The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer : Hugolino and the House of Rumour

Author / Editor
Cooper, Helen.

Title
The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer : Hugolino and the House of Rumour

Published
New Medieval Literatures 3: 39-66, 1999.

Description
Assesses Chaucer's relation to Dante as one of "palpable disbelief" in the Italian's claims for authority about the afterlife and God's judgments. In MkT and HF, Chaucer adapts Dante to establish a more worldly and more skeptical sense of poetry. Cooper argues for 1384 as the date of composition for HF and suggests that Dante is, ironically, Chaucer's "man of gret auctorite" (HF 2158).

Chaucer Subjects
House of Fame.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.
Monk and His Tale.