Chaucer Appropriated: The Troilus Frontispiece as Lancastrian Propaganda

Few portraits survive to satisfy our historical and personal curiosity about the man who was Geoffrey Chaucer, and hence the portrait of him that prefaces Corpus Christi College Cambridge (CCCC) MS 61 has exercised continuing fascination over the minds of literary and historical scholars alike.1 Unique among dedicatory miniatures, and borrowing, it may be, from a variety of pictorial traditions,2 the frontispiece offers a dauntingly complex iconography that has made it difficult for scholars to come to agreement as to its proper context and meanings.