Moult and Mastery

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is approached through its use of falconry imagery. Falconry in the Middle Ages was a highly evolved and specialized practice, with a rich literature of its own, both imaginative and practical. The poem's three main characters can be understood in the different ways that they engage falconry: Pandarus, a detached shaper of events, as a falconer himself; Criseyde, as a character both changeable and fixed in her nature, as a falcon; Troilus, as one that evolves from associations with falconry to something more aquiline and, ultimately, transcendent. These patterns also reflect an underlying and double pattern of reference within the poem: that to Ovidian and Boethian schemes of love and love's changes.