ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Chaucer provides a complex literary experience that allows individual readers to find in the love-affair everything from passionate sensuality to divine harmony and from comic cynicism to lyrical idealism. The most influential and eloquent advocate of Troilus as a poem of courtly love has undoubtedly been C. S. Lewis, whose Allegory of Love dominated discussion of the poem for more than a generation. The poem’s religious imagery is neither ironic nor an indication that the affair resembles Christian marriage, but a bold granting of ‘religious sanction to a love which originally asked and needed none’. Faced with the multiplicity of love in Troilus, critics have understandably sought to discover some unifying concept that could define the experience of the lovers. The multiplicity of love that Chaucer explores throughout Troilus is nowhere more evident than in the events that lead to the lovers’ consummation.
