Focuses upon the aspects of Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' which criticize erotic love, tracing the poem's transformations of Boccaccio's Filostrato and assessing external and internal evidence of attitudes towards love and sexuality. Contemporary negative opinions of love, especially those of John Gower (to whom Troilus is dedicated) clarify the proper subordination of human love to human will and the significance of Troilus's debasement....

Edmondson analyzes the different ways that three canonical texts---Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; its source, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato; and its fifteenth-century Scottish derivative, Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid---treat two figures, Troilus and Criseyde, and how those differences affect our understanding of literary history. He argues that what makes them neighboring texts is their shared concern with the subject of medieval Trojan historiography...