Boccaccio's and Chaucer's Cressida

Author / Editor
Kellogg, Laura D.

Title
Boccaccio's and Chaucer's Cressida

Published
New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Physical Description
xi, 144 pp.

Series
Studies in the Humanities, no. 16.

Description
Assesses Boccaccio's and Chaucer's attitudes toward their sources by examining the relations of their narrators with Cressida in "Filostrato" and TC. Cressida's legendary status as dishonest and inconstant had been established before Boccaccio and Chaucer were writing, but other antecedents are reflected in her character. Cressida's literary heritage owes much to female characterizations in Virgil and Ovid, as well as to Dante's readings of Virgil and Ovid, all of which provide compelling models for the Cressida of the High Middle Ages.

Chaucer Subjects
Troilus and Criseyde.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.