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Despite claims made by a number of critics that a clandestine marriage is conducted between Troilus and Criseyde, no such claim has been made for Boccaccio’s Troiolo and Criseida. In fact, the most vocal advocates of sub rosa nuptials in Chaucer’s poem resolutely deny the possibility of a similar espousal in the English poet’s Italian template, to the extent that their arguments even depend upon its absence.¹

And yet the case for the possibility of sponsalia per verba de praesenti (or even de futuro) in Il Filostrato is no less viable than that which has been made repeatedly for Chaucer’s redaction. ² However, I am by no means declaring that a clandestine marriage definitely takes place in Boccaccio’s poem, far from it. Rather I am querying the rationale which permits a secret union in the one text and denies it to the other, despite there being just as much (or as little, as the case may be) evidence for its occurrence in both. Indeed, the union in each text is not only concealed from the view of the ancillary characters but also from the view of the reader, due to the penumbral language employed by each poet; we too are faced with ‘ignorance ay in derknesse’ (TC, III. 826). ³

Various studies in recent years have illuminated the almost pandemic nature of clandestine marriage in late-medieval Europe – the Church considered it to be a pernicious social problem, which was finally curtailed by the Tametsi decree promulgated by the Council of Trent in 1563.⁴ Even Kelly, who refuses to acknowledge the possibility of a clandestine marriage in Il Filostrato, admits that ‘with very few exceptions there is a bias in favo[u]r of marriage on the part of serious medieval lovers; that is to say, when they got the chance to marry, they generally took it’ (Kelly, p. 435). Troiolo and Criseida, by extension, either fall into the category of the ‘very few exceptions’ or they are simply not ‘serious’ about one another, unlike their English counterparts. In this brief query I will examine the case for and against surreptitious nuptials in Boccaccio’s text, and attempt to cast light upon the possibility of a union conducted ‘whan lightles is the world’ (TC, III. 550). ⁵

The case against marriage in Il Filostrato rests largely upon Criseida’s interior monologue in II. 73-4, in which she argues that ‘ora non è tempo da marito¦e se pur fosse, la sua libertate¦servare è troppo più savio partito’ (‘now is not the time for a husband, and even if it were, to serve one’s liberty is by far the wiser part’), and that ‘d’amor la gioia che sia nascosa¦trapassa assai del sempre mai tenuto¦marito in braccio’ (‘the joy of hidden love far surpasses that of the husband forever held in arms’).⁶ This, however, has its Chaucerian equivalent in Troilus and Criseyde: ‘“I am myn owene woman, wel at ese […] Shal noon husbande seyn to me ‘chek mate.’ […] Shal I nat love, in cas if that me leste? […] it may do me no shame”’ (II. 750-63). Conversely, the case for marriage in Chaucer’s poem depends upon the language of the consummation scene in book III:



Yet such language again has its Italian equivalent, for example when Boccaccio’s Criseida says to Troiolo, ‘Spogliomi io? Le nuove spose¦son la notte primiera vergognose’ (‘Shall I undress? The newly wed are bashful on their first night’, III. 31). Boccaccio even speaks of the lovers being ‘rassicurati insieme’ (‘reassured in their union’, III. 40), which finds its Chaucerian corollary in ‘[they] diden al hire might, syn they were oon’ (III. 1405); both of which echo the Judaeo-Christian understanding of man and wife as being ‘duo in carne una’, or ‘two in one flesh’.⁷

The final “proof” of union comes to light following the Trojan counsel’s decision to exchange Criseyde for Antenor:



English texts initially spurn the possibility of her taking an ‘husbande’, or ‘marito’; yet we may question what is meant by these two titles here. We recall that Andreas Capellanus’s first rule of amore is that ‘marriage does not constitute a proper excuse for not loving’ (‘I. Causa coniugii ab amore non est excusatio recta’), which may be read as signifying that one should follow one’s heart even if the beloved is already married.⁸Alternatively, the law may be read as signifying that the married couple should be lovers, even though this violates the Church’s preaching against marital concupiscence; although of the two sins, adultery is greater than married carnality.⁹However, it must be borne in mind that Capellanus is composing an ironical treatise, which ought not to be misinterpreted as the vociferation or codification of an established adulterous practice amongst the late-medieval aristocracy; amour courtois is a nineteenth-century misprision (of medieval Italian amor cortese), a revisionist idée fixe, clandestine marriage a reality.¹⁰

It may be that Criseyde / Criseida have a particular concept of what an husband is. Both are young widows, which could suggest that their deceased spouses were older than they – akin to the relationship between January and May in The Merchant’s Tale, which stands in opposition to the love affair – but this can only be conjectural. The use of such phrases as Chaucer’s ‘wommanliche wif’ and Boccaccio’s ‘spose’ is similarly evasive. As Wentersdorf posits, Chaucer’s earlier use of ‘wommanliche wif’ (III. 106) ‘suggests that he meant, in both cases, some such praise as “pattern of womanhood”’ (p. 115). Kelly likewise refutes Vittore Branca’s interpretation of the Italian sposare as meaning to espouse, although this refutation is unclear – ‘spose’ here surely means spouses?¹¹However, Boccaccio’s Criseida does not refer to herself as newly wed, but rather refers to the newly wed (‘Le nuove spose’, my italics). Likewise, the ludic undertone to Chaucer’s ‘pleyinge’ – which may also refer to ‘sexual play’ (MED) – serves as a caveat to the exchange of rings, whilst ‘trouth’ does not necessarily mean trothplight, at least not in this instance.¹²Finally, Criseyde’s promise to Troilus that ‘my clothes euerychon¦Shal blake ben in tokennyng’ of her widowhood suggests at the very least a symbolic union, which is in fact emphasized more by her Italian counterpart’s explicit use of ‘vedova’ (‘widow’) and ‘o marito’ (‘O husband’). It may then be argued that the union conducted under the shadow of secrecy is illuminated, ironically, by these ‘blake’ clothes, or ‘vestimenti nero’.

The judgement that a clandestine marriage is possible in Troilus and Criseyde, and impossible in Il Filostrato, may stem from the widely held belief that Boccaccio is Chaucer’s more scurrilous or immoral Italian counterpart. The salacious incidents in the Decameron – for example Dioneo’s tale of the lapsed monk and his no less lustful abbot (I. 4), or Massetto da Lamporecchio’s adventures in the convent (III. 1) – may raise a smirk or an eyebrow, whilst similar episodes in The Canterbury Tales – The Miller’s Tale, for example – are interpreted as being indicative of Chaucer’s appreciation of life’s fullness, or ‘God’s plenty’ as Dryden termed it. ¹³Although it cannot be denied that Troilus and Criseyde is more paraphrase than metaphrase, it is equally important to recall Windeatt’s asseveration that



However, there extends out of this discussion of transformation and overlay the argument that Chaucer’s poem is working within a generic framework which is in some ways other to that of Boccaccio, and so requires a different hermeneutics. Yet Giulia Natali’s exposition of Il Filostrato as transgressing genre refutes such a critical dichotomy, and may also serve as a description of Troilus and Criseyde’s complex nature:



In conclusion: whilst the collective case made by Kelly, Maguire and Wentersdorf in favour of the clandestine marriage of Troilus and Criseyde may be convincing, the concomitant argument against a similar event in Boccaccio is perhaps less so. The ambiguity and conflicting perspectives inherent in the language of both texts begs the question as to why one should be allowed and the other disallowed; indeed, as to whether either claim is valid. Ultimately, the exposition of greater correlation between these two texts may not only help to cast light upon ‘What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato’, as Lewis’s essay put it, but may also help to explain why Chaucer turned with greater frequency and affinity to Boccaccio than he did to Petrarch or Dante. ¹⁶ Any answers to these umbrageous queries would be most illuminating.

W.T. Rossiter, U. of Liverpool

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NOTES

1. See in particular, Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘Clandestine Marriage and Chaucer’s “Troilus”’, Viator, 4 (1973), 435-57; John B. Maguire, ‘The Clandestine Marriage of Troilus and Criseyde’, Chaucer Review, 8 (1974), 262-78; Karl P. Wentersdorf, ‘Some Observations on the Concept of Clandestine Marriage in Troilus and Criseyde’, ChaucerReview, 15 (1980), 101-26.

2. ‘A distinction was to be made between the espousals known as sponsalia per verba de futuro, a solemn engagement in which the contracting parties promise each other to become man and wife at some future date, and sponsalia per verba de praesenti, in which ceremony, using words of the present tense, they become man and wife at the moment of making their promises’ (Wentersdorf, p. 103).

3. All references to Troilus and Criseyde are taken from Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book of Troilus” , ed. by B. A. Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 1984).

4. See Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector, eds, The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex and Marriage in the Medieval World (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991); Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100-1300 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997); Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe, eds, Marriage in Italy, 1300-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The essay by D. L. d’Avray in Dean and Lowe, ‘Marriage ceremonies and the church in Italy after 1215’, pp. 107-15, is particularly enlightening. I am using pandemic in both its senses, as referring both to the universal prevalence of a disease or problem, and as it relates to sensual love.

5. The metaphorical darkness of the clandestine marriage in both Troilus and Criseyde and Il Filostrato – id est , such a union is hidden in shadow, away from the public gaze, and slightly transgressive, despite the pre-Tridentine Church’s begrudging acceptance – is emphasized by the literal darkness in which it takes place. See the lovers’ aubade in TC, III. 1422-1470, which follows the Boccaccian equivalent in Fil., III. 42-4.

6. All references to Il Filostrato are taken from Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Vittore Branca, 12 vols (Verona: Mondadori, 1964 - ) II, 15-228. The translations are my own.

7. The phrase appears in Genesis 2. 24; Matthew 19. 5-6. See Aloisius Claudius Fillion, ed., Biblia Sacra Juxta Vulgatae, 8th edn (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1887); Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, eds, The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

8. See P. G. Walsh, ed. and trans., Andreas Capellanus on Love (London: Duckworth, 1982), pp. 282-3. Dante’s love for Beatrice dei Portinari, for example, was not deterred by his marriage; Petrarch’s Laura was reputed to be Laura de Sade, wife of an Avignon merchant; and of course Boccaccio’s own Fiammetta is really Maria d’Aquino, another married woman. For discussions of Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s respective relationships with Capellanus see Thomas J. Garbaty, ‘Andreas Capellanus and the Gate in the Parlement of Foules’, Romance Notes, 9 (1968), 325-30; Andrew Williams, ‘Clerics and Courtly Love in Andreas Capellanus’ The Art of Courtly Love and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 3 (1990), 127-36; Carlo Grabher, ‘Particolari influssi di Andrea Cappellano sul Boccaccio’, Annali della Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia dell’ Universita di Perugia, 5 (1967-8), 309-62; Dante della Terza, ‘The Tale of the Marchioness of Monferrato (I. 5)’, in The “Decameron” First Day in Perspective, ed. by Elissa B. Weaver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 135-47.

9. Medieval preachers averred that ‘there are four kinds of marriage, namely: carnal, sacramental, spiritual, and eternal’ (‘quod sunt 4 genera nuptiarum, scilicet nuptie carnales, sacramentales, spirituales, eternales’), and that ‘The first marriage is culpable and detestable […] the consummation is hateful and full of pain’ (‘Prima nuptie sunt culpabiles et detestabiles […] consummation exosa et penosa’). See D. L. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture without Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 248-9. The warning against uxoriousness or its converse, indeed any concupiscence within matrimony, stems from Augustine’s proclamation in De bono coniugali that ‘it is disgraceful to make use of a husband for purposes of lust’. See The Good of Marriage (De bono coniugali) in Saint Augustine, Treatises on Marriage and other Subjects, trans. by Charles T. Wilcox, The Fathers of the Church, 27 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955; repr. 1969), pp. 9-51 (p. 16).

10. For accounts of amor cortese in medieval Italian see Joan Ferrante, ‘Cortes’ Amor in Medieval Texts’, Speculum, 55 (1980), 686-95. See also Larry D. Benson, ‘Courtly Love and Chivalry in the Later Middle Ages’, in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. by Robert F. Yeager (Hamden: Archon, 1984), pp. 237-57: ‘it does not follow that, if a doctrine of courtly adultery did not exist, courtly love did not exist. The fact is that courtly love did exist, perhaps not in the twelfth century, but certainly in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and even sixteenth centuries. […]Amor cortese, courtly love, was in fairly common use in medieval Italian, and Chaucer might well have come upon the phrase cortesi amanti in his reading of Petrarch’ (p. 239). I am loath to comment upon the possibility that Chaucer encountered the phrase in Petrarch, as – apart from rime 132 – we do not know which of Petrarch’s vernacular poems Chaucer had read (‘cortesi amanti’ may be found in rime 72. 76). Yet as Benson argues, the phrase had achieved poetic currency long before 1372 – the year of Chaucer’s first documented visit to Italy – and may be found in the works of other poets, such as Dante and Cino da Pistoia. For refutations of Gaston Paris’ nineteenth-century misreading see D. W. Robertson Jnr, ‘Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Literary Texts’, in The Meaning of Courtly Love, ed. by F. X. Newman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1968), pp. 1-18; E. T. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 154-63.

11. For example, in Decameron II. 3. 35: ‘Essa allora levatasi a sedere in su il letto, davanti una tavoletta dove Nostro Signore era effigiato postogli in mano uno anello, gli si fece sposare’ (‘She then rose to sit upon his lap, before a little effigy of Our Lord she placed a ring upon his finger, they were espoused’); Branca writes ‘cioè si fece dare da lui promessa solenne di matrimonio’ (‘thus he is made to give his solemn promise of matrimony’). See Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. by Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), p. 945. The translations are my own. The phrase ‘le nuove spose’ also echoes the use of li novelli sposi (the new spouses) in Il Filocolo, the marriage scene from which both Wentersdorf and Maguire posit as being the source of the union of Troilus and Criseyde. See Filocolo, ed. by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, in Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, I, 61-675.

12. It is precisely this sort of misprision which caused a number of marriage claims to come to ecclesiastical court – one partner may interpret trouthe as signifying union, the other may not (or may not in retrospect). As d’Avray has shown, ‘a simple exchange of consent [a pledging of one’s trouthe] was enough to make a valid marriage in this period, until the Council of Trent [1545-63]. The marriage could be validly contracted behind a hedge, in a bedroom, in a brothel, or anywhere […] [and] there was no general church rule that priests should conduct marriages’. See ‘Marriage ceremonies and the church in Italy after 1215’, pp. 107, 113.

13. The phrase appears in the preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700). Robert apRoberts perhaps encapsulates the dichotomy in his discussion of ‘Love in the Filostrato’, wherein he argues that the ‘sensuality’ which is so ‘essential’ to Il Filostrato ‘has been purged by Chaucer, or at least so subdued as to be practically so’, Chaucer Review, 7 (1972-3), 1-26 (p. 1). This view perhaps ignores key elements in Chaucer’s poem, such as the eroticized effictio of the naked Criseyde in TC, III. 1247-53.

14.Barry Windeatt, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. by Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; repr. 1984), pp. 163-85 (p. 163).

15. Giulia Natali, ‘A Lyrical Version: Boccaccio’s Filostrato’, in The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. by Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 49-73 (pp. 50-51, 59).

16. See C. S. Lewis, ‘What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato’, Essays and Studies, 17 (1932), 56-75. Lewis’s essay has been enormously influential in shaping attitudes toward Boccaccio’s poem. C. David Benson, for example, citing Lewis, argues for the ‘four elements in Troilus that Chaucer had added to his immediate source, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato: history, rhetoric, doctrine, and courtly love […] Chaucer’s long Boethian addition in book 4 […] [and] Chaucer’s careful attention to physical space, not found in Boccaccio’s poem’ . See ‘Critic and Poet: What Lydgate and Henryson Did to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, in Writing After Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Daniel Pinti (New York and London: Garland, 1998), pp. 227-41 (pp. 230-9). In relation to the ‘long Boethian addition in book 4’ of TC I would point to Troiolo’s long Boethian hymn in Fil., III. 74-89, whilst the various spaces, rooms and closets in Chaucer’s poem are clearly modelled upon the architecture and topography of the Italian.

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