Where Chaucer Got His Pulpit: Audience and Intervisuality in the Troilus and Criseyde Frontispiece

Among the many puzzles that scholars have debated in the famous Troilus and Criseyde frontispiece (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 61, fol. 1v; Fig. 1), the most puzzling may be the placement of Geoffrey Chaucer in a draped pulpit, from which he is apparently reciting his text to a courtly audience.¹ Similar pulpits could be (and have been) found in many other illuminations, but one significant difference stands out. All those other pulpits hold religious men—bishops, priests, friars. This one holds a layman. The other pulpits appear in manuscripts containing Christian scripture, theology, sermons, devotional texts; this one adorns a story of love, sex, and betrayal set in pagan Troy. The purpose of this essay is to suggest a previously unexplored iconographic source for the pulpit imagery of the Troilus frontispiece. This new explanation "saves the appearances," I think, more successfully than any yet offered. It also suggests further connections that lead to some new ideas about the role of both author and audience in the frontispiece, and perhaps in Troilus itself.

I will begin with a quick overview of current critical thought on the

Fig. 1.

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 61, fol. 1v, early 15th century. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

frontispiece.² The creator of the miniature—dubbed by Kathleen Scott the "Corpus Master"³—is generally supposed to have been either a foreign artist working in England or an English artist who had been exposed to much continental work.⁴ The frontispiece and manuscript are universally dated, on both artistic and paleographic grounds, to the first quarter of the fifteenth century.⁵ The manuscript is obviously a luxury item, employing fine parchment, wide margins, and an unusually elaborate script,⁶ and introduced by an outstanding frontispiece. While space was left for some ninety illuminations in the body of the text, however, none was produced.⁷ The general assumption is that the manuscript was initiated on orders from a commissioner and suspended when that person's misfortune or death cut off funds to complete the project. Who that patron was is unknown; no coats of arms or other recognizable features have been identified. Kathleen Scott has proposed that Corpus 61's patron and thus also the gold-clad figure standing before Chaucer in the frontispiece (on the viewer's left) was Charles d'Orléans. Subsequently, Kate Harris suggested Henry, third Baron Scrope, as manuscript patron and chief frontispiece audience-member.⁸ Most recently, Anita Helmbold has placed the patronage issue in a neohistoricist context, arguing that Henry V commissioned Corpus 61 and its introductory image "as a tool in the Lancastrian propaganda campaign for the promotion of English as the national language of England."⁹

For the purposes of my essay, the identity of the patron of Corpus 61 is not important, other than to acknowledge that he or she was probably someone of considerable wealth and standing, associated with or at least cognizant of the interests of the Lancastrian court.¹⁰ What does require notice here, however, is the late datings for the manuscript implied by these proposed patrons; production on Corpus 61 was halted, it is suggested, by Scrope's execution in 1415, by Henry V's death in 1422, or by Charles d'Orléans's financial problems in the early 1420s.¹¹ Yet as English tomb effigies and pictorial evidence reveal, the high collars and small female headdresses in the Corpus frontispiece clearly date to c. 1400-1415; after c. 1415, women's hairstyles, particularly, become very different. The fashion historian Margaret Scott dates the Troilus frontispiece itself to c. 1400.¹²

The image of Geoffrey Chaucer, nearly dead center in the picture, is recognizable as a younger version of his two other famous portraits (astride a horse as a Canterbury pilgrim in the Ellesmere Chaucer, and pointing to the text in the margin of his disciple Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes).¹³ The...