Boccaccio and Chaucer

II volume mette in luce i debiti letterari e filosofici di Boccaccio verso Apuleio di Madaura, uno dei più influenti autori latini dell'età argentea e tra i più cari al Certaldese sin dagli anni della sua formazione napoletana. L'analisi filologica e paleografica dei principali manoscritti della tradizione apuleiana, copiati, annotati o consultati da Boccaccio, si affianca al raffronto intertestuale condotto su tutto il corpus delle sue opere e gli esiti della ricerca mostrano, da prospettive differenti, come la cultura classica e l'atteggiamento intellettuale dell'autore fossero quelli di un vero umanista. Modello di arte narrativa e di inesausta sperimentazione linguistica, filosofo autorevole, Apuleio stimola Boccaccio al dialogo con i classici (Platone, Aristotele, Virgilio, Ovidio, Seneca) e con i moderni (Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarca). Al centro dell'indagine è l'influenza della favola di Amore e Psiche, uno dei miti fondanti dell'immaginario poetico boccacciano dal Teseida alle Genealogie. La favola è indicata per la prima volta come fonte della novella di Griselda (Dec. X, 10), il cui disegno inventivo, unico nella letteratura trecentesca, è dettato dall'imitazione del racconto apuleiano. Nelle Genealogie, invece, l'allegoria della favola invita alla lettura del modello in prospettiva teologica e filosofica. Per Boccaccio, come per tanti intellettuali medievali che non leggevano il greco, Apuleio rappresentava il tramite privilegiato per la conoscenza della dottrina platonica: la scoperta del platonismo di Boccaccio, mediato da Apuleio, costituisce un ulteriore motivo di interesse del volume.

This essay surveys framed narratives known in the late medieval Mediterranean, with an emphasis on tales in Arabic and Italian that share in common a short list of narrative devices: the movement of character-narrators through space in order to flee danger; the measuring out of story-telling through a determined number of days (or years); storytelling as a strategy to save a populace at risk. These works -the Seven Sages of Rome, the Thousand and One Nights, Bosone da Gubbio's Avventuroso Siciliano, Boccaccio's Decameron, Giovanni Sercambi's Novelliere, and Giovanni Fiorentino's Pecorone -provide a literary context for Chaucer's narrative decisions and achievements.

In Boccaccio's Decameron, Novella 7.9, the final trick Lidia plays on her husband Nicostrato with her lover Pirro involves making love in full view of Nicostrato, but convincing him that what he sees is an illusion produced from the height of a pear tree.  Jalal al-Din Rumi tells a similar tale in his Masnavi, and an earlier analogue in Arabic in a collection of tales by Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201) dates from about the same time as the Latin poem, Comoedia Lydiae, which is the proximate source upon which Boccaccio bases his retelling. The tree itself (the "enchanted pear tree" or the tree of deception) has roots in the Tree of Existence, the Tree of Knowledge, Rabbinic material, and in Roman depictions of Venus genetrix.  It turns up again in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale.  This article shows how there were various versions of this tale circulating in the Mediterranean in the 12th to 14th century, based on misperception and employed especially in varieties of the fabliau genre to depict women's wiles and the gender wars.  The article also suggests that scholars attempting to explain Boccaccio's views on women would do well to consider earlier analogues and sources of his tales, to analyze what changes Boccaccio introduces, and what the import of those changes may be.

This essay claims that Chaucer's Knight fights in the siege of Algeciras, not in 1342-44 for King Alfonso XI, a Christian against Muslims, but in the last days of July 1369 for Sultan Muḥammad V of Granada, a Muslim king, against fellow Christians.  How does it come to this?

This formalist (pehaps even structuralist) reading of Chaucer's Knights Tale involves an ironic reading of Theseus (of Theseus as Theseuses, as a series of effects). I take in hand definitively modern questions of strategies of mastery, how they operate (through their representative, Theseus), and how they appropriate challenges to their operation (“disorder”). In the process, I will touch on Dale Underwood’s point that the celebrated “order” and “symmetry” of the tale contain, and in some sense produce, disorder and dissymmetry (and vice versa).

The fable of Eros and Psyche is the most important source of the Griselda tale (Dec. X, 10), a tale that enjoyed wide circulation from Petrarch’s translation into Latin and Chaucer’s adaptation in his Clerk’s Tale as well as throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe. But the case of Apuleianism in Dec. X 10 is unique and striking, though it is not isolated within Boccaccio’s oeuvre. The use of Apuleian language in various works (from early Latin letters to later novels and treatises) represented an important point of departure. Through careful study I have become convinced that Boccaccio’s classicism, and especially his reliance on Apuleius, needed to be rethought; moreover, this rethinking must reach out into different disciplines, including paleography and philosophy. Boccaccio was an avid student of Apuleius not only as a source of myths, but also as a source for Neoplatonic philosophy.  For Boccaccio, in fact, as for many medieval intellectuals who did not have any Greek (John of Salisbury, for example), Apuleius’ De deo Socratis and De dogmate Platonis were the only available introduction to Plato’s philosophy.

This critical overview of Chaucer and Italy examines the sources he encountered there, such as Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Teseida, and Decameron as well as Dante’s Comedìa. It covers the most important and influential publications on the subject since the early 1980s, as well as highlighting new and forthcoming work. This new work emphasizes the material contexts of these sources, such as the commentaries frequently accompanying the early copies of the Comedìa, and the influence of Boccaccio’s own early manuscripts on subsequent copies of his work. Work on Chaucer’s Italian sources remains vital and stimulating and offers Chaucerians a wealth of new reading contexts for his work.