Abstract
NEAR the end of the first book of Troilus and Criseyde Pandarus famously offers Troilus amorous advice in words that paraphrase the opening of Geoffrey de Vinsauf's Poetria Nova. ‘For everi wight that hath an hous to founde / Ne renneth naught the werk for to bygynne / with rakel hond, but he wol bide a stounde, / And send his hertes line out fro withinne / Aldirfirst his purpos for to wynne’ (I.1065–9). Vinsauf's advice was clearly designed for the rhetorician and not for the lover, and it is to the poet, rather than his protagonist, that the architectural metaphor most obviously applies. It is Chaucer, and not Troilus, who stills his impetuous hand, measuring out the work beforehand. The building of cities, of poets, and of books, and the commonality of the language used to describe them are the subject of Alexandra Gillespie's Print Culture and the...
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