From Larry Scanlon, “Sweet Persuasion: The Subject of Fortune in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Trolius and Criseyde: ‘Subgit to alle Poesye’: Essays in Criticism, ed. R.A. Shoaf (Binghamton, 1992)

The Middle Ages clearly understood and valued Fortune’s figural complexity. As Derek Pearsall astutely observes:

The paradox of Boethius’s influence upon the Middle Ages. . .is that the illusions of Fortune’s power that Philosophy so

authoritatively dispels proved more potent and resilient as images than the rational arguments demonstrating their

non-existence. Medieval literature is full of portraits of the awesome goddess Fortuna, and particularly fond of

demonstrations of the remorseless and arbitrary power of her Wheel.

For a later medieval culture, there is no better illustration of the image’s potency than Boccaccio’s De casibus, which uses Fortune as the central organizing principle in an encyclopedic exploration of the falls of illustrious men from Adam to contemporary princes. Often mistakenly assigned to the tradition of the De contempt mundi, the work is in act much more closely related to the Fürstenspeigel, the Mirror of Princes. (215)

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Nevertheless, to understand fully the political charge Fortune held for medieval court audiences, it is necessary to return to the Consolatio and examine the dramatic circumstances in which its sweet persuasion is offered. As a senator condemned for treason, deprived of his property and imprisoned, what Boethius faces is expulsion from the ruling class. If this dilemma affects him most directly, it also implicates the ruling class as a whole. For it presents the possibility that the hegemonic power in which each member has some share can suddenly and unpredictably turn against him. The Consolatio’s dramatic situation marks the ideological limit of the internal unity of the ruling class. Fortune figures that limit, and figures it in such a way as to reduce its threat. For although the image of Fortune and her wheel speaks to the contingency of material power, it understands such contingency as absolutely random, and denies it any coherent historical specificity. It assumes an invariable baseline against which increases or losses are measured, an immutable status quo, which in application will turn out to be the existing class structure. . . .

The status quo which underwrites Fortune's game also underwrites Philosophy's Stoic antidote, the internal self-possession which enables one to see through Fortune's illusions. For if we ask what exactly is possessed in this state of self-possession, we will see it can be nothing other than the equilibrium that exists in the moment before Fortune's game begins--in other words, one's social position. To suggest that some element of one's social position is innate, self-possessed, is simply to ratify the bias already built into any society ruled by an aristocracy of birth. In the figure of Fortune an aristocratic class can at once recognize the flux of historical existence, and affirm its own privilege as a locus of stability beyond such flux.

Furthermore, the recognition enables the aristocracy to evade its own role in producing that flux. Great men who fell from the top of Fortune's wheel were usually given a good push by would-be great men below them. Fortune completely deflects such intra-class conflict, whose motivations are clearly identifiable and highly specific, onto to its own random, indefinite figural space. It establishes a rhetorical common ground to which the ruling class can appeal even at that moment when it is most divided. Thus Paulus can weep for Perses at the very moment he captures him. Here is the subtlety, at once rhetorical and ideological, which Fortune's ostensible simplicity conceals. As a figure, Fortune seems entirely threadbare. It consists of nothing more than a perfunctory indication of gender and the single image of the wheel, whose sole function is to register, in an abstract and completely dehistoricized fashion, the variability of political power. Yet that is precisely the point. The figure designates a specific interest at work in the process of history and simultaneously denies its specificity. It allows history to be understood at once as receptive to sentient action,and as entirely given. It serves perfectly the ideological needs of an aristocratic ruling class, which must continually struggle to maintain its privilege, but wishes also to understand that privilege as a given. (216-17)

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In "Sweet Persuasion," Scanlon argues that Fortune was wildly popular with medieval aristocrats because she displaced the arbitrariness and cruel competitiveness of courtly culture. Private ambitions and vicious rivalries regroup under the universalizing sign of Fortune's wheel . . . . .Fortune's universal arbitrariness screens the class-specific destructivity of the aristocracy.

(L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer [Minneapolis, 2003]: 129)