3 - Troilus and Criseyde and the Letter of Cupid: MS Cosin V.ii.13

Summary

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is most often discussed with respect to its Italian sources and context, but its early fifteenth-century English readers operated within a French-influenced literary and cultural atmosphere. For example, the well-known frontispiece to Troilus and Criseyde in Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 61, dated before 1415, visually locates Chaucer and his masterpiece in a context that is both French and English. Elizabeth Salter suggests that the manuscript's fifteenth-century owners were most likely “families whose connections with France, during those years, were particularly close, and whose taste for French book-painting was particularly strong.” The border and foliate sprays of the frontispiece are recognizably English, probably the product of a London or East Anglian decorator, but the miniature within, with its diagonal layout, its figures and facial types strongly influenced by masters from Paris and Brussels, and its architectural gestures reminiscent of the workshops of the Limbourg brothers, would have been equally recognizably French to its early and mid-fifteenth-century owners. The mise-enpage of Corpus 61 would likely also have sent French cultural signals to its readers, for as they visually differentiated lyric, letter, complaint, and narrative, the Troilus scribes followed scribal practices commonly found in manuscripts of French fourteenth century works such as the Remede de Fortune and the Voir Dit of Machaut. Even the “pulpit” motif in the Corpus frontispiece, Salter argued, may imitate similar scenes in late fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century French manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de vie humaine, in which Guillaume himself is depicted as he lectures his audience. The bearded “Chaucer” pulpit figure in the center of the frontispiece illustrates the way Chaucer as the author of Troilus and Criseyde would have been viewed by his earliest readers: English by birth yet immersed in the world of French art and literature.

This chapter will examine two other fifteenth-century literary actions that connect Troilus and Criseyde to a French literary context. One action is authorial: in 1402, just two years after Chaucer's death, Thomas Hoccleve took it upon himself to translate and adapt Christine de Pizan's Epistre au Dieu d’Amours. In his adaptation, here called the Letter of Cupid to distinguish it from Christine's text, Hoccleve reads both Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women through the lens of contemporary French conversations about female skepticism of fin’amor rhetoric and male loyauté.