Forming Pity: Responses to Suffering in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

ABSTRACT:This article argues for the critical importance of pity for understanding Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. It shows that in his translation of the popular Troilus narrative Chaucer greatly expanded the role of pity from his sources, and it investigates the consequences of this expansion for the poem's larger consideration of the ethics of responding to others. "Forming Pity" proposes that, in his increased attention to pity, Chaucer revises and indicts medieval modes of ethical response to the suffering of others. He moves away from an ethics of identification prevalent in other medieval models of pity, including Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and towards an ethics that acknowledges and privileges the alterity of another's suffering. He does so through a careful investigation of the social efficacy and limitations of pity as it was understood in different medieval pity discourses—most notably chivalric ethics, fin amor, and Christian ethics. As he explores pity in these discourses, Chaucer contends with pity's power to ease suffering, but also its capacity to maintain dangerous social hierarchies and its inability to end the problem of suffering. This article argues that it is pity's limited capacity to ease suffering that helps to make sense of the poem's famously difficulty conclusion. It shows that in the poem's final transition to Christian ethics and passion meditation, Chaucer abruptly switches from speaking of pity to mercy: a change that Chaucer uses to make a distinction between limited human pity and limitless divine mercy.