Abstract

I wish to begin by recalling the treatment of mourning, melancholy, and suicide in the last two books of Troilus and Criseyde. The subject of that catastrophe was a chivalric hero whose identity, as I have argued elsewhere, involved a particular discourse of love. This discourse assumed models of gender, individual identity, and community which were intrinsic to ruling elites. It hinged on producing a sense of lack which was to be met by distinctive forms of erotic desire bound up with a complex web of courtly language and behavior. To this process a minutely organized construction of gender roles is essential, a topic whose analysis has been enabled and encouraged by wide-ranging developments in feminist scholarship over the last twenty years