Scribal glosses and hidden auctores in the manuscripts of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

It would be an arduous task to compile all the academic research ever published about Chaucer and his use of sources in the creation of Troilus and Criseyde. But there are still many aspects of Chaucer’s relationship with his sources that have been left largely unexplored. In particular, there is yet much to unearth in how the scribes, Chaucer’s earliest readers and fundamental agents in the shaping of the poem as we know it now, mediated the allusions that Chaucer, openly or otherwise, introduces in his text. In this paper, I explore the different scribal approaches to two of the most notable Latin sources of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: the portraits of Troilus, Criseyde, and Diomede in Joseph of Exeter’s Daretis Phrygii Ylias de bello troiano, and the summary of the twelve books of the Thebaid. The annotations analyzed in this article allow us a unique glimpse into the process of composition of the poem, as well as the twists and turns of its textual history, and the expectations had by all the agents involved in the creation, transmission, and interpretation of Troilus and Criseyde. Furthermore, they illuminate different aspects of the familiarity of the reading public with the classical authors in fifteenth-century England.