Curial Prose in England

That style which modern scholars have called “curial” or “clergial” is an elaborate fifteenth-century prose style practiced most notoriously by William Caxton in works published during the last decades of the century. It is often assumed that he learned the style from French courtly models. This view has recently suffered modification through the work of Diane Bornstein, whose study of the Tale of Melibee revealed that Chaucer had an independent grasp of many features of the style almost a hundred years before Caxton used it. Although she was successful in demonstrating the use at an early date of these stylistic features, Bornstein did not question or discuss the sources of Chaucer's evident competence. It could be reasonably assumed, as had been assumed for Caxton, that they lay in French literary texts, since features of the style are present in the source of Melibee, the Livre de Mellibee et de Prudence, and they could be presumed to have occurred also in other literary texts of French origin with which Chaucer was doubtless familiar.