Left incomplete on the death of its author in 1430, Alain Chartier's lyrical-narrative-confessional work, the Livre de l'Espérance (LDE), is among the last works of the so-called father of French eloquence. The LDE engages with philosophical and theological questions concerning the origins, mechanisms, and limits of human understanding, and it does so through the optic of one person's struggle with Melancholy, with the limits of his own reason, and with the precarity of his faith in God. The LDE does not so much illustrate, as reveal the limitations of, some of the philosophical theories that circulated in the Latinate settings in which Chartier was educated, worked, and wrote, and it does so for a broad vernacular public. This endeavour is not about the diffusion, or ‘vulgarisation’ (as the French say, so evocatively) of philosophy to the masses. Rather, Chartier exploits the freedom afforded vernacular literary works to mix forms, play with generic conventions, and place conflicting ideas in dialogue in order to produce a powerfully original philosophical-devotional text that aims to transform its readers.

The LDE, which in some manuscripts bears the title Consolation des Trois Vertus, l'Exil, or even l'Imparfait, is a prosimetrum comprised (in its existing state) of sixteen poems alternating with as many passages in prose, which recounts the first-person protagonist's struggle with – and possible victory over – Melancholy. The unfinished state of the text seems not to have deterred medieval readers, for the text survives in over thirty manuscripts, nine with programmes of illumination. Indeed, it may be that the text's very open-endedness contributed to its appeal for medieval audiences; it ends with the fate of its protagonist still pending, like the eschatological outcomes of the lives of its readers.

At the time of the LDE 's composition the kingdom of France had suffered decades of civil and foreign war, plague, and religious schism. In 1418 the Burgundian faction took control of Paris, killing or forcing into exile the partisans of the Armagnac faction, including the then-dauphin, the future Charles VII. Chartier, a member of the French royal chancery and a diplomat in the service of the so-called roi de Bourges, Charles VII, was living what he calls in the opening line of the LDE, the ‘diziesme an de mon dolent exil’ (tenth year of my sorrowful exile, Po. 1, 1).