The Chaucer Review

The phrases for Goddes love and for the love of God appear in each of Chaucer's major works, usually spoken in dialogue. In Chaucer's English, Ralph Elliott discussed the extensive use of the phrase for Goddes love in each of Chaucer's poems, noting that, as early as the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer "was clearly responding to characteristic elements in contemporary English speech, at least to the extent of recognizing them and incorporating them in dialogue."¹ For example, Pertolet in the Nun's Priest's Tale calls on God when chastising Chaunticleer for overreacting to his bad dream, and she uses the phrase to great humorous effect when she tells him, "For Goddes love, as taak som laxatyf " (VII 2943). In Troilus and Criseyde alone, I count fifty instances of the phrases for Goddes love and for the love of God, with thirty-five of these in Books II and III, and it is almost always spoken as part of dialogue between two characters (in the two exceptions, the narrator uses the phrase). Both Elliott and Richard Neuse have agreed that these oaths, particularly in Troilus, tend to be overlooked by critics, with Neuse noting that the appeals to God "are altogether unobtrusive enough to the point of seeming mere verbal tics or fillers."² I contend that we must be careful not to overlook these common [End Page 439] phrases, and we must also resist the temptation of trying to establish a single pattern of usage, as the phrases are used with vastly disparate intentions by particular characters. They mean different things when spoken in different contexts.

This article considers specific instances of appeals to God in Troilus and Criseyde in order to show how their usage in various situations highlights the semantic fluidity of phrases that signal the problem of linguistic disjunction between their constitutive signs and their referents. If there is a pattern to be drawn from this, I argue that it is not to establish a hierarchy between caritas and cupiditas or paganism and Christianity, but to call attention to the ways in which the idiomatic nature of these expressions invites an exploitation of their ambiguity by individual speakers. Throughout Troilus, the assertion of personal agency in defiance of immediate contingencies that limit possibilities for action most often takes the form of rhetorical performance and persuasion; sensing a loss of control over their own lives, characters attempt to exert control over the lives of others.³ These phrases also reveal a slippage between each character's personal motivation and rhetorical performance, a feature long recognized as central to Chaucer's poetry, particularly in Troilus.⁴

The phrases for the love of God and for Goddes love function as appeals to divine love that invoke either God's justice or God's mercy, while each specific meaning depends entirely on our understanding of a character's particular subject position and motivation. With each use, we as readers are asked to consider the utterance's significance within any number of competing contextual systems. This is particularly difficult in Chaucer's Troilus, where the lines between pagan and Christian theology and language are blurred, leaving us to wonder whose love or to which god is the speaker appealing.⁵ The phrase for [End Page 440] Goddes love can be read either as a subjective or objective genitive, with further ambiguity produced by the fact that in Middle English goddes can be read as either singular ('for god's love' or 'for our love of god') or plural ('for the gods' love' or 'for our love of the gods'). In this case, one is tempted to read a singular construction—in both for the love of God and for Goddes love—as anachronistic Christian discourse on the part of the poem's Trojan characters, with the plural sense as fittingly pagan, though the poem resists such easy distinctions.

The real concern over the phrases for the love of God and for Goddes love is not that the utterances can potentially produce meaning within both pagan and Christian discourse, but that they actually fail to...