Fiction · 1385
Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus, a Trojan prince, falls in love with the widowed Criseyde during the long siege of Troy; her uncle Pandarus brings them together, and for a time they are happy — until Criseyde is traded to the Greek camp in a prisoner exchange and, isolated among her captors, gives her love to the Greek warrior Diomede instead, leaving Troilus to a war he no longer has any reason to survive.
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde in the mid-1380s, adapting a story he found in Boccaccio's Il Filostrato into a long narrative poem many scholars consider his finest work, predating The Canterbury Tales and showing an unusually close, sympathetic interest in Criseyde's own reasoning as she moves between the two men.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text, in Chaucer's original Middle English.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1343–1400 · Medieval
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) was born in London to a family of wine merchants and spent his working life in royal service — as a diplomat, customs official, and clerk of the king's works — while writing in the hours it left him. Widely read in French, Italian, and Latin literature from his diplomatic travels, he did more than any other writer to establish English, rather than French or Latin, as a serious literary language, in works including Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380s) and his unfinished masterwork, The Canterbury Tales. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, in the area that later became known as Poets' Corner.
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