(ca. 1460–1480)
The Floure and the Leaf is a 595-line MIDDLE ENGLISH poem in RHYME ROYAL stanzas that was formerly attributed to Geoffrey CHAUCER, but is certainly too late to be his. The great Chaucerian scholar W.W. Skeat included it in his volume of Chaucerian and Other Pieces, and argued forcefully that it was written by the author of another anonymous Middle English poem, The Assembly of Ladies, but Skeat’s opinion has not found a consensus. The title comes from an aristocratic game in the French and English courts of the late 14th century, in which members of the court took sides in love debates, in particular those associated with the celebration of May, in which the courtiers supported either the party of the Flower or of the Leaf. Chaucer alludes to this court fad in the Prologue to his LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN, and GOWER makes a similar allusion in his CONFESSIO AMANTIS. The French poet Eustace DESCHAMPS wrote three BALLADES on the subject, taking the side of the Flower in two of them, and of the Leaf in the third. In the poem, a female narrator rises early to walk in a grove, from which, on a wide meadow beyond, she sees two parties of noble men and women. The first group, dressed in white and led by Diana, goddess of chastity, and including nine worthy knights later identified as the NINE WORTHIES, is the company of the Flower. The company of the Leaf arrives dressed in green, and led by Flora, goddess of the flowers. The parties sing and dance, and the knights joust, but the party of the Flower suffers from the heat, and when a great hailstorm comes up they suffer again, from the buffets of hail and from the cold. The adherents of the Leaf are safe from these extremes of temperature as they take shelter under the laurel tree, and they comfort the Flower party after the storm. The ALLEGORY of the two parties seems obvious. The Flower may look beautiful but is transient and delicate, and if the poem is related to a love debate, the flower suggests impermanence, a fickleness that is easily affected by passions that may blow hot and cold.The sturdier, more enduring Leaf suggests fidelity. In the poem, the narrator meets another Lady who acts as her guide, and who explains the allegory of the two parties, condemning those of the Flower for their idleness. The guide then asks the narrator which faction she herself would support, and the narrator opts for the Leaf, a decision for which she is praised. The condemnation of the “hot and cold” fickleness of lovers recalls Thomas MALORY’s comments about love in his Le MORTE DARTHUR, with which this poem is roughly contemporary. But the lovevision genre owes a great deal to Chaucer’s DREAM VISION poems like The Legend of Good Women and The PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS. Echoes of LYDGATE, Deschamps, and the ROMAN DE LA ROSE are also apparent in the text. The female narrator is unusual, and some have speculated that the poet was a woman, though there is no way to prove such a theory. No manuscript version of the poem is extant. The earliest text of the poem is a printed version in Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer’s works. John Dryden, ironically admiring the work as one of Chaucer’s best, composed a modernized version of the poem in his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700).
Bibliography
■ Barratt, Alexandra A. T. “ ‘The Flower and the Leaf ’ and ‘The Assembly of Ladies’: Is There a (Sexual) Difference?” Philological Quarterly 66 (1987): 1–24.
■ The Floure and the Leafe. In The Floure and the Leafe; The Assembly of Ladies; The Isle of Ladies, edited by Derek Pearsall. Kalamazoo,Mich.:Medieval Institute Publications, 1990.
■ Harrington, David V. “The Function of Allegory in The Flower and the Leaf,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970): 244–253.
■ Skeat,W.W., ed. Chaucerian and Other Pieces. Vol. 7, The Works of Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897.