Dante's British Public: Readers and Texts from the Fourteenth Century to the Present.

Author / Editor
Havely, Nick.

Title
Dante's British Public: Readers and Texts from the Fourteenth Century to the Present.

Published
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Physical Description
xviii, 355 pp.; b&w illus.

Description
Assesses the general or "public" familiarity with Dante and his works in British culture, acknowledging his impact on poets such as Chaucer, Milton, and T. S. Eliot, but exploring instead a more pervasive presence. Includes references to Chaucer's familiarity with Dante's works, to the knowledge of Dante among clerics in "the time of Chaucer," and to how Dante's and Chaucer's canonicity developed in Tudor England. Also comments on possible connections between Chaucer and Adam Easton, an English Benedictine who "possibly anticipated Chaucer as the first English writer to refer to Dante by name."

Chaucer Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion