In the same passage in his Regiment of Princes in which he canonizes Chaucer as the “firste fyndere of our faire langage,” Thomas Hoccleve also presents his late “worthi maister” as a Marian poet. Asking Mary to serve as Chaucer’s “advoket” in heaven, he implies that she owes Chaucer her assistance because of the special devotion he showed her in his writings:

This description of Chaucer as Mary’s “servant,” working to promote her honor with a “lovyng hert” and “hye devocioun,” is echoed by John Lydgate: translating Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine, Lydgate inserts Chaucer’s “ABC to the Virgin” rather than prepare his own rendition of Deguileville’s abecedarian prayer, and he introduces this insertion with words of praise for the eloquence and “ful devout entencioun” of the Chaucerian text. An emphasis on Chaucer’s Marian piety is also evident in the famous portrait that accompanies Hoccleve’s praise of Chaucer in some manuscripts, in which Chaucer points at the text with one hand and holds a rosary with the other. The early tradition of representing Chaucer with a rosary invites readers, as William Quinn has said, to “picture Chaucer at his beads” and to imagine him participating in the devotional culture of his day. Indeed he was more than a participant, he was a notable contributor: both in his Parson’s Tale and in his Marian writings, Chaucer added to the expanding corpus of vernacular devotional literature being produced in late-medieval England.

While both Hoccleve and Lydgate foreground Chaucer’s creative investment in devotional and especially Marian poetry, modern critics often marginalize his religious writings and approach him as a detached commentator on the religious practices of his world. Studies that address his Marian writings have proposed that even when Chaucer engages with highly emotional forms of Marian devotion, he disapproves of them, whereas he approves of restrained, doctrinally correct formulations of her role.