Afterword: The Legacy of Female Skepticism

Summary

I have been demonstrating that Chaucer's earliest readers encountered his shorter poems and the female hermeneutic dilemma in manuscript contexts that connected his work to discussions going on in French literature. John Shirley and the compiler of Gg.4.27 point frequently to later fourteenth-century French lyric as the proper context for reading Chaucer's works. As early fifteenth-century French dits come to circulate both in French and in English among mixed-gender English audiences in the 1430s, 40s, and 50s, the compilers of Cosin Durham V.ii.13, Tanner 346 and Fairfax 16 put Chaucer in conversation with the continuing French controversy about the reliability of male fin’amor suitors and the problem of loyauté, from the many works of Christine de Pizan to the poems of Alain Chartier. As a result of this consistent early contextualization, these manuscripts establish Chaucer's reputation as a French-influenced poet deeply interested in the female perspective on fin’amor from the beginning of the short poems’ circulation. My study stops rather arbitrarily, with Fairfax 16, in part because as the manuscript tradition evolves into print, the French context given to Chaucer's shorter poems remains frozen in time, never moving past Roos's 1440 translation of La Belle Dame Sans Mercy. But as the following, regrettably cursory overview will suggest, this idea of Chaucer, and the skeptical female voice he made prominent, retains its potency, because the early manuscripts influence the print tradition.

The compilers of later fifteenth-century Chaucer short poems manuscripts keep Chaucer's ventriloquized female skepticism about male courtly rhetoric alive. Like their predecessors, they continue to replicate the pre-1425 French context that encourages audiences to think of Chaucer as exploring the concerns of the female loving subject in dialogue with early fifteenth-century French literary traditions. Bodley 638, closely related textually to both Tanner 346 and Fairfax 16, includes Ragman's Roll and places Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid after Lydgate's Temple of Glass and before Chaucer's Pity and Legend of Good Women. Oxford, Bodleian Library Digby MS 181 gathers Troilus and Criseyde with Anelida and Arcite, Parliament of Foules, Lydgate's Complaint of the Black Knight, and Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid, a contextualization that offers support for both the Troilus narrator's Book V description of women as victims of male deceit and for Troilus's sense of injury.