The Tale of Melibee, or, as it was called in some manuscripts and the early prints of the Canterbury Tales, the Tale of Chaucer, is based on a Latin treatise, the Liber consolationis et consilii, written in 1246 by the Italian jurist, Albertano of Brescia, one of the earliest medieval authors unaffiliated with the Church or a university to have written a significant body of discursive prose. The same author composed two other treatises, the Liber de amore et dilectione in 1238 and the Liber de doctrina dicendi et tacendi in 1245, each of them, like the Liber consolationis et consilii, nominally addressed to one of his sons. Though Chaucer's familiarity with these works is sometimes called into question, the evidence long ago presented by Emil Koeppel, much of it drawn from the Merchant's Tale and the Manciple's Tale, has never been refuted. These three works frequently appear in the same manuscript, sometimes accompanied by Albertano's “sermons” or speeches. Recently inventoried by Paolo Navone and Angus Graham, there are more than 320 Latin manuscripts containing Albertano's treatises, about half of them including the Liber consolationis et consilii. The Latin text circulated in England as early as the thirteenth century and more than a dozen thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century manuscripts of English provenance survive. Chaucer's contemporaries, like John Gower, were familiar with the Liber consolationis et consilii and the scribes who copied the Canterbury Tales glossed the Melibee, the Merchant's Tale, and the Manciple's Tale with citations from the Latin texts of several of Albertano's treatises. In the edition of the Liber consolationis et consilii which he prepared for the Chaucer Society in 1873, Thor Sundby claimed that students of the source of the Melibee would do best to consult the Latin text of Albertano, and the Latin alone. Though Sundby certainly overstated his case, his argument seems to have convinced W. W. Skeat to draw his notes to the Melibee in the Oxford Chaucer almost exclusively from the Latin text.

However, as Skeat of course knew, while Chaucer may have been familiar with the Latin, it is nonetheless clear that when he composed the Melibee he turned to the Livre de Mellibee, the French translation of the Liber consolationis et consilii prepared in 1337 by a Dominican friar from Poligny, Renaud de Louens.