Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints

Download or read book Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints written by Dana M Symons and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2004-11-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On several counts, one particular collection of French lyrics made in France in the late fourteenth century, University of Pennsylvania MS 15, is the most likely repository of Chaucer's French poems. It is the largest manuscript anthology extant of fourteenth-century French lyrics in the formes fixes (balade, rondeaux, virelay, lay, and five-stanza chanson) with by far the largest number of works of unknown authorship. The known authors represented in the manuscript and the texts themselves have notable associations with England and with Chaucer. And intriguingly there are fifteen lyrics each headed by the initials Ch, very likely indications of authorship, neatly inserted between rubric and text. . . . [The] rubrics, together with other substantial manuscript evidence and the intrinsic worth of the poems, make them easily the best candidates among extant French lyrics for Chaucer's authorship, appropriate representatives of his French work. - from the Introduction