Chaucer on love, knowledge, and sight

by Norman Klassen

In this study Norman Klassen shows how Chaucer explores the complexity of the relationship between love and knowledge through recourse to the motif of sight. The author argues that Chaucer is unorthodox in exploiting the possibilities for using sight both to express emotional experience and to accentuate rationality at the same time. The conventional opposition of love and knowledge in the phenomenon of love at first sight gives way in Chaucer's development of love, knowledge, and sight to a symbiosis in his love poetry. The complexity of this relationship draws attention to his own role as artificer, as one who in the process of articulating the effects of love at first sight cannot help but bring together love and knowledge in ways not anticipated by the conventions of love poetry.