No Future, Perhaps*

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores the medieval idea of contingent futurities, especially as it is explored by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde. In contrast to the prevalent understanding of the divine experience of futurity as an eternal present made famous by Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy, the human experience of sublunar futurity is plagued by uncertainty, fear, anticipation, and even regret. In the face of what Lady Philosophy in the Consolation called hap, a puzzling and undecipherable confluence of events in the future, the human condition is necessarily one of radical uncertainty. This essay considers how Chaucer imagines Criseyde in the grip of a hap whose outcome the readers of his poem knew well, but which none of his characters could have known, the fall of Troy. Interestingly, the Middle English word for “future” occurs for the first time in this poem (outside of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius) in two speeches of Criseyde.