The mid-fifteenth century saw the emergence of thematically organized manuscripts of Chaucer's shorter poems: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 346, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, and Longleat House Library MS 258. These anthologies would in turn be imitated in the last quarter of the 1400s by the compilers of Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 2006; Bodleian Library MS Bodley 638; Bodleian Library MS Digby 181; and the Findern anthology, Cambridge University Library F.1.6. All of these compilers anthologize Chaucer's Hous of Fame, Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Foules, and Anelida and Arcite with texts such as Lydgate's Temple of Glass, Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid, and Richard Roos's English translation of Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame Sans Mercy. These post-1440 anthologies mark a shift in intensity: they typically include more of Chaucer's shorter poems than do the early manuscripts, including some that appear not to have been previously in circulation: his Complaint to Pity, Complaint to His Purse, Envoy to Bukton; his Book of the Duchess, and the F Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. Moreover, unlike the earlier manuscripts, they feature poems exclusively in English (though some of them are translated from French); and they place more thematic emphasis on the female hermeneutic dilemma.

This increase in thematic intensity and Chaucerian focus should not blind us to the continuity between the early and mid-fifteenth-century anthologies: the mid-century and later shorter poems anthologies amplify a pattern of French contextualization already laid down by the early fifteenth-century compilers. In other words, evidence for the fifteenth-century idea of Chaucer as a participant in the French fin’amor tradition, and for the fifteenth-century perception of him as “womanis frend,” does not suddenly appear in the 1440s. Rather, the mid-and later fifteenth-century manuscripts merely make these ideas more visibly central to his construction as author. Via this centrality, these anthologies also address or construct an audience that, like John Shirley's in Trinity R.3.20, includes both men and women, and that openly acknowledges, even addresses, the tension between male and female interests and viewpoints.