ABSTRACT
The literary tradition of courtly love was a pervasive and attractive one in Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary world. Most important is Chaucer’s reaction to two particular courtly love conventions which the poet inherited from the French: the idea of love as ennobling, and the idealization of the lady. The courtly love lyric was above all a poem about the aspirations of the aristocratic class: “The early courtly lyric explores the possibility that in his love for a woman, a man might search for an ideal which could refine his being”. In adopting the conventional “complaint” form for quite early poem, Chaucer also adopted the conventional persona of the courtly lover, and therefore brought into play all of the courtly conventions. The performer assumes the role of the courtly lover, and plays upon the opinions and responses of the different elements of Frederick Goldin audience.
