As the ‘Clerk of Oxenford […] preved by his wordes’ (IV. 1, 28) in the prologue to his tale, ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete’, although ‘deed and nayled in his cheste’ (IV. 29–31), was undergoing the process of immortalization by the time that Chaucer wrote both the Canticus Troili and the Clerk's Tale. What remains of Petrarch is ‘his rhethorike sweete [that] | Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ (IV. 32–3). The Italian laureate would subsequently be “nailed in his chest” by those sonnets which, together, constitute the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, boxed in by those vernacular lyrics which he himself considered inferior to his Latin works. Yet for Chaucer and his contemporaries Petrarch's reputation was not so confined. Far from being associated with a single vernacular form, Petrarch was regarded as the foremost littérateur and Latin scholar of his age. For example, the anonymous French translator of Le Livre Griseldis refers to him as ‘un tres vaillant et moult solennel poete’ (‘a very worthy and most solemn poet’). Likewise Boccaccio, in the preface to his De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women), describes him as ‘vir insignis et poeta egregious Franciscus Petrarca, preceptor noster’ (‘that renowned man and great poet, my teacher Petrarch’), whilst Chaucer's Monk advises his readers to consult ‘my maister Petrak’ (VII. 2325). Aptly enough, as we shall discuss in later chapters, the Clerk's tale of Walter and Griselda is not only a translation of a work by Petrarch, but a translation of a translation and a testament to the linguistic internationalism of the later Middle Ages. Chaucer himself, not least of all because of his upbringing in the Vintry Ward and his career in the customs house, excelled in this translative environment – indeed he was the ‘Grant Translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier’, as Deschamps dubbed him.5 In consequence, the present chapter will examine the Canticus Troili, the first ever translation of a Petrarchan sonnet into English, in order to illustrate this title through a tracing of Chaucer's translative praxis. The Canticus Troili will be seen as being akin to the Clerk's Tale not only in its Petrarchan source, but in that it, too, enacts the reflexive, dynamic “becoming” of the writer through translation.

Prior to examining the translation itself, however, it would help to consider where RVF 132 (‘S’amor non è’) is situated within the wider scope of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as a whole.