Recommendations
Books Like Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer reading, medieval love narrative, and books about the psychology of romantic betrayal
If Troilus and Criseyde moved you with Criseyde's impossible situation and Chaucer's extraordinary psychological sympathy, these eight works share its account of love at the mercy of forces beyond individual control, its sense of the gap between ideal and human love, and its engagement with classical tradition.
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Buy on AmazonThe Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's comic masterpiece — the essential companion to Troilus and Criseyde; the same author in a completely different register: comic frame narrative and twenty-four pilgrims' tales in place of sustained five-book romance.
- 2
Buy on AmazonTroilus and Cressida
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's 1602 bitter problem play — the dark, ironic afterlife of Chaucer's characters; Cressida here is the faithless figure the legend made her, and Troilus is a disillusioned idealist rather than a courtly lover.
- 3
Buy on AmazonIl Filostrato
by Giovanni Boccaccio
Boccaccio's Italian poem — Chaucer's primary source; reading it alongside Troilus and Criseyde reveals exactly what Chaucer transformed and why, particularly his transformation of Criseyde from simply faithless to complexly human.
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Aeneid
by Virgil
Virgil's epic — the classical source tradition Chaucer drew on; Dido's abandonment by Aeneas as the template for Criseyde's impossible situation; Chaucer's Criseyde and Virgil's Dido are both women destroyed by forces beyond their control.
- 5
Buy on AmazonSir Gawain and the Green Knight
by Anonymous
The other great Middle English narrative poem — contemporary with Chaucer; entirely different tradition (alliterative northwest Midlands vs. London rhyme royal) but sharing the sense of the hero tested and found humanly imperfect.
- 6
Buy on AmazonIphigenia in Aulis
by Euripides
Euripides's late play of a woman sacrificed to the logic of the Trojan War — Criseyde's situation as tragic sacrifice rather than romantic betrayal; both are accounts of what happens to women when men's wars need victims.
- 7Buy on Amazon
The Romance of the Rose
by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun
The French allegorical love narrative that was Chaucer's primary formal influence — the allegorical garden of love and its inhabitants are the conceptual background to Troilus's courtly love idealism.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's great novel of a woman destroyed by the social logic of her world — Criseyde's situation in a realist nineteenth-century form; both are accounts of a woman whose choices are severely constrained by the male world she inhabits.
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