This book breaks important new ground in the study of Chaucer's various engagements with Italian literary culture, taking a more dynamic approach to Chaucer's Italian sources than has previously been available. Most treatments of such influences do not take sufficient account of the material contexts in which these sources were available to Chaucer and his contemporaries. Manuscripts of the major works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch circulated in a variety of formats, and often the margins of their texts were loci for extensive commentary and glossing. These traditions of glossing and comme ... More

This book breaks important new ground in the study of Chaucer's various engagements with Italian literary culture, taking a more dynamic approach to Chaucer's Italian sources than has previously been available. Most treatments of such influences do not take sufficient account of the material contexts in which these sources were available to Chaucer and his contemporaries. Manuscripts of the major works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch circulated in a variety of formats, and often the margins of their texts were loci for extensive commentary and glossing. These traditions of glossing and commentary represent one of the most striking features of fourteenth-century Italian literary culture. Not only that, but the authors themselves were responsible for some of this commentary material, from Dante's own prosimetra Vita nova and Convivio, to the extensive commentary accompanying Boccaccio's Teseida. The startling example of Francesco d'Amaretto Mannelli's glosses in his copy of the Decameron, copied in 1384, is discussed in detail for the first time. His refiguring of Griselda offers an important perspective on the reception of this story that is exactly contemporary with Chaucer. Chaucer and Italian Textuality offers readers a new perspective on Chaucer and Italy by highlighting the materiality of his sources, reconstructing his textual, codicological horizon of expectation. It provides new ways of thinking about Chaucer's access to, and use of, these Italian sources, stimulating, in turn, new ways of reading his work. This attention to the materiality of Chaucer's sources is further explored and developed by reading the Tales through their early fourteenth-century manuscripts, taking account not just of the text but also of the numerous marginal glosses. Within this context, then, the question of Chaucer's authorship of some of these glosses is considered.