Geoffrey Chaucer lived in the Middle Ages and it would be one of the most well-known things about him. Many historians and literary critics take issue with the widespread cultural appropriation and abjection of words like "medieval" to describe anything that is perceived as old-fashioned or outmoded; or the careless use of the phrase "dark ages" to describe the many centuries between early Latin and Greek scholarship and their so-called re-birth or "renaissance" in fifteenth-century Europe. On those grounds alone, we might well resist the easy identification of Chaucer with the Middle Ages. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, for example, offers a very nuanced version of cultural and temporal layering, though it is not without contradictions. The poem is set in ancient Troy, in the city under siege by the Greeks.