‘Medieval writers found Venus a goddess and left her a personification’ (Brewer 1960b: 30), and the history of Venus throughout the Middle Ages and long afterwards, from the mythographers to the Romantics, was just one aspect of the larger fascination with literary inheritance and influence that led Derek Brewer to foundational work on the reception of Chaucer from 1400 to the present. It was Chaucer's Venuses that prompted Brewer's interest both in their antecedents and in their successors in the Renaissance and thereafter (Brewer 1992, 1995, 2002b, 2006b). The present essay revisits the fabulous history of Venus, exploring fifteenth-century afterlives of Venus in the light of Chaucer's key changes to his sources for the Venuses in his poems. Boccaccio's description of the temple of Venus in his Teseida (Limentani 1964: 7. 50–69) is the single source for Chaucer's two accounts of Venus in The Parliament of Fowls and ‘The Knight's Tale. Chaucer's reworkings of this source, his significant additions and omissions, along with the theme of Venus more largely in ‘The Knight's Tale’ and Troilus, will provide models for the Venus of Chaucer's successors.