eye

Question 1

intro

Answer 1

in book 1 troilus falls in love through visual rays, which penetrate his eye to wound his heart. chaucer’s use of the image of the lover’s eye beam, which is drawn both from the poetic tradition of ‘Love’s Fatal Glance’ as well as from medieval optical science, gives him a brilliant tool with which to allow T - penetrated by love’s arrow - the apperance of passivity, even as he chooses to love

Question 2

context

Answer 2

up to kepler’s theory of the retinal image in 1604, a major point of debate in classical and medieval optics concerned the operation of the visual ray down which the look is projected and up which impressions of objects return to the eye.

Question 3

the eye guy g

Answer 3

Grosseteste: how visual rays from the subject join with the object to form a complete vision. ‘the visual species [isuing from the eye] is a substance, shining and radiating like the sun, the radiation of which, when coupled with the radiation from the exterior shining body, entirely completes vision… ‘ (from De Iride, early 13th century)
also Bacon from mid-13th century also stressed the intromission and extramission of visual rays

Question 4

chaucers little poem

Answer 4

how medeival arguments about visual rays are echoed in medieval erotic poetry: the lover’s gaze that penetrates as an arrow or visual ray, usually though the eye to wound the heart. such as in ‘Merciles Beaute’

in this poem the implied visual ray connecting eye to object of desire takes the shape, of course, of cupids arrow.
it is a double movement in this poem ‘your eyen two wol slee me sodenly’. sense of execution from the womans two eyes suggests the same effect on her as him. like palamon

Question 5

eye scene in troilus

Answer 5

the erotic imagery is explicitly situated within an optical metalanguage. the narrator says how t ‘felte deyne’ felt himself slain by the ‘subtile stremes’ of her eyes, in an unambigious reference to the mechanics of visual species.

connection between the imagery of love’s fatal glance and medieval optical theory. its a sort of double movement.

Question 6

t descibes c eyes later

Answer 6

in an apostrophe to C’s eyes in book 3, troilus describes them as nets (1355). images of entrapment. suggests that he is acted upon rather than acting? ACTION AND INACTION yet is he? he gazes at her first and when she looks at him in return they catch eyes.

the use of ocular iconography affords chaucer a felcible too for depicting intersubjectivity, the experience, central to the ethics of western love tradition, of loss of boundaries. this constructed self, troilus as a lvoer, shaped by the imagined gaze of the other, is what the rest of the poem is about.