Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Quasi-Iconoclastic Present

Abstract

As can be surmised from his actions, proclivities, and writing, René d’Anjou piratically hypostatized courtly life into performance texts that reflect Fürstenspiegel, and particularly Arthurian, values. That is, he not only translated words into actions in his own life by heeding precepts, as witnessed in his Lancelot-like return to prison, he also surrounded himself with concrete articulations of visually powerful narratives that may well have functioned as reminders to uphold the complex ideals of chivalric behavior, whether these figured narratives were articulated in allegories, such as found in the Mortifiement de vaine plaisance, the Livre du coeur d’amours épris, and the various tapestries gracing his opulently appointed abodes; in the celebratory tournaments decked out in literary themes, Arthurian or pastoral; or in his own tomb’s complex message framed in the literary system of governance and phatically raising questions about life’s mutability. Rather than being lodged in the present mode of conative exhortation typical in the literary system of governance, René shaped allegorical and other figurative forms to create past-oriented reflections and meditations that emphasize the addresser’s position in emotive projections of how he might be understood beyond what appearances suggest and thereby possibly be remembered in good fame. In this vein, Le coeur complexly memorializes poets, along with René himself, and demonstrates how difficult it can be to achieve a fame-worthy goal, as it also phatically reflects upon an evocatively platonic world, in which transitory trappings promulgate Arthurian rather than eternal ideals.