Instrumentalizing Griseldis: Promotion of a Royal French Child Bride for Richard II and the Production of a Rhymed, Illustrated Play of Griseldis

ABSTRACT This article sets Chaucer’s rhymed English translation of Petrarch’s Griselda story (the Clerk’s Tale) and his “Envoy de Chaucer” into the context of contemporary French political instrumentalizations of Petrarch’s Griselda story by Philippe de Mézières and high-level French chancery officials, who persuaded the widowed Richard II to marry Charles VI’s six-year-old daughter, Isabelle, as an easily trainable “new Griseldis.” Evidence comes chiefly from the comparative study of Mézières’s Epistre au Roi Richart, relevant sections of Froissart’s Chronicles and of the Grandes Chroniques de France, and analysis of the text and illustrations of the small vellum manuscript of the Livre de l’istoire de Griseldis (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France fr. 2203), a rhymed, dramatized version of Petrarch’s Griselda story surviving in a single copy dated 1395 by its colophon and probably made by French chancery officers for the instruction and entertainment of little Isabelle.