Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and the 'Lives' of the Troubadours

Author / Editor
Kendrick, Laura.

Title
Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and the 'Lives' of the Troubadours

Published
Leo Carruthers and Adrian Papahagi, eds. Prologues et épilogues dans la littérature anglaise du Moyen Âge (Paris: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 2001), pp. 129-44.

Description
Suggests that collected "vidas," or "lives," of the troubadours may have served as Chaucer's model for the "portraits" of the pilgrims in GP. Individual "vidas" open anthologies of troubadour verse in some fourteenth-century manuscripts, and Chaucer may be comically adapting this convention.

Alternative Title
Prologues et épilogues dans la littérature anglaise du Moyen Âge.

Chaucer Subjects
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.