There is no known English translation of Ovid's verse before some excerpts from his Ars amandi were printed as a textbook in Latin translation, The flores of Ouide de arte amandi, in 1513 (STC 18934). But on the back of a songbook of music and carols (Bodl. MS Arch. Selden. B. 26, fol. 33v) some fifteenth-century person wrote this couplet translating two lines from Ovid's Remedia amoris (lines 139–40). It is a teasing fragment to add to a small but intriguing set of fifteenth-century translations from Latin – whether the classical Latin of authors such as Ovid or the fine Latin of their humanist imitators – into English verse.

These verse translators comment on their purposes only fleetingly. But one illuminating comment comes at the end of the translation by Gilbert Banester (d.1487) of a story from Boccaccio's Il Decamerone (NIMEV 4082). Like many fifteenth-century poets he addresses his little book, echoing Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (V.1786–99), but amid the conventions he describes his project precisely: