The Joy of Reading

chapter four

The Middle Age

When did the Middle Age begin? When did it end? These are interesting questions and, as Sir Thomas Browne, that great old seventeenth-century antiquarian said, “not beyond conjecture.”

A little numerology may help us. For example, Plato’s Academy was founded in the year 387 BCE. It was closed by the Emperor Justinian in 529. Hence it endured for 916 years, longer perhaps than any other school, college, or university in the history of the world. The year 529 was notable for another event: the promulgation of the “Rule” of Saint Benedict, which inaugurated the epoch of the monasteries, which may be said to have ended around 1450, give or take a generation. From 529 to 1450 is 921 years.

The convenient date of 1450 corresponds to the passage of the Renaissance, which began a hundred years before in Italy, to France and thence to England, Spain, and finally Germany, where its arrival was delayed by the devastation of the Thirty Years War.

When did it begin in Italy? Dante died in 1327; in many respects he was the last great truly medieval man. Bits and pieces of medievalism endured for a century or two beyond his death, but they were only fragments that the spirit of the Renaissance succeeded in wiping out as time passed. By 1550 they were almost all gone.

Petrarch and Boccaccio were the first to undertake this great change, which they believed had to happen. Neither was interested in the great cultural tradition they were seeking to displace. Oh, they admired Dante of course, and they remembered fondly some of the works of the troubadours, which they considered charming but primitive. But they saw a new world (actually an old one, because the Renaissance really was the rebirth of an old world that had passed away a millennium before).

The nine hundred years, more or less, that can be called the Middle Age is sometimes divided into two parts: the first half, which was considered a Dark Age, and the second half, which seemed to be full of light, but a strange light that was different from anything that existed before or since. In what follows I have allowed four figures to stand in some way for that darkness, which of course was mainly brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire, which didn’t really fall but only moved from Europe to Asia, from Rome to Ravenna to Constantinople. These four figures were Ptolemy, who lived in the second century; Boethius, who lived at the end of the fifth; Saint Augustine, who lived mostly in the fourth; and finally the author, whoever he was, of The Song of Roland, who wrote that great poem some time before the year 1000.

The second half is on the whole more interesting because it includes Aquinas, Dante, and Chaucer. But there were other, lesser lights, several of them anonymous because only at the end of the medieval age did it become customary for poets, especially, to sign their works. This anonymity also applied to most of the architects who built the great cathedrals of France during the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Almost all of these astounding buildings were dedicated to the Virgin Mary; indeed, the Mother of God was the inspiration for most major works of art of all kinds in those waning years of the Middle Age. The two centuries were hers and hers almost alone. When you read the little story, “The Tumbler of Our Lady,” you will see why—or if you read the Divine Comedy or visit Chartres. It was a wonderful and beautiful time.

PTOLEMY

fl.2nd century

The Almagest

“Almagest” means “the greatest” in Arabic. When Ptolemy’s work on astronomy (written by Claudius Ptolemaeus in the second century) came to be used by the Arabs of the early Middle Ages as a textbook of the subject they honored it with that name, and the Almagest it is to this day.

Its greatness can be attributed to the fact that it was the most complete and satisfying of all the ancient astronomical texts. Complete because it dealt with everything that such a book should deal with: the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and all the fixed stars. It described their motions and showed how to predict astronomical events like eclipses of the Sun and Moon.

It was satisfying because it explained every astronomical phenomenon according to a unified theory. “Phenomenon” comes from the Greek word for “appearance.” All that any scientist has to go on are phenomena, or appearances. His theory of why the appearances are the way they are must adequately “save” the appearances, as the Greeks said. Ptolemy’s theory saved all the astronomical appearances that were evident to the men of his day, and of a good many days after him—his theory prevailed for more than a thousand years.

Ptolemy’s theory was simple and, therefore, beautiful. In the sublunary world—the world beneath the Moon, the one in which we, who inhabit the Earth around which the Moon revolves, find our home—motions are complex and difficult to measure and understand. Above the Moon, Ptolemy believed, all motion is regular, uniform, and circular, as Aristotle had said. It was a fine idea.

The hypothesis of regular circular motion, whereby all celestial bodies revolve around one central point, which is the center of the Earth, does not actually save the appearances. The Moon does not seem to simply orbit the Earth, nor do the planets. But the hypothesis does not have to be abandoned. It will still save the appearances if we make some small adjustments. These involve allowing the Moon and the planets to revolve around points that in turn revolve around the Earth. All celestial motion is still uniform and circular, and that is the main thing. All is right with the world.

Why these adjustments have to be made, and indeed why the Earth must be supposed to be the unmoving central point of the cosmos, and why (for example) the great sphere that surrounds us and on the inside of which the stars appear to be placed (and which was therefore referred to as the Sphere of the Fixed Stars) must also be supposed to revolve around it once every day, is all explained in Ptolemy’s book. It is not only explained, it is also proved mathematically. The whole system is still satisfying in its way.

The Greeks invented science; that is, they were the first people to believe what the majority of humankind now believes, that the universe is intelligible and that we can understand how it works. When men like Pythagoras and Archimedes and Ptolemy first said this was so, the vast majority of mankind still thought the world was essentially unintelligible, at least to them, and therefore unpredictable. We live more comfortably today because we have come to recognize that those old Greeks were right. And among them Ptolemy was far from being the least right, even though in certain respects he was absolutely wrong. The Moon revolves around the Earth, all right, but the Sun does not, and neither do the fixed stars, which are not fixed after all but instead are speeding at enormous velocities away from us. The apparent motions of all these objects are better explained, because more simply explained, by supposing that the Earth rotates, not the cosmos around it. But when I say that, it is obvious that I am doing the same thing Ptolemy did—saving the appearances. That is still and forever will be the major task of science.

All of this will become clearer if you read, or read in, Ptolemy’s Almagest. Something else will become clear as well, and that is the enormous complexity and difficulty of the astronomical work done by Ptolemy—and by his predecessors, to whose observations and theories he constantly refers. He obviously considered himself but the latest in a long series of patient laborers in the vineyard of astronomy. Perhaps he was, after all, the greatest such laborer so far, but there would be even greater ones after him, he knew. That too is a noble idea, and at the very heart of science.

I had a philosopher friend who used to speak of what he called “The Great Academy.” There were only seven members of this august group: three poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare; three philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas; and one scientist, Ptolemy. Ptolemy belonged, my friend said, because, more than any other scientist who ever lived, he had a clear conception of the fundamental task of science, which is to explain everything and to include everything in one great system. With no exceptions.

Exceptions in science do not prove the rule, they spoil the theory. If Galileo had never built a telescope, we might still believe in Ptolemy’s system of the world. And we might be better off; but then again, maybe not.

BOETHIUS

480?–524

The Consolation of Philosophy

This is a book that only a hard heart can read without shedding a tear.

Boethius was born toward the end of the fifth century, when the Roman Empire in the West was falling apart. The emperors were brutal savages, and the institutions that survived were mere vestiges of the system of law and government that had made Rome great. Ignorance was everywhere, in high places and in low, and it was not hard for anyone with half an eye to see that a long dark age was coming, perhaps to endure forevermore.

Boethius had more than half an eye. A member of an old, distinguished Roman family, he received an excellent classical education and set himself, while still a young man, to translate and adapt the Greek works of philosophy into Latin so they might survive in some form, even if civilization did not. He translated Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s logical treatises, and then began to translate the Organon—the collective name of these treatises—itself. He may have completed the work but only parts of it are extant. Nevertheless, they were the only versions that could be read by monks and scholars in the West for more than eight hundred years.

Boethius’s father had served as consul and now Boethius came to the notice of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, who had usurped the imperial rule. Boethius became consul in his turn and a few years later was named by Theodoric magister officiorum, or head of all government and court services. As such Boethius was one of the most important men in the Roman world.

If you serve a despot, however, you are important only so long as you continue to please. Boethius ceased to please Theodoric some time around CE 522. He was accused of treason on grounds that are unintelligible to us now, and of practicing magic or sorcery, a charge he strenuously denied. He was tried, convicted, and imprisoned, probably in Pavia, to await his execution.

The wait was long, perhaps as much as two years. Boethius was continuously tortured to remind him of how far he had fallen from the grace of his lord. But he had extraordinary strength of heart and will, and he wrote a book, The Consolation of Philosophy. Whether the manuscript was spirited out of his cell before or after his execution we do not know; at any rate it survived and became the most widely read book during the early Middle Ages, after the Holy Scriptures as translated into Latin by Saint Jerome.

In the book Boethius makes little mention of the torments he suffered: it is enough to say that he has once been a great man and is now in prison, awaiting death. As he lies on his narrow bed in his dark cell a beautiful lady appears to him, dressed all in white, with radiance in her hair: this lady is Philosophy, and she speaks to him and soothes his pain. She reminds him that the true Good is not any earthly thing but is instead the being of all good things, existing in that higher and better world to which he perforce will go. Fortune and misfortune, she tells him, are subordinate to a greater Providence, a summum bonum (greatest good) that “strongly and sweetly” rules the universe. There is no real evil, and virtue is always finally rewarded. Boethius, the suffering prisoner, thus consoled by the hope of reparation and reward after his death, is able to die in peace.

Boethius’s family had been Christian for a century before his birth and he was almost certainly a Christian himself. Nevertheless, the Consolation contains little or no hint of Christianity. Instead the work, with its Platonic insistence on the real existence of such ideal forms as Being, Truth, and Good, is a kind of pagan version of a Christian tract. It possesses a clear, cool eloquence that is rare in such works, and all the rarer considering the hideous circumstances under which it was written.

AUGUSTINE

354–430

Confessions

Augustine’s Confessions is not only the first real autobiography in the history of literature, it is also one of the best. Maybe it is the best. It is astonishing how often the first example or examples of a genre turn out to be the best examples. Don Quixote may be the first novel, and few novels compare to it. The Iliad and The Odyssey are the first epics, and no subsequent works in that genre have surpassed them. No tragedy has surpassed Aeschylus’s Oresteia; if the tragedies of Shakespeare are equal to the Oresteia they are so different as almost to constitute a new genre—in which they, in turn, are unsurpassed.

The question is not, however, whether the first examples of a genre are relatively so good, but why they are. Is innovation sufficient by itself to guarantee excellence? Certainly not. Are the greatest artists naturally drawn to the creation of new forms? Perhaps, although some great artists have been followers rather than leaders, inspired imitators rather than breakers of new ground. Or is it only that, as with a field that has lain fallow for a long time or never been planted to crops, the first crop is often the richest, so with a new field of artistic endeavor the first crop is also the richest and best.

Augustine seems to have known almost everything there was to know about writing an autobiography despite the fact that he had no prior autobiographies to read and compare with his own. He started his Confessions, as is perhaps natural, with his childhood and youth, with his life within the bosom of his family and then as a student in Rome and Milan (he was born in CE 354 at Hippo, in North Africa, near present-day Tunis). He does not conceal the fact that he was a brilliant student of rhetoric, of history, of languages, and of philosophy; after all, we know from many other sources that there never was such a student as this young African, probably never such a brilliant young man in the whole history of Rome.

But Augustine does not conceal his failures, his inability to understand very important things about human life, and, most important, his inability for many years to accept the apparent contradictions of Christianity. We love him for his admissions of what he considered to be sins (but only in later life), most notably the time when as an adolescent he stole some pears, not because he wanted the pears, not even because it was exciting to break the law, but mainly because he was “ashamed to be ashamed”—that is, it was easier to go along with the other boys than to say to them that he was ashamed of what they were all doing. Many of us may remember similar occurrences from our own childhoods! And then, just as notably, his admission that for years he was unable to overcome his desire for women and had even kept a mistress for many years while praying most fervently for the strength to control these desires, but without his heart really being in it. “Give me chastity!” was his prayer—“but not yet.” Few readers have failed to recognize the humanity in those six words.

The heroine of Augustine’s Confessions is not that mistress, whom in fact he never names—she is one of the lost women of history—but instead his mother, Saint Monica, who was a Christian (her husband was not) and who prayed and worked to bring about the conversion of her son. Augustine was studying under the renowned theologian Saint Ambrose, in Milan. Monica came to Ambrose and pleaded for his help. “The son of these tears,” he comforted her, “will not perish.” But there were still many difficult philosophical and theological obstacles for Augustine to overcome. Finally he had resolved all doubts, but he still felt that something essential was missing. He could accept Christianity with his mind, he said, but not yet believe with his whole heart.

It is one of the famous scenes in the history of the Christian religion. Augustine is sitting in a garden, struggling to believe, unable fully to understand the Holy Scriptures which he holds in his lap. He dozes off in the sun. Suddenly he hears a voice saying, “Take up and read.” He asks himself whether that is a cry ordinarily heard in children’s games—there are children all around him, playing in the garden. No, he thinks, there is no such cry in a children’s game. He hears it again: “Tollete lege,” “Take up (the book) and read.” He opens the book and reads a passage, and at that instant his heart is filled.

Like all the greatest books, this one possesses great images. The pears, the prayer for chastity (but not yet), the conversion in the sunny garden. The greatest of all is the Window at Ostia. Monica is dying and her son, who has long since accepted Christianity, journeys to Ostia, the seaport of the city of Rome, to be with her in her last days. She lies in a room with a window on the sea. Augustine often stands at the window, listening to the sounds of the sea as it breaks against the shore. One day shortly before her death Monica is able to join him at the window, and they stand there together, he supporting her, she leaning on his arm, and talk of the life they have shared and of the life to come. Suddenly they grow silent, and the world grows silent, the sea becomes silent, there is no sound whatever, and then they hear or seem to hear the Universe itself, turning on its great center, turning by the will of God, and they hear, very faintly in the distance, the angels singing in praise of Him and of all His works. Monica dies soon after, happy in her dying because of her son and because of her vision of that life beyond death—“when we shall all be changed.”

The last part of the Confessions of Augustine is not autobiographical in the strict sense; rather, this part of the book consists of some profound philosophical discussions of the nature of time. Many readers stop at the end of Book Ten of the Confessions, but I urge you to go on, to read to the end, even though the last three books are not easy, requiring considerable care and attention to follow and understand. The reason is that the discussion of time in this book written more than fifteen hundred years ago is one of the most probing and interesting in all of literature. Note: There are many translations of the Confessions, but in my opinion the only really readable one is by Francis X. Sheed. Most other translations are hard to follow because of Augustine’s habit of interspersing biblical quotations in his text. Sheeer alone makes it clear.

Augustine wrote many other books besides Confessions. Toward the end of his life he prepared a list of his writings: as well as he could remember, there were more than two hundred and fifty different titles and that did not include several hundred letters, some of them very long, and perhaps thousands of sermons delivered before and especially after he became Bishop of Hippo. Two among this enormous number of works deserve mention here.

One was On Christian Doctrine, a relatively short (only a hundred pages or so) treatise seemingly for young priests or other neophytes. If you are interested in knowing what a good Catholic Christian was supposed to believe in the fourth century, try to find a copy of this (it is reprinted in Great Books of the Western World). The work is interesting for two reasons. First, you will find that not much has changed in the last sixteen centuries. That is either shocking or reassuring, depending on your point of view. Second, the treatise contains a long section on the difference between signs and symbols. The distinction interests me, although it may not interest you.

The other work is a very great book of several hundred pages. Called The City of God, it draws a distinction between two “cities,” as Augustine called them, one of God, the other of man. The book was completed near the end of Augustine’s life, in the year 430. Twenty years before, in the year 410, Rome had been sacked by marauding barbarians, and the pagan Romans who survived that defeat blamed the Christians. Augustine began to write The City of God immediately, to counter that charge and to show that the real culprit was the so-called gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, whose worship had been the work of the Devil. As he lay dying in Hippo in November 430, word came that his own city was under siege by another barbarian tribe. The destruction of his home, and then of the city of Rome itself a few months later, has been taken as a convenient date by which to begin the Middle Age. It is true that his Catholic doctrines had enormous influence for the next thousand years and were held by many to be an alternative orthodoxy to the system of St. Thomas Aquinas.

ANONYMOUS

—

The Song of Roland

No one knows who gave the Song of Roland its final form. Undoubtedly many poets and troubadours made contributions to it: in a sense it was the product of an entire age, that of the ninth and tenth centuries in Western Europe. Nothing expresses the beliefs of that age better than this poem.

Composed over a period of perhaps a century and a half—from 850, say, to about 1000—the poem describes an event that had occurred long before, during the reign of Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor and king of the French, who died in CE 814. Charlemagne was a real man but he was also mythic: he attracted legends as a pot of honey attracts flies. This, the best of all his legends, is the story of the heroic champion who was known as his nephew Roland, or as he later came to be called by Italians, Orlando.

There are many stories about Roland, and one of them even calls in question whether he was actually the nephew of Charlemagne. At Sutri, near Rome, stands an ancient castle that now serves as the home of a farmer who lives with his family in the thousand-year-old barn. Friends who live in the castle itself say that in what is now the barnyard and was once the courtyard of the castle Roland met Charlemagne during Charlemagne’s visit to Latium in A.D. 790, when he convened with Pope Adrian I for political discussions that changed the course of European history.

During ceremonies after the meeting, Charlemagne enquired formally whether any of his followers would ask of him a boon. A certain lovely woman advanced to the throne: she was one of the handmaidens of the Queen. She had a son, she confessed, though she was not married, and because of her faithful service to the Queen she asked that the King recognize her son and take him into his band of closest followers. He was already, the woman claimed, a valiant fighter. “His name?” the King asked. “Roland,” the boy’s mother replied. The King accepted him, both legitimizing and honoring him in one act. The boy may have been his own son by this handmaiden of his Queen.

Roland grew up and became the King’s right hand, the first among the Twelve Peers of the realm, the leader of Charlemagne’s armies in a hundred battles. Brave and stubborn, fierce and unyielding, ready to defend with his life any slight upon his own honor or that of his King, Roland was the epitome of the medieval knight, the vassal faithful to his lord until death and demanding equal loyalty from those who followed him. A simple man in the extreme, he saw all things as black or white; there were no shades of gray, no difficult moral problems. He was right and the enemy wrong. God was his ally and against his enemies.

The Song of Roland tells of how Roland is betrayed by his stepfather Ganelon, whose name betokens treachery to this day; of how Ganelon arranges it so that Roland commands the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army as it moves through the deep passes of the Pyrenees, leaving Spain after seven long years of warfare against the Infidel; of how the treacherous Paynim, egged on by Ganelon, attacks Roland and the Twelve Peers along with twenty thousand men, in the defile of Roncesvaux; of how Roland and all his followers are slain and of how Charlemagne revenges Roland’s death and punishes Ganelon. The story is straightforward, simple, and predictable. Roland refuses out of pride to call for help when he and his men are attacked and when he finally blows his famous horn it is too late for Oliver, his friend, and all his followers, and for Roland himself, who dies on the field stretched out upon his sword Durendal.

The poem’s primal simplicity does not detract from it. Roland is not a modern man nor is his world the modern world. His world died centuries ago. Good riddance to it, we may say, it was a world in which the only honorable occupation was fighting, killing, or being killed, a world in which butchers were exalted to the highest places among men. But it was also a world in which honor was clear and clean and palpable, apparent to all. There were no doubts about what a man ought to do with his life, no second thoughts, and no regrets if one’s career was ended by an early death as long as the death was noble and one died on the battlefield facing the enemy.

Men and women shared these beliefs even if they were not knights. Duke William of Normandy had a troubadour, the best in the world as he thought, named Taillefer. Taillefer had grown old in the Duke’s service and when William invaded England in the famous year 1066 and met King Harold the Saxon at Hastings, Taillefer asked a boon. “Lord,” he asked, “let me lead the charge against the enemy.” “You cannot lead the charge,” the Duke replied. “You are not a knight and besides, you are not armed.” “As for being a knight, you can change that with the tip of your sword,” said Taillefer. “And as for being armed, your other knights are well armed and will win the day.”

Duke William told him to kneel and knighted Taillefer on the spot. And Taillefer led the charge, riding on his horse and singing at the top of his voice the great verses of The Song of Roland that tell of the death of Roland and the revenge of Charlemagne. Taillefer was struck down the moment the armies met but we know, because he was a medieval man to whom chivalry was real, that he had obtained his dearest wish.

If you can understand how Taillefer felt you will have no trouble understanding this splendid old poem out of another age.

ANONYMOUS

—

“The Tumbler of Our Lady”

I don’t believe anyone knows the name of the author of this story, but it is nevertheless one I love. It was one of a collection of stories gathered by Gautier de Coinci, a monk of St. Medard, near Soissons in France. Once a royal abbey of the Frankish kings and the goal of many pilgrimages, hardly a trace of it now remains. The manuscript which includes the stories, now in Soissons, is a lovely example of the thirteenth-century art of bookmaking. Each story has its appropriate illustration on a background of gold, blue, and red. The stories were translated from Latin into French and were often based on Eastern originals, some brought by Crusaders, others by traders and travelers. Whatever their original source they were all dedicated to Our Lady, advocata nostra as St. Bernard called her. And again, whatever their original sources, they were all turned into simple tales for simple, pious folk, whether monks or peasants. And of course they all told of wonderful miracles wrought by the Virgin, the Mother of God.

This one, “The Tumbler of Our Lady,” could hardly be simpler. It seems that a certain man, weary of the world and having relinquished his horses, his clothes, his money—all that he had—and desiring never to return to his old life, has entered the great Monastery of Clairvaux, intending to spend the rest of his days in devotions to the Mother of God. The Abbot, the famous St. Bernard, has not examined very carefully into his background or abilities, content, the story suggests, with the gifts the man has offered and moved by his evident love of the Virgin, a love shared by the abbot himself.

For a while all goes well enough, except that the man is totally unschooled and does not even know how to pray to the Virgin or to God. He was a tumbler in his former life, a famous minstrel, and had performed in the courts of nobles as well as the king, always to great applause. But in the abbey there is no call for his skills, no place to perform. As time goes on he becomes at first embarrassed and then ashamed of his ignorance, which is laughed at by the monks (behind their hands). The man, growing desperate, seeks a quiet place and finds one in the crypt where there is an image of the Virgin, before which he kneels in supplication. He hears the bell ring for Mass and his heart assails him. He cannot attend Mass because he does not know any of the responses, but there is one thing he does know how to do. He strips himself of all but a belted tunic, lays his clothes on the altar beneath the image, and, saying “Lady, to your keeping I commend my body and my soul,” he begins to turn somersaults, now high, now low, first forwards, then backwards. When he is exhausted he kneels and says: “Lady, the others serve, and I serve also. Do not despise your servant, for I serve you for your diversion. I do homage to you with my heart, and my body, and my feet, and my hands, for naught beside this do I understand.”

From this time forth, whenever he hears the bell for Mass he dances and jumps and leaps until he falls to the ground from sheer fatigue. This goes on for a long time until, one day, he is discovered by a young monk who blames him because he does not come to matins, and following, finds him dancing and capering, as he thinks, just for his own pleasure. The young monk goes to the Abbot and tells him what he has seen.

The Abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, swears him to silence and goes himself to the crypt. Lo, he sees the man leaping and jumping until he falls to the ground in a swoon. And then the Abbot observes descend from the vaulting so glorious a lady that never has he seen one so fair or so richly crowned. Her clothes are adorned with gold and precious stones. She is accompanied by angels who solace and sustain the tumbler. The sweet, noble lady takes a white cloth and with it gently fans her minstrel before the altar, but of this the man knows nothing nor does he perceive that he is in such fair company.

Not long afterward the Abbot sends for the man. He is fearful because he believes he must have wronged God and his Mother. The Abbot examines him and requires him to tell everything that he has done. The man does so, then falls weeping and kisses the Abbot’s feet. The Abbot, weeping himself, raises him up and tells him he should never fear and adds, “Fair, gentle brother, pray for me and I will pray for thee.” The man is so overcome with joy that he can no longer devote himself to Our Lady, and in a short while he dies.

I will not tell you how this lovely story ends because I hope you can find it in a book edited by Jessie Weston called “The Tumbler of Our Lady,” published in the year 1900. There are other miracles in the book because the time—the twelfth century of our era and the thirteenth also—was a time when such miracles were believed by everyone. I think it is a shame that this is no longer so. Note: For more about this, read the entry on Henry Adams’s Mont-Saint Michelle and Chartres.

At the same time it is important to remember that this kind of simple faith was not shared by all in the twelfth century. For example, the famous and again anonymous “Ballad of Aucassin and Nicolette” tells a very different kind of story. Aucassin loves Nicolette with all his heart, but his adoration is not rewarded, at least at first. He even rebels against the warnings of a great churchman who declares that his illicit love threatens both him and his lady. He responds:

In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only to have Nicolette. For into Paradise go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go those same old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower continually before the altars, and in the crypts; and such folk as wear old arnicas and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst, and of cold, and of little ease. These be they that go into Paradise, with them have I naught to make. But into Hell I would fain go; for into Hell fare the goodly clerks and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars, and stout men at arms, and all men noble. With these would I liefly go. And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers, or three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold, and the silver, and cloth of vair, and cloth of gris, and harpers, and makers, and the princes of this world. With these would I fain go, let me but have with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady.

In the end he doesn’t have to make this choice. He overcomes all obstacles, wins Nicolette, marries her, and all is well.

JOSEPH BÉDIER

1864–l938

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult

Joseph Bédier was born in Paris in 1864. He was a distinguished scholar who made contributions to our knowledge of medieval literature. His major scholarly work, the four-volume Les Légendes Épiques (1908-21), advanced a theory that is now widely accepted about the old French epic poems, the chansons de geste. These were composed by the troubadours, according to Bédier, on subjects and themes proposed by the monks who traveled on pilgrimages from various sites in France to the shrine of Saint James in Spain, Santiago de Compostela. The troubadours traveled with the monks on these long, slow journeys from the cold north of France to the warm spring of Galicia at Easter time, singing as they rode. One imagines the sun glinting on the armor of the knights who, for protection, rode along with these bands of pious travelers, the banners waving in the gentle breezes, the birds singing in the trees and the fields full of flowers….

The favorite of all the chansons de geste was the story of Tristan and Iseult. Many poets sang the tale and so it took a number of different forms, but the basic events in the story were these: Iseult of Ireland was to marry King Mark of Cornwall. Her mother prepared a potion of exceeding strength for her daughter and the bridegroom to drink, a potion that would ensure their everlasting love. King Mark sent his nephew, Tristan, to Ireland to accompany his bride to her new home. They took ship to cross the Irish Sea but during the voyage, by accident the story says, they drank the potion. They were thus bound together in love forevermore, a love that could only end with their deaths.

They tried to remain loyal to the king. They slept with a drawn sword, naked and shining, between them in the bed. King Mark somehow understood and forgave them. Iseult married the king. Tristan left England and crossed the sea to Brittany. There he met and married another woman, Iseult of the White Hands, “for her name and beauty,” but the marriage was a formality; the symbolic sword was still drawn in the bed. Nevertheless Tristan was betrayed by his enemies at the court of King Mark and, wounded by a poisoned arrow, was dying. It was agreed that Iseult of Ireland should be sent for since she possessed the arts of healing. She came, but the lovers were betrayed by Iseult of the White Hands and died in one another’s arms.

The original versions of the tale were harsh and unforgiving: adultery was both a crime and a cruel joke. During the twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas produced a softer, more romantic version. Gottfried von Strassburg wrote, around 1200, an even later version that is the jewel of German medieval poetry; it was on this version that Wagner based his opera Tristan und Isolde. Bédier preferred the version of Thomas and produced an adaptation of it in modern French in 1900; the English title is The Romance of Tristan and Iseult.

Bédier, besides being a good scholar, was also a good writer and his version is one of the most beautiful of prose poems. The journey across the windswept sea from Ireland to Cornwall, the drinking of the potion and its immediate, terrible effect, the drawn sword in the bed of love, the gift given to Iseult by Tristan when he must leave her, the treachery of Iseult of the White Hands—all of these episodes possess an almost unearthly loveliness and sadness that in my opinion are rare indeed. Above all the tale, as Bédier tells it, is unmarked by any hint of scandal, duplicity, or shame: the lovers try to be loyal to their rightful lord and their fall from grace is noble. The story is a tragedy of love in which the end result is death.

Bédier had deep sympathy for the star-crossed lovers; he understood them, too. In their hearts the love they felt for each other was the greatest gift the world could give, and if it was accompanied by unrelenting pain, this, as it was for Taillefer, was a price they were willing to pay.

THOMAS AQUINAS

1225–1274

Summa Theologica

Thomas Aquinas was born in 1224 or 1225 in the town of Aquino, south of Rome. His parents possessed a modest feudal domain, and they were ambitious for their son, whom they destined very early for a career in the Church. When still a boy, Thomas was placed in the monastery of Monte Cassino near his home in the hope that he would some day become its abbot.

In 1239 Thomas was required to move to the University of Naples, where he became interested in the teachings of the Dominicans, which order he joined. The Dominican fathers decided to send him to Paris, the center of theological research and speculation at the time. He set out in the spring of 1244 but was abducted on the road by his family, who did not want him to go to Paris and undertake a teaching, instead of a political, career. After a year of captivity he was allowed to leave. He went to Paris to the convent of Saint-Jacques for study under the great teacher Albertus Magnus. He was immediately plunged into a controversy that was rocking the Church.

Three fundamental positions were vying for dominance in the theological thought of the time. First, there was the spiritual Christian Platonism that had been injected into Catholic thought by St. Augustine in the fourth century and that was the traditional conservative view. Second, there was the position of the Arab scholar Averroes, who held that there were two truths, the one of reason and the other of faith. Finally, there was the new position of the Aristotelians, who maintained that there was only one truth and that there was no basic conflict between nature, if rightly interpreted, and religion.

Aristotelianism represented a radical new departure, and Thomas was attracted by the novel doctrine. He was soon involved in the controversy and became known as the leading spokesman of the Aristotelians. He engaged in public disputes with various traditionalists, defeated the Averroists, and lived to see Aristotelianism’s official triumph, although the fundamentalist spirituality of the Augustinians has never died out of Catholic Christianity.

Thomas wrote many works. He was often writing more than one book at a time, which he would dictate to different scribes, sending still other scribes or students to search out and check references and citations. He sometimes employed as many as twenty assistants at a time.

Without their help it seems unlikely that he could have composed the more than fifty volumes of theology that are known to have come from his hand. His greatest work is the Summa Theologica, on which he worked from about 1265 until his death in 1274. It fills some twenty-five volumes in the complete edition translated by the Dominican Fathers.

Despite its enormous size the Summa is, as Thomas makes clear at the beginning, no more than a primer of Catholic theology for the instruction of beginning students. The Summa can therefore be read, or read in, by anyone.

The Summa Theologica is organized in the form of “questions” concerning God and man and their relation, the Angels and their relations to both God and man, virtue and vice, politics and art, knowledge and ignorance, teaching and learning—indeed, almost all of the matters of importance to mankind. One fascinating question deals with the aureoles—the golden circles that surround the heads of saints in medieval paintings. Several questions deal with eschatology, the science of “last things”—the Day of Judgment, the means whereby the dead will rise from their graves, the mode of corporeality that they will enjoy, and the orders of punishments and rewards.

The book has great authority and to read it is very exciting. But only if you know how to do so.

The Summa as a whole is divided into several Parts, these Parts into Questions, and these into Articles. Examination of the opening of the first Part of the first Part, on God, reveals the interior organization of the work.

The first question of all is “Whether God exists.” The Articles are then presented in contradiction to the truth. That is, a wrong answer is stated as a subject and this is then disproved and shown to be false: the opposite is therefore true.

Article I is: “It seems that God does not exist.” Arguments are given to support this contention. The prosecution, as it were, then rests, and the defense takes over. The first rebuttal is always a quotation from Scripture. In this case, the text cited is:

“On the contrary, God says in His own person, I am that I am.” Other arguments, not from Scripture but from reason, follow,

Thomas stating all the major ones. Finally, in his own voice, he says: “I answer that … ” and responds to the false arguments that were listed earlier in support of the false premise of the Article.

Having established in this exquisitely cumbersome way the existence of God, the Summa then moves on to other theological questions. The form is always the same, and the truth always emerges in the same tortured way.

Tortured perhaps, but also dramatic. The form of the Disputation, the major conflicts of will and reason that marked the late Middle Age, is always at work in the Summa Theologica to produce a living, almost throbbing work of literature.

It is not a book to read from beginning to end. That would take years. But the Summa is always interesting, wherever you start to read. Begin with a subject that especially intrigues you. Practice reading the queer, inverted form of the Articles. Learn and enjoy.

Thomas Aquinas was summoned by Pope Gregory X to the second Council of Lyons in 1274, where he probably would have been chastised. But he died on the way, at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova. Several of his theses were thereafter condemned by the masters of Paris, the highest theological jurisdiction of the Church. But the modified realism of Thomas Aquinas was important and valuable, representing as it does the reasonable middle position between excessive spiritualism on the one hand and excessive rationalism on the other. Thomas was canonized a saint in 1323, officially named a doctor of the Church in 1567, and proclaimed as the leading protagonist of orthodoxy during the nineteenth century.

All that need not concern you too much. The important thing about Thomas Aquinas, and particularly about his Summa Theologica, is that the book is a pleasure to read despite the strangeness and unfamiliarity of its form.

DANTE ALIGHIERI

1265–1321

The Divine Comedy

Dante called his masterpiece a “comedy” because it told of the passage of the soul through Hell and Purgatory to Heaven and the vision of God—that is, it ended happily. If the journey had been in the opposite direction and ended badly he might have titled it The Divine Tragedy. Dante’s understanding of these terms was not profound; it depended upon an abbreviated Latin synopsis of the Poetics of Aristotle. Neither Dante nor anyone else in Italy during the thirteenth century could read ancient Greek; there were no original texts of Greek classical authors in the West until after Dante’s death. The word “Divine” in the title was added later, by critics and readers who thought the poem was so good Dante could not have written it without God’s help. They may well have been correct.

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, of a petit bourgeois family. He was ambitious to excel both in politics and in poetry. His first book, La Vita Nuova (The New Life; 1293), an allegorical amalgam of prose and verse, ensured his literary reputation. He was not so fortunate in politics. The year 1301 was his undoing. He was elected in that year to an important post, but while he was on a diplomatic mission outside the city enemies managed to have him condemned for various crimes. He was exiled from Florence and never set foot in his city again. He died in 1321, in Ravenna. Of course by this time he was famous and Florence, which had banished him, petitioned for the return of his body. Ravenna refused, as it does to this day. There are many memorials of Dante in his native city, but his remains are not there.

For the remaining twenty years of his life Dante wandered from city to city throughout Italy, surviving on the undependable generosity of a succession of wealthy men. He learned how salty is the taste, as he wrote, of another’s bread, and how steep are another’s stairs.

La Divina Commedia is in one hundred verse chapters, or cantos, which are assembled into three canzone, or parts. (The first canto is an introduction to the entire poem; each of the three parts then contains thirty-three cantos, for a total of one hundred. Dante is always careful about this sort of detail.) The first part, called Inferno (Hell), relates Dante’s meeting with the Roman poet Virgil, who is to guide him through the Underworld, and their subsequent journey together through Hell. According to Dante, Hell is shaped like an enormous cone of concentric circles, going from greater to less as you descend (as the souls of the sinners punished there grow smaller and meaner). These great circles of Hell correspond more or less to the Seven Deadly Sins. All of these sins are deadly; that is, they all entail remorseless damnation and punishment without relief throughout eternity, but they vary in seriousness and intensity, from Lust, the least serious, through Greed, Avarice, Spiritual Sloth, Anger, and Envy, to Pride, the worst of all.

As Dante and Virgil move down through the circles of Hell they meet real people, many of them historical personages, others personal enemies and even some friends of Dante. In the years at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Dante was writing his poem, most readers recognized these people encountered in Hell, and they appreciated the satirical revenges wrought by Dante upon enemies who had harmed him in his real life. Today, we have to read the notes that accompany any good edition of The Divine Comedy. These notes are often a bore but they have to be read. They are the price that has to be paid to read Dante.

Not only does Hell become smaller the farther Dante descends with Virgil at his side, but it also becomes colder. In the last circle the souls of traitors are frozen in ice, signifying the coldness of their hearts when they were still alive on earth. At the very bottom of Hell, which is also the dead center of the earth, stands the dread figure of Satan, the proudest of all sinners, frozen in the ice up to his waist and grinding in his teeth the arch traitor Judas, who betrayed his friend and master. Having endured all the levels of Hell, Dante is able to pass through its center and emerge on the other side, at the base of the Mountain of Purgatory.

Dante’s and Virgil’s journey through Hell is one of the most famous events in literature. It has been the source of innumerable drawings and paintings and the subject of endless commentaries and critical appreciations. It is true that Dante’s major poetic strengths are much in evidence in Inferno: his skill at characterization, his ability to describe a concrete scene in just a few lines or even a few words so that it suddenly is realized before our very eyes, the power, grace, and flexibility of his verse. It is also true that Inferno contains wonderful and memorable scenes: Paolo and Francesca, guilty lovers doomed forever to enjoy only one another and not God; the Gluttons, gnawed eternally by the teeth of their hunger; the Fallen Angels and the Furies, and the Heavenly Messenger who rescues Dante from them; the great heretic, Farinata degli Uberti, who “entertained great scorn of Hell”; Dante’s old teacher, Brunetto Latini, doomed to run forever in payment for his sexual tastes; the Simonist Popes, already in Hell though not yet dead; Ulysses and his moving account of his own death; the Giants, looming terrible in the half-darkness of deep Hell; Ugolino, with his chilling story of his death and that of his children, immured in the Tower of Pisa.

It is not surprising, then, that so many readers enjoy Inferno and think, when they have finished it, that they have read enough of The Divine Comedy. Alas, they have not! To stop reading there is to miss another side of Dante that is even more wonderful than the tough, graphic realism of Inferno. Some of the most beautiful scenes in poetry are purposely placed by Dante in Purgatorio to balance the horrors of Hell, and the flights of thought and imagination that mark the third part of The Divine Comedy—Paradiso—possess a grandeur and luminosity seen in no other poem.

Purgatorio and Paradiso are no more difficult to read than Inferno, although some readers seem to believe they are. (None of The Divine Comedy is easy to read.) Perhaps this is because evil has come to seem more real than goodness, or it may be that scenes of pain and suffering have a fascination not possessed by scenes of bliss. There is plenty of pain and torment in Purgatorio, too, the difference being that here the suffering is not endless. It is a cleansing not a punishing fire that burns these souls. They will eventually reach Paradise—in a shorter or, perhaps, a longer time, but what matter how long the wait considering the good that is to be found there?

I myself am no longer able to read Inferno. Even though I am the first to concede its incomparable power, emotionally I can hardly stand it. In its place Purgatorio has become my favorite part of The Divine Comedy. I have reached the age when my own death no longer seems impossible, as was the case when I was young. I wonder, these days, about what is likely to happen afterwards. I cannot hope for bliss, certainly not immediate bliss; but I do hope that something like Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory is there to climb. I would be content to spend the necessary time and effort in the climbing in order finally to attain what can be found at the summit.

Virgil, the pagan poet and the symbol, in Dante’s scheme, of enlightened reason without the gift of Grace, is able to guide Dante only to the border of the Earthly Paradise, which surmounts Purgatory. There, Virgil must depart. He can go no farther, for he was not a Christian. The moment when Dante turns to exclaim with pleasure at what he sees, as he has done many times before—and finds Virgil gone—is one of the most affecting in literature.

I turned me to the left with the trust with which the little child runs to his mother when he is frightened or when he is afflicted to say to Virgil: “Less than a drop of blood is left in me that trembleth not; I recognize the tokens of the ancient flame.” But Virgil had left us bereft of himself, Virgil dearest Father, Virgil for whom for my weal I gave me up; nor did all that our dearest mother lost, avail to keep my dew-washed cheeks from turning dark again with tears.

Dante is alone now, in a beautiful garden, but he is soon astounded by the appearance of a magnificent medieval procession complete with chariots drawn by heraldic beasts. Out of the last chariot of all steps a veiled woman. This is the lady Beatrice.

The story of Dante and Beatrice is well known but bears retelling. Beatrice Portinari was a girl in Florence when Dante was growing up. He met her first in the street when he was nine years old and she about five. The extraordinary thing is that he fell in love with her instantly and carried the love within him until his death. He married another woman and had seven children with her; Beatrice married another man and died, very young, in childbirth. Dante’s love for Beatrice was no secret. He proclaimed it in his early autobiographical work, La Vita Nuova, and told the world about it in The Divine Comedy, which was dedicated to the memory of Beatrice and in which he said of her “what was never yet said of any woman.” Dante thus made Beatrice world famous as his inspiration and his muse.

The date of Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is Easter weekend of the year 1300, although he was working on the poem until his death in 1321. On that assumed date of 1300 Beatrice was already dead and, Dante also assumes, in Heaven. Now, in the poem, she has journeyed down from Heaven to the Earthly Paradise to meet him on his journey upward. At first she refuses to raise her veil. When she does, he is taken aback by the sternness of her look. She chastises him for having fallen away from his youthful innocence and purity of heart. He weeps, she forgives him, and she smiles. He feels within him all the force of l’antica fiamma, the ancient flame of love for her, and she leads him on his way to the throne of God.

Paradiso, the third part of The Comedy, is unfortunately where many readers stumble and lose their way. Theology, with which this part of the poem is deeply concerned, is no longer ordinary fare and there are pages, too, on which even Dante’s powerful poetic imagination may have flagged. But if you will give Paradiso a real chance, reading it slowly and thoughtfully, not feeling pressed, above all not feeling that you must understand everything the first time through, you may find—as others have—that Paradiso contains moments that transcend even Inferno and Purgatorio, that transcend, indeed, any other poetry. The last half dozen cantos are the finest of all. The occasion is the Beatific Vision of the Living God, and Dante rises to it.

A sign that you have approached that vision in your own right is that you have understood a conversation between Dante and a certain Piccarda, whom he meets in the third canto of Paradiso. Piccarda is “low down” in Heaven, a great distance by our mortal measure from God, for reasons having to do with her late repentance for sin while she was in life. Dante asks if her position in the heavenly scheme troubles or disappoints her. “No, of course not,” Piccarda replies. “I am content to be where He has placed me, for,” she adds, “in His will is our peace.” This famous statement comes close to summing up the meaning of The Divine Comedy.

The poem is more than the sum of its meaning. It is also the supreme creation of medieval art. Its words are strange, haunting, and beautiful. Its images implant themselves on the screen of the memory. It rewards any amount of time devoted to reading it

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

1340?–1400

The Canterbury Tales

Troilus and Criseyde

Geoffrey Chaucer was born about 1340, probably in London, of prosperous middle-class parents who were able to provide him with a good education. He married a sister of Catherine Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III and, as Duke of Lancaster, the leader of the Lancastrian faction in the fifteenth-century civil Wars of the Roses. Through him and probably others, Chaucer obtained at various times throughout his life important and lucrative official posts. He might be described in modern terms as a senior civil servant who was also a great poet. He seems to have possessed a singularly moderate temperament and an exemplary character, for he had many friends and few, if any, enemies. He loved books, as he tells us in several places in his works, and was well read; for example, he may have been the first Englishman to know the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, with whose works he became acquainted during several trips to Italy on diplomatic missions—the king’s business, as he called it. But he also loved human beings and was able to forgive them their follies; although he knew everything about human wickedness he was never indignant or censorious. He was, in short, a nice man.

As late as 1850, even 1900, most persons even in the rich countries of the world were cold in winter and usually spent the long winter nights in darkness. They were used to it, one is inclined to think; cold is partly a state of mind, and eyes grow accustomed to the dark. But in northern Europe and England the nights in winter are very long and very cold, and no amount of “getting used to it” can overcome the discomfort that, today, we can only imagine. Occasionally a power outage or an empty fuel tank or a bill unpaid reminds us of what life was like for almost everybody throughout most of the history of mankind. (I am reminded of an account by the historian Fernand Braudel of a certain January dinner party at Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles. That night, reports Braudel, the wine froze in the glasses on the magnificently appointed tables. The King of France was the richest man in the world and if he was cold, then everybody was.)

A healthy dose of cold and darkness might be the best possible preparation for reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Written at a time—the end of the fourteenth century—well before the discovery of fossil fuels and electric power and the other conveniences of modern life, the poem evokes for us overwhelmingly the sense of spring, when cold, dark winter is replaced by light and warmth, and everyone, not just young lovers, can venture out once more.

When in April the sweet showers fall And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all The veins are bathed in liquor of such power As brings about the engendering of the flower, When also Zephyrus with his sweet breath Exhales an air in every grove and heath Upon the tender shoots, and the young sun His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run, And the small fowl are making melody That sleep away the night with open eye (So nature pricks them and their heart engages) Then people long to go on pilgrimages And palmers long to seek the stranger strands Of far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands, And specially, from every shire’s end In England, down to Canterbury they wend To seek the holy blissful martyr, quick To give his help when they were sick.

The only thing that might be puzzling about those famous, wonderful lines that begin the “General Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales is the statement in the last seven of them. Perhaps it would not occur to you to go on a pilgrimage for your spring break. But, like everyone else, you want to go somewhere and it might not be so difficult to accept an invitation to ride with an interesting and joyous company through the countryside of southern England, from dark, dirty London to the lovely cathedral town of Canterbury, with birds singing in the trees and flowers blooming in the fields along the way. That, at any rate, is the invitation that Chaucer tenders us. Hardly any reader has ever been anything but grateful.

The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work. It is unfinished; not half done, according to the plan he lays out in the “General Prologue.” That hardly matters. The poem could be longer or shorter and still be as good because it is mainly a collection of separate stories, most of them interesting, some of them among the funniest stories in English literature. Chaucer may not have made up any of them from scratch, but that doesn’t matter either. The genius of Chaucer was not originality.

He was a funny man who must have smiled easily and often. This was probably one reason why people liked him. And he liked them. Some thirty persons join him on his imaginary poetical pilgrimage to Canterbury and he likes almost all of them, although some more than others; the Pardoner he may not have liked at all. His favorite may have been the Prioress, who was called Madame Eglantyne and who spoke French “after the scole [school] of Stratford atte Bowe”—that is, with an English accent. She was a worldly ecclesiastic and wore about her neck a locket that revealed her motto: amor vincit omnia, “love conquers all,” a sentiment that indeed may be understood in a religious sense but probably not by Madame Eglantyne. Or Chaucer’s favorite may have been the Knight, with his ceremonial manners and deep solemnity, or the rambunctious Wife of Bath, still seeking Mr. Right after burying eight husbands. These are joined by a Reeve and a Priest and a Miller and … well, when you read the “General Prologue” you will know all who were there and you will wish you were of their number.

When you have finished the “Prologue” begin on the tales themselves. Read as many, or as few, as you wish. Chaucer would not have cared.

The Canterbury Tales was written before modern English came into existence. Chaucer wrote in the common, ordinary language of his day—although enriched by his learning and his wit—with no intent and certainly no desire to be antique or to pose problems for his readers. But the Middle English, so-called, of his time and place changed rapidly in the century after his death in 1400, and even learned Englishmen found it difficult to understand and appreciate his poetry two centuries later, to say nothing of six centuries later where we are today. It is therefore the better part of valor to begin reading Chaucer in a modern version (for example, the one by Nevill Coghill, which I quoted above) that smoothes out some of the roughest places and replaces obsolete words with familiar ones. If, however, you decide you really like Chaucer you may wish to try him in Middle English, preferably in an edition that prints the original text on one page and a modern redaction on the facing page. Also, try to find some learned person who knows how to read Middle English aloud so you can have an idea of what it sounded like. (It’s beautiful.) After a while, with a “pony” or glossary by your side, you will be able to do all this yourself.

Chaucer wrote many works besides The Canterbury Tales. Probably the best of them is his retelling of the classical love tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde. It is a superb story, superbly told by Chaucer, but again it was not original with him. He took it from Boccaccio, in many ways improving on it.

Troilus is a noble young Trojan, one of the many sons of King Priam; Criseyde is a charming Trojan widow, somewhat older than Troilus, considerably more experienced in the ways of the world, and even, be it said, a trifle flighty. Troilus falls passionately in love with her and, through the good offices of his close friend, Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus (from whose name we get the word “pander”), presents his suit and wins her favors. But as the war drags on and seems to go against the Trojans, Criseyde’s father deserts to the Greek enemy. Criseyde accompanies him into the Grecian camp. There, as one of the few women and almost the only pretty young one, she is vehemently wooed by several Greek warriors. Criseyde genuinely loves Troilus, but he is far away and she may never see him again. She finally becomes the mistress of Diomedes, one of the Greek generals.

Troilus, of course, is in despair. He sallies forth, not caring whether he lives or dies, and is killed in battle. He is swept up into heaven (he being a hero of love and thus having a special dispensation) and looks down upon the Earth. At the close of the poem he expresses his deep pity for mortal humankind.

Shakespeare also wrote a version of the story of Troilus and Criseyde. His play is remarkable for its cynicism and coldness; the heroes are all villains (especially the Greeks) and the lovers are fools. That is very far from the tone of Chaucer’s work, which possesses a sweetness that has endured for six centuries and is likely to endure for six more. The love of Chaucer’s Troilus for Criseyde is misguided, but then Troilus is really still only a boy. In happier circumstances Chaucer’s Criseyde would not have betrayed her young lover. That is why Chaucer’s version is a tragedy of love, while Shakespeare’s is a hard comedy that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Troilus and Criseyde is one poem I think you will definitely want to read if you find yourself becoming one of Chaucer’s devotees.