaks to contemporary debates about the duplicity of (the) French. Shutters,
“Truth” 77-78.
81
Robert J. Meyer-Lee notes that “from a monk – whose most basic selfhood ought to be a
homogeneous imago dei – we expect the specificity of the poet to be emptied into a uni-
versalized, Spitzerian lyric ego.” And yet, one finds in Lydgate’s epideictic verse “coded
self-aggrandizement.” Meyer-Lee, “Lydgate’s Laureate Pose,” John Lydgate: Poetry, Cul-
ture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, Ind.:
Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2006) 44. Moreover, “When a poem’s first person speaker is
occupiable, as is typical of devotional poetry, this idealization is an instrument for the
formation of a spiritual community; the poet and the readers, in the moment of experienc-
ing the poem, are all joined in communion with God. In contrast, the precise denotation of
the ‘I,’ as in much of Lydgate’s work, restricts this elevation to the specific poet, relegat-
ing to the reader the role of vicarious poet rather than participant subject” (44).
550 Interchapter Two

Lydgate’s frequent loss of his guide, however, replicates the central problem of
the Troilus, and finds a correlative in the loss of truth – and the true history of
Troy. Similarly, Lydgate invokes Mars at the beginning, doubling the adoption
of guide Guido. Mars’s martial authority is quickly derailed as well, chiefly by
references to either Ovid’s amorous tale of Mars and Venus or by references to
the muses presiding over the amorous books of Chaucer’s Troilus. In other
words, Lydgate adopts an opaque, Virgilian mask that creates the illusion of
transparent one-to-one translation. While thus replicating the Virgilian frame of
the Troilus, Lydgate likewise frequently challenges Guidoan Virgilianism from
within. He resolves the various dichotomies through the adoption of a Criseydan
subject position, according to which (literary and personal) survival requires
Virgil and Ovid, Guido and Chaucer, opacity and transparency. These domains,
Lydgate argues, can be linked only by means of de- and reconstructing narra-
tives without slavish adherence to one authority. Therefore, Lydgate’s version of
the translatio imperii inevitably involves the kind of changeability that Chau-
cer’s poet likewise advocated for the construction of Britain’s Trojan past.
Lydgate’s account of theatrical masking occurs in the description of the re-
building of Troy. Expanding on Guido’s belief that comedy and tragedy are Tro-
jan inventions – suitably correlating effeminate Trojans with ‘effeminate’ theat-
rical activities – Troy Book focuses specifically on tragedies, which were read or
sung (that is, enacted) in a tent. A “pulpet was erecte,” from which an
“aw[n]cien poete” rehearses
[...] by rethorikes swete
Êe noble dedis, êat wer historial,
Of kynges, princes for a memorial,
And of êes olde, worêi Emperours,
Êe grete emprises eke of conquerours,
And how êei gat in Martis hiõe honour
Êe laurer grene for fyn of her labour,
Êe palme of knyõthod disservid by [old] date,
Or Parchas made hem passyn in-to fate. (II. 860-76)
Sweet rhetoric, otherwise complicated in Troy Book, is the vehicle by which the
poet relays the deeds of historical individuals, primarily martial deeds. For this
enterprise, poets receive the “laurer grene.”82 If the ancient poet wins his laurer
by rescuing from extinction noteworthy events of the past, this surely also ap-
plies to Lydgate himself,83 who initially asks for Mars’s favor so as to convey

82
According to the Mumming for the Mercers, Tullius, Macrobius, Ovid, Virgil, Petrarch,
Boccaccio, and Dante, are poets that, in Shirley’s words, “were called laureate for êey
were coroned with laurer in token êat êey excelled oêer in poetrye.” Qtd. in Maura Nolan,
“Performance of the Literary,” John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson 189.
83
Henry Ansgar Kelly believes that Lydgate “insists upon the importance of the didactic
purpose of tragedy, and he inherits from Chaucer the idea of calling narrative accounts of
misfortunes tragedies. But like Boccaccio, and unlike Chaucer, he was aware that the an-
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 551

the “verray knyõthod,” the “worthynes,” and “the prowesse of olde chiualrie”
(Pro. 76, 77, 78) in order to clarify the meaning of those poets, who tread this
path before him: “To make a merour only to oure mynde, / To seen eche thing
trewly as it was, / More bryõt and clere êan in any glas” (Pro. 168-70). This is
particularly important, perhaps, as concerns the inevitable death of the emperors
and conquerors after they gained the high honor of Mars, which the poets subse-
quently relate. They report – “with chere and face pale” – how false Fortuna
takes their lives, “How vnwarly [êat] êei dide dye” (II. 877, 890), how their
fame declines. Again, the poets’ accounts of the rise and fall of emperors eerily
corresponds to Troy Book, which attempts to prevent the decline of fame by
means of retelling the Troy story. While the poet would read or sing – “With
dedly face al devoide of blood” (II. 898) – actors enact the stories of old:
Êer cam out men gastful of her cheris,
Disfigurid her facis with viseris,
Pleying by signes in êe peples siõt,
Êat êe poete songon hath on hiõt;
So êat êer was no maner discordaunce
Atwen his dites and her contenaunce:
For lik as he aloft[e] dide expresse
Wordes of Ioye or of heuynes,
Meving & cher, byneêe of hem pleying,
From point to point was alwey answering–
Now trist, now glad, now hevy, & [now] liõt,
And face chaunged with a sodeyn siõt,
So craftily êei koude hem transfigure,
Conformyng hem to êe chaunt[e]plure,
Now to synge & sodeinly to wepe,
So wel êei koude her observaunces kepe....
(II. 901-16, emphases added)
The dramatic re-enactment of ancient tragedies parallels the kind of translation
Lydgate attributes to his Troy Book, relaying “From point to point” the lives and
deeds of the noble Trojans and Greeks. Lydgate appears to be most impressed
with the actors’ abilities to translate from point-to-point and their changeability.

cient world had a different form of tragedy, which had an acted dimension.” Kelly,
Chaucerian Tragedy (1997; Cambridge: Brewer, 2000) 151. If Lydgate’s tragedies corre-
spond to the dramatic enactment of Lydgate’s mummings, the ‘performance’ of Troy Book
may have a similar ideological subtext as do his Mumming for the Mercers and his Mum-
ming for the Goldsmiths, namely, offering “a consoling image of how London’s compa-
nies might best meet the challenge of growing internationalism” by fantasizing “a new
metropolis in which aliens joined natives in endorsing existing structures of rule for the
profit of all.” Claire Sponsler, “Alien Nation: London’s Aliens and Lydgate’s Mummings
for the Mercers and the Goldsmiths,” Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Cohen 240. Lydgate’s
Troy Book, however, appears to envisage a hybridity that challenges the residual ‘vertical-
ity’ in a horizontally-bonded English nation.
552 Interchapter Two

Changeability, coupled with role conformity – that is, adherence to the poet’s
script – is seen here in a positive light. In Troy Book, however, acting, change-
ability, and masking, are troublesome concepts attributed to women.
Of particular interest in the passage above are the ‘visors’ or masks, which
have given rise to much speculation among theater historians and literary critics
as concerns the staging practices Lydgate may have had in mind.84 Generally,
the visors are seen as static masks, wherefore Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpen-
ter rightly point out that Lydgate’s description is inconsistent insofar as the ac-
tors are masked while their changing expressions are visible.85 It is conceivable,
however, that Lydgate’s seeming misunderstanding is meant to draw attention to
his rhetorical negotiation of a middle ground between opacity and transparency,
since the actors’ masks are neither opaque nor transparent; rather, the individual-
ity of the actors appears to penetrate into the enacted role. As with Lydgate’s
rhetoric, the achieved translucence poses as transparency since the actors trans-
late from the text from point to point nonetheless. The domains involved in such
translations begin to multiply quickly insofar as translation becomes a ‘chain’ as
endless as Lydgate’s sentences. Like the actors translating text into performance,
the stories that ancient poets have already translated from other poets – from
point to point – are subject to change: “For after dethe, pleynly as it is, / Clerkis
wil write, and excepte noon, / The pleyn[e] trouthe whan a man is goon” (Pro.
192-93). Besides the inevitable historical distance to the original text, there is
also an evaluative difference; truth becomes a relative framework contingent on
other factors, which complicates the poet’s translation project – “From poynt to
poynt rehersyng al êe trouthe, / With-out[e] fraude, necligence, or slowthe” (Pro.
203-04). Lydgate thus appropriates a highly complex, ‘transparent’ poetological
84
Thomas Warton believes that Lydgate does not describe contemporary practice but rather
“a thing obsolete, and existing only in remote times.” Warton, History of English Poetry:
From the Twelfth to the Close of the Sixteenth Century, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, 4 vols.
(London: Reeves and Turner, 1871) 1: 91. For a different view, cf. Schirmer, John
Lydgate 102; Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300-1660: Volume One 1300-1567
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). Wickham contends that in Lydgate’s mum-
mings “actors were silent, but were presented to the audience by someone who introduced
them and interpreted their actions” (192); Lydgate’s description “may still portray quite
accurately the London indoor ‘theatre’, c. 1430, for which Lydgate wrote. What he is de-
scribing is a Mumming or Disguising” (194-95). Wickham generally argues that Lydgate
synthesized several strands of dramatic entertainment into a new dramatic form (207).
Benson (History 109) and Kelly (Chaucerian Tragedy 158-60) believe that Lydgate de-
scribes a non-medieval, classical stage.
85
Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor
England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 293 n. 49. The authors suggest that the idea of an-
cient masking could potentially originate in “contemporary popular masking” (293).
While Lydgate explicitly mentions expressions, it is worth noting that layered masks were
occasionally used in the mystery plays, for which see Martial Rose, “Robing and Its Sig-
nificance in English Mystery Plays,” Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investi-
ture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 334.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 553

model when laying claim to historical truth in his translation of martial deeds,
“Whiche to declare now I may not dwelle / From point to point, lyche as bokis
seyn” (I. 918-19).86
By constructing ‘transparent,’ one-to-one correspondences between source
and translation, Lydgate intends to fix the truth in ‘print’ and joins those poets
who laudably rescue the truth from extinction (Pro. 208-15, 223-25). The move
from domain to domain (textual, poetical, cultural, and so on) correlates with a
transfer of narratives from one poet to another – and eventually, from nation to
nation. Lydgate returns to this topos in his Fall of Princes, particularly with
reference to the poets whom he regards as his poetic precursors, first and
foremost Virgil:
Writyng caused poetis to recure
A name eternal, the laurer whan thei wan,
In adamaunt graue perpetuelli tendure.
Record I take of Virgile Mantuan,
That wrot the armys & prowesse of the man
Callid Eneas, whan he of hih corage
Cam to Itaill from Dido of Cartage.87
The Aeneid is mentioned first because of its ‘sovereign style’ and its ‘clear de-
termination of prowess,’ which contains the “grete conquest of Rome & of Itaill
/ Wrouht bi Enee, the manli Troian kniht.” Given his other books, the Eclogues
and the Georgics, he is “Aboue poetis to be most comendable” (Fall IV. 80-81,
91).88 Next comes Ovid, whose Metamorphoses should be read for “The grete
wondres, the transmutaciouns, / The moral menyng, [th]vnkouth conclusiouns”
(IV. 95-96). This introduces a slightly negative perspective, and the stress sub-
sequently falls on Ovid’s ‘error,’ his book about the “craft of loue [...] / Wheroff
Cesar hadde ful gret disdeyn” (IV. 99-100) – information easily (and most
likely) found in the medieval accessus.89 This Virgilian poetological bias seems
86
Lydgate’s notion of translating ‘from point to point,’ as my discussion has shown, surfaces
numerous times in Troy Book and in most instances insinuates transparency. For the mir-
ror metaphor with which Lydgate begins his Troy Book, see Torti, “From ‘History’ to
‘Tragedy’” 174-75. Torti argues that where Chaucer uses the mirror metaphor to represent
Troilus’s mind, Lydgate uses it with reference to literary works. The metaphor’s “signifi-
cance is transferred from the individual to the social plane, but the profound negative
value of the mirror remains unchanged” (175).
87
John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., EETS, e.s. 121, 122, 123, 124
(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1924, 1927) IV. 64-70. All future parenthetical references
are to this edition. At the beginning of Book IV, Lydgate expresses his belief that the truth
can be fixed in writing – for all times (1-7).
88
While Lydgate knew his Ovid, his knowledge of Virgil was most likely scant. See Ed-
wards, introduction, Troy Book 9. Atwood surmises that most of Lydgate’s Virgil is fil-
tered through Chaucer. Atwood, “Some Minor Sources” 37-40.
89
In spatial terms, Ovid is awarded with significantly fewer lines (12 ll.) than the laureate
Virgil (27 ll.) and the equally laureate Petrarch (21 ll.), who frame Ovid above and below
in the Fall of Princes.
554 Interchapter Two

to hold also for Lydgate’s one-to-one translation of Guido’s Historia (and Tro-
jan glory) into his English Troy Book. And yet, Virgil’s imperial opacity, which
remains firmly in place in Guido’s Historia, merely frames and cannot contain
its Ovidian ‘other’ in Troy Book.
At the beginning of Troy Book, Lydgate establishes a Virgilian framework
with a long invocation of Mars (Pro. 1-37), which extrapolates Guido’s imperi-
alism for Lydgate’s allegedly imperialist project.90 Next, he invokes Othea, the
goddess of prudence, which duplicates – within a Guidoan framework – the in-
vocation of Mars since prudence suppresses emotional turmoil (individuality) in
favor of the imperial mask. While Mars should help directing the traces of
Lydgate’s pen, “Whyche bareyn is of aureat lycour” and “stumbleth ay for faute
of eloquence” (Pro. 31, 34), Othea should make Clio and Calliope his muses.
She should “of thy golde dewe lat the lycour wete / My dulled brest, that wyth
thyn hony swete / Sugrest tongis of rhetoricyens” (Pro. 55-57).91 Lydgate, in
other words, adopts Mars as a guiding agency. Lydgate challenges this project
from the outset, however, insofar as he subsequently invokes the Ovidian epi-
sode of Mars and Venus caught in bed by Venus’s husband Vulcanus. This con-
tains Mars’s military prowess in a quintessentially Ovidian fashion and signifi-
cantly alludes to an Ovidian amatory episode, since it is especially for Mars’s
love for Venus that the former should help Lydgate: “Now, for the loue of
Wlcanus wyf, / Wyth whom whylom êou wer at meschef take, / So helpe me
now, only for hyr sake” (Pro. 22-24). Quite literally, Lydgate is interested in the
connections between the seemingly disparate Venerean and martial domains; he
is interested in the liminal, hybrid space.92

90
Baswell sees in the Prologue “an important triangulation, in which Guido receives praises
once accorded to Virgil, but Lydgate is allowed thereby to speak in the words and posture
of Virgil’s English follower and his own poetic progenitor, Chaucer.” Ultimately, though,
Lydgate has reservations about Chaucer’s “refusals, Chaucer’s slipperiness, and finally
[...] Chaucer’s real inimitability.” Baswell, “Troy Book” 227, 232.
91
With regard to the invocation of Mars, Clio, and Calliope, Edwards argues that “Prudence
stands as the middle term between epic material from pagan antiquity and Lydgate’s en-
coding of the story for a medieval chivalric audience; it is the virtue that governs the les-
son of history.” Edwards, “Lydgate’s Troy Book” 58. See further Meyer-Lee, “Lydgate’s
Laureate Pose” 45.
92
As Atwood observes, “Lydgate seems full of Ovid – almost overladen with Ovidian de-
tails which creep into his account without his knowledge, although he makes a conscien-
tious effort to acknowledge them correctly.” Atwood, “Some Minor Sources” 27. After the
long invocation of Mars and after Lydgate’s emphasis on reporting facts rather than fic-
tion, it is particularly ironic, as Tim Arner has pointed out to me, that Troy Book proper
begins with the story of the Myrmidons (for which, see Ebin, John Lydgate 47), adapted
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I. 10-11). Further Ovidian additions can be found in: Hercu-
les’s story (I. 553-616); the description of an (Ovidian), transformative Fortuna (I. 754-
56); Medea’s characterization which is linked to the Metamorphoses (I. 3700-715); Paris’s
dream (II. 2691-99); the discussion of idolatry (II. 5417), which also incorporates the nar-
rative of Vulcan detecting Mars and Venus in bed (II. 5796-825); Agamemnon’s sacrifice
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 555

Embedded more deeply in Lydgate’s ‘martial’ Prologue is the invocation of

Clio and Calliope, which recalls the second and third books of the Troilus (Ed-
wards 340n), that is, the Ovidian center of Chaucer’s poem. The “Sugrest tongis
of rethoricyens” that Lydgate mentions in invoking Calliope also surface in
Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, in which Chaucer emerges as the “Floure of poetes
thorghout al Breteyne,” who conveys the Canterbury Tales “Be rehersaule of his
sugrid mouth, / Of eche thyng keping in substaunce / The sentence hool with-
oute variance.”93 One-to-one translation, here attributed to Chaucer – who, in
case of the Troy story, is far from translating in such a manner – is likewise
Lydgate’s purported aim in Troy Book. The martial veneer is determined by the
rhetorical guidance Lydgate hopes to receive from Mars, Clio, and Calliope. Be-
fore the issue of guidance becomes explicitly complicated, other steering
authorities are mentioned, notably Prince Henry, who will govern “Brutys Alby-
oun” (Pro. 104, and see 73-74). Thus, the Prologue not only implicitly engages
with question of how the dichotomy between opacity (Mars, Virgil) and trans-
parency (Venus, Ovid) can be resolved, it further muses on the (quintessentially
Chaucerian) problem of guidance and steering – both on poetological (Guido,
Chaucer, Virgil, or Ovid) and ontological (Henry or Lydgate) levels.
Guido’s Historia becomes the guiding authority on the history of Troy.
Lydgate is keenly aware of the fact that the Historia itself has become a multi-
plicity of (different) texts for different audiences, as it is available in “latyn and
in frensche.” The purpose of his translation, then, is to ensure “That of the story
êe trouth[e] we nat mys / No more than doth eche other nacioun” (Pro. 116-17).
At this point, the martial veneer implodes. The audience is explicitly invited to
compare Lydgate’s translation with the Latin ‘original’ (of which Henry owned
a copy as well). Where Guido cleverly veils his source suppressing any allusion

of his own daughter to Diana (II. 6215-36); the description of the sunrise at the beginning
of Book III (III. 1-18); Achilles’s transformation into a servant of Venus (IV. 609-12,
1531-61); Lydgate’s lament for the death of Troilus (IV. 2998-70); and in the story of
Polyphemus. Besides some minor references to Virgil (II. 297-327, 328-354), Lydgate fre-
quently adds references to Mars in military contexts (II. 790-92, 798-800) – the Trojan
knight most frequently associated with Mars is Hector (II. 8468, 8546, III. 397, 504, 1406,
and above). Lydgate’s initial invocation of Mars is reiterated at the beginning of Book IV
and at the end of the poem (V. 3399-400), where Baswell discerns a reference to the
fourth Eclogue. Baswell, “Troy Book” 221. In Troy, Mars is worshipped but the walls are
held together by “copper gilt ful clere,” an Ovidian, transformative material – it is a cop-
per pillar on which Venus’s clerk resides in the House of Fame. While Cassibilans is bur-
ied in the temple of Venus, Lydgate adds that his helm, shield, sword, and steed were of-
fered to Mars (III. 2240-41). In a sense, Lydgate’s Troy becomes a hybrid Greco-Trojan
site.
93
John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards, TEAMS Middle English Texts
(Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001) Pro. 52-54. For Lydgate’s
characterization of Chaucer’s sugared eloquence, see further A. C. Spearing, Medieval to
Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) 69; Edwards,
Siege of Thebes 153n.
556 Interchapter Two

to his base text, Benoît’s Roman de Troie, Lydgate almost literally spells out his
changeability that is only thinly masked by the illusion of a transparent, genea-
logical line in the realm of historiography,94 which Lydgate begins to construct:
writers describe the virtues of great men – which emerge only post-mortem (Pro.
192-94) – from “poynt to poynt” (Pro. 203). Hence, the truth comes down to
Lydgate. Age “hath nouõt diffaced” the story: “õe may beholde in bokys / The
story fully rehersed new and newe, / And freschely floure of colour and of hewe
/ From day to day, quyk & no thyng feynt” (Pro. 250, 252-55). Following
Guido, Lydgate distinguishes this honored historiographical from a poetical tra-
dition: poets have “transformed” the matter and “hyde trouthe falsely vnder
cloude” (Pro. 262, 265). Homer, for instance, added that the gods were aiding
the Greeks, feigning with “sugred wordes vnder hony soote, / His galle is hidde
lowe by the rote, / That it may nouõt outewarde ben espied” (Pro. 277-79). The
passage is highly ambiguous, since it implicitly argues that Chaucer’s sugared
rhetoric is as misleading as Homer’s. And yet, the comparison holds. Where
Homer’s narrative deviates from truthful history insofar as he is blinded by love
for the Greeks (Pro. 284), Chaucer’s ‘translation’ differs from the Troy story on
account of the poet’s love for his heroine. And in a sense, Lydgate reverses
Homer in that he sides with the Trojans and modifies many a passage in accor-
dance with his pro-Trojan bias.95

94
“With Lydgate we thus have a return to the line of succession that had nearly been undone
by the inadequacy of Guido’s predecessors. Lydgate has the right to tell the Troy story be-
cause he tells it in accord with the substaunce passed down through this line of succession
and because he had adopted as his own the stile in which Guido wrote.” This is related to
the quintessential Lancastrian problem of legitimate succession after the usurpation.
Lydgate solves this problem by reference to Brutus, who is as imaginary a source as the
imagined Troy Book. As successors, Henry and Lydgate play a role in maintaining and re-
instating, establishing “a reconstructed series.” Alan S. Ambrisco and Paul Strohm, “Suc-
cession and Sovereignty in Lydgate’s Prologue to The Troy Book,” ChauR 30.1 (1995):
47, 53. The strategy is a salient feature of national historiography, which often is a matter
of mending a series: in Keith Stringer’s words, “every nation needs to manufacture a na-
tional history, blotting out painful episodes and glorifying past triumphs.” Keith Stringer,
“Social and Political Communities in European History: Some Reflections on Recent
Studies,” Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism in the European Past, ed. Claus Bjørn, Al-
exander Grant, and Keith Stringer (Copenhagen: Academic Press, 1994) 27.
95
“Lydgate certainly cheers on the Trojans, and especially Hector, while denigrating the
Greeks.” Benson, History 117. Although Lydgate extols the prudence of some Greeks, he
often blackens Greek troops: III. 931-32, 944, 987, 1025-26 (but cf. III. 1153-57), 1268,
1378-79, 1621-24, 2615-21, and so on. Individual Greek knights are often described as
cruel, an adjective rarely employed with reference to the Trojans: III. 2527, 2814, 2843,
3397, 3496, 4686, 4518, 4560, 4576; IV. 325, 838, 1252, 2055, 3889, 3921-22, 4428, et
cetera. The only Trojan frequently described as cruel is Troilus throughout Book IV
(2232-40, 2254-62, 2277-301, 2467, 2709, and so on). Lydgate adds freely to the blame of
the Trojan traitors, especially Antenor (IV. 5373, 5443, 5832, 6531, 6684-85, and so
forth), while Lydgate somewhat excuses Aeneas’s treachery.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 557

Ovid and Virgil are also guilty of intermingling fact and fiction. Ovid, for in-
stance, “poetycally hath closyd / Falshede with trouthe” (Pro. 299-300) – a proc-
ess, Geffrey recognizes in the House of Fame, inevitably inherent in the trans-
mission of historical knowledge. Lydgate himself is no exception as concerns
the conflation of accounts, especially in conveying the story of Troilus and
Criseyde. He also senses mutability in Virgil, whose changeability is caused by
love (Pro. 304). Lydgate, following the Prologue of the Historia, sees himself
rather in the genealogical line of Dares, Dictys, Cornelius, and Guido, whose
rhetorical skill is particularly stressed, suggesting “that our author is more of the
poets’ camp than he might like to admit.”96 Lydgate’s own Ovidian changeabil-
ity in portraying Criseyde is perhaps the most trenchant case in point. Guido
therefore only seemingly becomes Lydgate’s adopted pilot for the navigation of
turbulent textual worlds fraught with both love and warfare (Ovid and Virgil).
At the end of his Prologue (and at the end of Troy Book), Lydgate assumes the
‘transparent’ Virgilian mask again: Praise honor and ‘excellence of fame,’
Lydgate writes, “O Guydo maister, be vn-to thi name, / That excellest by souere-
inte of stile / Alle that writen this mater to compile” (Pro. 372-74). The Prologue
begins and ends on a Virgilian note, and it moves from the invocation of Mars to
a commendation of Guido for using Virgil’s high style. Lydgate thus reproduces
the Virgilian frame of Chaucer’s Troilus, underlined by the reorganization of
Guido’s thirty-five books into a five-book structure reminiscent of Chaucer’s
poem.97 Lydgate’s ‘sterisman,’ then, is problematic. In fact, that pilots are prob-
lematic is readily apparent to any reader coming to Troy Book from Chaucer’s
work. Lydgate himself tellingly aspires to follow the Virgilian model “as nyõe as
euer I may” (Pro. 375),98 a phrase that immediately recalls Geffrey’s intention in
the House of Fame to sing of the arms and the man, before slowly slipping into
the Ovidian modulations of Dido’s story. Like Troilus, Lydgate is caught in two
contrary winds – without a genuine guide.
The predicament of being guide-less surfaces frequently in Troy Book, and it
frames Book II. After a long digression about masks and the changeability of
Fortuna, the description of the carnage resulting from Laomedon’s inability to
mask his emotionality is followed by Lydgate claiming to lack the rhetorical
ability necessary for the task at hand: his style “of colour ful nakyd is and bare”
(II. 149).99 Not being able to translate from point to point, he follows the “sen-
tence” instead. Fittingly, he adds that he “hadde as êo no guyde / Me to reducyn,

96
Shutters, “Truth” 74.
97
For the five book structure, see Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer” 91, 91-92 n. 14.
98
Benson argues that this supports Lydgate’s fidelity to his source text. Benson does point
out echoes from the House of Fame, chiefly Lydgate’s description of Fortuna at the begin-
ning of Book II, which recalls Chaucer’s Fama. Benson, History 114, 121.
99
Lydgate believes (or at least wants to believe), however, that Henry is a forgiving ruler
since there is “Mercy anexid vn-to royal blood” (II. 156).
558 Interchapter Two

whan I went a-wrong” (II. 182-83) for emulating meter.100 Lydgate quickly re-
covers his ‘transparent’ pose, however, since there is no better guide than Guido:
I toke non hede nouêer of schort nor long,
But to êe trouêe, and lefte coryouste
Boêe of makyng and of metre be,
Nat purposyng to moche for to varie,
Nor for to be dyuerse nor contrarie
Vn-to Guydo, as by discordaunce;
But me conforme fully in substaunce,
Only in menyng, to conclude al on;
Al-be êat I ne can êe wey[e] goon
To swe êe floures of his eloquence;
Nor of peyntyng I haue noon excellence
With sondry hewes noble, fresche, and gay;
So riche colours biggen I ne may;
I mote procede with sable and with blake. (II. 184-97)
At the end of the book, Lydgate again stresses that Guido is certainly his
“guyde” (II. 7609),101 while it has emerged time and again that Lydgate fre-
quently does change his source and very liberally reinterprets the truth, always
at pains to maintain the opaque veil of transparency.
Lydgate and Lydgate’s protagonists find themselves more often in need of a
pilot than Guido and his protagonists in what is, overall, a more perilous jour-
ney. Lydgate’s Trojans frequently incite commentary about their lack of guid-
ance, such as Troilus’s lack of a guide in moral matters or Priam’s trust in
dream-lore (II. 1820, 2819, both cited above). One of the few individuals who is
a good guide is Agamemnon, who adopts the appropriate good: “For õif trouêe
oure sothfast guyde be, / [...] / Êan oure quarel schal ay in honour schine” (II.
6560-62). In Book III, Lydgate suddenly adopts Chaucer as a guide when turn-
ing, very briefly, to the ladies on the city wall, some of whom are so afraid that
they hide their faces so as not to witness the fighting (III. 530-31). At this point,
Lydgate himself is curiously unable to attend to the events on the field. He does
not know the terms to describe the war, and his one-to-one translation becomes
cloudy indeed: “Wel may I make an exclamacioun / On ignoraunce, êat stant so
in my liõt, / Whiche causeth me with a ful cloudy siõt” (III. 540-42).102 Even

100
Guido’s Historia is, after all, a prose narrative.
101
In passing, it should be noted that Lydgate heavily expands a passage on navigating the
seas (I. 668-722), which is attributed to Guido (I. 668). Guido is as much as guide in the
world of historiography as is Henry V in the realm of politics. See Ambrisco and Strohm,
“Succession and Sovereignty” 52.
102
Medieval discussions of clouds blocking the sun or the moon are often associated with an
overthrow of power. Sue Bianco, “New Perspectives on Lydgate’s Courtly Verse,” Na-
tion, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen
Cooney (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001) 105, with reference to Herbert Wright, Boccac-
cio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson, non videtur. On this view, the above passage
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 559

more curiously, Lydgate asks Chaucer for help: “And Chaucer now, allas! is nat
alyue / Me to reforme, or to be my rede, / For lak of whom slouõer is my spede”
(III. 550-52). Lydgate’s appropriation of the ladies’ ‘clouded’ view from the
wall, then, parallels his predicament in portraying Criseyde, who cannot be
‘guided by any rein’ (III. 4397-98, discussed above). Such passages are poe-
tologically significant insofar as the audience witnesses Lydgate’s act of doffing
the seemingly transparent, Virgilian mask in order to make visible his
Chaucerian changeability and Criseydan translucence.
At the end of Troy Book, Lydgate again emphasizes the need to balance opac-
ity and transparency. After the death of Penthesilea, Mars deserts Troy, but not
without Lydgate complaining about the god of war, foregrounding Mars’s (un-
contained) anger. Mars is described as “Wounder sleiõty and Engynyous, /
Compassynge and suspecious” (IV. 4467-68) and as “venymous” (IV. 4474,
4509). His double assault on Troy parallels that of the Greeks, for he intends
“First on hem [for] to do vengaunce / With speris sharp & swerdes kene whet, /
An[d] now in prisoun tenclosen hem & shet” (IV. 4488-90). Among the Trojans,
Mars sows treason: “Feyned trouêe and symulacioun, / To maken hertis amonge
hem silfe devide! / Lo, how êe serpent of discord can glyde” (IV. 4504-06).
Mars’s disappearance correlates both with the loss of prudent heroes, such as
Hector and Penthesilea, and prudent masking strategies in general. Troy is left
without guidance as the ability to mask intention and desires transfers to traitors
such as Aeneas and Antenor (IV 4440-537). The character of Aeneas particu-
larly allows Lydgate to more explicitly link the Virgilian and Ovidian traditions.
While the Destruction praises Virgil, “Lydgate, following Guido, is more scep-
tical.” Lydgate “links the Guido-tradition of Aeneas as a traitor to Troy with the
Ovidian tradition of Aeneas as a traitor to Dido (5. 1451-42).”103 Aeneas’s
treachery, perpetrated by opaque prosopagraphy is likewise necessary, even if it
is ethically problematic – without the traitors, there would be no translatio im-
perii (and no Albion).
The traitors contrive – “vnder veil concelyd secrely” – to save their lives in
the light of a falling Troy (IV. 4542); collective prudence gives way to self-
interested ‘prudence,’ which causes discord and instability. Amphimachus thus
alleges that Antenor, who will become a leader later on, lacks “stabilnes” and
has become a duplicitous mask maker (IV. 4733, 4761-68). Meanwhile,
Aeneas’s ‘moderation’ is described, by Lydgate, as a matter of “goon be-twene”
(IV. 4774), a Pandarian trait apparently suitable for the translation of empires:
“And gan his tale so to modifie / Like as he ment trouêe in his entent; / But êer-
in was double intendement” (IV. 4776-78). The traitors create self-interested
Virgilian masks. Accordingly, Lydgate introduces Antenor’s eloquent speech by

introduces Lydgate’s anxiety about the potential loss of poetic power. Such a loss does not
occur, however, emphasizing his ability to authorize his own discourse.
103
Simpson, Reform 96.
560 Interchapter Two

means of familiar metaphors: there is a mismatch between exterior and interior,

his plain meaning is “with fraude frauõt,” and he hides his venom like a serpent
(IV. 5201-29) – these strategies are somewhat obvious, since the prudent man
ensures:
Êat his tonge be nat ouer-large:
Trouêes alle be nat for to seyn;
For wisdam is, som tyme for to feyne
And dissymule in aduersite,
Specially whan men in trouble be,
And sene her speche may hem nat availle:
Better is êanne êat her tonge faille,
Êan folily to her damage speke.
Men most amonge cure and ouerreke
Êe trouêe of êinges, only of prudence,
And humblely suffre in pacience
For fals report of folkes envious.
Who can so done, I holde hym vertuous.... (IV. 5454-66)
Martial veiling evolves as doubly necessary here: ontologically (for individual
survival) and historiographically (for Brutus’s Albion). Lydgate’s altered char-
acterization of Aeneas is important in this context. After the city has fallen,
Aeneas sadly walks through the ruins of Troy. His heart bleeds remembering
“Êe false tresoun and êe grete offence / By hym compassid to êe toun a-forn”
(V. 400-01). Like Agamemnon, Aeneas presumably learns from past mistakes.
Aeneas’s remorse is emphasized again when Lydgate reports that Aeneas re-
mains with the surviving Trojans, adding that Aeneas stayed “Only of rouêe and
compassioun / To supporte hem êat wer left of êe toun” (V. 1339-40). Aeneas’s
ruth gains prominence for the last time in a context not unimportant for Lydgate
and his contemporary readers. Referring the reader to Virgil’s Aeneid as con-
cerns Aeneas’s destiny, Lydgate mentions Aeneas’s loss of his wife and his
harsh treatment of Dido, to whom “he was vnkynde” – a phrase that prominently
echoes Chaucer’s poet’s ‘euphemistic’ assessment of Criseyde’s ‘unkindness’ to
Troilus (V. 1451; Troilus IV. 15-16). Implicitly, this justifies Aeneas’s behavior
while highlighting Criseydan and Lydgatean translucence. It likewise demon-
strates that Lydgate’s version of the translatio imperii poses the same question
as does Chaucer’s Troilus, namely, how to link personal and collective dis-
courses, evincing Lydgate’s interest in connectedness, “a quality Lydgate must
have valued highly. This is apparent not only in the linking of sentences by
rhymes and the overflowing of stanza bounds but in the frequency with which
his sentences start with a conjunction: and, but, or for.”104 In Troy Book,

104
Phillipa Hardman, “Lydgate’s Uneasy Syntax,” John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson
23.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 561

Lydgate’s chief interest lies in the nexus between personal and national dis-
courses, and therefore in Criseydan translucence.105
The Chaucerian influence posited here generally does not square with the
evaluation of Lydgate’s reception of his poetic forebear. Recently, however,
there has been a shift regarding Lydgate’s Chaucerian intertextualities. As Larry
Scanlon and James Simpson observe, “Precisely because Chaucer was consis-
tently isolated as the exception, the monastic Lydgate, his closest and very defi-
nitely Catholic competitor, was taken to prove the medieval rule. This historical
logic has been reformulated across four centuries of literary history, according to
the demands of different historical interests.”106 While few scholars would con-
tradict Benson’s assertion that “Chaucer is the most important influence on all
aspects of the Troy Book,”107 the more important issue is how Lydgate perceived
of himself vis-à-vis Chaucer. Most critics agree that Lydgate, for different rea-
sons, sees Chaucer as a rival,108 while a minority suggests taking Lydgate out-

105
Besides the Troy Book women and Aeneas, Lydgate’s Ulysses is likewise one of the char-
acters capable of synthesizing personal and national, Ovidian and Virgilian domains.
Lydgate’s Ulysses vacillates “between Ovid’s strong pro-Ulyssean account of this incident
and the pro-Ajax sympathies of Cicero, Virgil, Dares and Dictys. [...] The total impression
from Lydgate’s treatment of Ulysses is of some stirrings of sympathy and understanding
heavily chained down by anti-Ulyssean prejudice.” W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A
Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963) 289-
90. Lydgate praises Ulysses’s opaque prosopagraphy, whereby he emphasizes his fore-
thought, for instance, when rhetorically battling with Ajax for the Palladium (see esp. V.
166-71; cf. Historia XXXI, 238). In Lydgate’s account of Ulysses’s wanderings, the lat-
ter’s opacity is generally described favorably, that is, as prudent (see V. 1807-09, 1820).
And yet, Lydgate borrows from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his expansion of Ulysses’s ad-
ventures, anticipating the latter’s Ovidian changeability, which comes to the fore at the
end of Troy Book when Ovidian recklessness penetrates the Virgilian mask. In Troy Book,
Ulysses ignores a banner that clearly spells out that his future misfortunes are related to
Circe (V. 3067-80) in particular and his recklessness in general. Ulysses becomes “Êe olde
fool, êis dotard Vlixes” (V. 3097). As a prudent man, however, he realizes his mistake (V.
3190-97) and is able to restrain Telemachus’s recklessness (V. 3273-76), which eventually
results in the marriage of Nausicäa and Telemachus, pointing to the unification of England
and France through Henry’s betrothal to Katherine (V. 2293-300; Edwards 421-22n).
106
Scanlon and Simpson, introduction, John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson 2; see also
Simpson, Reform 46-47.
107
Benson, History 107. For Lydgate’s indebtedness to Chaucer, see Pearsall, John Lydgate
49-82; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval
England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993) 34-56, 67-72.
108
See Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance 59-120, esp. 66-88; Pearsall, “Chaucer and
Lydgate” 39-40, 46; Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer” esp. 91; Federico, New Troy 123-27;
Simpson, “Chaucer’s Presence” 258-59. “The agon with Chaucer that he stages through
his imitation of the Canterbury Tales [in the Siege] [...] aims not so much to depict himself
as an authentic disciple and heir as to transform Chaucer into a flesh-and-blood laureate
who retroactively defines the role that Lydgate implicitly claims to occupy,” inventing
English laureateship. Meyer-Lee, “Lydgate’s Laureate Pose” 39-40, 49-52.
562 Interchapter Two

side the Chaucerian ambit altogether.109 Larry Scanlon, for instance, believes
that readings emphasizing Lydgate’s attempted ‘out-doing’ “are necessarily par-
tial, for they still take Chaucer’s dominance as already established. In viewing
the relationship between the two poets in largely instrumental terms, they do not
explain what attracts Lydgate to Chaucer in the first place, nor what Lydgate
thought he might learn from Chaucer, nor why Lydgate was so convinced that
Chaucer was entitled to the overarching authority Lydgate wanted to concede to
him.”110 What appears to attract Lydgate to Chaucer, particularly in Troy Book,
is Chaucer’s advancement of translucent prosopagrahphy, an ontological mode
that enables the maintenance of several contradictory domains and lends coher-
ence to individuals without collapsing all masks, that is, falling prey to prede-
termined and prefabricated (national) narratives. Lydgate, that is, reinforces
Chaucerian counter-nationhood.
The above corroborates recent reconsiderations of Lydgate’s position vis-à-
vis Lancastrian politics. Older studies often located in Lydgate’s works Lancas-
trian nationalism if not an imperialism.111 While the image of Lydgate as a Lan-
castrian flatterer still maintains in some studies,112 other scholars are more hesi-
tant in making Lydgate a Lancastrian propagandist. Walter Schirmer already
highlights Lydgate’s potential unease with the task of translating a ‘national’
epic, arguing that Lydgate was “less moved by such sentiments of national

109
Bianco, “New Perspectives on Lydgate’s Courtly Verse” 95-115; Shutters, “Truth” 69.
110
Larry Scanlon, “Lydgate’s Poetics: Laureation and Domesticity in the Temple of Glass,”
John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson 93 n. 2.
111
“Whereas we have detected only timid traces of humanism in the Troy Book, we are
struck by the violent nationalism which pervades the work from beginning to end.” Re-
noir, Poetry of John Lydgate 96.
112
Pearsall, John Lydgate 160-91; Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature
and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980)
189-90; Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval
Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987) 203; Patterson, “Making Identities
in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” New Historical Literary
Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry
J. Reynolds (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993) 74, emphasizing the contradic-
tions arising from the propagandist effort; Torti, “From ‘History’ to ‘Tragedy’” 184;
Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary
Studies, 1997) 9, 17, 18-19, 28-32; Ambrisco and Strohm, “Succession and Sovereignty”
40-57; Pearsall, “Lydgate as Innovator,” Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth-Century
Poetry, ed. Edwards 15-17; Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer” 92; Baswell, “Troy Book” 217-
19; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation,
1399-1422 (1998; Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2006) 186-95, with the
caveat that the texts themselves are at best ambiguous (190-91); Strohm, “Hoccleve,
Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Litera-
ture, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999) 656-61. Recent work
is careful with regard to Lydgate’s Lancastrian leanings – as is Federico, New Troy 127-
28.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 563

pride,” as was Henry.113 Benson similarly observes that “If Lydgate does not al-
legorize the history, neither does he exploit England’s Trojan heritage in any
special way.”114 In the absence of autobiographical statements, it is hard to de-
termine what Lydgate felt on the issue. In view of the fact that Troy Book is a
translation of the foundational myth of Britain undertaken with the intention to
make available this important text in English, preventing historical belatedness,
it is hard not to read the poem in a national and/or imperial context – and much
suggests that Henry would have read Troy Book in this way. After all, “the Troy
Book and the Siege of Thebes have an important position as public poems.”115
Lydgate’s interest in making selves, in masking and unmasking, underwrites his
concern with the question of reconciling national and personal mythologies,
which does not inevitably locate Lydgate in the Lancastrian camp. Recent work,
in fact, senses in Troy Book (and Lydgate’s works in general) a strong advoca-
tion of peace and an anti-imperialist bias.116 Focusing on the self-
contradictoriness of Lydgate’s poetics, Scott-Morgan Straker, for instance, ob-
serves that it is questionable whether Lydgate, occupying a mediatory position
between throne and public, urges his readers to “to agitate or integrate, to do or
to believe” – the classical aims of propaganda. Self-contradiction stands in the
way of such goals and possibly becomes “a coherent strategy for balancing po-
litical criticism with the decorum of addressing powerful patrons.”117 Self-
contradictoriness, or rather the contradictions between self (Lydgate) and public
discourse (national historiography) are certainly central to the ontological con-
flict posed throughout Troy Book – a problem Lydgate solves by deconstructing
and recirculating a national myth, that is, by re-articulating Chaucerian counter-
nationhood.118

113
Schirmer, John Lydgate 43.
114
While acknowledging the pro-Trojan bias of Troy Book, Benson refutes Renoir’s claim
that Lydgate’s Troy Book is nationalistic. Benson, History 117.
115
Ebin, John Lydgate 39. In the context of this assertion, it is unfortunate that Maura
Nolan’s John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2005) does not consider either of the mentioned poems.
116
For Lydgate’s advocation of peace, see Schirmer, John Lydgate 47-49; Lawton, “Dullness
and the Fifteenth Century” 778-79; Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer” 94; Baswell, “Troy
Book” 222; for a more skeptical view, cf. Edwards, introduction, Troy Book 9; Edwards,
“Lydgate’s Troy Book” 69. For Lydgate’s anti-imperialism, see Scott-Morgan Straker,
“Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate’s Troy Book,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999):
esp. 124-127, 145; Simpson, Reform 34-103; Simpson, “‘For al my body ... weieth nat an
unce’: Empty Poets and Rhetorical Weight in Lydgate’s Churl and the Bird,” John
Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson 129-46; Straker, “Propaganda, Intentionality, and the
Lancastrian Lydgate,” John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson 99-101, 122-24nn.
117
Straker, “Propaganda” 104, 107. For Lydgatean self-contradictoriness, see further Patter-
son, “Making Identities” 75; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne 195.
118
But cf. Fiona Somerset’s caveat that the conviction “that Lydgate is not a propagandist,
should not lead us too swiftly to a concurrent certainty that Lydgate is not an ideologue.”
564 Interchapter Two

Since Henry had access to the well-known Troy story in Latin and French,
the parts of Troy Book that would have been of greatest interest to him are the
beginning and end. As I argued above, the Prologue is seemingly Virgilian, as is
the end of the poem. Despite Lydgate’s frequent nods to imperialism, Simpson
argues that Troy Book is strongly anti-Virgilian: “Lydgate closes his Troy Book
by wishing imperial fame on ‘that noble myghti conquerour,’ Henry V, ‘So that
his name may be magnified / Here in this lyf up to the steres clene, / And after-
ward, above the nynthe spere, / Whan he is ded, for to han a place’ (5. 3600-3).
After the previous five books, this can only sound hollow, more like a superfi-
cial courtly gesture after the powerful and minatory story that precedes it.”119 At
the same time, Lydgate closes the Virgilian frame opened at the outset, with an
allusion to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue concerning Henry’s role in England (see
above). The Virgilianism that thus frames Ovidian changeability reinforces the
ontological necessity of Virgilian opacity and Ovidian transparency, effecting a
Chaucerian translucence in which individual mythemes ‘shine through’ the col-
lective masks. In contrast to Guido, whose translative endeavor is a matter of
obfuscating his source, Lydgate from time to time unveils his changeability in
his engagement with the ‘sources’ of Brutus’s Albion.
This is also true of Lydgate’s translation of Guido’s comments on the Trojan
foundations after the Trojan War. On the surface, the two passages seem to be
identical. Like Guido, Lydgate relates the Trojan foundations after reporting the
Argonauts’ arrival in Troy and the inhospitality with which they are greeted by
Laomedon. Fortuna – the lady of “transmutacioun” and “reuolucioun” prepares
hidden snares as do the fates in the Historia. The description of Fortuna’s mask-
ing prompts Lydgate to muse on the small spark that kindled the gigantic fire of
the war, before translating Guido’s acknowledgment that it could be argued that
some good resulted from the destruction of Troy, whereby Lydgate is less hesi-
tant in placing the latter in a positive light:
Êat êis mescheffe schulde after be
Folwyng per-chaunse of gret felicite.
For Troy[e] brouõt vn-to destruccioun,
Was êe gynnyng and occasioun –
In myn auctor as it is specified –
Êat worthi Rome was after edefied
By êe of-spryng of worêi Eneas,
Whilom fro Troye whan he exiled was. (I. 809-16)
The destruction of Troy represents an opportunity for a new beginning, for
change, as is also indicated by Lydgate’s modifications of the Historia at this

Somerset, “‘Hard is with seyntis for to make affray’: Lydgate the ‘Poet-Propagandist’ as
Hagiographer,” John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson 260.
119
Simpson, Reform 96-97, quotation at 97.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 565

point. While following Guido as concerns the foundation of Rome by “manly

man Enee” (I. 824), Guido’s mentioning of Britain motivates a further addition:
And after hym his sone Silvius,
Of whom cam Brute, so passyngly famus.
After whom, õif I schal nat feyne,
Whilom êis lond called was Breteyne;
For he of geauntys êoruõ his manhood wan
Êis noble yle, and it first be-gan. (I. 831-36, emphases added)
Again, Lydgate allegedly follows his source, while liberally adding to it. Guido
does not mention the giants, which recall Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
regum Britanniae.120 Notably, Guido does not refer to Britain as an island either.
Lydgate, however, first talks about “Breteyne” (rhyming on “feyne”) as a
“lond,” before specifying that Britain is “Êis noble yle.” Troy Book’s Britain is
thus just as much an ‘island encompassed by the sea’ as it is in Chaucer’s Troi-
lus: a nation rather than an empire.121 Subsequently, Lydgate faithfully retains
the other Trojan foundations until Guido’s inclusion of Diomedes’s settlement
of Calabria affords the opportunity for a long, Ovidian expansion,122 the veracity
of which Lydgate rejects in the usual manner (I. 904-12). No more of this, he
writes, and continues,
[...] & êus whan Troie tovn
Euersed was, and I-brouõt to nouõt,
Ful many cite was I-bilt and wrouõt,
And many lond and many riche tovn
Was edified by thocasioun
Of êis werre, as õe han herde me telle.
Whiche to declare now I may not dwelle
From point to point, lyche as bokis seyn,
For to Iason I wil resorte ageyn... (I. 912-20)

120
“Qualis est Anglia, que a Bruto Troyano, vnde Britania dicta est, legitur habitata” [Such is
England, which we read was settled by the Trojan, Brutus, which is why it is called Brit-
ain] (Historia II, 11).
121
At the end of Troy Book, Lydgate admittedly endorses the official version that England
legitimately claims hegemony over France (V. 3384-86, cited above; Envoy 6-7). Baswell
draws attention to the fact that – in the second half of the fifteenth-century – England “still
cherished imperial ambitions to replicate King Arthur’s conquests and reverse the transla-
tio imperii that had brought Brutus to England, and thereby to re-establish the Angevin
empire that had earlier exploited this same set of myths. And yet, England was a nation
increasingly functioning in a native language with a resurgent cultural and political author-
ity.” Baswell, “Troy Book” 215. For Henry’s attempts to forge a sense of nationhood, par-
ticularly qua the use of the English language, see further Derek Pearsall, “Chaucer and
Englishness,” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1999): 92; Pearsall, “The Idea of
Englishness in the Fifteenth Century,” Nation, Court and Culture, ed. Cooney 17-18.
122
Lydgate does not translate Guido’s reference to Ovid; he leaves it at saying “as bokes
telle” (I. 867; cf. Historia II, 12). Lydgate thus indirectly attributes his modifications to
the text he is translating, bestowing on these transformations Guidoan authority.
566 Interchapter Two

Lydgate again manufactures a seemingly transparent mask insofar as the point-

to-point translation of ‘empires’ correlates with his one-to-one translation of the
Historia, which he does not translate transparently at all. While Lydgate seem-
ingly translates Troy to England, allegorizing England as Troy, he actually em-
phasizes his own changeability underneath the mask; Lydgate advances a mode
of allegory which accommodates both identity and difference.123 Besides
Lydgate’s major structural modifications and those changes affecting characteri-
zation, his ‘Criseydan’ translation is telling in the minor details as well. In the
above-cited passages, Lydgate rhymes both “destruccioun” and “tovn” with “oc-
casioun,” the semantic range of which stretches from reason to occasion in the
sense of opportunity. The (narrative of the) destruction of Troy indeed invites
change. It is the rewriting of the myth (feyne / Breteyne) that ultimately results
in Lydgate’s borrowing of one of Chaucer’s frequently employed rhyme-pairs in
the Troilus. When Laomedon commands at the end of Troy Book that the Tro-
jans should live unharmed among the Thessalians, Lydgate writes “And êus êe
folke êat cam êral fro Troye / Restored ben sodeinly to Ioie” (V. 2861-62).124 On
the allegorical level, Lydgate’s Troy Book promotes allegorizing in a conceptual
framework in which source and target domains are not identical, a discourse
promoting change, where intersections between several domains always have to
be determined anew.125 Like Criseyde, Lydgate manages to rhetorically con-
struct an opaque, Virgilian mask of stability that only appears to be transparent,
variously veiling and unveiling his own changeability.
Even at the end of Troy Book, when Lydgate heaps imperial praise onto his
patron, he occasionally doffs the mask. Lydgate celebrates Henry V as the “pro-

123
At the end of Troy Book, Lydgate “encodes England as a mirror of Troy, reviving its im-
perial glory but inverting those self-destructive sins that the book’s readers have just en-
countered.” Baswell, “Troy Book” 221. While noting that the Destruction and Troy Book
conspire “in the English appropriation of Trojans as illustrious, heroic ancestors,” John
Finlayson believes that they cannot “reasonably be read as overt or subversive, contempo-
rary political allegories.” Finlayson, “Guido de Columnis’ Historia destructionis Troiae,
The ‘Gest Hystorial’ of the Destruction of Troy, and Lydgate’s Troy Book: Translation and
the Design of History,” Anglia 113.2 (1995): 159. Fewer suggests that in Lydgate’s “care-
ful disposition of Guido’s material it is possible to see the outlines of a society more com-
plex than that which appears either in Guido or, indeed, in Lancastrian propaganda – one
that I am suggesting is a more accurate portrait of contemporary English political society
than has generally been acknowledged.” Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book” 240.
124
In the Historia, Achilleides issues the command.
125
Edwards argues that Lydgate’s “language belies the transparency of the monarch’s goals.
Henry, as Lydgate describes him, evidently believes that making the ‘noble story’ avail-
able to all in English will leave its meaning stable and uncontested: the princely reader
will disseminate the story and enforce his hermeneutics without disturbance. But to tell the
‘noble story openly’ is to submit the unifying narrative of chivalry to ideological scru-
tiny.” Edwards, “‘The Metropol and the Mayster-Toun’: Cosmopolitanism and Late Me-
dieval Literature,” Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture,
ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001) 46.
 Post-Chaucerian Prosopagraphy in Lydgate’s Troy Book 567

tector of Brutis Albyoun” (V. 3377) and as conqueror of Normandy, who “by
his myõti prudent gouernaunce / Recured eke his trewe title of Fraunce” (V.
3385-86) – a martial ruler noted for his “mervailles in armis” (V. 3445). Cruel
Mars should not menace the two realms which should live in peace. Borrowing
the terms used to describe the Greek reconciliations after the destruction of
Troy, Lydgate hopes that “Yngelond and Fraunce / May be al oon, with-oute
variaunce” (V. 3411-12).126 In a Chaucerian gesture, Lydgate next excuses his
ignorance and offers the poem for correction, which culminates in another
eulogy of Chaucer. The length of Lydgate’s call for correction is notable (V.
3468-543). Despite the stability envisaged for the future rule of France and Eng-
land, and in spite of the stability attributed to his (hybrid) Troy Book, Lydgate
excessively invites change and changeability, which is underlined by his subse-
quent move from the changeability of his text – “with her prudent loke, / To race
& skrape êoruõ-oute al my boke” – to the changeability of Fortuna which forms
the substance of his work: “And who-so liste to se variaunce, / Or worldly êing
wrouõt be daies olde,” will find in his book “Chaunge of Fortune, in hir cours
mutable, / Selde or nat feithful ouêer stable,” as lords and princes are “Sodeinly
brouõt in aduersite” (V. 3537-50).127 Change and fortune hover beneath the sur-
face even when Lydgate places Henry “aboue êe nynêe spere” (V. 3602) after
his death and eulogizes him in the Envoy as the best of knights, “To be registred
worêi as of name / In the hiõest place of êe hous of fame” (Envoy 13-14, empha-
ses added). The obvious allusion to Chaucer’s House of Fame, in which the
highest place is awarded to poets rather than princes,128 could not more strongly
corroborate the inevitability of change.

126
“In the historical and textual space that the Siege shares with Troy Book in their quotations
from the Treaty of Troyes, alliance holds out the prospect of resolving a protracted con-
flict over succession while identifying the reason for collapse when those prospects ulti-
mately fail.” Edwards, “Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track,” European Liter-
ary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Fre-
derick A. de Armas (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002) 121.
127
The rhetorical construction of stability is problematic, as Priam’s (prudent) rebuilding of
the second, seemingly indestructible Troy illustrates. In erecting the new town, Priam em-
ploys ‘image makers’ and painters, who “Make an ymage êat wil neuere fade” (II. 512).
Similarly, if somewhat less assured, the workmen responsible for the gates “set vp gret
ymages, / Wrouõt out of stone, êat neuer ar like to fayle” (II. 610-11). Without the neces-
sary changeability, this kind of ornamental (rhetorical) hue does not stay the course of
time any more successfully than the walls protecting Troy.
128
For the allusion to the House of Fame, see Edwards 427n. According to Meyer-Lee,
Lydgate is aware of the contradictions inherent in being an historian and a panegyrist, for
“How may one create in a single text both factual history and encomium without the his-
tory becoming mere flattery or the encomium patently disingenuous?” The dilemma dis-
appears, however, if poetic authority corresponds to political authority. Meyer-Lee,
“Lydgate’s Laureate Pose” 48.
568 Interchapter Two

Poetologically (and prosopagraphically) Lydgate inscribes himself into a na-

tional myth of origins,129 steering through turbulent, discursive European seas
and negotiating royal patronage – a journey that serves more purposes than self-
authorization. Unlike many Trojans, Lydgate escapes unscathed. In occupying
an ultimately changeable, Criseydan subject position, Lydgate reinforces Chau-
cer’s lesson of changeable mythologies, linking person and nation by means of
mythological bricolage. Lydgate rewrites national history which, like Guido’s
Historia and unlike Chaucer’s Troilus, has all the appearance of rewriting na-
tional history. Underneath the mask, however, Lydgate turns the tables on both
Guido and Henry, reinforcing Chaucerian counter-nationhood instead. At the
end of Lydgate’s Envoy, written in the rhyme royal of Chaucer’s Troilus,
Lydgate quotes Chaucer directly for a last time. “Go, litel bok,” Lydgate com-
mands, asking again for correction (Envoy 92; Troilus V. 1786). This reference
to Chaucer’s tragedy of changeability highlights the Ovidian transformation na-
tional mythology must undergo: collective discourse must be subjected to a con-
tinual hermeneutic process, in the course of which connections between personal
and national masks can be determined (and renegotiated) in order to center self-
hood.130 Like Chaucer before him, and to a greater extent than Guido’s Historia,
Lydgate stresses the necessity to use international mythemes in the making and
remaking of (Anthony D. Smith’s) Myths and Memories of the Nation.131 What
emerges in lieu of empire is a Chaucerian counter-nationhood that promotes al-
legories of change.

129
Renoir observes that Lydgate “generally stays with his original, but makes whatever al-
terations seem feasible to ensure that the final product does not clash with his own view.”
Renoir, Poetry of John Lydgate 64.
130
At the beginning of Troy Book, the necessity to deconstruct national discourse is antici-
pated when the monk of Bury rhymes destruction and nation. Peleus learns about the
Golden Fleece and “Êe gret[e] meschefes and destrucciouns / In Colchos wrought on son-
dry naciouns, / Êat pursued êe au[n]tres to conquere” (I. 369-71).
131
Troy Book is “at once cosmopolitan and national,” and the Prologue, including the refer-
ence to Henry’s commission, “reflects the ambiguous rivalry within international aristo-
cratic culture. Lydgate’s poem [...] will secure an English presence in the major textual
and cultural communities of the age.” Edwards, “Cosmopolitanism” 44, 45.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Conclusions: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy & Beyond

The most common denominator among the works in the ‘Guido tradition’ dis-
cussed in this study – Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Guido delle
Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, the anonymous Laud Troy Book, Geof-
frey Chaucer’s House of Fame, his Troilus and its immediate source, Giovanni
Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and John Lydgate’s Troy Book – is that they are alle-
gories of changeability, a structural principle variously critiqued, excused, or ex-
tolled. The mentioned works are further myths of, and mythologies for, collec-
tive identification, which look backward and forward at the same time; in fact,
they reconsider the collectivity’s past in order to look forward to a nation’s fu-
ture. The concluding chapter of this study proceeds in a similar fashion. First, I
briefly review this study’s central theses. Second, I sketch potential applications
of the prosopagraphical model, especially with regard to Robert Henryson’s Tes-
tament of Cresseid, before offering a brief overview of the longevity of onto-
logical concerns in the medieval Troy story in the early modern period.

1. Selves and Nations from Guido delle Colonne to John Lydgate

The aim of the first part of this study was twofold. On the one hand, I argued
that it is perfectly legitimate, if not necessary, to consider medieval persons as
individuals and to speak of medieval England as a nation. On the other hand,
and in contrast to other studies engaging with related topics, processes of me-
dieval identity formation were situated in a cognitive, narratological model that
construes personhood in terms of layered masks corresponding to the roles (or
selves) of older sociological and psychological theories, that is, to classical per-
sonae. Assuming that medieval selfhood is a matter of adopting narratively con-
structed masks that encompass and reinforce a given culture’s central values, I
turned to the contemporary debate about modern selfhood that operates with
very similar axioms. The discussion of both medieval and “postmodern” proc-
esses of identity formation revealed that the modus operandi of narrative self-
hood is analogous to the workings of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s mythologies. There-
fore, I proposed to visualize narrative masks either as opaque and ‘vertical’ –
where stereotypical, mythical roles are enacted – or as transparent and ‘horizon-
tal’ – where individuals synthesize divergent roles. Both transparency and opac-
ity are in and of themselves ontologically untenable modes. Translucence is the
middle ground: the maintenance of contradictory (opaque) role narratives is
achieved by nodal mask intersection (punctual transparency) which ‘horizon-
tally’ centers masks. The advantages of the model of prosopagraphical selfhood
570 Conclusions

are: a) that it shows how personal and collective identities are part and parcel of
the same structural system, enabling the investigation of the nexus between in-
dividuality and collectivity; b) that it can make palpable the way in which indi-
viduals inscribe themselves in, and thus change, public discourse; c) that it ap-
proaches processes of identity formation by means of a trope which is common
to classical, medieval, and modern discussions of identity and, therefore, pro-
vides a suitable tool for further diachronic investigations of differences and
similarities. As such it offers a very useful approach to d) the myth and mythol-
ogy most widely circulated for collective and individual identification in the
Middle Ages, the Troy story.
In Part Two, the most popular version of the Troy story in medieval Europe,
Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, was examined with regard
to its construction of personal and collective identities. Through the lens of the
prosopagraphical model, the understudied and underappreciated Historia ap-
pears to be a highly significant text for such an inquiry insofar as the Historia
dramatizes phenomena of identity formation in terms of narratively constructed
masks. It does so by advancing several dichotomies, all of which are related to
the principal juxtaposition of opacity and transparency. Guido initially opposes
Peleus’s masking of personal desires to the unmasking of ‘fickle females’ like
Medea, who lack stability due to their relentless emotionality – a trait that be-
comes the key characteristic of an effeminate Troy. Moreover, Greek imperial
masking is aligned with a Virgilian poetological model that is opposed to
Medea’s changeability, which is couched in terms of Ovidian metamorphosis.
Guido condemns Ovidian changeability as duplicitous and mutes the productiv-
ity of changeability as it emerges in his source, Benoît’s Roman. Where one
would expect a pro-Trojan stance, Guido consistently extols Greek imperial
opacity. Ironically, Guido can only articulate his preference for monolithic,
opaque masks by means of the narrative changeability he indicts, by decon-
structing the Roman. Mythological turns into mythical bricolage in that Guido
intends to pen the one truthful and unchangeable Latin version of Trojan his-
tory. Given the historical context in which Guido translates the Roman, the tex-
tual evidence demonstrates that Guido fabricates a hybrid Greco-Trojan origin
for his native Sicily, readopting an imperial Virgilian narrative strategy (opacity)
in an effort to reverse the westward translatio imperii that left Sicily behind in
(political) turmoil.
In view of this reading of Guido’s Historia, it becomes difficult to classify
the Laud Troy Book as a straightforward translation of the Historia into Middle
English. In the first of two interchapters – which frame the discussion of Chau-
cer’s Troy stories – I argue that where Guido places emphasis on opacity, the
English poet prefers transparency. By transforming Guido’s Latin prose history
(epic) into a vernacular romance, the Laud-poet uses a genre that centrally en-
gages questions of identity formation, which are an abiding concern of the Troy
story. The Laud-poet also retains and extrapolates the dichotomies inherent in
the Historia. Hector’s emotional transparency, however, is not only frequently
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 571

excused, it is often embellished as Hector becomes the chief hero of the poem.
Moreover, Hector is the first in a heroic genealogy extending beyond Trojan his-
tory to include the Laud-poet himself. Where Guido offers his version as an al-
legory of a future imperial Sicily, the Laud likewise gestures toward an allegori-
cal reading of England as a desirably transparent Troy at war with a duplicitous
France. Although the Laud is less overtly interested in poetological questions
than previous and future Troy stories, the poet’s admiration for emotional
changeability and transparency implicitly excuses his changeability and dresses
transparency up as a poetological (and ontological) role model, suggesting that
Trojan historiography – like his own version of the Troy story – can be altered,
that individuals can and should deconstruct myths of (Trojan) nationhood.
Chaucer’s Troy stories – the House of Fame and the Troilus – are discussed
in the third part of this study. In isolating the love story of Troilus and Criseyde,
Chaucer’s Troilus focuses to a much greater extent on three ‘individuals’ and
their struggle to reconcile personal desires and public obligations. The House of
Fame functions as an important prologue to that engagement insofar as it brings
into play the axioms with which Chaucer argues for translucent, rather than
transparent or opaque prosopagraphy. The House of Fame and the Troilus oper-
ate on a hermeneutics of the blank that invites a process of rereading and rewrit-
ing of the poems themselves. The blank page on which the House of Fame ends
refers the reader backward (into the poem) to the dreamer’s emergence from a
confusingly hybrid Ovidian-Virgilian reading of Dido in the temple of Venus,
only to encounter a blank instead of authoritative knowledge or a “sterisman.” A
hermeneutic circle emerges, which time and again bounces the issue of authori-
tative guidance back onto the dreamer, who has to authorize his own mythologi-
cal bricolage, his deconstruction of narratives circulated for individual identifi-
cation, notably the Troy story. A similar hermeneutics can be evinced for the
Troilus; in fact, the blank at the end of the House of Fame also points forward to
the Troilus as an example of subjecting Trojan mythology to the inventive brico-
lage at work in the House of Fame. That Troilus’s body vanishes after being
slain by Achilles toward the end of the poem – thus constituting a blank – serves
to undo a deterministic version of Trojan historiography, and invites a reinvesti-
gation of Troilus’s ontological strategies, even as it suggests potential alterna-
tives in Pandarian or Criseydan models. The rereading and rewriting of the Troi-
lus furthermore ensue in a national context, since several intertextual references
in Troilus’s view from the eighth sphere explicitly invite the audience to read
the Troilus allegorically – a conceptual allegory anticipated in Guido’s Historia,
and present also in the Laud Troy Book, and in Chaucer’s immediate source,
Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato.
The three main protagonists of the Troilus exemplify three different models
of conceptualizing selves and nations. Troilus’s deterministic Trojanness is a
matter of transparency. Like Guido’s Trojans, he wants to construe his martial
and Venerean selves in terms of transparency. Like the dreamer in the House of
Fame, Troilus quests for a “sterisman” to overcome the inherent contradictions
572 Conclusions

between the two roles, but Pandarus and Criseyde can only momentarily center
his personae. Unable to steer himself – that is, unable to engage in mythological
bricolage – Troilus falls for a deterministic, mono-mythological Trojanness.
Troilus becomes transparent. The lacuna caused by his death invites a rereading
from the perspective of the two other protagonists. Opaque prosopagraphy, dis-
cernible in Guido’s Greeks, is tested as an ontological model by means of Pan-
darus. Like public discourse itself, Pandarus offers a plethora of (contradictory)
narratives. Pandarus’s masks, however, fail to intersect since they are not cen-
tered around all-informing ethical goods. Because of this, the multitude of
opaque veils destabilizes personhood itself: Pandarus disappears in the public
discourse he himself represents, leaving one other ontological model to be
tested: the translucence of Criseyde and Chaucer’s poet. Both are bereft of a pi-
lot, replicating the situation of the dreamer in the House of Fame. Unlike Troi-
lus, Criseyde and the poet are capable of overcoming the contradictions inherent
in making selves and are capable of authorizing their individuality.
While the three characters move through the Ovidian cursus, Pandarus and
Troilus are restricted to the amatory works. Only Criseyde is capable of tran-
scending the Ovidian canon by abandoning abandonment. At the end of the
poem, in a situation structurally analogous to the liminal position of the persona
in Ovid’s exilic poems (particularly the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto),
Criseyde realizes that both veiling (opacity) and unveiling (transparency) are
imperative; she recognizes that some Virgilian stability is necessary within
Ovidian changeability. She thus elaborates translucent prosopagraphy, which is
capable of maintaining contradictory personae by means of nodal mask intersec-
tion. The poetological analogue is exemplified by the poet himself, who recasts
the Ovidian love story in a Virgilian framework – a framework, however, that
does not suppress changeability. The poet thus suggests that selves and nations
have to be subjected to a continual process of hermeneutical rereading, of de-
constructing all available cultural narratives circulated for personal and collec-
tive identification. In recirculating his rewritten account of the Trojan origins of
Britain, Chaucer not only provides new paradigms for making selves and na-
tions, he turns nationhood into counter-nationhood.
Lydgate’s Troy Book, as demonstrated in the last chapter of this study, en-
gages with Guido’s and Chaucer’s investigations of masking strategies. Again,
the focus falls on the possibilities of linking selves and nations, which is a ques-
tion particularly urgent in the light of a translation commissioned by a (future)
monarch. In Troy Book, masking practices overlap with Lydgate’s interest in
prudence, which corresponds to the opaque, Virgilian mask. While Agamem-
non’s prudence represents an opaque ideal, such masking practices are ethically
problematic since they have recourse to an ethics of deception. A pro-Trojan
stance is only seemingly elaborated inasmuch as Lydgate grants Priam and Hec-
tor better masking skills, which only exacerbates Troilus’s problems in Chau-
cer’s poem, namely, the reconciliation of two seemingly exclusive masks.
Lydgate struggles with the same problem, having to align Trojan transparency
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 573

and Greek opacity while reconciling Guidoan Virgilianism with Chaucerian

Ovidianism. A feasible solution to this problem is presented by the Troy Book
women. Medea, Helen, and especially Criseyde are able to be changeable and to
mask this changeability by means of seemingly transparent, opaque masks.
Criseyde, whose portrait is framed by references to her exilic plight, best exem-
plifies the workings of translucent prosopagraphy. Criseyde’s strategy to be
transparent and opaque, to use changeability in order to center personhood and
thus inscribe individuality into public discourse, correlates with Lydgate’s own
poetological and ontological program. Lydgate’s description of Criseyde’s pre-
dicament is analogous to his dilemma of reconciling Guido’s Briseida with
Chaucer’s Criseyde: Lydgate loses his ‘guyde Guydo.’ While projecting a trans-
parent mask with the intention of providing a one-to-one translation, Lydgate
challenges the Troy story underneath the mask. Unlike Guido’s Historia, how-
ever, Lydgate’s Virgilian mask is not seamless. It is translucent, since
Chaucerian Ovidianism – often not very subtly – vitiates (even as it combines
with) Guidoan Virgilianism. By means of Criseydan translucence, Lydgate can
bridge the Guidoan dichotomies: Virgil vs. Ovid, Guido vs. Chaucer, opacity vs.
transparency. His seemingly transparent Lancastrian imperialism only thinly
disguises the necessity already emphasized by Chaucer to reconcile individual
with national masks by means of a hermeneutics of mythological bricolage.
Once again, Brutus’s Albion is a matter of counter-nationhood.
The prosopagraphical model uncovers within the Troy stories studied here
several perspectives on, and strategies for, making selves and nations in thir-
teenth-century Italy and fourteenth- to fifteenth-century England. While my
readings are chiefly designed to fill a lacuna in the (literary) history of medieval
selfhood and nationhood, and while I hope to have demonstrated that a pro-
sopagraphical reading necessitates a revaluation of little studied texts and un-
veils new facets in more familiar canonical works, these analyses raise new
questions and make necessary further study as well. One work that crucially re-
quires revaluation is Guido’s Historia. Although it is certainly not the rhetori-
cally most sophisticated text, it was nonetheless the most widely circulated his-
tory of Troy and, as my discussion suggests, one that is not mired in merely his-
toriographical questions, since it prompts poetological questions as well. Textual
studies of the different manuscript traditions may yield further insights into local
variation and thus could open new areas of inquiry concerning not only collec-
tive identity formation but related questions of regional identity formation in the
late Middle Ages. Given the current ‘rediscovery’ of positivist methodologies
and the concomitant interest in the history of the book, such an enterprise does
not seem wholly unlikely. By the same token, Guido’s thirteenth-century milieu
deserves renewed investigation. My brief account of Guido’s potential political
agenda rests primarily on intratextual evidence and a rough sketch of the his-
torical framework. The questions to what extent the Historia borrows from con-
temporary legislative and political documents, and to what extent these form vi-
able intertexts for the interpretation of the Historia, could only be raised in this
574 Conclusions

study, but the answer would make, in my opinion, for an interesting chapter
concerning Greco-Italian relations in thirteenth-century Sicily.
By focusing on the Laud Troy Book, Chaucer’s Troilus, and Lydgate’s Troy
Book, I have chosen texts that are representative of one Troy tradition, namely,
that tradition that deals with the entire Troy story or at least assumes it as a nec-
essary background. Given the popularity of the Troy story, especially in thir-
teenth- to fifteenth-century England, there is a host of other texts in which the
Trojan origins of Britain play a minor, but potentially significant role. Thus, it
would be interesting to prosopagraphically supplement analyses of the Troy sto-
ries texts in which Troy plays a seemingly ‘marginal’ role, for example, Sir Ga-
wain and the Green Knight or the works of John Gower. A related concern, one
that lurks just beneath the surface of the above readings, chiefly in Chaucer’s
House of Fame, the Troilus, and Lydgate’s Troy Book, is how their counter-
national musings relate to these writers’ other works. In Chaucer’s case, such an
inquiry is particularly timely concerning the relationship of the Troilus and the
Canterbury Tales; in Lydgate’s case the Siege of Thebes may make for an inter-
esting comparative study. The last question I should like to raise here is of a
theoretical nature and concerns the problem of how such aspects of veiling and
identity are played out across the period divide into the Renaissance and beyond.
This question skirts issues of teleology – a bone of contention ever since discus-
sions of medieval selfhood and nationhood first surfaced in critical discourse.
It is tempting to see in the present study, as much as in other accounts of me-
dieval identity formation, intimations of a teleological narrative from a pre-
modern toward a modern self, toward a more ‘enlightened’ selfhood. Peter
Haidu spells this out clearly when he argues that “The modern subject was in-
vented in the Middle Ages, such is the thesis of this book, destined to disturb
medievalists and modernists (including postmodernists) alike,” since both me-
dievalists and modernists rely heavily on the dichotomy between medieval ver-
sus modern.1 If the modern self was invented in the Middle Ages, this invention
must have been a long process, given the sources of the medieval self in antiq-
uity. Although my interpretations of the various Troy stories suggest a teleologi-
cal progression from opacity to transparency and thence to the combination of
both opacity and transparency, this meta-narrative is not as teleological as it
may seem. Benoît’s Roman, for instance, already determines an ontological
model capable of synthesizing opacity and transparency. The same is true for
narratives that come after Chaucer and Lydgate, which variously dally with
transparency, opacity, and/or translucence. In place of teleology, my pro-
sopagraphical analyses rather highlight different conceptions of selfhood in the
Middle Ages that are intrinsically related to other, alternative modes of concep-
tualizing nationhood. As such, the prosopagraphical model might lend itself as a

1
Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval / Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004) 1.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 575

suitable tool to map the parallels and differences between pre- and post-
Renaissance negotiations of the nexus between selves and nations. If anything,
the prosopagraphical lens would suggest a strong continuity at least concerning
the central axioms of the model itself. Across the periodic divide, the two main
trajectories I see at work in the Troy story are: a) ontological questions couched
in terms of masking and unmasking as well as attendant dichotomies that betray
b) an increasing concern with career models and with the opposition of Virgilian
and Ovidian tracks.

2. Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy

Negotiations of the relationship between personal and national narratives con-
tinue to haunt the reception of the Troy story in fifteenth-century England be-
yond Lydgate’s Troy Book. Criticism usually regards Robert Henryson’s Testa-
ment of Cresseid as the other major reworking of the Troy story.2 Strictly speak-
ing, Henryson does not fit into the framework of this study: he is a Middle Scots
writer; his Testament engages only to a limited extent with the Troy story in
general – he focuses on Criseyde’s life after the exchange; and the Testament is
seen as a Renaissance rather than a medieval poem. Nevertheless, it is necessary
to devote some space to an analysis of the poem, since it prominently tests the
limits of prosopagraphical selfhood and changeability. In fact, Henryson’s alle-
gories of Cresseid threaten to defeat allegoresis itself. Hence, a short interpreta-
tion of the Testament makes for a suitable concluding chapter of medieval views
on self- and nationhood, opening up interesting perspectives on Renaissance
prosopagraphy. While critics debate whether the Testament is a medieval or
Renaissance poem, they largely agree that Henryson’s treatment of Cresseid is
reductive.3 In the Testament (and his Orpheus), however, it appears that he
understands very well Chaucer’s counter-national Criseyde,4 even if he
approaches the problems of masking and unmasking differently from Chaucer
2
C. David Benson, “Critic and Poet: What Lydgate and Henryson Did to Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde,” Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. A. S. G. Ed-
wards, spec. issue of MLQ 53.1 (1992): 23.
3
See Hyder E. Rollins, “The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA
32.3 (1917): 383-429; Alice R. Kaminsky, Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” and the
Critics (Columbus: Ohio Univ. Press, 1980) 159; Richard Waswo, “The Narrator of Troi-
lus and Criseyde,” ELH 50.1 (1983): 23; C. David Benson, “True Troilus and False
Cresseid: The Descent from Tragedy,” The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boi-
tani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 160; Benson, “Critic and Poet” 23-24; Sylvia Fede-
rico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Univ. of Min-
nesota Press, 2003) 169 n. 61. For an overview of criticism sympathetic to Cresseid’s pre-
dicament, see Melvin Storm, “The Intertextual Cresseida: Chaucer’s Henryson or Hen-
ryson’s Chaucer,” SSL 28 (1993): 105-08.
4
Discussing the Orpheus, John Marlin argues that Henryson “fully recognized and ex-
ploited the potential of the Chaucerian tradition. And in grasping the spirit of Chaucer,
Henryson has also grasped something of the spirit of that other great ironist, Ovid, whose
Metamorphoses inspired the medieval Orpheus tradition.” Marlin, “‘Arestyus is noucht
576 Conclusions

the problems of masking and unmasking differently from Chaucer and Lydgate.
Henryson advances a cognitively allegorical epistemology that not only points
up the limits of interpretation but also – more pressingly – necessitates a herme-
neutics of deconstruction that ultimately challenges mythical conceptions of na-
tionhood. With his focus on Cresseid, Henryson thereby continues a ‘Trojan’
tradition that revolves around the question of how to reconcile selves and na-
tions. In Henryson’s days, this tradition was boiling under the pressure of the ad
fontes movement and the increasing availability of translations of Virgil’s
Aeneid, promoting a mythical track that culminated in a nation-state arguably
operating upon fixed myths rather than flexible mythologies.
Henryson addresses issues of masking in an allegorical framework. While
Henryson’s allegories have been discussed extensively in criticism, not many
scholars have explored the pervasiveness – for readings of Henryson’s poetry
generally – of the allegorical model introduced in the Orpheus, which engages
with questions of masking on a more abstract level than the Troy story. The Or-
pheus, one of Henryson’s earlier poems, if not his earliest, encompasses Hen-
ryson’s poetological program, and yields important clues for the interpretation
of his other works.5 The poem’s title places it in the Orpheus tradition,6 implic-
itly drawing attention to the poet’s mythological bricolage.7 Scholarship has fo-
cused primarily on four aspects: artistic merits (that is, the symmetry of the
poem); the influence of Sir Orpheus; the stimulation of religious and philoso-
phical meditation; and political allegory. Few critics have commented on the
poem’s poetological significance,8 which is important for a general understand-
ing of Henryson’s often problematic tale-moralitas relationship.9 That a poem

bot gude vertew’: The Perplexing Moralitas to Henryson’s Orpheus and Erudices,” Fif-
teenth-Century Studies 25 (1999): 149.
5
Matthew P. McDiarmid dates the poem to between 1465 and 1472 in his Robert Henryson
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981) 20. See further Robert L. Kindrick, Henryson
and the Medieval Arts of Rhetoric (New York: Garland, 1993) 234; Kindrick, Robert Hen-
ryson (Boston: Twayne, 1979) 159-63.
6
See Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, “Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Or-
pheus Traditions of the Middle Ages,” Speculum 41.4 (1966): 643-55. For the Orpheus
tradition, see John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1970). For romance aspects of the Orpheus, see Carol Mills, “Romance
Convention of Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice,” Bards and Makars: Scottish
Literature; Medieval and Renaissance, ed. Adam J. Aitken, Matthew P. McDiarmid, and
Derick S. Thomson (Glasgow: Univ. of Glasgow Press, 1977) 57-68.
7
See, for example, Kindrick, Robert Henryson 151-52.
8
According to Denton Fox, the Orpheus – although “usually thought to be by far the most
unsuccessful of Henryson’s major poems” – is “a poem about poetry,” in fact, a “defence
of poetry.” Denton Fox, introduction, The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox,
Oxford English Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) cix. All subsequent parenthetical
references to Henryson’s poems are to this edition.
9
Robert L. Kindrick observes that “Many questions about this poem relate to an issue
which is also critical to the Fabillis: the relationship between the poem and its moralitas.”
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 577

about Orpheus is ultimately concerned with acts of artistic creation and poetry is
obvious, and the long prolegomenon to the poem, with its allusions to music,
meditation, modulation, and so on (esp. 36-40, 43-48, 50-56), underscores this
aspect. The tale itself follows the traditional outline, with some idiosyncrasies. A
somewhat forward Eurydice marries Orpheus – “Hir erand to propone scho
thocht no schame” (80) – and the couple lives a happy life until “A bustuos herd,
callit Arystyus, / Kepand his bestis, lay wnder a bus” (97-98), notices Eurydice.
Immediately struck by the lady’s appearance – “Barfute with schankis quhytar
than the snawe” – Aristaeus goes after her. While fleeing his attempted rape, Eu-
rydice accidentally “trampit on a serpent wennomus” and dies (100, 105). Or-
pheus laments her death, before searching for her in the heavens above and, after
a long description of Orpheus’s travels, in the nether realm. Having put Cerberus
and the Furies to sleep with the aid of his own music – and releasing, inciden-
tally, Ixion, Tantalus, and Titius from their eternal punishments – Orpheus per-
forms for Pluto and Proserpine and is awarded with a glimpse of his wife. He
obtains permission to take Eurydice out of hell, but only on one condition: “Gyf
thou turnis, or blenkis behind thy bak, / We sall hir haue forewir till hell agayn”
(382-83). Inevitably, look he does: “He blent bak-ward and Pluto come anone, /
And vnto hell agayn with hir is gone” (392-93).
While the tale is misleadingly straightforward, the appended moralitas, often
criticized as too reminiscent of Nicholas Trivet’s commentary on Boethius’s De
consolatione Philosophiae III (mentioned in the moralitas at ll. 415 and 421]),10
seems to be deliberately misleading. While Orpheus is allegorized as represent-
ing the intellect and rationality – “Quhilk callit is the part intellectiue / Of man-
nis saule and vnder-standing, free / And separate fra sensualitee” (428-30) – and
Eurydice represents “oure affection, / Be fantasy oft movit vp and doun” (431-
32), Henryson’s understanding of Aristaeus’s significance is un-traditional: “Ar-
estyus, this hird that coud persewe / Erudices, is noucht bot gude vertewe, / Qu-
hilk besy is ay to kepe oure myndis clene” (435-38). Henryson seems to follow
standard allegorization here, but with a striking difference, since “such tension
between tale and allegory is not evident in their [Nicholas Trivet’s and Guil-
laume de Conche’s] versions, as their Aristaeus is merely a name, a flat or ab-
stract type; indeed, he doesn’t even appear as a character in the version of the

Kindrick, introduction, The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Robert L. Kindrick, TEAMS:
Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997) 188.
10
Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979) 240. See further Friedman, Orpheus
203; Gros Louis, “Robert Henryson’s Orpheus” 654; John MacQueen, Robert Henryson:
A Study of the Major Narrative Poems (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967) 34-35; but cf.
Marlin, “Perplexing Moralitas” 137-53. For summary, see Grace G. Wilson, “Robert Hen-
ryson (1420?-1505?),” British Writers: Supplement VII, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 2002) 145-46. Dietrich Strauss believes that the moralitas was not
penned by Henryson at all. Strauss, “Some Comments on the Moralitas of Robert Hen-
ryson’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’” SSL 32 (2001): 1-12.
578 Conclusions

tale they are allegorizing.” In making Aristaeus an individual, “It is as if Hen-

ryson purposely adapted his sources at this point to drive the tale and its morali-
tas in opposite directions.”11 Indeed, other apparent incongruities between tale
and moralitas complicate matters further. The generic hybridity that results in
Orpheus’s portrayal as a courtly lover, for instance, suggests that Orpheus, and
“not Eurydice, seems a proper figure of the affections,” marking a further ironic
division between tale and allegory and positing that one “might examine the
speaker of the moralitas as a character as individuated and idiosyncratic as Or-
pheus or Aristaeus.”12
Marlin’s argument that Henryson’s irony is reminiscent of Chaucer’s fallible
narrators is conclusive. Earlier criticism is more inclined to take Henryson at
face value, however, placing Henryson firmly in the allegorical tradition.13 Rob-
ert Kindrick particularly stresses the Christian allegorical tradition by which
Henryson was “profoundly” influenced, which, given all its cruces, would ren-
der the Orpheus an amateurish work.14 Given that allegorical readings of the
poem necessarily break down at some point, Dorena Allen Wright hypothesizes
that “either Henryson has wavered uneasily between an allegorical and a non-
allegorical method, or [...] he intended the moralitas to provide an optional and
added level of meaning, not the obligatory key to the entire poem.”15 In my un-
derstanding of allegory as an epistemological system, none of this really takes
Henryson’s Orpheus out of the ambit of allegorical interpretation. Many of the
readings that place Henryson in a Christian allegorical tradition or alternatively
stress the poem’s youthful weaknesses on account of an allegorical aporia attest
to the ‘transparency fallacy,’ the assumption that allegory transparently maps
one domain onto another (in a metaphorical rather than allegorical process).16
Henryson’s poem is concerned precisely with a self-authorizing lack of balance

11
Marlin, “Perplexing Moralitas” 139.
12
Marlin, “Perplexing Moralitas” 143, 147. Wilson writes, “Once Aristaeus has set the read-
ers digging around the poem, other questions present themselves.” Wilson, “Robert Hen-
ryson” 145. For other problems, see Kindrick, Henryson and the Medieval Arts of Rheto-
ric 235-56.
13
For discussions of Henrysonian allegory, see Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Litera-
ture (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958) 44; Charles Elliott, introduction, Robert Hen-
ryson: Poems (1963; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) xxi; McDiarmid, Robert Henryson
56; Gregory Kratzmann, “Henryson’s Fables: ‘the subtell dyte of poetry,’” SSL 20 (1985):
49-70.
14
Kindrick, Robert Henryson 35-39, esp. 37. See further Kindrick, Henryson and the Medie-
val Arts of Rhetoric 236. Gros Louis sees the narrative contradictions in the light of a dy-
ing allegorical tradition, and suggests that Henryson “apparently forgot his moral when he
was writing the actual poem.” Gros Louis, “Robert Henryson’s Orpheus” 646, 654.
15
Dorena Allen Wright, “Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Tradition of the
Muses,” Medium Ævum 40.1 (1971): 46-47.
16
See Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Alle-
gory (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2004) 8, and Chapter Four above.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 579

(or lack of correspondences) that determines a translucent middle ground,

emphasizing difference over sameness.
Structurally, the moralitas foregrounds the chief ethical questions posed by
the Orpheus: what is the right balance of emotion and rationality?17 How can
contradictory traits be reconciled, which, in the light of the bifurcation of the
story into tale and moralitas, becomes literally the question of how narratives
can be syncretized.18 The all too obvious doctrinal point made by the poem is
that one should abstain from sins of the flesh, that rationality should guide (that
is, mask) desires:
Than Orpheus has won Erudices,
Quhen oure desire wyth reson makis pes,
And sekis vp to contemplacion,
Off syn detestand the abusion. (616-19)
And yet, Orpheus and Eurydice’s destiny is inevitable. Their sin is only too hu-
man, which the narrator underlines by concluding: “Now pray we God, sen oure
affection / Is alway prompt and redy to fall doun” (628-29). On the one hand,
enjoying this-worldly pleasures has tragic consequences. On the other hand, the
consequences cannot be avoided. A perfect balance, it follows, can only be
achieved temporarily,19 a process mirrored in the audience’s predicament to rec-
oncile the contradictory perspectives offered on Eurydice and Aristaeus – a rec-
onciliation that suggestively calls for a hermeneutics of deconstruction of the
kind gleaned in Chaucerian mythological bricolage. For Henryson, this is an ap-
parently eminently delightful process, given the frequent reference to delyte in
the context of artistic creation.20

17
“By postulating a fallible narrator we might also understand how the poem’s two divisions
work together as a literary unit. The moralitas’s announced theme is the right relationship
between affect and reason, and its ideal is a harmony between the two [...]. “ Marlin, “Per-
plexing Allegories” 149.
18
Rita Copeland argues that, on the one hand, the text “announces its dependence on the
authoritative schoolmaster tradition; on the other hand it subordinates that tradition to the
vernacular narrative, making Trevet’s commentary a supplement to the poetic fable.”
Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Tradi-
tion and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991) 229.
19
Both McDiarmid and Marlin believe that the argument that ideal harmonies can be
achieved only momentarily is rooted in the turbulent political and religious debates of
Henryson’s lifetime. McDiarmid, Robert Henryson 49; Marlin, “Perplexing Moralitas”
149. For the inevitability of human fallibility, see Elliott, introduction xx.
20
Henryson uses delyte more often in the Orpheus than in any other of his poems (five times
in the Orpheus, three times in the Fables, and once in the Testament; the cognate plesance
is used three times in the Orpheus). Moreover, delyte (which in itself recalls poetic craft
qua its similarity to dyte) often occurs in close proximity to appetyte, eloquence, persua-
sion, affectioun, or contemplatioun.
580 Conclusions

Delight is similarly prompted by the often problematic tale-moralitas rela-

tionships in Henryson’s Aesopian Fables,21 which likewise caused critical de-
bate. On the one hand, scholarly accounts of the Fables often argue for the gen-
eral compatibility of tale and moralitas;22 on the other hand, criticism increas-
ingly emphasizes the delight audiences can take in reconstructing non-
authorized readings, stressing the experimental character of the poems.23 Gener-
ally, the difference between literal and figural levels is to be established only
with difficulty. Arnold Clayton Henderson observes that the verbs of discovery,
which Henryson uses “to transform a narrative element into an element of the
moralitas” almost never “say that A is B, but that A is likened to B, or even that
A may be likened to B, as if this were only one option among many.”24 This ob-
servation suggests that Henryson establishes a translucent middle ground within
conceptual allegory insofar as layers can be connected without collapsing the
domains – a different meaning, that is, ‘shines through’ and renders the relation-
ship between tale and moralitas translucent rather than transparent or opaque.25
This is highly illustrative with regard to the many ‘Cresseids’ emerging in the
Testament, which is not a traditional allegorical text but structurally replicates
allegorical processes that ultimately challenge the predominant conception of
Henryson’s ‘reductive’ Cresseid.
The Testament is not usually discussed along with the Orpheus or the Fables,
although scholars have occasionally noted similarities.26 In the short poem, a
21
This connection between the Orpheus and the Fables has been noted also by Marlin, “Per-
plexing Allegories” 145.
22
See Stephan Khinoy, “Tale-Moral Relationship in Henryson’s Moral Fables,” SSL 17
(1982): 99-115. Kratzmann, “Henryson’s Fables” 56; Philippa M. Bright, “Medieval Con-
cepts of the figure and Henryson’s Figurative Technique in The Fables,” SSL 25 (1990):
134-53; Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Fol-
lowers (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2000) 158.
23
See Dieter Mehl, “Henryson’s Moral Fables as Experiments in Didactic Narrative,” Me-
dieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen:
Narr; Cambridge: Brewer, 1984) 138.
24
Arnold Clayton Henderson, “Having Fun with the Moralities: Henryson’s Fables and
Late-Medieval Fable Innovation,” SSL 32 (2001): 72.
25
The Fables are writerly texts, representing two poles or edges, “an obedient, conformist,
plagiarizing edge [...], and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours),
which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is
glimpsed.” The latter invites readers to take delight in texts. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans.
Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 5; Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text,
trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 6.
26
Wilson, for example, writes that “likenesses to The Testament of Cresseid abound. A
woman of passion dies or is dying, and her death gives rise to poetry. A Christian author
presents classical gods at length. A glance has tremendous effect. Love is inevitable, but
brings great loss, with all lovers finally bereft.” Wilson, “Robert Henryson” 146. See fur-
ther Tom Scott, “Henrysoun: The Narrative Tragedies,” Scots Teaching and Resource
Network, <http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/sesll/stella/starn/poetry/henryson/tscott/tragedy.htm>
(accessed Dec. 14, 2007).
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 581

narrator turns to Chaucer’s Troilus on a wintry evening, but then settles for an-
other tale which relays the destiny of Criseyde after her exchange. In ‘chrono-
logical’ terms, the narrative is “an interpolation between lines 1804 and 1805 of
Book Five of Chaucer’s poem” rather than a continuation of the Troilus.27 The
Testament relays how Diomeid leaves Cresseid, who, some say, turns to prosti-
tution. At her father’s house, her destiny prompts a bitter complaint unto Cupid
and Venus. She swoons and has a vision in which Cupid assembles the seven
deities who pass harsh judgment on her. When Cresseid awakens, she notices
that her dream has become a shocking reality – her face is deformed, and she has
turned into a leper. Joining the other lepers in a hospital, she realizes that her
blasphemy has compounded her plight. When Troilus rides by, the two former
lovers do not recognize each other, but Troilus is reminded of her and gives her
money. Upon learning the identity of her benefactor, Cresseid writes her testa-
ment, bequeathing the ruby ring, a token of Troilus’s love, back to Troilus be-
fore she dies. The chief characteristic of the Testament lies in paralleling and
differentiating aspects of the story within the Testament – and beyond. The
audience is constantly invited to compare Henryson’s Cresseid to their imagina-
tion of Criseyde, be it reminiscent of Chaucer, Lydgate, or Guido. Continually,
difference is unveiled and veiled, and transparent one-to-one correspondences
are deconstructed in ways suggestive of the Testament’s delight in a liberated
and liberating process of allegoresis.
Like Lydgate’s Troy Book, the Testament opens with an emphasis on trans-
parent relationships. The setting of the poem, for example, is introduced as ap-
propriate to the tale: “Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte / Suld correspond
and be equiualent” (1-2). The awareness of the problematic nature of this
equivalence is already entailed, however, in that the tale and weather should
(rather than do) correspond to the subject matter. After briefly mentioning that
“fair Venus, the bewtie of the nicht, / Vprais” (11-12), through the “glas” the
narrator notices that “The northin wind had purifyit the air / And sched the
mistie cloudis fra the sky” (15, 17-18), prompting an “icily clear vision of both
poetry and reality.”28 Again, the pervading image is that of transparency. The
narrator aborts his attempt to pray to Venus, to whom he was obedient for a
while, in order to rejuvenate his ‘faded heart.’ It is simply too cold for such
prayers. Thus, he lights a fire, has a drink, and turns to Chaucer’s Troilus to
shorten the night. He briefly reports Troilus’s sorrow and his anxiety of awaiting
Criseyde’s return. However,
Of his distres me neidis nocht reheirs,
For worthie Chauceir in the samin buik,

27
Storm, “Intertextual Cresseida” 111.
28
Nicholas Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s Testament of
Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde,” Shifts and Transpositions in
Medieval Narrative: A “Festschrift” for Dr Elspeth Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1994) 107.
582 Conclusions

In gudelie termis and in ioly veirs,

Compylit hes his cairis, quha will luik.
To brek my sleip ane vther quair I tuik,
In quhilk I fand the fatall destenie
Of fair Cresseid, that endit wretchitlie. (57-63, emphases added)
Again, Henryson’s strategies resemble those of Lydgate, who also draws on his
audience’s familiarity with Chaucer’s Criseyde, an account that is at odds in
more ways than one with the Historia he is translating. Henryson chooses an-
other track, opposing Chaucer’s well-known tale with an “vther quair” that is
explicitly located in the realm of fiction, indicated by the beginning of the lines:
OFICTIO.29 The other tale is the Testament itself.30 Where Lydgate is thrown off
course by the competing authorities of two texts, Henryson knowingly abandons
an ‘authoritative source,’ the veracity of which he questions in the following line
– “Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew”? (64) – which, notably, pre-
sents a very different Cresseid from Chaucer’s Criseyde insofar as Henryson
portrays a “fatall destenie” and reports the “wofull end of this lustie Creisseid”
(69). Henryson sets side-by-side two versions of Cresseid that overlap, but are
radically different. He thus provides yet another level for the audience’s poten-
tial allegorizing of Chaucer’s Criseyde as Henryson’s Cresseid.
In the subsequent stanza, the narrator conveys how Diomeid, after he had “all
his appetyte, / And mair” of Cresseid, “Vpon ane vther he set his haill delyte”
(71-73). Transparent correspondences are again complicated, since Diomede’s
choice of another woman echoes the narrator’s own choice of an “vther quair.”
Henryson’s storytelling thereby connects the persona’s narrative unfaithfulness
to Chaucer with the unfaithfulness of Diomeid. Reporting that the desolate lady
is aimlessly wandering about, “And sum men sayis, into the court, commoun”
(77), the narrator wonders how Cresseid, “the flour and A per se / Of Troy and
Grece [...] / [...could] change in filth all thy feminitie” (78-80). He adds insult to
injury by maintaining a mask of pity and by presumably intending to excuse her
– “I haue pietie thow suld fall sic mischance!” and “I sall excuse als far furth as
I may” (84, 87). On the one hand, the audience sees Chaucer’s Criseyde, who is
unable to change historical circumstance and to control her reputation; on the
other hand, the audience witnesses a Cresseid about whom it is rumored that she
became a prostitute and thus knowingly changes her destiny for the worse. The
poem appears to contradict itself with respect to the latter, however, since
29
William Stephenson, “The Acrostic ‘Fictio’ in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of
Cresseid (Lines 58-63),” ChauR 29.2 (1994): 163-65. Henryson is the first to use inven-
tion as meaning literary creation in English. MacQueen, Robert Henryson 55. “Lydgate
goes back behind Chaucer to the authoritative history of Guido delle Colonne; Henryson
goes forward to tell an original story about the most vulnerable character.” Benson, “Critic
and Poet” 34.
30
Tim William Machan, “Textual Authority and the Works of Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Hen-
ryson,” Writing After Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century,
ed. Daniel J. Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998) 193.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 583

Cresseid has precious little time to engage in many lecherous activities, for
when she comes home to her father, it seems as though Diomeid left her only
minutes ago (99-105).31 These and other incongruities make it difficult indeed to
consider the Testament a transparent tale.32
The first time Cresseid herself is heard occurs after she withdraws into a “se-
creit orature” (120) where she bemoans her destiny. After overcoming aban-
donment multiple times in Chaucer’s Troilus and Lydgate’s Troy Book, Cresseid
is abandoned yet again. She begins a long lament about the harsh treatment she
received from Venus and Cupid. Although the deities promised her to be the
loveliest lady of Troy, “Now am I maid ane vnworthie outwaill, / And all in cair
translatit is my ioy.” She wonders, “Quha sall me gyde? Quha sall me now co-
nuoy,” since she is excluded both from Diomeid’s and Troilus’s company (129-
33).33 The question of guidance evokes parallels between Henryson’s tale,
Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Chaucer’s Troilus. Within the poem, Cresseid’s com-
plaint to Venus mirrors the narrator’s own obedience to Venus, from whom he
turns in aborting his prayer.34 Cresseid does ‘pray,’ but she also complains, con-
ceiving her situation as guideless. This predicament is comparable to that of the
narrator, who does not know, and indeed does not care to know, which of the
many tales of Cresseid is true – everything is fiction. Cresseid first lost Troilus’s
protection,35 since the latter was unable to speak up for her, and now she has lost
Diomeid who, thus she reasons in the Troilus, would vouchsafe her survival in

31
Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer” 105 n. 37.
32
Calchas is a priest of Venus in the Testament, who lives a mile out of “town” in a “man-
sioun / Beildit full gay” – odd locations for what is presumably the Greek camp. Cresseid
is unwilling to attend the ceremonies for Venus in a kirk (117), since she does not want
people to know “Of his expuls fra Diomeid,” rather than, as one would expect from a
prostitute, for other reasons. See further Watson, “Outdoing Chaucer” 102. A. C. Spearing
observes that the depiction of Calchas correlates with that of the narrator; both are men of
Venus. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1985) 172-73, 175.
33
Ralph Hanna writes that “the only satisfactory experience Criseyde can visualize is one
where she is an object of attention, where arrangements are ceaselessly made for her.”
Hanna, “Cresseid’s Dream and Henryson’s Testament,” Chaucer and Middle English
Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowland (London: Allen & Unwin,
1974) 292. For Felicity Riddy, the question of guidance represents “the voice of the un-
governed woman whom the authorities in late-medieval society continually attempted to
control.” Riddy, “‘Abject odious’: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s Testament of
Cresseid,” The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and
Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 234.
34
Venus and Cupid sowed the seed of love into her face, “And ay grew grene throw õoure
supplie and grace. / Bot now, allace, that seid with froist is slane, / And I fra luifferis left,
and all forlane” (138-40). The narrator, during the frosty night, wishes that Venus “My
faidit hart of lufe scho wald mak grene” (24).
35
Troilus’s somewhat laissez-faire appearance in the Greek camp suggests further that he
may well have done more for their relationship than wail and cry inside the walls of Troy.
584 Conclusions

exile. In the Testament, Cresseid appears to be unable to use her abandonment

productively, to engage in the processes of invention used by her creator, the
narrator. There is nowhere to turn, after all: in Troy, her reputation has been
damaged; in Greece, she lacks all protection since Diomeid left her. She faces
the loss of two steering authorities. In this, her plight of losing guidance inverts
Troilus’s sudden affliction with two mutually exclusive goods in Chaucer’s
poem. His prideful transgression against Venus results in his inability to make
decisions; Cresseid’s loss of guidance, caused by her transgression against Ve-
nus, is a matter of having no choice.
After uttering her complaint, Cresseid falls into an “extasie” in which Cupid
assembles the seven planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Phebus, Venus, Mercury, and
Cynthia. With “ane assent” (a phrase recurrent for Guido in describing Greek
parliaments)36 they choose Mercury “To be foirspeikar in the parliament” (265-
66). Cupid complains bitterly about Cresseid for blaspheming the ‘good names’
of the gods, whereby it is questionable to what extent Venus’s name, for in-
stance, could be defamed. The narrator spends more space on Venus’s portrait
than those of the other deities, and she emerges as rather duplicitous: although
she is a “goddes gay,” “in hir face semit greit variance, / Quhyles perfyte treuth
and quhyles inconstance.” Moreover, “Vnder smyling scho was dissimulait,” she
“suddanely changit and alterait, / Angrie as ony serpent vennemous,” “variant,”
“With ane eye lauch, and with the vther weip,” and she is “Richt vnstabill and
full of variance” (218-38).37 Henryson’s Venus thus shares many attributes with
Lydgate’s Fortuna and many Troy Book women.38 The verdict of the assembled
gods is not any less shattering than the Trojan parliament’s decision to exchange
Criseyde for Antenor. For her transgression against Cupid and Venus, Cresseid
should “In all hir lyfe with pane to be opprest, / And torment sair with seiknes
incurabill, / And to all louers be abhominabill” (306-08). The narrator is angry
and cries out for mercy, but to no avail (323-29). When Cresseid awakens from
her “doolie dreame, this vglye visioun” (344), she beholds herself in a “poleist
glas” seeing “hir face sa deformait” (348-49) and realizes her transgression:39
“My blaspheming now haue I bocht full deir” (354). Cresseid is not punished for

36
The usage of parliament echoes Chaucer’s Troilus. Benson, “Critic and Poet” 35-36.
37
For Venus’s duplicity, see Storm, “Intertextual Cresseida” 114; Scott, “Henrysoun” 27.
38
For the parallels between Venus and Lydgate’s women, see Anna Torti, “From ‘History’
to ‘Tragedy’: The Story of Troilus and Criseyde in Lydgate’s Troy Book and Henryson’s
Testament of Cresseid,” European Tragedy, ed. Boitani 193.
39
In Hanna’s opinion, “The cause of Cresseid’s leprosy has to be sought in her own experi-
ence, in her descent to harlotry, in her career not just as lady in love but as complaisant
agent of lust.” Hanna, “Cresseid’s Dream” 295. For Torti, the mirroring becomes a first
step toward self-knowledge. Torti, “From ‘History’ to ‘Tragedy’” 193-94. Elizabeth Allen
argues that “the process by which this polished glass becomes a figurative mirror shows
how the concrete sign identifies exemplary meaning.” Allen, False Fables and Exemplary
Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2005) 145.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 585

her sinful life; she is punished for her transgression against Venus.40 Allegori-
cally speaking, a presumably duplicitous Criseyde speaks out against a duplici-
tous Venus.
Deformed by her “lipper face” (372), Cresseid decides to live the begging life
assigned to her by the gods. A second complaint, based on ubi sunt formulae,
follows. First, she regrets the loss of all her joy and mirth, about her evil fortune,
wishing to be buried “Quhair nane of Grece nor õit of Troy micht heird!” (415).
Second, she complains about the loss of material objects, her chamber and tapes-
tries, her silver cups, the sweet meats, and so on. In the third stanza, she turns to
her garden, and the fourth stanza deals with her decay, the fact that the leper
hospital is now her chamber, straw replacing her bed. The focus of the fifth
stanza falls on the loss of her clear voice and the deformation of her face. The
complaint culminates in her advice to other ladies: “O ladyis fair of Troy and
Grece, attend / My miserie, quhilk nane may comprehend” (452-53), suggesting
that comprehending the Testament necessitates inventio, since mirroring appears
to be epistemologically faulty:
And in õour mynd ane mirrour mak of me:
As I am now, peraduenture that õe
For all õour micht may cum to that same end,
Or ellis war, gif ony war may be. (457-60)
In the second stanza of her lament, she admonishes the ladies of Troy and
Greece that beauty is but a fading flower, fame but wind in other people’s ears,
et cetera. Her heroid comes abruptly to an end when a fellow “lipper lady” re-
minds her to make virtue of necessity “And leif efter the law of lipper leid”
(474, 480).41 Chaucer’s multifaceted Criseyde has turned into a type.42 Troilus
rides by and although he does not recognize her (beyond her ‘type’), he is re-
minded “Of fair Cresseid” (504) and throws a purse of gold into her lap (520-
22). Upon learning Troilus’s identity, she gives utterance to her emotions for a
third time; she blames herself for her previous treatment of Troilus, whose gen-
tility “I countit small in my prosperitie / Sa efflated I was in wantones, / And
clam vpon the fickill quheill sa hie” (548-50).
While Troilus appears as a defender of womankind, Criseyde emerges as a
fickle women worthy of antifeminist tirades: “My mynd in fleschelie foull affec-
tioun / Was inclynit to lustis lecherous” (558-59). Each of the three stanzas of
her last complaint ends on the dichotomy between “fals Cresseid” and “trew

40
See Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance 173; Catherine S. Cox, “Froward Language and
Wanton Play: The ‘Commoun’ Text of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” SSL 29
(1996): 64.
41
For echoes of Ovid’s Heroides, see Sally Mapstone, “The Origins of Criseyde,” Medieval
Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain; Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000) 147.
42
For a similar point, see Allen, False Fables 146.
586 Conclusions

knicht Troilus” (546, 553, 560).43 From these introspective thoughts, Cresseid
turns to her audience, warning lovers to be careful in their choice of lovers,
again making herself a mirror: everything is unstable. She knows best herself,
Becaus I knaw the greit vnstabilnes,
Brukkil as glas, into my self, I say –
Traisting in vther als greit vnfaithfulnes,
Als vnconstant, and als vntrew of fay –
Thocht sum be trew, I wait richt few ar thay;
Quha findis treuth, lat him his lady ruse;
Nane but my self as now I will accuse. (568-74)
These last stanzas represent a moralitas for the Testament – and in some sense
indeed a moralitas to be appended to Troilus and Criseyde. It is a Henrysonian
moralitas, however, that takes delight in the brittleness of glass, delights in the
mirror that does not reflect the source image and does not construct one-to-one
correspondences. In this sense, to use Cresseid’s own words, the narrator is ill-
advised to trust in his “vther” tale of Cresseid. That the tale is very different be-
comes also tangible in the last glimpse of Troilus, whose last words – “Siching
full sadlie, said, ‘I can no moir; / Scho was vntrew and wo is me thairfoir’”
(601-02) – recall Pandarus’s inability to say any more about Criseyde at the end
of the Troilus. This is to say, Troilus misreads Criseyde for the second time, as
does the narrator of the Testament. He also “can no moir” at the end, replicating
Troilus’s misconception of Cresseid: “Sen scho is deid I speik of hir no moir”
(616). The narrator himself concludes to the “worthie wemen” (610) – for whom
the tale now appears to be intended – that they should “Ming not õour lufe with
fals deceptioun: / Beir in õour mynd this sore conclusioun / Of fair Cresseid”
(613-15). The narrator advocates an ethical transparency that his poem has been
undercutting from the beginning.
As with the Orpheus, such a moralitas does not work. With his ‘other’ tale of
Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s Criseyde, Henryson instead has been adding even
more layers to Criseyde – incongruous masks that veil to a much greater extent
the ‘true’ Criseyde.44 The most obvious ethical contradiction embedded within
the poem is that Criseyde cannot be an object acted upon by forces beyond her
control and be an agent lecherously acting upon the very forces that are sug-
43
For the dualities in the poem, see Jill Mann, “The Planetary Gods in Chaucer and Hen-
ryson,” Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and
Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 91-106; Riddy, “Femi-
nine and Masculine” 229-48; Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Mod-
ern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (Houndmills: Macmillan; New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) 58; Allen, False Fables 150-52.
44
Elizabeth Scala argues that the more the Testament tries to “include, the more it returns to
the exclusions from which it arose. Cresseid’s exclusion becomes the central gesture of a
text designed to include her moral and ethical condemnation neither Troilus nor Hen-
ryson’s reader has been able to make.” Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality,
and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2002) 201.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 587

gested to be in her control, notably Troilus and Diomeid. While it is possible to

argue that the poem represents Cresseid’s progression from “self-pity and defi-
ance [...] to a genuine sorrow in which she accuses herself,”45 the contradiction
would nevertheless persist, for the poem does not furnish any evidence save
Cresseid’s own words, uttered in a state of mind (and illness), preventing her
from recognizing Troilus! In view of the similarities with the tale-moralitas
structure of the Orpheus and the Fables, instead of a progression, the audience
beholds snapshots of different ‘Cresseids,’46 that is, different possibilities of fill-
ing the various lacunae surrounding her problematic history.
Cresseid is whatever the reader wants her to be, the narrator seems to sug-
gest. He also offers a corrective to his reading, however, which may make him
less of a “slanderer.”47 For if the narrator finally were to indict Cresseid for be-
ing fickle, desirous, and changeable, he would structurally merit the same in-
dictment because of his desire for another tale which correlates with Diomeid’s
desire for another woman. Nor is Henryson’s narrator any less fickle or change-
able than the image of Cresseid that he allegedly intends to convey. After having
his fill of Chaucer, the narrator drinks from the cup of literary invention that
pushes to its very limits invention itself. The Testament’s aggressive antifem-
inism makes for an equally aggressive writerly poem which challenges allegore-
sis. The typified misrepresentation of Cresseid initiates the audience’s ‘inven-
tiveness’ in order to reconcile the inherent contradictions.48 And invention, in
Henryson’s framework, includes the possibilities of new connections, the possi-
ble inclusion of new mythologies.49

45
Wilson, “Robert Henryson” 143.
46
For different (self-)images of Cresseid, see Jane Adamson, “The Curious Incident of the
Recognition in Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid,” Parergon 27 (1980): 23-24.
47
See Cox, “Froward Language” 67.
48
Lesley Johnson suggests that “active readers [...] may warm their hearts in assimilating
another’s private experience to their own. This is the most positive interpretation of the
process of reading and writing suggested by Henryson’s narrative frame and which takes
the physic of reading to be both literal and metaphorical.” The narrative frame, however,
also has profoundly negative implications insofar as the narrator “makes her end merely a
reflection of his experience. Reading in this model is not so much a physic as a placebo. It
is a self-reflexive act which provides simply the illusion of another kind of experience.”
Johnson, “Whatever Happened to Criseyde? Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Courtly
Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 1990) 319.
49
Allen argues that the ending of the poem seals “Henryson’s argument that it is the task of
figuration to bring about formal and moral order, rather than (as in Chaucer) to raise mul-
tiple unanswerable questions.” Later on, she emphasizes that Henryson shares with Chau-
cer “the call to audience judgment, which is not simply a matter of reiterating timeless ex-
emplary morals but is understood to be contingent upon time, place, and point of view.”
Allen, False Fables 152, 155. I would argue that Henryson’s poetry prompts the rethink-
ing of moral frameworks as such.
588 Conclusions

Since the Testament obviously engages in a dialogue with the Troy story and
the versions of Criseyde furnished therein, the poem cannot be seen in isolation.
Accordingly, the Testament also has a national dimension, which can only be
sketched at this point. The issues of masking and mapping, which frequently
surfaced in the above, likewise reflect the juxtaposition of Virgilian and Ovidian
models, which are less tangible but nevertheless present. The seemingly trans-
parent message of the poem is that desire needs to be masked, changeability in-
dicted, necessitating Virgilian masking. Whether or not her self-recognition
wins her purgatory, Cresseid should have subjected her emotions to reason. By
the same token, Cresseid subjected herself to the forces of public discourse,
which obviously do not provide adequate guidance. Insofar as the poem recur-
rently summons contradictions, it evokes an Ovidian model that, like the Virgil-
ian track, trades in opacity: the bifurcated structure of the Ars amatoria and the
Remedia amoris, which “pulls off a brilliant coup, pretending to be the rhetorical
‘other side’ of the argument, and the ultimate retraction and denial of the world
of erotic elegy, in preparation for greater things, but actually being a seductive
song, which will further draw us into the world of Ovidian erotics.”50 The Tes-
tament likewise opposes two contradictory views enforcing reconciliation. It is a
Venerean poem of duplicity that does not completely abide without a Virgilian
counterpart. While doubleness and changeability become the delightful onto-
logical strategies of the narrator, the narrator’s pleasure is held in check by the
Virgilian reminder that Troilus must move on – the Testament itself stays the
course of the Troilus. This structurally resembles Dido’s letters to Aeneas,
which attempt (ineffectually) to stop the translatio imperii.51 If Cresseid’s la-
ment momentarily stays the course of empire, it ultimately does so only to rein-
force the Ovidian transformation of nationhood into counter-nationhood; Hen-
ryson pushes a radical Ovidian changeability to its limits.
Positing this relationship between Chaucer’s Troilus and the Testament
means recognizing the national dimension of the contradictory allegory of Hen-
ryson’s poem. When scholars study medieval Scottish texts, a concern with na-
tionhood is usually found in those works dealing with the Wars of Independ-
ence, such as the Bruce and the Wallace, but not in the poetry of Henryson or
William Dunbar. R. James Goldstein points to an important paradox of Scottish
identity that is relevant for studying the Testament as well: while the Bruce and
the Wallace include visions of Scottish independence, they often do so with ref-

50
Alison Sharrock, “Ovid and the Discourses of Love: The Amatory Works,” The Cam-
bridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002)
160.
51
“The relationship between the Testament of Cresseid and Troilus and Criseyde might be
compared to that between Ovid’s Heroides and, for example, Virgil’s Aeneid (or more
specifically between Dido’s letter in the Heroides and the Aeneid), in so far as Henryson’s
focus on Cresseid’s personal history disrupts Chaucer’s closing view of events in Book
V.” Johnson, “Whatever Happened to Criseyde?” 314.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 589

erence to English role models, a process seen at work in the poetry of the Scot-
tish makars.52 The Wars of Independence were clearly conducive to fostering na-
tional unity; the period between 1375 and 1513, however, is generally seen as
politically stable; “the Stewart monarchy was unchallenged, with a clear and ac-
cepted line of succession.” Consequently, “few Older Scots poets show any sign
of ‘linguistic or cultural cringe’: neither Henryson nor Dunbar, for instance,
choose their register or other linguistic variants in order to assert their national
identity.” The chronicle tradition does take pride in Scottish antiquity, especially
Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon (1449), going back to “Gathelos, a Greek
prince, and Scota, an Egyptian princess” denying “any claim to overlordship
implicit in the Brutus origin myth common in English material.”53 Troy, then,
was perhaps important insofar as it was a different myth of origins, an English
myth that was used indeed to claim hegemony over Scotland.
Such considerations are important for a reading of Henryson’s poetological
allegory in the Testament. As Anna Torti observes, “The war does not disappear
from Henryson’s version”; in fact, readers are expected to know the outline of
the war as well as Chaucer’s Troilus.54 While this enables the relationship be-
tween the Troilus and the Testament, it has consequences for Henryson’s drama-
tization of the necessity to reconcile several allegorical domains. His inquiry
into how much difference an allegorical epistemological system can maintain
engages specifically also with the dichotomies inherent in the Troy story. The
Troy story, after all, is limited to Trojan (Ovidian), Greek (Virgilian) and hybrid
ontological models. Henryson’s Testament is no less a hybrid model. One per-
haps surprising constant in Henryson’s Testament is that Cresseid is both Trojan

52
R. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993) 282-83. See further Joachim Schwend, “Nation-
alism in Scottish Medieval and Renaissance Literature,” Nationalism in Literature – Lite-
rarischer Nationalismus: Literature, Language and National Identity, ed. Horst W. Dre-
scher and Hermann Völkel (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1989) 34; Richard J. Moll, “‘Off quhat
nacioun art thow?’ National Identity in Blind Hary’s Wallace,” History, Literature and
Music in Scotland, 700-1560, ed. R. Andrew McDonald (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press,
2002) 120-43. For Middle Scots as the national language of Scotland, see Joanna Bugaj,
“Middle Scots as an Emerging Standard and Why It Did not Make It,” Scottish Language
23 (2004): 23-25, 27-30.
53
Nicola Royan, “Scottish Literature,” Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and
Middle English Literature, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2005) 356, 357, 362. She thinks that the relative stability of Scottish identity
is the reason for the absence of national concerns in the poetry of Dunbar and Henryson; a
national poetical tradition, however, can be found in “the detail of style and technique, and
in the broad impression of theme and assumption” (364, 367).
54
Anna Torti, “From ‘History’ to ‘Tragedy’” 185. Tapestries depicting the Troy story were
shown in Scotland in 1503 at the wedding of James IV and Margaret Tudor. James V
owned a set of nine older pieces depicting the Troy story. Scot McKendrick, “The Great
History of Troy: A Reassessment of the Development of a Secular Theme in Late Medie-
val Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 58.
590 Conclusions

and Greek:55 She is “the flour and A per se / Of Troy and Grece” (78-79); she
wants to be buried “Quhair nane of Grece nor õit of Troy micht heird!” (415);
and she addresses the “ladyis fair of Troy and Grece” (452) – only Troilus seems
to remember her as truly Trojan, as the tombstone suggests: “Cresseid of Troy
the toun” (607). Given Cresseid’s predicament as doubly (or even triply) aban-
doned, there is no place left for her to go in quest of a new mythology; she has
exhausted the ontological potentials of what both Greece and Troy have to offer.
Thus, the Scottish writer goes beyond these “English” models to literally dis-
cover an Ovidian counter-tradition based on (and transcending) Chaucer’s
counter-national Criseyde – Cresseid, after all, wants to locate herself outside
the realms of both Troy and Greece, which entails a multi-leveled, radical break
from Trojan mythology in its entirety. Henryson’s Ovidian changeability is held
in check, however, by a new dimension of Virgilianism, mainly represented by
the first full translation into Middle Scots of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas – the
empire translates back.

3. Beyond
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Troy story continued to have a strong
hold on the English and Scottish imagination,56 as evinces itself, for example, in
William Caxton’s treatments of Trojan history, the Recuyell of the Historyes of
Troye (1474), an English translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s Troy story and the first
English printed book, and his Eneydos (1490). Particularly the latter brings into
focus Virgilian concerns. As Christopher Baswell notes, the Eneydos, an odd
mixture of diverse materials, “simultaneously subverts and pays homage to Vir-
gil [...]; it at once tells an ever less Virgilian story and yet claims Virgilian
authority.” He further suggests that “The most telling of the Eneydos’s anxieties,
probably, is its sense of manhood endangered, and gender distinctions undone,
by Dido’s command of Carthage and her temporary influence over Eneas.”57
Since Caxton dealt with the Dido narrative before, the story in the Eneydos

55
Cox notes this association of Cresseid with both Troy and Greece: she is “mutable and
unstable, belonging to neither and yet associated with both.” Cox, “Froward Language”
61. Steele Nowlin points out to me that Calchas’s ‘mansion’ literally occupies a liminal
space between Troy and Greece – it is “far out of the toun / Ane myle or twa” (95-96).
56
James G. Harper, “Turks as Trojans; Trojans as Turks: Visual Imagery of the Trojan War
and the Politics of Cultural Identity in Fifteenth-Century Europe,” Postcolonial Ap-
proaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir
and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) 151-79.
57
Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the “Aeneid” from the Twelfth
Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 273, 275. Marilynn
Desmond also argues that in the Eneydos, Caxton becomes “inextricably enmeshed in con-
flicting stories about Dido.” Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medie-
val “Aeneid” (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994) 168. See further James
Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350-1547: Reform and Cul-
tural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) 78.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 591

“marks an amplification of Chaucer’s Book of Fame 1 and Ovid’s Metamor-

phoses 14. Likewise, it engages in a sort of textual dialogue with passages [...]
from the Polychronicon and the Recuyell.” Consequently, Caxton’s audience is
confronted with very different ‘Didos,’58 just like Henryson’s reader witnesses
several ‘Criseydes’ placed side-by-side.
Caxton’s Chaucerian bricolage, his Ovidianism, did not win him much praise
with near-contemporary writers and translators.59 Especially Gavin Douglas ex-
pressed reservations about Caxton’s works. In the Prologue to his 1513 transla-
tion of Virgil’s Aeneid, he stresses that he is “Writing in the language of the
Scottis natioun,” explicitly juxtaposing his version to that of Caxton, who is “of
Inglis natioun.”60 Caxton, he says, has printed a book in English and “Clepand it
Virgill in Eneados, / Quhilk that he sais of Frensch he did translait, / It hes na
thing ado therwith, God wait” – no more than Augustine had to do with the
Devil (2: 7). He is particularly troubled by Caxton’s treatment of Dido: “Me list
nocht schaw how the story of Dido / Be this Caxtoun is haill peruertit so” (2: 8).
Douglas reverses Caxton’s emotional attachment to Dido, and “explicitly works
to make Aeneas the focus of the epic and to displace Dido [...].”61 After all, were
Aeneas really to have wronged Dido, Virgil’s labors would have been for noth-
ing. Besides, “Virgill schawis Enee did na thing, / Frome Dido of Cartaige at his
departing”; the gods commanded Aeneas to leave, so if there was any reason to
complain, it would have to be about the former and not Aeneas (2: 16). Despite
his Virgilian stance that aligns with his philological enterprise, there is still a
troubling potential for faultlines. As Douglas himself has to admit, “Sum tyme I
follow the text als neir I may, / Sum tyme I am constrenit ane wther way: / Be-

58
Desmond, Reading Dido 174-75.
59
W. B. Stanford suspects that Caxton’s interest lies in catering to a female audience. Stan-
ford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd ed. (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 1963) 290.
60
Gavin Douglas, Eneados, The Poetical Works, ed. John Small, 4 vols. (1874; Hildesheim:
Olms, 1970) 2: 6, 7. All parenthetical references, by volume and page number, are to this
edition. Douglas likewise accuses Chaucer, who greatly offended Virgil, for instance, in
his Ovidian handling of Dido. Moreover, he “was euer [...] wemenis frend” (2: 16-17).
61
“Douglas’s concern about language and national identity points to the cultural role he
wants his ‘wlgar Virgil’ to play as a translation that creates vernacular textual authority
within the late medieval court culture of James IV.” That is to say, he “juxtaposes his
Scottish Eneados, an exemplary text about Eneas and Rome, to Caxton’s Eneydos ‘of
Inglis natioun,’ a text about Dido,” and “vehemently” objects to Caxton’s multiplicities
and Dido’s disruptive tendencies. Desmond, Reading Dido 164-66, 176. See also Simp-
son, Reform 91. Desmond further points out that the Eneados marks a significant shift
from “Douglas’s allegiance to Ovid in his earlier composition, The Palice of Honour”
(179), which poses interesting questions about the tension between Virgilian and Ovidian
models in his works in general.
592 Conclusions

syde Latyne our langage is imperfite” (2: 14).62 Despite these faultlines, it stands
to reason whether or not Douglas rightly claims Virgilian fama.63 Douglas’s
translation of the Aeneid betrays worries about the mythological bricolage char-
acteristic of many a Troy story, and it couches the debate implicitly in a Virgil-
ian-Ovidian dichotomy familiar from Guido’s Historia and his adaptors.
The Troy story continued to enjoy wide popularity in the Renaissance, al-
though the voice of the doubters was heard more distinctly. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the Trojan ancestry of Britain was debunked by Polydore
Virgil in his Anglica Historia (1534) and by the French historian Lancelot
Voisin de la Popelinière (1540-1608), who asked – as Guido delle Colonne im-
plicitly asked before him – why would it be so honorable to be the offspring of
‘losers’?64 As Nicholas Birns observes, France required “a myth less porous and
ironic than the Trojan legend.”65 The mythology of Trojan origins continues to
be regarded as too flexible in its multiplicity of medieval traditions, increasingly
challenged, as already seen in the early sixteenth century, by a philological re-
course to Virgil’s Aeneid. And yet, the role of Troy remains pivotal. Rulers still
enjoyed seeing themselves in a Trojan/Arthurian tradition – James VI of Scot-
land saw himself as “fulfiller of Merlin’s prophecy,” as a “second Arthur” – and
popular plays, such as John Bankes’s The Destruction of Troy, address the audi-
ence as “London’s Trojans.”66 Whether in poetry, plays, or historiography, it ap-
pears that the axioms of prosopagraphical selfhood and concomitant histori-
ographical and poetological inquiries – the latter increasingly aligned with more
explicit questions about (Virgilian and Ovidian) career models – survive in the
Renaissance.

62
The sheer length of Douglas’s excuses for his work at the end of the Prologue somewhat
betrays his unease about others’ potential allegations regarding the misrepresentation of
the Latin text: “sum wald sweir that I the text haue vareit” (2: 18).
63
Although Douglas’s Eneados claims “a purer, originary Virgilianism, and on an imperial
theme,” Baswell believes that the narratorial voice harks back to Chaucerian narrators. Es-
pecially in his prologues, Douglas crafts a space for his own poetic voice and ambition,
albeit one that ultimately confirms his Virgilianism: “Douglas hangs up his pen, like a tri-
umphant warrior’s lance, on Virgil’s post, and thereby lays claim to Virgil’s glory.”
Baswell, Virgil 276-78, quotations at 276, 278.
64
See Claus Uhlig, “Nationale Geschichtsschreibung und kulturelle Identität: Das Beispiel
der englischen Renaissance,” Nationale und kulturelle Identität: Studien zur Entwicklung
des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit, ed. Bernard Giesen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhr-
kamp, 1991) 173-74. For the relevance of La Popelinière’s Histoire des Histoires, see
Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1955) 205-06. For a discussion of Polydore Virgil
and La Popelinière, see Nicholas Birns, “The Trojan Myth: Postmodern Reverberations,”
Exemplaria 5.1 (1993): 71-74.
65
Birns, “Trojan Myth” 73.
66
Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-
Saxons (Montreal: Harvest House; Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1982) 23,
24.
 Chapter Twenty-One: Henryson’s Pleasurable Prosopagraphy 593

Thus, the present study is perhaps an untold preface to Patrick Cheney’s in-
vestigation of early modern career models, especially Christopher Marlowe,
Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. A prosopagraphical approach might
modestly add to such inquiries a heuristic instrument to map the overlap be-
tween ontological and poetological concerns. A revaluation of Shakespeare’s
Troy stories, chiefly his Troilus and Cressida, and his history plays – with their
triple concerns regarding questions of masking, nationhood, and historiogra-
phy/authorship – appears to be particularly timely in view of the controversial
debates about the various kinds of ‘nationhoods’ for which Shakespeare’s name
has been appropriated.67 Most contentious in this context is the discussion about
Shakespeare’s religion, which is caught up in an unhealthy dichotomizing along
the lines of an English versus a European Shakespeare68 – a debate that often
touches on questions of both masking and national identity. Richard Wilson has
recently drawn attention to problems with such dichotomizing in ways that I
think make fruitful a reinvestigation of Shakespearean masking couched within
the triad of person, nation, and Shakespeare’s ‘medieval’ view on antiquity. Re-
considering arguments in favor of a Jesuit Shakespeare, he concludes that “the
idea of the dramatist as a secularising figure is as false as the picture of him as a
Roman Catholic spy. Secret Shakespeare turns out, instead, to resemble the
politique Montaigne who praised Julian the Apostate [...] as a model for the rul-
ers of multi-confessional societies, who, if they cannot impose belief, can at
least pretend that acts of toleration [...] are what they always wished.”69 A pro-
sopagraphical approach to Shakespeare’s (historical) works potentially makes
palpable the negotiation of just such a middle ground as it begins to emerge, for
example, in Cheney’s work on Shakespeare as a national poet-playwright, laying
claim both to a Spensarian, Virgilian empire and a Marlovian, Ovidian counter-
nationhood.70 The evolving Shakespearean translucence might thus testify to and
reinforce the necessity, articulated in the late medieval Troy stories, of allegoriz-
ing change and of countering counter-nationhood itself.

67
See Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Political Culture (New York: Thom-
son, 2003); Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 2004) esp. 46-47.
68
For Shakespeare’s Jesuit background, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost
Years (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1985); Sonja Fielitz, Jakob Gretser, “Timon:
Comoedia imitata” (1584); Erstausgabe von Gretsers “Timon”-Drama, mit Übersetzung
und einer Erörterung von dessen Stellung zu Shakespeares “Timon of Athens” (München:
Fink, 1994) 192-243; Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion
and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2004). For the role of veiling in re-
ligious contexts, see Peter Lake, “Religious Identities in Shakespeare’s England,” A Com-
panion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 64.
69
Wilson, Secret Shakespeare 7.
70
“Shakespeare inherits the opposition between Marlowe and Spenser, but he stands above
it, precisely to bridge it.” Cheney, Shakespeare 277.
594 Conclusions

If Shakespeare’s Troy (in Troilus and Cressida, for instance) therefore

emerges as a medieval Troy, it is, as my view on medieval individuality and na-
tionhood suggests, a medievalism that is strikingly modern. This medieval mod-
ernism speaks in interesting ways to current concerns with religious toleration in
view of fundamentalist terrorism, with present perceptions of the potential ‘loss’
of selves and identities, be they personal or national, with debates about post-
nationalism and postcolonialism. It would be foolish to presume that these issues
and debates would not affect any investigation into related issues in earlier dec-
ades,71 rendering this study inevitably an “implicit allegory of the present.” 72
With regard to the making of both selves and nations, Keith Stringer’s assertion
that “a more concerted dialogue between medievalists and modernists”73 is
needed is no less pressingly true today than it was in the mid-1990s. I began this
conclusion by suggesting that the medieval Troy stories look backward and for-
ward at the same time, a movement exemplified best, perhaps, by one of Aga-
memnon’s reflective moments, when, before rushing to attack Troy, he momen-
tarily pauses to consider what he can learn from the past. If my sketch of a pro-
sopagraphical trajectory across the periodic (and oftentimes epistemic) divide
suggests possibilities of mapping the complex negotiations of personal and na-
tional identities, of reconstructing a textual past for the making of personal and
national futures in the Renaissance and beyond, some of Agamemnon’s anxie-
ties of past and future carry over into my investigation of the nexus between
selves and nations in the transmission of the Troy story. It is an anxiety that calls
for yet more allegories of change.

71
See Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Stud-
ies,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 100-03.
72
The phrase is borrowed from Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne:
Power and Subjectivity from “Richard II” to “Hamlet” (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2002) 2.
73
Keith Stringer, “Social and Political Communities in European History: Some Reflections
on Recent Studies,” Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism in the European Past, ed. Claus
Bjørn, Alexander Grant, and Keith Stringer (Copenhagen: Academic Press, 1994) 33.
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 INDEX

Accessus ad auctores, 157n, 158n, 162, Bennett, J. A. W., 330-31nn, 342-43n

232, 357n, 450n, 473n, 533 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, 1, 6-7, 9, 12, 14,
Adamson, Jane, 587n 80, 119-20, 121n, 122, 125, 133-36,
Adler, Alfred, 141n 138, 140-52, 159, 161, 165, 170, 178,
Adorno, Theodor W., 50n 180-82, 186n, 190, 192, 194-204, 206-
Aers, David, 23n, 29n, 73n, 77n, 81n, 08, 210, 213-15, 218-22, 225, 229, 230,
374n, 397n, 411n, 428n, 464n 233-34, 236-39, 248, 251, 253n, 257,
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 83n, 98n, 343n, 260n, 261-63, 269, 288, 291, 306n, 309,
371n, 377, 578n 321, 325, 330, 340, 347-50, 353, 358-
Allen, Elizabeth, 501n, 584-87nn 60, 362, 366n, 372, 393, 396n, 397-98,
Ambrisco, Alan S., 556n, 558n, 562n 415, 430n, 436, 450-51, 454n, 456, 470,
Amtower, Laurel, 72-73, 152n, 343n, 367, 492, 499-502, 516, 533, 556, 569-70,
406n, 424n, 427n, 432n, 499n 574
Anderson, Benedict, 3, 108, 111n, 116n, Benson, C. David, 6n, 133n, 135, 136n,
377 143, 144-46nn, 150n, 208n, 213n, 230,
Andreas Capellanus, 158n, 534n 238, 265n, 266, 268, 269n, 270-71, 273,
Andrew, Malcolm, 266n, 390n 276, 278, 281n, 287n, 294, 299, 300n,
Antonelli, Roberto, 196n, 197-98 302n, 302, 306n, 309, 310n, 318n, 349,
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 84, 87n 350n, 368n, 370n, 379n, 393n, 405n,
Archibald, Elizabeth, 463n 418n, 431n, 451n, 4564, 456n, 479n,
Armstrong, John A., 390n 480-82, 486n, 515-16n, 521n, 530n,
Arn, Mary-Jo, 271n, 353n, 432n, 450n, 542, 544n, 552n, 556-57n, 561, 563,
456 575n, 582n, 584n
Assmann, Aleida, 105n, 111n Benson, Ciarán, 36-38, 42, 48-49, 51, 53-
Atwood, Elmer Bagby, 290n, 541n, 544n, 54, 56, 76, 77n, 92, 105-06, 322, 357,
553-54n, 429
Auerbach, Erich, 86n, 98n Benton, John F., 27n, 73n, 115n, 158n
Augustine, Saint, 64, 121, 591 Bernard of Clairvaux, 72, 75
Confessions, 30, 73-74, 79 Bernardus Silvestris, 339, 352
De doctrina christiana, 70, 85, 86-87n Berschin, Walter, 242n
Besser, Ingeborg, 332n
Bankert, Dabney Anderson, 395n, 451n, Besserman, Lawrence, 418n
458n Bhabha, Homi K., 111n
Barney, Stephen A., 288n, 350n, 400, Bianco, Sue, 558n, 562n
405n, 409n, 412n, 415n, 418, 423-24n, Birns, Nicholas, 120n, 260n, 265-66n, 306,
432, 471, 485, 486n, 491n, 497, 505 592
Barr, Helen, 514n Black, Max, 90n
Barron, W. R., 136n Bloom, Harold, 23, 24
Barthes, Roland, 48, 49-50n, 96, 451n, Bloomfield, Josephine, 379n, 386n, 401n,
480, 580n 415n, 425n, 493n
Baswell, Christopher, 107n, 121n, 146n, Bloomfield, Morton W., 15, 379, 413,
161n, 186n, 272, 332n, 335n, 344-45n, 479n, 481-82n, 488n, 503
538n, 540n, 546n, 554-55n, 562-63n, Blumenberg, Hans, 50n
565-66n, 590, 592n Blyth, Charles, 352
Beer, Jeanette, 134n Boccaccio, Giovanni, 192, 321, 372, 550n
Bellamy, Elizabeth J., 119n Filostrato, 1, 11, 14, 322-23, 347-48,
Bendix, Reinhard, 111n 350, 353-54n, 359-68, 371, 379-80,
 Index 637
386, 395, 399, 401n, 403, 407, 408, Chance, Jane, 347n, 351, 367n, 372n,
411-12, 416n, 418, 423, 437, 439, 442, 390n, 428n
444, 446, 448, 453, 455, 457, 461, Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1, 7, 24, 72, 80, 118,
462n, 464, 465-66, 471, 474, 476, 480, 192, 205, 262, 276, 347, 366, 375, 481,
489, 490, 493-94n, 500, 502, 511, 569, 516, 525, 578
571 Book of the Duchess, 329n, 339n, 348,
Teseida, 323, 382, 386, 390, 511 435-36
Børch, Marianne, 482 Canterbury Tales, 76, 252, 323, 349,
Boitani, Piero, 225n, 329-30n, 339n, 347n, 367, 369, 374, 377, 462
350n, 361n, 386n, 390n, 392-93n, 511n House of Fame, 10-11, 13, 22, 263, 302,
Borthwick, Mary Charlotte, 458 321, 322, 323, 328-45, 346, 348, 351,
Bowers, John M., 252n, 349n, 390 355, 356, 367, 379n, 381, 383, 391,
Branca, Vittore, 361n, 365n 393, 396, 401, 403n, 419, 420, 426,
Brand, Gerd, 49-50n, 101n 427n, 449, 451, 459, 463, 478, 486,
Bredekamp, Horst, 33, 35, 75 497, 500, 503, 505-06, 512, 543n, 555n,
Breuilly, John, 108n, 115n 557, 567, 569, 571-72, 574
Brewer, Derek, 479 Legend of Good Women, 158n, 332n,
Bright, Philippa M., 580n 346, 348, 352, 434, 491, 505, 541
Brittan, Simon, 86n, 87n, 89 Troilus and Criseyde, 1, 9-14, 22, 61,
Broadhurst, Karen M., 140n, 142n, 238n 135, 138, 265n, 266, 281, 285n, 286-94,
Brody, Saul N., 370, 371n, 379n, 407n 302, 306-07, 317, 321-515, 518, 521,
Broich, Ulrich, 140n, 142n, 238n 521, 522n, 529-32, 534n, 538-39n, 540-
Brown, Carleton, 373n, 494n 47, 550, 555-58, 566, 568-69, 571-72,
Brown, Sarah Annes, 331n, 338n, 340n 574-75, 581-89, 593-94
Brown, William H., Jr., 136n, 494n Cheney, Patrick, 80n, 104, 106-07, 119n,
Bruner, Jerome, 41n, 46n, 48 514n, 593
Brut, 9, 11, 119, 126, 264-65, 308, 323, Chesterton, G. K., 375-76
340n, 376, 382, 388-90, 421, 512 Chiàntera, Raffaele, 143n, 241n, 243n
Bruyne, Edgar de, 83n Cicero, 61-65, 85
Burckhardt, Jacob, 2-4, 19, 23-26, 45, 73, De inventione, 439, 444-45
76, 83, 102, 128 De officiis, 5, 20, 59, 61-64, 129
Burger, Glenn, 377 De re publicam, 11, 325, 382, 385, 387-
Burnley, J. D., 146, 147n 90, 421, 425
Burrow, Colin, 332n Clanchy, M. T., 114n, 312n
Burrow, J. A., 70n, 328n, 380n, 431n Clark, John, 124n, 265n
Bush, Douglas, 1 Clemen, Wolfgang, 329n, 331-32n, 336n
Busse, Wilhelm G., 126n Clerk, John, 6, 176n, 265, 304, 430n, 514,
Butterfield, Ardis, 337n, 488n 524n
Bynum, Caroline Walker, 28-29, 31, 66n, Clopper, Lawrence M., 67n, 173n
161n, 181-82n Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 181-82n, 183
Coleman, Janet, 115n, 260n, 312n
Calabrese, Michael A., 13, 158n, 353-54, Cooper, Helen, 2720, 328n, 332n, 334n,
404, 410n, 414n, 418n, 422n, 425n, 340-41n, 347n, 353n, 369n, 378, 382n,
427n, 434n, 438n, 450n, 470n, 493n, 434n, 506n
498n, 499, 510n Copeland, Rita, 86n, 134n, 146-48nn, 149,
Carpenter, Sarah, 5, 66-69, 70n, 82, 552 237, 579n
Carruthers, Mary J., 71n, 338n Cox, Catherine S., 585n, 587n, 590n
Carton, Evan, 472n Crick, Julia C., 122n, 144n
Cassirer, Ernst, 50 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 64n, 71, 73, 86n,
Caxton, William, 176, 514, 515n, 590-91 88n, 146n, 148, 161n, 232-33n, 355n,
496n
638 Index

419n, 426-27n, 435n, 446n, 455n, 464n,

Damasio, Antonio, 36n, 37-42, 44-45, 52 468n, 470n, 480n, 490n, 516n, 522n,
Dane, Joseph A., 331n, 345n 527-29n, 531n, 534n, 536n, 538-39n,
Dann, Otto, 111n, 117n 541, 546n, 549, 554-55n, 561-63nn,
Dante Alighieri, 347n, 351, 378, 483 566-68nn
Commedia 231n, 323, 336-37n, 360n, Eisenhut, Werner, 121-22n, 133n
368, 382, 385-867, 390, 484, 487, 509 Eley, Penny, 125, 141n, 143, 220n
Vita nuova, 343-44 Evans, Murray J., 480n, 508n
De vulgari eloquentia, 143n, 148-49, Evans, Ruth, 147n, 149
244-45, 488, 514n Evreinoff, Nicolas, 46n
Dares Phrygius, 121, 133n, 136, 140,
142n, 147, 174n, 180n, 218, 221, 225n, Federico, Sylvia, 1n, 12, 124n, 312n, 331n,
231, 262n, 267, 280, 288, 294, 295n, 335n, 345n, 354n, 373n, 378n, 391n,
303, 310, 339-40, 349, 557, 561n 482n, 493n, 513, 514n, 561-62n, 575
Davis, Kathleen, 113n, 116 Fewer, Colin, 516, 520n, 524n, 566n
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 30n, 70n Field, Rosalind, 269n, 271-72
De Man, Paul, 46, 98n, 99-101 Fielitz, Sonja, 593n
Dean, James, 483n, 513n Finlayson, John, 146, 266, 380, 566n
Delany, Sheila, 336n, 339n Finley, Moses I., 241-42n, 244-45n, 255n
Deleuze, Gilles, 35n, 44n Fisher, Sheila, 496n
Derrida, Jacques, 46n, 51n, 55 Fleming, John V., 158n, 347n, 352-53n,
Desmond, Marilynn, 107n, 331n, 338n, 419n, 432n, 441n, 465, 472n
342n, 590-91n Fletcher, Angus, 84n, 85n, 92n, 98n, 100n
Dictys Cretensis, 121, 140, 142n, 147, 152, Folkenflik, Robert, 73n
174n, 180n, 190, 222, 225-26, 228n, Foucault, Michel, 32n, 55
231-32, 280, 294, 295n, 303, 309-10, Fradenburg, Louise O., 271, 453n, 471n,
339, 557, 561n 493n
Dimmick, Jeremy, 158n, 332n Fränkel, Hermann, 356n, 467, 470n, 473n,
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 367-68n, 411n, 443n, 511n
455n, 480-81n, 486, 500n, 510n Frank, Manfred, 5n, 25n, 41n
Dinzelbacher, Peter, 32 Frantzen, Allen J., 113n, 357n, 367n, 388n,
Dirven, René, 95n, 96-97 391n, 462n
Dobbs, Elizabeth A., 459n Freeman, Margaret H., 91n
Donaldson, E. Talbot, 193n, 199-200, Fry, Donald K., 444, 445n
350n, 368n, 428n, 454, 471n, 479-81nn Frye, Northrop, 36n, 92n, 93, 97-98n, 337n
Dopsch, Alfons, 2, 25-27, 32 Fuchs, Peter, 31, 110n
Douglas, Gavin, 514, 590-92 Fuhrmann, Manfred, 61n, 63n, 64
Doyle, Kara, 458-59n Fulgentius, 86, 352
Dronke, Peter, 2, 25n, 78 Fyler, John M., 328, 330-32nn, 335-37nn,
Dryden, John, 375-76n, 514 344n, 347n, 353n, 354, 355-56n, 385n,
Dülmen, Richard van, 2, 25n, 32n 428n, 432n, 481n, 489n
Dunger, Hermann, 133n
Durling, Robert M., 355n, 379n Galloway, Andrew, 119, 120n, 123n-24n,
238n, 264n
Eakin, Paul John, 41n, 42-43, 48n, 57 Ganim, John M., 369n, 494n, 495
Ebin, Lois A., 524n, 527n, 554n, 563n Garber, Jörn, 111n, 119n, 121n
Edwards, Robert R., 25n, 69n, 80n, 87n, Gaylord, Alan T., 76n, 403n, 489n
115n, 120n, 145, 159n, 161n, 174n, Geary, Patrick J., 108n, 117n
220n, 259n, 286n, 303, 331n, 333, 336- Gellner, Ernest, 3, 108n, 110-111n
37n, 339n, 346-47n, 354n, 372n, 380,
386n, 390n, 392n, 394n, 399n, 413n,
 Index 639
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 9, 120-24, 144-45, Hacking, Ian, 45n, 55n, 56-57
184, 250, 321, 339, 340n, 388, 389n, Hadfield, Andrew, 3, 111n, 593n
565 Hagedorn, Suzanne C., 165n, 333n, 347n,
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 153, 434n, 486 353n, 392n, 415n, 423n, 432n, 462n,
Gergen, Kenneth J., 43n 463n
Gerhardt, Volker, 79n, 81 Haidu, Peter, 2, 81n, 117, 574
Gerok-Reiter, Annette, 78-79 Hamilton, George L., 348, 349n
Giancarlo, Matthew, 330n, 350n, 385n, Hanna, Ralph, III., 116n, 118n, 144n,
481n 583n, 584n
Giesen, Bernhard, 110n, 112-13 Hanning, Robert W., 2, 25n, 78, 79n, 123n,
Gill, Christopher, 62-64nn 125, 339n, 365n, 507n
Gillespie, Vincent, 157-58n, 357n, 379n, Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, 354n, 410n, 434n,
496n 443n, 481n
Ginsberg, Warren, 47n, 347n, 362-64n, Hardie, Philip, 107n, 335n
386, 509n Hardman, Phillipa, 141, 463n, 560n
Given-Wilson, Chris, 264n, 313n Harré, Rom, 36, 39n, 41, 44n, 45, 46n, 53,
Glass, James M., 35n, 45 54n
Goffman, Erving, 36n, 70n Harrison, Stephen, 352n, 485n
Goldstein, R. James, 588, 589n Hastings, Adrian, 3, 104, 109, 113n, 114-
Goodall, Peter, 431n, 454n 15, 116n, 118n
Gordon, Ida L., 413n, 490n Havely, Nick, 360n, 362n, 387n, 487n
Guattari, Félix, 35n, 44n Hebron, Malcolm, 253n, 268n, 308n
Gubrium, Jaber F., 35, 41n, 43-44, 53n, Heidegger, Martin, 50n
55-56n Helgerson, Richard, 3, 80n, 111n
Guido delle Colonne, 1, 6-14, 22, 80, 104, Hellerich, Gert, 44, 45-46n, 55n, 63, 428
119-22, 127, 130, 133-263, 264-276, Henderson, Arnold Clayton, 580
278, 280-94, 296, 298-99, 301, 303, Henryson, Robert, 118, 205, 276, 281n,
305, 307-11, 313-18, 321, 324, 330-31, 514
339-40, 347-51, 354, 358-59, 360, 362, Orpheus, 575, 576-80
366n, 368, 372, 380, 392-93, 396-98, Testament, 1, 265, 306, 508, 515, 569,
400n, 406, 411-12n, 413, 415, 425, 575, 581-91
430n, 436, 446-47, 449, 454n, 456-57, Hexter, Ralph, 158n
461, 462n, 466, 468-69n, 470, 474-75, Hill, John, 418n, 428n, 433n
477, 480-81, 492-93, 496, 500-02, 512, Hobsbawm, E. J., 3, 108-09n
515-50, 554-59, 564-73, 581, 582n, Hodges, Laura F., 65n, 367n, 379n, 409,
584, 592 410n, 453, 491n
Grabes, Herbert, 69-70n, 111n Hollander, Robert, 350n, 395n, 489-90n
Graus, František, 117n, 122n, 280n Holstein, James A., 35, 41n, 43-44, 53n,
Gray, Douglas, 577n 55-56
Green, D. H., 140-41 Horkheimer, Max, 50n
Green, Richard Firth, 297n, 442n, 562n Hübner, Kurt, 105n
Greenblatt, Stephen, 1-2, 24, 33 Huizinga, J., 2, 25
Greenfeld, Liah, 3, 106n, 109n, 111n, 115- Hume, Kathryn, 307
16n, 118n Hussey, Stanley, 114n
Gros Louis, Kenneth R. R., 576-78nn
Guenée, Bernard, 127n, 312n Ingham, Patricia Clare, 119n
Guillaume de Lorris, 536 Ingledew, Francis, 121-22n, 124n
Gurevich, Aaron, 2, 25n, 30, 70n, 73n, 77, Iser, Wolfgang, 336n
152n Isidore of Seville, 67, 233-34, 250-51,
253n, 391n
Habermas, Jürgen, 50n, 118n
640 Index

Jaeger, Stephen C., 27n, 141-42 Lambert, Mark, 429n, 453n, 463n, 473n
Jager, Eric, 42n, 71-73, 216, 252n, 343 Lanham, Richard A., 46n, 59-61, 88-89n,
Jakobson, Roman, 8, 21, 51-52, 57n, 83n, 92n, 96n, 225, 230, 357, 367, 372, 394,
84, 91, 95-97, 98n, 134 402n, 404n, 413n, 426, 428n, 442, 474
James, Heather, 340n Laud Troy Book, 1, 6, 9-10, 12, 14, 22,
Jamme, Christoph, 49-50n, 112n 261, 263, 264-318, 321, 353, 371, 390,
Jauss, Hans Robert, 5-6, 40n, 74, 98n, 101, 395, 413, 430n, 475, 509, 512, 516,
102n, 129, 508 521n, 522-23, 524n, 527, 569, 570-71,
Jean de Meun, 419n, 536 574
John of Garland, 65, 161 Lawton, David, 369-70n, 480n, 511n,
Johnson, Eric J., 453n 515n, 563n
Johnson, David F., 126n Le Goff, Jacques, 30, 154n, 182, 184n,
Johnson, Lesley, 587-88n 252n
Johnson, Mark, 90, 92n, 93, 96n Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr., 2, 367n
Johnston, Andrew James, 370n Lejeune, Philippe, 48n
Jordan, Robert M., 330n, 371, 372n, 479n, Lenk, Uta, 91n
486n, 508n Lerer, Seth, 33, 116n, 144n, 370n, 561n
Jordan, William Chester, 241n, 243-44n Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 4, 20, 50-53, 57,
Joseph Iscanus, 187n, 288, 349, 366n, 322, 429, 476, 569
396n, 478, 501n Lewis, C. S., 24n, 89n, 98n, 371, 380,
Joseph of Exeter, see Joseph Iscanus 453n
Juvenal, 477, 495-96 Lienert, Elisabeth, 122n, 143n, 231n
Lipking, Lawrence, 80n, 165n, 176n, 204n,
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 242n 422
Kartschoke, Dieter, 74n, 80, 82n Little, Katherine C., 32n
Kaske, R. E., 411, 412n, 460n Lowes, John Livingston, 353n, 382n,
Kedourie, Elie, 109n 454n, 479n, 481n
Kellogg, Alfred L., 382n Loyn, H. R., 114n
Kelly, Douglas, 140n, 142n, 146n, 192n, Lucan, 106-07, 378, 382n, 385n, 390, 455
204n, 207n Lüdeke, H., 349n, 476n
Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 352n, 508n, 551-52n Lumiansky, R. M., 195, 196n, 198, 199n,
Kempe, Dorothy, 268-69, 270n, 279, 290n, 203, 290, 369n
306, 313n, 318n Lydgate, John, 107, 118, 205, 262, 276,
Kendrick, T. D., 124n 281, 376, 514
Kennedy, Thomas C., 333n Fall of Princes, 553
Khinoy, Stephan, 580n Siege of Thebes, 555, 563, 574
Kimmelman, Burt, 79 Troy Book, 1, 6-7, 13, 14, 22, 146-47n,
Kindrick, Robert L., 576-77n, 578 160n, 176, 261, 263, 265-66, 268n, 288,
Kittredge, George Lyman, 349n, 369, 378, 306, 317n, 318, 430n, 515-68, 569, 572-
392n, 479 73, 574, 575-76, 581-84, 586
Knapp, Peggy A., 368n, 377 Lynch, Andrew, 372n
Knight, Stephen, 373n, 401n, 431n Lyotard, Jean-François, 43n, 342
Koch, J., 347n, 496n
Kölmel, Wilhelm, 73n McAdams, Dan P., 41n
Kohn, Hans, 108n McAlpine, Monica E., 352n, 479n, 484n,
Korte, Barbara, 118n 488n, 491n
Krämer, Ulrike, 142n McCall, John P., 368n, 378-79n, 390n,
Kratzmann, Gregory, 578n, 580n 392n, 493, 494n
McDiarmid, Matthew P., 576n, 578-79n
Laird, Andrew, 88 MacDougall, Hugh A., 122-23n, 592n
Lakoff, George, 90-91n, 92n, 93, 96n, 167 Macfarlane, Alan, 25n
 Index 641
Machan, Tim William, 114n, 264n, 582n Natali, Giulia, 362n, 364n
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 29n, 53n, 81 Nennius, 122, 250, 388-89n
Mack Smith, Denis, 240-44nn, 247, 253n, Neuse, Richard, 63n, 347n
255n Nicoll, Allardyce, 67n
McKendrick, Scot, 121n, 136n, 589n Nolan, Barbara, 141n, 143n, 161, 199-
McKinnell, John, 370n, 423n 01nn, 204-05n, 229, 230n, 346n, 350n,
McLuhan, Marshall, 84 361-64nn, 391n, 395n, 424n, 451n, 481-
MacQueen, John, 577n, 582n 82n, 544n
Macrobius, 11, 323, 382-85, 390 Nolan, Maura, 358n, 548n, 550n, 563n
Madsen, Deborah L., 84n, 98n, 100n Norton-Smith, John, 332n, 352n
Mann, Jill, 438n, 456n, 513, 586n
Mapstone, Sally, 192, 197n, 199n, 207n, O’Callaghan, Tamara F., 141-42n, 194n,
450-51n, 583n, 585n 224n
Maresca, Thomas E., 351n, 354n, 371n, Ogilvy, J. D. A., 67
390n, 392n, 491n Olney, James, 43n, 91-92
Marlin, John, 575n, 577n, 578, 579-80n Orr, Patricia R., 174n, 395n
Matter, Hans, 120n Osberg, Richard H., 481n, 511n
Mayo, Robert D., 378 Otto von Freising, 27, 172n, 239, 250-51,
Meech, Sanford Brown, 353n, 430n, 511n 259
Meek, Mary Elizabeth, 133n, 140n, 144- Ovid, 7, 11, 14, 60-61, 106-07, 147, 233,
46nn, 163, 181, 188n, 193-95n, 198- 263, 327, 349, 379n, 518, 532
99n, 207, 208n, 213n, 215, 216n, 218n, Amores, 335n, 352n, 355, 357, 359,
227-28n, 232n, 234, 238-40, 247, 248n, 396, 482, 485, 543n
249, 250n, 251-52, 253n, 257n, 259n, Ars amatoria, 12, 324, 335n, 350, 353-
262n, 288n 59, 362-63, 394, 395n, 396, 400, 402-
Mehl, Dieter, 268n, 280n, 379-80n, 484n, 03n, 410, 414, 418, 425, 427n, 429,
485, 580n 431, 436, 438-39, 443, 473n, 482, 490,
Melville, Gert, 127n, 223n 510n, 533, 534, 538, 544n, 588
Merkle, Stefan, 122n Epistulae ex Ponto, 10, 13, 325, 356,
Meyer, John W., 35n 451, 470, 472-74, 477, 505n, 513, 572
Meyer-Lee, Robert J., 549n, 554n, 561n, Heroides, 12, 13, 121, 163-64, 174,
567n 193-94, 197n, 199n, 221, 324-25, 332-
Midgley, Mary, 49n, 90n 333, 350, 353, 356, 392, 394, 414,
Mieszkowski, Gretchen, 196, 200n, 204n, 420n, 422, 423n, 427, 432n, 442, 450n,
207n, 290, 293n, 361n, 399n, 450n, 451-52, 456, 459, 463, 465, 471, 478,
466n, 471n, 541n, 543-45nn 484-85, 492, 498, 499, 504, 505, 548,
Miller, J. Hillis, 88, 89n 585n, 588n
Mills, Carol, 576n Metamorphoses, 13, 102, 121, 157, 162,
Minnis, A. J., 147n, 157-58n, 202n, 347n, 163, 175n, 181n, 221, 223n, 249, 329,
352n, 358n, 366n, 379, 412n, 423n, 338n, 340, 350, 354, 357n, 359n, 360n,
426n, 428n, 454n, 461n, 473n, 479n, 396n, 409, 421n, 432n, 433n, 434n,
502 435, 450n, 452, 456-57, 463, 465, 477-
Misch, Georg, 73-74 78, 492, 498-99, 553, 554n, 561n, 575n
Moll, Richard J., 108n, 589n Remedia amoris, 12, 324-25, 335n, 350,
Morris, Colin, 2, 27-28 355-56, 394, 400, 414n, 418-19, 421,
Mortimer, Nigel, 515n, 542n 427n, 429, 433n, 436, 443-45, 470, 482,
Mühlhäusler, Peter, 93n, 98n 510n, 588
Muscatine, Charles, 347n, 368n, 392n, Tristia, 10, 12, 13, 324-27, 353, 356,
429n, 435-36n, 450-51n, 459, 475n, 357-58n, 394, 414, 418, 420-21, 425,
507n, 513n 427, 451-52, 462, 467, 470, 472-74,
642 Index

477, 478, 483, 484-85, 487, 491, 498- Ruffolo, Lara, 333, 337n, 343n
99, 505, 513, 531, 572 Runciman, Steven, 244n
Russell, Stephen J., 340n
Parsons, A. E., 119n Rutherford, Charles S., 428n, 434n
Patterson, Annabel, 75, 76n
Patterson, Lee, 2, 23, 24n, 27n, 76n, 123, Salter, Elizabeth, 337n, 346, 376n
124n, 144n, 145, 147-48, 150, 204n, Sanok, Catherine, 409n, 462n
224n, 238-39, 264n, 270, 271n, 342, Sarnowsky, Jürgen, 313n
344n, 347n, 367n, 373n, 377n, 390-91n, Saunders, Corinne, 392n, 401n, 471n
393n, 400n, 482n, 493n, 510, 514n, Scanlon, Larry, 561-62
562n, 594n Scherer, Margaret R., 121n, 122n, 144n
Paxson, James J., 370n, 393n Schirmer, Walter F., 542n, 552n, 562,
Payne, Anne F., 394n 563n
Pearsall, Derek, 2, 114n, 271n, 328, 344n, Schleburg, Florian, 425n, 446n, 474n
369-70n, 375-76n, 378, 456n, 541-42n, Schmitt, Arbogast, 24-25n, 47
544n, 546n, 561-62n, 565n Schulze, Hagen, 150n, 242n
Peck, Russell A., 32n, 118n Schweikhart, Gunter, 75n
Petkov, Kiril, 309 Schwend, Joachim, 114n, 589n
Poirion, Daniel, 52n, 101, 273n Seidensticker, Bernd, 24n
Poppe, Erich, 144n, 352n Seznec, Jean, 87n, 234n
Praz, Mario, 331n, 349n, 444n Shannon, Edgar Finley, 338n, 347n, 353n,
Pugh, Tison, 392n, 404n, 427n 450n, 454n
Shakespeare, William, 23-24, 389, 492n,
Quinn, Naomi, 93 514-15, 593-94
Quintilian, 85, 87n Sharrock, Alison, 223n, 355n, 357-58n,
588n
Rand, Edward Kennard, 332n Shoaf, R. A., 347n, 415n, 426n, 435n,
Reale, Nancy M., 347n, 482n 470n, 479n, 482-83, 483n, 507-09nn
Reinhold, Meyer, 180n, 255n Shutters, Lynn, 532n, 544-46nn, 549n,
Reiss, Timothy J., 2, 15 557n, 562n
Renan, Ernest, 105n Silk, Michael, 91n
Renoir, Alain, 535n, 542n, 544n, 548n, Simpson, James, 14, 145, 161n, 266, 268n,
563n, 568n 307, 308n, 310, 331n, 338n, 340n,
Reynolds, Susan, 28-29n, 109n, 113n, 119- 345n, 357-58n, 370n, 432n, 470n, 522n,
20n, 496n 540n, 549n, 559n, 561, 562-63n, 564,
Rheinfelder, Hans, 61n, 64 590-91n
Ricoeur, Paul, 41n, 89, 90-91n Simson, Otto von, 83-84
Riddy, Felicity, 119n, 126, 583n, 585-86n Sinding, Michael, 94-95
Robert of Gloucester, 264, 367, 388n Sklar, Elizabeth S., 266n
Robertson, D. W., Jr., 87, 352, 368n, 373n, Smarr, Janet Levarie, 360-61n, 363n, 428n
378n, 393n, 395n, 401-02n, 408n, 428n, Smith, Anthony D., 6, 108, 109, 110n,
479n, 494n 112-13n, 118, 129, 306, 318, 376n,
Robinson, Ian, 412n, 510 515n, 568
Rollins, Hyder E., 290n, 575n Smyth, Alfred P., 113n
Root, Robert Kilburn, 266, 382n, 412n, Sorabji, Richard, 41n, 47n, 62n
479n, 501n Spearing, A. C., 2, 24n, 334n, 344n, 366,
Rose, Martial, 66n, 552n 371n, 379n, 392n, 398n, 408n, 454n,
Rosen, Bernard Carl, 474 479n, 480, 484n, 486n, 488, 506n,
Rosenmeyer, P. A., 356n, 420n 555n, 561n, 583n, 585n
Royan, Nicola, 589n Speed, Diane, 126n, 273n, 280n, 306-07,
Rudisill, George, Jr., 493, 494n 317n
 Index 643
Spengemann, William C., 48 Tydeman, William, 66n
Spitzer, Leo, 77, 230, 549
Spitzley, Thomas, 56 Uhlig, Claus, 3, 111-12n, 255n, 592n
Sponsler, Claire, 551n Ullmann, Walter, 2, 25n, 26-27, 30
Sprinker, Michael, 43
St. John, Michael, 329-30n Vance, Eugene, 71n, 74n, 351n, 374n,
Staley, Lynn, 424n, 431n, 500n, 530n 378n, 393n
Stanford, W. B., 142, 225, 561n, 591n Virgil, 7, 10, 14, 145-46n, 177, 327, 344,
Statius, 339, 349, 30, 351, 385-86n, 409n, 345n, 348, 349, 350, 378, 478, 506,
412n, 419-21, 421n, 454, 478, 484, 488, 518, 532, 549, 550, 553, 554, 555, 557,
505, 506 559, 573
Steadman, John M., 336n, 508n Aeneid, 107, 121, 160-61, 207, 218,
Steinberg, Diane Vanner, 354n, 390n, 468, 220n, 221, 233, 255, 257, 259, 263,
475n 330, 331n, 332, 334, 335-36n, 339,
Stephenson, William, 582n 340n, 351, 352, 385-86n, 401, 404n,
Stevens, Martin, 355n, 427n, 443n, 481n, 408n, 419, 421n, 426, 465, 472, 484-
487n 85n, 491, 492, 497, 505, 553, 560, 567,
Stierstorfer, Klaus, 426n 588n, 590-92
Stillinger, Thomas C., 344n, 361-62n, 365, Eclogues, 553
380n, 390n, 401n, 420-21n, 494n Georgics, 356-57, 358n, 487n, 553
Stock, Brian, 29, 126n
Stock, Lorraine Kochanske, 450n Wace, 126, 389n
Storm, Melvin, 575n, 581n, 584n Wack, Mary, 428n, 432-33n
Straker, Scott-Morgan, 160n, 563 Wald, Berthold, 65n
Straub, Jürgen, 105n Wallace, David, 344n, 346-47n, 366n,
Strauss, Dietrich, 577n 377n, 400n, 506n
Strayer, Joseph R., 115n Warren, Victoria, 404n
Stringer, Keith, 29n, 556n, 594 Waswo, Richard, 106n, 119n, 122n, 124n,
Strohm, Paul, 115n, 140n, 268n, 270, 272, 479n, 481-82, 511n, 575n
274, 345n, 399n, 556n, 558n, 562-63n Watson, Nicholas, 530n, 557n, 561-63nn,
Strub, Christian, 73n 581n, 583n
Stürner, Wolfgang, 240-41n, 246n, 248n, Weber, Max, 50
254n Weihe, Richard, 47n, 61n, 63-65nn, 69n,
Sundwall, McKay, 545n 273n
Weiss, Judith, 123, 150n, 184, 236n, 389n
Tatlock, J. S. P., 475n, 494n, 505n Weiss, Roberto, 242n
Taylor, Charles, 32n, 36n, 53n, 54-57, 73, Wetherbee, Winthrop, 334n, 347n, 352n,
111, 128, 136, 273 359n, 434n, 479n, 481n, 498-99n, 508n
Taylor, Karla, 331n, 336n, 339n, 347n, Wheatley, Edward, 580n
391, 411n, 481n, 484n Wheeler, Jim, 494n
Terrell, Katherine H., 343n White, Daniel R., 44-45, 46n, 55n, 63n,
Thompson, Diane P., 121-22n, 213n, 231n 428
Tomasch, Sylvia, 387 Wickham, Glynne, 67n, 68, 552n
Torti, Anna, 288n, 378n, 390n, 425n, Willemsen, Carl A., 240n, 248n
481n, 543-44n, 553n, 562n, 584n, 589 Williams, Gareth D., 223n, 356n, 420-21n,
Troeltsch, Ernst, 2, 25, 32 470n, 473n
Turner, Marion, 372, 442n, 474n Wilson, Grace G., 577-78n, 58n, 587n
Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 3, 104, 113-14n Wilson, Richard, 593
264-65n, 376, 377n, 381, 479n, 506n Windeatt, Barry, 198n, 322n, 346n, 349,
Twycross, Meg, 5, 66, 67n, 68, 69-70n, 82, 350-51n, 353n, 362n, 369n, 370, 371n,
552 382n, 392n, 396-99nn, 401n, 403, 404-
644 Index

06n, 406-07n, 409n, 411, 412-14nn,

417, 420n, 423-24n, 430-31, 435n, 437,
439n, 441n, 442, 458n, 461n, 464n,
476n, 484n, 487n, 499, 501n, 505n
Wittig, Kurt, 578n
Wolff, Max J., 121n
Wood, Chauncey, 347n, 381-82n, 426n
Wright, Dorena Allen, 578
Wülfing, J. Ernst, 268-69, 311, 318n
Young, Arthur M., 121-22nn, 125n, 136n,
144n
Young, Karl, 348, 501n
Žižek, Slavoj, 36n, 45
Zumthor, Paul, 39n, 74n, 87n, 260, 269n