“Buried in an Herte”: French Poetics and the Ends of Genre in Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity Available to Purchase

This article analyzes Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity in the light of the current renewed interest in form and English-French literary relations. It argues that a knowledge of medieval French poetic conventions reveals an interplay between form and meaning in Pity that would have been obvious in its original fourteenth-century bilingual Ricardian setting, but which is overlooked in modern readings. By exaggerating and twisting multiple components of the French love literature tradition, Chaucer creates a poem that is simultaneously both a clever critique and a loving homage of complaint.