ABSTRACT
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, Aeolus has two trumpets called ‘Laude’ and ‘Sklaunder’ with which he broadcasts the judgements of Fame to the world. One is golden and sweet-smelling, the other black and foul. The names of these two instruments correspond to a pair of antonyms common in classical and medieval Latin: laus and vituperatio. Poets of every sort, from common minstrels to classical masters, figure large in the entourage of the goddess, and Puttenham was right to remember the House of Fame as a poem about poetry. Although the opposition between laus and vituperatio went back to the rhetoricians of antiquity, whose concern was public speaking, it was taken over by medieval writers on the ars poetriae. In Chaucer’s poetry — very unlike Dante’s — there is only one passage where invective concerns contemporary affairs. In his sequence of ‘tragedies’, the pilgrim Monk directs two stanzas at the treacherous assassination in 1369 of Pedro, king of Castile and Leon.
