3 - Chaucer’s Italian inheritance

Summary

Viewed from continental European perspectives, Chaucer's England and its poetry appear both eccentric and retarded. Its eccentricity is geographical: from classical times onward, the British Isles had been mapped as the last stop before ultima Thule and the end of the world. In Boccaccio's Decameron ii, 3, England is regarded as more exotic and fantastical than Barbary (the north African coast, just two hundred miles from Sicily): a place where a savvy young Tuscan might be seduced by an abbot (a princess in disguise), mortgage barons' castles and become Earl of Cornwall. The vernaculars of these distant islands were thus seen as eccentric and of scant literary consequence: the French chronicler Froissart, who spent the years 1361-7 in England, apparently never troubled to learn English, getting by in the European lingua franca (French). Over two centuries earlier, Chrétien de Troyes had written the great romances foundational to the values of chivalry celebrated by Froissart in his Chronicles; around 1275, the Roman de la Rose was approaching completion. Inspired in part by Italian receptions of the Rose, Dante composed not only the greatest European poem of all - his Commedia - but also a series of works to guide its future reception and interpretation. Petrarch, while championing Latin rather than Italian, nonetheless assembled a collection of Italian lyrics - the Canzoniere - that English poets would not fully fathom until the early sixteenth century. Boccaccio's greatest legacy to English literature, his framed collection of tales, was also not absorbed until the sixteenth century (when it eased the path to Shakespeare). Chaucer, however, made early and precocious use of Boccaccio and was ultimately inspired to fashion a framed collection of his own.