The depictions of the skeptical female reader of male fin’amor rhetoric in Christine de Pizan's poetry and Chaucer's shorter poems have ripple effects in early fifteenth-century poetry. These works suggest to French and English male poets that women might be loving subjects with agency, rather than mere objects of affection – and that there might be valid reason for women to doubt their male suitors’ intent. Christine and Chaucer open up space for a literary conversation and debate about these issues that included the female voice and skeptical perspective. But, as we will see, the male poets who respond to Christine and to Chaucer's shorter poems cannot fully de-center themselves or the male suitor. Despite acknowledging the female voice, their individual poems return to exploring the problem of male “trouthe” or loyauté, often anxiously reasserting the veracity of male fin’amor rhetoric. While the female hermeneutic dilemma has the power to make men briefly see their own rhetoric in a different light, the male perspective usually maintains or re-takes center stage, shutting down conversation in the poem.

At the more macro level, this same dynamic operates in, and is generated by, the contents and sequence of the two manuscript anthologies of Chaucer's shorter poems featured here and in the final chapter: Tanner 346 and Fairfax 16. With plenty of female readers available as a potential audience (as we saw in the previous chapter), the continued English familiarity and interest in French literary debates demonstrated by Ardis Butterfield and others, and a growing general interest in Chaucer's works, these fifteenth-century compilers had multiple incentives to gather Chaucer's shorter poems together with Lydgate, Hoccleve, and other works that, as a group, perpetuate the ongoing debate in both French and English about male loyauté and female skepticism of male fin’amor rhetoric. By doing so, I suggest, the compilers of Tanner 346 and Fairfax 16 open up space for conversation about these problems. Like the individual poets who respond to Christine and Chaucer, they sometimes struggle to maintain that openness.

Unlike the earlier manuscripts that preserve Chaucer's shorter poems, these (and later) fifteenth-century anthologies are more clearly thematic.