Troilus and Criseyde was probably composed during the early and middle years of the 1380s and completed no later than 1387, which places it after the Boece and certainly before the earliest version of the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, where it is cited. In five books of rhyme royal stanzas the ‘double sorrow’ of Troilus is charted as he loves, wins and loses Criseyde, the story being set within the context of the Trojan War, which Chaucer embellishes with extensive use (and to some extent creation) of appropriately pagan history, philosophy and religion. Chaucer took the relatively straightforward account of an amatory love triangle from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (1336–8?) and reworked it with occasional recourse to two sources Boccaccio himself had used, Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (of the mid-twelfth century) and the Latin prose rendering of that French poem that Guido delle Colonne completed in 1287, the Historia destructionis Troiae. Guido had introduced heavily moralistic comments about the evils of pagan love and lore, but this is quite different in tenor from Chaucer’s transformation of Boccaccio, which is marked by a desire to find virtue in his heathen characters and to endow Troilus (thanks to material derived from Boethius’ Consolatio philosophiae) with the ability to engage in intricate philosophical analysis, as he suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Here is an ‘historical novel’ conceived on a grand scale; featuring a distinctive and internally consistent heathen imaginary which manifests distance, difference and otherness. A world all of its own.

Other worlds: pagan philosophy and desire

In Chaucer’s day, it was widely recognized that many worlds existed within the present one, inasmuch as it accommodated different peoples and races, many of which followed creeds that were quite different from Christianity. Several hundred years of crusades (with Jerusalem, the place of Christ’s death, as the great prize) had prompted some awareness, however crude and miscomprehending, of the tenets of Islam, and in 1243–5, approximately two decades before Marco Polo began his travels in Asia, Persia, China and Indonesia, Friar William of Rubruck had made an arduous journey to meet the fourth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, Möngke (1209–59).