SOURCE: "Chaucer and the Psychology of Fear: Troilus in Book V," in ELH, Vol. 40, No. 3, Fall, 1973, pp. 307-24.

In the following essay, Hatcher discusses Chaucer's realistic presentation of Troilus's anxiety over Criseyde's infidelity in Book V of Troilus and Criseyde through comparison with a parallel passage in Boccaccio's Il Filostrato.

If… fear increases so much as to disturb the reason, it hinders action even on the part of the soul. But of such a fear the Apostle did not speak.

—St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica1

Despite St. Paul's omission and St. Thomas's caveat, medieval literature frequently gave allegorical or stylized accounts of the way fear paralyses the human mind. Prudentius, when he allows Avaritia and her unsavory followers, including Anxietas, Cura, and Metus, to strip the valuables from the corpses of the fallen Luxuria and her allies, suggests that avarice burdens the miser with a host of anxieties...