The Middle English Verse Love Epistle

Author / Editor
Camargo, Martin.

Title
The Middle English Verse Love Epistle

Published
Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1991.

Physical Description
viii, 220 pp.

Description
Surveys the historical, literary, and rhetorical development of the Middle English verse love epistle, tracing its precursors in Latin and Continental traditions, the roles of TC and Gower's Cinkante Balades, and the flowering of the genre in the English fifteenth century. The letters of TC, especially the "Litera Troili," served as seminal models of function and form for the tradition through about 1550, only to be replaced in the Renaissance by Ovid's Heroides.
Camargo provides comprehensive description and discussion of printed and manuscript versions of love epistles from 1400-1568.

Chaucer Subjects
Background and General Criticism.
Troilus and Criseyde.
Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.