Balis, Nathaniel Cogswell

The search for all sources of The Romaunt of the Rose, the fourteenth-century English version of Le roman de la Rose, focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer. The authorship controversy is so divisive that prominent medievalists like Huot, Hult, Robertson, and Badel write long volumes on the Roman's influence without mentioning the Romaunt. Comparing Geissman's list of rime-borrowings with both poems' concordances is the only way to end the debate, because Chaucer is the likeliest author and one must start with the most compatible French and English texts. At present, the best way to test Geoffrey Chaucer's authorship of the Middle English Romaunt is through close examination of the French rime-borrowings most orthoepically comparable in both languages that the Middle English writer occasionally chose to translate rather than borrow. This selective borrowing suggests the translator's attempt to bring each term slowly into the English mainstream, by using it at first only in its literal sense.

Among the first Old English inflectional forms to vanish were the instrumentals, surviving only in the interrogative pronoun that became the Modern English word "why." Its four synonymous forms were the only Old English words that had exclusively "instrumental" meanings. Despite their apparent importance, in all 30,535 Old English poetry lines, they occur only forty-eight times. This suggests that the Old English poetic instrumental merely imitated the Latin ablative's instrumental usage. Old English poets tried to graft onto it their own dative-instrumentals, anticipating in their meanings the goals of their clauses' subjects and in their forms the invariant preposition-plus-dative caseforms gradually replacing most Old English case inflection. This Latin-Old English discord attends all Old English instrumental interrogative clauses.