Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on References
- Introduction: A Modern Medievalist's Career
- 1 Derek Brewer: Chaucerian Studies 1953–78
- 2 Brewer's Chaucer and the Knightly Virtues
- 3 Class Distinction and the French of England
- 4 Time in Troilus and Criseyde
- 5 Virtue, Intention and the Mind's Eye in Troilus and Criseyde
- 6 Falling in Love in the Middle Ages
- 7 The Idea of Feminine Beauty in Troilus and Criseyde, or Criseyde's Eyebrow
- 8 ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’: Friendship in Medieval English Romance
- 9 Gowerian Laughter
- 10 Derek Brewer's Romance
- 11 Malory and Late Medieval Arthurian Cycles
- 12 The Ends of Storytelling
- 13 Manuscripts, Facsimiles, Approaches to Editing
- 14 Words and Dictionaries: OED, MED and Chaucer
- 15 Afterlives: The Fabulous History of Venus
- Afterword: Derek Brewer: with ful deuout corage
- Bibliography
- Index
- Tabula in Memoriam
4 - Time in Troilus and Criseyde
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on References
- Introduction: A Modern Medievalist's Career
- 1 Derek Brewer: Chaucerian Studies 1953–78
- 2 Brewer's Chaucer and the Knightly Virtues
- 3 Class Distinction and the French of England
- 4 Time in Troilus and Criseyde
- 5 Virtue, Intention and the Mind's Eye in Troilus and Criseyde
- 6 Falling in Love in the Middle Ages
- 7 The Idea of Feminine Beauty in Troilus and Criseyde, or Criseyde's Eyebrow
- 8 ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’: Friendship in Medieval English Romance
- 9 Gowerian Laughter
- 10 Derek Brewer's Romance
- 11 Malory and Late Medieval Arthurian Cycles
- 12 The Ends of Storytelling
- 13 Manuscripts, Facsimiles, Approaches to Editing
- 14 Words and Dictionaries: OED, MED and Chaucer
- 15 Afterlives: The Fabulous History of Venus
- Afterword: Derek Brewer: with ful deuout corage
- Bibliography
- Index
- Tabula in Memoriam
Summary
Derek Brewer was an extraordinarily energetic and prolific writer, whose work was published in many different lands – if not from China to Peru, certainly from Japan to Germany. It was sometimes hard, even for his colleagues (of whom I was one for over twenty years) and his admirers (among whom I have never ceased to be), to keep up with his publications. I begin this essay on some aspects of time in Troilus and Criseyde from my own failure to know in time about one such publication. For years I had been increasingly sceptical about the concept of ‘the narrator’ as it had been employed in modern interpretation of medieval poetry. Troilus and Criseyde seemed to be a key case, for the great majority of critics in the second half of the twentieth century had found in it a narrator whom they saw as a fictional character invented by Chaucer – ‘a central character in his own right’, as one recent account continues to put it (Summit 2006: 219). He was frequently described in terms such as ‘naive’, ‘imperceptive’ or ‘obtuse’, and was generally regarded as more foolishly tender-hearted in his attitude towards Criseyde and her betrayal of Troilus than Chaucer himself could have been. To take a single example, it was almost universally assumed that when Chaucer wrote about Criseyde, ‘if I myghte excuse hire any wise,/ ffor she so sory was for hire vntrouthe,/ I-wis, I wolde excuse hire 3et for routhe’ (5. 1097–9), he was expressing the attitude of this soft-headed narrator, and that readers were meant to understand that Chaucer's own attitude was far less forgiving.
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- Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English LiteratureThe Influence of Derek Brewer, pp. 60 - 72Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013