Fortune, Fate, and Free Will: Chaucer’s Encounters with Providence

It’s easy to assume that the world is innately unstable as Chaucer seems to do in the short poems “Truth”, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”, “The Forger Age” and “Gentilesse”, and yet we are called to wonder with the Black Knight in The Book of the Duchess how any divine authority could let this be the case. As Lady Philosophy informs readers in Boece, the world is not really Fortune’s chaotic kingdom of unreliability. Instead, the Earth and all that happens within it has already been laid out in the plan of Providence, which unravels regardless of whether individuals are aware of it, as various approaches to Providence in Troilus and Criseyde prove. At Troilus’ final ascension into Heaven after his death, Lady Philosophy’s abstract reasoning becomes the reader’s lived experience, as Chaucer transforms intellectual revelation into personal revelation through his supreme skill of narrative artistry.