The Romaunt of the Rose

Written in Old French, in octosyllabic, iambic tetrameter couplets, the poem was an allegory of what D. S. Brewer called fine amour.

[5] Geoffrey Chaucer began translating Le Roman into Middle English early in his career, perhaps in the 1360s.

"Le Roman" enabled Chaucer to introduce a "stylish wit and literary manner" to his English audience and then to claim these attributes as his own.

"[13] An early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Romaunt of the Rose was included in the library William Hunter donated to the University of Glasgow in 1807.

Commissioned by Henry VIII to search for copies of Chaucer's manuscripts in the libraries and monasteries of England, Thynne printed a collection that included the Romaunt of the Rose.

Working independently, Bradshaw and Dutch philologist Bernard ten Brink concluded that the existing version of the Romaunt was not Chaucer's translation of le Roman, and they placed the work on a list that included other disqualified poems no longer considered to have been written by Chaucer.

[15] Citing research by both Linder and Kaluza, Walter Skeat, a nineteenth-century scholar, divided the Romaunt into the following three fragments that correspond to French text in le Roman: Le Roman continues another 9,510 lines without a corresponding English translation in the Romaunt.

When the 5,547 untranslated lines between fragments B and C are included, the English translation is roughly one-third of the original French poem.

In what Skeat said would be a "libellous" attribution to Chaucer, the author of fragment C rhymed paci-ence with venge-aunce and force with croce.

In a recent metrical analysis of text, Xingzhong Li concluded that fragment C was in fact written by Chaucer or at least "88% Chaucerian.

"[3] The story begins with an allegorical dream, in which the narrator receives advice from the god of love on gaining his lady's favor.

The rest of the fragment is a confession given by Fals-Semblant, or false-seeming, which is a treatise on the ways in which men are false to one another, especially the clergy to their parishioners.