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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - ‘And lat hem in this hevene blisse dwelle’

  • Lucie Kaempfer, University of Geneva
  • Book:
    The Joy of Love in the Middle Ages
    Published online:
    20 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025, pp 137-168

  • Summary

    Chapter 5 is a study of Troilus and Criseyde, a poem that showcases Chaucer’s transformation of the language of blisse into that of erotic and transcendent joy. Chaucer constructs a new language of love’s joy indebted to the French and Italian traditions while at the same time shaped around an innovative semantics of love’s blisse. This language, crucially, constructs itself in opposition to philosophical felicity: in quasi-apophatic discourse, the poem expresses the ‘passing’ quality of the lovers’ joy, which exists beyond the conceptual language of philosophical happiness. This last chapter focuses on the writing of love’s joy within tragedy: the bliss of love is what it is because of its precarity, because it is surrounded by death. But if Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers an exceptionally memorable scene of joy, it is because of its use of a transcendent language of bliss that arrests, albeit briefly, the passage of time.