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This thesis examines the imagery of love as it is depicted in three medieval versions of the story of Troy. The result is an attempt to determine to what extent Benoit, Gower, and Chaucer use love motifs and language to distinguish between the gendered experiences of the passion and to what extent love, as it is expressed by the various characters of both sexes, is considered to be the motivational force behind the events at Troy.
A distinctive feature of Benoit's Roman de Troie is the attention it gives to the love stories that comprise it, not only the story of Paris and Helen, but also the stories of Jason and Medea, of Troilus, Briseida, and Diomedes, and of Achilles and Polyxena. A close analysis of the poem reveals a variety of recurring images and vocabulary relating to the experience and expression of erotic love. Benoit clearly views the women in these stories not just as objects of the passions of their male lovers, but as subject to passions of their own.
In his Confessio Amantis, John Gower restructures the story of Troy around other tales of love and kingship which exemplify the same sin. By presenting the history of Troy out of sequence, by eliminating some of the traditional imagery and language, and by developing his own unique set of images and vocabulary, he effectively disassociates the love episodes from the war narrative. The love stories of Jason and Medea and of Paris and Helen become exempla of the sin of avarice, connected not so much by parallels in plot, but by similarities in the love experience of the main characters.
Unlike the other two versions of the story of Troy, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde focusses on a single, self-contained fragment of the story. In contrast to the language and imagery associated with the male characters of the poem, the patterns of vocabulary and images affiliated with Criseyde reveal her to be a figure motivated more by a concern for honour and the passion of fear, than by love.
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