Speaking volumes: Chaucer and the legacy of the “Troilus” frontispiece

This study examines the rationale underlying the unique iconography of the frontispiece to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in Corpus Christi College Cambridge Manuscript 61. The miniature offers an ambiguous and confusing story: most often described as an illustration depicting Chaucer reading to the court of Richard II, it confounds literary expectations by its failure to depict a text before Chaucer, and social norms by depicting the poet as elevated above his sovereign.

Since the frontispiece seems to situate Chaucer in both oral and literate realms, this study examines Chaucer in light of orality/literacy theory as well as in relation to prelection, the practice of reading written texts aloud. It demonstrates that the view of Chaucer as a poet of silent reading, and, thus, the view of the Troilus frontispiece as, of necessity, a literary fiction, lacks historical validation. The oral character of the scene depicted would not necessarily have suggested fictionality to either the literary or non-literary public of the first quarter of the fifteenth century.

The frontispiece, by its depiction of a richly dressed, fashionable, and presumably courtly audience, encourages us to consider its implications within a political, or perhaps rather, a politicized, context. It testifies to a set of ideas about Chaucer, ideas that were at work in shaping the legacy of the poet in the crucial first quarter-century following his death. Considering, in the light of recent scholarship, the possibility of Henry V's having bespoken the Corpus Christi Troilus, we find that a compelling, cohesive, and comprehensible narrative emerges that explains with striking clarity the function of the Troilus frontispiece. The miniature appears to have been commissioned as a tool in the Lancastrian propaganda campaign for the promotion of English as the national language of England. The presence or absence of a literary text in front of Chaucer makes little difference to the key element that the picture is designed to portray: Chaucer's preeminence as a user and perfecter of the English language, rather than his skill as an author per se, is the concept or idea that the miniature promotes.