Chaucer treats the subject of love in many forms and across genres from fabliau to romance, with a unique variety and flexibility. His works draw on classical, continental and English traditions; on courtly and chivalric ideals and practices; and the tropes of Christianity.It is often in the reshaping, adapting and undercutting of material and motifs that the originality of Chaucer’s works lies.In exploring love, Chaucer also probes the psychology of loss and grief, the physiology of love, the paradoxes of fin’ amor, and the ways in which love can open onto the sublime.Chaucer’s treatment of love is intimately connected with questions of gender, in particular, the possibilities of female agency and voice.This essay makes reference to a range of Chaucer’s works, in the context of their sources and analogues, but focuses in particular on his romance narratives, The Book of the Duchess, The Legend of Good Women, The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.