Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Memorial Verses

Throughout his career Geoffrey of Vinsauf composed highly rhetorical poems that dramatized and thus memorialized the emotions associated with England’s (and his own) greatest triumphs and tragedies. His most frequently quoted poem, the lament for King Richard I, probably began as just such a composition. Geoffrey’s occasional pieces clearly and succinctly embody the grand poetic ambitions behind his Poetria nova. This essay sheds light on the ten shorter poems that have been attributed to Geoffrey both by identifying their characteristic rhetorical strategies and by translating them into English for the first time.