In 1415, when the nearly twenty-one-year-old Charles d’Orléans arrived in England after his capture at the battle of Agincourt, the English poet and Benedictine monk John Lydgate was forty-five years old, over twice his age. The next twenty-five years – the years of Charles's captivity – were extremely productive literary periods for both men, during which they each developed their respective poetic styles as well as the bulk of their writings. For obvious reasons, we think of this as Charles d’Orléans’ ‘English period’, a time when Charles absorbed, reflected, and otherwise interacted with English literary culture and aesthetics, a topic which is being newly explored in this volume. By any account, Charles's reception and retention of English aesthetics were profound. Previous scholarship has noted literary debts to Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and, occasionally, John Lydgate, and a developing admiration for Anglo-Latin writers such as John of Howden, Richard Tryvytlam, and William Rymington. Charles of course not only read and wrote poetry in English, but also acquired books from English artisans, including, if Kathleen L. Scott's hypothesis is correct, one of the most important extant manuscripts of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde ever commissioned. During his captivity Charles chose to create manuscripts with English decoration, even when the texts were in the French language and could have been limned in France. Moreover, after his release Charles continued to engage with English poetry, including his own English poems as well as those of English visitors in his personal manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25458), where scribes also occasionally employed English letter forms.

Less well known, perhaps, is that this period also encompasses what has come to be known as Lydgate's ‘French period’. It is now well documented that in the 1420s, and arguably most of the 1430s, when Charles was the most high-profile French prisoner in England, Lydgate was himself deeply immersed in French literary culture. During this time he relocated to English-occupied Paris for an extended stay, translated several important works from French for two of the most powerful Englishmen in France (Salisbury and Warwick, some of the same men ultimately responsible for the political fate of both Charles and his lands around Orléans), and undertook an intensive period of writing propagandistic texts aimed at shoring up Henry VI's claim to the French crown (often mining French noble history – Charles's family history – to do so).