Chaucer's Silent Italy.

Description: Offers a "new description of Chaucer's interaction with Italian poetry," focusing on how he avoids borrowing several of its most innovative features: the "presence of a beatific lady," the tendency to elevate the poet's poetry to high authority, and the defense of poetry as "truth beneath a pleasing veil of fiction that concomitantly makes theology the poetry of God." Contends that Chaucer's familiarity with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio is unique in his time, and suggests that the lack of the above Italianate features defines his own poetics.