Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

Chaucer’s two recorded visits to Italy in the decade of the 1370s is the starting point for considering vernacular literature at a point of transition: the middle of the decade is marked by the death of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and the beginning of the Chancellorship of Coluccio Salutati, a key figure in Florence’s incipient humanism. This chapter briefly examines some of the most important Italian influences on the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, namely: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), and in particular the Comedìa; Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), whose Decameron, Filostrato and Teseida were so important for Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight’s Tale, as well as the Canterbury Tales more generally; and Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who is attributed in the Clerk’s Tale as the source for the story of Griselda (his Latin translation of Boccaccio’s story comprises the seventeeth of his letters of old age, the Res seniles), and whose sonnet from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is included in Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.