ABSTRACT
The fragments of the Heroides in the Legend tell us little or nothing about Chaucer's feeling for the Ovidian heroic epistle. Here the total epistolary format has been abandoned and the heroine's words or quotation of Ovid conform more or less to the narrative lament pattern common to Dido in Book of the Hous of Fame and Criseyde in Books II and IV of Troihis. Chaucer's polite, graceful and conventional style in these letters sets the tone for the vast number of amatory verse epistles which was to be written in England in the fifteenth century. The style is similar in Latin and French. They are racy, unsophisticated and crammed with detail. Chaucer's achievement in the letter genre is stylistically distinct from that of his medieval forerunners and of his fifteenth-and sixteenth-century imitators. Only one English verse epistle of Charles of Orleans aims at a conversational style.
