The French Balades

John Gower is distinct among medieval English poets in composing extensively in all three of late medieval England’s major languages: Middle English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman French. Moreover, Gower is unique in Western medieval poetry and music as the only native Englishman proven to have composed Anglo-French poems in the “fixed forms” genres of the balade, rondeau, and virelai, the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. This edition presents both sets of Gower’s late fourteenth-century balades in their original Anglo-French verse alongside modern English translations: Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz, or “Treatise Following the Authorities as an Example for Married Lovers,” a staunch defense of married love comprising eighteen balades in rhyme royal; and his Cinkante Balades, or “Fifty Balades,” Gower’s title for a sequence of fifty-four balades addressing themes of loyalty, temptation, separation, and reconciliation in love.