Transformations: Chaucer's Use of Italian

Published: Derek Brewer, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London: G. Bell, 1974), pp. 184-223.

Description: Surveys evidence of the likelihood that Chaucer learned Italian from "Lombards" (especially members of the Bardi family) who were living in London and involved in affairs of trade and banking. Demonstrates how Chaucer adapted his Italian literary sources by means of three extended examples: his radical refashioning of Boccaccio's temple of Venus as a "temple of excess" in PF; his enlivening of Boccaccio's characters from "Filostrato" in TC; and his rendering of Dante's Ugolino as a figure of pathos in MkT.

Chaucer Subjects: Chaucer's Life; Language and Word Studies; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations; Parliament of Fowls; Troilus and Criseyde; Monk and His Tale