While recent scholarly attention to the medieval aspects of Troilus and Criseyde has overshadowed the older custom of critics to associate it with modern fiction, its kinship with such later literature is authentic. The poem’s plentiful medieval materials—for which Chaucer draws extensively on Dante, Machaut, and Boethius—invite interpretation of it in terms of traditional modes: the epic, the romance, and the philosophical demonstration. Chaucer, however, completely undercuts the usual effects of these modes with irony, at the same time employing the elements and techniques of realism. The irony cooperates with the realism to make a work that finally is like modern fiction in identifying the essentially human through the particularity of its presentation.
Pandarus Quotes Ovid in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book One of Troilus and Criseyde