Understanding Deschamps's Ballade Praising Chaucer in the Context of Early Humanist Epistolary Exchanges in Verse and Prose

Abstract:Eustache Deschamps's famous ballade praising Chaucer as "great translator" is best understood in the context of the early French humanist milieu whose literary values, linguistic markers, and transcultural reach it displays. With this epistolary ballade, written in the late 1390s and avant-garde at the time, Deschamps wanted to establish a literary friendship and an exchange of poetic writings with Chaucer, whom Deschamps perceived as a fellow humanist poet-translator, and whom he lauded for translating eloquence into the English language. Evidence for this new interpretation comes from comparisons of Deschamps's Ballade 285 with early fifteenth-century epistolary exchanges in French verse and prose, including letters from the debate over Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose and the exchange of poetic praise between Deschamps and Christine de Pizan; from the Latin epistolary exchanges of the last quarter of the fourteenth century between leading French and Italian humanists Jean de Montreuil and Coluccio Salutati; and also from Petrarch's Latin letters to long-dead classical authors, which permitted no reply. Although Ballade 285 survives only in the collection of 300 "moral ballades" at the beginning of the huge manuscript of his collected works in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 840, Deschamps must have valued it, for this is the only section whose content he is thought to have selected and ordered himself before his death in 1404.