“Us from visible and invisible foon / Defende” (Troilus and Criseyde, V, 1866–67): A Previously Unrecognized Liturgical Echo

Abstract

Abstract Chaucer's borrowing from Dante's Paradiso 14 for the closing prayer in the final stanza of Troilus and Criseyde has been well known since the nineteenth century, but previous scholars have overlooked how the phrase “visible and invisible foon” (V, 1866) echoes a Latin formula in the liturgy. In Middle English sources, the collocation of “visible” and “invisible” with words for “enemy” was relatively rare. Drawing on David Lawton's theory of voice and “public interiorities,” the article considers how the religious turn at the end of the poem is marked by the translation into the vernacular of a Latin phrase that appears in liturgical sources and is related to language that commonly appears in sermons, biblical commentaries, and royal ordinations, including the coronation of Richard II in 1377.