{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_neu_eng_mect_mect62_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_neu_eng_mect_mect62_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_neu_eng_mect_mect62_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/neu/eng/mect/mect62.htm","summary":"This is the opening of Book 5 of Chaucer's *Troilus and Criseyde*, a 14th-century Middle English courtly romance in the tradition of Boccaccio's *Il Filostrato*, recounting the doomed love affair of a Trojan prince during the Trojan War. The passage depicts the moment Criseyde is formally surrendered to the Greek camp in exchange for the Trojan prisoner Antenor, with Troilus escorting her to the city gate before being forced to turn back. Diomede, the Greek knight assigned to escort her, immediately and calculatingly begins wooing Criseyde on the road, swearing extravagant devotion while privately noting she is not yet emotionally available \u2014 a portrait of tactical seduction that contrasts sharply with Troilus's paralyzed, passive grief. Troilus returns alone to Troy and collapses into a frenzied night of weeping, cursing the gods, and tormented dreams, his suffering rendered in hyperbolic terms the narrator explicitly declares beyond language to convey. The excerpt is notably frank about the contrast between Diomede's shrewd opportunism and Troilus's courtly idealism \u2014 the latter's refusal to simply seize Criseyde back is attributed not to cowardice but to fear of getting her killed, a detail that frames his passivity as tragic rather than weak. Chaucer closes the section by directly addressing the reader and invoking Pandarus's arrival, signaling the sustained psychological drama of betrayal and loss that will define the rest of the book.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas","translated_text":null,"word_count":15044}