ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a Boethian tradition committed to the didacticism of such contraries, a tradition that also imbues Boethius's voice with irony and eroticism. It also provides the influence of a fuller Boethian corpus, not only De disciplina and its commentaries but also Boethius's writings on logic and his depiction as a character in Maximian's Elegies. Geoffrey Chaucer's status as a philosophical poet depends largely on three major projects he undertook in the 1380s: Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight's Tale, and his translation of the Consolatio, called the Boece. In Troilus and Criseyde, male—male friendship is a site of callousness, manipulation, and aggression, from Troilus's condescending mockery of suffering lovers as he saunters about with "his yonge knyghtes" to the casual pimping of Criseyde by Pandarus. Pandarus again adopts the technical language of the schools to speaks in terms of contraries, "game and ernest," "wommen" and "men," uncle and traitor.
