In their authoritative Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Bryan and Dempster take the descriptive portrait of the rhetorical tradition to be the only known background for the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (pp. 3–5). Three pages of the introductory chapter, contributed by L. A. Haselmayer, are devoted to this tradition, and in particular to the series of portraits in the Roman de Troie of Benoit de Ste-Maure, but the conclusion is that

Although the fruitfulness of looking in places quite outside of the portrait tradition for ‘sources or appropriate analogues’ to the Prologue should now be clear, its connection with the descriptio tradition also needs clarification. In this chapter I shall discuss, first, the techniques developed in the portrait tradition which Chaucer could have used for the presentation of complex figures, and second, the links between the formal portrait and the estates tradition.

The influence of the rhetorical descriptio personae on the Prologue is recognisable in the form – a series of self-contained descriptions – and in the content of these descriptions, which in certain instances shows clear affinities with the traditional content of such portraits.