Chivalry, power, and justice in three medieval romances

This dissertation has two purposes: to uncover a critique of chivalry in a twelfth-century roman antique, Benoi t de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, and to assess its implications for two fourteenth-century English poems, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and John Gower's Confessio Amantis.;Benoi t's critical inquiry into chivalry is conducted largely in two ways. First, he uses female characters as a site from which to criticize the oppressive mechanisms whereby the chivalric class maintains the status quo. Second, he points to the incompatibility of knightly conduct with good government by emphasizing the individualistic nature of knights' pursuit of honor and revenge.;The subsequent two chapters of this thesis demonstrate that these two methods were adopted by Chaucer and Gower respectively. While basing his Troilus primarily on Boccaccio's Filostrato, Chaucer occasionally alluded to the Briseida story in the Roman de Troie to amplify Criseyde's role as a victim of chivalric society and to highlight through her experience the Trojan nobility's preoccupation with class solidarity and war effort. Gower, on the other hand, chose to translate those episodes in the Roman which problematize the chivalric principles of honor and revenge ("Ring Namplus and the Greeks," "Athemas and Demephon," "Orestes," "Telaphus and Teucer," "Jason and Medea," "Paris and Helen," "Ulysses and Telegonus"). Gower used these tales to reflect on the nobility's self-interested exercise of armed force and the threat it poses to civil order and justice. Although Chaucer and Gower responded to different aspects of Benoi t's critique of chivalry, they were united in that they both developed the borrowings from the Roman into an implicit commentary on the Hundred Years War and its consequences for the late fourteenth-century English society.;The first chapter of this thesis examines the Roman de Troie in light of the cultural environment of Henry II's court, where the aristocracy and the secular clergy collaborated to promote knightly duties and virtues. While purporting to endorse this ideological project, Benoi t simultaneously questions it by exposing not only the egotism, aggression, and violence that underlie knightly activities but also the discursive strategies of concealment and suppression deployed in elevating knighthood.