Choreographing Fin'amor: Dance and the Game of Love in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

This article examines the rhetorical "daunce" in Geoffrey Chaucer's epic romance Troilus and Criseyde. More specifically, this article explains that "daunce" a term that appears a total of thirteen times and in every book of Troilus and Criseyde, and nowhere in Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato-is the predominant mode of fin'amor in the poem, casting discourse about love as a playful dance in which partners move, whirl, and spin each other with rhetoric. Understanding the love game as a rhetorical dance better explains the sometimes deeply problematic interactions of the poem's main characters-Pandarus, Criseyde, Troilus, and Diomede.