Chaucer was the most influential of medieval English poets. Much of his influence involved matters of style and tone unrelated to the theme of this book, but, not surprisingly, his successors' reception of Troilus and Criseyde sometimes stimulated further developments in the treatment of looking and listening. One of the most interesting cases is Partonope of Blois, a romance dating from the early fifteenth century – evidently quite a popular one, surviving in at least five manuscripts, with some marked differences among the versions. It is translated, often freely, from Partonopeus de Blois, an even more popular twelfth-century French romance – one scholar describes it as being, for its contemporaries, of equal importance to the stories of Tristan and of the Grail. The translator's identity is unknown, but it is unmistakably clear that he had read and learned from Chaucer, and especially from Troilus and Criseyde. Besides many recollections of Chaucerian phrases, the translator had learned from Chaucer a way of representing himself as a translator: that is, as a secret intruder in and commentator on the often private world of the French narrative. In doing so, he takes up Chaucer's contrast between sentement and written sources, observing that while the French poet