Many of the concerns we have traced in the dream-visions are explored more fully in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer's best-known and most substantial work outside the Canterbury Tales, and one completed in the mid-1380s. The concern with female reputation is at the heart of the work, and is voiced by Criseyde herself after her betrayal of Troilus in Book V, in terms similar to Dido's:

The interventions that the text makes to defend Criseyde from this defamation lie less in the narrator's overt sympathy for her in Book V – ‘if I myghte excuse hire any wise, | For she so sory was for hire untrouthe, | Iwis, I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe’ (ll. 1097–9) – than in the emphasis that pervades Chaucer's account of the affair on the powerlessness of Criseyde and the fierce manipulation she was subject to by the males around her. Indeed, she seems a classic case of a pawn in a patriarchal world.Within this world, to be sure, she gains what advantage she can through using her sexual attractiveness to win protection and partners, and it is a little difficult, after she has been dumped in the Greek camp through the sudden access of affection from her father, and with the bully-boy attentions of Diomede bearing down on her, to express moral outrage at the way she acquiesces in the face of this. In short, if we expect her to be a ‘heroine’, we will be disappointed, but Chaucer is testing his readers in this text by going beyond conventional literary expectations. As David Aers puts it, Chaucer ‘has created a profound vision of a social individual whose bad faith was almost impossible to avoid, encouraged and prepared for by the habits and practices of the very society which would, of course, condemn such a betrayal with righteous moral indignation’.