In the Middle Ages, the dismemberment of Agrippina, Emperor Nero’s mother, was not simply a gruesome family affair, but it had links to the emerging practice of dissection and the anatomical difference between the sexes. According to classical authors, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt involving a self-sinking boat, Agrippina was slayed by Anicetus upon Nero’s orders.1 In Roman History, Cassius Dio added that Agrippina opened her dress and asked Anicetus to strike at her womb “for this bore Nero.”2 Nero wished to see her corpse to verify the death, “so he laid bare her body, looked her all over and inspected her wounds.”3 The emperor examining the wound of the womb is transformed in the Middle Ages into the image of the ruler ordering the dissection of the female body.4 Jacobus de Voragine described such episode in the Golden Legend (c. 1260).5 Jean de Meun, in his continuation to The Romance of the Rose (c. 1275), wrote that Nero “had his mother dismembered so that he might see the place where he was conceived.”6 Jean de Meun is documented between 1265 and 1269 in Bologna, where post-mortem medical examination was practiced from the thirteenth century onward.7 Giovanni Boccaccio reports the story at length, including the wound of the womb, and mentions that in some sources “after her death Nero inspected the corpse, criticizing some parts of her body and praising others.”8

The fourth chapter shows how Boccaccio manipulates the Petrarchan model of the poet for different ends. It is prefaced by a reassessment of the relationship between Boccaccio and Petrarch, focusing on the political differences between the two poets. In an analysis of the initial years of their friendship, the chapter shows how Boccaccio moves from seeing Petrarch’s presence in Florence as the condition for the repatriation of Dante’s poem, to trying to separate the two poets from one another in his first redaction of the Vita di Dante. After establishing the fundamental political and cultural differences between the two poets, the chapter moves to an analysis of Boccaccio’s defense of poetry in Book 14 of the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, which has traditionally been understood as a reiteration of Petrarch’s ideas. It argues that Boccaccio undermines and at times reverses the terms of Petrarch’s notion of the poet’s relationship to the city, which also has implications for the value of vernacular poetry. Throughout, the chapter indicates how Boccaccio’s Decameron and vernacular poetry are often in the background of his defense. It concludes with the suggestion that Boccaccio obliquely claims for himself the role of the poet for the city.

Chapter 1 proposes to read the anecdote of Aristotle mounted by the courtesan Phyllis as relevant to the interaction of Latin academic practices and vernacular culture. By building on the idea that the taming of the philosopher stages the conflict between the ‘artificial’ culture of academic learning and concurrent ideas about Nature, I argue that some versions of the story (e.g, the Lai d’Aristote) relate to the medieval reflection on the ethical worth of the mother tongue. To this end, I compare the iconography of the mounted Aristotle to the depiction of Grammar, whose ‘bilingual’ status mirrors the ambiguous place that the vernacular holds vis-à-vis Latin in the age of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. The chapter then looks at other spaces (both textual and visual) for the translation of the philosophical ideals embodied by Aristotle. In different ways, both the novella tradition (e.g., Novellino and Decameron) and the visual display of civic values (e.g., the painted cycles of San Gimignano, Siena and Asciano) shed light on the ways in which the appropriation of Aristotle shaped the new vernacular societies while also being part of wider discussions about linguistic difference.

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.