644 YEARS IN THE MAKING

Planning our 2026 Valentine’s Day memo book led us way back to the fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules (c. 1382) is considered by scholars to be the first written work associating romantic love with St. Valentine’s Day. This poem predates The Canterbury Tales by a few years. It’s centered around a long dream sequence in which Chaucer witnesses all the species of birds choosing their mates.

Now, let’s be clear, we’re no scholars of Middle English. The original manuscript is lost, and there are many sources in the poem’s stemma codicum. We took the liberty of cobbling together our own modern translation of the first stanza, being careful to maintain the “rhyme royal” pattern and iambic pentameter of the original.

You’ll find a lovely woodcut of two lovebirds by our friend René Arceo on the cover, and our translation of the first stanza on the back.

We’ve also shoddily translated our “Practical Applications” into Middle English, which you’ll find delightful, unless you’re an uptight tweedy philologist. Let us have our fun!

The body pages are our usual 60#T Domtar Lynx, ruled in ”Double Knee Duck Canvas.”

Choose your favorite manuscript or translation, copy all 700 lines into this book in your tidiest script, and regale your love interest with this meandering poetic treatise on the nature of love. Or sift through the perplexing Middle-English classic for sure-fire pick-up lines.

Or just use it as a memo book, and wait until next year for true love, like Chaucer’s formels: the she-eagles refused to select he-eagles, and Nature herself was perfectly OK with that.