Chaucer and Petrarch (Chaucer Studies) (Chaucer Studies, 41) 1843842157, 9781843842156

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WILLIAM T. ROSSITER

Chaucer and Petrarch

Chaucer introduced Petrarch’s work into England in the late fourteenth century but there has up to now been no sustained examination of Petrarch’s influence on his work. This first book-length study of Chaucer’s reading and translation of Petrarch examines his translations of Petrarch’s Latin prose and Italian poetry in the context of his experience of Italy through his travels there in the 1370s, his interaction with Italians in London, and his reading of the other two great Italian medieval poets, Boccaccio and Dante. Chaucer’s engagement with early Italian humanism and the nature of translation in the fourteenth century are also considered, with an examination of Chaucer’s pronouncements upon translation and literary production. Chaucer’s adaptations of Petrarch’s Latin tale of Griselda and the sonnet ‘S’amor non è’, as the Clerk’s Tale and the ‘Canticus Troili’ from Troilus and Criseyde respectively, illustrate his various translation strategies. Furthermore, Chaucer’s references to Petrarch in his prologue to the Clerk’s Tale and in the Monk’s Tale provide a means of gauging the intellectual relationship between two of the most important poets of the time.

Chaucer and    P etrarch

is Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool Hope

University. Cover: The Story of Patient Griselda, Part I (c.1493 –1500) by the Master of the Story of Griselda (National Gallery, London).

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Rossiter

Chaucer Studies

William T. Rossiter

CHAUCER STUDIES XLI

Chaucer and PETRARCH Despite the fact that Chaucer introduced Petrarch’s work into England in the late fourteenth century, Petrarch’s influence has been very little studied. This book, the first full-length study of Chaucer’s reading and translation of Petrarch, examines Chaucer’s translations of Petrarch’s Latin prose and Italian poetry against the backdrop of his experience of Italy, gained through his travels there in the 1370s, his interaction with Italians in London, and his reading of the other two great Italian medieval poets, Boccaccio and Dante. The book also considers ­Chaucer’s engagement with early Italian humanism and the nature of translation in the fourteenth century, including a preliminary examination of adaptations of Chaucer’s pronouncements upon translation and literary production. Chaucer’s adaptations of Petrarch’s Latin tale of Griselda and the sonnet ‘S’amor non è’, as the Clerk’s Tale and the ‘Canticus Troilii’ from Troilus and Criseyde respectively, illustrate his various translative strategies. Furthermore, Chaucer’s references to Petrarch in his prologue to the Clerk’s Tale and in the Monk’s Tale provide a means of gauging the intellectual relationship between two of the most important poets of the time. William T. Rossiter teaches at Liverpool Hope University.

CHAUCER STUDIES ISSN 0261–9822

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book

Chaucer and PETRARCH

WILLIAM T. ROSSITER

D. S. BREWER

©  William T. Rossiter 2010 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of William T. Rossiter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2010 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  978–1–84384–215–6

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Note on Texts and Translations

ix



Abbreviations

xi



Introduction: Forms of translatio

1

1 Father of English Poetry, Father of Humanism: When Chaucer ‘Met’ Petrarch

35

2 ‘The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen’: Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato

69

3 ‘But if that I consente’: The First English Sonnet

109

4 ‘Mutata veste’: Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch

132

5 ‘Of hire array what sholde I make a tale?’: Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer

161



Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditynges’

191



Bibliography

203



Index

227

Acknowledgements First thanks must go to Nick Davis, Jill Rudd and Laura Barlow at the University of Liverpool, and to David Matthews and Anke Bernau at the University of Manchester, for their constant support and friendship. I would also like to thank Caroline Palmer at Boydell and Brewer for her advice and know­ledge, Kenneth Clarke, of the University of Cambridge, and Manuela Tecusan, copy-editing for Boydell and Brewer and formerly affiliated to the University of Cambridge, both of whose comments and suggestions have proved invaluable. Many thanks also to Katie Edge for her assistance in compiling the index. Any remaining errors are my own. Last, and by no means least, I would like to thank my parents, whose endless support has made everything possible. Elements of certain chapters have appeared in earlier incarnations, and I would like to thank Interculturalidad & Traducción: Revista Internacional and Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their kind permission in allowing me to include them here.

Note on Texts and Translations All quotations from Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987). The abbreviations used for Chaucer’s works follow those used in this edition. The Canterbury Tales are cited in accordance with fragment (given in roman numerals) and line number(s). All quotations from Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta are taken from Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini, 2 vols (Turin, 2005). English trans­ lations are taken from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA, 1976). Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Petrarch’s collections of letters, the Familiares and the Seniles, are taken from Le Familiari di Francesco Petrarca, ed. by Umberto Bosco and Vittorio Rossi, Edizione nazionale delle opere di ­Francesco Petrarca, 10–13 (Florence, 1933–42), and from the Opera Omnia (Basle, 1581). For the English translations, see Rerum familiarium libri: Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols (Albany, NY–­Baltimore, MA, 1975–85) and Rerum senilium libri: Letters of Old Age, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore, MA, 1992). References to the letters are given in the order of book, letter and page number(s) of the original text, followed by the page number(s) of the English translation. All quotations from Boccaccio’s works are taken from Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), with details of individual volumes and translations provided in footnotes. Unless a translation is specified as my own, I have used standard translations of Italian and Latin texts throughout, details of which are to be found in the footnotes.

Abbreviations ChR Dec. EETS, ES EETS, OS ELH ELN Fam. Fil. HF Inf. JEGP JMEMS JMRS LGW MED MLN MLR NS N & Q Para. PMLA Purg. RVF SAC Sen. SS Tr. VN

Chaucer Review Decameron Early English Text Society, Extra Series Early English Text Society, Original Series A Journal of English Literary History English Language Notes Rerum familiarium libri (Familiares) Filostrato The House of Fame Inferno Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (formerly JMRS) Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies Legend of Good Women Middle English Dictionary Modern Language Notes Modern Language Review New Series Notes and Queries Paradiso Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America Purgatorio Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Studies in the Age of Chaucer Rerum senilium libri (Seniles) Second Series Troilus and Criseyde Vita nuova

Introduction Forms of Translatio The purpose of this study is to address an absence at the heart of critical responses to Chaucer’s reception of the tre corone. Whilst there has been a series of book-length studies of Chaucer’s relationships with Boccaccio and Dante, there is a notable lacuna in relation to his reading and understanding of Petrarch and Petrarchism.1 This, however, is not to say that there have not been important and influential essays, articles and studies within studies – the invaluable commentaries of E. H. Wilkins, Patricia Thomson, Piero Boitani, David Wallace and Warren Ginsberg, for example – but a sustained focus has yet to be placed upon the relationship which gathers together the accumulated evidence and arguments and draws upon them.2 The present study hopes at least to lay the groundwork for such a focus. It may of course be argued that there has been no lengthy study of ­Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch on account of a relative shortage of ­material. The works which we can confirm that Chaucer translated are the sonnet ‘S’amor non è’ (RVF 132) and the Latin tale of Griselda. However, what Chaucer translated from Petrarch and what he understood or read of him are not necessarily the same thing. And whilst the present study is predicated upon Chaucer’s translations, it also incorporates the various literary, historical and social contexts which inform them and our reading of them. By familiarizing ourselves with

1

2

See for example Piero Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Medium Aevum Monographs, New Series VIII (Oxford, 1977); David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1985); Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke, 2002); R. A. Shoaf, Chaucer, Dante and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, OK, 1983); Howard Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK, 1984); and Richard Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Berkeley, CA, 1991). See E. H. Wilkins, ‘Cantus Troili’, ELH, 16 (1949), pp. 167–73; Patricia Thomson, ‘The “Canticus Troili”: Chaucer and Petrarch’, Comparative Literature, 11 (1959), pp. 313–28, Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 103–24, and The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 56–74; A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1–14; Robin Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (London, 1995), pp. 51–60; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), pp. 261–98; Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), pp. 240–68.

2  Chaucer and Petrarch

these various contexts we are able to discover further possible Petrarchan elements elsewhere in Chaucer’s work, such as in the post-stilnovistic idiom of Troilus and Criseyde or the quasi-humanism of the Monk’s Tale. Furthermore, as Ginsberg has recently argued, Chaucer read Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio intertextually. And so by examining ­Chaucer’s relationship with Petrarch we also trace the English poet’s hermeneutic interaction between Italy’s Three Crowns, which might profitably be thought of as three points on the same corona.3 Boccaccio in particular is integral to Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch, as the Clerk’s Tale draws on Petrarch’s Latin revision of the final tale in Boccaccio’s vernacular masterpiece, the Decameron, whilst the Canticus Troili’s translation of Petrarch’s RVF 132 is inserted into a work which is founded upon Boccaccio’s Filostrato. Furthermore, Petrarch’s humanism is outlined against Dante’s ennoblement of the vernacular, as the latter is theorized in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia and embodied by the Commedia.4 The intention of the present study is then to provide a detailed examination of Chaucer’s interaction with Petrarch’s work and influence, an examination based in the first instance upon what he wrote, and by extension to provide an outline of critical response to that interaction. The book is thus not primarily concerned with Chaucer’s perceived or extrapolated opinion of Petrarch the man, or of Petrarch’s politics, but with Chaucer’s reception of ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete’ (IV. 31), of ‘[h]is wordes and his werk’ (IV. 28).5 Yet the extent to which the cultural status of the Laureate can be extracted from a political backdrop is debatable, and it must be reiterated that the present study considers Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch within its proper social and historical ambit.6 As is shown in the opening chapter, Chaucer encountered Petrarch, to borrow Wallace’s description, ‘as part of a trans­national nexus of capital, cultural, mercantile, and military exchange’, although this is not to say that his reading of Petrarch was exclusively political.7 The new historicist dictum that history informs literature just as literature informs history can often seem somewhat imbalanced in favour of the first half of the chiasmus. The present study hopes to restore the second half, a sense of literary history, and concomitantly to restore a poetic basis to Chaucer’s understanding of

3 4 5 6

7

See also Zygmunt Barański and Martin McLaughlin, eds, Italy’s Three Crowns: Reading Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio (Oxford, 2007). Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Stephen Botterill (Cambridge, 1996). The Canterbury Tales are cited throughout with reference to fragment number (given in roman numerals) and line number/s (given in arabic numerals). See for example Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007) and Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame, IN, 2005). Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 1.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  3

Petrarch; yet not to the extent that the socio-political becomes lost or marginalized.8 Above all, this is a study of translations. As such, it is predicated upon a series of dichotomies which inform the relationship Chaucer–Petrarch. These dichotomies, or rather binary oppositions – for example source–target, form– content, moderate–radical, functional–dynamic – will of course be familiar to anyone with an interest in translation studies.9 Such oppositions may be understood as being illustrated by a central dichotomy, one familiar to both Chaucer and Petrarch. It appears in Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians: ‘littera enim occidit, Spiritus autem vivifacet’ (‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’, 2 Cor 3: 6); and in his epistle to the Romans: ‘ita ut serviamus in novitate spiritus, et non in vetustate litterae’ (‘we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter’, Rom 7: 6).10 A number of theorists and commentators on translative hermeneutics have appropriated Paul’s words as a means of illustrating the divergent methods and interpretative problems of translation. Umberto Eco, for example, has recently argued that ‘[i]f to interpret always means to respect the spirit (allow me this metaphor) of a text, to translate means to respect also its body’.11 Indeed one may trace the development of modern translation studies by noting the recurrence of the Pauline division. Jorge Luis Borges recalls the Newman–Arnold debate of 1861–2 in his essay on translating the Thousand and One Nights. Archbishop Newman argued for literatim translation, whilst Matthew Arnold argued for an Ockhamist elimination of extraneous detail. Borges posits that to ‘translate the spirit is so enormous and phantasmal an intent that it may well be innocuous; to translate the letter, a requirement so extravagant that there is no risk of its ever being attempted’.12 In voicing this dilemma Borges is pre-empted by Hieronymus, who argued in his epistle to Pammachius that, ‘si ad verbum interpretor, absurde resonant; si ob necessitatem aliquid in ordine, in sermone mutavero, ab interpretis videbor officio 8

9

10 11 12

For a recent discussion of the merits of historicism, philology and formalist approaches, see Lee Patterson, Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales (New York, 2006), pp. 1–18. See Lawrence Venuti and Mona Baker, eds, The Translation Studies Reader (London, 2000), which incorporates some of the most important and influential studies of the twentieth century and provides an overview of how theories of translation have developed over the past century. See also George Steiner’s bibliography of key works dating from Schleiermacher in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), pp. 500–16. See also John 6: 63; Rom. 8: 2; 1 Pet. 3: 18. Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London, 2003), pp. 136–7. See Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. by Eliot Weinberger, trans. by Esther Allen (New York, 1999), pp. 92–109 (at p. 95). Eugene Nida also invokes the Newman– Arnold exchange in his discussion of ‘easy and natural style in translating’ as it pertains to functional and dynamic equivalences. See his Toward a Science of Translating (Leiden, 1964), pp. 156–92 (at pp. 162–4).

4  Chaucer and Petrarch

recessisse’ (‘if I translate word for word, the result will sound absurd; if out of necessity I alter anything in the order or the wording, I will be seen to have retreated from the office of a translator’).13 To adhere to either as an absolute model of translation, Borges appears to argue, is erroneous, as Paul’s preference is beyond possibility and his alternative is anathema, for reasons which could be clearer but which Borges assumes as a given. Borges believes instead that ‘[m]ore serious than these infinite aspirations is the retention or suppression of certain particularities; more serious than these preferences and oversights is the movement of the syntax’.14 This, nevertheless, seems to err more on the side of a source-oriented rather than target-oriented methodology, and in doing so it approaches Walter Benjamin’s thesis, presented in his influential essay ‘The Task of the Translator’.15 Benjamin, after negating literatim translation as being detrimental to the sense (or spirit), argues that a translation, ‘instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as parts of a greater language’.16 This ‘greater language’ is reine Sprache (‘pure language’), that which existed prior to the fall of Babel. Concomitant with the tessellation of linguistic fragments is the disruption and enrichment of the target language by that of the source. In this Benjamin appears to have been influenced by the nineteenth-century philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who in a lecture of 1813 argued that ‘the more closely the translation follows the turns taken by the original, the more foreign it will

13

14 15

16

Hieronymus (St Jerôme), Epistulae [henceforth Ep.], 57. v. 7. Hieronymus is actually citing the preface to his translation of Eusebius. See Hieronymus, Liber de optimo genere interpretandi (Epistula 57), ed. by G. J. M. Bartelink (Leiden, 1980), pp. 11–21 (at p. 14). The translation is my own. See also Dante, Convivio, I. 7. 14. Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, p. 95. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, in Illuminations, ed. and intro. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zorn (London, 1999), pp. 70–83. See also Paul de Man’s important reading ‘Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” ’, in The Resistance to Theory, Theory and History of Literature, 33 (Manchester, 1986), pp. 73–105, and Ginsberg’s discussion of Benjamin’s reine Sprache and its application to Chaucer’s “reading” of Italy in the introduction to Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, pp. 8–10. Benjamin, ‘Task of the Translator’, pp. 78–9. On Benjamin’s linguistic cabbalism, see Steiner, After Babel, pp. 66–8. Annie Brisset has argued that ‘the ideology of homogeneity rejects all dialogism and is, thus, a form of totalitarianism […] The mother tongue is an Edenic, native, natural language, dating from the idyllic era of colonization (when “we” were the colonizers).’ See her A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968–1988, trans. by Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon (Toronto, 1996), pp. 162–94 (at pp. 175–6). This has implications not only for Benjamin’s reine Sprache but also for Petrarch’s Latin ideal and its counterpoint, Dante’s maternal vulgari eloquentia, which are discussed in Chapter 2 of the present study, pp. 72–77.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  5

seem to the reader’.17 This “foreignising” effect, to borrow Eco’s term, would appear to equate translation with poetic production, if one were to follow the formalist view – contemporary with Benjamin – that poetry’s defining feature is its tendency towards defamiliarization (ostranenie), its perversion of conventional syntactic formations.18 Whilst Ginsberg has shown the efficacy of applying the concepts of reine Sprache and translation-as-afterlife (Überleben) to Chaucer’s reception of Italian texts, Benjamin’s post-Romantic concept of authorial originality poses a problem for our present understanding of late medieval textual production. He asserts that the task of the translator ‘may be regarded as distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet’ on the grounds that ‘[t]he intention of the poet is spontaneous, primary, graphic; that of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational’.19 Benjamin thus asserts a binary opposition, translator–poet, which did not exist in the late medieval period. Chaucer was both the ‘father of English poetry’ and the ‘Grant translateur’.20 Even Petrarch, whilst positing the individual humanist agent, was dependent upon translation. Indeed, one might argue that humanism’s recall of the classical is itself an act of translatio, a selfhood developed through the ingestion of otherness.21 James Simpson has recently discussed the medieval method of textual production via ‘accretive bricolage’, itself akin to Benjamin’s own translative Überleben – further to which we might recall C. S. Lewis’s hypothetical scenario in which, were one to ask a medieval poet ‘Why do you not 17

18

19 20

21

See Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘Uber die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’ (‘On the Different Methods of Translating’), in André Lefevere, ed., Translation, History, Culture: A Sourcebook (London–New York, 2002), pp. 141–66 (at p. 155). See Eco, Mouse or Rat?, p. 89. Benjamin wrote his essay in 1923, seven years after Viktor Shklovsky wrote his essay ‘Art as Technique’, wherein he argues that the ‘technique of art is to make things “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult’. See Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, (Lincoln, NE, 1965), pp. 3–24 (at p. 12). Benjamin, ‘Task of the Translator’, p. 77. He was dubbed ‘Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier’ by his French contemporary Eustace Deschamps. See Eustace Deschamps, Selected Poems, ed. by Ian S. Laurie and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, trans. by David Curzon and Jeffrey Fiskin (London, 2003), pp. 70–1. See also T. Atkinson Jenkins, ‘Deschamps’ Ballade to Chaucer’, MLN, 33 (1918), pp. 268–78, and James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto–Buffalo–London, 1991), pp. 248–54. Wimsatt questions the view that Deschamps knew the Troilus, arguing that it is based upon a critical misreading of the word “pandras” (line 9) as a reference to Pandarus, whereas he claims it to be instead a future form of the verb pandre, meaning ‘to disseminate or illuminate’. On Petrarch’s historical model, see Theodor E. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages’, Speculum, 17 (1942), pp. 226–42; Benjamin G. Kohl, ‘Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus’, History and Theory, 13 (1974), pp. 132–44; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), pp. 80–103; Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC, 1993), pp. 14–32, 102–28; and Christopher S. Celenza, ‘Petrarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity’, JMEMS, 35 (2005), pp. 509–36.

6  Chaucer and Petrarch

make up a brand-new story of your own?’, the answer would most likely be, ‘Surely we are not yet reduced to that?’22 After Benjamin, the Pauline dichotomy recurs in reverse in Vladimir Nabokov’s stridently literalist model, when he argues that ‘ “free translation” smacks of knavery and tyranny. It is when the translator sets out to render the “spirit” – not the textual sense – that he begins to traduce his author’.23 George Steiner, on the other hand, steps outside of the opposition when he argues that ‘[f]idelity is not literalism or any technical device for rendering “spirit” ’, which he sees – much like Borges – as being ‘hopelessly vague’.24 Translative fidelity, rather, only comes into being when the translator ‘endeavours to restore the balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative comprehension has disrupted’. By extension, Steiner argues, translation is as economic as it is ethical – a fact of Realpolitik which Chaucer would have understood all too well, correlating as it does with late medieval internationalism.25 Steiner also posits the fundamental continuity at the heart of translation theory: ‘Identical theses, familiar moves and refutations in debate recur, nearly without exception, from Cicero and Quintilian to the present day’, a position echoed by Antoine Berman and illustrated by Rita Copeland’s discussion of medieval translatio’s classical origins – although Copeland also points out that the similarity between Ciceronian and Hieronymic translation is cosmetic, and creates ‘not a history of continuity but a series of ruptures’.26 22

23 24 25

26

See James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), p. 35, and C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1967), p. 211. Lewis appears to be drawing on Horace’s Ars poetica, lines 127–9. See also, of course, Rita Copeland’s indispensable Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), in particular the discussion in chapter 3 of how in the middle ages enarratio poetarum (the commentary upon poetry) assumed the powers of inventio and elocutio, which on the Roman model were placed under the aegis of rhetoric rather than belonging in the less sophisticated sphere of grammar. Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Problems of Translation: Onegin in English’, Partisan Review, 22 (1955), pp. 496–512 (at p. 496). Steiner, After Babel, p. 318. Chaucer’s visits to Italy in 1372–3 and 1378, one must recall, were due to economic relations between the English monarchy and Italian bankers/despots, and his interactions with Italian merchants were dependent upon his father’s trade and his own position as controller of customs (although the latter postdates his visits to Italy). See the following chapter of the present study. Eco also argues for the economic criteria which impinge upon translation (pp. 3–4), as does André Lefevere in ‘Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature’, Modern Language Studies, 12: 4 (1982), pp. 3–20 (at pp. 6, 15–16). See Steiner, After Babel, p. 251, and Rita Copeland, ‘The Fortunes of “Non Verbum Pro Verbo”: or, Why Jerome is Not a Ciceronian’, in Roger Ellis, ed., The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages: Papers Read at a Conference Held 20–23 August 1987 at the University of Wales Conference Centre, Gregynog Hall



Introduction: Forms of translatio  7

Thus Paul’s binary opposition, if we are to view it as a reiteration of the Platonic–Ciceronian continuum, proceeds to play a discursive role within modern conceptions of translation and hermeneutics. Yet there remains the matter of how Chaucer and Petrarch understood and implemented the dichotomy and of the extent to which they each absorbed other established translative dicta and methodologies. The corrupt mendicant friar of the Summoner’s Tale extols the virtues of glossing by appealing to the Pauline dichotomy: I have to day been at your chirche at messe, And seyd a sermon after my symple wit – Nat al after the text of hooly writ, For it is hard to yow, as I suppose, And therfore wol I teche yow al the glose. Glosynge is a glorious thyng, certeyn, For lettre sleeth, so as we clerkes seyn  (III. 1788–94)

As Copeland argues, the medieval glossa is born of a translative hermeneutics. However, the term ‘glose’, for Chaucer, has negative connotations.27 For example, in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Alison says of her fifth husband that ‘so wel koude he me glose,| Whan that he wolde han my bele chose’ (III. 509–10), which not only links glosynge with misprision and sexual expedition but also reinforces the Hieronymian trope of the feminine text.28 Hieronymus himself writes to Pammachius that he translates ‘non uerbum e uerbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensu’ (‘not to extract word from word, but meaning from meaning’). He is here drawing on Cicero and Horace, yet he is also speaking of secular, as opposed to scriptural, translation. When it comes to translating Scripture, Hieronymus promotes literal translation, as ‘et uerborum ordo mysterium est’ (‘even the order of the words is a mystery’).29 Thus the friar’s displacement of ‘the text of hooly writ’ with the ‘glose’ is in contravention of Hieronymus’s teaching, whilst seemingly being within the

27 28 29

(Cambridge, 1989), pp. 15–35 (at p. 34). Antoine Berman argues that ‘[f]rom its very beginnings, western translation has been an embellishing restitution of meaning, based on the typically Platonic separation between spirit and letter, sense and word, content and form, the sensible and the non-sensible’. Antoine Berman, ‘La Traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger’, Texte (1985), pp. 67–81, trans. by Venuti as ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’ in Lawrence Venuti and Mona Baker, eds, The Translation Studies Reader (London, 2000), pp. 284–97 (at p. 296). See D. W. Robertson Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ, 1962), pp. 331–2. See Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI, 1989), pp. 22–5. See Hieronymus, Ep. 57. v. 2; Cicero, De finibus, III. 4. 15; and Horace, Ars poetica, 133–4. On Hieronymus’s translative models and his ostensible inconsistencies, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 45–55, and ‘The Fortunes of “Non Verbum Pro Verbo” ’. See also Tim William Machan, ‘Chaucer as Translator’, in Ellis, ed., The Medieval Translator, pp. 55–67.

8  Chaucer and Petrarch

remit of Pauline doctrine. However, the addition of ‘so as we clerkes seyn’ to the letter that kills and to its implicit critique of scriptural exclusion – Chaucer has after all been linked to the Lollard knights at court – suggests that he is not in fact maintaining Paul’s vision of evangelism.30 Likewise, Chaucer’s Manciple declares to his audience that ‘[o]f me, certeyn, thou shalt nat been yglosed’ (IX. 34), referring to deliberate misinformation, whilst the Monk teaches that ‘whan that Fortune list to glose,| Thanne wayteth she her man to overthrowe| By swich a wey as he wolde leest suppose’ (VII. 2140–2) – again, linking glossing with deception. The Parson also uses the term pejoratively in the prologue to his tale, and implicitly suggests a Platonic link between poetry and deceptive glossing: But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man; I kan nat geeste ‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre, Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre; And therfore, if yow list – I wol nat glose – I wol yow telle a myrie tale in prose.  (X. 42–6)

The Parson’s suggested connection between glossing and poetry as involving different forms of falsehood may be brought into correspondence with the wider medieval practice of enarratio poetarum, or textual commentary.31 As Copeland has pointed out, in the Middle Ages the hermeneutic practice of enarratio, which had previously been the preserve of classical grammar, assumed the creative properties of rhetoric.32 Furthermore, the exegetical practice of enarratio, which informs vernacular translation in the Middle Ages, assumes the appropriative force of translation, as described in Roman rhetorical texts – ‘that is, the displacement of the original text and the investment of the new text with an originary authority’.33 The Parson thus proposes a naked text, 30

31

32

33

Hieronymus would, of course, become an important contributor to the glossa ordinaria. On the glossa’s usurpation of Scripture, see Christopher Burdon, ‘The Margin is the Message: Commentary’s Displacement of Canon’, Literature and Theology, 13 (1999), pp. 222–34 (at pp. 224–6), and Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation (passim). Hieronymus also points out that ‘apostolos et evangelistas in interpretatione veterum scripturarum sensum quaeisse, non verba’ (‘the apostles and the evangelists in translating the Old Testament sought the sense rather than the words’, Ep. 57. ix. 8). On Chaucer and Wycliffism, see Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious’, SAC, 17 (1995), pp. 23–42, and, more recently, Craig T. Fehrman, ‘Did Chaucer Read the Wycliffite Bible?’, ChR, 42 (2007), pp. 111–38. John M. Fyler cites the Parson’s reservations as a residual view on the theological sermo humilis, as this is specified by Alain of Lille and used by Dante. See his Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge, 2007), p. 136. At De oratore I. xxxi. 142–3 (a work composed around 55 bc), Cicero delineates the five divisions of rhetoric: inventio, elocutio, dispositio, actio and memoria. See Cicero, De oratore, trans. by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1942–8), 1: pp. 98–9. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, p. 83.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  9

unadorned by misleading translative hermeneutics.34 His implied connection between, poetry, glossa and creative falsehood recurs, furthermore, in modern translation theory. As Steiner argues, one cannot progress very far in an examination of language development and translation ‘so long as we see “falsity” as primarily negative’. In support of this thesis, Steiner offers up two paradigms: the ancient Greeks, who ‘took an aesthetic or sporting view of lying’, who possessed ‘an awareness of the organic intimacy between the genius of speech and that of fiction’; and the Stoic–Christian tradition, whereby ‘“feigning”, whose etymology is so deeply grounded in “shaping” (fingere), has been in very bad odour’.35 The Parson’s refusal to ‘glose’ thus corresponds with his rejection of poetry, insofar as both were conflated in the later Middle Ages as part of a rhetorical–translative–hermeneutic node. Whilst Chaucer refers explicitly to the Pauline dichotomy only in the Summoner’s Tale, there remain further allusions to the spirit of the verse scattered throughout his corpus, often predicated upon the image of separating the wheat from the chaff. The Man of Law, whilst reciting his tale, confirms that ‘[m]e list nat of the chaf, ne of the stree,| Maken so long a tale as of the corn’ (II. 701–2), and likewise the Nun’s Priest exhorts his listeners at the close of his tale of Chauntecleer’s folly to ‘[t]aketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille’, on the basis that ‘Seint Paul seith that al that writen is,| To our doctrine it is ywrite, ywis’ (VII. 3441–3). Outside of the Tales, the phrase appears in the Romaunt of the Rose, in both texts of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women and in the Legend itself.36 And, whilst the imagery of the wheat and the chaff is attended by other scriptural echoes – in particular Matthew 3: 12 and Luke 3: 17 – Chaucer appears to use it in the same sense as the spirit and the letter in Paul’s epistles. Petrarch, a devotee of Paul, whom he described in De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others) as ‘supremus omnium Paulus ipse’ (‘the greatest [thinker] of them all’), expresses the tenor of the Pauline dichotomy in a letter written to his brother Gherardo:

34

35

36

See Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley, CA, 1994), pp. 115–52. Chaucerian discussions of the naked text can be found in the LGW (G  85–8) and in The Romaunt of the Rose (lines 6555–7) – although the idea originates with medieval artes rhetoricae. See Steiner, After Babel, pp. 228–31. In support of this argument, Steiner cites Homer’s admiration for wily Odysseus and Socrates’ comment, in Plato’s Hippias minor, that the ‘false are powerful and prudent and knowing and wise in those things about which they are false’ (p. 230). The reference in the Romaunt appears in fragment C (6354), which in all likelihood is not of Chaucerian provenance, although see Simon Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition, Chaucer Studies 33 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 139–40, for some doubts on this view. The references in the Legend of Good Women are as follows: LGWP (F) 190; LGWP (G) 311–12, 529; LGW 1160, 2579.

10  Chaucer and Petrarch theologie quidem minime adversa poetica est. Miraris? parum abest quin dicam theologiam poeticam esse de Deo […] sensibus intende, qui si veri salubresque sunt, quolibet stilo illos amplectere. In truth, poetry is not in the least contrary to theology. Does this astonish you? I might almost say that theology is the poetry of God. […] Concentrate on the meaning; if it is true and wholesome, embrace it regardless of the style. 37

It is necessary to examine Petrarch’s concept of translation for a number of reasons. The first is that Chaucer translates one of Petrarch’s works, the Latin Griselda, which is embedded within a discussion of translative hermeneutics. The second is that Petrarchan humanism is itself based upon a certain translatio studii and a rewriting of the classical past; and this leads to a third factor concerning the medieval poet as always-already being a translator of prior materials.38 To illustrate the latter two points, there is, in addition to Petrarch’s admiration for Pauline exegesis, a wealth of classical translation theory which underpins his own views on the subject. The most famous of these is the refutation of verbatim translation included in Horace’s Ars poetica – which we have already seen employed by Hieronymus and which Petrarch cites in the framing epistle to his translation of Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda (Sen. XVII. 3): Itaque die quodam, inter varios cogitatus animum more solito discerpentes, et illis et michi, ut sic dixerim, iratus, vale omnibus ad tempus dicto, historiam ipsam tuam scriber sum aggressus, te haut dubie gavisurum sperans, ultro rerum interpretem me tuarum fore. Quod non facile alteri cuicumque prestiterim, egit me tui amor et historie. Ita tamen, ne horacianum illud poetice artis [oblivescerer] – Nec verbum verbo curabis redder fidus interpres – historiam tuam meis verbis explicui, [imo] alicubi aut paucis in ipsa narracione mutatis verbis aut additis. And so one day I was as usual dividing my thoughts in many ways. Angry at them and myself, as I was saying, I tossed aside routine business and addressed myself to write this story of yours. I certainly hoped to make you glad by translating your work on my own initiative. Love of you and of the 37

38

See De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others), V. 134, in Francesco Petrarca, Invectives, ed. and trans. by David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, 2003), pp. 222–363 (at pp. 338–9), and his Familiares (henceforth Fam.), X. 4. 301–3/69– 70. See also Hieronymus’s advice to Pammachius: ‘Aliis syllabas aucupentur et litteras, tu quaere sententias’ (‘seek the meaning, let others grasp after syllables and letters’, Ep. 57. vi. 2). For a recent discussion of the pitfalls of translating Petrarch, see Peter Hainsworth, ‘Translating Petrarch’, in Martin McLaughlin, Letizia Panizza and Peter Hainsworth, eds, Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 Years, Proceedings of the British Academy, 146 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 341–58.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  11 story impelled me to what I would hardly have done for anyone else. Not forgetting Horace’s advice in the Ars Poetica – ‘Do not force yourself to translate too faithfully, word by word’ [l. 40] – I have unfolded your story in my own way, freely changing or adding a few words throughout.39

It is thought, furthermore, that Chaucer would not only have known Petrarch’s translation of the Boccaccian Griselda, but that he was also familiar with its epistolary framework.40 Yet, apart from the Horatian dictum’s appearance in the Griselda epistle, Chaucer’s familiarity with the Ars poetica, whether direct or indirect, is not in question. Chaucer paraphrases Horace’s work (1–5, 70–2) in Book II of Troilus and Criseyde (22–5, 1037–43), although sententiae culled from the Ars were common currency in the later Middle Ages, as Harriet Seibert pointed out many years ago.41 Petrarch’s Horatian ethos thus displays a preference for paraphrase over metaphrase, and Chaucer would appear to share his sensibility in this respect, as B. A. Windeatt has noted with regards to his process of ‘in-etching’.42 R. A. Shoaf has recently offered an alternative view of Chaucerian trans­ lation which draws upon Petrarch’s epistle: Chaucer the translator. The translator always does some violence to the body of the original. The translator is always at some risk of becoming a rapist. Tradittore traduttore, as Italian has it. The translator betrays the

39

40 41

42

Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, eds, Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer Studies, 29, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2002–5), 1: pp. 101–67 (at p. 108). In addition to this translation by Thomas Farrell, I also had occasional recourse to Bernardo’s edition of the Seniles and to the often cited version by J. H. Robinson and H. W. Rolfe in their Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (New York, 1898), pp. 191–6. See also J. B. Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven, CT, 1942). Whilst I refer for the most part to the 1581 Basle edition of Petrarch’s Opera omnia when I cite the Seniles, it is worth noting that Silvia Rizzo’s edition thus far covers books I–IV (Florence, 2006). See also Francesco Petrarca, Le ‘Senili’ secondo l’edizione Basilea 1581, ed. by Marziano Guglielminetti et al. (Savigliano, 2006). See Ars poetica, 128–35. See also Copeland’s discussion of Jerome’s misprision of Horace’s dictum. See Harriet Seibert, ‘Chaucer and Horace’, MLN, 31 (1916), pp. 304–7. It has been claimed that Chaucer translated Dante’s paraphrase of the Ars poetica at Convivio I. 5. 55–56 and II. 14. 83–9. See C. L. Wrenn, ‘Chaucer’s Knowledge of Horace’, MLR, 18 (1923), pp. 286–92 (at pp. 288–9); and J. L. Lowes, ‘Chaucer and Dante’, Modern Philology, 12 (1917), pp. 705–35 (at p. 710). For a more recent discussion, see Schless, Chaucer and Dante, pp. 115–17, and John V. Fleming, ‘The Fidus interpres, or from Horace to Pandarus’, in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds, Interpretation: Medieval and Modern: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Eighth Series, Perugia 1992 (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 189–200. On Petrarch and Horace, see Karsten Friis-Jensen, ‘Petrarch and the Medieval Horace’, in Marianne Pade et al., eds, Avignon and Naples: Italy in France–France in Italy in the Fourteenth Century (Rome, 1997), pp. 83–98. See Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’, ed. by B. A. Windeatt (London, 1984), pp. 5–11.

12  Chaucer and Petrarch body of the original by effacing it, substituting his own body for the original’s – he puts his in (the place of) the other.43

Shoaf’s understanding of translation as a potential form of rape, in particular as it applies to the tale of Walter and Griselda – which he describes as ‘a parable of this [translative] violence’ – may be seen to gain credibility from Petrarch’s own views on the subject, as they are related to Boccaccio in the epistle which accompanied his rewriting: ‘I suddenly sent everything flying, and, snatching up my pen, I attacked this story of yours.’44 However, the passage cited by Shoaf is somewhat problematic, precisely due to its translation. Shoaf refers to the edition of Robinson and Rolfe, which is much more vehement than that of Correale and Hamel: ‘I tossed aside routine business and addressed myself to write this story of yours.’ Also, in Bernardo’s translation Petrarch’s ‘aggression’ is self-directed rather than being expressed against the source-text: ‘seizing my pen, [I] set out to write that very story of yours’. A great deal pivots upon the translation of ‘calamum arripiens, ystoriam ipsam tuam scribere sum aggressus’, integral as it is to Shoaf ’s translative model.45 The verb aggredior (‘to take steps, proceed’) – of which aggressus is the participial form – can be translated as ‘to assault’ or ‘attack’, but also as ‘to set oneself (to do something)’, in particular when it is used in conjunction with the infinitive, as Petrarch uses it here with scribere.46 This construction, as Lewis and Short note, was often used by Cicero – whose influence upon Petrarch needs no reiteration – for example in the De officiis: ‘De quibus dicere aggrediar’ (‘These questions I shall proceed to discuss’, II. 1).47 Similarly, ‘arripiens’, whilst reinforcing the potentially aggressive tenor, is akin to eripere, which Petrarch used often in the sense of ‘to take [away]’, as for

43 44 45

46 47

R. Allen Shoaf, Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Gainesville, FL, 2001), p. 116. Ibid.; Robinson and Rolfe, Petrarch: First Modern Scholar, p. 193. Petrarch, Seniles (henceforth Sen.) XVII. 3. 656, in the translation of Bernardo, Levin and Bernardo. See also, for example, the closing line of the prohemium to his Secretum: ‘his ille me primum verbis aggressus est’ (‘this is how he [Augustine] began the conversation with me’) – in Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed. by G. Martellotti et al., La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, 7 (Milan–Naples, 1955), pp. 22–215 (at p. 26), and in Francesco Petrarca, The Secret, ed. by Carol E. Quillen (Boston, MA–New York, 2003), p. 49. P. G. W. Glare, ed., The Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1982), p. 84, s.v. aggredior. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, eds, A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1917), p. 71, s.v. aggredior, and Cicero, De officiis, trans. by Walter Miller (London and New York, 1928), pp. 168–9. See also his Orator XXXVIII. 133, in Cicero, Brutus; Orator, trans. by G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (London and Cambridge, MA, 1939), pp. 404–5.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  13

example in On His Own Ignorance: ‘Neque enim magnifacio quod michi eriptur’ (‘I attach no importance to what is taken from me’, II. 12).48 The action of suddenly seizing one’s pen in an urgent desire to write may also have been a literary commonplace. We see it for example in the prohemium to Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium: ‘ratus eo me a fortuna deductum quo appetebat intentio, festinus arripui calamum scripturus in tales’ (‘I realized that Fortune had led me to where my desire intended, and immediately I seized my pen to write of such men’, De cas., pro. 2; emphasis added).49 Interestingly, this image of the author seizing his pen appears in the second version of the De casibus, dated either 1373 or 1374, shortly after Petrarch wrote the Latin Griselda. Hence Boccaccio may have recalled Sen. XVII. 3 when he was composing his dedicatory epistle; although this would depend upon the later dating, given the delay in the letters reaching Boccaccio.50 In any case, the idea of attacking the tale is incongruous with Petrarch’s declaration that he was driven by a love for it. Were one to maintain Robinson and Rolfe’s translation, it may also be argued that Petrarch’s technique here pertains to the specific work he is adapting. The translator is the active agent, and therefore male – in accordance with the classical principle of dator formarum. Conversely, that which is traduced (the original text) is configured as passive, malleable, feminine

48

49

50

See Zygmunt G. Barański, ‘The Ethics of Ignorance: Petrarch’s Epicurus and Averroës and the Structures of the De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia’, in Martin McLaughlin, Letizia Panizza and Peter Hainsworth, eds, Petrarch in Britain, pp. 39–59 (at p. 56). Barański notes Petrarch’s use, in this treatise, of eripere in relation to his use of detrahere and auferre (all of them meaning ‘to snatch’, ‘take away’, ‘extract’). See On His Own Ignorance, II. 12, 25; III. 29. See Giovanni Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium, ed. by P. G. Ricci and Vittore Zaccaria, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), 9 (1983): p. 8. Translations are my own. The opening dedication is to Mainardo Cavalcanti (see Chapter 1). Sen. XVII. 3 and Sen. XVII. 4 were written in 1372–3, although Boccaccio did not receive them until after Petrarch’s death in July the following year. In a letter to Francesco da Brossano dated 3 November 1374, Boccaccio complains that he has still not received the letters – which makes one question the possibility of influence (Boccaccio, Ep. XXIV, in the volumes Opere in versi; Corbaccio; Tratatello in Laude di Dante; Prose Latine; Epistole, ed. by Pier Giorgio Ricci (Milan­–Naples, 1965), and Epistole, ed. by Ginetta Auzzas in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, 5. 1 (1992): pp. 724–37. On the two different versions of the De casibus, see Zaccaria’s Introduction to this complete edition of Boccaccio, pp. xv–xx, and also his ‘Le due redazioni del “De Casibus” ’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 10 (1977–8), pp. 1–26. See also Boccaccio’s Epistole in Auzzas’ edition (above); and the preface to De remediis, in Petrarca, Prose, ed. by Martellotti et al., pp. xxvi–xxviii, wherein Petrarch speaks of quickly turning his pen to other matters in order that the readers might turn to writing these things, which do not belong to their own time, and see their minds reflected in his words as in a mirror (‘sed alio festinantem calamum, ad haec non suo tempore scribenda deflexeris, ut et in scriptis meis, animi tui vultum velut in speculo contempleris’, p. xxviii).

14  Chaucer and Petrarch

matter, as Shoaf posits in his description of the potential ‘rapist’.51 In these circumstances, the literary tradition to which Petrarch subscribes ensures that he cannot help but align himself with Walter/Valterius, who is also a translator of sorts: ‘Quam quidem an mutata veste deformaverim an fortassis ornaverim, tu iudica’ (‘Whether the change of vestment has disfigured it or perhaps adorned it, you be the judge’).52 Petrarch’s metaphor here is a knowing reference to Walter’s stripping away and translation of Griselda, from ‘la pastorella alpestra et cruda’ (RVF 52. 4) to a stilnovistic donna angelicata, the effect of which is thematic contiguity between the translation and its epistolary framework. In other words, Petrarchan translative methodology, although it may adhere to certain principles, is not entirely circumscribed, but rather adapts itself in relation to the material, which is apposite for a textual persona that locates itself in mutability and reflective self-identification.53 How, then, might Chaucer have interpreted the contentious passage? Fortunately there is an example of Chaucer translating the verb aggredior in the Boece: ‘Deficiente etenim voluntate ne aggreditur quidem quisque quod non vult’ (De consolatione philosophiae, IV. 2. 14–15).54 Chaucer translates this as ‘[f]or yif that wille lakketh, ther nys no wyght that undirtaketh to done that he wol nat doon’ (Boece, IV. prosa 2. 28–9, emphasis added). In this instance at least, Chaucer did not translate the verb as signifying ‘assault’ or ‘attack’.55 The verb also occurs earlier on: ‘quanto ardore flagrares, si quonam te ducere aggrediamur’ (III. 1. 15–16). Interestingly, the construction here is with the infinitive (ducere), as in Petrarch and Cicero, and it is translated by Chaucer as ‘with how greet brennynge woldestow glowen, yif thow wistest whider I wol leden the!’ (III. pr. 1. 31–3). Thus, whilst there is an aggressive aspect to translation which is born out of the Ciceronian tradition (as Copeland has shown), it would seem that in this instance Petrarch is not

51

52

53

54 55

See Spearing’s comments on the ‘dator formarum […] the masculine principle that imposes shape on the shapeless feminine matter’, in Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, p. 97; Dinshaw’s introduction to Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, pp. 3–27 (at p. 9); and Susan Schibanoff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio (Toronto–London, 2006), p. 11. Correale and Hamel, eds, Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, pp. 110–11. I maintain the more common ‘Valterius’ throughout when I refer to Petrarch’s Walter, although in the Correale and Hamel edition he is named ‘Walterus’. Machan makes a similar claim for Chaucer: ‘what he writes is largely determined by the nature of the text he is rewriting’. See his ‘Chaucer as Translator’ in Ellis, ed., The Medieval Translator, p. 59. Boethius, The Theological Tractates; The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand and S. J. Tester (London and Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 318–19. In the French translation upon which Chaucer also drew, the verb is not linked to aggression: ‘Car se volenté fault, nulz n’enprent a faire ce que il ne veult pas.’ See Tim William Machan and A. J. Minnis, eds, Sources of the Boece (Athens, GA, 2005), pp. 148–9.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  15

necessarily reinforcing that aggression, as Chaucer’s translation of the same key phrase suggests an undertaking rather than an assault.56 As the varying interpretations of Seniles XVII. 3 illustrate, one of the problems facing a primarily English-speaking or non-Latinate audience when gauging Petrarch’s translative methodology is that the latter must itself be refracted through translation. And, whilst the primary focus of the present study is upon Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch, in the absence of the English poet providing any critical statements upon the art of translation it will help to examine first Petrarch’s formula, as a means of understanding the view of a contemporary poet whom Chaucer admired.57 The issue of Chaucer’s admiration for Petrarch, however, is not without its problems, akin to the issue of his admiration for Dante.58 Indeed, the matter of what Chaucer thought of Petrarch, as opposed to what he did to his works in translation – or rather what certain critics claim Chaucer to have thought of Petrarch as a poet, as a moral philosopher, or as a political propagandist – poses a difficult and precarious question, one which this study will address through an examination of the available evidence. In terms of affinity, which is somewhat distinct from admiration, Boitani has noted a possible correlation between Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s conceptions of fame, albeit the two differ in degree: ‘At the root of Chaucer’s attitude towards the problem of glory and fame there is, then, a wide oscillation – one perhaps could call it “conflict” if Chaucer had written about himself as much as Petrarch did.’59 The truth is that Chaucer did not write about himself as much as Petrarch, but this is not to say that the correspondence does not exist. In relation to fame and literary renown, at least, one glimpses in Chaucer what one cannot help but see in Petrarch; and the same might be said for their respective views of translation. Chaucer’s views on translation face potential complication, however, from a passage from the General Prologue which is worth quoting at length: But first I pray yow, of youre curteisye, That ye n’arette it nat my vileynye, Thogh that I pleynly speke in this mateere, To telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere, 56 57

58 59

See Copeland, ‘The Fortunes of “Non Verbum pro Verbo” ’, p. 16, and Cicero, Orator XXI. 69. As Boitani posits, ‘the most moving celebration of an Italian poet that Chaucer ever wrote is not of Dante, but, significantly, of Petrarch’. See his Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), p. 157. Fyler argues that Chaucer rejects Dante’s linguistic model; he also ascribes to Chaucer a concept of language which is very similar to the one which Petrarch appears to hold: ‘a simulacrum, a representation of language, as it works in the fallen world. Its source is uncertainty, its value ambiguous; its terms are subject to arbitrary multiplication and distortion’ (Language and the Declining World, p. 152). See for example Spearing’s reading of The House of Fame in his Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, pp. 22–30. Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, p. 155.

16  Chaucer and Petrarch Ne thogh I speke hir wordes proprely. For this ye knowen al so wel as I: Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe. He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother; He moot as wel seye o word as another. Crist spake hymself ful brode in hooly writ, And wel ye woot no vileynye is it. Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.60

Chaucer is here discussing what Roman Jakobson terms intralingual translation or rewording, that is, ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language’.61 Chaucer’s narrator speaks ‘pleynly’ due to his attempts to ‘telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere’ as faithfully as he can, or rather ‘as ny as evere he kan’, which suggests the inevitable loss of something in translation. There is a correspondence between the narrator’s admission here and the Host’s request that the Clerk speak clearly (‘[s] peketh so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye,| That we may understonde what ye seye’, IV. 19–20). The Clerk ostensibly adheres to the Host’s stipulation (‘[y]oure termes, youre colours, and youre figures| Keep hem in stoor til be so ye endite| Heigh style’, IV. 16–18) by noting that ‘first with heigh stile he [Petrarch] enditeth,| Er he the body of his tale he writeth […] Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent’ (IV. 41–2, 54). In this latter instance we are dealing with Jakobson’s second type, namely ‘[i]nterlingual translation or translation proper [, which] is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language’ and which raises the question of differentiation between reportage and translation, reiteratio and translatio.62 Indeed, Jakobson proceeds to argue that ‘translation is a reported speech’ insofar as the translator ‘recodes and transmits a message received from 60 61

62

I. 725–42. See also I. 3167–81, IX. 207–10 and Lak of Stedfastnesse, lines 4–5, for similar sentiments. Jakobson posits three types: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation. See his ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Stephen Rudy and Martha Taylor, 8 vols (The Hague, 1962–88), 2: pp. 260–6 (at p. 261). See Chapter 2 of the present study, pp. 00–00. Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, p. 261. Copeland points out that, whilst ideas about translation ‘emerged within the larger context of theories of imitation’, nevertheless translation and imitation were ‘theorized in quite distinct terms. Imitation was generally understood in intralingual and intracultural terms’ (‘The Fortunes of “Non Verbum Pro Verbo” ’, p. 17). Chaucer’s discussion may thus be seen to refer to intralingual imitation as distinct from interlingual translation.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  17

another source. Thus translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes.’63 Steiner, addressing Jakobson’s claim, argues that by ‘using the neutral term “involves” Jakobson side-steps the fundamental hermeneutic dilemma, which is whether it makes sense to speak of messages being equivalent when codes are different’.64 To transfer this debate to Chaucer’s statement: translation essentially enables one to ‘telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere,| Ne thogh I speke hir wordes proprely’, although this is not to say that one ‘moot as wel seye o word as another’, as equivalence is desirable – both between the original and the retelling and between the matter and the form: ‘The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.’ The equivalence Chaucer’s narrator aims at here is made possible by the adoption of what appears to be the same code – for which one might read discourse or sociolect – as that in which the source was embedded; he will speak ‘pleynly’, meaning both clearly and comprehensively. Yet this does not prevent us from reading the encoded ‘significaunce’ which underpins ‘[e]verich a word’. The hermeneutic dilemma which Steiner posits as being elided by Jakobson is encapsulated in the Chaucerian caveat ‘if it be in his charge’. That is, the translator does not always have ‘charge’ over each word, as each word is encoded within a larger discursive formation, not to mention within a wider synchronic semiotics, and carries with it a wealth of association either for the individual reader or for a given interpretative community.65 Steiner says as much in his discussion of Weltansicht and Wört, wherein he argues that the ‘linguistic world-view of a given community shapes and gives life to the entire landscape of psychological and communal behaviour’, and hence ‘language, die Sprache, is identical with “the totality of spirit” or Geist’.66 The letter is the spirit within a given period and community; to alter

63

64 65

66

Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, p. 262. Jakobson is discussing his second form of translation (interlingual) here, but the argument nevertheless maintains in relation to the statement in the General Prologue, especially given the references to Latin (Scripture) and Greek (Plato). Steiner, After Babel, p. 274. On individual and group hermeneutics, see Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD, 1974); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA, 1980); H. R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Brighton, 1982). On medieval readerships, particularly those of Chaucer, see Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the “Chaucer Tradition” ’, SAC, 4 (1982), pp. 3–32; ‘Writing and Reading’, in Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod, eds, A Social History of England 1260–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 454–72; Derek Brewer, ‘The Presidential Address: The Reconstruction of Chaucer’, SAC, Proceedings No. 1 (1984), pp. 1–19; J. B. Trapp, ‘Literacy, Books and Readers’, in L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, III: 1400–1557 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 31–43; and Helen Cooper, ‘The Presidential Address: After Chaucer’, SAC, 25 (2003), pp. 3–24. Steiner, After Babel, pp. 86–90.

18  Chaucer and Petrarch

one is to affect the other, which is what translation does: the wörtlich dictates the Zeitgeist. Venuti echoes Steiner’s view when he argues: The foreign text, then, is not so much communicated as inscribed with domestic intelligibilities and interests […] Translating is always ideological because it releases a domestic remainder, or inscription of values, beliefs, and representations linked to historical moments and social positions in the domestic culture.67

This, however, like so much translation theory, is not an exclusively modern formulation. Hieronymus had argued that ‘[s]ignificatum est aliquid unius verbi proprietate: non habeo meum, quo id efferam’ (‘each particular word has its own meaning, and [occasionally] I have no word of my own which conveys it’), in addition to addressing the problem of what he terms the target language’s particular, indigenous quality, that is, its very vernacularity (‘ut ita dicam, vernaculum linguae genus’).68 The socio-historical and political elements of translation mentioned earlier thus emerge through a spirit–letter equivalence, as opposed to dichotomy. This is not to say that translation is exclusively ideological (in the Althusserian sense), but rather that it encompasses both the subjective and the communal modalities. Interestingly, Chaucer’s endorsement of speaking ‘ful brode’ with reference to Christ and Plato would appear to run contrary to Petrarch’s justifications of poetic diction and ekphrasis. In the aforementioned letter to his brother Gherardo, Petrarch not only claims that theology is the poetry of God but asks, rhetorically, ‘[q]uid vero aliud parabole Salvatoris in Evangelio sonant, nisi sermonem a sensibus alienum sive, ut uno verbo exprimam, alieniloquium, quam allegoriam usitatiori vocabulo nuncupamus? Atqui ex huiusce sermonis genere poetica omnis intexta est’ (‘what else do the parables of the Savior in the Gospels echo if not a discourse different from ordinary meaning or, to express it briefly, figurative speech, which we call allegory in ordinary language? Yet poetry is woven from this kind of discourse’).69 Moreover, in his Invective contra medicum (Invectives against a Physician), Petrarch juxtaposes Christian and Platonic conceptions of figura: in ultimo agmine poetarum quidam sunt quos ‘scenicos’ vocant […] qui quales essent Plato ipse declaravit in sua Republica, quando eos cemsuit urbe pellendos. […] Id tamen Platonis iudicium non modo heroycis atque aliis nil nocebat, imo vero multum proderat, quoniam, velut excussor poeticam ingressus in aream, valido verbi flabro grana discrevit a paleis. […] stilus […] intentioris animi stimulus, et exercitii nobilioris occasio. […] An non Aristotiles, et qui luculentissimus omnium habetur, Plato ipse,

67 68 69

Venuti and Baker, pp. 468, 485. Hieronymus, Ep. 57. v. 7. Petrarca, Fam. X. 4. 301/69.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  19 loqui posset apertius […] Quid sermo ipse divinus […] Quam in multis obscurus atque perplexus est, cum prolatus sit ab eo Spiritu qui homines ipsos mundumque creaverat, nedum, si vellet, et verba nova reperire, et repertis clarioribus uti posset!  (III. 116–119, 164–8) The so-called dramatic poets are placed last in the rank of poets. […] Plato himself declared their nature in his Republic when they wrote that they should be banished from his city. […] Yet Plato’s judgment, rather than harming epic poets and others, was of great benefit to them. He entered the poetic threshing floor like a winnower; and with the powerful gusts of his word, he separated the grain from the chaff. […] Poetic style serves as a stimulus to more intense reflection and as an opportunity for nobler studies. […] Could not Aristotle speak more clearly, or even Plato, who is considered the most lucid of all? […] What about the Word of God […] How many obscure and perplexing passages it contains! And yet it was uttered by the same Spirit that created humankind and the world, and that certainly could, if it wished, both invent new words and then, use the words it had invented with greater clarity.70

There would appear to be an opposition between Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s respective concepts of translation, despite their shared Horatian inheritance. The Chaucerian narrator’s preference for words spoken ‘pleynly’ and his distaste for ‘wordes newe’ oppose Petrarch’s exhortation of ‘stilus’ as ‘animi stimulus’, and of ‘verba nova’. However, this is a false dichotomy, as Petrarch is extolling the oblique as part of a wider defence of poetry; whereby that which involves struggle is of greater worth than that which is plainly perceived. Chaucer is approaching from the opposite end of the same spectrum, apologizing for the descent from his customary courtly style into the plain speech of the Canterbury pilgrims and the necessarily naked text of the faithful reproduction. Indeed, Chaucer’s language throughout this passage echoes Hieronymus’s extolment of ‘plainness’ in the letter to Pammachius: Nec reprehendo in quolibet Christiano sermonis inperitiam – atque utinam Socraticum illud haberemus: ‘scio, quod nescio’ et alterius sapientis: ‘te ipsum intellege’! – venerationi mihi semper fuit non verbosa rusticitas, sed sancta simplicitas: qui in sermone imitari se dicit apostolos, prius imitetur in vita. Illorum in loquendo simplicitatem excusabat sanctimoniae magnitudo. I do not censure any Christian on account of unskilled speech; and how I wish that we could say like Socrates: ‘I know that I know nothing’, and another wise man: ‘know yourself’! I have always venerated a holy 70

Petrarca, Invective contra medicum, III. 124–32, ed. by Francesco Bausi (Florence, 2005), pp 24–169 (at pp. 104–12). For a facing-page English translation, see Invectives, ed. and trans. by David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, 2003), pp. 2–179 (at pp. 100–3, 108–9). On figura, see Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. by Ralph Manheim et al., Theory of History and Literature, 9 (Manchester, 1984), pp. 11–76.

20  Chaucer and Petrarch simplicity rather than a verbose rudeness: he who says that he imitates the language of the apostles should first imitate their lives. Their great sanctity made up for plainness of speech.71

There is also the matter of ‘ful brode’ as signifying unadorned speech. Christ spoke plainly in his parables – in low style, as Augustine might describe it – but that plainness was in fact the surface imagery of moral allegory. Speaking ‘ful brode’ can signify speaking frankly, freely or openly (MED); but this does not necessarily debar a deeper ‘significaunce’, which is what Petrarch is arguing for: ‘Laudare dapem fictilibus appositam, eandem in auro fastidire, aut dementis aut ypocrite est’ (‘To praise food served in an earthen vessel while feeling disgust at the same meal served on a golden platter is a sign either of madness or hypocrisy’).72 As Chaucer’s narrator says with reference to Plato – albeit a Plato refracted through Boethius – ‘[t]he wordes moote be cosyn to the dede’.73 Low tales call for a low style, high romance for a high style. In any case, we can juxtapose Chaucer’s statement here on intralingual translation with a statement from the Knight’s Tale which accords with the ‘impertinent’ passage from the Clerk’s Prologue and, as such, further distinguishes Chaucer’s interlingual poetics. Chaucer omits a sizable section of Boccaccio’s Teseida by claiming that ‘it were al to longe for to devyse| The grete clamour and the waymentynge […] shortly for to telle is myn entente’ (I. 994–5, 1000). There is no talk here of rehearsing ‘as ny as evere he kan| Everich a word’, which suggests that Chaucer, like Petrarch, alternated between amplificatio and abbreviatio. This position is reinforced in the preface to the Treatise on the Astrolabe, which also refutes literal translation: ‘And God woot that in alle these languages and in many moo han these conclusions ben suffisantly lerned and taught, and yit by diverse reules; right as diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome’.74 Here, however, Chaucer appears implicitly to posit a kind of reine Sprache, a transcendent signifier – which of course God as Logos was, is and will be – which 71 72 73

74

Hieronymus, Ep. 57. xii. 4. Petrarch cites the Socratic profession of ignorance in On His Own Ignorance, VI. 148. Fam. X. 4. 303/70. See Boece, III, Prologue 12. 206–7: ‘thow hast lernyd by the sentence of Plato that nedes the wordis moot be cosynes to the thinges of whiche thei speken’, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987), pp. 395–469 (at p. 439). The passage referred to is Plato, Timaeus 29b. On Chaucer and the Timaeus, see Chauncey Wood, ‘Chaucer’s Clerk and Chalcidius’, ELN, 4 (1967), pp. 166–72. See also R. K. Root, ‘Chaucer and the Decameron’, Englische Studien, 44 (1911), pp. 1–7 (at p. 5, n. 2). Treatise on the Astrolabe (henceforth Astr.), 36–40. For a discussion of this passage, see Andrew Cole, ‘Chaucer’s English Lesson’, Speculum, 77 (2002), pp. 1128–67. See also Carol Lipson, ‘ “I n’am but a lewd compilator”: Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe as Translation’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 84 (1983), pp. 192–200.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  21

ensures that all linguistic roads lead to their proper fixed meaning.75 Chaucer’s pronouncement and practice here is akin to that which we find in the prologue to the Lollard Bible, which stresses the importance of the sentence: First it is to knowe þat þe best translating is, out of Latyn into English, to translate aftir þe sentence and not oneli aftir þe wordis […] if the lettre may not be suid in þe translating, let þe sentence euere be hool and open, for þe wordis owen to serue þe entent and sentence, and ellis þe wordis ben superflu eiþer false.

Ultimately this perspective may trace its lineage back to Hieronymus’s position that ‘sermonem varietas spiritus unitate concordat’ (‘linguistic variety is harmonized through unity of spirit’).76 The emphasis upon a plurality of linguistic approaches which converge upon a semantic unity finds its compositional equivalent in a trope for translation which Petrarch inherits from one of Seneca’s moral epistles to Lucilius (Ep. LXXXIV), whereby a plurality of sources converge upon the new work: curandum imitatori ut quod scribit simile non idem sit, eamque similitudinem talem esse oportere, non qualis est imaginis ad eum cuius imago est, que quo similior eo maior laus artificis, sed qualis filii ad patrem. In quibus cum magna sepe diversitas sit membrorum, umbra quedam et quem pictores nostri aerem vocant, que in vultu inque oculis maxime cernitur, similitudinem illam facit, que statim viso filio, patris in memoriam vos reducat, cum tamen si res ad mensuram redeat, omnia sint diversa; sed est ibi nescio quid occultum quod hanc habeat vim. Sic et nobis providendum ut cum simile lateat ne deprehendi possit nisi tacita mentis indagine, ut intelligi simile queat potiusquam dici. Utendum igitur ingenio alieno itendumque coloribus, abstinendum verbis; illa enim similitude latet, hec eminet; illa poetas facit, hec simias. […] scribamus scilicet sicut apes mellificant, non servatis floribus sed ni favos versis, ut ex multis et variis unum fiat, idque aliud et melius. An imitator must take care to write something similar yet not identical to the original, and that similarity must not be like the image to its original in painting where the greater the similarity the greater the praise for the artist, but rather like that of a son to his father. While often very different in their individual features, they have a certain something our painters call an ‘air’, especially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance; 75

76

‘The ultimate end of Desire is God, in Whom the soul finds its satisfaction. The ultimate end of signification is a principle of intelligibility whereby all things may be understood. God the Word is at once the end of all desire and the interpretant of all discourse. […] As all desire is ultimately a desire for God, so all signs point ultimately to the Word.’ John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’, Diacritics, 5 (1975), pp. 34–40 (at p. 35). See Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge, 1978), p. 68, and Hieronymus, Ep. 57. vii. 5.

22  Chaucer and Petrarch seeing the son’s face, we are reminded of the father’s, although if it came to measurement, the features would be all different, but there is something subtle that creates this effect. We must thus see to it that if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar, and that the similar be elusive and unable to be extricated except in silent meditation, for the resemblance is to be felt rather than expressed. Thus we may appropriate another’s ideas as well as his colouring but we must abstain from his actual words; for, with the former, resemblance remains hidden, and with the latter it is glaring, the former creates poets, the second apes […] we must write as the bees make honey, not gathering flowers but turning them into honeycombs, thereby blending them into a oneness that is unlike them all, and better. 77

Petrarch’s fears of apish as opposed to apian imitation also figure, as we shall see in the second chapter, in his relation to Dante, as does his Senecan concept of the father–son resemblance. To reduce the matter to its essential division, it might be argued that for Petrarch paraphrase is preferable in poetic imitatio or translatio, whilst metaphrase is appropriate to painting. The act of ‘blending them into a oneness that is unlike them all’ can be extended to Chaucerian–Petrarchan translative hermeneutics on a wider scale. Quite often, late medieval translatio is itself an anthology or florilegium of classical and other precursory sources and materials, as is illustrated here by Petrarch’s rewording of Seneca and Horace – with the proviso that Petrarch does not simply gather flowers, but rather transforms them. This is, furthermore, the model to which Petrarch adheres in his historical works, as he says in the preface to De viris illustribus: ‘multa apud alios carptim dicta coniunxi et vel de unius vel de diversorum multis historiis unam feci’ (‘I have joined together many things which were found dispersed in many histories, by one author or by several, and I have made them a whole’) – although he prefaces this admission with the caveat ‘sicut in philosophicis aut poeticis rebus nova cudere gloriosum, sic in historiis referendis vetitum’ (‘as it is glorious to invent new things in philosophical or poetic

77

Fam. XXIII. 19. 206/301–2. See Seneca, ‘Epistle LXXXIV. On Gathering Ideas’, in Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, trans. by Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols (London, 1918–25), 2: pp. 276–85. Seneca draws the image from Virgil (Aeneid, I. 432–23), but see also Horace, Carmina, IV. 2. 27–32: ‘ego apis Matinae| moro modoque| grata carpentis thyma per laborem| plurimum circa nemus uvidique| Tiburis ripas operosa parvus| carmina fingo’ (‘I, in manner and method like a Matine bee that with incessant toil sips the lovely thyme around the woods and riverbanks of well-watered Tibur, fashion in a small way my painstaking songs’): Horace, Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. by Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp. 222–3. See, in addition, Petrarch’s Fam. I. 8. 3 and his Bucolicum carmen VIII. 123–8, which also uses the images of bees collecting pollen, relating it to poetry, imitation and the virtues of the vita solitaria. Greene’s discussion of the passage from Fam. XXIII. 19 in his Light in Troy (pp. 95–100) is indispensable.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  23

works, so it is forbidden to do so in history’).78 Whilst the methodologies may be the same, the objectives are different. The blending of elements in the historical work is to create a concise account, the accumulation of sources in poetry aims at the creation of the new work.79 History, like the visual arts, is more amenable to metaphrase in terms of fidelity to its model. The division between metaphrase and paraphrase is crucial, as it informs Petrarch’s inability to provide an ‘effictio’ of Laura in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.80 Whilst Petrarch favours metaphrase in the mimesis of the visual arts, literary translation must be paraphrastic if it is to have any worth. The attempted configurations of the beloved are repeatedly refracted through an intertextual prism, whether it be classical (Laura as Daphne) or scriptural (Laura as Eve). The text cannot duplicate the beloved, but only displace her; the linguistic act is thereby prolonging desire through a paraphrasis necessary to the translative process. The attempt to translate Laura into the linguistic sphere is doomed to failure from the start, as linguistic similitude should not be that of the portrait to the sitter. This perhaps explains why Petrarch had Simone Martini paint Laura, as the artist’s medium allows for metaphrasis, whereas any description of an object before the poet’s eyes must undergo translatio, must be paraphrastic, and so unable to reproduce that object.81 Paraphrasis of the object creates the subject as the translator must superimpose the latter over the former. As Greene argues in his discussion of Petrarchan translation, mimesis ‘at its most powerful pitch required a profound act of self-knowledge and then a creative act of self-definition’, whilst ‘the definition or creation of literary voices, literary styles, required the progressive apprehension of voices and styles from outside the self ’ as part of a ‘process of dynamic self-discovery’.82 Crucially, this translative process is akin to that which Shoaf describes in relation to Chaucer:

78 79

80

81

82

See De viris illustribus, in Petrarca, Prose, ed. by Martellotti et al., pp. 218–67 (at p. 220), and Kohl, ‘Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus’, p. 139. For a discussion of diversity as an aesthetic principle in Chaucer and Boccaccio, see N. S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron (Oxford, 1996), pp. 8–42. The effictio is a head-to-toe catalogue of physical beauty, as recommended by artes rhetoricae such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova and Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria. On Petrarch’s inability to provide Laura’s effictio, see Nancy J. Vickers, ‘The Body Re-Membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description’, in John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols Jr, eds, Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (London, 1982), pp. 100–9 (at p. 102). Martini’s famous lost portrait of Laura is discussed at RVF 77–8. See also Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, pp. 26–32, and J. B. Trapp, ‘Petrarch’s Laura: The Portraiture of an Imaginary Beloved’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 64 (2001), pp. 55–192. Greene, Light in Troy, p. 97.

24  Chaucer and Petrarch [The Clerk’s Tale] is the autobiography of Chaucer the translator, how he became a writer other than and better than Walter (in part, by coming to terms with the Walter in him).   The Clerk’s Tale narrates the story of translation as the marriage of the original with the translator. The translator takes the original as his mate. He may treat the original like wax […] Or he may treat the original like an independent, individual body with its own agency. But in that event he will never be sure of what he has done, what he has acquired, and what his meaning is; the substance will be between him and his original.83

Just as Chaucer comes to terms with his inner Walter through the translation of Petrarch’s text, so does Petrarch express his own inner Walter through the translation and the epistolary framework of Boccaccio’s text. Both Chaucer and Petrarch rely to some extent upon an apian metaphor which suggests malleability – the wax of the Merchant’s Tale and the honey of the epistle, respectively; but both also acknowledge the original text’s status as ‘an independent, individual body with its own agency’. For Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale and in the Canticus, this acknowledgement allows for communion with what we might term the antecedent body-text. For Petrarch in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the frustrated translatio of Laura’s body as text is a source of solitary anguish; whilst in his Griselda story the acknowledgement of agency impels the desire for adornment. Yet, whereas Petrarch expounds his views on translatio independently of praxis, Chaucer does not. The methods of the ‘Grant translateur’ are rather to be found in the performative action, in the translations themselves. This is not to say that their methodologies are different. Indeed, N. S. Thompson argues in relation to the Petrarchan model of Familiares XXIII. 19 that, ‘judging from his practice, it appears to be the process that Chaucer follows: from the various sources which nourished the work he creates something which is aliud et melius’.84 In addition to the unity composed of plurality, there is the fact that translatio introduces matter into a given national literature which is unlike anything already established within that interpretative community, whilst remaining faithful to its interlingual source. Itamar Even-Zohar argues that this process not only is characteristic of translation but also makes it the most important element within what he terms the literary polysystem: [I]n this situation no clear-cut distinction is maintained between ‘original’ and ‘translated’ writings, and […] it is often the leading writers (or members of the avant-garde who are about to become leading writers) who 83

84

Shoaf, Chaucer’s Body, p. 116, original emphasis. Shoaf draws the wax simile from the Merchant’s Tale: ‘But certeynly, a yong thyng may men gye,| Right as men may warm wex with handes plye’ (IV. 1429–30). Whilst the wax imagery was well-established, its usage here is somewhat subversive. Thompson, ‘Translation and Response: Troilus and the Filostrato’, in Roger Ellis, ed., The Medieval Translator, 2 (London, 1991), pp. 123–50, at p. 130.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  25 produce the most conspicuous or appreciated translations. Moreover, in such a state when new literary models are emerging, translation is likely to become one of the means of elaborating the new repertoire. Through the foreign works, features […] are introduced into the home literature which did not exist there before.85

In order to prove this point, one might refer to the fact that Chaucer introduced the Muses into English poetry through his conflated translation of the second canto of the Inferno and of the opening canto of the Paradiso in his proem to the second book of the House of Fame, or that he introduced Petrarchan lyric into England over a century prior to the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey. Thus ‘diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome’, or at least to Tuscany.86 It remains to attempt to codify Chaucer’s methods of translation as they have been thus far identified. It must also be noted that the number of Chaucer’s works which depend upon translation necessitate a limited survey and an immense debt to those scholars who have studied those translations in much greater detail than is allowed here. As Caroline Eckhardt points out, ‘different investigators looking at Chaucer’s general habits as a translator have come to contradictory conclusions about his fidelity’. Indeed, following her own careful analysis of Chaucer’s techniques, Eckhardt adds the following caveat: ‘For each of these characteristics, however, it is possible to find contrary examples.’87 The two statements are not unrelated: academic disagreement is 85

86

87

Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’, Poetics Today, 11: 1 (1990), pp. 45–51 (at pp. 46–47). (This entire issue on polysystem studies is edited by Even-Zohar.) There remains the question of whether one can speak of ‘foreign’ literature in the same way when discussing the Latinate culture of medieval Christian Europe. Interestingly, Thompson argues that, whereas ‘Dante privileges unity over diversity […,] neither Boccaccio nor Chaucer make that same distinction nor privilege the one above the other. In fact, theirs is a specific reaction against the totalizing vision of the Divina Commedia’ (Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love, pp. 12–13). Caroline D. Eckhardt, ‘The Art of Translation in The Romaunt of the Rose’, SAC, 6 (1984), pp. 41–63 (at pp. 45–6, 60–1). In addition to those already mentioned, I am grateful to the following studies: B. Windeatt, ‘The “Paynted Process”: Italian to English in Chaucer’s Troilus’, English Miscellany, 26–7 (1977–8), pp. 79–103; Tim William Machan, Techniques of Translation: Chaucer’s Boece (Norman, OK, 1985); Rita Copeland, ‘Rhetorical and Vernacular Translation in the Middle Ages’, SAC, 9 (1987), pp. 41–75; Thompson, ‘Troilus and the Filostrato’; A. J. Minnis and Tim William Machan, ‘The Boece as LateMedieval Translation’, in A. J. Minnis, ed., Chaucer’s Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius, Chaucer Studies, 18 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 167–88; Jeanette M. A. Beer and Sir Kenneth Lloyd-Jones, Translation and the Transmission of Culture between 1300 and 1600, Studies in Medieval Culture, 35 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995); Roger Ellis, ‘Translation’, in Peter Brown, ed., A Companion to Chaucer, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2000), pp. 443–58. I am very much aware of Machan’s warning that ‘one does not, indeed cannot, speak of how [Chaucer] rendered Boccaccio’s Italian syntax and lexicon into English’ (Techniques of Translation, p. 2), as indeed it is an enormously complex issue.

26  Chaucer and Petrarch

the result of Chaucer’s contrariety, his movement between translative practices; within a single work he can balance fidelity to the letter and fidelity to the spirit. The effect is a dilution of the question of overall fidelity, leading us to look for other factors.88 Lipson, discussing the Treatise on the Astrolabe, claims that ‘Chaucer’s additions and changes have taken two directions: (1) simplifying the information for the audience, and (2) adding personal contact with the reader’.89 It can be argued that simplification is necessitated by the Treatise’s technical terminology, and indeed Lipson notes the discrepancy between critical approaches to literary translation and to historical or scientific translation. The question of ‘personal contact’ is more complex, and it is one which recurs in discussions of Chaucerian translation.90 The consensus that Chaucer achieves greater intimacy by means of the narrative voice is identified by Eckhardt as a linguistic, translative necessity: ‘Chaucer’s English more often requires the presence of a stated subject for each verb than does Guillaume’s French.’91 The same claim can be made for Chaucer’s translations from Latin and from Italian; although Chaucer’s English subject perhaps meets its match in the dominant ‘io’ of Petrarch’s RVF 132.92 One might also argue that the nature of this ‘personal contact’ is dependent upon the persona that Chaucer is assuming, which is in turn dependent upon the material being translated. There is discretion between the translator of Filostrato and the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde, just as there is discretion between the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde and the translator of Petrarch’s RVF 132 or the tale of Griselda.93 In other words, the ‘personal contact’ may be considered a 88

89 90

91 92

93

As Eckhardt argues, it ‘is more important to observe, where the translation is accurate, how that accuracy is achieved and, where it is not, what the value of the departures might be’ (‘Art of Translation in The Romaunt’, p. 46). Lipson, ‘Chaucer’s Astrolabe’, p. 197. In addition to Lipson’s argument, Eckhardt notes how, in the translation of the Roman de la Rose as the Romaunt, ‘the tone becomes ever so slightly more personal’ (‘Art of Translation in The Romaunt’, p. 52). Similarly, Thompson argues that, in comparison to ‘the selfconscious quality which pervades the Filostrato’s narration’, Chaucer’s narrator initially appears ‘more distantly placed, then gradually becomes more involved in the narrative’ (‘Troilus and the Filostrato’, p. 125). Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation in The Romaunt’, p. 52. Yet, even here, Chaucer’s stated subject outnumbers Petrarch’s: ‘I’ appears eleven times in the English, compared to five instances of ‘io’ in the Italian; the verb more often subsumes the subject in Petrarch’s sonnet (as in ‘ardo’, ‘pianto’ and ‘lamento’, first person emphasis added), confirming Eckhardt’s argument. This is dependent, however, upon thinking in terms of English grammar and syntax; the subject per se is no less present in Petrarch’s Italian. On Chaucer’s narrative voices, see David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, Chaucer Studies, 13 (Cambridge, 1985), and, more recently, Michael Foster, ‘Chaucer’s Narrators and Audiences: Self-Deprecating Discourse in the Book of the Duchess and House of Fame’, in Janne Skaffari et al., eds, Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past (Philadelphia, PA, and Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 199–214.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  27

constructed part of the translation rather than a by-product of it. For example, Chaucer’s narrator in the Treatise of the Astrolabe employs the false modesty topos: ‘I n’am but a lewd compilator of the labour of olde astrologiens, and have it translatid in myn Englissh’ (Astr. 61–3). Whilst this suggests a personal intervention, it remains a rhetorical device, and as such prevents ‘contact’. Indeed this false modesty may be considered in relation to the certainty and doubt of the Troilus narrator, who at the start of his task declares that ‘[t]he double sorwe of Troilus to tellen […] My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye’ (Tr. I. 1–5), and who closes with an address to his ‘litel boke’: So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche!  (Tr. V. 1795–8)

The ‘personal contact’ is present in both cases, but the persona is slightly different in each. The false modesty topos evokes fears of creative inadequacy, whilst the envoy suggests fears of hermeneutic inadequacy. Nevertheless, the construction of intimacy may be considered one of Chaucer’s translative methods, as can his fluid movement between literal and spiritual translation. One method, already touched upon, is the process of in-etching identified by Windeatt. This is constituted by a variety of techniques, many of which can be reduced to one out of two options: ‘To encresse or maken dymynucioun’ (Tr. III. 1335). In terms of ‘encresse’ Chaucer tends towards a ‘heightening of visual imagery’, an increase in the description and precision of a given visual image, but also towards what might be termed an emotional heightening, an increase in the portrayal of the inwardly felt and thought.94 This tendency towards expansion is characteristic of the translation of RVF 132, as we shall see in the third chapter of the present study. In terms of ‘dymynucioun’, Chaucer also reduces and redirects the focus of his source, or excises it completely. For example the Clerk’s ostensible omission of Petrarch’s descriptive prologue to his translation of the Griselda tale is in fact a reduction masquerading as excision, despite its being ‘a thyng impertinent’ (IV. 54). An interestingly genuine excision which will be discussed in Chapter 2 is Chaucer’s omission of the benediction trope, which Boccaccio employs in Book III of the Filostrato (stanzas 83–5), and which he appears to have borrowed from Petrarch’s use of the same trope in RVF 61. There remains a third option, a midpoint between ‘encresse’ and ‘dymynucioun’, which consists in the use of cognates. In the translation of RVF 132, for example, Chaucer renders ‘tormento’ (132. 4) as ‘torment’ (Tr. I. 404) and

94

See Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. by Windeatt, pp. 5–11; Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation in The Romaunt’, pp. 54–6.

28  Chaucer and Petrarch

‘consento’ (132. 8) as ‘consente’ (Tr. I. 413). Indeed he declares his fidelity to his source prior to the translation: But pleinly, save oure tonges difference, I dar wel seyn, in al, that Troilus Seyde in his song, loo, every word right thus As I shal seyn  (Tr. I. 395–98)

As we shall see, however, Chaucer in the same translation dissects single Italian terms into two English synonyms – although this is often done for the sake of the rhyme and as such may come under the remit of ‘oure tonges difference’.95 As Eckhardt acknowledges in relation to Chaucer’s use of cognates or equivalents in the Romaunt, ‘literal fidelity to the source must have been impossible to sustain beyond a line or two’.96 What, then, can be concluded from this preliminary examination of Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s respective translation theories? One might offer three initial points from which to proceed. The first is that both Chaucerian and Petrarchan translatio is received, born of the classical models of enarratio poetarum and excercitatio, and of medieval hermeneutics. Such a translative aesthetics is also familiar with the Pauline distinction between the spirit and the letter, which begets a series of further dichotomies maintained by modern translation theory, most noticeably source and target-based orientation. The second point, emergent from the first, is that Petrarchan and Chaucerian translatio is predicated upon multiplicity, both in terms of sources and in terms of method. Cicero, Seneca and Horace rub shoulders with Paul, Augustine and Hieronymus, whilst the materials to be translated are to be blended ‘into a oneness that is unlike them all’, and a variety of post-Babel (and post-Pentecostal) linguistic approaches may lead to the same logos. The translative ideal of creating e pluribus unum is consonant with what Lewis termed the ‘Principle of Plenitude’ and Simpson ‘accretive bricolage’.97 This is not to posit a yoking together of differentials – the passage from Cicero to Hieronymus and from there to Petrarch and Chaucer is incorporative but linear, at least at the cosmetic level. The third point would concern the periphrastic nature of Chaucerian and Petrarchan translation. Neither of them, following its classical heritage, favours literatim translation as the superior practice, or views it as being entirely possible. In its emphasis upon plain speech and identical language, the passage from the General Prologue concerns intralingual as opposed to 95

96 97

See also Chaucer’s prologue to Melibee, ed. by Sharon Hiltz DeLong, in Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 216–17: ‘in my sentence| Shul ye nowher fynden difference| Fro the sentence of this tretys lyte| After the which this murye tale I write’ (VII. 961–4). The sentence is not the same as ‘every word right thus’, however. Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation in The Romaunt’, p. 47. See Lewis, The Discarded Image, p. 44.



Introduction: Forms of translatio  29

interlingual translation. Chaucer’s usage elsewhere, noticeably in the introduction to the Treatise on the Astrolabe and in his discussion of in-etching in the Troilus, posits different routes to the same terminus; not to mention his actual praxis, as we shall see in the forthcoming chapters. The opening chapter provides the historical backdrop for those which follow by examining Chaucer’s overall experience of Italian language, literature and culture, and how this wider whole affected his reading of Petrarch. In particular, Petrarch’s poetics of exile, which effects an equivalence between mental and physical wanderings and necessitates textual communion with geographically and temporally distant writers, is seen to be central to the discussion of Chaucer’s “meeting” with Petrarch. The chapter proceeds to address Chaucer’s ambassadorial visits to Italy and the possibility that he met Petrarch during one of them. It is argued that, whilst it is theoretically possible that Chaucer might have met Petrarch (or Boccaccio) during the visit in question, this event is not probable. Petrarch was a prolific correspondent, as his letter collections show – the Rerum familiarium libri (1350–66) and the Rerum senilium libri (1361–74); a surprise visit from a young English poet would certainly have merited at least a couple of lines in a letter. Apart from the fact that many of Petrarch’s letters were lost in transit or stolen on account of his great fame, there are extant letters dating from the period of Chaucer’s visit, in particular the one which contains Petrarch’s translation of the Griselda and the reports of its reception. None of these letters mentions an English visitor. The chapter thus concludes that Chaucer did not meet Petrarch in person and that it is erroneous to equate Chaucer with his Clerk, who claimed to have heard his tale from Petrarch whilst he was in Padua – where the latter was indeed living during Chaucer’s visit. Nevertheless, the nature of medieval intertextuality allows for a meeting between the two authors without need of their physical presence. Chapter 1 also discusses Chaucer’s knowledge of Italian prior to the documented embassies and his translation of Italian culture, language and literature following them. The frequent visits made by Italian bankers and ambassadors to the court of Edward III, where Chaucer had served as a valettus and as an esquier since 1367, support the possibility put forward by Howard Schless that Chaucer may have come into contact with Italian poetry prior to his ambassadorial visits to Italy; but the chapter ultimately decides against this hypothesis on the basis of textual evidence. Chaucer’s work in the customs house after 1374 may have offered further interaction with Italian merchants, but this position postdates the first embassy. The chapter proceeds to examine Chaucer’s direct experience of Italian culture and society. It is not surprising that the complexity and variety of the Italian states are seen to provide aspects both of the familiar and the unfamiliar. One feature that would have been immediately evident, however, was the internecine factionalism which created fierce divisions within and

30  Chaucer and Petrarch

between the city–states, being one of the causes of Petrarch’s dissatisfaction with the present. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s respective views of history, tragedy and humanism by examining the trajectory from Petrarch’s De viris illustribus to Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, via the intermediate stage of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. Chapter 2 examines the intertextual triangle constituted by Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (begun c.1326), Boccaccio’s Filostrato (c.1339), and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c.1382–5). It begins with an account of Petrarch’s castigation of Boccaccio for the burning of his juvenilia – an action impelled, it would seem, by a sense of inferiority felt after reading Petrarch’s early works. This account is counterbalanced by the examination of an earlier letter of Petrarch’s to Boccaccio (Familiares XXI. 15). In this letter Petrarch reveals that, despite being a fervent bibliophile, he never owned a copy of Dante’s Commedia in his youth, out of fears that it would unduly influence him and thereby prevent his own style from emerging. The chapter proceeds to an analysis of Boccaccio’s Petrarchan inversions, the degree to which they were translated into Troilus and Criseyde, and the effects they had upon Chaucer’s work. Critics such as E. H. Wilkins and Armando Balduino have argued for Boccaccio’s imitation of Petrarch’s early lyrics in the Filostrato, Chaucer’s primary source text for Troilus and Criseyde. In order to verify these claims it is essential to distinguish between conscious imitation and stock tropes, tags and epithets employed by Boccaccio and Petrarch alike. These were inherited by both poets from the poetic tradition of the dolce stil nuovo (‘sweet new style’) of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti, from the cantare (oral romance), and from the troubadours. Having made this distinction, the chapter discusses how both the likely Petrarchan inversions in Filostrato and the traditional tropes are translated by Chaucer into Troilus and Criseyde, paying heed to his own familiarity with such devices. Ultimately the chapter reveals how Chaucer’s unconscious translation of Petrarchan idiom – the lexicon which is synonymous with Petrarch but does not necessarily originate with him – by means of Filostrato creates the ideal literary environment and Rezeptionästhetik for his conscious translation of a Petrarchan sonnet into English. Chapter 3, following the groundwork laid by its predecessor, provides a detailed, contextualized examination of the Canticus Troili. The Canticus, as is well known, is Troilus’s anguished love complaint, which follows upon his first sight of Criseyde in the opening book of Chaucer’s poem. It is also an adaptation of Petrarch’s RVF 132, ‘S’amor non è’, and the first ever translation of a Petrarchan sonnet into English. The analysis of Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch’s sonnet is predicated upon three interrelated factors: the extent to which Chaucer remains faithful to Petrarch’s text; how (and why) he extends Petrarch’s complaint; and how he creates a legitimate ratio between the two verse forms (sonnet and rhyme royal). As part of this tripartite analysis, the chapter examines the possible



Introduction: Forms of translatio  31

relationship between the rhyme royal and sonnet forms. As David Wallace has argued, the rhyme royal as Chaucer employs it in Troilus and Criseyde owes a great deal to Chaucer’s study of Boccaccio’s ottava rima. The ottava rima, despite the reservations of Patricia Thomson, is in turn shown to be a direct descendant of the strambotto form, which, as Wilkins has illustrated, is also the main source for the sonnet.98 Poetic consanguinity between the two forms is demonstrated by collating and expanding upon these discrete critical examinations whilst acknowledging Chaucer’s familiarity with similar French forms, such as the three-stanza ballade. The book’s final chapters trace the pan-European progress of the tale of ‘patient Griselda’. Chapter 4 examines Petrarch’s allegoresis of Boccaccio’s tale as it appears in the final day of the Decameron and its emerging through translation before it is deliberately undermined by a plurality of interpretations, which Petrarch includes in the letter that follows his translation (Sen. XVII. 4). Ultimately, Petrarch’s translation of Boccaccio’s tale is read as constructing an allegory of the act of translation itself. The chapter opens with Petrarch’s response to a letter from Boccaccio which asks him to give up writing on account of his age and his considerable fame (Sen. XVII. 2). The letter enables the chapter to start a discussion of how the intertextual dynamics of the Griselda tale differ from, or even reverse, that which is attendant upon Troilus and Criseyde’s dialogues with Filostrato and the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Petrarch’s translation is read as providing the allegorical exegesis of Boccaccio’s artfully bare novella. Echoing Boccaccio’s brigata, whose members discuss the tale of Griselda long into the night, Petrarch relates a debate between two readers, one of whom interprets it as history, the other as fable. The chapter proceeds to illustrate how neither fable nor history precludes allegory. To reinforce Petrarch’s allegorical interpretation of the tale, the chapter compares medieval allegory with modern formulations and traces the tale’s pre-Boccaccian heritage, which illustrates that the tale itself might already be said to possess allegorical capacity. In relation to the tale’s alleged origins, the chapter discusses the various critical arguments for its provenance in the folklore tradition. The various critical interpretations of Petrarch’s tale are read as evidence of Petrarch’s translating the interpretative plurality orchestrated by Boccaccio – a plurality which Chaucer embraces. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Petrarch’s reference to his stripping and redressing of Boccaccio’s tale. By making such remarks, Petrarch aligns himself with Walter, who also 98

See David Wallace, ‘Chaucer’s Continental Inheritance: The Early Poems and Troilus and Criseyde’, in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds, The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 19–37 (at p. 25); Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (London, 1964), p. 211; and E. H. Wilkins ‘The Invention of the Sonnet’, in his The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature (Rome, 1959), pp. 11–39.

32  Chaucer and Petrarch

translates Griselda, and offers up his translation of the tale as an allegory of the translative process. Chapter 5 examines Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch’s Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale. It explores the connection between contemporary and modern interpretations of the tale by positing a correspondence between the accumulative, referential nature of medieval texts and the modern conception of the intertext. Petrarch’s emphasis upon Griselda’s figurative textuality, as discussed in the previous chapter, is clearly understood by Chaucer, as is the tale’s self-referential impulse and its dialogic construction. This dialogic aspect of Chaucer’s tale – the way in which it develops through interaction with Petrarch’s version and triggers a plurality of responses – is a key feature of later intertextual readings. By extension, the chapter addresses the question of whether Chaucer read Petrarch’s tale as a monologic (self-enclosed) or as a dialogic text (receptive and open-ended). This intertextual, dialogic basis to Chaucer’s translation refutes monadic or isolationist interpretations of the tale. The fact that Petrarch’s tale is not only written in response to, but also predicated upon, that of Boccaccio, and the likelihood that Chaucer knew the epistolary framework to Petrarch’s tale mean that the Latin adaptation cannot be monologic or self-contained. In order to stress Chaucer’s knowledge of that framework, the chapter shows how the varying responses within Chaucer’s tale echo the responses which Petrarch offers. In addition, the Clerk’s condemnation of Walter’s actions is read as reaching back, through Petrarch’s tale, to the attack on Gualtieri by Boccaccio’s storyteller, Dioneo. Dioneo’s attack has, furthermore, a political edge, and it is to the politicized readings of Chaucer’s translation – readings which explore its emphasis upon hierarchical and gendered relations of power – that the chapter turns for its remainder. The chapter concludes by returning to the opening of the tale in order to stress the position of the Clerk within the Canterbury group; to compare him both with Griselda and with Petrarch; and to see how this material might direct our reading of the tale. Ultimately the interpretative plurality of The Clerk’s Tale is seen to link premodern and postmodern readerships, just as the tale’s intertextual genealogy connects premodern and postmodern ideas of textual construction and development. This plurality, furthermore, is acknowledged as being dependent upon Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch’s tale and of its framework. Both the Clerk’s Tale and the Canticus translate works which are entirely representative of Petrarch’s oeuvre in Latin and in the vernacular. The study concludes by addressing the anti-Petrarchan bias which has emerged in recent comparative readings of Chaucer’s work as a means of building upon the findings of the previous chapters. The Canticus Troili captures the voice of the Petrarchan poet–lover, the divisions of which may be read as illustrating the fractures within the idea of Italy that Chaucer encountered during his ambassadorial visits. Furthermore, this paradoxical,



Introduction: Forms of translatio  33

antithetical means of expression provides a legacy for later English poets wishing to express inner division (psychomachia), reflection upon an external division, or a fusion of the two. The Clerk’s Tale is consonant with this Petrarchan division in its examination of the rupture between individual and community – between Walter and his subjects, between Griselda and her readers within and without her tale; and also rupture within the individual, as in Walter’s sorrow for Griselda’s suffering and in his determination that it should continue until its appointed end. Moreover, the tale’s translation from the vernacular into Latin illustrates for Chaucer one of the central tenets of post-Dantean humanism; the English poet would have understood as much from the tale’s epistolary framework, if not only from the tale itself. This concern with classical Latin and its concomitant culture informs the engagement with recent critical discussions of Chaucer’s view of Petrarch. In particular, the conclusion addresses Wallace’s influential description of what he terms the Petrarchan Academy and James Simpson’s refutation of Petrarchan influence on post-Chaucerian poetics.99 Ultimately the conclusion stresses Chaucer’s understanding of Petrarch as being of greater import than his admiration for him. The English poet saw something within Petrarch’s writings, an expression of a thought unuttered by Dante or Boccaccio, which added to his overall experience of Italian culture. Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch ought not to be displaced by our own literary and socio-political preconceptions, but rather understood for what it was: a meeting of individual minds.

99

See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 286–93, and Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 121–53.

1 Father of English Poetry, Father of Humanism: When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch At some point between 1370 and his death in 1374, Petrarch composed his Epistle to Posterity. The incomplete letter details his life, his nature and his achievements, and provides a valuable account of his sense of dislocation: [Posteritati.] Fuerit tibi forsan de me aliquid auditum; quanquam et hoc dubium sit: an exiguum et obscurum longe nomen seu locorum seu temporum perventurum sit. […] Incubui unice, inter multa, ad notitiam vetustatis, quoniam michi semper etas ista displicuit; ut, nisi me amor carorum in diversum traheret, qualibet etate natus esse semper optaverim, et hanc oblivisci, nisus animo me aliis semper inserere. […] Honestis parentibus, florentinis origine, fortuna mediocri, et – ut verum fatear – ad inopiam vergente, sed patria pulsis, Arretii in exilio natus sum, anno huius etatis ultime que a Cristo incipit MCCCIV, die lune ad auroram […] kalendas Augusti. [Francis Petrarch to posterity, greetings.] Perhaps you will have heard something about me, although this too is doubtful, whether a petty, obscure name would reach far into either space or time. […] I have dwelt singlemindedly in learning about antiquity, among other things because this age has always displeased me, so that, unless love for my dear ones pulled me the other way, I always wished to have been born in any other age whatever, and to forget this one, seeming always to graft myself in my mind onto other ages. […] I was born in exile in Arezzo in the year 1304 of this last age, which began with Christ, at dawn on a Monday, July [20], of honorable parents, Florentine in origin, of modest fortune, and, to tell the truth, verging on poverty, but driven from their homeland. (Sen. XVIII. 1. 2. 8/672–4)1

Petrarch’s father Pietro, a notaro known as Ser Petracco, was in October 1302 sentenced to ‘a heavy fine, the cutting off of a hand, banishment from Florentine territory, and confiscation of his property’ following fabricated charges 1

See Posteritati, in Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed. by Martellotti et al. (Milan–Naples, 1955), pp. 2–19; for the English version, see the translation of Seniles by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo in Rerum senilium libri: Letters of Old Age, 2 vols (Baltimore, MD, 1992).

36  Chaucer and Petrarch

which had been made against him.2 He fled with his wife Eletta to Arezzo, a city to the south of the family home at Incisa, whereto Eletta returned in early 1305 with her young son; as E. H. Wilkins notes, this was ‘the first of Francesco’s many journeys’.3 Petrarch’s sense of being ‘born in exile’, notwithstanding the important contribution it makes to his geographically itinerant lifestyle, is also linked to his conception of himself as being temporally dislocated, to his desire ‘to have been born in any other age whatever’. The removal of the Papal See to Avignon in 1309 constitutes a focal point in Petrarch’s temporal and spatial exiles. Ser Petracco took his young family to Avignon the following year in the hope of finding employment, and Petrarch campaigned throughout his life for the return of the See to its rightful home, as he saw it, in Rome. In addition to vituperative poems and invectives, he wrote letters to successive pontiffs, and his fame ensured that they were read – it is not impossible that Petrarch’s 1366 letter to Urban V (Sen. VII) played some minor role in his decision to return the See, albeit briefly, to Rome in 1367.4 Petrarch’s reverence for classical Rome exacerbated his sense of exile, and is intertwined with what he calls the shameful exile (‘turpi in exilio’) of the Church in Avignon; as he says in the letter to posterity, ‘[d]omum voco avinionense illud exilium’ (‘I call home that place of exile, Avignon’, Sen. XVIII. 1. 8. 12/674–6). The two cities may be seen to constitute a binary opposition within Petrarch’s thought, informing what might be termed his Roman agenda. It is a sad irony that the papacy returned to Rome in 1377, three years after Petrarch’s death.5 2 3

4

5

Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, IL, 1961), p. 1. Wilkins, Life, p. 2. Ser Petracco was banished in the same year as Dante Alighieri, who was exiled following the triumph of Florentine Black Guelphs (I Neri) over the White Guelphs (I Bianchi). Traditionally the Guelphs supported the papacy, whereas the Ghibellines favoured the emperor. However, the parties soon fragmented, and in late medieval Florence political allegiances served to reinforce existing family feuds and economic disputes. For an overview of Florentine politics in the trecento, see R. Kirkpatrick’s introduction to his English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue and Divergence (London, 1995), pp. 1–23 (esp. 9–15), and D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), pp. 9–64 (esp. 16–24). See also Gene A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society 1343–78 (Princeton, NJ, 1962), and The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, NJ, 1977); Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transition (Baltimore, MD, 1968). Anti-Avignonese sentiments recur throughout Petrarch’s works. See RVF 136–8; Petrarch’s Book without a Name, trans. by Norman P. Zacour (Toronto, 1973); and Contra eum qui maledixit Italie, ed. by Monica Berté (Florence, 2005). For a facing-page English translation, see Invectives, ed. and trans. by David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, 2003), pp. 364–475. See also Franco Suitner, ‘L’invettiva antiavignonese del Petrarca e la poesia infamante medievale’, Studi petrarcheschi, NS, 2 (1985), pp. 201–10. For commentary upon Petrarch’s conception of Rome, see Angelo Mazzocco, ‘Petrarca, Poggio, and Biondo: Humanism’s Foremost Interpreters of Roman Ruins’, in Aldo Scaglione, ed., Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium (Chapel Hill, NC, 1975), pp. 353–63; T. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  37

However, in 1351 Boccaccio arranged for Petrarch to return to the confiscated family home in Florence from which his parents had been banished half a century earlier. He gracefully declined – having already accepted Clement V’s offer of return to Avignon – much to the displeasure of the Florentine signoria, which promptly revoked the offer.6 Two years later, to the horror and outrage of his Florentine acolytes, Petrarch moved to Milan, under the aegis of the infamous Visconti family. Petrarch’s home, as we have seen, lies in exile; it is in dislocation and contradiction that he finds himself, or at least his literary voice. He subsequently wrote to another friend, the papal secretary Francesco Bruni, an apologia, if one might call it such, of his inability to adhere to a fixed point: Nescio qua seu siderum vi, seu volubilis animi levitate, seu lege necessitates rerum humanarum, dura et ineluctabili adamantinos […] seu alia quavis mihi incognitae ratione, tota fere usque ad hoc tempus, in peregrinationibus vitam duxi. Hic ut boni forte aliquid, sic mali certe plurimum tali, et si roger, cur non igitur pedem figis, repeto quod incipiens dixi, causam rei nescio: Sed effectum scio […] Iam de ingenio ac doctrina facilis coniectura est, profecto enim plus aliquid ambiendo vidit, quam visurus domi fueram, et experientiae, rerumque notitiae, non nihil est additum, sed detractem literis […] Itaque consilium coepi, ad eas terras, non navigio, non equo, pedibusque per longissimusque iter, semel tantum, sed per brevissimam charta, sepe libris, ac ingenio, proficisci, ita ut quotiens vellum, horae spatium, ad eorum littus irem, ac reverterer. I know not, by what power of the stars, or inconstancy of my flighty spirit, or hard, irresistible law of necessity governing human affairs […] or by what other reason unknown to me, I have spent almost all my life up to the present in wanderings. While perhaps I have gotten some good from this, I have certainly gotten the utmost evil. And if I were asked, ‘Then why do you not stop?’ I repeat what I said at the beginning: I know not the cause, but only the effect. […] Of course, I have seen more by travelling than I would have seen at home, and I have added something to my experience and knowledge of things, but I have diminished my knowledge of literature. […] Therefore I decided not to travel just once on a very long journey by ship or horse or on foot to those lands, but many times on a tiny map, with books and the imagination, so that in the course of an hour I could go to the shores and return as many times as I liked. (Sen. IX. 2.854/328–9)

6

Haven, CT, 1982), pp. 81–103, and ‘Resurrecting Rome: The Double Task of the Humanist Imagination’, in P. A. Ramsey, ed., Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth (Binghamton, NY, 1982), pp. 41–54; Janet Smarr, ‘Petrarch: A Vergil without a Rome’, in Rome in the Renaissance, pp. 133–40; Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC, 1993), pp. 14–32; Jennifer Summit, ‘Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer and the Making of Medieval Rome’, JMEMS, 30 (2000), pp. 211–46. For Petrarch’s eloquent declination, see his Fam. XI. 5; also Wilkins, Life, pp. 99–102, and Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, ed. by Dennis J. McAuliffe, trans. by Richard Monges (New York, 1976), pp. 90–1.

38  Chaucer and Petrarch

It is this equivalence between physical and mental ‘wanderings’ that constitutes the core of the present chapter: the idea that Chaucer somehow met Petrarch in Italy, either in person or by means of ‘a tiny map, with books and the imagination’; and the extent to which Petrarch’s poetics of dislocation was understood and shared by Chaucer. In consequence, it is necessary to examine Chaucer’s cultural interaction with Italy both prior to and following his first recorded commission of 1372–3, and the extent to which his reception of Italian poetics and humanist thought provided him with a renewed sense of poetry’s purpose, range and possibility. For many years it was thought – or at least thought possible – that Geoffrey Chaucer, the ‘father of English literary history’, met with Francesco Petrarca, ‘the father of humanism’.7 We know that Chaucer travelled to Italy twice, in 1372–3 and again in 1378, but it has also been claimed that Chaucer may have visited the peninsula in 1368.8 This earlier journey would have been made in order to celebrate the marriage of Chaucer’s former patron, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo, lord of Pavia and Petrarch’s former patron – a marriage which took place in Milan either on 28 May or 5 June 1368. The marriage itself ‘turned out very unluckily, [with] Lionel dying on 17 October 1368 […] after a five-month whirl of feasts and tournaments’.9 The marriage also turned out very unluckily for scholars hoping for an encounter between the two literary figures. Firstly, it cannot be proven that Chaucer went to Italy in 1368. The only evidence that there is to support the possibility is a warrant, stamped with the privy seal, granting Chaucer permission to pass at Dover (‘nostre ame vallet Geffrey Chaucer de passer en port de Dovorre’).10 No mention is made of his destination and, as Pearsall points out, ‘with the four-week or five-week one-way journey, it would have been a whirlwind visit, and he is unlikely to have made it’ in order to be back in England before the end of October, as records show he was.11 Secondly, the date given for the warrant is 17 July (‘le xvii jour de Juyl’), which negates any possibility of his having met Petrarch, who had left Milan for Pavia two weeks before Chaucer had even left England.12

7

8 9 10 11 12

See A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 59, 88–110; J. H. Robinson and H. W. Rolfe, Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (New York, 1898), pp. 225–93. See for example Donald R. Howard, Chaucer and the Medieval World (London, 1987), pp. 120–1. Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 53. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford, 1966), p. 29. Pearsall, Life, p. 53. Crow and Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 29. Wilkins, Life, p. 216, points out that at ‘some time in June Petrarch went to Milan, called there, probably, to attend the festivities celebrating the wedding of Galeazzo’s daughter Violante to Lionel, Duke of Clarence. While in Milan he was confined to his bed, for at least much of the time, by an ulcerated leg. On the 3rd of July he rode back to Pavia.’



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  39

We may also discount the idea of any meeting having taken place in 1378 by virtue of the fact that Petrarch died on 19 July 1374, which leaves only the commission of 1372–3. It is known for certain that Chaucer was in Italy upon this occasion, as there is a series of documents which detail the journey made by Chaucer, Sir James de Provan and John de Mari (‘Jacobi Provan Johannes de Mari civis Januensis et Galfridi Chaucer scutiferi nostri plenam fiduciam’).13 This commission took Chaucer to Genoa, as part of a trade mission, and to Florence, most probably in relation to Edward III’s financial arrangements with the Bardi and other Florentine banking houses. It is possible that Chaucer could have met Petrarch or Boccaccio on his way down from Genoa to Florence […] but it is extremely unlikely that he did, or that he would have been well received if he had gone out of his way to do so. They were old and crotchety, and very distinguished, and did not have time for young travellers of no rank, and from England, of all places.14

It is also unlikely that Petrarch, a prolific correspondent, would have neglected to mention the visit of a young Englishman to his house in one of his epistles. Petrarch was not entirely hostile to the English in any case. As Boitani notes, his position on the English altered over his lifetime: originally considering them to be the most timid amongst all the barbarian races (‘omnium barbarorum timidissimi’, Fam. XXII.14.138/242) – or, even worse, dialecticians (see Fam. XVI. 14; Sen. XII. 2) – Petrarch changed his view with the English victories over the French in the Hundred Years War and with English hostility to the Avignon curia. In the final poem of his pastoral sequence, the Bucolicum carmen, Petrarch shows Pan, the king of France, in confrontation with Arthicus, the king of England. Petrarch has the two figures ‘represent two nations, two policies, two ethical codes’ at a time when English national identity was itself inchoate even to the English themselves.15 Mythopoeic national histories and genealogies reinforce the conflict, with the French looking to Charlemagne and the English to Brutus and ‘Ennias the athel’.16 13 14

15 16

Crow and Olson, eds., Chaucer Life-Records, p. 33. Pearsall, Life, p. 104. Whilst ‘crotchety’ seems an apposite description of the aged Petrarch, there is no reason to believe that he would have turned away a visitor on account the latter’s being ‘of no rank’. On Petrarch’s view of the English, see Piero Boitani, ‘Petrarch and the “barbari Britanni” ’, in Martin McLaughlin, Letizia Panizza and Peter Hainsworth, eds, Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 Years, Proceedings of the British Academy, 146 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 9–25. His views upon the English are intertwined with his intense dislike of logicians; yet Boitani notes that the Britons come to ‘rival the ancient Romans’ (p. 25) by virtue of their hostility to the Avignon curia. Ibid., p. 23. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. J. Anderson (London, 1996), I. 5. The opening of Gawain encapsulates the Trojan genealogy of the British; see pp. 167–8 of Anderson’s edition.

40  Chaucer and Petrarch

Given Petrarch’s Roman agenda, it is no surprise that the English receive the more magnanimous illustration – despite the fact that Petrarch himself was dispatched in 1360 to celebrate King John’s release from English captivity. Nevertheless, neither Petrarch’s ameliorated perspective upon the English nor his encounters with Englishmen such as Richard de Bury, author of the Philobiblon, serves to provide any further evidence of a possible meeting with Chaucer. However, there remains the literary “evidence” for Chaucer’s potential meeting with Petrarch, which is to be found in the famous prologue to the Clerk’s Tale: I wol yow telle a tale which that I Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, As preved by his wordes and his werk. He is now deed and nayled in his cheste […] Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete, Highte this clerk, whos rhetorike sweete Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie.  (IV. 26–33)17

The fact that Chaucer’s Clerk explicitly states that he learned his tale at Padua, which is where Petrarch was living whilst Chaucer was in Italy in early 1373, may count for something, but it would be imprudent to extrapolate a meeting between the two poets out of this. In short, Chaucer is not the Clerk; nor is he the Monk, who ambiguously directs his audience towards ‘my maister Petrak’ (VII. 2325). Overall, it would appear that Chaucer and Petrarch never met in person; but, once we have separated the fantastic or the desired from the actual, it becomes possible to investigate how Chaucer and Petrarch interact in other ways: poetically, culturally and historically. In relation to the 1372–3 commission, Chaucer would most likely have been chosen due to an existing knowledge of Italian gleaned from the merchants with whom his father and step-cousins dealt on a regular basis. Chaucer’s Italian would thus predate his first visit to Italy, rather than being a product of it. His father, John Chaucer, had been a prosperous vintner, and as such had dealings with the Italian wine merchants who resided near to the family home on Thames Street, in the Vintry Ward. Both Pearsall and Howard Schless subscribe to this claim, yet the latter goes further than the former by raising the possibility that the work of Dante had arrived in England prior to Chaucer’s first journey to Italy.18 17

18

Boitani’s amazement is understandable: ‘An Oxford dialectician sensitive to the humanist project and to Petrarch’s poetry! A lover of logic who praises the poetic laurel! European culture, in a matter of two decades, has taken a sensational leap. And it has done so thanks to Petrarch himself’ (‘Petrarch and the “barbari Britanni” ’, p. 15). Pearsall, Life, p. 102; H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK, 1984), p. 3.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  41

This view suggests that Chaucer achieved a twofold acquisition of the Italian language and that the Italian he may have learned as a youth in the Vintry Ward was supplemented by study of the vernacular in written form. The primary claim for Chaucer’s knowledge of Italian prior to the 1372–3 commission appears to be straightforward: In 1372, however, Chaucer, although still a relatively unknown member of the court, would have had a distinct qualification for the Italian mission if he could have presented a fluency in the language. Without such a knowledge he would hardly have been more than another esquire of the king’s chamber whose selection for the trip we would have to ascribe to the plausible coincidence that brought up his name for assignment at the moment that an Italian mission was being formed.19

As a counterpoint to this argument, John Larner has pointed out that Chaucer would not have needed to know any Italian, as ‘Italian merchants and nobles used French as a lingua franca; Italian officials, it goes without saying, knew Latin’.20 By extension, in the absence of primers or dictionaries, ‘any version of Italian he acquired must have been obtained orally’ and was the result of ‘a very powerful and intellectual and literary curiosity’.21 Nevertheless, the experience of the Vintry Ward still stands, and an ambassador in possession of Italian could be party to valuable unofficial information. The secondary claim, that the Commedia arrived in England before Chaucer arrived in Italy, is more open to question in the absence of any evidence. Schless depends here on links between the Bardi banking family and Dante himself. According to Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante (Short Treatise in Praise of Dante) (30–2), the poet’s beloved Beatrice had been the daughter of the Florentine Folco Portinari, who gave her in marriage to another Florentine, Simone dei Bardi, of the banking family who subsidized both Edward III and Richard II.22 Schless thus reasons that the Bardi would have had a vested interest in the Commedia, and that we must therefore

19 20

21 22

Schless, Chaucer and Dante, p. 4. John Larner, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, in Piero Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 7–32 (at p. 18). For a wider discussion of the Italy Chaucer encountered, see John Larner’s Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch 1216–1380 (London, 1980), and Culture and Society in Italy 1290–1420 (London, 1971); Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 9–64; and Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), pp. 1–28. Larner, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, pp. 18–19. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. by P. G. Ricci, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), 3 (1974): pp. 423–538 (at 444–5); Life of Dante, trans. by J. G. Nichols (London, 2002), pp. 14–15; R.  W.  B. Lewis, Dante: A Life (London, 2002), pp. 43–4; Schless, Chaucer and Dante, p. 6. See also, of course, Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova, ed. by Domenico de Robertis (Milan, 1980).

42  Chaucer and Petrarch

‘treat with extreme caution the argument that Dante’s work was unknown in England before Chaucer’s return from his Italian journey’. Wendy Childs offers another possible link between the Bardi and the opportunity their presence in England provided for those of a literary bent, when she posits the likelihood that ‘the London representatives of the Bardi company even had a particular interest in the work of Boccaccio, once one of their junior representatives in Naples’.23 What these varying perspectives confirm is that it cannot be ascertained exactly when Chaucer first learned Italian, although his upbringing in the Vintry Ward suggests that he would have had at least a smattering of the language prior to the 1372–3 commission. And, whilst it is possible that the latest Italian literature had somehow made it to London, it is more probable that it would have remained in the hands of the Italian community, if it made the journey at all.24 Nevertheless, records show that there was a large number of Italians resident in the City of London. Similarly, Chaucer had been in the service of the king since 1367, and as such encounters with Italians at court were likely, especially given the relationship between the monarchy and the Italian banking families. Furthermore, following his first mission to Italy, Chaucer was appointed the controller of customs for hides, skins and wools in the port of London on 8 June 1374, which brought him into direct relation with the capital’s Italian merchants on a regular basis – as the Italians were the only alien group involved in the exportation of English wool during this period.25 What, then, was Chaucer’s direct reaction to Italy and Italian culture, and – more pertinently to this study – what was his experience of Petrarch and Petrarchism? In relation to the former – Chaucer’s former – Chaucer’s Italian Rezeptionästhetik, formed by the commissions of 1372–3 and 1378 – there are two possible responses: recognition or culture shock. The first may be summed up by Wallace’s argument that No magic curtain separated ‘medieval’ London and Westminster from ‘Renaissance’ Florence and Milan; all sites were interlinked for Chaucer (and, indeed, through Chaucer) as part of a transnational nexus of capital, cultural, mercantile, and military exchange. […] [We should […] suspend belief in cultural partitions such as ‘medieval’, ‘Renaissance’,

23 24

25

See Schless, Chaucer and Dante, p. 6, and Wendy Childs, ‘Anglo-Italian Contacts in the Fourteenth Century’, in Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 65–87 (at p. 74). Childs argues for the likelihood that the Italian community would have brought their own culture with them, as had the French (for example in the form of the Feste de Pui); she also entertains the possibility that Italian merchants brought books to England which could then be copied or sold (ibid., pp. 74, 83). Ibid., p. 68, and T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 248–50, 255–6.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  43 and ‘humanist’. There is nothing going on in Petrarch and Boccaccio that cannot, with profit, be brought into intelligible relation with Chaucer.26

The counterpoint to this interpretation may be found in Warren Ginsberg’s argument for Chaucer’s Italian Tradition: These Italians [trading in London] may have proved valuable ciceroni; nevertheless, both the country Chaucer visited twice and the literature he acquired there probably always retained some sense of remoteness for him. A land without a ruling sovereign, in which independent cities, each differently governed, fiercely competed with one another (and with the pope) for hegemony, surely was unfamiliar terrain. […] No doubt the civic structures Chaucer knew afforded some insight into those he observed; Florence’s sesti and arti certainly could be compared to London’s wards and misteries. But the scope and the pace of political life in Florence would have amazed any English visitor.27

In brief, Wallace argues that Chaucer’s daily experience of the bustling English metropolis and of its mercantile operation prepared him for the city–states of northern Italy, whilst Ginsberg claims that the irreconcilable differences between the two cultures rendered Genoa, Florence and Milan terra incognita. We are effectively faced with a choice between Chaucer the Londoner versus Chaucer the Cosmopolite; yet surely the answer lies in the space between these two extremes. Chaucer’s interaction with London’s Italian merchants, his experience at a court funded by Italian bankers, and also the conversation he entered into with Sir James (Jacopo) de Provan, or rather with the latter’s son, Saladin, and with John de Mari on his first journey to Italy would have helped to prepare him for Genoa and Florence. This visit in turn would have prepared him in turn for his journey to Milan in 1378, in the company of Sir Edward de Berkeley.28 However, there were certain cultural differences, which would have

26 27 28

Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 1–7. Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, pp. 1–2. Childs (‘Anglo-Italian Contacts’, p. 74) points out that it ‘remains doubtful whether Jacob [Provan] made the journey’ in 1372–3. The second commission, which occupied the period 28 May–19 September 1378, was created in order to discuss the King’s French Wars with Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan, and his son-in-law, the English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood. As Ginsberg points out, ‘the fact that Richard presumably had sent Chaucer to Milan to enlist Visconti’s aid should complicate our inclination to position Chaucer as an undeviating proponent of Florentine liberty against the “tirauntz of Lumbardye” ’ (Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, p. 3, n. 5). Kirkpatrick also argues that it would be anachronistic to think of trecento Florence as democratic, and that the city’s republican sentiments were exploited by the higher guilds (English and Italian Literature, pp. 11, 17). See Frances Stonor Saunders, Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman (London, 2004), pp. 252–60, and William Caferro, John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Baltimore, MD, 2006), pp. 191–208.

44  Chaucer and Petrarch

broadened the English traveller’s ‘horizon of expectations’.29 One of these incongruities would have been the absence of nationhood. As Petrarch had noted at Bucolicum carmen XII, the English had begun to define themselves qua English, in order to distinguish themselves from the French, whereas in Italy the local and the communal took pride of place.30 This would have been made clear by the social and political diversity of the cities Chaucer visited: the alberghi or noble clans which were prominent in Genoa differed from the noble-merchant oligarchy of the Florentine commune or from the signoria of Visconti-ruled Milan. As Larner points out, “Italy” was ‘nothing more than a sentiment or […] a literary idea. The reality was not unity, but a mass of divided cities, lordships, and towns, dominated by particularist sentiments and local interests.’31 Chaucer’s encounter with this mass of divisions opens up a means of interpreting his “reading” of the Italian landscape and culture. If one is to ‘suspend belief in cultural partitions such as “medieval”, “Renaissance”, and “humanist” ’, then Chaucer himself becomes a limen (or gateway) through which subsequent English authors and readers may pass, moving towards his translation of the trecento, as ‘all sites were interlinked for Chaucer (and, indeed, through Chaucer)’. Alternatively, if one is to maintain those cultural partitions and to hold, with Ginsberg, the view that ‘the country Chaucer visited twice and the literature he acquired there probably always retained some sense of remoteness for him’, then Chaucer occupies a liminal space between cultures rather than constituting it (or perhaps as well as constituting it). Overall, James Simpson’s view seems to maintain a balance between the two extremes: Chaucer’s England was ‘culturally very much a part of the larger place of continental Europe’, yet Chaucer himself ‘saw a set of polities at work in Italy entirely different from the political organization to which he was accustomed in England’.32 Chaucer’s encounter with Petrarchan literature would have revealed to him a mind not only attuned to, but also dependent upon, the divisions which characterized trecento Italy. At the same time, however, Petrarch maintained the ‘literary idea’ of Italy in the face of the rivalries and vendette of Realpolitik: 29

30

31 32

The term ‘horizon of expectations’ (Erwartungshorizont) is central to the reception theory of H. R. Jauss. See his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Brighton, 1982), p. 44. See also Ginsberg’s discussion of Jauss’s reception theory in Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, pp. 5–7. See Janet Coleman, ‘English Culture in the Fourteenth Century’, in Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 33–63 (esp. 33). See also Larner, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, for the question of Italy’s existence beyond the page (p. 9). Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, p. 3. See also Larner’s discussion of the differences between the city–states in ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, p. 8. James Simpson, ‘Chaucer as a European Writer’, in Seth Lerer, ed., The Yale Companion to Chaucer (New Haven, 2006), pp. 55–86 (at pp. 58, 71).



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  45 Italia mia, benché ’l parlar sia indarno a le piaghe mortali che nel bel corpo tuo sí spesse veggio, piacemi almen che’ miei sospir’ sian quali spera ’l Tevero et l’Arno, e ’l Po, dove doglioso et grave or seggio. Rettor del cielo, io cheggio che la pietà che Ti condusse in terra Ti volga al tuo dilecto almo paese. Vedi, Segnor cortese, di che lievi cagion’ che crudel guerra; e i cor’, che ’ndura et serra Marte superbo et fero, apri Tu, Padre, e ’ntenerisci et snoda; ivi fa che ’l Tuo vero, qual io mi sia, per la mia lingua s’oda. Voi cui Fortuna à posto in mano il freno de le belle contrade di che nulla pietà par che vi stringa, che fan qui tante pellegrine spade? […] Vostre voglie divise guastan del mondo la piú bella parte. […] Non è questo ’l terren ch’ i’ tocchai pria? Non è questo il mio nido ove nudrito fui sí dolcemente? Non è questa la patria in ch’io mi fido, madre benigna et pia, che copre l’un et l’altro mio parente? My Italy, although speech does not aid those mortal wounds of which in your lovely body I see so many, I wish at least my sighs to be such as Tiber and Arno hope for, and Po where I now sit sorrowful and sad.   Ruler of heaven, I beg that the mercy that made You come to earth may now make You turn to Your beloved, holy country. See, noble Lord, from what trivial causes comes such cruel war: the hearts that proud fierce Mars makes hard and closed, Father, do You open and soften and free: cause Your truth (though I am unworthy) to be heard there through my tongue.   You into whose hands Fortune has given the reins of these lovely regions for which no pity seems to move you: what are so many foreign swords doing here? […] Your divided wills are spoiling the loveliest part of the world. […] Is this not the ground that I touched

46  Chaucer and Petrarch first? Is this not my nest, where I was so sweetly nourished? Is this not my fatherland in which I trust, and my kind and merciful mother, which covers both of my parents?  (RVF 128. 1–20, 55–6, 81–6)

Petrarch’s open letter to the warring lords of Italy, begging them to end their internecine warfare (‘Vostre voglie divise’) and the blight of foreign mercenaries (‘che fan qui tante pellegrine spade?’) bears witness to the further division between the ideal and the actual, between the political and the literary. Petrarch embodies Italy via an image of warfare which will appeal to the hearts of those waging it – the loving mother ravaged by the invading army. Yet Petrarch’s poetic idea of Italy is not only a desire for the future, but also an image drawn from the past; the Italian ideal was achieved by classical Rome, the move forward to unity is in fact a return. This is key to Petrarch’s thought: he is not only a geographical exile, but also a temporal exile, existing outside of a time which he projects as home.33 We witness this sense of temporal exile operating upon RVF 128, wherein Petrarch castigates the Italian warlords’ employment of German mercenaries. The Italian rulers evidently do not recall how Marius pierced the flanks of that uncivilized people (‘come si legge, | Mario aperse sí ’l fianco, | che memoria de l’opra ancho non langue’); not to speak of Julius Caesar, who turned the grass crimson with German blood (‘Cesare taccio che per ogni piaggia | fece l’erbe sanguigne | di lor vene’); indeed, nature herself set the Alps in place as a shield against Teutonic rabidity (‘Ben provide Natura al nostro stato, | quando de l’Alpi schermo | pose fra noi et la tedesca rabbia’, 33–51). The past has definite examples to teach the present, as Chaucer’s Monk attempts to illustrate. It is also worth recalling that one of the reasons why Chaucer went to Italy in 1378 was to meet with one of those ‘pellegrine spade’ – the notorious English mercenary or condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, who had been making a very lucrative living in the peninsula since 1362 (and continued to do so up until his death in 1394).34 And, whilst there is no evidence that Chaucer knew RVF 128, we know that he encountered in some form the work of ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete […] whos rhetorike sweete | Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’, as we have the evidence of The Clerk’s Tale and of the Canticus Troili. It may be that Chaucer only ever found one vernacular poem by Petrarch while he was in Italy – although, given Petrarch’s fame, this appears somewhat unlikely. It 33

34

A great deal has been said about Petrarch’s historical consciousness. See Introduction, p. 5, n. 21. The link between Avignon, the place of exile which Petrarch calls home, and classical Rome as a spiritual and cultural patria is expounded in the Contra eum qui maledixit Italie, ed. by Monica Berté (Florence, 2005), 208–15/IX. 77–9, where Petrarch posits the Rhône as a place of exile in the Roman world. ‘Galfridi missi in nuncio regis versus dictas partes Lumbardie tam ad dominum de Mellan quam ad Johannem de Haukewode pro certis negociis expedicionem guerre tangentibus’ (Crow and Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 58–9).



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  47

is to be noted, however, that most of Petrarch’s fame during his lifetime was dependent upon his humanist credentials. It was the author of the unfinished Latin epic, the Africa, who was crowned upon the Capitoline Hill in 1341; similarly, it would have been the ‘worthy clerk’ who wrote the De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies against Good and Evil Fortune) and the De viris illustribus (Lives of Famous Men) that Chaucer’s Clerk revered, and not necessarily the unrequited lover of madonna Laura; although it is possible that the Clerk had read the Triumph of Time.35 Yet there remains a danger of oversimplifying this case. Wilkins has shown that Petrarch circulated copies of certain poems from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta during his lifetime; and, in a letter written the very same year when Chaucer first set out for Italy, Petrarch himself complains as follows: Invitus, fateor, hac aetate vulgari iuveniles ineptias cerno, quas omnibus, mihi quoque si liceat ignotas velim. Etsi enim stylo quolibet ingenium illius aetatis emineat, ipsa tamen res senilem dedecet gravitatem. Sed quid possum? Omnia iam in vulgus effusa sunt, legunturque libentius quam quae serio postmodum validioribus animis scripsi. At this age, I confess, I observe with reluctance the youthful trifles that I would like to be unknown to all, including me, if it were possible. For while the talent of that age may emerge in any style whatsoever, still the subject matter does not become the gravity of old age. But what can I do? Now they have all circulated among the multitude, and are being read more willingly than what I later wrote seriously for sounder minds. (Sen. XIII. 11. 923 / 500)36

It may well have been that Chaucer came into contact with one of these ‘youthful trifles’ which ‘have all circulated amongst the multitude’. It has even been suggested that Chaucer encountered a Latin translation of Petrarch’s original by Coluccio Salutati, but, as Wilkins points out, this translation ‘was made from the early text of the sonnet, and Chaucer agrees with the final Italian text rather than with Salutati at the points at which the Italian and the Latin versions differ’.37 In more than name were these Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which is only to be expected: in a manuscript environment texts

35

36

37

The Trionfi are the series of vernacular triumphs which were often published together with the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta after Petrarch’s death and continue to be until this day. See Chapter 5, p. 163, n. 8, and E. H. Wilkins, The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’ and Other Petrarchan Studies (Rome, 1951), p. 379. The letter, addressed to Pandolfo Malatesta, closes by revealing that it was written ‘Patavi pridie Nonas Ianuarii algentibus digitis, et fervent bello’ (‘[in] Padua, January 4 [1372], with frozen fingers and war raging’: Sen. XIII. 11. 923/501). The peninsula was thus as divided at the end of Petrarch’s life as it had been when he wrote RVF 128, almost thirty years earlier (c. 1344–5). Wilkins, Making of the ‘Canzoniere’, p. 307.

48  Chaucer and Petrarch

circulate and become corrupted. Petrarch’s attempts to exert tight control over circulation add an ironic tinge to the title of his sequence.38 Indeed, what Mazzotta terms ‘Petrarch’s poetics of fragmentation’, in which ‘the unity of the work is the unity of fragments in fragments’, is linked to his sense of ‘misero esilio’ (‘miserable exile’, RVF 45. 7).39 The sense of home, which, as we have seen, is geographically and temporally dislocated, is as irretrievable or impossible as the perfect, unfragmentary totality; the essence of Petrarchan poetics is the desire for a telos which is always tantalisingly out of reach.40 Chaucer, whilst he might have been unfamiliar with the minute details of the specific political divisions which enabled Petrarch’s writing, could not fail to witness the divisions themselves, and would have understood their psychological reflections. Indeed the Petrarchan voice provided a means of translating those divisions. The poet who lamented the fragmentation of ‘Italia mia’ is translated into the fragmented io of Troilus; the country exiled from the unity of its past (and future) finds expression through the poet who makes his home in such dislocation. It is this voice, first translated by Chaucer, that would become the touchstone for generations of poets who sought a way of sounding out their own dislocation.41 It should be pointed out that the voice of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta may have also appealed to Chaucer on account of its familiarity, in addition to those new elements which, as Itamar Even-Zohar claims, make translation the most important factor within the literary polysystem and which were so vital to the nascent English culture.42 What we think of as Petrarchan lyrics is composed of pre-existing elements: classical poetics, Provençal lyrics, the poetry of the dolce stil nuovo and of the earlier Italian tradition – to name but a few. As such, it exemplifies late medieval poetic accretion. Indeed, those lyrics which have been claimed as potential candidates for Chaucer’s earliest translations from the Italian are in many ways indistinguishable from his lyrics in the French style, and hence they have been contested. A Complaint

38

39 40

41

42

On the title Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, see Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima: Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna, 1992), pp. 9–11; Emanuela Scarpa, ‘ “Canzoniere”: Per la storia di un titolo’, Studi di filologia italiana, 55 (1997), pp. 107–9; and Bettarini’s introduction to her edition of the Canzoniere, pp. xxiii–xxiv. Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, pp. 60, 79. For a recent discussion of Petrarchan dislocation, see Massimo Lollini, ‘ “Padre mite e dispotico”: Eredità culturale e poetica di Petrarca’, Annali d’Italianistica, 22 (2004), pp. 321–36 (at pp. 325–6). Poetically speaking, Chaucer’s Italian experience may be seen to isolate him from his peers. As Kirkpatrick notes, ‘[n]o English poet makes fuller or more critical use of Italian sources than Chaucer. It is probable that he alone, among his literary contemporaries, had travelled to Italy, where he would have met Italian intellectuals […] there is nothing in the fifteenth century to compare’ (English and Italian Literature, p. 24). The idea of Chaucer as a Renaissance man has not gone unchallenged, as one would expect. See Introduction, pp. 24–25.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  49

to his Lady, for example, was claimed by F. N. Robinson to be an early attempt by Chaucer at terza rima: Hir name is Bountee set in womanhede, Sadnesse in youthe and Beautee prydelees And Plesaunce under governaunce and drede; Hir surname is eek Faire Rewthelees,   The Wyse, yknit unto Good Aventure,   That, for I love hir, she sleeth me giltelees. Hir love I best, and shal, whyl I may dure,   Bet than myself an hundred thousand deel,   Than al this worldes richesse or creature. Now hath not Love me bestowed weel   To love ther I never shal have part?   Allas, right thus is turned me the wheel, Thus am I slayn with Loves fyry dart!   I can but love hir best, my swete fo;   Love hath me taught no more of his art But serve alwey and stint for no wo.  (24–39)

The poem’s overall form is French, as is evinced not only by its allegorical tone, so redolent of the Roman de la Rose tradition, but also by its alternative title, The Balade of Pytee (see MS Add. 34360; MS Harley 78). The conventional language of amour courtois also suggests the French tradition, although certain phrases are also found frequently in contemporary Italian poetry; the oxymoronic ‘my swete fo’, for example, has equivalents in both Petrarch and Boccaccio.43 James Wimsatt also notes that, whilst the diction is French and owes something to Machaut’s ‘Complainte I’, the use of terza rima has no precursor in the formes fixes.44 Again, the interfusion of and kinship between French and Italianate elements works to Chaucer’s advantage – the introduction of the new elements to the English audience’s Erwartungshorizont has more chance of success if it might be seen as contiguous with established poetics.45

43 44

45

See the following chapter, p. 102. J. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto–Buffalo–London, 1991), pp. 30, 112–16. See also Laila Gross’s headnote and explanatory note in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987), pp. 633, 1078. Gross notes the relationship between the Complaint and Anelida and Arcite, which might suggest a later date for the poem, although this cannot be ascertained. See also James I. Wimsatt, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and Chaucer’s Love Lyrics’, Medium Aevum, 47 (1978), pp. 66–87. For F. N. Robinson’s original comments, see his edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1979), pp. 520, 856. See Wallace, ‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Early Writings’, in Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 141–62: ‘The old theoretical division of Chaucer’s career into French, Italian and English periods is now generally discredited’ (p. 141).

50  Chaucer and Petrarch

The French tradition is also perhaps what drew Chaucer to Boccaccio’s Neapolitan works, influenced as they were by the cultural environment of the Angevin court.46 However, as Wallace notes: When Boccaccio was about fourteen years of age he moved into a merchant colony to train as an apprentice merchant: when Chaucer was about the same age he moved out of a merchant milieu to train as a page under the Countess of Ulster. […] Chaucer convinces us of his ability to generate and sustain a discourse fit for an aristocratic milieu; Boccaccio does not.   Chaucer must have recognised that he had much in common with Boccaccio: but in reading Boccaccio’s early writings, he became increasingly aware of this difference in discourse.47

Petrarch, on the other hand, spent his life being courted by kings, lords and popes, as he says in the Epistle to Posterity: ‘Maximi reges mee etatis et amarunt et coluerunt me; cur autem nescio: ipsi viderint’ (‘The greatest kings of this age have loved and courted me. They may know why; I certainly do not’, Sen. XVIII. 1. 6/673).48 And, whilst Petrarch was disdainful of chivalric culture, he was a great admirer of King Robert, being publicly examined by him over three days at Naples in March 1341, prior to receiving the laureateship (see Familiares IV. 3). As we know, Petrarch continued to live in the shadow of French culture, remaining close to the Avignonese court until his scandalous move to Milan in 1353. Petrarch and Chaucer thus had a shared experience of a courtly culture which to some extent excluded Boccaccio – who longed to return to Naples for many years – and which had an obvious effect upon their work and thought. Moreover, Petrarch’s difficult, ambivalent relationship with Avignon, the home of the Whore of Babylon and of his donna angelicata,49 gave rise to the

46

47 48

49

Boccaccio travelled to Naples with his father in 1327, returning to Florence around 1340–1. See Branca, Boccaccio, pp. 56–85; E. G. Léonard, Boccace et Naples (Paris, 1944); Francesco Sabatini, Napoli angioina (Naples, 1975); N. R. Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1980); Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 23–38; Pade et al., eds, Avignon and Naples: Italy in France–France in Italy in the Fourteenth Century (Rome, 1997). Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, p. 37. When Petarch was 22, he summered with the Bishop of Lombez, Giacomo Colonna, following which he sojourned with Cardinal Giovanni Colonna for many years, ‘non quasi sub domino sed sub patre’ (‘not as under a master but as under a father’, Sen. XVIII. 1. 10/675). The Colonnesi were, of course, a wealthy and powerful family. See Marco Santagata, Petrarca e i Colonna: Sui destinatari di R. v. f. 7. 10, 28 e 40 (Lucca, 1988). The innamoramento at Avignon was famously recorded by Petrarch in his Virgil codex (Chapter 2, p. 92, n. 74): see Francisci Petrarcae Vergilianus codex ad Publii Vergilii Maronis diem natalem bis millesimum celebrandum quam simillime expressus atque in lucem, ed. by Giovanni Galbiati and Achille Ratti (Milan, 1930), and Le postille del Virgilio Ambrosiano, ed. by M. Baglio, A. Nebuloni Testa and M. Petoletti, 2 vols (Padua, 2006). Giovanni Colonna questioned the existence of Laura outside of the poetic sphere, to which



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  51

kind of anti-clerical sentiments that we find repeatedly in Chaucer, although with less vituperation in the latter: Fiamma dal ciel su le tue treccie piova, malvagia, che dal fiume et da le ghiande per l’altrui impoverir se’ ricca et grande, poi che di mal oprar tanto ti giova; nido di tradimenti, in cui si cova quanto mal per lo mondo oggi si spande, de vin serva, di lecti et di vivande, in cui Luxuria fa l’ultima prova. Per le camere tue fanciulle et vecchi vanno trescando, et Belzebub in mezzo co’ mantici et col foco et co li specchi. May fire from heaven rain down on your tresses, wicked one, since doing ill pleases you so, who after eating acorns and drinking from the river have become great and rich by making others poor, nest of treachery, where is hatched whatever evil is spread through the world today, slave of wine, bed, and food, in whom intemperance shows its utmost power! Through your chambers young girls and old men go frisking, and Beelzebub in the midst with the bellows and the fire and mirrors. (RVF 136. 1–11)

Although the tone is different, one might compare such invective with the implicit charges that Chaucer lays against Friar Hubert in the General Prologue: A FRERE ther was, a wantowne and a merye, A lymytour, a ful solempne man. In alle the ordres foure is noon that kan So muchel of daliaunce and fair langage. He hadde maad ful many a mariage Of yonge wommen at his owene cost. […] For ther he was nat lyk a cloysterer With a thredbare cope, as is a povre scoler, But he was lyk a maister or a pope.  (I. 208–13, 259–61)50

50

Petrarch responded in Fam. II. 9. See also Bortolo Martinelli, ‘Feria sexta aprilis: La data sacra del canzoniere del Petrarca’, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, 8 (1972), pp. 449–84. See Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973); Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 231–46; G. Geltner, ‘Faux Semblants: Antifraternalism Reconsidered in Jean de Meun and Chaucer’,

52  Chaucer and Petrarch

As Nick Havely has pointed out, lechery, gluttony, avarice and pride were sins synonymous with friars in the antifraternal tradition, and indeed these are the charges which Petrarch lays against the cardinals of the Avignon curia.51 The ‘vecchi’ who go ‘trescando’ find their equivalent in Chaucer’s ‘wantowne and a merye’, who ‘hadde maad ful many a mariage  Of yonge wommen at his owene cost’ – presumably because of pregnancy. Likewise, Petrarch’s cardinals have become wealthy by impoverishing others (‘per l’altrui impoverir se’ ricca et grande’), in the same way in which Friar Hubert was ‘lyk a maister or a pope’.52 Petrarch’s depiction of the curia’s association with Beelzebub, furthermore, finds a somewhat crude, comical corollary in the Prologue to the Summoner’s Tale, in which ‘[o]ut of the develes ers ther gonne dryve | Twenty thousand freres on a route’ (III. 1694–5). There is in fact an intertextual link between this account of the devil’s fraternal tail and Petrarch’s depiction of the curia in league with Beelzebub. The Summoner’s prologue and his tale of the hypocritical Friar John is, of course, a response to Friar Hubert’s tale of the summoner who encounters the devil. The devil predicts that the summoner will experience hell ‘Bet than Virgile, while he was on lyve, | Or Dant also’ (III. 1519–20). As Roberto Mercuri has argued, Petrarch’s Reimbildung (ghiande; grande; spande; vivande) in this sonnet appears to draw upon Dante’s invective against Florentine luxuria in canto XXVI of the Inferno, and also upon canto XXII of the Purgatorio. This last passage also shows a correlation of subject matter; as Mercuri argues, ‘Dantean reminiscences [are] exhibited by Petrarch in order to denounce the avidity and the dissolution of the Church and in order to evoke a mythical age of gold’.53 Indeed, at Purgatorio XXII. 145–50, Dante posits that ‘le Romane antiche per lor bere | contente furon d’acqua’ (‘the ancient Roman women were content with water for their drink’) and that ‘[l]o secol primo quant’oro fu bello: | fé savorose con fame le ghiande, | e nettare

51 52

53

Studies in Philology, 101 (2004), pp. 357–80. The most obvious figure of antifraternal satire in the Canterbury Tales is of course Friar John of the Summoner’s Tale (whose glosynge we heard in the Introduction). Boccaccio was also an exponential antifraternalist, although, as Nick Havely reminds us, ‘some of Boccaccio’s best friends were friars’: see his ‘Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Friars’, in Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 249–68 (at p. 252), and also Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Religion and the Clergy in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Rome, 1984). Havely, ‘Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Friars’, p. 260. Petrarch’s distaste for the enormous wealth of the curia is also linked to his admiration for Robert of Naples, who in 1322 wrote (or had someone write) a pauperist tract entitled Tractacus de paupertate Christi, Apostolorum eorumque imitatorum. See Charmaine Lee, ‘Avignon and Naples: An Italian Court in France, a French Court in Italy’, in Pade et al., eds, Avignon and Naples, pp. 141–8 (at pp. 143–4), and Havely, ‘Friars’, p. 252. R. Mercuri, ‘Avignone e Napoli in Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio’, in Pade et al., eds, Avignon and Naples, pp. 117–29 (p. 120, my translation).



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  53

con sete ogne ruscello’ (‘[t]he first age was as lovely as gold: it made acorns tasty with hunger, and with thirst turned every stream to nectar’).54 As we know, Petrarch’s contempt for the Avignonese papacy stems from his commitment to the idea of Rome, which is itself symptomatic of his temporal exile and of his conception of the classical past as constituting the ‘età dell’oro’ to which Dante refers. This temporal exile, furthermore, is another intertextual locus in which Chaucer and Petrarch “meet”, as we see in Chaucer’s Boethian poem, The Former Age (1398–9?): A blisful lyf, a paisible and a swete, Ledden the peples in the former age. […] But cursed was the tyme, I dar wel seye, That men first dide hir swety bysinesse To grobbe up metal, lurkinge in derknesse, And in the riveres first gemmes soghte. […] Allas, allas, now men may wepe and crye! For in oure dayes nis but covetyse, Doublenesse, and tresoun, and envye, Poyson, manslawhtre, and mordre in sondry wyse. (1–2, 27–30, 60–3)

Chaucer may be referring to a time prior to the civilization which Petrarch extols; but, in his comparison of the past with a present which cannot but seem barbarous by contrast, he is communing with one of the fundamental impulses which spurred Petrarchan humanism.55 And, whilst this is not to claim that the poem is irrefutable proof of Chaucer’s understanding of the humanist ethos – the possible influence of the Roman de la Rose would perhaps undermine such a claim – it is nevertheless evidence of a shared nostalgic impetus. In both poets the present is weighed against the past and found wanting.

54

55

See also Sen. XII. 1. 901/446: ‘miseras matronas Romanorum, illas primas, quibus vinum bibere capitale fuit […] nec tamen inutiles ideo, nec exangues feminae illos filios peperere, quos nunc etiam admiramur cultores virtutum, expulsores vitiorum’ (‘[t]hose poor matrons of early Rome, for whom drinking wine was a capital crime […] nor were they therefore useless or thin-blooded women, for they bore the sons we now admire as cultivators of virtues, scourges of vice’). The poem postdates Chaucer’s Italian embassies, being written at some point between 1380 and the end of his life, although its exact date cannot be ascertained. John Norton-Smith argues for 1398–9, reading the poem as a critique of late Ricardian rule. See his ‘Chaucer’s Etas Prima’, Medium Aevum, 32 (1963), pp. 117–24. The primary source is Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, II metrum 5.

54  Chaucer and Petrarch

Robert Edwards, drawing on the work of Morton Bloomfield and A. J. Minnis, has described Chaucer’s sense of the classical past in terms remarkably similar to those often ascribed to Petrarch: Chaucerian antiquity is removed from the medieval universal histories that correlated events from pagan history with incidents in Jewish history from the Old Testament. […] Implicitly, Chaucer is the counter-example to the claim that historical consciousness arises with the Renaissance and that no one in the Middle Ages could see the classical past as a conceptual whole.56

This correlation of pagan and scriptural historicism, developed by Hieronymus and Augustine and used by Dante, was also rejected by the Petrarchan model of history.57 As we have seen, rather than adhere to the conception of the six ages and four world monarchies, Petrarch divides world history instead into the classical past, the inglorious present, and a possibly reinvigorated future, based upon the recovery of the past. Bloomfield’s position that Chaucer possessed ‘a new heightened attention toward past, present and future’ certainly corresponds to Petrarch’s tripartite historicism.58 Likewise, Edwards’ emphasis upon Chaucer’s sense of the ‘pastness of antiquity’, which ‘makes it an object of aesthetic representation and poetic scrutiny’, corresponds with Petrarch’s recognition of ‘the pastness of the past’ and with Greene’s account of Petrarchan historicism as being predicated upon a metaphorical rupture, as opposed to a metonymic continuity, of medieval historicism.59 Yet one might be led to ask whether there was a de facto meeting of minds, as opposed to the application of a contentious academic periodiza56

57

58

59

R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 2–3. See also Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘Chaucer’s Sense of History’, JEGP, 51 (1952), pp. 301–13; Alastair J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, 1982); also by Minnis, ‘From Medieval to Renaissance? Chaucer’s Position on Past Gentility’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 72 (1986), pp. 205–46; and Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI, 1991). On Dante’s historicism, see Charles T. Davis, ‘Dante’s Vision of History’, Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, 118 (2000), pp. 243–59; and, also by Davis, ‘Rome and Babylon in Dante’, in P. A. Ramsay, ed., Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth (Binghamton, NY, 1982) , pp. 19–40. Davis points to the influence of Ubertino da Casale’s Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu (‘Rome and Babylon’, pp. 30–3). Bloomfield, ‘Chaucer’s Sense of History’, p. 304. A somewhat negative view of this trichotomy is to be found in a letter to the Venetian Brother Bonaventura Baffo, in which he discusses the plight of the patria: ‘Sic in rebus humanis semper odiosius quod est presens. Et preteritum quoque, dum aderat, odiosum fuit futurumque, cum venerit odiosum erit’ (‘It is thus with human beings: the present is always more hateful, as the past was hateful too when it was there, as the future will be hateful when it arrives:’: Sen. III. 9. 30/114). See Francesco Petrarca, Res Seniles: Libri I–IV, ed. by Silvia Rizzo and Monica Berté (Florence, 2006), pp. 252–61 (p. 260); for the English translation, see Letters of Old Age, trans. by Bernardo, Levin and Bernardo. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio, p. 4; Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, p. 2; Greene, Light in Troy, p. 86.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  55

tion – which in many ways is Petrarch’s legacy – to two different poets. This question might be answered by considering Chaucer’s own quasi-humanist history, The Monk’s Tale, in relation to its literary forebears.60 The Monk’s Tale numbers, amongst its various sources, Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–63) and De mulieribus claris (1361–2), both of which were influenced by Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, in which he lays out his historical schema. And, whilst the Monk’s Tale is prematurely curtailed, it does not automatically follow that Chaucer was belittling Petrarchan historicism; although some commentators have read it as such.61 Wallace, for example, argues that ‘Chaucer aligns himself with Boccaccian revisionism and against a Petrarchan cultural project that proves congenial to despotic ideology’, further emphasizing the tale’s lineage by positing that ‘Petrarch writes in praise of great men and is rewarded by the great despots of Northern Italy; Boccaccio writes in praise of great men, hence furthering republican critiques of despotic polity; Chaucer writes the Monk’s Tale’.62 In order to verify or refute these arguments it is necessary to consider a series of points before returning to the exact reason(s) given in the text as to why the Monk is stopped short: the first point is Petrarch’s implied motivation – reward from a despotic patron; the second is Boccaccio’s alleged critique of Petrarch; the third is Chaucer’s putative republicanism. Such a brief examination of the contexts of, and interrelationships between, the texts will perhaps reinforce Peter Brown’s view that there ‘may be more of Petrarch in Chaucer than Wallace would have us believe’.63 Petrarch’s historicism, as schematized in the prefaces to his De viris illustribus, is predicated upon three objectives.64 The first objective is moral: to

60

61 62 63 64

See Piero Boitani, ‘The Monk’s Tale: Dante and Boccaccio’, Medium Aevum, 45 (1976), pp. 50–69; Peter Godman, ‘Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Latin Works’, in Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 269–95; Renate Haas, ‘Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale: An Ingenious Criticism of Early Humanist Conceptions of Tragedy’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 36 (1987), pp. 44–70; M. C. Seymour, ‘Chaucer’s Early Poem: De Casibus Virorum Illustrium’, ChR, 24 (1989), pp. 163–5; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 299–336; Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 39–91; Richard Neuse, ‘The Monk’s de casibus: The Boccaccio Case Reopened’, in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds, The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison, NJ, 2000), pp. 247–77; and Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, pp. 190–229. See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. Robert Boenig queries the tale’s status as a fragment poem in his paper ‘Is The Monk’s Tale a Fragment?’, Notes and Queries, 43: 3 (1996), pp. 261–4. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 301–8. Review of Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, in Review of English Studies, 46: 196 (1998), pp. 497–9. Petrarch wrote a long preface for the 1351–3 draft and a shorter one for the 1371–4 draft. According to Benjamin G. Kohl, in ‘Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus’, History and Theory, 13 (1974), 132–44, De viris was first conceived around 1337, as we first hear of the project in his dialogue the Secretum. However, Hans Baron, in Petrarch’s Secretum: Its

56  Chaucer and Petrarch

inspire virtue in the reader by means of historical examples which have either sustained or failed to sustain such virtue. Petrarch’s primary source for a model of this sort is Livy. The second aim is aesthetic; it consists in achieving dignity of style, and the sources for this are Cicero and Valerius Maximus. The final aim is critical, oriented towards the truth, and the source, again, is Cicero. Petrarch’s historical preference is illustrated by the 1351–3 preface: Scriberem libentius, fateor, visa quam lecta, nova quam vetera […] Gratiam habeo princibus nostris, qui michi fesso et quietis avido hunc preripiunt laborem; neque enim historie sed satyre materiam stilo tribuunt. Nam etsi quosdam nuper victoriis satis insignes noverim, ita tamen aut fortune aut hostium inertie cunta cedunt […] neque ego fortunatos sed illustres sum pollicitus viros. […] Hic enim, nisi fallor, fructosus historici finis est, illa prosequi que vel sectanda legentibus vel fugienda sunt, ut in utranque partem copia suppetat illustrium exemplorum. I confess that I should prefer to write on things seen rather than read, contemporary rather than ancient […] However, being tired and desirous of rest, I thank those contemporary princes who free me from this labor, for they contribute material not fit for history but for satire. And though I realize that some of them have recently become famous because of military victories, these occurred because of good fortune or the inertia of the enemy […] In any case, I have promised not to describe lucky men, but illustrious ones. […] For, unless I am mistaken, this is the profitable goal for the historian: to point up to the readers those things that are to be followed and those to be avoided, with plenty of distinguished examples on either side.65

Petrarch’s distaste for ‘contemporary princes’, his refusal to incorporate modern instances, as they have come to be called, into his series, surely calls into question Wallace’s argument that Petrarch wrote De viris illustribus with the implicit hope of being rewarded by those whom he purposely excises. However, as Wallace rightly notes, Petrarch removed the disparaging comments on trecento magnates when he dedicated the De viris to Francesco da Carrara, lord of Padua. Yet this does not necessarily entail an alteration

65

Making and Its Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 181–3, has since posited a date of 1347 for the Secretum. This first plan ranged from Romulus to Titus. The second plan, of 1351–3, was much more inclusive, ranging from Adam to Caesar. The final plan, of 1371–4, covered the period from Romulus to Trajan, and was “completed” by Petrarch’s literary executor, Lombardo della Seta, in 1379. See De viris illustribus, in Martellotti et al., Petrarca, Prose, pp. 218–67 (at pp. 218–24) and Kohl, ‘Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus’, pp. 138–41. Several volumes of the De viris illustribus have recently been re-edited under the auspices of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Francesco Petrarca: De viris illustribus I, ed. by Silvano Ferrone (Florence, 2006); De viris illustribus II, ed. by Caterina Malta (Florence, 2007); and De viris illustribus IV: Compendium, ed. by Paolo de Capua (Florence, 2007). The text is largely that of Martellotti, but the new critical apparatus is of great interest.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  57

of purpose, or the transformation of his belief that the past outstripped the present in terms of virtue and art. Nor does this alteration automatically connote a promotion of despotic rule on Petrarch’s part; rather, it illustrates the need for patronage and security in order for him to write in his old age. The impetus behind the De viris remains Petrarch’s anti-Avignonese, Roman agenda. Moreover, in relation to Boccaccio’s critique of Petrarch’s cultural project, Branca notes that ‘he [Boccaccio] became acquainted with the Maecenas-like lord of Padua, Francesco da Carrara, and seconded his entreaties that his great friend [Petrarch] should complete the De Viris Illustribus’.66 Boccaccio also understood the import of patronage, dedicating the De casibus virorum illustrium to his old friend: ‘[g]eneroso militi domino Maghinardo de Cavalcantibus de Florentia preclaro regni Sycilie marescallo’ (‘to the generous warlord and famous marshal of the kingdom of Sicily, Mainardo Cavalcanti of Florence’); although it had originally been intended for his equally influential friend, the Grand Seneschal Niccolò Acciaiuoli.67 It would have entailed a profound loss of tact for Petrarch to dedicate De viris to Francesco da Carrara whilst retaining the original preface, and seems too great or unlikely an expectation of him. Petrarch tells us in both his prefaces that his object is to promote virtue through historical example; and he was subtle enough to dedicate the work to a ruler who would understand what that meant. Indeed, in the De casibus Boccaccio does not denounce despots as much as he seeks to persuade and encourage them through negative illustration – a methodology not too dissimilar to Petrarch’s ‘things that are to be followed and those to be avoided’. Indeed, Boccaccio’s language in the opening book provides a direct echo of the man whom he describes at its close as his ‘insignis praeceptor’: Nam, quid satius est quam vires omnes exponere, ut in frugem melioris vite retrahantur errantes, a desidibus sopitis letalis somnus excutiatur, vicia reprimantur et extollantur virtutes? For what is better than to use all one’s resources in order that the errant might be called back to the better, virtuous life, in order that the sleep of death might be shaken from the indolent, in order to repress vices and extol virtue? (De casibus, prohemium, 3) 66

67

Branca, Boccaccio, p. 164. Branca notes that, ‘as an expert in such tasks, Boccaccio helped to promote the work on the frescos in the Sala dei Giganti’ (ibid.). See also Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 301. The name of Gaius Maecenas was synonymous with patronage of the arts. See also Theodor E. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch and the Decoration of the Sala virorum illustrium in Padua’, Arts Bulletin, 34: 2 (1952), pp. 95–116. See Boccaccio, De casibus, p. 2, and Branca, Boccaccio, p. 174. Boccaccio explains in this dedication the double benefit of patronage, whereby the patron’s name is exalted and the work is safeguarded by that name (‘ut nomini suo aliquid afferret ornatui, et, eiusdem adiutus subsidiis melioribus quam mei auspiciis, prodiret in medium’, p. 2).

58  Chaucer and Petrarch

Chaucer too, writing for the Ricardian court, shows, through the Monk’s account of Seneca and Nero, the danger of holding the mirror for magistrates too closely to its object: This Seneca, of which that I devyse, By cause Nero hadde of hym swich drede, For he fro vices wolde hym ay chastise Discreetly, as by word and nat by dede – ‘Sire,’ wolde he seyn, ‘an emperour moot nede Be virtuous and hate tirannye – ’ For which he in a bath made hym to blede On bothe his armes, til he moste dye.  (VII. 2503–10)68

Boccaccio’s account of Nero occurs in book VII of the De casibus, although Chaucer appears to be drawing primarily on the Roman de la Rose (6183– 488) – further evidence, were any needed, that Chaucer fused his Italian (Latin) and French sources. However, Helen Cooper has pointed out that the second stanza of Nero’s tragedy does not appear in the Roman, and may be derived from Boccaccio, if not from Vincent of Beauvais.69 Following book VII of the De casibus, Boccaccio gives an account of his ‘acedia’ – at which point Petrarch appears to him, giving him – his friend –the impetus to continue, in a ventriloquistic example of Petrarch’s theologia rhetorica: ‘Ego autem verborum lepiditate lenitus, revocatis paululum viribus’ (‘I then, comforted by his words, recovered some of my strength’).70 Again, Boccaccio’s overt praise of Petrarch leads one to question the extent to which the former can be said to be critiquing the latter and, by extension, to question the view that Boccaccio and Petrarch were diametrically opposed in terms of their cultural perspectives. The appearance of Boccaccio’s magister may even hold the clue as to why Chaucer’s Monk refers to ‘my maister Petrak’, in that he might be seen to be fulfilling the role of Boccaccio.71 Certainly the Monk’s directing his audience towards Petrarch for an account of Zenobia – and not towards Boccaccio, upon whose account in the De mulieribus claris Chaucer is drawing – is erroneous: it cannot be that Chaucer is referring to the handful of generic lines which Petrarch devotes to Zenobia in the Triumphus Fame (II. 107–17). 68

69 70

71

Simpson notes that ‘a direct and personal relationship between poet and ruler’ was ‘more specific to Lancastrian than Ricardian kingship’. See Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), p. 202. See Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1996), p. 330. De casibus, VIII. 1. 30. Boccaccio’s reference to ‘Franciscum Petrarcam optimum venerandumque preceptorem meum’ (‘my great and venerable master, Francis Petrarch’) in this capitolo (VIII. 1. 6) might have provided Chaucer with his Monk’s reference to ‘my maister Petrak’. As Neuse argues in ‘The Monk’s De casibus’, pp. 247–9.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  59

Piero Boitani has formulated a hypothesis as to why Petrarch’s name appears at this point.72 He suggests that Chaucer may have confused the De viris illustribus with a manuscript of the De casibus virorum illustrium which did not bear Boccaccio’s name, coming to the belief that Petrarch wrote the latter. Furthermore, the preface to the De casibus displays the intention to include both men and women (‘tam viros quam mulieres’, De casibus, prohemium, 7) – which may have led to the equally misplaced belief that Petrarch also wrote the De mulieribus claris. These errors might have been reinforced by the fact that the two Boccaccian works were still being confused in the fifteenth century, and – as Aage Brusendorff and J. A. W. Bennett suggested – by the possibility that Chaucer had read the Triumphus Fame.73 This hypothesis depends upon Chaucer’s having used (as Boitani hypothesizes) mutilated manuscripts, which omitted the references to Petrarch in book VIII of the De casibus and in the prohemium to the De mulieribus. This is not impossible, given the frequency of anonymous, mutilated works. Nevertheless, the hypothesis remains dependent upon a large number of variables and subjunctives, and as such cannot be ascertained. It may simply be, as Wallace argues, that Chaucer cites Petrarch in order ‘to authorize, and characterize, the cultural undertaking of the Monk’s Tale’.74 Petrarch was, after all, an ‘auctoritee’ in his own lifetime. Alternatively, it could be that Chaucer’s failure to name Boccaccio was the result of ‘a kind of identification with his Italian predecessor that rendered superfluous any explicit acknowledgement of indebtedness’.75 In any case, Chaucer’s famous opening to the Monk’s Tale suggests its Boccaccian–Petrarchan genealogy: Heere bigynneth the Monkes Tale De Casibus Virorum Illustrium I wol biwaille in manere of tragedie The harm of hem that stoode in heigh degree, And fillen so that ther nas no remedie To bring hem out of hir adversitee. For certein, whan that Fortune list to flee,

72 73

74 75

Boitani, ‘The Monk’s Tale’, p. 69. See Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford, 1925), p. 161, n. 1; and J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame (Oxford, 1968), p. 110. Such erroneous belief may also affect Chaucer’s idea of the author of Filostrato, as we will see in the following chapter (pp. 85–6). Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 307. Neuse, ‘The Monk’s De casibus’, p. 249. I agree with Neuse’s claim that Chaucer’s Monk assumes Boccaccio’s habit, as it were, but I demur in relation to the dichotomy he creates between Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s historicism on the one hand and Petrarch’s on the other, as such a dichotomy ascribes to Petrarch the Dantean model which Petrarch rejects in the De viris illustribus (and elsewhere).

60  Chaucer and Petrarch Ther may no man the cours of hire withholde. Lat no man truste on blynd prosperitee: Be war by thise ensamples trewe and olde.  (VII. 1991–8)

The Monk’s warning of ‘thise ensamples trewe and olde’ recalls, in its purpose, Boccaccio’s ‘vicia reprimantur et extollantur virtutes’ (‘to repress vices and extol virtue’) and Petrarch’s ‘illa prosequi que vel sectanda legentibus vel fugienda sunt, ut in utranque partem copia suppetat illustrium exemplorum’ (‘to point up to the readers those things that are to be followed and those to be avoided, with plenty of distinguished examples on either side’). The close proximity of ‘remedie’ and ‘Fortune’ may even imply a reference to Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae.76 However, the question as to whether Chaucer and Petrarch “meet” in relation to Fortune is a potentially contentious matter. In his preface to the De casibus, Boccaccio distinguishes between ‘Deus omnipotens, seu – ut eorum loquar more – Fortuna’ (‘God almighty, or – to use their language – Fortune’, 6). ‘They’, of course, are the vulgus, and Boccaccio may be seen here to display the kind of humanist elitism with which Petrarch is so frequently charged. Yet the import lies in the distinction between Providence and Fortune. Boitani notes that the ‘theme of Fortune obsessed Chaucer’, whereas ‘it was Boccaccio’s constant preoccupation to make it clear that it is Divine Providence that directs human affairs’.77 Petrarch had written to Boccaccio on the same subject, and in a letter to the renowned Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo states his case clearly with regards to the De remediis: At ut uulgus, nec exigua literatorum, quoque hominum pars accipit, fortunae nomen, clare fateor, nec indocti uereor infamiam, credere me nihil esse fortunam […] Me de fortuna quidem nihil, sed de remediis contra illam, quae fortuna dicitur, scribentem collegisse, quae mulcere, uel augere humanum animum uisa sunt. Quae quoniam vulgo fortuita dicerentur nomen antiquum tenui, ne lectorem uerbi controuersia deterrerem, et scriptis alienarem, et scribenti. But, as the multitude and no small part of literate people accept the term fortune, I frankly confess, nor do I fear the taunt of being called an ignoramus, to believing that there is no such thing. […] in writing nothing about fortune but about remedies against what is called fortune, I included what

76

77

See Haas, ‘Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale’, pp. 65–9, and also N. Mann, ‘La prima fortuna del Petrarca nel Inghilterra’, in Giuseppe Billanovich and Giuseppe Frasso, eds, Il Petrarca ad Arquà: Atti del Convegno di Studi nel VI Centenario (Padua, 1975), pp. 279–89. Boitani, ‘The Monk’s Tale’, p. 50. However, see Edward M. Socola, ‘Chaucer’s Development of Fortune in the Monk’s Tale’, JEGP, 49 (1950), pp. 159–71, and William C. Strange, ‘The Monk’s Tale: A Generous View’, ChR, 1 (1967), pp. 167–80, both of whom argue for differentiation in Chaucer’s representation of Fortune over the course of the ‘ensamples’.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  61 seemed either to soothe or to inspire the human spirit. Since those things are commonly called “fortuitous,” I kept the ancient name lest I frighten the reader by quibbling over the word, and turn him against the book and the writer. (Sen. VIII. 3. 837/286–7)

Chaucer’s Monk certainly has no quibbles over using the word, repeating it to the extent that it becomes almost a refrain. Yet Chaucer’s Fortune is multiform, as Socola notes, and does not always encroach upon ‘blynd prosperitee’. Often the Monk uses the term as Petrarch does, for the benefit of his audience – we recall RVF 128’s ‘[v]oi cui Fortuna à posto in mano il freno | de le belle contrade’ – when he is in fact referring to Divine Providence. In his first example, that of Lucifer, the Monk notes that ‘Fortune may noon angel dere’ and that ‘fel he for his synne’ (VII. 2001–2). Adam also ‘for mysgovernaunce | Was dryven out of hys hye prosperitee’ (VII. 2012–13); in both cases Divine retribution responds directly to betrayal or disobedience. Again, Sampson fell because he ‘toold to wommen thy secree’ (VII. 2053), and Nebuchanezzar was punished and not restored until ‘God relessed hym […] He knew that God was ful of myght and grace’ (VII. 2177, B2 3372), rather than suffering through the turning of Fortune’s wheel. There remain various other instances which, likewise, implicitly refute Fortune’s omnipotence, as Petrarch says in his Invectiva contra quendam magni status hominem sed nullius scientie aut virtutis (Invective against a Man of High Rank with No Knowledge or Virtue): O fortuna, si vera viri tales loquuntur, omnipotens, quid hoc est agis? Huccine etiam regni tui potestas extenditur? Nimis est. Nichil est autem quod non possit omnipotens, sed absit ut omnipotens sit fortuna, neque est enim nisi unus omnipotens; imo vero mox ut virtutem ab adverso viderit, impos et imbecilla succumbit […] Itaque liceat illi ad te bonis debitos honores divitiasque transferre. Ingenium Deus dat […] Non dat fortuna mores bonos, non ingenium, non virtutem, non facundiam. (94–97, 107) O Fortune, who are omnipotent if such men [Virgil and Cicero] speak the truth, what are you doing? Does the power of your realm extend even here? It is too much. There is nothing omnipotence cannot accomplish, but God forbid that Fortune should be omnipotent. For there is only one who is omnipotent. Indeed, as soon as Fortune sees virtue approach, she surrenders, impotent and infirm […] So let her [Fortune] transfer to you the honours and wealth that were due to good men. But our intelligence is a gift from God […] Fortune cannot grant good character, intelligence, virtue, or eloquence. (III. 18–20)78

78

See Invective contra medicum; Invectiva contra quendam magni status hominem sed nullius scientie aut virtutis, ed. by Francesco Bausi (Florence, 2005), pp. 176–209 (at pp. 188–90); and Invectives, ed. and trans. by Marsh, pp. 180–221 (at pp. 194–8).

62  Chaucer and Petrarch

Indeed Boitani’s position that the Monk’s Tale is ‘a mixture of cultural elements, old and new’ is encapsulated at the close of Hercules’ tragedye: Ful wys is he that kan hymselven knowe! Beth war, for whan that Fortune list to glose, Thanne wayteth she her man to overthrowe By swich a wey as he wolde leest suppose.79

The two statements initially do not seem to correlate. The first statement is akin to Petrarch’s position. In a letter to Agapito Colonna, Petrarch writes: ‘videris michi vim pati et, qui proximus ad salutem gradus est, statum tue mentis agnoscere’ (‘You seem to me to be suffering strongly and to recognize the state of your mind which is the first step toward well being’, Fam. II. 10. 98–9/107). Similarly, in the Invective contra medicum, he claims: ‘defectus proprii cum dolore notitia principium est profectus’ (‘the beginning of progress is the painful awareness of one’s own shortcomings’, III. 227/141). Furthermore, it is this sense of nosce te ipsum which underpins Petrarchan humanism: ‘Quis enim dubitare potest quin illico surrectura sit, se ceperit se Roma cognoscere?’ (‘who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?’, Fam. VI. 2. 58/293). Chaucer’s second statement seemingly counteracts the first: what good is self-knowledge in the face of a Fortune who ‘wayteth she her man to overthrowe | By swich a wey as he wolde leest suppose’? The two statements are ultimately united, however, through their Boethian tenor, in that someone in possession of complete self-knowledge is better equipped to respond to a sudden reversal of fortune.80 A distinction is to be made between material fortune and spiritual richness. Petrarch’s emphasis upon virtue as conquering Fortune is entirely consonant with the Boethian argument: O ye mortel folk, what seeke ye thanne blisfulnesse out of yourself whiche that is put in yowrself? […] yif it so be that thow art myghty over thyself (that is to seyn, by tranquillite of thi soule), than hastow thyng in thi powere thow noldest nevere leesen, ne Fortune may bynymen it the. […] ‘Certis,’ quod sche, ‘it folweth or comith of thingis that ben grauntid that alle fortune, what so evere it be, of hem that ben eyther in possessioun of vertu, or in the encres of vertu, or elles in the purchasynge of vertu, that thilke fortune is good; and that alle fortune is ryght wikkid to hem that duellen in schrewidnesse. (Boece, II, pr. 4. 128–38; IV, pr. 7. 65–72)

For both Petrarch and Chaucer, self-knowledge and virtue are the keys to overcoming sudden reversals of fortune, which often pertain to one’s mate79 80

VII. 2139–42. See Boitani, ‘The Monk’s Tale’, p. 63. The Monk may be drawing upon the Stoic elements within Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, although the sequence retains its appearance of an inapposite sententia. See Douglas L. Lepley, ‘The Monk’s Boethian Tale’, ChR, 12 (1978), pp. 162–70.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  63

rial well-being and as such are more detrimental to those who live secundum carnem than to those who live secundum spiritum, to borrow Augustine’s terms. Virtue is the primary objective of the De viris illustribus, and it is one of Petrarch’s central tenets: ‘Satius est autem bonum velle quam verum nosse’ (‘it is better to will what is good than to know what is true’, On His Own Ignorance, IV. 111). As Chaucer’s Seneca exhorts Nero, ‘[b]e virtuous and hate tirannye’. The role of Fortune in the tragedy of Bernabò Visconti, a figure of questionable virtue, can appear to be somewhat ambiguous, not least due to its closing line: Off Melan grete Barnabo Viscounte, God of delit and scourge of Lumbardye, Why sholde I nat thyn infortune acounte, Sith in estaat thow clombe were so hye? Thy brother sone, that was thy double allye, For he thy nevew was and sone-in-lawe, Withinne his prisoun made thee to dye – But why ne how noot I that thou were slawe.  (VII. 2399–406)

The entire stanza gives the impression of being an afterthought or a late addition, and critical consensus would appear to reinforce this view. It is thought that the majority of the Monk’s Tale, with the exception of the modern instances, was composed in the early 1370s, following the 1372–3 Italian commission – although, as Helen Cooper notes, the arguments for the early date are ‘almost entirely hypothetical’.81 Bernabò had been arrested by his nephew Gian Galeazzo in May 1385, dying in prison unexpectedly (and therefore suspiciously) in December of the same year. In the circumstances, this stanza could not have been written prior to 1386. The rhetorical question which constitutes the opening quatrain does not offer much in the way of information, save the line ‘God of delit and scourge of Lumbardye’. Donald Howard has argued that Chaucer was ‘not necessarily calling him [Bernabò] a tyrant’ in this line, whereas Wallace argues that ‘that

81

The Canterbury Tales, p. 325. The argument for the modern instances having been composed during the same period as the other tragedies dates back at least to J. S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer’s Works (London, 1907), pp. 164–72 (at pp. 171–2). On the positioning of the modern instances relatively to the other tragedies, and on their altered positions in different manuscripts, see Donald Fry, ‘The Ending of the Monk’s Tale’, JEGP, 71 (1972), pp. 355–68 (at p. 362); Socola, ‘Chaucer’s Development of Fortune’, pp. 170–1; and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 319. The later dating would correspond with R. A. Pratt’s thesis that Chaucer came into contact with Dante’s works during 1372–3, and with those of Boccaccio and Petrarch in 1378; see his ‘Chaucer and the Visconti Libraries’, ELH, 6 (1939), pp. 191–9. See also John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of The Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols (Chicago, IL, 1940), 4: pp. 508–13.

64  Chaucer and Petrarch

is exactly what he was doing’; the epithet ‘God of delit’ can certainly be read as a reference to the Visconti practice of ‘merging fear of the Lord with fear of the despot’, whereby the dominus becomes Dominus.82 In relation to ‘delit’, the prohemium to the De casibus aims to teach the illustrious how to rein in their pursuit of pleasure (‘letis modum ponere discant’, 8). Indeed, one of the symptoms of tyranny was the substitution of the common good for personal pleasure.83 The true meaning of the epithet must ultimately remain a matter of conjecture and extrapolation due to the lack of context. Bernabò’s second title, ‘scourge of Lumbardye’, appears to be less ambiguous, yet even here the Monk leaves himself room for manoeuvre. It may be read as denoting Bernabò’s tyranny, or as signifying his ruthless punishment of criminals and heretics; the two are not unconnected, as grisly public spectacle promotes subjection. Nevertheless, Chaucer appears to be deploying what he terms in Troilus and Criseyde ‘ambages […] double wordes slye, | Swiche as men clepen a word with two visages’ (V. 897–9). This would not only correspond with Jill Mann’s account of Chaucer’s ambiguation of the Monk; it also prepares us for the ‘double allye’ upon whom the second quatrain opens.84 The juxtaposition of ‘delit’ and ‘scourge’ may even be edging towards the duality of Petrarchan paradox, and corresponds with the view of Visconti, expressed long ago by Robinson and Rolfe, that ‘the reader may always choose between the seemingly irreconcilable epithets of vir diabolicus and pater patriae’.85 Yet, even if Chaucer is presenting Bernabò in an entirely negative light, it does not follow that he disapproves of Petrarch. The Visconti (primarily, Galeazzo) were, of course, Petrarch’s patrons from 1353 to 1361. Wallace argues that the Visconti employed Petrarch often ‘and to great effect’ when he was resident in Milan.86 Petrarch would seem to agree: Quid iussu principum perdiderim iam audies, nam et michi cum Seneca ratio constat impense: semel Venetias pacis missus pro negotio inter urbem illam et Ianuam reformande, hibernum in hoc mensem integrum exegi; inde ad romanum principem, in extrema barbarie heu collapsi spes imperii refoventem, dicam rectius deserentem, pro ligustica pace tres estivos menses; denique ad gratulandum Iohanni Francorum regi, britannico tunc carcere liberato, alios tres hibernos. Etsi enim in his tribus itineribus assidue solitis

82 83 84 85

86

See Howard, Chaucer and the Medieval World, p. 230, and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 327–8 (at pp. 323 and 328). Wallace’s reading appears to be the more plausible one. See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 280. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4, this alone does not make a tyrant. See Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, pp. 17–37. Robinson and Rolfe, Petrarch: First Modern Scholar, p. 122. For a more recent account of this dichotomy, see Wallace’s discussion of the varying contemporary accounts of Bernabò in Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 126–7. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 53.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  65 curis animum exercerem, quia tamen nec scribere erat nec affigere cogitata memorie, perditos dies voco […] Ecce ergo: menses septem sub obsequio principum amisi: iactura ingens, non inficior, in tam brevi vita; utinam tamen non fuisset ingentior quam michi adolescentie mee vanitas et occupationes supervacue peperere! What I lost at the princes’ bidding you will now hear. For I too, like Seneca, keep account of expenses. Once I was sent to Venice to negotiate the re­establishment of peace between that city and Genoa [1353], and I used up a whole month of the winter; later, in behalf of peace in Liguria, three summer months far away from civilization with the Roman Prince [Charles IV], who was reviving, or to put it more correctly, abandoning hopes of the – alas – collapsed empire [1356]; finally three more winter months to congratulate King John of France [1360], who had then been freed from an English prison. For even if on these three journeys I assiduously applied my mind to my usual concerns, still, because there was no means to write or to fix my thoughts in my memory, I call them lost days […] There, then, are the seven months I lost in the service of princes, an enormous loss, I do not deny, in so short a life; but would that the loss which the vanity and empty activities of my adolescence caused me were not so enormous! (Sen. XVII. 2. 1148/650)87

Petrarch’s ‘lost days’ thus add up to seven months; there is more than a touch of irony felt here. We are, of course, not bound to believe Petrarch, and the amelioration of his service is evident – he was working towards ‘the reestablishment of peace’, ‘in behalf of peace’. We cannot establish the extent to which Petrarch believed in his own account; what we do know of Petrarch is that he placed a great deal of importance upon individual perception. And, whilst the Death of the Author reduces Petrarch’s explanation to simply another text, we ought not to discredit it completely.88 The idea that Petrarch was employed ‘to great effect’ is also rendered questionable by the fact that the 1353 mission to Venice and the accompanying letter to the Doge (Fam. XVIII. 16) failed to have any pacific effect. As mentioned above, the crimes of the Visconti do not entail Chaucer’s opposition to Petrarchan humanism; one does not, after all, judge the merits of Chaucer’s works on the basis of Ricardian policy, no matter how much contemporary politics might be seen to inform them. As Ginsberg argued, that fact that Chaucer was chosen specifically to visit the Visconti court at Milan and to deal with Bernabò Visconti’s mercenary son-in-law Hawkwood

87 88

All quotations from Sen. XVII. 2 are taken from Petrarca, Prose, ed. by Martellotti et al., pp. 1134–59; for the English version, see the translation of Bernardo, Levin and Bernardo. See Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in his Image–Music–Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London, 1977), pp. 142–8, and Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in his Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford, 1977), pp. 113–38.

66  Chaucer and Petrarch

ought to complicate the image of Chaucer the republican.89 Pratt also implies a certain symmetry in Richard’s and Bernabò’s use of their most respected poets: It was not a second Petrarch who had come to Milan, but the two cases present certain parallels. In seeking the great laureate’s favour, the Visconti had not failed to recognize and accord with his literary tastes. Perhaps Chaucer was received in a similar manner, and in more ways than one received a second heritage from Petrarch during his second journey to Italy.90

With the inclusion of Bernabò in the Monk’s Tale, we return to our (and Chaucer’s) point of departure, that is, his Italian commissions. It remains to say a few words concerning the reason for the Monk’s curtailment, before offering some conclusions. According to the prevailing critical view, the Monk’s dullness is the reason for his tale being stopped short; but this is not entirely the case. The Knight interjects first: ‘Hoo!’ quod the Knyght, ‘good sire, namoore of this! That ye han seyd is right ynough, ywis, And muchel moore; for litel hevynesse Is right ynough to muche folk, I gesse. I seye for me, it is a greet disese, Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese, To heeren of hir sodeyn fal, allas!  (VII. 2767–73)

The Knight interrupts the Monk not because of his dullness, as ‘ynough, ywis | And muchel moore’ might suggest, but because of the subject and its efficacy: ‘I seye for me’ (emphasis added). The import of ‘heigh style’ lies in its effect upon the audience, so it is only right that the Monk causes the Knight ‘greet disese’, as he is the Canterbury pilgrim who, by virtue of his ‘estaat’, approximates the implied reader of Petrarch’s De viris and of Boccaccio’s De casibus.91 Indeed, Fry even suggests that the Knight stopped the tale after hearing the downfall of Peter of Cyprus, who ‘Alisaundre wan

89

90

91

One might also point to the possibility that Boccaccio himself had been chosen as Florentine ambassador to the Visconti. See V. Branca, Boccaccio medievale, 6th edn (Florence, 1986), p. 115. Pratt, ‘Chaucer and the Visconti Libraries’, p. 199. It needs to be pointed out that Richard was still in his minority in 1378, having come to the throne only the previous year, at the age of ten, and as such it is unlikely that he hand-picked Chaucer for the commission. More probable is the involvement of Chaucer’s former patron, John of Gaunt. See Chapter 4 for a discussion of heigh style, pp. 141–2.



When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch  67

by heigh maistrie’ (VII. 2391), as we are told in the General Prologue that at ‘Alisaundre he [the Knight] was whan it was wonne’ (I. 51).92 The Host echoes the Knight’s sentiments with a slight sycophancy: ‘it is a peyne, | As ye heyn seyd, to heere of hevynesse’ (VII. 2786–7); but his own unhappiness with the Monk lies in the fact that in his tragedies ‘ther is no desport ne game’ (VII. 2791), which is not the same as the Knight’s ‘greet disese’. Indeed, the Host has no time for humanist historicism, and in his responses we sense again Chaucer’s ‘ambages’: ‘He spak […] I noot nevere what […] I sholde er this han fallen doun for sleep’ (VII. 2782–3, 2797). The Host’s judgement of the Monk, which misreads that of the Knight, implies Chaucer’s gentle judgement of the Host, who cares little for tragedy, less about humanism, and falls asleep if the tale be not ‘murie everemo’ (VII. 2815). Yet it is the Host who manages to encapsulate the Monk’s dilemma: Thanne hadde youre tale al be toold in veyn. For certeinly, as that thise clerkes seyn, Whereas a man may have noon audience, Noght helpeth it to tellen his sentence. (VII. 2799–802)

The Monk’s failure, if we are to think of it as such, is not so much his inability to live up to the Host’s expectations of him, nor is it necessarily that he aims to disappoint, but rather that his accounts of the falls of princes either misjudge or ignore his audience. The context of ‘best sentence and moost solaas’ (I. 798) is not necessarily alien to the Monk’s purpose, but he does fall foul of the Host’s earlier stipulation to ‘be myrie’ (I. 782). His failure, in other words, is his successful adaptation of the Petrarchan–Boccaccian humanist tradition for an audience which does not want it. This is not Chaucer’s criticism of Petrarch’s cultural project, but an acknowledgement of the need for textual and extratextual correspondence. If ‘[f]ul wys is he that kan hymselven knowe’, then equally wise is he who knows his listeners. In conclusion: I agree with Wallace that Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch was contextualized by the political plurality of Italy. Yet Italy at that moment was to some extent a Petrarchan idea, the riven ‘Italia mia’ which needs to look to its Roman heritage if it is to remember itself and rise again; a resurgence which Petrarch anticipated at several junctures throughout his life. These anticipations – such as Cola da Rienzo’s overthrow of the Roman barons in the name of the people, or Urban V’s temporary return of the Papal See – were always frustrated, which enabled him to maintain his Roman agenda. It is this agenda that, in turn, informed his focus upon the classical past, his humanist historicism, rather than any desire to become a propagandist for Chaucer’s ‘tirauntz of Lumbardye’, as he terms them in The Legend of Good

92

This again raises the question of where the modern instances were originally intended to appear.

68  Chaucer and Petrarch

Women (F 374). Chaucer was himself in Lombardy in order to deal with one of these tyrants, and it is possible that through him he encountered the texts of Petrarch and Boccaccio, which would be read against those of Dante. And, whilst this makes possible a connection between the political and the poetical, it does not entail Chaucer’s refutation of Petrarchan humanism, or indeed Boccaccio’s refutation of the same – to suggest that it does would be to ignore or to misread the repeated praise for Petrarch which we find in both Chaucer and Boccaccio and to deny Boccaccio’s key role in the development of humanism. Hence I also agree with Ginsberg’s argument that Chaucer’s reading was further contextualized – literally – by his reception of the other two corone. Indeed one might view Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante as three points on the same crown. The Monk’s Tale hinted at the Pandaric ­Boccaccian intertext which often expedited Chaucer’s ‘meetings’ with Petrarch, but it failed to find its audience. Troilus and Criseyde had no such problem, as we shall see in the following chapter.

2 ‘The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen’: Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato In a letter to his friend Joshua Reynolds dated 21 September 1819, John Keats revealed that he had ceased work upon his would-be epic poem Hyperion on the basis that there ‘were too many Miltonic inversions in it’.1 By discontinuing his poem, Keats illustrated the pernicious nature of what Harold Bloom terms ‘the anxiety of influence’. Bloom explains his theory of poetic production as follows: Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong, authentic poets, – always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.2

Yet Bloom clearly demarcates the chronological boundaries within which his theory of poetry will operate; crucially, it will begin with the post-Shakespearean. This is not to negate the poetic output of the premodern; rather it is argued that there was a great age before the Flood, when influence was generous (or poets in their innermost natures thought it so), an age that goes all the way from Homer to Shakespeare. At the heart of this matrix of generous influence is Dante […] every post-enlightenment master moves, not towards a sharing-with-others as Dante does […] but towards a being-with-oneself.3

This conception of antediluvian poetic generosity has been questioned in recent years, not least by A. C. Spearing’s conception of Father Chaucer and the Oedipal complex that he produced in his successors.4 Spearing argues that poets such as Hoccleve and Lydgate had to struggle in order to assert 1 2 3 4

The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 2: pp. 166–8 (at p. 167). See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997), p. 30, original emphasis. Ibid., pp. 122–3. See A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 88–110. See also Daniel T. Kline, ‘Father Chaucer and the Siege of Thebes: Literary Paternity, Aggressive Deference, and the Prologue to Lydgate’s Oedipal Canterbury Tale’, ChR, 34 (1999), pp. 217–35.

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their poetic identities in the shadow of a father figure who effectively constituted the English poetic tradition. Yet I would suggest that the demarcation may be pushed further back, to the point where the Italian trecento encounters fourteenth-century England, and specifically to the poetic triumvirate of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer. Indeed, John Freccero has argued that ‘Petrarch’s rivalry with Dante is possibly the first example in the West of what Harold Bloom has called the “anxiety” of influence’, thereby refuting Bloom’s concept of Dantean benevolence.5 The present chapter will then examine how inversions of the kind which led Keats to abandon Hyperion might also be located within Boccaccio’s Filostrato. This, of course, is not to say that Boccaccio’s inversions are all deliberate – Keats did not even notice his Miltonic inclination until he was some way into his poem – although some of them are so similar in nature to particular Petrarchan lyrics that they merit close inspection. Yet, rather than viewing conscious imitation or unconscious influence as being negative, as many late medieval poets certainly did not, these inversions will be read positively, in terms of their effects upon the English literary tradition. That is, Chaucer’s unconscious transposition of Petrarchan inversions into Troilus and Criseyde is seen as enabling a textual environment which would receive the first English translation of a Petrarchan sonnet (the subject of the next chapter) without the occurrence of a stylistic rupture between Boccaccian narrative and Petrarchan lyric. A natural by-product of this examination is the argument that Dante’s influence was not as generous as it might at first appear. Indeed, Troilus’s ‘double sorwe’ (Tr. I. 1), with which Chaucer’s poem opens, might be read as influence; the line itself is double in that it potentially draws on both Boccaccio (‘doppia doglia’, Filostrato, IV. 118. 2) and Dante (‘doppia trestizia’, Purgatorio, XXII. 56), and thereby implies the intertextual, inverted nature of the Troilus.6 The concept of a premodern golden age in which ‘poets in their innermost natures’ believed influence to be generous is rendered questionable by a letter that Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio concerning the latter’s burning of his ‘iuvenilia’: Ait enim te prima aetate, hoc vulgari stylo unice delectatum, plurimum eo curae ac temporis possuise, donec quaerendi, legendique ordine, in mea eius generis vulgaria, et iuvenilia incidisses: tum vero tuum illum scribendi impetum refrixisse, nec fuisse satis, in posterum a similibus stylum abstinere, nisi iam editis odium indixisses, incensisque omnibus, non mutandi 5 6

John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’, Diacritics, 5 (1975), pp. 34–40 (at p. 39, n. 3). Giovanni Boccaccio, Filostrato, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), 2 (1964): pp. 15–228 (at p. 142). All the quotations from the Purgatorio are taken from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Volume 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. by Robert M. Durling (Oxford, 2003).



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  71 animo, sed delendi, teque simul et posteros, tuorum huius generis fructu operum spoliasses, non aliam ob causam, quam quod illa nostris imparia iudicasses. Indignum odium, immeritum incendium […] uide ne superbiae uerae sit, ut ego etenim, te antistitem cui utinam par essem, ut te praecedat ille nostri eloqui dux uulgaris […] Audio senem illum Rauennatem, rerum talium non ineptum iudicem, quotiens de his sermo est, semper tibi locum tertium assignare solitum. Si is sordet, sique à primo obstare tibi uideor, qui non obsto, ecce volens cedo, locus tibi linquitur secundus. [Donato Albanzani] tells me that in your early youth, fascinated solely by the vernacular style, you devoted the most time and care to it until, in the course of your research and reading, you came upon the vernacular compositions of my youth in that genre. Whereupon your urge to write grew cool; nor were you subsequently satisfied with not writing any more in that vein – you had to express your hatred for what you had already written; intending not to revise but destroy, you burned them all and deprived yourself and posterity of the fruit of your labours in this genre for no other reason than you judged them inferior to mine. Such undeserved hatred and unmerited fire! […] Take care lest it really be pride that you cannot endure second or third place, or that I should surpass you when I wish to be your equal, or that the master of our vernacular literature [Dante] should be preferred to you. […] I understand that the old gentleman from Ravenna [Donato], a competent judge of such matters, always likes to assign you third place whenever the subject comes up. If this is too lowly, if I appear to block your way to first place, which I do not do, look, I gladly yield and leave second place to you (Sen. V. 2. 793–94/158–60)7

Boccaccio evidently did not enjoy the benevolent glow which Bloom describes as warming the literary endeavours of the premodern literary community, and which Petrarch would appear to endorse here. On the contrary, Boccaccio’s auto da fé confirms Bloom’s position that poetic influence ‘is not a separation but a victimization – it is a destruction of desire’.8 Undoubtedly the culture of authority was immensely important to textual production in the medieval period(s), but it does not follow that influence anxiety did not, or could not, exist. In the circumstances, it is necessary to distinguish between the authority of the ‘auctour’ and the authority of the author: the inclusion of the former may be seen as validating the position of the latter as part of a rela7

8

Sen. V. 2 is listed as Sen. V. 3 in the 1581 edition of Opera omnia. See also Francesco Petrarca, Senile V 2, ed. by Monica Berté (Florence, 1998). Branca argues that the destroyed poems were most likely those which ‘he says he composed following his unhappy mercantile and canonical experiences, at Naples’: Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Storia e Letteratura, 66 (Rome, 1958), p. 295 (my translation). See also Epistole, ed. by Ginetta Auzzas, in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, 5. 1 (1992): pp. 674–89 (at p. 686). Boccaccio travelled to Naples with his father, who worked for the Bardi banking family, in 1327, returning to Florence in 1340–1. Boccaccio confirms the destruction of his early works in a 1372 letter to Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte (Ep. XX). Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 38.

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tionship which is unlike that of precursor and ephebe in Bloom’s model.9 The medieval author who incorporates the ‘auctour’ does so apparently without anxiety. However, an ‘auctoritee’ would not be cited if the truth it conveyed were incomplete; rather the cited work may be seen as a gloss upon the work which cites it, and vice versa. It is perhaps this relation that Bloom is referring to when he speaks of antediluvian benevolence. Yet the ‘auctour’–author dynamic was a matter of truth: the need of the author to ground his or her position in a redoubtable moral or religious certainty. The kinds of inversions which led Boccaccio to throw his works upon the fire were more a matter of style and aesthetics.10 Style, for humanists such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, was inseparable from the truth. Indeed Ciceronian eloquence, rather than the dialectics and syllogisms of scholasticism, was the means by which moral truths were conveyed. Yet the vernacular was not the vehicle for Ciceronian eloquence, as Petrarch explains in the same letter: Certe mihi interdum, unde coniecturam hanc elicio, de vulgaribus meis […] fecissemque fortassis, ni vulgata undique iam pridem mei vim arbitrii evasissent […] At hic modo, inventus ad huc recens, vastatoribus crebris, ac raro squallidus, colono, magni se vel ornamenti capacem ostenderet, vel augmenti […] intellexi tandem, molli limo, instabili arena perdi operam, meque, et laborem meum inter vulgi manus laceratum iri. Tanquam ergo, qui currens calle medio, colubrum offendit, substiti, mittamque consilium aliud, ut spero rectius, atque altius arripui, quamvis sparsa illa, et brevia atque vulgaria iam et dixi, non mea amplius, sed vulgi potius facta essent, maiora ne lament providebo. Certainly I have sometimes had the idea of doing the same with my vernacular writings […] and perhaps I would have done so had they not long ago escaped from my control […] On the other hand, this vernacular writing, just invented, still new, showed itself capable of great improvement and development after having been ravaged by many and cultivated by so few husbandmen. […] I finally came to realize that it was a waste of effort to build on soft mud and shifting sand, and that I and my work would be torn to shreds by the hands of the mob. Thus, like the runner who stumbles upon a serpent in the middle of the path, I halted and changed my mind, taking another pathway that I hope will be straighter and higher; although those 9

10

As C. S. Lewis argued, if medieval culture ‘is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour […] Though literacy was of course far rarer than now, reading was in one way a more important ingredient in the total culture’: The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1967), p. 5. The burning of one’s own work was itself something of a topos; Virgil was thought to have asked for the Aeneid to be burned when he was on his deathbed. On Petrarch and style, see Maria Serena Sapegno, Petrarca e lo ‘stile’ della Poesia (Rome, 1999).



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  73 brief and scattered vernacular works of my youth are no longer mine, as I have said, but have become the multitude’s, I shall see to it that they do not butcher my major ones. (Sen. V. 2. 795/162–3)

If the ‘soft mud and shifting sand’ of the vernacular do not offer the certainty of Latin’s ‘straighter and higher’ paths, its original promise of ‘great improvement and development’ becomes overshadowed – from a humanist perspective – by Latin’s capacity for permanence. What is left to the vernacular is style, and this calls for an individual impress. One must develop one’s own style if one is to succeed in the vernacular; one must follow Virgil’s and Cicero’s if one is to succeed in Latin eloquentia: ‘uterque stylus altior Latinus, eo usque priscis ingeniis cultus essest, ut pene iam nihil nostra ope, vel cuiuslibet addi posset’ (‘the loftier Latin style – both prose and poetry – had been so highly polished by ancient talents that now my resources, or anyone else’s, can add very little’, Sen. V. 2. 793/162). It was the presence of a supposed inferiority within Boccaccio’s early poetry, what Branca terms ‘his consciousness of the impossibility of equalling the Petrarchan lyric experience’, that caused him to destroy his works. In other words, it was not only the difference in quality but also the fact that both authors were writing within the same remit.11 Petrarch’s view of the vernacular is of course very different from that set out by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning the Eloquence of the Vernacular) (c.1303–5).12 The presence of Dante is certainly felt throughout this letter, in which Petrarch appears to be asserting his contraposition to ‘the master of our vernacular literature’. Petrarch’s description of himself as being akin to ‘the runner who stumbles upon a serpent in the middle of the path’ may even be read as a deliberate paraphrase of the Commedia’s famous opening line: ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ (‘In the middle of the path of our life’).13 Yet it is just such a paraphrase that causes Petrarch to shun 11 12

13

V. Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, p. 292. In order to stress the truth of his position on vernacular eloquence, Dante wrote the treatise in Latin and employed a number of authorities, as he says in his opening: ‘non solum aquam nostri ingenii ad tantum poculum aurientes, sed, accipiendo vel compilando ab aliis, potiora miscentes, ut exinde potionare possimus dulcissimum ydromellum’ (‘I shall not only bring to so large a cup only the water of my own thinking, but shall add to it more potent ingredients, taken or extracted from elsewhere, so that from these I may concoct the sweetest possible mead’, De vulgari eloquentia (henceforth DVE), ed. and trans. by Steven Botterill, pp. 2–3). For a recent account of Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s overall views on Dante, see the opening chapter of Simon Gilson’s Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 21–53. For Chaucer’s relationship with Dante, see H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK, 1984), and R. Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Berkeley, CA, 1991). All the quotations from the Inferno are taken from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Volume 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. by Robert M. Durling (Oxford, 1996). Petrarch may also be recalling the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which features throughout the RVF (see Ovid, Metamorphoses (henceforth Met.), X. 23–4). See Nicola Gardini, ‘Un esempio di imitazione virgiliana nel Canzoniere petrarchesco: Il mito di Orfeo’, MLN, 110 (1995), pp.

74  Chaucer and Petrarch

the vernacular. In an act of kenotic evacuation, he allows the multitude and the canterini (street singers) to keep his scattered vernacular rhymes, but they will not ‘butcher’ his Latin opere. In an earlier letter to Boccaccio (Familiares XXI. 15), Petrarch describes how the canterini had already butchered the Commedia and how, if he had time, he would rescue Dante from them.14 Furthermore, it is in this letter that Petrarch reveals the extent of the induced anxiety he feels in relation to Dante: Odiosum ergo simulque ridiculum intelligis odium meum ergo illum nescio quos finxisse, cum ut vides, odii materia nulla sit, amoris autem plurime, et patria scilicet et paterna amicitia et ingenium et stilus in suo genere optimus, qui illum a contemptu late prestat immunem. Ea vero michi obiecte calumnie pars altera fuerat, cuius in argumentum trahitur quod a prima etate, que talium cupidissima esse solet, ego librorum varia inquisitione delectatus, nunquam librum illius habuerim, et ardentissimus semper in reliquis, quorum pene nulla spes supererat, in hoc uno sine difficultate parabili, novo quodam nec meo more tepuerim. […] verebar ne si huius aut alterius dictis imbuerer, ut est etas illa flexibilis et miratrix omnium, vel invitus ac nesciens imitator evaderem. Quod, ut erat animus annis audentior, indignabar […] Hoc unum non dissimulo, quoniam siquid in eo sermone a me dictum illius aut alterius suiusquam dicto simile, sive idem forte cum aliquo sit inventum, non id furtim aut imitandi proposito, que duo semper in his maxime vulgaribus ut scopulos declinavi, sed vel casu fortuito factum esse, vel similitudine ingeniorum, ut Tullio videtur, iisdem vestigiis ab ignorante concursum. […] Hodie enim ab his curis longe sum; et postquam totus inde abii sublatusque quo tenebar metus est, et alios omnes et hunc ante alios tota mente suscipio. [M]y scorn for that man is someone’s detestable and ridiculous invention because, as you see, there are no reasons for hatred and many for love, including our fatherland, our family’s friendship, his talent and style, the best of its kind, which must always raise him far above contempt. There is a second accusation leveled against me: I never owned a copy of his book, although from early youth when one usually longs for such things I enjoyed collecting books. While always passionately hunting for other books with little hope of finding them, I was strangely indifferent to this one, which was new and easily available. […] I did fear that, were I to immerse myself in his, or in any other’s, writings, being of an impressionable age so given to indiscriminate admiration, I could scarcely escape becoming an unwilling or unconscious imitator. Because of youthful

14

132–44. Dante also compares Fortune to a snake hidden in the grass: ‘che è occulto come in erba l’angue’ (Inf. VII. 84), drawing on Virgil’s third eclogue (line 93). ‘scripta eius pronuntiando lacerant atque corrumpunt; que ego forsitan, nisi me meorum cura vocaret alio, pro virili parte ab hoc ludibrio vendicarem’ (‘[they] mispronounce and mangle his verses […] and if my many concerns were not so pressing, I might even strive to the best of my powers to rescue him’) (Fam. XXI. 15. 97/205).



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  75 boldness I considered it unworthy […] This one thing I do wish to make clear, for if any of my vernacular writings resembles, or is identical to, anything of his or anyone else’s, it cannot be attributed to theft or imitation, which I have avoided like reefs, especially in vernacular works, but to pure chance or similarity of mind, as Tullius calls it, which caused me unwittingly to follow in another’s footsteps. […] Today I have left these scruples far behind; and with my total abandonment of such productions and the waning of my earlier fears, I can now welcome wholeheartedly all other poets, him above all. (Fam. XXI. 15. 96–7/203–4)

Despite his admission of anxiety (‘verebar’) and his apparent liberation from it (‘alios omnes et hunc ante alios tota mente suscipio’: ‘I can now welcome wholeheartedly all other poets’), Petrarch’s repeated protestations of innocence and his praise for Dante may be read as concealing various ironic and defensive undercurrents. For example his approval for Dante’s neglect of his fellow citizens, wife and children in the pursuit of literary glory, which by the time of the writing of this letter (1364–66) Petrarch claimed to have foregone, may cause the reader to suspect an ulterior discourse.15 Indeed, Gilson has noted that Petrarch’s language here echoes Dante’s negative representation of Ulysses, in counterpoint to his own father’s role as devoted paterfamilias: né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,   vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto e di li vizi umani e del valore  (Inf. XXVI. 94–9)   neither the sweetness of a son, nor compassion for my old father, nor the love owed to Penelope, which should have made her glad, could conquer within me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world and of human vices and worth.16

It is to be recalled that both Dante and Ser Petracco were exiled in 1302, although not on the same day, as Petrarch averred.17 The reason why Petrarch chose this passage is perhaps explained by the fact that Boccaccio appears to refer to it in his Trattatello in laude di Dante.18 Importantly, Familiares XXI. 15

16 17

18

On Petrarch’s cupiditas gloriae, see H. Baron, Petrarch’s Secretum: Its Making and Its Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 239–42, and Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 103–24. See Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, pp. 33–5. ‘simul uno die atque uno civili turbine patriis finibus pulsus fuit’ (‘on the same day and as a result of the same civil disturbance he was driven from his native land into exile’, Fam. XXI. 15. 95/203). In fact, Dante was exiled in January 1302, Ser Petracco in October of the same year. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Vittore Branca 10 vols (Milano: Mondadori, 1964–98), 3: pp. 423–538

76  Chaucer and Petrarch

15 has been claimed as a response to Boccaccio’s first redaction of the Trattatello and to the Latin poem extolling both Dante’s and Petrarch’s virtues, which accompanied a gift copy of the Commedia (MS Vat. Lat. 3199) sent by Boccaccio to Petrarch.19 In this poem (‘Ytalie iam’), Boccaccio seeks to reconcile Petrarch to Dante by asking him – the man ‘cui tempora lauro | romulei cinsere duces’ (‘whose temples the Roman senators encircled with laurel’, 1–2) – not to disdain the work of one who had never been redeemed by such an honour (‘frondibus ac nullis redimit’, 7).20 Boccaccio also stresses Dante’s status as the poet of exile (‘poete | exilis’, 5–6), and how this was a great sin of Fortune (‘Crimen inique fortune exilium’, 7–8). Clearly Boccaccio is appealing to his friend’s own sense of exile, to which Petrarch responds not by comparing himself to Dante, but by comparing Dante to his father, thereby emphasizing a clear generational gap. As Gilson argues, ‘to equate Dante with Petrarch’s father is to attach Dante to an earlier generation, and for Petrarch the act of delineating an earlier historical period brought with it judgements of value’ (p. 33). Hence Dante remains exiled from what Petrarch refers to as ‘nostra studia, multis neglecta seculis’ (‘these studies of ours, neglected for many centuries’ Sen. XVII. 2. 1144/648) – from what would come to be known as humanism.21

19

20 21

(p. 457); Life of Dante, trans. by J. G. Nichols (London, 2002), p. 29. For further references to Dante’s Ulysses in Petrarch and Boccaccio, see Roberto Mercuri, ‘Genesi della tradizione letteraria in Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio’, in A. A. Rosa, ed., Letteratura Italiana, Storia e Geografia , 3 vols (Turin, 1987), 1: pp. 229–396 (at pp. 312, 408–11); Carlo Pulsoni, ‘Il Dante di Francesco Petrarca: Vaticano latino 3199’, Studi Petrarcheschi, NS 10 (1993), pp. 155–208; and Aldo Rossi, ‘Dante nella prospettiva del Boccaccio’, Studi Danteschi, 37 (1960), 63–140; Piero Boitani, L’ombra di Ulisse (Bologna, 1992), pp. 64–65, now translated by Anita Weston as The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth (Oxford, 1994); Enrico Fenzi, ‘Tra Dante e Petrarca: Il fantasma di Ulisse’, in his Saggi Petrarcheschi (Florence, 2003), pp. 493–517; and Theodore Cachey Jr, ‘From Shipwreck to Port: RVF 189 and the Making of the Canzoniere’, MLN, 120 (2005), pp. 30–49. On Petrarch and Dante, see also Aldo S. Bernardo, ‘Petrarch’s Attitude toward Dante’, PMLA, 70 (1955), pp. 488–517; Paolo Trovato, Dante in Petrarca: Per un inventario dei dantismi nei ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’ (Florence, 1979); C. Paolazzi, ‘Petrarca, Boccaccio e il Trattatello in laude di Dante’, Studi danteschi, 55 (1983), pp. 165–249; Giuliano Tanturli, ‘Il disprezzo per Dante dal Petrarca al Bruni’, Rinascimento, SS 25 (1985), pp. 199–219; Giuseppe Velli, ‘Il Dante di Francesco Petrarca’, Studi petrarcheschi, 2 (1985), pp. 185–99; and Zygmunt Barański and Theodore Cachey, eds, Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (Notre Dame, IN, 2009). Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, p. 32; see also Pulsoni, ‘Il Dante di Petrarca’. For the idea that Boccaccio recreated Dante in Petrarch’s image in the Trattatello, see Todd Boli, ‘Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, or Dante resartus’, Renaissance Quarterly, 41 (1988), pp. 389–412. All quotations are taken from Carmina, ed. by Giuseppe Velli, in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, 5. 1 (1992): pp. 430–3 (here at p. 430). The translation is my own. On Dante’s humanist credentials, see Roberto Weiss, ‘Dante e l’umanesimo del suo tempo’, Letture Classensi, 2 (1969), pp. 11–27. Weiss argues that, ‘if Dante was a humanist, and he was, he was so in a way all of his own’ (‘un modo del tutto suo personale’: p. 16).



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  77

Petrarch emphasizes this division further by responding to Boccaccio’s discussion of the Commedia’s vulgarity and to his view, in ‘Ytalie iam’, that Dante’s aim was to show what modern vernacular poetry was capable of (‘metrum vulgare queat monstrare modernum, causa fuit vati’, 10). Again, Petrarch’s response is courteous but ultimately dismissive: ‘quod illi artificium nescio an unicum, sed profecto supremum fuit, michi iocus atque solatium fuerit et ingenii rudimentum’ (‘what was for him, if not his only occupation, surely his principal one [that is, vernacular poetry], was for me mere sport, a pastime, a mental exercise’, Fam. XXI. 15. 98/205). Overall, whilst he seeks to defend himself against accusations of jealousy, Petrarch still manages to display signs of unease. Boccaccio’s struggle for poetic independence may appear to be an inversion of Petrarch’s, yet both poets were preyed upon by the same fear. Boccaccio wrote unconsciously of Petrarch, and his awareness destroyed his own works; Petrarch wrote within his consciousness of Dante, but allegedly beyond the remit of the Commedia, which he claims saved his works to a certain extent. Once more, the emphasis is on style. Style mattered because all three poets were drawing upon the stock material of love poetry, which emerged out of the French tradition.22 Boccaccio wrote in a style fostered by Dantean stilno­ vism, ostensibly his own but similar enough to Petrarch’s to be compared with it, and deemed unequal by himself. Petrarch claimed to have avoided all other vernacular writers in order to foster his own style, which, when achieved, allowed him freedom to readmit those writers into his sphere; the return of the dead.23 Indeed Petrarch lists the illustrious dead in RVF 287, written after the death of Sennuccio del Bene in 1349; there Petrarch asks his friend ‘che ’n

22 23

This unique way ultimately allows Weiss to argue that Dante was ‘the greatest humanist of his time’ (p. 27). However, the present study is concerned with the tenets and praxis of humanism as they were understood by Boccaccio and Petrarch; in these circumstances I would agree with Gilson’s argument that, despite his ‘strong predilection for classical writers and philosophers […,] Dante’s relationship to the classical world is quite a narrow one’ (Dante and Renaissance Florence, p. 2). Translations from Weiss are my own. I will return to this matter later on in the chapter. I have adopted a sceptical tone here, as many commentators have discussed Dante’s influence upon Petrarch. In addition to the aforementioned commentaries, see for example Durling’s introduction and second appendix (‘Dante’s Rime petrose and Canzone montanina’) in his edition of the RVF; Marco Santagata, ‘Presenze di Dante “Comico” nel Canzoniere del Petrarca’, Giornale storico della letteratura Italiana, 146 (1969), pp. 163–211; Domenico de Robertis, ‘Petrarca Petroso’, Revue des Etudes Italiennes, 29 (1984), pp. 13–37; Robert E. Lerner, ‘Petrarch’s Coolness toward Dante: A Conflict of “Humanisms” ’, in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds, Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 204–5l; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Power Plays: Petrarch’s Genealogical Strategies’, JMEMS, 35 (2005), pp. 467–88; and the studies by Francesca Galligan and Enrico Santangelo in Martin McLaughlin, Letizia Panizza and Peter Hainsworth, eds, Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 Years, Proceedings of the British Academy, 146 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 85–111.

78  Chaucer and Petrarch

la terza spera | Guitton saluti, et messer Cino, et Dante, | Franceschin nostro et tutta quella schiera’ (‘to salute all in the third sphere: Guittone and messer Cino and Dante, our Franceschino, and all that band’, 9–11).24 Petrarch points to the same figures in the Triumphus Cupidinis: ‘vidi gente ir per una verde piaggia | pur d’amor volgarmente ragionando. | Ecco Dante e Beatrice, ecco Selvaggia, | ecco Cin da Pistoia, Guitton d’Arezzo’ (‘I saw people walking through a meadow, talking of love in the common tongue. | Behold Dante and Beatrice, behold Selvaggia, behold Cino da Pistoia, Guittone d’Arezzo’, IV. 29–32). However, in this last case the adjective ‘vulgarmente’ serves again to keep Dante in his place, whilst the insistence upon this separation illustrates a continuing unease. Thus Petrarch feared Dantean inversions and avoided Dante; Boccaccio embraced Dantean influence, but was distraught by unconscious Petrarchan inversions and conscious comparisons.Boccaccio, then, would seem to have had two literary forefathers: one whose influence was benevolent (Dante) and one whose influence was not – or at least not initially (Petrarch). It may be argued that Petrarch’s influence became benevolent once Boccaccio adopted him as his father in humanism and Dante as his vernacular father. However, even this is open to question, as Robert Hollander has described Boccaccio’s Dante as ‘the necessary and perhaps unsurpassable precursor’, whilst Branca has argued for a reconfiguration of the relationship whereby ‘the artist Boccaccio – and especially the poet – was indeed always placed under the tutelage of Petrarch’, and has claimed that ‘the idea of influence and dependence ought resolutely to be substituted for the more truthful convergence of the two authors in problems, interests, solutions and analogous experiences’.25 Gilson states the case clearly: ‘Too much has often been made of Boccaccio’s passivity in what amounts to a dialogue.’26 This may be applied to his relations with both Dante and Petrarch, although it is not to say that the fundamental agon which informs the anxiety over influence is removed – far from it. 24

25

26

The third sphere is that of Venus, and it is inhabited in the Paradiso by those who did good through love: ‘Io non m’accorsi del salire in ella; | ma d’esservi entro mi fé assai fede | la donna mia ch’i’ vidi far più bella’ (‘I was not aware of rising into it, but of being within it my lady gave me full assurance when I saw her become more beautiful’, VIII. 13–15). See The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, ed. and trans. by Charles S. Singleton, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1975), pp. 82–3. All the quotations from the Paradiso are taken from this edition. Chaucer, drawing on Fil. III. 74–9 (which itself draws on Para. VIII. 1–15), opens the third book of Troilus and Criseyde with ‘O blissful light of which the bemes clere | Adorneth al the thridde heven faire!’ (III. 1–2). See also Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, XI. 1–3, ed. by Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 2 (1964): pp. 253–664. Robert Hollander, ‘Boccaccio’s Dante’, Italica, 63 (1986), pp. 278–89 (at p. 287); Vittore Branca, ‘Temi e stilemi fra Petrarca e Boccaccio’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 8 (1974), pp. 215–25 (pp. 215–16). The translation is my own. An extended version of this essay, incorporating ‘Boccaccio and Petrarch’, appears in V. Branca’s Boccaccio medievale, 6th edn (Florence, 1986). Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, p. 40.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  79

In the earlier letter (Familiares XXI. 15), Petrarch agrees with Boccaccio’s prior praise of Dante on account of the latter’s benevolent influence upon the younger poet: Inseris nominatim hanc huius officii tui excusationem, quod ille tibi adolescentulo primus studiorum dux et prima fax fuerit. Iuste quidem, grate memoriter et, ut proprie dicam, pie; si enim genitoribus corporum nostrorum omnia, si fortunarum auctoribus multa debemus, quid non ingeniorum parentibus ac formatoribus debeamus? You expressly add as justification for your praise that he was your first guide and the light of your youthful studies. This is a proper, grateful, accurate, and, to speak candidly, fitting acknowledgement; for if we owe everything to the creators of our bodies and much to our benefactors, what do we not owe to the parents and fashioners of our minds? (Fam. XXI. 15. 94/202)

In the later letter, however, Petrarch refers to himself as effectively having usurped Dante’s fatherhood over Boccaccio: Solent enim ueri amantes, sponte sua sibi praeferre quos diligunt, et uinci optare, et ex hoc eximiam uoluptatem percipere si uincantur: idque ita esse, nemo pius pater neget, cui nihil est grauius, quam a filio superari. Speraui ego, ne desino esse minus quam tu ipse, non dicam, quam filius charus tibi, nomenque tibi meum tuo charius. For true lovers always gladly prefer to themselves those whom they love; they wish to be surpassed by them and feel the greatest pleasure if they are. No loving father will deny to whom nothing is more welcome than to be surpassed by his son. I hoped, as I still do, to be no less dear to you than you yourself are; I won’t say no less dear than a son, and I hoped that my name would be more dear to you than your own. (Sen. V. 2. 794–5/161)27

The emphasis on a plurality of ‘ingeniorum parentibus ac formatoribus’ (‘parents and fashioners of our minds’) in the first letter may be read as Petrarch seeing himself implicitly leading Boccaccio away from Dante, as a single father figure who would cast too long a shadow over the poet’s work. Boccaccio himself may already have been guiding Petrarch’s response in this direction, since he says at the opening of the letter: ‘Itaque quicquid de illo predicas, totum si pressius inspiciam, in meam gloriam verti ais’ (‘You [Boccaccio] assert that, whatever you say about him, if closely examined, redounds to my glory’, Fam. XXI. 15. 2. 94/202). Petrarch nevertheless refutes the charge that he cannot countenance praise of other authors which

27

See also Robinson and Rolfe’s translation: ‘no fond father would deny that his greatest pleasure consisted in being surpassed by his son’ (p. 205).

80  Chaucer and Petrarch

does not reflect upon himself.28 As we shall see, in Filostrato Boccaccio does indeed draw upon the various parents and fashioners of his genius. Yet in the later letter Petrarch refers to a singular relationship between father and son, an image which also remains at the core of his thoughts upon interlingual and intralingual translatio.29 Did Petrarch, then, come to view himself as Boccaccio’s paternal predecessor, and did this perception develop out of the tales he heard from the canterini and from Donato Albanzani, of Boccaccio burning his poems?30 And is his apparent generosity towards Boccaccio to be interpreted as benevolent? In relation to the first question, there is undoubtedly a paternal, didactic tone which Petrarch adopts upon occasion when writing to Boccaccio, despite the former being only nine years older than the latter. It is not necessarily a patronizing or pernicious tone – Petrarch was genuinely devoted to his friends, and he even left Boccaccio fifty gold pieces in his will with which to buy a warm coat.31 It is Petrarch’s adherence to an ideal of Ciceronian amicitia that gives rise to his statement ‘true lovers always prefer gladly to themselves those whom they love’ and ‘wish to be surpassed by them’.32 As such his friendship with Boccaccio allows literary influence to assume the mutual kenosis of perfect amicitia, and thereby approaches Bloom’s ‘matrix of generous influence’. However, Boccaccio did not meet Petrarch in person until 1350 and, despite their correspondence prior to this date, the former had certainly not yet become a friend of Petrarch’s during the period in which he was writing Filostrato. It is thus necessary to gauge the extent to which Boccaccio had knowledge of Petrarch’s lyrics at that time, if at all, and how

28

29 30 31

32

‘Ergo ego clarorum hominum laudibus non delecter, imo et glorier?’ (‘So then, I do not delight in the praises of outstanding men, and indeed join in glorifying them?’ Fam. XXI. 15. 95/202). Petrarch is surely referring here to De viris illustribus, which Boccaccio knew; see his preface to De mulieribus claris, ed. by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), 10 (1970), and Chapter 4 of the present study, p. 152, n. 61. See Fam. XXIII. 19, discussed in the Introduction, pp. 21–2. Petrarch claims first to have heard the rumour from canterini who pestered him for lyrics, following which he received confirmation from Donato. This may have been a pointed legacy – the coat was to be worn whilst Boccaccio sat in his study: ‘Domino Iohanni de Certaldo seu Boccaccii, verecunde admodum tanto viro tam modicum, lego quinquaginta florenos auri de Florentia pro una veste hiemali ad studium lucubrationesque nocturnas.’ (‘To Lord Giovanni of Certaldo or Boccaccio I bequeath – ashamed as I am to leave such a trifling legacy to so great a man – fifty Florentine gold florins for a winter garment to be worn by him while he is studying and working during the night hours.’) See Francesco Petrarca, Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, 2 vols, ed. by Antonietta Bufano (Turin, 1975), 2: pp. 1342–57 (at p. 1352) and Petrarch’s Testament, ed. and trans. by Theodor E. Mommsen (Ithaca, NY, 1957), pp. 68–93 (at p. 83). See Cicero, On Friendship; The Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. by J. G. F. Powell (Warminster, 1990). For further examples of De amicitia’s influence, see Petrarch’s Seniles (Sen. I. 3; I. 6; III.1).



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  81

he would have come into contact with them, before proceeding to examine the possible effects of this interaction upon Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The primary problem facing the question of whether Boccaccio drew on, or incorporated, Petrarchan lyrics concerns the date of Filostrato’s composition, an issue which has generated no small amount of debate. Certain commentators place the composition of the Filostrato around 1335, others place it around 1340. This later dating is consonant with the findings of E. H. Wilkins, who discusses the composition of the Filostrato by putting it in a direct relation to Boccaccio’s potential knowledge of Petrarch’s sonnets: Petrarch began to write Italian lyrics at least as early as 1327, and continued to write them, with greater or lesser frequency, at least until 1362 […] Before 1358 [the year in which a copy of the collection was released for circulation], however, he had released copies of a good many single poems or small groups of poems […] An interesting indication of the early release of Nos. 61 and 112 is afforded by the fact that Boccaccio, writing the Filostrato in Naples in 1339–1340, appears to have derived material for Stanzas 83–85 of Part III from No. 61 and material for Stanzas 54–55 of Part V from No. 11233

Wilkins himself knew of the difficulties of dating the Filostrato, as in an earlier version of the same essay he gave its date as being 1338. Gordon R. Silber responded to Wilkins’ original claim, refuting Petrarch’s influence, to which Wilkins in turn responded by arguing that ‘the verbal similarities, plus the close similarity, in the second case, in the use of initial repetition, still seem to me to be convincing’.34 One of the primary problems of dating the poem, at least up until recently, was the matter of biographical interpretation; a subject which merits a brief digression. G. B. Baldelli, in his 1806 Vita di Giovanni Boccaccio, was the first to claim that the Filostrato was written for Maria d’Aquino, who is better known by her senhal or poetic alter ego Fiammetta, despite the Proemio’s peritext: ‘Filostrato alla sua più ch’altra piacevole Filomena salute’ (‘Filos-

33

34

E. H. Wilkins, The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’ and Other Petrarchan Studies (Rome, 1951), p. 289. Wilkins emphasizes the likelihood that ‘friends and admirers of Petrarch got from each other, or from giullari [canterini], copies of poems so released, and thus developed personal collections of his poems. This inherent probability is confirmed by the known development of personal collections of the letters of Petrarch’ (p. 291). Ibid., p. 301. For Wilkins’ original claim, see his ‘Notes on Petrarch’, MLN, 32 (1917), pp. 193–200 (at pp. 196–8); for his original, corrected dating of the Filostrato as being 1338, see ‘On the Circulation of Petrarch’s Italian Lyrics during his Lifetime’, Modern Philology, 46 (1948), pp. 1–6, revised as ‘The Circulation of Petrarch’s Rime during his Lifetime’ in his Making of the ‘Canzoniere’, pp. 287–93. See also his ‘Notes on Certain Poems’ in the same volume, pp. 295–304 (at pp. 300–1), and Gordon R. Silber, ‘Alleged Imitations of Petrarch in the Filostrato’, Modern Philology, 37 (1939), pp. 113–24.

82  Chaucer and Petrarch

trato greets his Filomena, who is more pleasing than any other woman’).35 Francesco Corrazzini’s 1877 edition of Boccaccio’s letters reinforced this misreading, as did Vincenzo Crescini ten years later, who was in turn followed by Della Torre and Torraca.36 As P. G. Ricci posits, ‘in the cycle of a hundred years Baldelli’s invention, reinforced by Corrazzini, had become gospel’.37 Similarly, Branca complained that ‘the chronology of Boccaccio’s early works […] was fixated upon an arbitrary reconstruction of his amorous relations with the mythical Fiammetta’.38 There are then at least two fundamental problems with dating the Filostrato: the first is that many of the earlier chronologies were based upon Boccaccio’s relationship with Fiammetta, now largely dismissed as a myth derived from received literary practice, which echoed Petrarch’s love for Laura and Dante’s devotion to Beatrice; the second is that Filostrato is in any case dedicated to a lady named Filomena. Vincenzo Pernicone, although he, too, was restricted by a biographical interpretation of the early works, began to move away from such readings when he drew a distinction between the poem’s audiences, that is, between Fiammetta (Filomena) and the reading public, and argued that ‘it is easily comprehended that the first words were written for the public and not for Fiammetta’.39 Pernicone also dates the work as being written in 1338, the year which Wilkins and Young had originally posited, thereby moving away from the earlier chronological claim, which gave 1336 as the year of Filostrato’s composition on the grounds that that was the year of Boccaccio’s innamoramento with Fiammetta and that the work was composed prior to his having ‘had entire possession of her’ – to use Young’s words.40 A dating of the Filostrato which is based upon supposedly autobiographical references scattered throughout the early works starts to collapse in the

35

36

37 38 39 40

See G. B. Baldelli, Vita di Giovanni Boccaccio (Florence, 1806), p. 59. On Fiammetta, see Janet Levarie Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana, IL, 1986). For the English translation of the Filostrato by Robert P. ap Roberts and Anna Bruni Benson, see Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. by Stephen Barney (New York and London, 2006), pp. 3–428. Francesco Corrazzini, Le lettere edite e inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio (Florence, 1877); Vincenzo Crescini, Contributo agli studi sul Boccaccio (Turin, 1887); Arnaldo della Torre, La giovenezza di G. Boccaccio (Città di Castello, 1905); Francesco Torraca, Per la biografia de Giovanni Boccaccio (Rome, 1912). Pier Giorgio Ricci, ‘Per la dedica e la datazione del Filostrato’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 1 (1963), pp. 333–47 (at p. 334, my translation). Fil., introduction, p. 3, my translation. Vincenzo Pernicone, ‘Il Filostrato di Giovanni Boccaccio’, Studi di filologia italiana, 2 (1929), pp. 77–128 (at p. 80, my translation). See Karl Young, The Origin and Development of the Story of Troilus and Criseyde (London, 1908), pp. 26–32 (at pp. 30, 32).



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  83

face of Fiammetta’s non-existence.41 Ricci, writing in 1963, despite adhering in many ways to the biographical interpretation – for example he notes that Filomena was tall and a widow, whereas Fiammetta was not tall and was married – noted the stylized nature of the relationship (p. 341). The following year, Branca’s edition of the Filostrato laid to rest the biographical interpretation of the early works’ chronology. Branca also claimed, like Ricci, that the Filostrato preceded the Filocolo, and he dated it in 1335.42 This retrodatazione is interesting in the light of Young’s earlier comment that, ‘if the autobiographical criterion had never been discovered and we had been left only with the works themselves and the scanty external evidence, the chronological priority of Filocolo would probably never have been refuted’.43 However, now that the ‘autobiographical criterion’ has been discredited, the priority of the Filocolo has been refuted not only by Branca but also by Wallace and Edwards, amongst others.44 Yet there remains a quibble over Branca’s earlier dating, at least in relation to Boccaccio’s use of Petrarch’s RVF 112. In his introduction to the Filostrato, Branca asserts that ‘echoes of Petrarchan lyrics […] are almost totally absent (the one clear exception being that of V. 55)’.45 Not only does this exception run counter to Branca’s claim that ‘a true presence of Petrarch in the poetry of Boccaccio before about 1347 can in no way be proven’, but it faces the added problem of Wilkins’ dating of RVF 112 between 1337 and 1341, as was RVF 61.46 Branca qualifies his phrase ‘true presence’ by saying that Petrarchan lyric ‘does not appear in the very nucleus of Boccaccio’s lyrical experience, which at that time, if ever, was fixed on the examples of Dante, Cavalcanti and Cino’.47 However, Branca, drawing upon Boccaccio’s 1374 letter to Francesco da Brossano on the death of Petrarch, wherein Boccaccio says that they had been friends for over forty years (‘et ego quadraginta annis vel amplius suus fui’, Ep. XXIV. 28), also posits that Boccaccio’s first experience of Petrarch’s verse happened around 1334–5: ‘Those first contacts occurred therefore around 1334–35, and Petrarch’s own words “the vernacular compositions of my youth in that 41

42 43 44

45 46

47

That is, the dating of the Filostrato was determined by its being based on Boccaccio’s relationship either with Fiammetta (c.1336–9) or with Filomena, which may have preceded or succeeded it. Fil., introduction, p. 5. Young, Origin and Development, p. 32. D. Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1985), p. 157, and R. R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 12. See also Maria Gozzi, ‘Sulle fonti del Filostrato’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 5 (1969), pp. 123–209, who notes that ‘critics are now inclined to reverse the traditionally established temporal relations between Boccaccio’s two works’ (at p. 203, my translation). Fil., introduction, p. 5. Vittore Branca, ‘Petrarch and Boccaccio’, trans. by Aldo and Reta Bernardo, in Aldo S. Bernardo, ed., Francesco Petrarca: Citizen of the World (Padua–Albany, NY, 1980), pp. 193–221 (at p. 197). See also della Torre, Giovinezza di G. Boccaccio, pp. 232ff, 338ff. Branca, ‘Petrarch and Boccaccio’, p. 197.

84  Chaucer and Petrarch

genre” serve to confirm this indirectly, because they appear to refer to his earliest verses, those composed between 1327 and 1336–37.’48 Branca’s retrodatazione for the Filostrato would thus appear to coincide with the period in which Boccaccio discovered Petrarchan lyrics. Branca’s chronology has not gone unchallenged. Carlo Muscetta and Achille Tartaro, drawing upon what they perceive to be the unmistakable presence of Petrarchan lyrics in the Filostrato, date the poem as being composed towards the end of Boccaccio’s Neapolitan sojourn, in autumn–winter 1340, and ask: ‘would the title itself not have been influenced by a comedy that he attributed to Petrarch?’.49 A later date is also proposed by Armando Balduino, who reasserts Wilkins’ arguments and dates the poem to 1339; by Luigi Surdich; and by Giulia Natali.50 Balduino suggests that a clue to the chronology of Boccaccio’s early works might be found in the hierarchy of the ladies of the brigata, as described in the introduction to the Decameron: ‘la prima, e quella di più età era, Pampinea chiameremo e le seconda Fiammetta, Filomena la terza e la quarta Emilia’ (‘the first of them, who was also the oldest, we shall call Pampinea, the second Fiammetta, Filomena the third, and the fourth Emilia’).51 With the exception of Pampinea, who has priority by virtue of her age, Balduino suggests that ‘with the name of Fiammetta […] Boccaccio alludes above all, and perhaps with privilege, to Filocolo; with Filomena, most certainly, to Filostrato; with Emilia to the Teseida’.52 That is, the order which the donne assume in the Decameron corresponds to the order in which the early works were composed. This is not Balduino’s only argument, however. He also argues convincingly for the chronological and material connections between the Filostrato and the Teseida, as had Pernicone, and discusses when and how Boccaccio could have come into contact with Petrarch’s sonnets. The means by which Boccaccio obtained Petrarch’s lyrics are also worth addressing briefly before examining the Filostrato’s inversions. ­Balduino 48 49

50

51

52

Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Boccaccio, p. 293. Carlo Muscetta and Achille Tartaro, Il Trecento: Dalla crisi dell’età communale all’umanesimo, La Letteratura Italiana: Storia e testi 2, 2 vols (Bari, 1971–2), 2: pp. 79–8: ‘sonnet 112 from Petrarch to Sennucio del Bene […] without doubt made known to Boccaccio the central verses upon which his two ottave are refashioned’ (p. 98, my translation). On Sennuccio, see Daniele Piccini, Un amico del Petrarca: Sennuccio del Bene e le sue rime (Rome–Padua, 2004). I will return to the title of Petrarch’s lost comedy subsequently. Armando Balduino, Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri poeti del Trecento (Florence, 1984), pp. 231–47 (at p. 243); Luigi Surdich, La cornice di Amore: Studi sul Boccaccio (Pisa, 1987), p. 107; Giulia Natali, ‘A Lyrical Version: Boccaccio’s Filostrato’, in Piero Boitani, ed., The European Tragedy of Troilus (Oxford, 1989), pp. 49–73 (at p. 51). Decameron (henceforth Dec.), Introduction, 51. All quotations are taken from Il Decameron, ed. by Vittore Branca, in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, 4 (1976). In each case the reference is given in order of day, novella, and the line number(s). For the English translation, see Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. by G. H. McWilliam (London, 1972). Balduino, Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri poeti, p. 246.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  85

suggests that Boccaccio may have received at least one of them from Sennuccio del Bene, given that RVF 112 was addressed to the latter; and he reinforces this possibility by making reference to certain letters. It is known that in 1339 Boccaccio had exercised his epistolary skills by composing some Latin letters, one of which was addressed to Petrarch (the Mavortis miles extrenue). It is also known that ‘in these punctilious and scholastic dictamina he inserts continuous variations, and true and proper excerpta, recalled from Dante’s epistles to Cino [da Pistoia] and Moroello Malaspina’.53 Furthermore, the only other trecento figure connected to these epistles was Sennuccio, who was a friend of both Dante and Petrarch. Thus Balduino, following Billanovich, suggests not only that Sennuccio passed these letters on to Boccaccio, but that he might also have delivered to him RVF 112 during their possible encounter (c.1339). This, however, is only circumstantial evidence, and hence the transmission of Petrarch’s sonnets through this medium must remain conjectural.54 There remains the matter of Petrarch’s lost comedy and its potential influence on the Filostrato. In the catalogue of works which he included in his De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi (c.1342–3?), Boccaccio reveals that Petrarch ‘[u]ltra eciam scripsit pulcerrimam comediam, cui titulum imposuit Philostratus’ (‘wrote, furthermore, a most delightful comedy, which he entitled Philostratus’).55 Wilkins points out that the correct title of the work was Philologia, whilst Muscetta and Tartaro argue that ‘[Boccaccio’s] inexactitude is important because it could have influenced the title of Filostrato and thereby confirm the later date’, given that the information upon which the biography is based appears to have been gleaned largely from Petrarch’s friend Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro in 1338.56 It is tempting to conjecture as to whether Chaucer might have read Boccaccio’s life of 53 54

55

56

Ibid., p. 242. For details of the Dantean correspondence, see Giuseppe Billanovich, Restauri Boccacceschi (Rome, 1947), pp. 49–78. For further information regarding the circulation of the rime, see Wilkins, ‘Circulation of Petrarch’s Italian Lyrics’. See also his paper ‘Boccaccio’s Early Tributes to Petrarch’, Speculum, 38 (1963), pp. 79–87. See Vite di Petrarca, Pier Damiani e Livio, ed. by Renata Fabbri, in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, 5. 1 (1992): pp. 879–941 (at p. 910, my translation). Fabbri gives the probable date for this work as being 1348–9; Gilson and Balduino both give it as being 1341–2. Wilkins (‘Early Tributes’, p. 85) dates the De vita as being written in or after 1347 and claims that much of Boccaccio’s information came from Petrarch’s friend Laelius, who has been named as a possible model for Chaucer’s Lollius. See Lillian Herlands Hornstein, ‘Petrarch’s Laelius, Chaucer’s Lollius?’, PMLA, 63 (1948), pp. 64–84. For an alternative reading of Lollius, see G. L. Kittredge, ‘Chaucer’s Lollius’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 28 (1917), pp. 47–133. See also Barry Windeatt, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford, 1995), pp. 37–41. Wilkins, ‘Early Tributes’, p. 85; Muscetta and Tartaro, Il Trecento, p. 336. See also Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Boccaccio: ‘il Boccaccio avrà nel ’38–’39 l’incontro con un amico devoto del Petrarca, Padre Dionigi da Borgo S. Sepolcro’ (p. 294).

86  Chaucer and Petrarch

Petrarch and received the impression that it was the latter who wrote the Filostrato. Chaucer would not have been alone in making such a mistake. The author of the Roman de Troyle, for example – most likely a seneschal of Anjou named Louis de Beauveau – thought this to be the case, as he says in the proemium to his work: ‘entre lesquelx en trouvay ung | petit en langue ytalienne que en appelle Philostrato, | lequel jadis fut fait et compose par ung poete florentin | nommé Petrarque’ (‘Among these volumes I found a little one in the Italian tongue, which is called Filostrato, which was composed years ago by a Florentine poet named Petrarch’).57 Further to this, there is the spelling of Arcite’s pseudonym in the Knight’s Tale: ‘Now highte I Philostrate’ (I. 1558).58 However, in the absence of any further evidence to support such a possibility, this too must remain conjecture. Drawing upon the information above, I would argue that the Filostrato cannot be dated in accordance with Boccaccio’s relationship with Fiammetta, not only because of the dedication to Filomena but also because the evidence for such a relationship is inherently dubious. The presence of at least one Petrarchan lyric – RVF 112, at Filostrato V. 54–5, which was composed during the period 1337–41 (most likely in 1339–40) – nevertheless refutes the retrodatazione proposed by Branca.59 That Boccaccio was not averse to drawing upon the works of others in the Filostrato is reinforced by the various Dantean echoes which recur throughout the poem, and also by his inclusion of a canzone by Cino da Pistoia (V. 62–5). Interestingly, this canzone, ‘La dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave’, is cited by Petrarch in one of his canzoni (RVF 70) in which he concludes each stanza with the opening line of a poem from a previous poet.60 Furthermore, RVF 70 is thought to have been composed during Petrarch’s early vernacular period (c.1326–36), and so it may have been known to Boccaccio; a possibility reinforced by the proximity between the citation of RVF 112 and Cino’s stanzas, but which must ultimately remain conjectural.61 Likewise, how Boccaccio came into 57

58 59 60 61

See Michael G. Hanly, Boccaccio, Beauveau, Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: Four Perspectives on Influence (Norman, OK, 1990), pp. 138–9. On the question of whether Chaucer used a French version of Filostrato when writing the Troilus, Hanly points out in his preface that the most likely author of the Roman de Troyle ‘was born fifteen years after Chaucer’s death’ (p. ix). See also Windeatt, Troilus and Criseyde, pp. 19–24, and Robert A. Pratt, ‘Chaucer and Le Roman de Troyle et de Criseida’, Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), pp. 509–39. In Chaucer’s source, Teseida IV. 12, Arcita changes his name to Penteo. Interestingly, Bettarini, in her edition of the RVF, follows Contini in claiming that ­Boccaccio’s stanzas were the source for Petrarch’s sonnet (p. 523). These are, in order, the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel (or so Petrarch thought), Guido ­Cavalcanti, Dante, Cino, and finally the opening line of Petrarch’s own RVF 23. On the history of Cino’s canzone, see Domenico de Robertis, ‘Per la storia del testo della canzone “La dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave” ’, Studi di filologia italiana, 10 (1952), pp. 5–25. On Cino in general and on the text of ‘La dolce vista’, see Poeti del Duecento, ed. by Gianfranco Contini, 2 vols (Milan, 1960), 2: pp. 629–32.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  87

contact with Petrarch’s sonnets remains open to question. It is possible that he received them from friends of Petrarch’s who visited, or who temporarily resided in Naples.62 Whether Chaucer knew that Boccaccio was the author of the Filostrato remains to be seen. With these observations made, we may turn to what Balduino terms Boccaccio’s ‘reminiscenze petrarchesche’.63 Of the most likely Petrarchan reminiscences, the first appears in Troiolo’s love song in book III: E benedico il tempo, l’anno e ’l mese, il giorno, l’ora e ’l punto che costei onesta, bella, leggiadra e cortese, primieramente apparve agli occhi miei; benedico figliuolto che m’accese del suo valor per la virtù di lei, e che m’ha fatto a lei servo verace, negli occhi suoi ponendo la mia pace. E benedico i ferventi sospiri ch’io ho per lei cacciati già del petto, e benedico i pianti e li martiri che fatti m’ha avere amor perfetto, e benedico i focosi disiri tratti del suo più bel che altro aspetto, perciocché prezzo di sì alta cosa istati sono, e tanto graziosa. And I bless the season, the year, and the month, the day, the hour, and the moment that that virtuous, beautiful, graceful and courteous one first appeared to my eyes; and I bless the son who kindled me by his strength through her power and who has made me true servant to her, placing my peace in her eyes.   And I bless the fervent sighs which I have driven formerly from my breast for her, and I bless the pains and torments which perfect love made me have, and I bless the fiery desires drawn by her face more beautiful than any other because they have been the price of an object so lofty and gracious. (Fil. III. 83–4)

62

63

Possible candidates are Sennuccio del Bene, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, Laelius (Lello di Pietro Stefano Tosetti), Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili. As we know, Petrarch later complained to Boccaccio (Sen. V. 2) and to Pandolfo Malatesta (Sen. XIII. 11) that his vernacular works no longer belonged to him but to the multitude. However, it cannot be proven whether Boccaccio heard some of Petrarch’s early works via the canterini or not. See Wilkins, ‘Circulation of Petrarch’s Italian Lyrics’, p. 3. Balduino, Boccaccio, Petrarca e altri poeti, p. 235.

88  Chaucer and Petrarch

These stanzas have obvious echoes, intended or otherwise, of Petrarch’s RVF 61: Benedetto sia ’l giorno, e ’l mese, et l’anno, et la stagione, e ’l tempo, et l’ora, e ’l punto e ’l bel paese, e ’l loco ov’io fui giunto da’ duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno; et benedetto il primo dolce affanno ch’ i’ ebbi ad esser con Amor congiunto, et l’arco, et le saette ond’ i’ fui punto, et le piaghe che ’nfin al cor mi vanno. Benedette le voci tante ch’io chiamando il nome de mia donna ò sparte, e i sospiri, et le lagrime, e ‘l desio; et benedette sian tutte le carte ov’ io fama l’acquisto, e ’l pensier mio, ch’ è sol di lei, sí ch’altra non v’à parte. Blessed be the day and the month and the year and the season and the time and the hour and the instant and the beautiful countryside and the place where I was struck by the two lovely eyes that have bound me; and blessed be the first sweet trouble I felt on being made one with Love, and the bow and the arrows that pierced me, and the wounds that reach my heart! Blessed be the many words that I have scattered calling the name of my lady, and the sighs and the tears and the desire; and blessed be all the pages where I gain fame for her, and my thoughts, which are only of her, so that no other has part in them! (RVF 61)

The number of similarities here would seem to suggest that Boccaccio is conscious of Petrarch’s sonnet at the point of composition; and, if RVF 61 was not to hand, then at least it was in mind. Yet it is also the careful, knowing divergences that reinforce the presence of influence, as the order of elements included in the litany constituted by Petrarch’s opening lines is reproduced, but with delicate rearrangement. The first and most obvious connection is the use of anaphora (‘E benedico’, ‘Benedetto’), which serves as formal ballast in both cases and provides an intertextual, secularized reflection of the Beatitudes.64 This implicit reference serves to align the tenets of a fin amour with a Christian mindset, emphasizing the sense of ‘love as religious devotion’, upon which Chaucer expands.65 The conferment of beatitude places the

64 65

See Matthew 5: 3–12. Windeatt, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, in P. Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 163–83 (at p. 168). The religion of love recurs in the Provençal



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  89

lover, rather than the beloved, in the position of Christ delivering the oratio Montana to a gathered audience–readership. Yet, whilst Petrarch’s poet–lover apparently shrinks away from such a position by removing the ‘I’ (‘benedetto sia’, ‘blessed be’) – unlike Troiolo’s ‘benedico’ (‘I bless’) – it is he who reflects Christ’s words more exactly, as the anaphora in the sermon also excludes the speaking ‘I’ (Beati, ‘blessed be’). The oratio Montana is not the only potential source for the topos. Hauvette has suggested that the manner of enumeration may stem from Rev. 9: 15: ‘Et soluti quatuor Angeli, qui parati erant in horam et diem, et mensum et annum’ (‘And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year’). There were also more contemporary precedents, for example in the poetry of Peire Vidal (to whom Petrarch refers at Triumphus Cupidinis IV. 44), who uses it to recall his énamourment: ‘Ben aja·l temps e·l jorns e l’ans e·l mes’ (‘Blessed be the time and the day and the year and the month’).66 The author of the Mare amoroso, for many years thought to be Brunetto Latini, likewise includes the benediction trope: ‘guardando l’anno, il mese e la semana, | e ’l giorno e l’ora, il punto e lo quadrante | del più gentil pianeta’ (‘Reguarding the year, the month and the week, and the day, and the point and the quadrant of the most gentle planet’, 160–2).67 Yet the close comparisons between Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s versions would appear to attest to the former’s direct use of the latter, and Boccaccio returns to Petrarch’s sonnet with even greater exactitude in the Ninfale fiesolano (1344–5): ‘Benedetto sia l’anno e ’l mese e ’l giorno, | e l’ora e ’l tempo, ed ancor la stagione’ (‘Blessed be the year and the month and the day, and the hour and the time, and even the season’).68

66

67

68

lyric tradition and in the dolce stil nuovo, Dante’s Beatrice being its perfect embodiment. Dante concludes the Vita nuova hoping ‘dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna. E poi piaccia a colui che è sire de la cortesia, che la mia anima se ne possa gire a vedere la Gloria de la sua donna, cioè di quella Beatrice, la quale gloriosamente mira ne la faccia di colui qui est per omnia secula benedictus [Romans 1: 25; 9: 5; 2 Cor 11: 31]’ (‘to tell of her what has never been told of anyone. And then to please He who is lord of courtesy, that my soul may turn to see the Glory of his lady, that is, of Beatrice, who gloriously gazes upon the face of He who is through all ages blessed’ (XLII. 3, my translation). ‘Non es savis ne gaire ben apres’ (line 9), in Peire Vidal, Poesie, ed. by D’Arco Silvio Avalle, 2 vols (Milan, 1960), 2: pp. 445–7 (at p. 445). See also Nicola Scarano, ‘Fonti provenzali e italiane delle lirica petrarchesca’, Studi di filologia romanza, 8 (1901), pp. 250–360, at pp. 257, 280; now in Francesco Petrarca, ed. by Isotta Scarano (Campobasso, 1971), pp. 167–268. See Poeti del Duecento, ed. by Contini, 1: pp. 483–500 (at p. 493). For a discussion of the trope’s tradition, see Guido Vitaletti, ‘Benedizioni e maledizioni in amore’, Archivum Romanicum, 3 (1919), pp. 236–9 (at p. 212). Like Silber, Vitaletti believes that Boccaccio was drawing upon popular tradition. See also the earlier studies by Hugo Schuchardt, Ritornell und terzine (Halle, 1874), p. 121, and Henri Hauvette, Boccacce (Paris, 1914), p. 89. See Ninfale fiesolano, 274. 1–2, ed. by Armando Balduino, in Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, 3 (1974): pp. 273–421 (at p. 366, my translation). I agree with Branca’s assertion that influ-

90  Chaucer and Petrarch

There are, however, some minor stylistic differences which cumulatively constitute a tonal distinction. Petrarch moves temporally outward from the specific day (‘giorno’), through the month (‘mese’), followed by the year (‘anno’), before regressing through the season (‘stagione’), the time of day (‘tempo’) and the hour (‘l’ora’) to the actual point (‘punto’) of innamoramento, which becomes the ‘punto’ of Love’s arrow that pierces the speaker in line 7.69 In the Filostrato Boccaccio progresses from the generality of ‘tempo’ before temporally and quantitatively whittling down his opening lines to the same ‘punto’ as the one reached by Petrarch in RVF 61. Petrarch, perhaps constrained by a more stringent sense of lyricism, has two subjective perspectives converging upon a single point. That is, the progression moves back and forth in time, forcing the lines, and thereby the sonnet as a whole, to look in both directions from the disadvantage point of an uncertain present; although it remains certain in its sense of being present. It may be argued that Petrarch’s poet–lover allows himself to explore the chiastic structure of remembered experience to a greater degree than Troiolo, whose room for meditation is limited by the demands of a genre – narrative romance – which relentlessly urges forward momentum. However, as Branca points out, the barriers between the lyric and the narrative were ‘always very fragile and entirely provisional for Boccaccio’.70 The two works diverge at this point, but not completely. The Boccaccian text echoes the Petrarchan intermittently, in a complex process of extrication and dependence which goes beyond a shared vernacular inheritance. Petrarch extends his catalogue, in a shift from temporal to spatial emphasis (‘bel paese, e ’l loco’ – ‘the beautiful countryside and the place’), but is again drawn back to his original point (‘ov’io fui giunto’ – ‘where I was struck’) in order to stress further its ineluctable influence upon, and alteration of, the present ‘punto’, the point of recollection.71 Boccaccio’s catalogue develops into a description of his lady (‘onesta, bella, leggiadra e cortese’) and thereby takes advantage of the momentum created by the rapidity of

69

70 71

ence was not unilateral between Petrarch and Boccaccio. See ‘Petrarch and Boccaccio’, p. 198; ‘Temi e stilemi fra Petrarca e Boccaccio’, pp. 216–17. Thus providing us with a dateline obliquely referred to in RVF 9 and clarified in the Virgil codex: 6th April 1327. On the significance of this date see Bortolo Martinelli, ‘Feria sexta aprilis: La data sacra del canzoniere del Petrarca’, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, 8 (1972), pp. 449–84. ‘Temi e stilemi’, p. 223. This position constitutes the core of Natali’s argument (‘Lyrical Version’). The polarization of these two punti creates the sonnet’s spatio-temporality. There are two definite points: the then, the instant of enamourment, and the ongoing suspended now, the latter of which is characterized more by sentience than by temporality; now will end when the intense feelings of desire subside – a future which is inconceivable for the present ‘I’. Indeed it is the attempted movement away from the punto of the then which drives the sequence forward as a whole; the sequence’s chronology (excepting the anniversary poems) eludes the reader, as it takes place in a series of sustained present moments.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  91

the opening lines. Yet, as any reader of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta will know, Petrarch’s donna is synonymous with the ‘bel paese, e ’l loco’, as her reflections are scattered throughout the sequence to the extent that she informs the verbal landscape, becoming a speculum naturae. Boccaccio may be seen to shift from an implicit to an explicit reference, linked by the positioning of ‘bella’ in the third line – a possible echo of Petrach’s ‘bel’ in the correspondent line in RVF 61. The closing line of Boccaccio’s opening quatrain realigns itself with Petrarch by means of its optical emphasis. Boccaccio reverses the perspective offered by Petrarch, as in the latter’s poem the ‘duo begli occhi’ (‘two lovely eyes’) belong to the beloved, whereas the former refers to ‘occhi miei’ (‘my eyes’); an alteration which may be read as a comment on Boccaccio’s potential status as a Petrarchan reader. As is well known, the theory of extromissive to intromissive sight is central to the tradition of courtly love: love is emitted from the eyes of the love-object via a beam of light, which enters the heart of the subject through his/her own eyes.72 Thus Petrarch’s ‘begli occhi’, belonging to his lady, are simultaneously object and subject of vision, as Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky posits: Eye becomes ‘I’, the self perched at the edge of the body […] the analogy exposes the self to the many threats implicit in the eye’s engagement with the world, its vulnerability to disease, deception, and the objectifying gaze of another’s gaze […] The lovers’ gaze becomes a combat; as the eye suffers wounds, it also strikes. In Petrarchan tradition, these roles are strictly gendered, but not as one might expect: the male lover’s eye is a passive victim, wounded by the beloved’s gaze.73

So, too, the eye of the reader–translator engages in an agon with the text it finds before itself (in both senses). The gaze of the beloved, which projects out of Petrarch’s text through objectified and objectifying ‘begli occhi’, alights upon the ‘occhi miei’ of Boccaccio’s poem, and there begins a battle for selfhood which is inevitably won by the translator, who has the option of

72

73

Giacomo da Lentini, who composed the first sonnets (c.1235), averred that ‘li occhi in prima genera[n] l’amore | e lo core li dà nutricamento […] li occhi representa[n] a lo core | d’onni cosa che veden bono e rio’ (‘the eyes first generate love and the heart gives it nourishment […] the eyes in turn submit to the heart all that they see, both good and bad’, lines 3–4, 9–10): Giacomo da Lentini, Poesie, ed. by Roberto Antonelli (Rome, 1979), pp. 274–75. The translation is my own. Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, ‘Taming the Basilisk’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London, 1997), pp. 195–217 (at pp. 202–3). Dino del Garbo’s famous commentary on Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega is also interesting in relation to medieval sense-psychology; moreover, this is a text which Boccaccio copied in Vat. MS Chig. L V 176. See Otto Bird, ‘The Canzone d’Amore of Cavalcanti according to the Commentary of Dino del Garbo’, Medieval Studies, 2–3 (1940–1), pp. 150–203; 117–60.

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alteration.74 Boccaccio’s possessive confirms subjectivity; Petrarch’s ‘begli occhi’ undermine subjectivity; the former thus takes the active role in relation to the passivity of the latter. The second quatrains of each poem begin as previously, with ‘benedico’ and ‘et benedetto’, and again diverge before becoming ‘congiunto’ at the close. Petrarch’s implicit image of Cupid, signified by ‘l’arco, et le saette’ (‘the bow and the arrows’) of line 7, is made explicit in Boccaccio’s fifth line through the personification of ‘figliuolto’ (‘your son’). This is not to say that Petrarch does not include a personification, as the presence of ‘Amor’ suggests. The possibility remains that Petrarch intended ‘Amor’ to signify the adult Eros rather than the infant Cupid, as his quatrain’s inherent violence suggests something beyond the playfulness of the child-god. This hermeneutic bifurcation is stressed further by Troiolo’s beatification of ‘figliuolto’ as an expression of gratitude for the status of loyal servant (‘servo verace’), which has been conferred upon him. Boccaccio thus adheres to the precepts of amore cortese: the lover in thrall to the beloved, the lover as servant. Petrarch, on the other hand, suggests a symbolic union via his inclusion of ‘congiunto’. And, whilst this applies to himself and ‘Amor’ being conjunct, the implication remains: it is the conjunction which he blesses, not the personification. It may be argued that Petrarch’s ‘voci tante’ (‘many words’) are echoed by Boccaccio’s ‘ferventi sospiri’ (‘fervent sighs’). Sighs are associated with words throughout Petrarch’s sequence, as one of the permutations of that all-important morphological name is ‘l’aura’, meaning a ‘light breeze’ such as the one produced by the poet’s sighs. Boccaccio was himself aware of the allegorical and semiotic plenitude offered by Laura’s name, as he says in the De vita et moribus: ‘Laurettam illam allegorice pro laurea corona quam postmodum est adeptus accipiendam existimo’ (‘Laura is an allegory for the laurel crown which later he was to accept, I suspect’).75 Nevertheless, Boccaccio’s regression from articulated words to formless sounds represents a movement towards the aphonia felt by the stilnovistic lover when he finds himself in the presence of his donna.76 A further link between ‘voci’ and ‘sospiri’ is supplied by what immediately follows in both texts. Petrarch’s ninth line ends upon 74

75 76

Boccaccio’s phrasing here, ‘Primieramente apparve agli occhi’ (‘first appeared to my eyes’), seems to have been a tag. See for example Dante, Vita nuova, II. 1, ‘a li miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa donna’ (‘the glorious lady first appeared to my eyes’), or Petrarch’s description of Laura in his ms copy of Virgil. ‘Laurea, propriis virtutibus illustris et meis longum celebrata carminibus, primum oculis meis apparuit sub primum adolescentie mee tempus’ (‘Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth’) – for which see Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Paris, 1907), 2: pp. 286–87, and Francesco Petrarca, Le postille del Virgilio Ambrosiano, ed. by M. Baglio, A. Nebuloni Testa and M. Petoletti, 2 vols (Padua, 2006); for the English translation see Wilkins, Life, p. 76. Giovanni Boccaccio, De vita et moribus (Vita di Petrarca), p. 908; the translation is my own. See for example Vita Nuova, XI; RVF 18. 12, 20. 9–10; Tr. I. 274.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  93

‘ch’io’ (‘that I’), whereas Boccaccio’s tenth line begins with ‘ch’io’. This is a common grammatical unit; but its positioning – in terms of the line where it appears in Boccaccio’s text relative to Petrarch, and in terms of its contextual relation to ‘lei’ (‘she’) and ‘mia donna’ (‘my lady’), which appear in the same respective lines – suggests a direct recall. It is worth pausing at this point to consider the question of the translative ratio. Boccaccio’s ottava rima stanza 83 corresponds to the octave of RVF 61 in its points of convergence and divergence. Muscetta and Tartaro rightly aver that the ‘transcription from the closed form of the sonnet to the open form of the ottava is facilitated by anaphora: it relies upon a syntax that admits convenient rhymes and is not under obligation to the concordance between the participle benedetto and the substantives’ (p. 86). But how is one to ratiocinate stanza 84 in relation to Petrarch’s sestet? The Petrarchan sestet divides itself into two tercets, as opposed to Boccaccio’s two quatrains – or rather three distichs, each beginning with the anaphorical repetition followed by a rhyming couplet. As such, one may loosely co-ordinate Petrarch’s opening tercet with the first four lines of the second Boccaccian stanza, and the closing tercet with the second four, although this is not always possible.77 Boccaccio appears to shift between Petrarch’s tercets in his composition, which makes direct comparison problematic at times; but there is rarely a complete absence of similitude. For example, the closing line of Petrarch’s opening tercet refers back to the ‘benedetto’ of the ninth line, as Boccaccio would have found it obvious, and so it reads: ‘e [benedette] i sospiri, et le lagrime, e ’l desio’ (‘and [blessed be] the sighs and the tears and the desire)’. This is reflected, grammatically at least, in Boccaccio’s ‘e benedico i pianti e li martiri’. Thus the one remaining line which seems to find no correspondence in Petrarch is ‘che fatti m’ha avere amor perfetto’. Yet even this may be seen to echo the union symbolized by ‘congiunto’. This line also serves a more direct structural purpose, if we are to read Petrarch’s tercet as being equivalent to the opening four lines of Boccaccio’s ottava rima, as the last line of Petrarch’s tercet ends in ‘desio’, whilst the opening line of Boccaccio’s closing quatrain ends in ‘desiri’, thereby maintaining a sense of continuity. Boccaccio’s final quatrain would seem to share only its anaphorical opening and certain linguistic echoes with Petrarch’s closing tercet. Boccaccio’s ‘del suo più bel che altro aspetto’ (‘[of] her face more beautiful than any other’), for example, loosely corresponds to ‘di lei, sí ch’altra non v’à parte’ (‘of her, so that no other has part in them). However, there is a shared trope of the recalled image which serves to unite the raison d’etre of the respective 77

The confusion stems from the fact that Boccaccio has an extra ‘E benedico’ in the third line of the second stanza, which does not have a correspondent ‘benedetto’ in Petrarch – were this absent the division of ratio would perhaps be more straightforward. We encounter a similar problem in the division of Chaucer’s Canticus Troili as it relates to the structure of Petrarch’s RVF 132.

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texts; that is, the attempted pictura poesis, the image of the beloved, which is seared upon the heart of the poet–lover. Boccaccio blesses the cause of the internal image (‘i focosi desiri’ – ‘the burning desires’), whereas Petrarch blesses the product (‘tutte le carte’ – ‘all the pages’). The implied image in both is of poetic re-membering in accordance with the ars memorativa.78 Boccaccio’s phrase ‘tratti del suo più bel che altro aspetto’ confirms that his stanzas are indeed drawn from her excellent aspect, or rather drawn from the memory of that aspect. It may then be argued that this emphasis upon the action of drawing, both in the sense of depicting in verse and of drawing forth, is in turn drawn from Petrarch’s poetic sketches of Laura upon ‘tutte le carte’, themselves extracted out of ‘’l pensier mio’. But there are certain points that one must bear in mind when considering Boccaccio’s stanzas as a possible redaction of Petrarch’s RVF 61. Firstly, very few translations are ever verbatim copies of the original; indeed Petrarch’s own translative methodology is dependent upon this.79 The untraceable element inherent in all translations is that intermediary punto between the original text and the rewriting – that is, the translator’s perception or reading of the text as it exists in the mind. In this instance, the text–image which is transcribed from Boccaccio’s ‘’l pensier mio’ is problematic, as we have no concrete means, other than the text itself, of knowing whether or not Boccaccio had Petrarch’s sonnet physically before him. Secondly, the purpose of examining the similarities between RVF 61 and Filostrato III. 83–4 is not primarily to declare an absolute translative link between them, but to illustrate possible similarities between Boccaccio’s text and the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as a means of ascertaining the feasibility – from Chaucer’s perspective – of inserting a Petrarchan lyrics into a Boccaccian narrative without producing a stylistic rupture. Interestingly, Chaucer does not translate Boccaccio’s stanzas into Troilus and Criseyde. Troiolo’s hymn to Love, within which the Petrarchan inversion is embedded, is replaced instead by a translation of Boethius (De consolatione philosophiae II, metrum 8) which Boccaccio himself drew upon for the paean. Chaucer thus bypasses Boccaccio in favour of his subtext, and, whilst he does transpose certain stanzas (Fil. III. 74–9) into the proem of Troilus’s third book (lines 1–49), he deliberately omits the Petrarchan stanzas. Quite why this should be so remains unclear. One might conjecture that Chaucer found the secular, amorous paraphrase of the Beatitudes distasteful, although this would run contrary to Windeatt’s assertion that Chaucer amplifies the 78

79

On medieval ars memorativa and reminiscentia, see Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008). Trovato claims that Petrarch’s line ‘et benedette sian tutte le carte’ draws on Purg. XXXIII. 139: ‘ma perché piene son tutte le carte’ (‘but because all the pages are full’); see his Dante in Petrarca, p. 52. See the Introduction and Chapter 3.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  95

love–religion topoi in his translation of the Filostrato. I would suggest that the benediction trope does not correspond to Chaucer’s direction in the Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer was a reader of the Filostrato before he was the author of the Troilus, and as such he knew in advance the outcome of the plot. The benediction of Criseyde would not correlate with her subsequent betrayal of Troilus and with the narrator’s closing condemnation of ‘payens corsed olde rites’ and ‘thise wrecched worldes appetites’ (Tr. V. 1849–51). As N. S. Thompson notes, Chaucer does not translate Boccaccio’s references to Criseida’s ‘alta virtute’ or the description of her as ‘onesta’. The Chaucerian narrator, following Boccaccio’s description of ‘Criseida villana’ (VIII. 28), reminds the reader that ‘the argument is about Criseyde’s virtue – or lack of it’.80 If, furthermore, ‘Chaucer’s tale is cautionary’ and ‘the narrator tells the prospective lovers not to confuse the transient love to be found in this world with the eternal love of God’,81 then the absence of the benediction trope corresponds not only with the overall shaping of Criseyde’s character, but also with the conclusion of the poem itself, which promotes caritas over cupiditas: O yonge, fresshe folks, he or she, In which that love up groweth with youre age, Repeyreth hom fro worldly vanyte […] And loveth hym the which that right for love Upon a crois, oure soules for to beye, First starf, and roos, and sit in heven above […] And syn he best to love is, and most meke, What nedeth feynede loves for to seke?  (Tr. V. 1835–48)

The ‘feynede loves’ of cupidity, which places the creation above the Creator, correspond to the secular benediction of the innamoramento; the omission of this trope may be seeen to inform the overall direction of the poem’s ascent, and its Dantean conclusion – which reminds us that Criseyde is not Beatrice.82 Yet there are examples of Petrarchan inversions finding their way into Troilus and Criseyde via the Filostrato. Following the likely presence of RVF 61 in book III, the other immediately apparent inversion features in book V, in which Troiolo laments Criseida’s absence from Troy by revisiting the significant landmarks of their courtship: 80 81 82

N. S. Thompson, ‘Translation and Response: Troilus and the Filostrato’, in Roger Ellis, ed., The Medieval Translator, 2 (London, 1991), pp. 123–50 (at pp. 135, 145). Ibid., p. 150. The concluding stanza of Troilus begins with a translation of Paradiso, XIV. 28–30.

96  Chaucer and Petrarch Quando sol gia per Troia cavalcando, ciaschedun luogo gli tornava a mente; de’ quai con seco giva ragionando: ‘Quivi rider la vidi lietamente, quivi la vidi verso me guardando, quivi mi salutò benignamente, quivi far festa e quivi star pensosa, quivi la vidi a’ miei sospir pietosa. Colà istava, quand’ella mi prese con gli occhi belli e vaghi con amore; colà istava, quand’ella m’accesse con un sospir di maggior fuoco il core; colà istava, quando condiscese al mio piacere il donnesco valore; colà la vidi altera, a là umile mi si mostrò la mia donna gentile.’ When he went riding through Troy alone, he remembered every place; of these places he would go about speaking to himself: ‘Here I saw her laugh joyfully, here I saw her glancing toward me, here she graciously greeted me, here I saw her rejoice and here stay thoughtful, here I saw her full of pity for my sighs. There she was when her fair and beautiful eyes captured my love; there she was when she kindled my heart with a sigh of the greatest fire; there she was when through her womanly worth she graciously pleased me; there I saw her disdainful; and there my gentle lady showed herself submissive to me.’ (Fil. V. 54–5)

As we have seen, these stanzas have generated much debate concerning the dating of Boccaccio’s work, appearing as they do to depend upon Petrarch’s sonnet to Sennuccio del Bene: Sennuccio, i’ vo’ che sapi in qual manera tractato sono, et qual vita è la mia: ardomi et struggo ancor com’io solia; l’aura mi volve, et son pur quel ch’ i’ m’era. Qui tutta humile, et qui la vidi altera, or aspra, or piana, or dispietata, or pia, or vestirsi honestate, or leggiadria, or mansüeta, or disdegnosa et fera. Qui cantò dolcemente, et qui s’assise; qui si rivolse, et qui rattenne il passo; qui co’ begli occhi mi trafisse il core; qui disse una parola, et qui sorrise; qui cangiò ’l viso. In questi pensier’, lasso, notte et dí tiemmi il signor nostro Amore.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  97 Sennuccio, I wish you to know how I am treated and what my life is like: I am burning and suffering still just as I used to, the breeze turns me about, and I am still just what I was. Here I saw her all humble and there haughty, now harsh, now gentle, now cruel, now merciful; now clothed in virtue, now in gaiety, now tame, now disdainful and fierce. Here she sang sweetly and here sat down; here she turned about and here held back her step; here with her lovely eyes transfixed my heart; Here she said a word, here she smiled, here she frowned. In these thoughts, alas, our lord Love keeps me night and day. (RVF 112)

Silber cites many Ovidian loci which might have provided Petrarch, or indeed Boccaccio, with the inspiration for this trope.83 The likely sources for most of Petrarch’s sonnet are to be found in the Remedia amoris (‘[h]ic fuit, hic cubuit; thalamo dormivimus illo: | Hic mihi lasciva gaudia nocte dedit’ – ‘Here was she, here she lay; in that chamber did we sleep; | here did she give me wanton joys at night’, 727–8) and in the Fasti: carpitur adtonitos absentis imagine sensus ille. recordanti plura magisque placent: ‘sic sedit, sic culta fuit, sic stamina nevit, iniectae collo sic iacuere comae, hos habuit voltus, haec illi verba fuerunt, hic color, haec facies, hic decor oris erat.’ Meantime the image of his absent love preyed on his senses crazed. In memory’s light more fair and fair she grew. ‘’Twas thus she sat, ’twas thus she dressed, ’twas thus she spun the yarn, ’twas thus her tresses lay fallen on her neck; that was her look, these were her words, that was her colour, that her form, and that her lovely face.’ (II. 769–74)84

I would suggest a further possible classical source for this topos of spatial recollection, one which is not found in Latin poetry but in prose. In his coronation oration of April 1341, Petrarch cited a passage from Cicero’s De legibus which discusses the sensation of walking where one’s intellectual forbears resided; in Cicero’s case this was Greece: ‘’twas here they dwelt, ’twas here they sat, ’twas here they engaged in their philosophical discussions. And with reverence I contemplate their tombs’ (‘ubi quisque habitare, ubi sedere, ubi 83 84

Silber, ‘Alleged Imitations’, pp. 122–4. See Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. by J. H. Mozley, rev. by G. P. Goold, 2nd edn, Ovid in Six Volumes (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 2: pp. 177–233 (at pp. 226–7), and Fasti, trans. by J. G. Frazer, rev. by G. P. Goold, 2nd edn, Ovid in Six Volumes (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 5: pp. 112–13.

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disputare sit solitus, studioseque eorum etiam sepulcra contemplor’).85 Such a mnemonic sensation is vital to Petrarch’s humanism and to its dependence upon the idea of Rome, as may be illustrated by the echoes of De legibus within the famous letter he wrote to Giacomo Colonna, following his first visit to the eternal city: aderatque per singulos passus quod linguam atque animum excitaret: hic Evandri regia, hic Carmentis edes, hic Caci spelunca, hic lupa […] hic Cristus profugo vicario fuit obvius; hic Petrus in crucem actus; hic truncates est Paulus […] possum ne tibi in hac parva papiro Roman designare? at each step there was present something which would excite our tongue and mind: here was the palace of Evander, there the shrine of Carmentis, here the cave of Cacus, there the famous she-wolf […] here Christ appeared to his fleeing Vicar; here Peter was crucified; there Paul was beheaded […] Can I really describe everything in this short letter? (Fam. VI. 2. 56–58/291–93)

The pilgrim is spurred to the remembrance of those who are absent through a process which one would term peripatetic, were it not for Petrarch’s abhorrence of Aristotelianism, or rather of those who professed themselves to be Aristotelians.86 It is this same process which is in operation in RVF 112: Laura – although she is not yet in morte – is recalled by the landscape which she has invested. As Giuseppe Mazzotta says of Petrarch’s letter to Colonna, in it ‘history is an archaeological palimpsest whereby time turns into laminations of space’.87 I would, furthermore, argue that this process is not only understood by Boccaccio but repeated in his stanzas. Whilst Petrarch does not describe his physical movement through the beloved landscape, Boccaccio makes it clear from the start that this is exactly what Troiolo did. Indeed his description, ‘[q]uando sol gia per Troia cavalcando, | ciaschedun luogo gli tornava a mente’ (‘When he went riding through Troy alone, he remembered every place’), expresses the same thought as Petrarch’s ‘aderatque per singulos passus quod linguam atque animum excitaret’ (‘at each step there was present something which would excite our tongue and mind’).

85

86

87

For the English translation, see E. H. Wilkins, ‘Petrarch’s Coronation Oration’, in his Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch (Cambridge, MA, 1955), pp. 300–13 (at p. 305). The Latin original may be found in M. Tullius Cicero, De legibus, ed. by Konrat Viegler (Heidelberg, 1950), p. 51. See De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others), in Francesco Petrarca, Invectives, ed. and trans. by David Marsh (Cambridge, MA, 2003), pp. 222–363: ‘dulcis et suauis, sed ab his scaber factus Aristotiles’ (‘Aristotle, a sweet and pleasant writer to whom they have given a scaly hide’, II. 11). For Petrarch’s reading of Aristotle, see Charles Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, CT, 1979), pp. 15–21. Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC, 1993), p. 21.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  99

The distinct verbal parallels between Petrarch’s sonnet and Boccaccio’s stanzas, moreover, suggest a direct link, and offer RVF 112 as a much more likely candidate for the position of Boccaccian source-text than any of the Ovidian resources. For, whilst Ovid might be the ultimate source of the topos in terms of form, there is no sustained linguistic parallel between the passages in his works and Boccaccio’s use of it. Apart from the anaphorical structure and the dependence upon ars memorativa, which appear to be the common denominators between the Filostrato’s Petrarchan inversions, certain echoes cannot be dismissed. For example the operative anaphorical term in Petrarch’s sonnet, ‘qui’ (‘here’), is repeated ten times; Boccaccio predicates his anaphora upon two terms, ‘quivi’ (‘here’) and ‘colà’ (‘there’), which likewise appear ten times in total. Yet this in itself does not prove influence. One might be convinced, however, by a brief comparative inventory: Qui tutta humile, et qui la vidi altera (RVF 112. 5) colà la vidi altera, e là umile (Fil. V. 55. 7) or dispietata, or pia (RVF 112. 6) a miei sospir pietosa (Fil. III. 54. 8) co’ begli occhi mi trafisse il core (RVF 112. 11) con gli occhi belli […] di maggior fuoco il core (Fil. V. 55. 2–4) qui sorrise (RVF 112. 12) Quivi rider la vidi (Fil. V. 54. 4)

The final example is testimony to Boccaccio’s careful distinction between his own language and Petrarch’s, made while he remained within the same lexical field; hence ‘sorrise’ (‘smiled’) becomes ‘rider’ (‘laugh’). We see this throughout, often in adverbial constructions: Petrarch’s ‘[q]ui cantò dolcemente’ (‘Here she sang sweetly’) has equivalents in ‘[q]uivi rider la vidi lietamente’ (‘Here I saw her laugh lightly’) or ‘quivi mi saluto benignamente’ (‘here she greeted me benignly’). Moreover, adverbs such as ‘lietamente’ and ‘benignamente’ pair with synonymous Petrarchan adjectives such as ‘leggiadria’ (‘gaiety’) and ‘mansüeta’ (‘tame’, or ‘courteous’). There is also a number of shared or similar rhymes. For example, Petrarch uses the rhymes ‘assise/sorrise’ and ‘core/Amore’ in his sestet; at Fil. V. 55, Boccaccio uses the rhymes ‘prese/accese/condiscese’ and ‘amore/core/valore’. Furthermore, each poet employs a protasis prior to his anaphorical catalogue: in Petrarch’s sonnet this is constituted by the preliminary quatrain’s address to Sennuccio, whereas in Boccaccio’s stanzas it is constituted by the account of Troiolo’s riding through Troy.88

88

Unfortunately, there is neither the time nor the space here to enter into a discussion of rhythmical and metrical correlations, save to note their presence. On Petrarch’s metrics and syntax in general, see M. Fubini, Metrica e poesia: Lezioni sulle forme (Milan, 1962);

100  Chaucer and Petrarch

It must be recalled, however, that the purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the linguistic, phrasal, descriptive and formal parallels between Petrarchan lyric and Boccaccio’s romance and to show how these enable Chaucer to introduce Petrarch into England. Unlike in the case of Boccaccio’s redaction of RVF 61, which Chaucer omitted, in this instance Chaucer does translate the stanzas from the Filostrato: From thennesforth he rideth up and down, And every thyng com hym to remembraunce As he rood forby places of the town In which he whilom hadde al his plesaunce. ‘Lo, yonder saugh ich last my lady daunce; And in that temple, with hire eyen cleere, Me kaughte first my righte lady dere. ‘And yonder haue I herd ful lustyly My dere herte laugh; and yonder pleye Saugh ich hire ones ek ful blisfully; And yonder ones to me gan she seye, “Now goode swete, love me wel, I preye”; And yond so goodly gan she me biholde That to the deth myn herte is to hire holde. ‘And at that corner, in the yonder hous, Herde I myn alderlevest lady deere So wommanly, with vois melodious, Syngen so wel, so goodly, and so cleere That in my soule yet me thynketh ich here The blisful sown; and in that yonder place My lady first me took unto hire grace.’  (Tr. V. 561–81)

Interestingly, Troilus’s first memory, ‘yonder saugh ich last my lady daunce’, has no Boccaccian equivalent, but is somewhat akin to Petrarch’s ‘qui si rivolse, et qui rattenne il passo’ (‘here she turned about and here held back her step’) – which, following as it does upon his memory of Laura singing (‘Qui cantò dolcemento’), might well be read as a description of her dancing. Unlike Petrarch’s poet–lover, Troiolo does not refer to Criseida singing, whereas Chaucer’s Troilus dedicates almost an entire stanza to the recollection of her ‘vois melodious […] That in my soule yet me thynketh ich here | The blissful sown’. And, while there can be no doubt that Chaucer is drawing directly upon Boccaccio’s stanzas here, his additions, which themselves might be called Petrarchan inversions, may lead one to speculate as to E. Bigi, La cultura del Poliziano e altri studi umanistici (Pisa, 1967), pp. 30–43; and, of course, Gianfranco Contini’s ‘Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca’, in his edition of the Canzoniere (Turin, 1964), pp. vii–xxviii. See also Branca, Boccaccio medievale, pp. 250–76.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  101

whether Chaucer knew RVF 112 or not. We know from Chaucer’s Boethian proem to book III that, in certain sections of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer returns to the source when he notices an inversion; it is thus possible that he knew Petrarch’s sonnet.89 There is also the fact that, whereas Boccaccio divided Petrarch’s anaphorical ‘qui’ into two terms, ‘quivi’ and ‘colà’, Chaucer returns to a single term, ‘yonder’. However, Chaucer’s direct translations from Boccaccio here leave little doubt that the Filostrato was his primary source. The opening description of Troilus as ‘he rideth up and down’ is a faithful translation, as is his account of how ‘with hire eyen cleere, | Me kaughte first my righte lady dere’ (‘quand’ella mi prese | con gli occhi belli e vaghi con amore’). Chaucer alters Troiolo’s account of seeing his lady laugh (‘Quivi rider la vidi’), opting instead for describing how ‘yonder have I herd ful lustily | My dere herte laugh’, and he complements the aural memory with a recollection of her speech: ‘Now goode swete, love me wel, I preye’. And, while Chaucer reproduces Boccaccio’s ‘quivi far festa’ as ‘yonder pleye | Saugh ich hire ones’, he omits any memories which detract from the cumulative image of an ideal past. In Filostrato, Boccaccio balances the image of Criseida making merry with that of her standing in thought: ‘quivi far festa e quivi star pensosa’. As is known, the term pensoso sounded melancholy undertones, as in Petrarch’s RVF 35, ‘Solo et pensoso’ (‘Alone and filled with care’). Troilus does not allow such images to contaminate his perfect memory, and as such he moves away from Petrarch’s sustained balance between positive and negative: ‘or aspra or piana, or dispietata or pia, | or vestirsi onestate or leggiadria, | or mansuseta or disdegnosa et fera’ (‘now harsh, now gentle, now cruel, now merciful; now clothed in virtue, now in gaiety, now tame, now disdainful and fierce’). Nevertheless, Chaucer’s translation of the Filostrato, with its potential Petrarchan inversions or reminiscenze involontarie (to borrow Santagata’s term for Dantean resonances within the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), enable his direct incorporation of a Petrarchan sonnet.90 Yet it is important that we understand the epithet ‘Petrarchan’ as being constituted not only by terms original to Petrarch, but also extending to cover various stock tags, tropes and epithets – forms of expression familiar to the European poetic tradition, as we have already seen in Peire Vidal’s use of the benediction trope. As Derek Pearsall has argued, ‘a certain set of phrases, rigorously formalised in content, are the recognised stimulus, through their traditional associations, for a certain poetic response, a form of descriptive shorthand’.91 This is, 89

90 91

On Chaucer’s recourse to Dantean subtexts in his translations from Boccaccio, see J. A. W. Bennett, ‘Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio’, in P. Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 89–113. Santagata, ‘Presenze di Dante’, p. 166. Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London, 1977), p. 149. Pearsall

102  Chaucer and Petrarch

furthermore, a commonplace both of the cantare tradition of the poesia popolare, upon which Boccaccio drew in the Filostrato, and of English romances, with which Chaucer was familiar. Indeed Wallace argues that, as the Filostrato was ‘situated between poesia popolare and poesia d’arte […] Chaucer perceived that the Filostrato would suit him admirably as a source, if not as a poetic exemplar’.92 It is thus worthwhile to discuss briefly some of these phrases common to Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer, and to examine the ways in which they further create the textual environment into which Chaucer would translate Petrarch’s lyric. There are a variety of tags, for example in Boccaccio’s proemio (of which Chaucer did not avail himself), which might bear the epithet ‘Petrarchan’, despite owing no direct influence. Consider the opening line ‘Molte fiate già, nobilissima donna’ (‘A thousand times already, most noble lady’, proemio, 1) in comparison with Petrarch’s ‘Mille fïate, o dolce mia guerrera’ (‘A thousand times, O my sweet warrior’, RVF 21. 1). The latter trope also corresponds with one of Chaucer’s favourite tags, ‘my swete fo called Criseyde’ (Tr. I. 874), ‘O herte myn, Criseyde, O swete fo!’ (Tr. V. 228). It might be argued that Chaucer in this second usage has mistranslated Boccaccio’s ‘dolce anima bella’ (Fil. V. 25. 1), but such a claim is undermined not only by the initial usage but also by Chaucer’s earlier employment of ‘swete fo’ in Anelida and Arcite (274), where he makes his first use of the Teseida, and in A Complaint to His Lady (37, 58).93 Similarly, Boccaccio’s proemio shares with Petrarch’s sonnet the penitential trope of the wiser lover looking back: ‘io puerilmente errando’ (‘I, childishly erring’, proemio, 7) corresponds to Petrarch’s ‘[il] mio primo giovenile errore’ (RVF 1. 3). And, whilst there is no Chaucerian correspondent to Boccaccio’s proemio, one finds a similar discourse at the close of the Troilus, where the deceased lover looks down upon human concerns with Macrobian disdain (‘contemptus mundi’), as part of a passage which draws both upon the Teseida and upon the Filostrato: Swich Swich Swich Swich Swich

fyn fyn fyn fyn fyn

hath, lo, this Troilus for love! hath al his grete worthynesse! hath his estat real above! his lust, swich fyn hath his noblesse! hath false worldes brotelnesse!  (Tr. V. 1828–32)

Cotal fine ebbe il mal concetto amore di Troiolo in Criseida, e cotale

92 93

draws a distinction between tags and ‘genuine formulae’. See also Wallace, Early Writings, pp. 73–105. Ibid., p. 105. It has been argued that the Complaint was one of the first of Chaucer’s poems to show any Italian influence. See the following chapter, pp. 116–17.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  103 fine ebbe il miserabile dolore di lui al qual non fu mai altro eguale; cotal fine ebbe il lucido splendore che lui servava al solio reale; cotal fine ebbe la speranza vana di Troiolo in Criseida villana. Such an end had the ill-conceived love of Troilo for Criseida, and such an end had his wretched sorrow, to which none other was ever equal. Such an end had the bright splendour which he would have brought to the royal throne; such was the end of Troilo’s vain hope in the base Criseida. (Fil. VIII. 28)

Furthermore, in the Triumphus Cupidinis (c.1351) – a work which, according to Branca was influenced by Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione – Petrarch offers a similarly anaphorical refutation of love: (‘Or questo per amar s’acquista! […] Questo m’avven per l’aspre some | de’ legami ch’io porto’ (‘This now through love is achieved […] This I have because of the harsh burden of the chains that I carry’, I. 42–6).94 There is an even closer link between these lines from the Trionfi and the proemio of the Filostrato: ‘Ora, misero me, il conosco, ora il sento, ora apertissimamente il discerno’ (‘Now, poor me, I know it [love], now I feel it, now openly I discern it’, proemio, 20). In this instance we thus see a reversal: the presence of Boccaccian inversions in Petrarch’s vernacular works, born of their shared literary language (and, again, based upon anaphora). Outside the proemio, the parallels proliferate. For example there is the familiar Ovidian image of the lover as a ship tossed upon the sea: ‘tu se’ la tramontana stella | La qual’io seguo per venire al porto’ (‘you are the North star which I follow in order to come to port’, Fil. I. 2. 3–4). Chaucer, however, omits this reference, replacing the lover’s voice with that of one ‘that God of Loves servantz serve’ (Tr. I. 15), who has no star to follow: ‘So fer am I from his help in derknesse’ (Tr. I. 18). Again, this is more akin to Petrarch’s depiction of himself in poems such as RVF 132 and RVF 189. In addition to anaphora and shared imagery, there are further devices which characterize the various correspondences. For example the notion of the unfair deal, which Petrarch employs in RVF 224 – ‘vostro, donna, ’l peccato, et mio fia ’l danno’ (‘yours, will be the blame, Lady, mine the loss’, 224. 14) – is similar to Boccaccio’s ‘Tuo sia l’onore e mio si sia l’affanno’ (‘let the honour be yours and the labour mine’, Fil. I. 5. 7). Again, when he translates Boccaccio’s lines, Chaucer alters the tone in accordance with his caricature of the unro-

94

See Francesco Petrarca, Rime, Trionfi e Poesie Latine, ed. by Francesco Neri et al. (Milan, 1951), pp. 481–508 (at p. 482). The translation is my own. See also the commentary in Francesco Petrarca, Trionfi; Rime estravaganti; Codice degli abbozzi, ed. by Vincio Pacca, Laura Paolino and Marco Santagata (Milan, 1996).

104  Chaucer and Petrarch

mantic narrative alter ego: ‘if this may don gladnesse | To any lovere and his cause availle, | Have he my thonk, and myn be this travaille’ (Tr. I. 19–21).95 Whilst these devices, rhetorical tropes and images are all commonplaces descended from the Ovidian tradition, filtered through the refractions of the Roman de la Rose and of the dolce stil nuovo, some of them nevertheless merit closer attention than others, because they illustrate not only repeated correspondences but also key points of divergence between the three authors investigated. For example, Petrarch’s proleptic opening sonnet addresses his readership as a gathered audience: ‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono | di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core’ (‘You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart’, 1. 1–2). Specifically, Petrarch says that, ‘ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, | spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono’ (‘where there is anyone who understands love through experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon’, 1. 7–8). Boccaccio likewise appeals to an audience of lovers: E voi, amanti, priego ch’ascioltate Ciò che dirà ’l mio verso lagrimoso, e se nel core avvien che voi sentiate destarsi alcuno spirito pietoso, per me vi priego che Amor preghiate And you lovers, I pray that you listen to what my tearful verse will say, and if it happens that you feel any sense of pity awakening in your hearts, I beg you that you pray for me to Love (Fil. I. 6. 1–5)

Chaucer’s translation etches in further detail: But ye loveres, that bathen in gladnesse, If any drope of pyte in yow be, Remembreth yow on passed hevynesse That ye han felt, and on the adversite Of othere folk, and thynketh how that ye Han felt that Love dorste yow displese, Or ye han wonne hym with to gret an ese.  (Tr. I. 22–8)

One might judge Petrarch’s rhetorical appeal as being consonant with his Augustinian theologia poetica. In particular, the exhortation to pathos is correlative with the use of ‘heigh stile’.96 In his edition of the Filostrato, Branca writes that this form of appeal to the audience is also characteristic 95

96

Further familiar devices include the appeal to the audience (RVF 1. 1–2; Fil. I. 6. 1–2; Tr. I. 22–28); the representation of the beloved as donna angelicata (RVF 90. 9–10; Fil. I. 11. 4–5; Tr. I. 102–5); the reinvestiture of the natural world (RVF 9, 310; Fil. I. 18; Tr. I. 155–61); the image of the body bereft of its animating principle (RVF 15; Fil. IV. 34; Tr. III. 302–8); and the conceit of the eyes deprived of their delight (RVF 275. 1–4; Fil. IV. 35; Tr. IV. 309–15). On Petrarch’s theologia poetica, see Chapter 4 of the present study, pp. 000–000.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  105

of the canterini tradition (p. 848), and he notes a similar plea for pathos at Teseida I. 2. However, there is a distinction between Petrarch’s appeal and those of Boccaccio and Chaucer, in that the latter authors seem to have no doubt that their audiences are composed of ‘amanti’, or ‘loveres’, whereas Petrarch hopes that there might be among his readership some who may have experienced love at some point. A further difference lies in the final object of pathos: Boccaccio’s speaker prays that his audience will pray to Amor on his behalf; Chaucer’s speaker asks his audience to ‘preieth for hem that ben in the cas | Of Troilus’ (I. 29–30), rather than for himself; whilst Petrarch’s poet–lover simply feels ashamed for having been so in thrall to love in the first instance (‘di mi medesmo meco mi vergogno’, RVF 1. 11). Nevertheless, the overall thrust in all three cases remains nostalgia, in its literal sense of a shared pain; as the speaker recalls, so must the audience. The similarity in phrasing here between Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s versions is most likely due, as Branca pointed out, to the cantare tradition. Yet if one of the two had followed the other it would appear to be Petrarch drawing on Boccaccio, given that RVF 1 was most likely composed during 1345–7, thus reinforcing the reciprocal nature of inversion. The representation of the beloved as a donna angelicata is interesting in this case when one considers the close correspondence between the phrasing of the two Italian poets and its effect upon Chaucer’s translation. In RVF 90, Petrarch’s poet–lover describes Laura’s movement thus: ‘Non era l’andar suo cosa mortale, | ma d’angelica forma’ (‘Her walk was not that of a mortal thing but of some angelic form’, 9–10). Likewise, Boccaccio’s narrator says that Criseida ‘sì bella e sì angelica a vedere | era, che non parea cosa mortale’ (Fil. I. 11. 4–5), which Chaucer translates as ‘[s]o aungelik was hir natif beaute, | That lik a thing inmortal semed she’, adding ‘[a]s doth an hevenyssh perfit creature, | That down were sent in scornynge of nature’ (Tr. I. 102–5). It cannot be ascertained whether Boccaccio knew of Petrarch’s RVF 90, or which came first. In any case, there is a definite stilnovistic inheritance in evidence here. Indeed in the Trattatello Boccaccio describes Beatrice in very similar terms, drawing on Dante’s own account in the Vita nuova.97 The effect of Chaucer’s translation of the stilnovistic donna is a further contribution, both to the textual environment that would receive Petrarch’s RVF 132 and 97

See Trattatello, 32 (p. 445); Life of Dante, trans. by Nichols, p. 15; Vita nuova, II. 8. Both Durling (Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, p. 92) and T. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), pp. 112–13) argue that the description of Laura at RVF 90 stems from Virgil’s description of Venus in the opening book of the Aeneid. However, more contemporary examples were provided by the Provençal tradition. Peire Cardenal, for example, refers to his beloved as speaking ‘[a]b votz d’angel’ (‘With angel’s voice’), which corresponds with Petrarch’s ‘le parole | sonavan altro che pur voce umana’ (‘her words sounded different from a merely human voice’, RVF 90. 10–11). See Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. by Alan R. Press (Edinburgh, 1971), pp. 294–5. It must be stressed, however, that Petrarch knew his Virgil by heart.

106  Chaucer and Petrarch

to the creation of a Rezeptionästhetik amongst English audiences prepared to accept Petrarchan tropes in the early modern period. Chaucer effectively naturalizes the lexicon of what would come to be known as Petrarchan poetry, as we see in the description of Criseyde as being ‘[n]ow hoot, now cold; but thus, bitwixen tweye’ (II. 811). It would perhaps be best to conclude by returning to the point from which this chapter began. Tim Machan claims that, ‘[r]ather than the anxiety of influence, it was apparently the anxiety of originality that informed Chaucer’s procedures’.98 That is, Chaucer did not present himself as an author, but as a translator or ‘lewd compilator’, and as such bypassed the anxiety felt by Petrarch and Boccaccio, who wrote in the wake of the Commedia. We can trace the influence of Petrarch upon Boccaccio, and of Dante upon Petrarch, yet Chaucer’s intertextual reading of the tre corone circumvents the kind of one-on-one struggle which Bloom identifies as informing the creation of a strong poet, or poem – although this does not confirm that he partook of the ‘matrix of generous influence’. Chaucer’s omission of the benediction trope, for example, does not render him ignorant of the creative agon, but rather represents his triumph over it: he reads Boccaccio’s text and chooses to omit. Boccaccio’s destruction of his ‘iuvenilia’, on the other hand, reveals a stylistic, comparative anxiety, and might also be seen as constituting, symbolically and by extension, a burning of Petrarch’s poems – poems which unconsciously inhered within his work. We do not know when this incident took place, yet it is related in a letter in which Petrarch appeared to humble himself both before ‘the master of our vernacular literature’ and before Boccaccio: ‘if I appear to block your way to first place, which I do not do, look, I gladly yield and leave second place to you’. Petrarch’s humility here, however, seeks to humble Boccaccio and simultaneously to undermine Dante, and, as such, it reveals his anxiety: ‘Certainly I have sometimes had the idea of doing the same with my vernacular writings […] [but] I finally came to realize that it was a waste of effort to build on soft mud and shifting sand.’ That mud and sand was of course the vernacular, the basis of Dante’s fame, of which Petrarch ostensibly purged himself, replacing it with Latin humanism. And, just as Petrarch removed the influence of Dante (or so he claimed), so Chaucer removed Boccaccio, his primary source, replacing him with ‘myn auctour called Lollius’ (Tr. I. 394) and substituting Boccaccio’s narrator– lover with a narrator who is alien to love, the caricature of ‘Geffrey’, a figure familiar from the earlier dream poems: Help me, that am the sorwful instrument, That helpeth loveres, as I kan, to pleyne […] 98

Tim Machan, ‘Chaucer as Translator’, p. 60, original emphasis.



Petrarchan Inversions in Chaucer’s Filostrato  107 For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse, Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve, So fer am I from his help in derknesse. But natheles, if this may don gladnesse Unto any lovere, and his cause availle, Have he my thonk, and myn be this travaille!  (Tr. I. 10–11, 15–21)

There are thus varying stages of anxiety and influence which one can trace from Petrarch to Chaucer. These stages are accompanied by a series of subjective refractions. Petrarch appears to write personal lyrics which are not quite personal, but are voiced through the voice of the poet–lover; something of himself is removed. Boccaccio in turn composes a poem which fuses narrative and lyric modalities, and of which he claims in the proemio that, whenever the unfortunate hero of the poem laments or sighs, the reader must think of the author himself. Boccaccio’s single remove from lyrics is doubled by Chaucer, who speaks through a narrator removed both from himself and from love lyric. By thus removing the amorous narrator, Chaucer also removes, or attempts to remove, Boccaccio. However, he does not entirely erase Boccaccio’s voice, and thereby he inherits potential traces of the ‘Petrarchan’ voice. It may be argued that Chaucer’s translation of Filostrato V. 54–5 betrays an attraction for the subtext buried beneath Boccaccio’s poem, namely Petrarch’s RVF 112. Yet the mnemonic trope which Chaucer translates from Boccaccio, and which appears to emerge from Petrarch, does not in fact originate with Petrarch, but may be found as far back as Ovid; hence it illustrates the cumulative medieval model of literary appropriation to which Chaucer adhered. This is not say that the anxiety of influence is absent, but rather that it is rendered more complex for operating within an aesthetic environment which does not claim originality as its holy grail. Bloom’s anxiety and Simpson’s ‘accretive bricolage’ are not necessarily antithetical, especially if one takes into account the question of style (rather than materia).99 This allows one to argue that Petrarchan poesis is subsumed by its generality, yet Petrarch remains; and the same might be said of Chaucer. Petrarch gives himself up to the Petrarchans, Chaucer to the Chaucerians, whilst somehow maintaining the poetic vita solitaria.100 After Petrarch, many poets imitated the posture of being ‘Solo et pensoso’ (RVF 35), whilst poets such as Wyatt sought to follow Chaucer and ‘Flee fro the prees’. The majority of Chaucer’s ‘Petrarchan’ moments in Troilus and Criseyde

99 100

James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), p. 35. Chaucer appears to have fared better through this process than Petrarch, who has to some extent been critically damned by Petrarchan poetry. De vita solitaria is, of course, one of Petrarch’s key Latin works.

108  Chaucer and Petrarch

are unconscious, pre-Petrarchan even, insofar as that term may be applied to English literature. Indeed, part of the meaning of Troilus and Criseyde, I would contend, is the presence of poems unread by Chaucer, and yet which return within the work again and again, as revenants. This may also explain the sense of déjà-vu attendant upon the first English sonnets. One might conjecture that, when they read Petrarch’s poetry for the first time, the Tudor sonneteers would have received the impression that the Italian was in fact copying Chaucer. Such conjecture is supported by Surrey’s Chaucerian translation of Petrarch’s RVF 310 (‘Zefiro torna’) – beginning as it does with an echo of the General Prologue: ‘The soote season’ – and by the continuing popularity of the sonnet first introduced by Chaucer: the Canticus Troili.101

101 See

The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ed. by F. M. Padelford, rev. edn (Seattle, 1928), p. 56; also ‘A Comparison of His Love with the Faithful and Painful Love of Troylus to Creside’, in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, rev. edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1965), 1: pp. 183–6 (here at p. 184): ‘As agues have sharpe shiftes of fits | Of colde and heat successively: So had his head lyke chaunge of wits’ (237. 30–32). The poem is followed by Chaucer’s Truth. Thomas Watson, whose Hekatompathia lays claim to being the first English sonnet sequence, adapted RVF 132 and referred to Chaucer’s prior translation. Watson also translated RVF 132 into Latin, like Salutati before him. See Stephen Clucas, ‘Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism’, in McLaughlin, Panizza and Hainsworth, eds, Petrarch in Britain, pp. 217–27, and P. Thomson, ‘The “Canticus Troili”: Chaucer and Petrarch’, Comparative Literature, 11 (1959), pp. 313–28 (at pp. 321–3).

3 ‘But if that I consente’: The First English Sonnet As the ‘Clerk of Oxenford […] preved by his wordes’ (IV. 1, 28) in the prologue to his tale, ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete’, although ‘deed and nayled in his cheste’ (IV. 29–31), was undergoing the process of immortalization by the time that Chaucer wrote both the Canticus Troili and the Clerk’s Tale.1 What remains of Petrarch is ‘his rhethorike sweete [that] | Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ (IV. 32–3). The Italian laureate would subsequently be “nailed in his chest” by those sonnets which, together, constitute the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, boxed in by those vernacular lyrics which he himself considered inferior to his Latin works.2 Yet for Chaucer and his contemporaries Petrarch’s reputation was not so confined. Far from being associated with a single vernacular form, Petrarch was regarded as the foremost littérateur and Latin scholar of his age. For example, the anonymous French translator of Le Livre Griseldis refers to him as ‘un tres vaillant et moult solennel poete’ (‘a very worthy and most solemn poet’).3 Likewise Boccaccio, in the preface to his De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women), describes him as ‘vir insignis et poeta egregious Franciscus Petrarca, preceptor noster’ (‘that renowned man and great poet, my teacher Petrarch’), whilst Chaucer’s Monk advises his readers to consult ‘my maister Petrak’ (VII. 2325).4 Aptly 1

2

3 4

The Canticus was written c.1382–6, the Clerk’s Tale c.1392–5. Chaucer’s phrasing here provides a possible indication as to the form in which he may have encountered Petrarch’s RVF 132, as a number of Petrarch MSS bear the title inscription Francisci petrarche laureati poete (for example Vat. Lat. 3195), or variants upon this. See E. H. Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies (Rome, 1951), p. 70. And by the European cult of Petrarch, which was propounded initially by Petrarch himself during his own lifetime; but also by Boccaccio and, later, by Pietro Bembo. See Leonard Wilson Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge, 1969); Nicholas Mann, ‘Petrarch and Humanism: the Paradox of Posterity’, in Aldo S. Bernardo, ed., Francesco Petrarca: Citizen of the World (Padua-Albany, NY, 1980), pp. 287–99; Stephen Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchism: The English and French Traditions (Manchester, 1980); Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1999). See J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven, CT, 1942), p. 255. The translation is my own. See De mulieribus claris, ed. by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), 10 (1970): p. 22. For the English translation, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, trans. by Virginia Brown

110  Chaucer and Petrarch

enough, as we shall discuss in later chapters, the Clerk’s tale of Walter and Griselda is not only a translation of a work by Petrarch, but a translation of a translation and a testament to the linguistic internationalism of the later Middle Ages. Chaucer himself, not least of all because of his upbringing in the Vintry Ward and his career in the customs house, excelled in this translative environment – indeed he was the ‘Grant Translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier’, as Deschamps dubbed him.5 In consequence, the present chapter will examine the Canticus Troili, the first ever translation of a Petrarchan sonnet into English, in order to illustrate this title through a tracing of Chaucer’s translative praxis. The Canticus Troili will be seen as being akin to the Clerk’s Tale not only in its Petrarchan source, but in that it, too, enacts the reflexive, dynamic “becoming” of the writer through translation. Prior to examining the translation itself, however, it would help to consider where RVF 132 (‘S’amor non è’) is situated within the wider scope of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as a whole. Piero Boitani, for example, has noted how RVF 132–4 constitute a triadic unit within the sequence, occupying a central position in the in vita section of the poems, which covers RVF 1–263 (the in morte section, composed after Laura’s death, extends between RVF 264 and RVF 366) and which typify the Petrarchan style.6 The three poems are characterized by antitheses, paradox, oxymora and chiasmus – the formal and tropic manifestations of the poet–speaker’s internal psychomachia.7 Erich Auerbach, touching upon Augustine’s use of tropes in a discussion of bodily cupiditas, notes that a ‘succession of questions, anaphoras, isocola, and antitheses leads on to the source of all this distress’, as they do in Petrarch’s sonnets.8 Petrarch, a devotee of Augustine, may thus be seen to transpose the Latin rhetorical devices of the Augustinian sermon – which themselves draw on Petrarch’s other literary idol, Cicero – into his vernacular works, which are similarly addressed to a particular audience, namely the plural ‘Voi’ that opens the sequence.9

5 6

7 8 9

(Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 4. The relation of the Monk’s Tale to Petrarchan humanism is discussed in Chapter 1, pp. 55–68. See Chapter 1, p. 5, n. 20. See Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 56–74. Also on the subject of RVF 132, see E. H. Wilkins, ‘Cantus Troili’, ELH, 16 (1949), pp. 167–73; Patricia Thomson, ‘The “Canticus Troili”: Chaucer and Petrarch’, Comparative Literature, 11 (1959), pp. 313–28; Dominique Diani, ‘Pétrarque Canzoniere 132’, Revue des Etudes Italiennes, NS 18 (1972), pp. 111–65; and the commentaries of Santagata (Milan, 1996) and Bettarini (Turin, 2005) in their respective editions of the Canzoniere. On Petrarchan psychomachia, see also Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC, 1993), pp. 11, 35, 56. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and the Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. by Ralph Manheim (London, 1965), p. 30. On the subject of Petrarch’s Augustinian theologia rhetorica, see Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (Chicago,



The First English Sonnet  111

These sonnets also illustrate the familiar movement between physical extremes, such as ‘tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno’ (‘I shiver in midsummer, burn in winter’, RVF 132. 14), ‘come al sol neve’ (‘like snow in the sun’, RVF 133. 2), or ‘ardo, et son un ghiaccio’ (‘[I] burn and am of ice’, RVF 134. 2). Similar Petrarchan topoi to be found in the sonnets are the personification of Love, the language of imprisonment and attack (RVF 133 and 134), and paronomasia upon the beloved’s name (‘l’aura’, RVF 133. 14). The sonnets are characterized by the turn inwards, which stands in relief against, and develops out of, the series of preceding canzoni – these are concerned with responses to the natural world (RVF 125–27, 129) and Italy’s war-torn landscape (RVF 128). RVF 132–4 also contrast with the antiAvignonese sonnets which follow (RVF 136–8).10 The context to ‘S’amor non è’ outside of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is also worth considering. As we saw in the previous chapter, Petrarch’s relationship with Dante was not an easy one; and indeed the well-known precursor to Petrarch’s sonnet is Dante’s ‘Tutti li miei pensier parlan d’Amore’.11 This sonnet from the Vita nuova bears many of the characteristics of Petrarch’s poem and of the sequence in general – a fact which should not surprise us, given that Petrarch drew upon a series of poetic traditions, from Virgil, Horace and Ovid through to the Provençal poets, the Sicilian school and the dolce stil nuovo. Dante’s complaint that his thoughts ‘hanno in lor sì gran varietate’ (‘have in them such great variety’, 2) points towards the Petrarchan psychomachia, but does not quite evoke the same degree of intensity as Petrarch’s sonnet. This may be because Dante does not employ those formal corollaries to the internal war upon which Petrarch builds his poem. For example, Dante speaks of trembling because of the fear which is in his heart (‘tremando di paura che è nel core’, 8), a natural process, whereas Petrarch configures trembling as part of an unnatural paradox: ‘tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno’. Similarly, the Dantean state of confusion pertains to a loss of words, ‘non so da qual matera prenda; | e vorrei dire, e non so ch’io mi dica’ (‘I don’t know what to take as my theme, and I would like to speak, but I don’t know what to say’, 9–10), whereas Petrarch follows that aphonia to its conclusion in loss of thought and of self-knowledge: ‘che dunque è quel

10

11

1970), 2: pp. 689–97, and The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, CT, 1979), pp. 90–113. On Petrarch and the natural world of the RVF, see Jennifer Petrie, Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the Canzoniere (Dublin, 1983), pp. 51–102. The natural landscape in Petrarch often serves in fact as the impetus to self-reflection, in addition to reflecting Laura, and so RVF 132–34 may be read as thematically contiguous. VN, XIII. 8. Marco Santagata also notes the influence of Provençal poetics upon RVF 132 in his edition of the Canzoniere. For a wider discussion of Petrarch’s debt to the troubadours, see Scarano, ‘Fonti provenzali e italiane della lirica petrarchesca’, Studi di filologia romanza, 8 (1901), pp. 251–360, and more recently William D. Paden, ‘Petrarch as a Poet of Provence’, Annali d’italianistica, 22 (2004), pp. 19–44.

112  Chaucer and Petrarch

ch’io sento?’ (‘what then is it that I feel?’, 1). Dante’s opening line makes it clear that it is love he feels. Nevertheless, Dante’s sonnet is an important antecedent for Petrarch, by virtue of its language alone. It contains a series of phrases familiar to readers of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: the absence of reason (‘folle ragiona’, 4), the emphasis upon otherness (‘altro’ constitutes an anaphora from lines 3–6), the movement between ignorance and self-discovery (‘non so […] mi trovo in amorosa erranza’, 10–11). And, whilst Dante’s poem might not be as tropically complex as Petrarch’s, this is not necessarily to be viewed as a bad thing – the poet Vittorio Sereni, somewhat harshly, claimed that there is not a single line in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta which speaks feelingly of actual love.12 Again, what is revealed by Petrarch’s echoes of Dante’s sonnet is the extent to which Chaucer drew upon Italian works which have a complex intertextual lineage; Boccaccio’s stanzas are replaced by a Petrarchan sonnet which has Dantean memories. Indeed, the paraphrastic revisioning of ‘S’amor non è’ serves as a verse précis of Chaucer’s approach to translation, a methodology based simultaneously upon a respect for and a departure from the original, effecting a convergence of imitatio and independence: S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento? Ma s’egli è amor, perdio, che cosa et quale? Se bona, onde l’effecto aspro mortale? Se ria, onde sí dolce ogni tormento? (RVF 132. 1–4) If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me, When every torment and adversite That cometh of hym may to me savory thinke, For ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke. (Tr. I. 400–406)

When reading Chaucer’s poem in conjunction with Petrarch’s sonnet, we are faced initially with three obvious and contiguous factors: the extent to which Chaucer remains faithful to Petrarch’s text; how (and why) he extends Petrarch’s complaint; and how he creates a legitimate ratio between the two verse forms, sonnet and rhyme royal.

12

See V. Sereni, ‘Petrarca, nella sua finzione la sua verità’, in G. Strazzeri, ed., Sentieri di gloria: Note e ragionamenti sulla letteratura (Milan, 1996), pp. 127–46 (at p. 138). I am indebted to Diego Zancani’s essay ‘Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch’, in Martin McLaughlin, Letizia Panizza and Peter Hainsworth, eds, Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 Years, Proceedings of the British Academy, 146 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 161–75 (at p. 162), for this reference.



The First English Sonnet  113

In relation to the first factor, Chaucer’s language traces Petrarch’s, to a large degree, almost verbatim, as we witness in the first stanza: ‘S’amor non è’ corresponds to ‘If no love is’; ‘Se bona […] Se ria’, is echoed by ‘If love be good […] If it be wikke’, in the correctly equivalent lines. So far so good, but in the final line of the Petrarchan quatrain there is a fourth question mark, whereas in Chaucer the line continues despite the efforts of the caesura to retain Petrarch’s structure, and so ‘tormento’ does not find its translation until the fifth line (as ‘torment and adversite’), with ‘dolce’ bordering on its own antithesis in the ‘savory’ of the sixth.13 This bifurcation leads us to the second factor inherent in any interlingual comparison: how and why does Chaucer stray from his original source? The how is, from a formal perspective, somewhat easier to explain than the why; Petrarch’s hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable long) quatrain is transposed on to Chaucer’s decasyllabic (ten-syllable long) rhyme royal stanza, creating seven lines which rhyme ABABBCC. The rhythm, however, withstands the transition from Italian to Middle English, Chaucer thus becoming the first English poet to translate Petrarch into iambic pentameter. As Windeatt points out, frequently in Troilus ‘the metrical pattern of the English line has been determined by the translation of the Italian model with its own distinct pattern of stresses’.14 This line would in turn become the normative metre for subsequent English sonnets; despite the various formal alterations instigated by Wyatt, Surrey and Spenser, few stray away from the rhythm which Chaucer decided on.15 The question of why Chaucer translated Petrarch into rhyme royal is a complex one, one which opens onto the third factor (that of the ratio) and elicits numerous possible answers. It has been suggested that Chaucer simply did not recognize the form; but, given his previous experience of translation, metre and Italian poetry, this seems unlikely.16 Alternatively, Chaucer may have found the restrictions imposed by the established form to be unpalatable to English poetic sensibility; he did not want to be ‘nayled in his chest’ by the sonnet, as Petrarch would be in the cinquecento. A third, much more pragmatic possibility is that a sonnet appearing suddenly, in medias res, in a poem composed entirely out of rhyme royal stanzas would be incongruous. 13

14 15

16

However, the meaning remains the same: pleasant. See s.v. ‘dolce’ in Salvatore Battaglia’s Grande dizionario delle lingua italiana, 21 vols (Turin, 1961–2002), 4: pp. 904–7. See also s.v. ‘sāvǒurī’ in the MED. B. A. Windeatt, ed., Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’ (London, 1984), p. 59. For an account of Chaucer’s pentameter, see Martin J. Duffell, ‘ “The craft so long to lerne”: Chaucer’s Invention of the Iambic Pentameter’, ChR, 34 (2000), pp. 269–88. See also ­Windeatt’s discussion of Chaucer’s metre in his edition of Troilus, pp. 55–64, and Marco Praloran’s study of Petrarch’s metre, La metrica dei Fragmenta (Rome, 2003). See Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London, 1992), pp. 64–5.

114  Chaucer and Petrarch

This possibility in turn relates to Chaucer’s creation of the rhyme royal itself. I would argue that Chaucer understood and admired certain potentialities presented by the sonnet form but chose instead to adhere to a relative of the sonnet, the ottava rima. The Italian sonetto came into being around 1235, at the Sicilian court of Emperor Frederick II, an absolute ruler who was also a great patron of the arts. A notary of the court named Giacomo da Lentini is consensually accredited with the creation of the form.17 As Spiller argues, Lentini ‘seems to have got it right first time’: all of the twenty-five sonnets attributed to him are composed of fourteen lines of eleven syllables. Fifteen of the sonnets rhyme in the form ABAB ABAB CDE CDE; nine of them have a sestet rhyming CDCDCD, and one has a sestet of CCD CCD.18 The sonnet as Lentini fashioned it, with its concatenated octave, in all likelihood stemmed from the popular Sicilian strambotto, an hendecasyllabic eight-line song form, originally rhyming ABABABAB (strambotto siciliano) or ABABABCC (strambotto toscano). Wilkins argues that the original sonnet’s octave developed out of the strambotto siciliano and the sestet devised, ‘without any reference to any pre-existing form’ – while at the same time he takes great pains to stress (and to show) that the sonnet ‘has no model among the Frederican canzoni’ and that there is no direct input from Provençal forms either.19 Kleinhenz, on the other hand, claims that Lentini ‘conceived the sonnet precisely in terms of the [Provençal] canso and that he consciously imitated those formal features of the canso which would best serve his purpose’. However, Kleinhenz’s declaration may be read as contradicting his earlier comment that the sonnet was a new poetic form, which was invented ‘in protest against the pervasive, stifling influence of the troubadour tradition’.20 Also, Wilkins cites a large amount of evidence which contradicts the possibility of Provençal influence. For example, he argues that out of

17

18

19 20

Michael Spiller, Early Modern Sonneteers: From Wyatt to Milton (Devon, 2001), p. 7. Not a great deal is known about Lentini’s life, and in consequence it cannot be ascertained when he was born or when he died. However, Antonelli’s introduction to his edition is both useful and interesting; see Giacomo da Lentini, Poesie, ed. by Roberto Antonelli (Rome, 1979), pp. ix–lxxiv (esp. ix–xvi). See also the entry for ‘Notaio Giacomo da Lentini’ in Poeti del Duecento, ed. by Gianfranco Contini, 2 vols (Milan–Naples, 1960), 1: pp. 49–90 (esp. 49–50) and Christopher Kleinhenz, ‘Giacomo da Lentini and Dante: The Early Italian Sonnet Tradition in Perspective’, JMRS, 8 (1978), pp. 217–34 (at p. 234). See also R. Antonelli et al., I poeti della scuola siciliana (Milan, 2008). In his Development of the Sonnet, Spiller argues that this last sestet is actually AAB AAB (p. 13). E. H. Wilkins imputes only nineteen indisputable sonnets to Lentini in his excellent study ‘The Invention of the Sonnet’, in The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature (Rome, 1959), pp. 11–39 (at pp. 14–15). Wilkins, ‘Invention of the Sonnet’, pp. 31–8. Kleinhenz, ‘Giacomo da Lentini and Dante’, pp. 224–6.



The First English Sonnet  115 the 893 different rhyme-schemes (used in a total of 1841 poems [by the troubadours]) […] there are 34 (used in a total of 72 poems) that begin abababab: but (aside from two schemes […] used in the second half of the 13th century [i.e. post-Lentini]) there are none that are similar to the scheme of the sonnet. Two only […] are of 14 lines: in one of them each of the first 13 lines is of five syllables and the last is of three syllables, and the last six lines rhyme CCDCCD, and in the other the first eight lines are alternately of seven and five syllables and the last six are of ten syllables, rhyming CCDDEE.21

Yet the Provençal canso and its Sicilian equivalent, the canzone, did have a more general influence on the formation of the sonnet, in that ‘the relationship between octave and sestet can be said to resemble the relationship between strophes in a canso, just as together the two parts of the sonnet resemble the internal division of the canzone stanza’.22 Spiller supports the view that the canso/canzone’s stanzaic division into fronte and sirma is a likely influence for the sonnet’s bipartite structure – a dichotomy which Kleinhenz, somewhat confusingly, disputes – while he concedes that we ‘cannot prove this debt’.23 I would argue that the answer lies somewhere between the two positions. In terms of specific formal debt, the strambotto siciliano appears to be the main benefactor; but, in terms of a more generalized, dichotomous structure, the canso/canzone must receive some credit too. And, just as the original sonnet emerged, at least in part, from the strambotto siciliano, so we may observe a similar formal interdependence between the strambotto toscano, the ottava rima (both of which are ABABABCC), and the English rhyme royal stanza (which is ABABBCC). I would have to disagree with Patricia Thomson’s assertion that ‘the strambotto is not related to the ottava rima’ (on the grounds that although ‘metrically identical these are independent literary forms, the one essentially narrative, the other lyrical’).24 David Wallace, for example, implies the link between the two forms which Thomson puts asunder when he argues that ‘the evolution of Chaucerian rhyme royal […] owes much to a careful study of the Boccaccian ottava’,25 and he discusses 21 22 23 24 25

Wilkins, ‘Invention of the Sonnet’, p. 30. Kleinhenz, ‘Giacomo da Lentini and Dante’, p. 226. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, p. 16. Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (London, 1964), p. 211. David Wallace, ‘Chaucer’s Continental Inheritance: The Early Poems and Troilus and Criseyde’, in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds, The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 19–37 (at p. 25). See also Martin Stevens, ‘The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature’, PMLA, 94 (1979), pp. 62–76: ‘possibly [Chaucer] was influenced by Boccaccio’s use of ottava rima in the Filostrato and the Teseide, two poems that served as models for his own longer compositions. Certainly, in the years after Chaucer and Boccaccio, rhyme royal and ottava rima served a similar purpose in their respective national literatures’ (p. 74).

116  Chaucer and Petrarch the tradition of narrative that supplied Boccaccio with a stanzaic model for his Filostrato: the cantare […] the cantare stanza is invariably composed of eight hendecasyllabic lines rhyming abababcc. However, attempts to define the cantari more narrowly run into difficulties. The form and content of the cantare has much in common with that of the strambotto or rispetto.26

Boccaccio’s ottava rima is, from a purely formal perspective, a narrative form constructed out of strambotti toscani. Chaucer, crucially, did not employ the rhyme royal until after he returned from his first documented embassy to Italy in 1372–3. However, earlier critics such as Ten Brink argued that rhyme royal was in fact based on a French model, and modern critics such as Julia Boffey and James Wimsatt have reiterated this view.27 Wimsatt’s argument is particularly convincing, and it would be erroneous to suggest that the French equivalent of the rhyme royal, as employed by Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–77) and Eustace Deschamps (c.1346–1406), played no part in the development of the Chaucerian stanza. Indeed the use of what is ostensibly a rhyme royal stanza within a French ballade structure occurs both in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women (F 249–69; G 203–23) and in ‘Against Women Unconstant’, which, as Wimsatt argues, takes its refrain from Machaut’s ‘Se pour ce muir’.28 Yet the argument for the rhyme royal as being of entirely French provenance, at least as Chaucer used it in works such as The Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde, does not correlate with the chronological and metrical circumstances. In these works, as Wimsatt himself agrees, ‘Chaucer probably was influenced by Boccaccio’s example in his stanzaic works, the Filostrato and Teseida’.29 Moreover, the Canticus Troili, although superficially akin to the French ballade, lacks a refrain. Wimsatt also posits Chaucer’s use of the rhyme royal in the Complaints as proof of their French origin, despite the likelihood of their being written at the onset of what was formerly known as Chaucer’s ‘Italian period […] under the influence of Boccaccio’s narrative stanza’.30 The Complaint unto Pity and the Complaint unto His Lady (the earliest poems in which the rhyme 26

27

28

29 30

D. Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1985), p. 76. The rispetto, a form of strambotto, is a Tuscan stanza form consisting of either six or eight lines, which ends in a rhyming couplet. See Bernhard ten Brink, The Language and Metre of Chaucer, trans. by M. Bentinck Smith, 2nd edn (London, 1901), pp. 255–6. For the reiteration, see Julia Boffey, ‘The Reputation of Chaucer’s Lyrics in the Fifteenth Century’, ChR, 28 (1993), pp. 23–40 (at pp. 28–9); J. I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto–Buffalo–London, 1991), pp. 30, 137–44. Ibid., pp. 144–6. See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987), pp. 1089–90, for an account of the debate as to this poem’s Chaucerian provenance and for the likelihood that the refrain is proverbial. Ibid., p. 137. Riverside Chaucer, p. 1077.



The First English Sonnet  117

royal appears), simultaneously showcase Chaucer’s introduction of iambic pentameter into English metrics. Duffell has capably shown that the English iambic pentameter takes the Italian hendecasyllabic line as its model, and if we need to reinforce the Italianate tenor of these poems we need only recall that the Complaint unto His Lady also features the first English attempt at terza rima.31 That Chaucer could splice a French form with an Italianate metre is possible, but not probable, and it is more likely that the rhyme royal stanza was to some extent, as Wallace suggests, an Anglicized version of Boccaccio’s ottava rima; a form which – along with the sonnet – locates its source in the strambotto. Yet, if the terminus a quo of the strambotto is a Provençal form, then the critical debate over the French or Italian origins of the rhyme royal ought to be reconsidered, as both the ottava rima and the ballade (equivalent of the Chaucerian stanza as practised by Machaut and Deschamps) would, in all likelihood, share a poetic gene pool thanks to the troubadours. This being the situation, I do not doubt that the French forms influenced the rhyme royal, but I believe that it was the ottava rima that ultimately solidified, not only the shape, but also the use and the metre of Chaucer’s stanza form. Nevertheless, Wimsatt’s study is vital to an understanding of Chaucer’s poetry, and in conjunction with our understanding of Chaucer’s relationship with Boccaccio it serves to remind us of how intertwined French, Italian and English literatures were during this period. The ottava rima, then, like the sonnet, probably finds its origin in the strambotto – the difference being that the strambotto is a self-contained single stanza and as such possesses a level of independence akin to that of the sonnet, whereas the ottava rima is used to construct a continuing narrative, being akin to the sonnet sequence. Hence it may be argued that Chaucer’s rhyme royal sprang from the same source as the sonnet. It is also interesting to note that – on condition that what Chaucer read was the Italian version of Petrarch’s sonnet and not Coluccio Salutati’s Latin translation of it – Chaucer would have encountered RVF 132 as two adjacent seven-line blocks. It would not have been therefore too great a leap of the formal imagination to convert Petrarch’s sonnet into rhyme royal.32

31 32

See Chapter 2, p. 102, n. 93. As Wilkins points out, ‘[o]ne other theoretically possible source remains: Coluccio Salutati made a Latin verse translation of this sonnet, beginning Si fors non sit amor. But this translation was made from the early text of the sonnet, and Chaucer agrees with the final Italian text rather than with Salutati at the points at which the Italian and the Latin versions differ’ (The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’, p. 307). This is very interesting in relation to manuscript circulation, considering that Salutati was far more of a scholar than Chaucer was and would be expected to have reliable texts. By ‘early text’ Wilkins means a text prior to the copying of the sonnet into the final manuscript (Vat. Lat. 3195) of the RVF in 1366–7. Salutati may have used the version of the 1359–62 manuscript, known as the Chigi form. See also Wilkins, ‘Cantus Troili’, pp. 168–9, and Francesco Petrarca, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta:

118  Chaucer and Petrarch

Yet, as was mentioned earlier in relation to the incongruity of a quatorzain amongst the rhyme royal forms, Chaucer’s reasons for ‘ignoring’ the sonnet in favour of its likely source may be entirely practical. The Italian lexicon tends towards multiple meanings, ambiguity and paronomasia, more so than the English; thus ‘dolce’ can be both sweet and ‘savory’, whilst ‘tormento’ translates as both ‘torment and adversite’. Furthermore, the Italian language boasts a greater wealth of inherent rhymes than medieval English did – words that almost call out to one another. As a result, English poet–translators will find themselves occasionally forced to dissect single terms into their synonyms in order to create a rhyme. In the opening stanza of the Canticus, ‘tormento’ becomes ‘torment and adversite’ in order to correlate with ‘he’ and ‘me’. Likewise, ‘lamento’ in Petrarch’s second quatrain is extended in Chaucer’s medial stanza to ‘my waillynge and my pleynte’ for the sake of ‘feynte’ and ‘queynte’. Thus Chaucer organizes a mutually beneficial cooperation between form and content within his translation – four lines become seven for the sake of the rhyme. Like Troilus himself, Chaucer must ‘consente’ in order to succeed. This in turn poses a further question concerning both the translative ratio(nale) and the underlying method behind Chaucer’s alteration of Petrarch’s sonnet: does the translation create the form, or does the form enable the translation? Again, the answer lies in consent and cooperation; indeed, should we even be questioning Chaucer’s translation in terms of cause and effect – is it not rather that the form necessitates the content, and therefore the consent, and vice versa, in a continuously reciprocal cycle? This may appear to avoid the question somewhat; but the question itself is perhaps irrelevant, considering Chaucer’s flexible approach to metrical constrictions. ‘Consento’ for Petrarch is a matter of yielding to another (‘Et s’io ’l consento’), for Chaucer it signifies concord; although yielding can also produce concord, but only if it is a mutual submission. Thus the antitheses which in Petrarch’s sonnet threaten to tear the poet–speaker apart become a means of balanced consideration in the Chaucerian stanza.33 Petrarch’s speaker wants to know if he is in fact experiencing love (‘S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?’), whereas Troilus prefers to question its very existence (‘If no love is’), and in doing so shifts the focus from the individual

33

Facsimile del codice autografo Vaticano Latino 3195, ed. by Gino Belloni, Furio Brugnolo, H. Wayne Storey and Stefano Zamponi, 2 vols (Padua and Rome, 2003–4). Antitheses, however, provide the means whereby the mindset of the RVF’s poet–lover is encapsulated. As Petrarch avers in his Invective contra medicum, ‘in eodem instanti nunc hoc nunc illud uni et eidem ingenio videatur’ (‘one and the same mind will hold different views in the same instant’, IV. 255/205, in Francesco Bausi’s edition of Florence, 2005). See also Fam. II. 11, an extended sequence of antithetical epithets. Gerald Morgan, The Tragic Argument of Troilus and Criseyde, 2 vols (Lewiston, NY, 2005) argues that Chaucer’s emphasis upon oxymora in the Canticus outdoes ‘even the Italian master of the oxymoron himself’ (1: p. 81).



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to the universal. Chaucer’s alteration of the nature of the question stems from the nature of English syntax compared to the Italian, and from the ambiguity afforded by translation. In Italian, the adverb ‘non’ will always precede the verb – in this case ‘è’; thus ‘S’amor non è’ would translate syntactically as ‘If love not is’, but semantically as ‘If it is not love’; Rosanna Bettarini has rightly pointed out that the sonnet recalls and surpasses the Sicilian school by virtue of its attempts to establish just what love is.34 The translation as ‘If no love is’ thus shows a deft translative sleight of hand on Chaucer’s part, a deliberate misprision informed by knowledge of Italian grammatical nuance. This transformation of perspective both stems from and enables the formal metamorphosis, as Spiller hints: It is worth recalling that Troilus and Criseyde, for all its sensitivity to the lovers’ emotions and sufferings, is a medieval tragedy, not a modern one, and Chaucer’s rendering of Petrarch pulls in that direction, and away from the valuation of individual experience. He seems to have engaged with a Petrarchan form whose structure he observed, but whose characteristically Petrarchan drive he chose to divert back into what he himself called ‘pleynt’, that is, the moral protest of man faced by the hostile forces of the universe.35

Just as the ‘drive’ in Petrarch’s sonnet emanates from the tension between the disordered emotions trapped within – and therefore struggling against – the strictures of the form, the progression in Chaucer’s rhyme royal rendition of the same sonnet develops out of the confluence which allows the content to extend beyond the rigours of the sonnet structure: content yields to form yields to content, cyclically, in a process of quasi-dialectical poetic development.36 Chaucer’s view of translation reflects his method in that it develops through compromise rather than domination, in some ways imitating Petrarch’s approach, in other ways creating a respectful distance from it. Chaucer, for example, would not view a translation as an ‘attack’, as R. A. Shoaf claims

34

35 36

See Bettarini’s comment in her edition of the Canzoniere, 2 vols (Turin, 2005), 1: pp. 641–3, at p. 641: ‘it all goes far beyond the taste demonstrated in the problematic of thirteenthcentury poetics on the nature of Love’. Bettarini’s superlative commentary also points to Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega, Andreas Capellanus’s De amore (on absence making the heart grow fonder) and Alanus’s De planctu naturae (wherein love is predicated on antitheses). Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, pp. 66–7. It is worth recalling that the first sonnets, those composed at the court of Frederick II, were organized around a scholastic and dialectical schema, which applied logic to emotional problems. See Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet (Oxford, 1989), pp. 3–25 (at p. 24). I do have some doubts, however, as to Oppenheimer’s predication of the sonnet’s development upon Platonic numerology.

120  Chaucer and Petrarch

that Petrarch did; a view which remains debatable, given the evidence we have already examined for Petrarch’s harmonizing method, and given his words to Boccaccio in the Griselda epistle that he was drawn by love for his friend and for the tale itself.37 Chaucer, if he is to follow Petrarch’s Horatian rules for translation, is therefore permitted to transpose RVF 132 into his own words. Indeed one might compare Petrarch’s method with that which Chaucer’s narrator hints at in book III of Troilus and Criseyde: But sooth is, though I kan nat tellen al, As kan myn auctour, of his excellence, Yet have I seyd, and God toforn, and shal In every thyng, al holly his sentence; And if that ich, at Loves reverence, Have any word in eched for the beste, Doth therwithal right as youreselven leste. For myne wordes, heere and every part, I speke hem alle under correccioun Of yow that felyng han in loves art, And putte it al in youre discrecioun To encresse or maken dymynucioun Of my langage, and that I yow biseche.  (Tr. III. 1324–36)

Although the contexts surrounding the two statements differ, methodological similarities remain evident. Both Chaucer and Petrarch adhere to the ‘sentence’ of their originals, but do not refrain from ‘mutatis verbis aut additis’ (‘changing or adding a few words’, Sen. XVII. 3. 108) in order to ‘encresse or maken dymynucioun’, as long as they are ‘in eched for the beste’. And, just as Petrarch was guided by ‘tui amor et historie’ (‘love of you and of the story’, Sen. XVII. 3. 108), so Chaucer’s narrator is here guided by ‘Loves reverence’. Chaucer’s appeal, furthermore, to ‘yow that felyng han in loves art […] I yow biseche’ reminds one of the opening sonnet of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: ‘Voi ch’ascoltate […] ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, | spero trovar pietà, nonchè perdono’ (‘You who hear […] where there is anyone who understands love through experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon’, RVF 1. 1–8). Yet an important question has remained unanswered: why does Chaucer, whilst translating Boccaccio, suddenly invoke a Petrarchan sonnet? In order to answer this question it is vital that we endeavour to understand the degree to which Chaucer distinguished between Petrarchan lyric and Boccaccian narrative, which is not as simple a distinction as the presence of formal boundaries may lead us to imagine. As Giulia Natali points out, ‘the structure

37

See Introduction, pp. 10–13.



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of the Filostrato is altogether unusual in that it adopts a narrative form traditionally employed to entertain the public with accounts of battles to relate a story of love’, the end result of which is that ‘the relationship between eros and epos has been reversed both quantitatively and qualitatively so that the former has taken over the space and importance which was previously given to the latter’.38 The form and genre of the Filostrato are dynamic, neither being strictly narrative nor strictly lyric but at a midpoint between the two, punctuated as the Filostrato is by canzone, both sung and written (as billets-doux), and oscillating between the vulgari eloquentia of the dolce stil nuovo and the poesia popolare of the canterini.39 It is this multiplicity that Chaucer develops in his Troilus and Criseyde, as a means of transcending the thematic constrictions of genre without incoherence, and which allows for the admission of Petrarch’s RVF 132 as the Canticus Troili without producing a stasis in stylistic contiguity. It remains to mention briefly one further aspect of Boccaccio’s text, which enables us to appreciate the facility with which Chaucer inserted Petrarch’s RVF 132 into the Troilus: that is, Boccaccio’s lyric stanzas, which Chaucer replaces with his reading of the Petrarchan substitute. Troiolo’s song in the Filostrato is fourteen and a half hendecasyllabic lines, just over a sonnet: E verso Amore tal fiata dicea con pietoso parlar: – Signor, omai l’anima è tua che mia esser solea; il che mi piace, però che tu m’hai, non so s’io dica a donna ovvero a dea, a servir dato, ché non fu giammai, sotto candido velo in bruna vesta, sì bella donna come mi par questa. Tu stai negli occhi suoi, signor verace, sì come in loco degno a tua virtute; per che, se ’l mio servir punto ti piace, da quei ti priego impetri la salute 38 39

G. Natali, ‘A Lyrical Version: Boccaccio’s Filostrato’, in Piero Boitani, ed., The European Tragedy of Troilus (Oxford, 1989), pp. 49–73, at pp. 50–1 and 59. On Boccaccio’s debt to the canterini (street singers), see V. Branca, Il cantare trecentesco e il Boccaccio del Filostrato e del Teseida (Florence, 1936), and Wallace, Early Writings, pp. 73–105. The Boccaccian balance between the lyric and the narrative also characterizes the Teseida and is reflected in its full title: Teseida, o delle nozze d’Emilia (Theseiad, or on the Nuptials of Emily). Chaucer, of course, drew upon the Teseida for the Knight’s Tale, further reducing epos in favour of eros by omitting the war against the Amazons: ‘if it nere to long to heere, | I wold have told yow fully […] The remenant of the tale is long ynough’ (I. 875–6, 888). On Chaucer’s frequent recourse to the Teseida, see Piero Boitani, ‘Style, Iconography and Narrative: The Lesson of the Teseida’, in Piero Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 185–99, and Chaucer and Boccaccio, pp. 72ff.

122  Chaucer and Petrarch dell’anima, la qual prostrata giace sotto i tuoi piè, sì la ferir l’acute saette che allora le gittasti, che di costei ’l bel viso mi mostrasti. And to Love he sometimes said with devoted speech: ‘Lord, now this soul is yours which used to be mine; this pleases me because you have given to me to serve – I don’t know if I should say a lady or a goddess, for there was never under a white veil in black clothes so beautiful a lady as this one appears to me. ‘You stand within her eyes, my true lord, a place that is worthy of your power; therefore if my service pleases you at all, I pray you obtain from them the salvation of my soul, which lies prostrate beneath your feet, for the sharp arrows which you shot so wounded it when you showed me the beautiful face of this lady.’ (Fil. I. 38–9)

Why omit Boccaccio’s lines and replace them with Petrarch’s? I am inclined to agree with John V. Fleming’s assertion that Chaucer has ‘invoked the profounder Petrarch to redress the amatory puerilities of Boccaccio’.40 However, these ‘amatory puerilities’ belong to Troiolo rather than to Boccaccio, despite the latter’s age at the time of composition. As Fleming himself argues: Troilus’ response to love is distinctly literary, not merely in the sense that his behaviour reflects certain discernible literary traditions but in the sharper, more explicit sense that it is controlled by specific and identifiable literary texts. The most important of these in terms of Chaucer’s philosophical ambitions is of course the Consolation of Boethius; but the first in the priority of its explicit introduction into Chaucer’s poem is the Canzoniere of Petrarch.41

Troiolo’s song, which is displaced by Chaucer through the inclusion of the Petrarchan sonnet, is also ‘distinctly literary’, and shows Boccaccio using his character as a mouthpiece for a traditional lyric plaint. If the Filostrato is intended to depict, as Boccaccio avers in his proemio, a young lover’s transition from immaturity to maturity through the bitter experience (‘Amara esperienza’, 6) of infidelity – a maturity never fully attained in view of Troiolo’s premature death at the hands of Achilles – then such amatory and literary ‘puerility’ must surely be intentional, given the song’s appearance in book I. 40

41

John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus (Lincoln, NE, 1990), p. 183. Such puerility may be a comment on Boccaccio’s age at the time of composing Filostrato. Boccaccio was born in 1313, and so would still have been relatively young whether the Filostrato was written in 1335 or in 1339 (for the problems of dating the work see the previous chapter of the present study). It is worth recalling also that Petrarch was only nine years older than Boccaccio. Fleming, Classical Imitation, p. 119.



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However, whether Chaucer overlooked Boccaccio’s irony here, or whether he saw it but still felt it did not justify the inclusion of an insipid reiteration of stock images and rhetoric, he nevertheless chose to replace it with a sonnet which suggested a character with the potential capacity for deeper thought and greater poetry. The Canticus Troili may not be a quatorzain, or “true sonnet”, but Chaucer’s three stanzas of rhyme royal can at least be considered as a variation on the ‘Petrarchan form whose structure he observed’; an idea that is reinforced by Chaucer’s choice of metre, the self-containment of the Canticus, and its length (fourteen lines and half that again).42 However, if we are to investigate this claim to formal kinship with the sonnet, we must return to the remaining stanzas of the Canticus: S’a mia voglia ardo, onde ’l pianto e·lamento? S’a mal mio grado, il lamenter che vale? O viva morte, o dilectoso male, come puoi tanto in me, s’io nol consento? (RVF 132. 5–8) And if that at myn owen lust I brenne, From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte? If harm agree me, wherto pleyne I thenne? I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte. O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, How may of the in me swich quantite, But if that I consente that it be? (Tr. I. 407–13)

The opening lines of Chaucer’s stanzas certainly conform to Spiller’s translative ratio, ’4 to 7; 4 to 7; 4 and 2 to 5 and 2’.43 That is to say, the first two stanzas of the Canticus correspond to the two quatrains of rime incrociate (crossed rhymes: ABBA ABBA) which constitute the octave, while the final stanza contains the sestet. As we see in the second stanza, Chaucer continues to shift between verbatim translation, line extension, addition and omission, as part of a process akin to Petrarch’s own method of translatio. However, Chaucer is not simply ‘changing or adding a few words’; if this were the case, the rhyme royal stanza would docilely follow the corresponding quatrain to its conclusion before receiving three extra lines as a kind of poetic addendum. Such simplification, indeed such a mechanical process would serve no purpose, it would neither test nor express the translator’s ability. Similarly, Chaucer refuses simply to place Petrarch’s corpus on the rack; his approach has no desire to stretch the sonnet form out of dispassionate poetic curiosity. The Canticus Troili is rather a testament to Petrarch’s posthumous renown,

42 43

The notion of the true sonnet would not emerge until the sixteenth century, when it did thanks to critics such as George Gascoigne (c.1535–77). Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, p. 66.

124  Chaucer and Petrarch

a means of showing that ‘his wordes and his werk’ continue to live and evolve organically, even after the death of the author. Comparison allows us to witness this evolution as it occurs, for example in the second stanza. The first line of the Italian becomes the opening lines of the rhyme royal, perhaps as Chaucer’s language cannot express Petrarch’s sentiments within the same metrical constraints; it takes Chaucer twenty syllables to translate what Petrarch manages in eleven. However, this is not a weakness on the part of the English poet, but rather a matter of poetic choice. To illustrate this point, Chaucer translates Petrarch’s second line (‘S’a mal mio grado’) as his third (‘If harm agree me’), without any metrical hindrances whatsoever. The lines appear to expand and contract, in a respiratory movement which is akin to John M. Fyler’s description of the House of Fame’s ‘diastolic/ systolic rhythm of expansion and collapse’, an idea reinforced by Chaucer’s insertion of a line that has no correspondent in the Italian: ‘I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte’.44 This implicit image may be seen to be drawing upon the immediate context of Chaucer’s translation, in which the breathless Troilus retires to his bed after his first sight of Criseyde and sighs out his song: And whan that he in chambre was allone, He doun upon his beddes feet hym sette, And first he gan to sike, and eft to grone […] And over al this, yet muchel more he thoughte What for to speke, and what to holden inne. (Tr. I. 358–60, 386–87, emphasis added)

If the opening lines of the Canticus Troili’s medial stanza signify inhalation and the third line exhalation (expansion and contraction), then the fourth line may be seen to represent the median state – surrounded as it is by three lines on either side – the point between inhalation and exhalation, a state of breathlessness which causes the speaker to ‘feynte’. Yet Chaucer, rather than transpose the third line of Petrarch’s quatrain onto two lines, translates it as one, and thereby continues to exhale. The line itself is focussed upon inspiration and expiration, both in the Italian and in the English: ‘O viva morte, o dilectoso male’ effortlessly becomes ‘O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte’; the distinction between living and dying is blurred by oxymora which follow that midpoint between inhalation and exhalation signified by the addition of the fourth line. Such blurring suggests the familiar problem faced by any translation: the inevitable identity crisis it must undergo. Does it belong to the source or to the translator? This problem of identity is at the core of the final stanza, in

44

See J. M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, CT, 1979), p. 25.



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which the roles of source, translator and translation are constantly held up to scrutiny, in an attempt to provide the Canticus with the answers to the questions asked by the sonnet: Et s’io ’l consento, a gran torto mi doglio. Fra sí contrari vènti in frale barca mi trovo in alto mar senza governo, sí lieve di saver, d’error sí carca ch’ i’ medesmo non so quel ch’io mi voglio, e tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno.  (RVF 132. 9–14) And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, iwis. Thus possed to and fro, Al sterelees withinne a boot am I Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, That in contrarie stonden evere mo. Allas, what is this wondre maladie? For hote of cold, for cold of hote, I dye.  (Tr. I. 414–20)

The correspondence between the English and the Italian lines here attains a level of complex integration which almost confounds distinction. This is perhaps due to Chaucer’s adaptation of Petrarch’s entire sestet within his seven-line stanza, a process which necessitates fluid expansion and omission. The vital elements of the Petrarchan sestet are present within the final stanza, but they cannot be traced as exactly and to the same degree of symmetry as the preceding verses. However, the Chaucerian stanza’s central metaphor provides a sense of unity which its predecessors lack, although this centripetal tendency finds its source in the crisis of identity that concluded the previous verse. Chaucer’s opening line and its enjambed hemistich agree to follow the first line of the Petrarchan sestet without complaint; indeed the lines grow and form around this central ‘consento’. But it is from the middle of Chaucer’s second line through to the couplet that the stanza finds its true centre, both in terms of form and in terms of content, adding as it does a much greater significance to the original metaphor. For Petrarch, the image of the fragile bark (‘frale barca’) caught at sea (‘in alto mar’) and torn between two winds (‘contrari vènti’) signifies the poet–lover’s psychosomatic confusion: is love a mental or a physical state? Boitani, for example, asks: ‘what if “male” [in line 8] indicates, as it certainly can in Petrarch’s Italian, “disease”, “illness” – in fact a disease that leads up to “viva morte”?’.45 Chaucer translates ‘male’ and the earlier ‘mal’ as ‘harm’, which can signify either psychological or physical distress. Chaucer certainly knew of the dangers of lovesickness or aegritudo amoris, which in the late medieval period was considered to be fatal in extreme cases and was 45

Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime, p. 58.

126  Chaucer and Petrarch

constituted by the fusion of the psychological and the physical. Describing aegritudo amoris in his Lilium medicinae (c.1285), Bernard of Gordon says that ‘morbus qui hereos dicitur est sollicitudo melancholica propter mulieris amorem’ (‘the disease, which is called hereos [Eros], is a melancholic anxiety caused by love for a woman’).46 Chaucer describes the dangers of this condition in the opening of the Book of the Duchess: I have gret wonder, be this lyght, How that I lyve, for day ne nyght I may nat slepe wel nygh noght; […]   and thus melancolye And dred I have for to dye. Defaute of slep and hevynesse Hath sleyn my spirit of quyknesse […] I hold it be a sicknesse That I have suffred this eight yeer; And yet my boote is never the ner (1–3, 23–6, 36–8)47

Interestingly, Chaucer’s narrator also characterizes himself as a ship at sea here, as does Troilus when singing his Petrarchan Canticus – which reinforces the possibility that Chaucer understood ‘S’amor non è’ as a description of aegritudo amoris. The provenance of the ‘I’ configured as a storm-tossed ship is to be found in Ovidian love elegy: ‘erro velut ventis discordibus acta phaselos, | dividuumque tenent alter et alter amor’ (‘I waver like a yacht when winds are warring; | This love, that love, they keep me torn in two’, Ovid, Amores II. 10. 9–10).48 Unsurprisingly, Petrarch draws repeatedly upon Ovidian tropes and images throughout the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, combining the lyric voice of the Amores with the events of the Metamorphoses – the most memo-

46

47 48

Cited in Massimo Ciavolella, ‘La tradizione della aegritudo amoris nel Decameron’, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 147 (1970), pp. 496–517 (at p. 511). See also J. L. Lowes, ‘The Loveres Maladye of Hereos’, Modern Philology, 2 (1914), pp. 491–546, and Esther Zago, ‘Women, Medicine and the Law in Boccaccio’s Decameron’, in Lillian R. Furst, ed., Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (Lexington, KY, 1997), pp. 64–78. Gerald Morgan, Tragic Argument, 1: p. 120 has recently noted that by ‘placing Troilus’s passion within a precise medical framework of ideas Chaucer lends both seriousness and credibility to the representation of such folly’. See also the Knight’s Tale I. 1361–76. See also Amores, II. 4. 5–8; II. 9b. 7–9 and Ars amatoria, I. 411–12 and II. 514 in Ovid, Amores; Medicamina faciei femineae; Ars amatoria; Remedia amoris, ed. by E. J. Kenney (Oxford, 1961), pp. 1–108 (pp. 42, 52–4); Ovid, Amores, in The Love Poems, ed. by E. J. Kenney, trans. by A. D. Melville (Oxford, 1990), pp. 1–82 (pp. 32, 40–1).



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rable example being the canzone delle metamorfosi (RVF 23).49 Chaucer also draws heavily upon Ovidian poetics in dream visions such as The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, and of course throughout the Troilus and Criseyde. However, Petrarch’s fusion of classical and Christian subtexts within his sonnet sequence possibly points to a further reference, which underpins his ‘barca’. At Matthew 13. 24, the Apostles’ ship upon Lake Galilee is described in very similar terms to those which Petrarch uses to illustrate his internal doubts: ‘nauicula autem in medio mari iactabatur fluctibus erat enim contrarius ventus’ (‘And the boot in the myddel of the see was schoggid with wawis, for the wynd was contrarie to hem’, emphasis added).50 The language of Chaucer’s translation appears to reinforce the possibility of this reference: ‘Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, | That in contrarie stonden evere mo.’ Chaucer’s translation sounds the Ovidian trope, but in doing so it allows his audience to hear simultaneously Petrarch’s Christian voice and thereby it illustrates the intertextual heteroglossia which constitutes the entire Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Furthermore, this form of translation, which glosses upon the text from which it derives, may be seen to conform to the medieval process of translatio, whereby texts would be provided with an explanatory gloss, and both these elements would then be subsumed by the translation.51 For Chaucer, the image of the ship may also be seen to represent the flux and reflux of translation. The anxiety felt by Troilus echoes the poet’s anxiety of influence, as the translation finds itself ‘possed to and fro’ between the source and the translator; as Shoaf argues, ‘the substance will be between him

49

50

51

On the canzone delle metamorfosi, see Bortolo Martinelli, Petrarca e il Ventoso (Bergamo, 1977), pp. 19–102; Marco Santagata, ‘La canzone XXIII’, Lectura Petrarce, 1 (1981), pp. 49–78; Annalisa Cipollone, ‘ “Né per nova figura il primo alloro”: La chiusa di RVF XXIII, il Canzoniere e Dante’, Rassegna europea de letteratura italiana, 11 (1998), pp. 29–46; and the Conclusion to the present study, pp. 198–200. On Petrarch’s Ovidian subtext, see Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime sparse (Columbia, MO, 1985), pp. 9–38, and Kathleen Anne Perry, Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard (New York, 1990), pp. 79–132. I have used Wycliffe’s translation here (Matt. 14: 24) in order to highlight the similarity between Chaucer’s translation and that of the Vulgate. See John Wycliffe, The New Testament in English according to the Version by John Wycliffe and Revised by John Purvey, ed. by J. Forshall and F. Madden (Oxford, 1879), p. 31. See also Inf. V. 29–30: ‘mar per tempesta, | se da contrari venti è combattuto’; the circle of the lustful, which includes Paolo and Francesca, is a particularly apt contextual reference. On Chaucer’s Bible, see Amanda Holton, ‘Which Bible Did Chaucer Use? The Biblical Tragedies in the Monk’s Tale’, N & Q, 55 (2008), pp. 13–17. An interesting example of this process is Sir Thomas Wyatt’s translation of Petrarch’s ‘Una candida cerva’ (RVF 190), as his most famous sonnet, ‘Whoso list to hounte’. Wyatt not only paraphrases Petrarch’s original but also appropriates the gloss of the phrase ‘Noli mi tangere’ provided in contemporary editions of the RVF, such as that of Alessandro Vellutello, published in Venice in August 1525 (Wyatt travelled to Venice in February 1527).

128  Chaucer and Petrarch

and his original’.52 Just as we witnessed the poem’s becoming in the second stanza, as it inhaled Petrarch and exhaled Chaucer, so in the confusion of the third stanza we see the translation continuing to search for a fixed identity.53 The stock image of the seafarer gathers resonance from this quest for poetic selfhood, as the translation is caught ‘betwixen wyndes two’; one blows it towards trecento Italy; the other, back to fourteenth-century England. This voyage of self-discovery thus leads us to resubmit the question of periodization which was asked in the opening chapter and which we are inevitably faced with when we draw any comparison between Chaucer and Petrarch. Is Chaucer’s Canticus a medieval text, or does it belong to an early modern mindset? Alternatively, is it still even feasible for us to be discussing literature in accordance with such terminology? Wallace exhorts us to ‘suspend belief in cultural partitions such as “medieval”, “Renaissance” and “humanist” ’, on the basis that ‘there is nothing going on in Petrarch and Boccaccio that cannot, with profit, be brought into intelligible relation with Chaucer’.54 From this perspective, the question of identity within the final stanza is nullified and Troilus finds himself ‘[a]mydde the see’ which Chaucer has traversed many times before. The translation seeks a single identity, which is at odds with Chaucer’s ‘transnational’ ideology – an outlook that seeks to render ‘cultural partitions such as “medieval”, “Renaissance”, and “humanist” ’ almost entirely redundant. The poem therefore cannot continue to be torn between its Italian (or Renaissance) inheritance and its English (or medieval) attributes, as it is the legitimate offspring of the marriage between the two, the product of a poetic diplomacy which undermines, to an extent, traditional periodization. If this is the case, however, what are we then to infer from these ‘wyndes two | That in contrarie stonden evere mo’? The answer to this question may lie in the integration of the Canticus within Troilus and Criseyde as a whole, and in the encompassment of the politico-literary relationships which are inherently linked to Chaucer’s experience of Italy.55 The contraries to which 52 53

54

55

R. A. Shoaf, Chaucer’s Body: The Anxiety of Circulation in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Gainesville, FL, 2001), p. 116. See D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), pp. 56–60, for a discussion of late medieval and early modern individualism. The question of paternity/maternity is one addressed by Shoaf; as Chaucer translates into English, he is in fact ‘continuing the contest between Latin, or patriarchal discourse, and the vernacular, the “parlar materno” (Purgatorio 26. 117)’ (Chaucer’s Body, p. 120). This contest is of great import to Petrarch as a means of defining himself against Dante, as at Fam. XXI. 15 and Sen. V. 2. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 1–7. As we saw in the opening chapter, the matter is not quite as straightforward as Wallace’s polemical statement would have it; there were various cultural differences and aporiae in addition to the many similarities, and they must be taken into account. As Petrarch complains in the Griselda epistle, written around the same time as Chaucer visited Italy: ‘Idque ipsum, ut nosti, bellicis undique motibus inquietum, a quibus et si



The First English Sonnet  129

Troilus refers – although they find their source in Petrarch’s ‘contrari vènti’ and in the antitheses which constitute the sonnet –may be seen to represent, according to Wallace, the presiding genii of the Troilus and the Canticus: Boccaccio and Petrarch. From this perspective, the contrasting ideologies of these two poets exemplify the dominant political thought of Chaucer’s Italy. Boccaccio’s brigate of the Decameron and of the Filocolo represent his commitment to Florentine republicanism, whereas the isolated individual of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta points towards Lombard despotism. Both of these models provide Chaucer with an indication of the direction in which the political ‘wyndes’ of change may be blowing in England, as Wallace argues: These polarized Italian options offered Chaucer (as poet and political subject) clarifying visions of possible English futures […] The discrete yet mutually defining paradigms of Florence and Lombardy serve not only to clarify the possibilities of English polity but also to reveal its extraordinary complexity.56

Chaucer’s best known works, The Canterbury Tales and the Troilus and Criseyde, would appear to imply that he favoured Boccaccio; but pieces such as the Canticus and The Clerk’s Tale declare a simultaneous loyalty to Petrarch. Is it, then, Chaucer’s literary allegiance that finds itself ‘Amydde the see’?57 Possibly; yet the political element, as Wallace argues, is not to be discounted: after all Chaucer, in the final years of his life, witnessed the accession of Henry IV after the removal (and relative despotism) of Richard II.58 Thus the Canticus Troili can perhaps be said to pre-empt, albeit embryonically, the politicized sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey.59

56

57

58 59

animo procul absim, nequeo tamen fluctuante re republica non moveri’ (‘As you know, even if I remain distant from the disturbances of battles all around, I cannot be unmoved by restlessness in the state’, Sen. XVII. 3. 4–6). Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 63. See also Marion Turner’s discussion of Troy in Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford, 2007) for a possible counterargument: ‘Chaucer’s poem does not warn about what might happen, rather it demonstrates what has already happened’ (p. 80). Of course, Chaucer also relied on the other great trecento poet, Dante, most obviously in the House of Fame, but also in Troilus and Criseyde: see for example III. 1261–7; IV. 225–8; V. 1541–7; V. 1863–65 – which draw upon Para. III. 13–18; Inf. III. 112–14; Inf. VII. 73ff.; and Para. XIV. 28–30 respectively. In Chaucerian Conflict, Turner argues that Troilus and Criseyde is embedded in late-fourteenth century anxieties concerning urban division in London (pp. 31–55). Chaucer’s political sympathies would, after all, have been torn between the king and the dispossessed son of his patron, John of Gaunt (although this, admittedly, was after the writing of Troilus and Criseyde). Also, as shall be seen subsequently, Petrarch’s politics are not as black and white as recent critiques would have them be, and one must be careful of oversimplifying the matter, or of projecting twenty-first century political morality onto the fourteenth century.

130  Chaucer and Petrarch

But where does this leave the translation at its close in relation to its source? Chaucer omits the opening line of Petrarch’s final tercet, opting instead for taking the final lines of the sonnet within his own closing couplet and paying particular attention to the sonnet’s parting antitheses: ‘For hote of cold, for cold of hote, I dye.’ The Canticus, with the insertion of its last words, achieves the sense of closure which Petrarch’s poem seeks. Chaucer ensures finality with ‘I dye’, whereas Petrarch’s gerund (‘ardendo’) and his ‘verno’ (‘winter’) of discontent inherently suggest that spring will come again soon and the cycle will begin anew – which it does in RVF 133. The rhetorical “death” of Troilus at the close of the Canticus thereby acts a guarantee that this will be Chaucer’s only foray into the sonnet, at least in the Troilus and Criseyde.60 What, then, has been achieved by Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch? Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Chaucer has set a precedent by being the first English poet to translate not only a Petrarchan sonnet, but any work of Petrarch’s, thus granting a mandate for later poets such as Wyatt and Surrey, who would go on to popularize the form in England. As Simpson has pointed out, ‘[e]ven before the death of Henry VIII Chaucer had been isolated as the official Tudor representative […] [and] had been rendered thoroughly Protestant by 1550’; that is, seven years prior to the publication of Tottel’s Miscellany.61 Secondly, Chaucer has illustrated the connection between Boccaccian narrative and Petrarchan lyric, both of which draw upon a stilnovistic inheritance and a shared poetic discourse. The fact that Chaucer could insert a sonnet by Petrarch into his adaptation of Filostrato bears witness to his intertextual reading of the tre corone, whereby one informs the other. This insertion also illustrates Chaucer’s translative practice of drawing upon a variety of sources to form something new, a practice which reveals that the construction of Troilus and Criseyde corresponds to Petrarch’s own exhortation to create something ‘aliud et melius’. Thirdly, Chaucer has indicated the wide range of themes that the Petrarchan sonnet may explore: not only introspective courtly love, but also the body language of the materialist psychology, political division, and the autoreflexive nature of sonnet writing and of translatio itself. Finally, Chaucer lays the formal 60

61

Zancani, ‘Renaissance Misogyny’, queries whether scurrilous early modern appropriations of Petrarch might have been responding to potential paronomastic elements within the RVF. He notes that some of the more obvious misprisions relate to ‘the concept of dying […] because poets have frequently indicated sexual orgasm by the signifier of death’ (p. 173). It remains to be seen whether Chaucer’s ‘I dye’ is doing something similar, and whether it is linked to a potential pun on ‘queynte’ in the second stanza. See Larry D. Benson, ‘The “Queynte” Punnings of Chaucer’s Critics’, SAC, Proceedings No. 1 (1985), pp. 23–47, and Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, p. 87. Simpson, James, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), p. 41. See also Theresa M. Krier, ed., Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville, FL, 1998).



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foundations for the English sonnet by producing a translation of a Petrarchan sonnet which includes the iambic pentameter (not the hendecasyllables of the Italian), rhyming couplets and twenty-one lines, which echo the original fourteen in accordance with a definite observance of sonnet structure. What Chaucer has left for the English poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a formal legacy that would provide a possible basis for the English sonnet as we know it today; what he has left for modern scholars is a navigable passage between medieval and Renaissance poetry, between trecento Italy and fourteenth-century England.

4 ‘Mutata veste’: Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch In his response to a letter from Boccaccio containing a plea to abandon his studies on account of his age and his already considerable fame, Petrarch gives the first hint as to his translation of the final tale of his friend’s Decameron: Nulla calamo agilior est sarcina, nulla iucundior; voluptates alie fugiunt et mulcendo ledunt; calamus et in manus sumptus mulcet, et depositus delectat, ac prodest non domino suo tantum sed aliis multis sepe etiam absentibus, nonnunquam et posteris post annorum milia. […] Hoc mihi igitur fixum est; quamque sim procul ab inertibus consiliis, sequens ad te epystola erit indicio. No knapsack is as easy to move as a pen, none more enjoyable. Other pleasures slip away, and bruise as they tickle; the pen tickles as you take it in hand, and it delights when it is put down, and benefits not only its master but many others, often even those who are far away, sometimes even those who follow after thousands of years. […] I have, therefore, settled this, and the next letter to you will be a sign of how far I am from counsels of idleness. (Sen. XVII. 2. 1156/653)

That next letter would contain Petrarch’s translation of the tale of Griselda, a tale which did indeed benefit ‘aliis multis sepe etiam absentibus’ (‘many others, even those who are far away’), including Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. As Harry Bailey says at the tale’s close: ‘By Goddes bones, | Me were levere than a barel ale | My wyf at hoom had herd this legende ones!’ (IV. 1212b–d). The following chapters trace the pan-European progress of Patient Griselda, from her first codified appearance at the closing day of the Decameron, through Petrarch’s Latin transposition, and finally to her presence in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. The tale of Griselda’s subjection to her husband Walter’s cruelties is predicated upon the same intertextual matrix that underpins the tripartite relationship between Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. However, there are certain shifts in emphasis which differentiate the Griseldan intertext from the complex translative relations which have been examined thus far. Perhaps the most fundamental difference concerns Bloomian influence



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  133

anxiety. As we saw in the second chapter, Bloom posits a pre-Shakespearean, antediluvian golden age centred around Dantean generosity. Yet Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio in which the former rebukes the latter for burning his ‘iuvenilia’ after his having read Petrarch’s early vernacular works (Seniles V.  2) may be read as denoting the presence of an anxiety of influence within the generation which immediately followed Dante. Similarly, there is Petrarch’s revelation that, when he was a youth, despite being a dedicated bibliophile, he never sought out a copy of the Commedia, for fear of being influenced by it. Such an admission, rather than elucidating Bloom’s matrix of benevolent influence, reveals the potentially pernicious shadow that ‘ille nostri eloquii dux uulgaris’ (‘the master of our vernacular literature’, Sen. V. 2. 794/160) could cast over those who followed in what Robin Kirkpatrick terms the wake of the Commedia.1 Chaucer, however, despite being reluctant (or unable?) to name the true author of his source, relies heavily upon the Filostrato throughout the Troilus, even when he departs from it.2 Rather than eschewing direct influence from his contemporaries, Chaucer embraces it, just as he asks his ‘litel bok’ to ‘kis the steppes where as thow seest pace | Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace’ (Tr. V. 1786–92). In the tale of Griselda we encounter a reversal. Boccaccio’s alleged imitations of Petrarch are replaced by Petrarch’s definite translation of Boccaccio, and, whereas Chaucer replaced Boccaccio’s auctoritee with that of the fictional Lollius in Troilus and Criseyde, in the Clerk’s Prologue we discover that the tale was ‘[l]erned at Padowe of a worthy clerk […] Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete’ (IV. 27, 31). A question that must then be answered before embarking upon a detailed study of the Griseldan intertext is: why does this shift in influence anxiety occur? The first factor is Petrarch’s fame and both his and Chaucer’s (together with Boccaccio’s) awareness of it. We recall that it was only in his youth that Petrarch studiously avoided Dante, or the Commedia at least.3 In the same letter where he admits his earlier avoidance of Dante he also reveals that, with age, with experience and with the cessation of his vernacular production, he has progressed beyond such anxiety:

1

2

3

Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘The Wake of the Commedia: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron’, in Piero Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 201–30. See also R. Kirkpatrick’s article ‘The Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer’ in the same volume, pp. 231–48. See D. Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 73–140; B. A. Windeatt, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, in P. Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 163–83, and his introduction to Troilus and Criseyde, pp. 1–11. Or so he professed. See Chapter 2, pp. 74–5. Whilst the terza rima of the Trionfi suggests Dantean influence, Vittore Branca has argued for its dependence upon Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione, which adds to the complexity of the two poets’ reciprocal literary relationship. See Vittore Branca, ‘Petrarch and Boccaccio’, trans. by Aldo and Reta Bernardo, in Aldo S. Bernardo, ed., Francesco Petrarca: Citizen of the World (Padua–Albany, NY, 1980), pp. 193–221.

134  Chaucer and Petrarch Hodie enim ab his curis longe sum; et postquam totus inde abii sublatusque quo tenebar metus est, et alios omnes et hunc ante alios tota mente suscipio. Today I have left these scruples far behind; and with my total abandonment of such productions and the waning of my earlier fears, I can now welcome wholeheartedly all other poets, him above all. (Fam. XXI. 15. 97/204)4

The immense fame which Petrarch achieved in his lifetime, his laureate coronation upon the Capitoline in 1341 – an honour which Dante failed to achieve – meant that he no longer had to live in fear of his illustrious predecessor.5 Furthermore, the medium through which Petrarch achieved this fame, Latin, also set him apart. As has been discussed in the second chapter, Petrarch’s pursuit of excellence in Latin places him within a different aspirational sphere from that of Dante; the younger poet does not adhere to his older compatriot’s concept of vulgari eloquentia, but rather views the vernacular as an inferior form of the language of Cicero and Virgil.6 Petrarch was thus better known in the late fourteenth century for being the Father of Humanism and for writing didactic Latin compositions such as De remediis utriusque fortunae rather than for being the author of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.7 It is for this reason that Chaucer’s Clerk refers to Petrarch not only as ‘the lauriat poete’ but also as a ‘worthy clerk’, a scholar and rhetorician. It is for this reason, too, that Petrarch can confidently translate Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda, adding the reminder that this was ‘[q]uod non facile alteri cuicumque prestiterim’ (‘what I would hardly have done for anyone else’, Sen. XVII. 3. 37–8). Such a statement almost smacks of the benevolent maestro bestowing favour upon a promising discepolo; yet it is countered by Petrarch’s willingness to yield gladly and to leave the second place to Boccaccio (‘volens cedo, locus tibi linquitur secundus’, Sen. V. 2. 794). Boccaccio, in turn, in a letter to Pietro da Monteforte, accepts being second-place to Petrarch, which may be read as reinforcing Branca’s claim that ‘the idea of influence and dependence 4 5

6

7

Of course, Petrarch did not abandon vernacular poetry completely; he continued to revise the RVF up until his death in 1374. See Para. I. 25–7 and XXV. 1–9. Dante did not actively seek to be crowned; Giovanni del Virgilio suggested that he should write something in Latin, in order that he might be offered the laurel by the Università degli Studi at Bologna. Dante replied with his series of Eclogues. See Ettore Bolisani and Manara Valgimigli, La corrispondenza poetica di Dante Alighieri e Giovanni del Virgilio (Florence, 1963); Guido Martellotti, ‘Egloghe’, in Umberto Bosco, gen. ed., Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols (Rome, 1970–6), 2: pp. 644–6; and John Took, ‘Eclogues’, in Richard Lansing, ed., The Dante Encyclopedia (New York, 2000), pp. 334–5. See Kenelm Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 25–6. Boitani’s statement, however, that ‘Dante’s fame […] was a model the younger generation had to measure itself against’, still holds. See Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge, 1984), p. 91. See Chapter 3, p. 109.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  135

has to be resolutely substituted by that more realistic and profitable idea of convergence in problems, interest and analogous solutions’.8 His acceptance is, moreover, a sign of the Ciceronian amicitia which existed between the two poets. Yet the fact that Chaucer does repeatedly refuse to name Boccaccio as his source whilst honouring Petrarch with ‘the most moving celebration of an Italian poet that [he] ever wrote’ may be seen to provide a testament to the difference between the two friends’ respective reputations.9 The Clerk, like Petrarch, would appear to favour the universal solidity of Latin, although it was not the latter’s dream to possess the complete Aristotelian corpus ­(Aristotle’s works were, for the most part, read in Latin translations of Arabic texts, themselves translated out of Greek). However, it must be recalled that the Clerk is not Chaucer, and prior to examining the English poet’s reception of Petrarch’s translation in the following chapter it is necessary to chart the tale’s development from the vernacular into Latin. In particular, Petrarch’s translation may be seen as providing an allegorical concretization – to use Iser’s term – of Boccaccio’s Italian.10 That is, Boccaccio’s deliberately sparse tale and its narrative framework provide the translation with semantic potentia; the opportunity for Petrarch to give his translation and, retrospectively, Boccaccio’s original a definite moral meaning, although, as the epistolary framework of the tale and a great deal of recent criticism show, Petrarch’s apparently univocal interpretation conceals a similar plurality to that of his source text – to the extent that the Latin translation may be seen to represent the hermeneutic process itself, and to operate as an allegory of its own translative existence. Petrarch’s Latin translation of Decameron X. 10 is not the most immediately obvious example of the medieval allegorical mode. That is, the tale does not embody perhaps, for the modern reader, the aforementioned mode to the same stylistic degree as works such as the Roman de la Rose or Langland’s Piers Plowman, the landscapes of which are densely populated by personified abstractions. However, critics such as Jon Whitman have shown that, while

8

9

10

Branca, ‘Petrarch and Boccaccio’, p. 198. Boccaccio’s letter to Pietro is in Epistole, in Giovanni Boccacio, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), 5. 1 (1992): pp. 674–89. I would not remove the question of influence and dependence altogether, although there is far greater reciprocity between Boccaccio and Petrarch than some commentators would allow. Boitani, Imaginary World of Fame, p. 157. Petrarch, like Dante, became an auctour after his death, in a way that Boccaccio did not, or at least not initially. See William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 25–81. As Boitani argues, Chaucer’s contact with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, ‘the first heralds of the triumph of Fame’ (Imaginary World of Fame, p. 5), greatly affected his conceptions of poetic dignity and reputation. Iser’s term is konkretisation, whereby the ‘convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence’. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD, 1974), pp. 274–5.

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‘personification is the most striking kind of compositional allegory, it is not the only kind. Allegorical composition need not employ abstract characters at all.’11 In order to illustrate this position, one need only look to the Commedia, inhabited as it is by historical figures who serve as exempla no less effectively than their prosopopoeic counterparts; indeed Whitman includes both the Roman and the Commedia in the same category, namely of ‘sustained psychic allegory’.12 Hence Petrarch’s allegorical translation may be seen as coming in the wake of the Commedia both chronologically and in terms of figurative strategy, in spite of his troubled relationship with Dante.13 And, just as medieval allegory is frequently motivated by an exemplary ethical or didactic impulse, so Petrarch’s translation is not only dependent upon an allegorical hermeneutics but also directed towards the spiritual and moral lesson which the literary technique aims to instil within its readership. Through being thus directed, the Latin redaction of Griselda’s misfortunes may be seen to contribute to allegory’s development from its mythopoeic origins to its humanized end, from personified abstraction to historical exemplar.14 A key factor is distinction. To be more specific, this is the distinction – or lack of distinction – which Petrarch and his contemporaries perceived in the interrelated natures of translation and allegory, both of which fuse within the concept of what Rita Copeland terms ‘turning meaning’. Such a distinction, by extension, results in a conceptual dichotomy for the modern medievalist.15 This discussion of the Griseldis will then examine how allegory was and continues to be translated, how Petrarch’s autotelic poetics redressed Boccaccio’s tale, and how that mutata veste continues to generate debate as to the meaning beneath its ‘costume morale’.16 By addressing such

11

12 13

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Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Oxford, 1987), p. 6. See also James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, Literature, Culture, Theory, 6 (Cambridge, 1994). Whitman, Allegory, p. 47. The Dantean conception of allegoresis, allegedly expounded at length in the much debated Epistle to Can Grande, is concisely illustrated in Inf. IX. 62–3: ‘O voi ch’avete li ’ntelletti sani | mirate la dottrina che s’asconde | sotto ’l velame de li versi strani’ (‘O you who have sound intellects, gaze on the teaching that is hidden beneath the veil of the strange verses’). As C. S. Lewis argued: ‘If Dante is right – and he almost certainly is – we must begin the history of allegory with the personifications in classical poetry’: The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), p. 48. Whitman’s examination of allegory’s progress helps to clarify its shift from such personification: ‘In the very process of challenging the old frameworks allegory necessarily generates new ones. It is simultaneously committed to radical acts of destruction and construction’ (Allegory, p. 58). Rita Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation in the Middle Ages’, SAC, 9 (1987), pp. 41–75 (at p. 42). I am using allegoresis as referring to the ‘allegorical interpretation’ of a given text, which itself may or may not be an ‘allegorical composition’. See Whitman’s discussion of the two categories (Allegory, pp. 3–6). Guido Martellotti, ‘Momenti narrativi del Petrarca’, Studi petrarcheschi, 4 (1951), pp. 7–33 (at p. 9, my translation). The expression Petrarch’s ‘autotelic poetics’ designates his habit



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questions we will be able to formulate a clearer picture of just how Chaucer received the tale and what he did with it. Before such matters can be addressed directly, however, it remains necessary to establish the extent to which Petrarch’s translation may be definitively classified as allegory. Might it not, in spite of Gualtieri’s (Valterius’s) extreme behaviour towards his wife and in spite of Griselda’s (Griseldis’s) superhuman resolve, belong to the more explicitly didactic category of the exemplum book? Charlotte Morse, in her examination of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, which draws both on Petrarch’s Latin text and on the anonymous Livre Griseldis, argues for the latter: The allegorizers justify Walter’s tests of Griselda […] by reading them as God’s tests of the faithful Christian soul […] Thus displacing the tale from itself and from themselves, readers make it safe, acceptable, and comfortable […] the allegorizers, and outraged students – and, to varying degrees, the proponents of aesthetic failure – resist the example of Griselda’s patience, her chief virtue.17

Other critics, such as Martin McLaughlin, have argued for the counterpoint, stating that ‘Petrarch saw his heroine as an allegory of the human soul’.18 I will return subsequently to the theological specifics of Petrarch’s alleged allegoresis; for the moment I would like to focus briefly upon the perceived distinction between the two categories. The separation between allegory and exemplum, apart from constituting a false dichotomy – allegorical representations of the seven deadly sins, for instance, served specific exemplary ends – is central to the tale’s problematic reception and is related to the question of whether the tale functions as historia or fabula. As Carolyn Dinshaw (amongst others) has argued, ‘the tale’s attractiveness does indeed lie in its hermeneutic difficulty’.19

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18

19

of illustrating the process by which his work develops; an illustration apparent within the work itself, which advertises its textuality. Charlotte C. Morse, ‘The Exemplary Griselda’, SAC, 7 (1985), pp. 51–86 (at p. 52). Philippe de Mézières, for example, who translated the tale into French around 1385–9 as part of his Livre sur la vertu du sacrament du marriage, evidently saw it as exemplum, as Morse rightly argues. This does not mean that Petrarch understood it as such, nor does it deny the possibility that Philippe also understood an allegorical subtext to the tale. See Kevin Brownlee, ‘Commentary and Rhetoric of Exemplarity: Griseldis in Petrarch, Philippe de Mézières, and the Estoire’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 91 (1992), pp. 865–90 (at p. 867). Martin McLaughlin, ‘Petrarch’s Rewriting of the Decameron, X. 10’, in Eileen A. Millar, ed., Renaissance and Other Studies: Essays Presented to Peter M. Brown (Glasgow, 1988), pp. 42–59 (at p. 56). See, also by M. McLaughlin, ‘Humanist Rewriting and Translation: The Latin Griselda from Petrarch to Neri de’ Nerli’, Humanistica, 1 (2006), pp. 23–40. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI, 1989), p. 133. See also Anne Middleton, ‘The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts’, SAC, 2 (1980), pp. 121–50.

138  Chaucer and Petrarch

Such hermeneutic difficulty has been central to the tale since its first recorded appearance in the Decameron, as Boccaccio’s fictional company, the brigata, debate both its meaning and its merits: La novella di Dioneo era finita, e assai le donne, chi d’una parte e chi d’altra tirando, chi biasimando una cosa, un’altro intorno a essa lodandone, n’avevan favellato. Dioneo’s story had ended, and the ladies, some taking one side and some another, some finding fault with one of its details and some commending another, had talked about it at length. (Dec. X, Concl. 1)

The novella’s inherent potential for diverse interpretations is translated by Petrarch into his Latin version, as he relates the contrasting responses of a Paduan and a Veronese reader, mutual friends of Petrarch and Boccaccio, in the letter following the Griseldis epistle.20 The Paduan reader interprets the tale as historia and cannot finish reading it for weeping; the Veronese reader on the other hand views it as fabula, and refuses to believe that any such figure as Griseldis could have existed, given her almost supernatural patience. However, this second response may hold the key to Petrarch’s own understanding of the tale’s verisimilitude, as he complains that ‘[e]sse nonnullos, qui quaecunque difficilia eis sint, impossibilia omnibus arbitrentur, sic mesura sua omnia metientes’ (‘there are some who consider whatever is difficult for them, impossible for everyone, and they so judge everything by their own measure’, Sen. XVII. 4. 546/670). Petrarch had made a similar comment in relation to Boccaccio’s critics in the preface to his translation: ‘scio expertus esse hominum genus et insolens et ignavum, qui, quidquid ipsi vel nolunt vel nesciunt vel non possunt, in aliis reprehendunt’ (‘I know that such people have proved arrogant and despicable: they chastise others for accomplishing whatever they lack the will, or the knowledge, or the ability to do’, Sen. XVII. 3. 10–12).21 Furthermore, Petrarch proceeds to offer examples from history in order to qualify the verisimilitude of the tale, which confirms Martellotti’s 20

21

For a discussion of the readers’ possible identities, see A. S. Cook, ‘The First Two Readers of Petrarch’s Tale of Griselda’, Modern Philology, 15 (1918), pp. 633–43, and V. Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, ed. by Dennis J. McAuliffe, trans. by Richard Monges (New York, 1976), p. 173. Martellotti (‘Momenti narrativi’, p. 31) suggests that they may even have been fictionalized: ‘The juxtaposition of the two [readings] has a stylized quality, and makes the reader suspect that the poet’s imagination has played some part in it.’ Petrarch suggests that eventually all histories become stories in any case: ‘nescio an res veras, an fictas, quae iam non historiae, sed fabellae sunt’ (‘whether the contents are true or fictitious I know not, since they are no longer histories but just tales’, Sen. XVII. 4. 546/669; emphasis added). He thus excises the historia versus fabula debate by expositing the view that they are the same thing in different states of development. Petrarch’s piqued response also appears to echo Augustine’s De civitate Dei, XXI. 5–7. See Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. by David Knowles, trans. by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 971–9.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  139

position that, in ‘preparing to link this tale of Griselda to the manifold examples of virtue that he has described in his historical works’, Petrarch felt it necessary to ‘consider the events as being at least possible, if not true; and it is on this point that he insists at length in the two letters which accompany his translation’.22 It may then be argued that Petrarch saw Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda’s misfortunes as being either a possible history, or a history which had passed into story as part of a gradual, determined osmosis. At no point does he claim that the tale is pure fantasy. Yet this is not to deny its allegorical dimension; as was mentioned above in relation to Dante’s figurative strategy, historia does not preclude allegoria. Moreover, as Robert Durling has argued in his discussion of the letter which recounts Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux (Familiares IV. 1), ‘it is possible that Petrarch himself had conceived of a relationship […] between the literal sense and the allegorical sense, as between fictional integumentum and true content’, although he renders them ‘deliberately inextricable’.23 In the same way that history may become story, so may it become allegory. With the tale’s allegorical potential placed in context, it is possible to return to the primary question of just how allegory is, or was, translated. In order to broach such a question in relation to these two texts, it becomes necessary to establish the relationship between translation and metaphor. Rita Copeland has shown that the ‘commonplaces of translative theory descended to the Middle Ages (and in turn to us) from ancient rhetoric’.24 Petrarch’s translative formula, at least as it pertains to his rewriting of Boccaccio’s tale, although it appears to be humanistically based on classical principles, is in fact representative of established medieval practice, as we have seen. Crucially, Copeland also posits the complex interrelation between interpretation and metaphor, which characterized the medieval translatio and which is central to a clear understanding of Petrarch’s allegoresis: As is well known, the standard rhetorical term for metaphor, translatio, also denoted translation in medieval usage. But in Latin, translatio as a term for translation long competed with the word interpretatio, a term from hermeneutics. […] The word interpretatio, however, is also the Latin term equivalent to the Greek hermēneia, and it is this idea that informs 22 23

24

Martellotti, ‘Momenti narrativi’, p. 20. See also McLaughlin, ‘Petrarch’s Redressing’, pp. 43–7. Durling notes not only that the account of the ascent is a ‘key text in the Petrarchan corpus’, but also that the problematic of historia and of fabula (which it details) ‘is not completely resolved’, indeed cannot be, due to this inextricability. See R. M. Durling, ‘Il Petrarca, il Ventoso, e la possibilità dell’allegoria’, Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes, 23 (1977), pp. 304–23 (at pp. 304–5, my translation). Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation’, p. 44.

140  Chaucer and Petrarch both uses of translatio, as interlingual paraphrase and as metaphor. Both, as linguistic acts of turning meaning, are acts of interpretation.25

Medieval translation is, then, both an act of ‘interlingual paraphrase’ and one of metaphorical ‘turning’. Moreover, this concept of translatio as constituting the point at which periphrasis meets allegoresis is reinforced by the concretizing, disclosing nature of both, as the former ‘gives verbal expression to that which may be silent in [rather than absent from] the text but which the interpreter has discovered’, whilst the latter ‘proposes itself as co-extensive with the [primary] text, as the realization, at the level of the text’s “proper” (as opposed to “figurative”) reference, of authorial intentionality’.26 It is with this dual model of translatio in mind that Petrarch would have approached Boccaccio’s text. It is also such a model that Chaucer would have adhered to, as Copeland argues: ‘Chaucer’s Boece is part of this vernacular tradition of translation in which interpretatio (exegesis) and exercitatio are conflated.’27 At this point it ought perhaps to be made clear that the definition of allegory from which I am working is situated at a midpoint between the modern and the medieval. The OED’s definition of allegory as signifying either symbolic representation or an extended metaphor places it well within the remit of medieval translatio, and also aligns it with the rather generalized use of the term, as both Petrarch and Boccaccio would have understood it. Indeed Petrarch, in a letter to his brother Gherardo, describes his conception of allegory in straightforward terms: theologie quidem minime adversa poetica est. Miraris? parum abest quin dicam theologiam poeticam esse de Deo […] Quid vero aliud parabole Salvatoris in Evangelio sonant, nisi sermonem a sensibus alienum sive, ut uno verbo exprimam, alieniloquium, quam allegoriam usitatiori vocabulo nuncupamus? Atqui ex huiusce sermonis genere poetica omnis intexta est […] sensibus intende, qui si veri salubresque sunt, quolibet stilo illos amplectere. In truth, poetry is not in the least contrary to theology. Does this astonish you? I might almost say that theology is the poetry of God. […] Indeed, what else do the parables of the Savior in the Gospels echo if not a discourse different from ordinary meaning or, to express it briefly, figurative speech, which we call allegory in ordinary language? Yet poetry is woven from this kind of discourse […] Concentrate on the meaning; if it is true and wholesome, embrace it regardless of the style. (Fam. X. 4. 301–3/69–70)

25 26 27

Ibid., p. 42. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation: Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 81–4. Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation’, p. 57.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  141

There is thus no need here to reinstate Lewis’s famous distinction between allegorical and symbolical functions as he explains it in the Allegory of Love, as Petrarch and Boccaccio – like Dante before them – would have incorporated both within the single term.28 Also, as Rosemund Tuve has pointed out, such a ‘Coleridgean definition of allegory (and symbol) [is] born of nineteenth-century German critical theory, not mediaeval usage’.29 Had Chaucer known more of Petrarch’s correspondence than Seniles XVII, then the epistle to Gherardo might have provided the necessary riposte to the Host’s stricture that the Clerk should keep his rhetorical colours in store ’til so be ye endite | Heigh style’ (IV. 17–18), requesting him rather to speak ‘so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye, | That we may understonde what ye seye’ (IV. 19–20). The Clerk himself admits that ‘Petrak writeth […] with heigh stile he enditeth’ (IV. 1147–8) after having told his tale, and that its meaning – or Harry’s misreading of it – ‘veri salubresque’ (‘true and wholesome’) as it is, is embraced in spite of this apparent stylistic insubordination. Furthermore, the ‘heigh style’ does not preclude the allegorical. In his discussion of the three forms of style in the De doctrina christiana, Augustine, after having spoken of the subdued and temperate styles, proceeds to discuss the grand style. This mode of speech ‘capit etiam illa ornamenta paean omnia, sed ea so non habuerit, non requirit’ (‘[a]lthough it uses all the ornaments [including allegory], it does not seek them if it does not need them’, IV. xx. 42).30 Nor is allegory removed from speech that is ‘pleyn’, as Augustine notes: ‘allegoria, aenigma, parabola […] omni hi tropi, qui liberali dicuntur arte cognosci, etiam in eorum reperiantur loquellis, qui nullos grammaticos audierunt et eo, quo vulgus utitur, sermon contenti sunt’ (‘allegoria, aenigma, parabola […] all of these tropes, said to be learned in the liberal arts, find a place in the speech of those who have never heard the lectures of grammarians and are content with the usage of common speech’, III. xxix. 40). 28

29 30

‘The allegorist leaves the given – his own passions – to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real. To put the difference in another way, for the symbolist it is we who are the allegory […] However the personification [of Amor in La vita nuova] is to be defended, it is clear that Dante has no thought of pretending that it is more than a personification’ (Lewis, Allegory, pp. 45–7). Rosemund Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, NJ, 1966), p. 3. All the quotations from De doctrina christiana are taken from Saint Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. by Joseph Martin, Aurelii Augustini Opera 4. 1 (Turnhout, 1962); for the English translation see On Christian Doctrine, trans. by D. W. Robertson (Indianapolis, IN, 1958). On the subject of ‘pleyn’ speech, see Erich Auerbach’s discussion of sermo humilis in Literary Language and the Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. by Ralph Manheim (London, 1965), pp. 25–66. Auerbach notes the distinction between Augustine’s three rhetorical levels, which may be applied to the same matter, and the Ciceronian application of style to matter in De oratore, 69ff. In Christian discourse, ‘ “low locutions” are transformed by their contact with the serious and the sublime’ (p. 56).

142  Chaucer and Petrarch

Yet Augustine warns against Harry’s form of literal interpretation: ‘[c] um enim figurate dictum sic accipitur, tamquam proprie dictum sit, carnaliter sapitur [….] intelligentia carni subiicitur sequendo litteram’ (‘when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally […] the understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the pursuit of the letter’, III. v. 9).31 Even Petrarch’s exhortation that true and wholesome meaning ought to be embraced regardless of style has its Augustinian precedent in the De doctrina christiana: ‘Porro qui non verbis contendit, sive submisse sive temperate sive granditer dicat, id agit verbis, ut veritas pateat, veritas placeat, veritas moueat’ (‘Indeed, he who does not dispute in words whether he uses the subdued, the moderate, or the grand style, so acts with words that the truth becomes clear, that the truth is pleasing, and that the truth moves’, IV. xxviii. 61). The focus upon the forcible or effective nature of the grand or ‘heigh’ style lies at the heart of what Charles Trinkaus terms Petrarch’s theologia rhetorica.32 And, whilst Petrarch emphasizes the import of truth over style’, he nevertheless tends towards the grand and the allegorical. Furthermore, one need only look at the tearful response of the Paduan reader of Petrarch’s translation in order to bear out the Clerk’s judgement of the tale’s ‘heigh style’, as Augustine explains that ‘the grand style frequently prevents applauding voices with its own weight, but it may bring forth tears’ (‘[g]rande autem genus plerumque pondere suo uoces premit, sed lacrimas exprimit’), affecting the audience ‘finally through a change of their way of life’ (‘postremo vitae mutatione monstrasse’, De doctrina, IV. xxiv. 53). However, if Lewis’s allegory/symbol dichotomy is disallowed by virtue of its anachronism, it does not follow that Petrarchan allegory is entirely amorphous – far from it. Both Petrarch and Boccaccio understood a distinction which has become increasingly central to contemporary discussions of the allegorical mode. In order to highlight this distinction, I refer to Paul Piehler’s discussion of allegory in his work The Visionary Landscape, wherein he claims that ‘allegory proper pleases by the appropriateness, ingenuity and wit displayed in the translation of the basic material into allegorical form’.33 This conception admits the translative element of allegory and highlights a further bifurcation by default. Piehler’s definition, whilst referring to the allegorization which takes place at the moment of the text’s composition, may serve just as well as a definition of allegoresis: the exegetical hermeneutics whereby 31

32

33

Harry’s ‘carnal’ interpretation is congruent with Mark Miller’s description of him as ‘Chaucer’s mouthpiece for the “common sense” of bourgeois masculinity’: Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 2004), p. 239. See Chapters I and XV. 2 of Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (Chicago, 1970), pp. 689–97. See also, by the same author, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, CT, 1979), pp. 90–113. Paul Piehler, The Visionary Landscape: A Study in Medieval Landscape (London, 1971), pp. 10–11.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  143

it is disclosed that the basic, ostensibly non-allegorical material possesses a metaphorical dimension. The dichotomy which Tuve denied Lewis has thus been succeeded by another: The older polarity ‘symbol-allegory’, which valued symbol over allegory, appears to have been replaced with the polarity ‘allegory-allegoresis,’ in which allegory stands as the preferred mode. This is at least one implication of the term ‘imposed allegory’ used by Rosemund Tuve to characterize a text like the Ovide moralisé as an example of allegoresis, against which the properties of ‘true’ allegory can be defined.34

My own interpretation of allegory is, then, predicated upon correspondence between the current definition (extended metaphor) and Petrarch’s ‘figurative speech’. And, whilst this interpretation entails the acknowledgement of the division between allegory and allegoresis – as Petrarch and his peers would have made the distinction between Whitman’s categories of allegorical composition and allegorical interpretation – it does not privilege one over the other, but does concede to the conjunction of translation and allegory within allegoresis. Despite this conceptual or definitive correlation between the contemporary and the medieval, there remains an interpretative dilemma which the modern reader faces when reading Boccaccio’s tale. The ‘basic material’, that which Petrarch is not simply translating but transmuting ‘into allegorical form’, is already amenable to charges of allegory proper; yet, if Petrarch’s translation is not the most immediately obvious example of medieval allegory, then Boccaccio’s original is even less so. This dilemma corresponds, however, with Copeland’s argument that ‘allegoresis proposes itself as co-extensive with the text’, as it may be claimed that Boccaccio imbues his tale with the potential capacity for allegory, which he expected to be fulfilled by the reader; although it is unlikely that he would have anticipated Petrarch’s translation. Indeed, it would be difficult to reconcile Gualtieri’s actions, his ‘matta bestialità’ (Dec. X. 10. 3) or ‘merveillous desir’, as Chaucer terms it (IV. 454), without recourse to such interpretatio.35 It is only through allegory 34 35

Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville, ‘Allegory and Allegoresis: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics’, Exemplaria, 3 (1991), pp. 159–87 (at pp. 161–2). An echo of Virgil’s words to the Pilgrim in Inf. XI. 79–83: ‘Non ti rimembra di quelle parole | con le quai la tua Etica pertratta | le tre disposizion che ’l ciel non vole, | incontenenza, malizia e la matta | bestialitade?’ (‘Do you not remember the words with which your Ethics treats so fully the three dispositions that Heaven refuses, incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality?’) This passage, however, as Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi argues, poses ‘a difficult question – and indeed it is one which is still discussed today – because it is linked to an apparent incongruity in [Dante’s] text’. See Dante Alighieri, Commedia. Volume 1: Inferno, ed. by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Milan, 1991), p. 352. See also Durling’s edition (The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Volume 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. by Robert M. Durling, Oxford, 1996), p. 182, for a brief account of the critical debate as to

144  Chaucer and Petrarch

that the tale’s action can be justified; otherwise, when Boccaccio – or rather Dioneo, who relates the tale – declares that some good did come of it in the end (‘che ben ne gli seguisse alla fine’, Dec. X. 10. 3), we would find it difficult to understand exactly how. Through a referral to the tale’s mythological origins, however, and an examination of key elements within Boccaccio’s original which are amplified by Petrarch’s translation, we may reveal the allegorical basis necessary for semantic validation.36 It may even be argued that the good which results is the fusion of the primary text’s hermeneutic potentia with the secondary text’s allegoresis. Yet, in order to enable the evaluation of the Boccaccian text’s exegetical afterlife, it is necessary to trace its history. M. J. Marcus, drawing on previous studies by Griffith, Cate and Severs, asserts that the tale of Griselda’s hardships and mistreatment constitutes a development of the Cupid and Psyche folk-tale, in which ‘an other-world creature marries a mortal and subjects the spouse to a series of tests’; but the story had to adapt itself, through the process called rationalization, to the needs of more sophisticated, less credulous audiences. Accordingly, the other-world creature becomes a nobleman, and the mortal becomes a peasant […] so that the original spiritual meaning is displaced from the literal to the allegorical level. Allegory thus becomes a way of maintaining the original supernatural purpose of this folk tale while allowing the narratives to rationalize according to the rules of medieval poetics.37

Charlotte Morse, on the other hand, refutes, or at least is sceptical towards, the Cupid and Psyche interpretation, whilst Bettridge and Utley have argued for the tale’s basis in a different folk tale – that of the ‘patience of a princess’ tradition.38 However, as Vladimir Propp illustrated in his seminal formalist

36 37

38

the alleged Aristotelian referent; and Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 125–7, for a discussion of Dioneo’s use of the phrase. See also Chapter 5, p. 174. I would argue that the import of this phrase for Boccaccio’s tale, irrespective of any Aristotelian context, is that it introduces a theological dimension upon which Petrarch could expand. The Petrarchan equivalent of ‘matta bestialità’ is ‘mirabilis […] cupiditas’ (Sen. XVII. 3. 193), which has more of an Augustinian resonance and is the source of Chaucer’s ‘merveillous desir’. Our knowledge of these potential origins, however, does not detract from Petrarch’s belief in the tale’s historical possibility. See Millicent J. Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Saratoga, CA, 1979), pp. 98–9. See also D. D. Griffith, The Origin of the Griselda Story (Seattle, 1931) and W. A. Cate, ‘The Problem of the Origin of the Griselda Story’, Studies in Philology, 29 (1932), pp. 389–405. See Morse, ‘Critical Approaches to the Clerk’s Tale’, in C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds, Chaucer’s Religious Tales (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 71–83: ‘The folklorists explained Walter as a rationalized version of a monstrous, supernatural bridegroom who is not, however, rationalized enough to make him acceptable to these lovers of novelistic realism. The folkloric explanation satisfied modern critics by allowing them to simultane-



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  145

study Morphology of the Folktale, the ‘characters of a tale, however varied they may be, often perform the same actions. The actual means of the realization of functions can vary.’39 As such, the tale of the patient princess may have different dramatis personae from those of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, whilst their functions may remain the same. Propp also provides a similar account of rationalization, or acculturation as Bettridge and Utley prefer to term it, which may help to explain the multiple hermeneutics which Boccaccio’s tale elicits.40 Propp argues that, ‘as the characteristics and functions of deities are transferred from one to another, and, finally, are even carried over to Christian saints’, the functions of personages do transfer from one to the other – for example from Cupid and Psyche to Walter and Griselda. By extension, there is only a small number of functions relative to the potential number of the dramatis personae, and this accounts for ‘the two-fold quality of a tale: its amazing multiformity, picturesqueness, and colour, and on the other hand, its no less striking uniformity, its repetition’.41 Petrarch’s recollection of when he first heard the tale may appear to support the view that the tale emerged out of the folk tradition: ‘michi semper ante multos annos audita placuisset, et tibi usque adeo placuisse perpenderem ut vulgari eam stilo tuo censueris non indignam’ (‘it had consistently pleased me for many years after I first heard it and you liked it, I felt, well enough to give it the final position in your [vernacular] book’, Seniles XVII. 3. 30–2). As Petrarch was writing in 1372–3 and the Decameron was written ­c.1348–51, it is possible that Petrarch had heard a version of his friend’s tale without knowing its derivation; however, the unspecific nature of ‘ante multos annos’ prevents us from knowing if this was the case. Petrarch evidently thought (knew?) that the tale preceded Boccaccio, which creates an equality between the two: they are both translators – hence perhaps the mirroring of ‘placuisset’ and ‘placuisse’. In Petrarch’s eyes, both he and Boccaccio are operating upon antecedent material – extracting or instilling its allegorical, moral, and overall hermeneutic potential – although Boccaccio has appropriated a number of folk-tale motifs and adapted them beyond recognition.42 In consequence, many of the allegorical commonplaces are present in Boccaccio’s tale, but implicitly or vestigially so, or rather in that state of orchestrated potentia expressed above. It is left to Petrarch’s translatio to explicate fully the allegory which underpins its source. Furthermore, certain

39 40 41 42

ously understand and feel superior to the Clerk’s defectively primitive story’ (pp. 72–3). See also William Edwin Bettridge and Francis Lee Utley, ‘New Light on the Origin of the Griselda Story’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 13 (1971), pp. 153–208 (at p. 169). Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, ed. by Louis A. Wagner, trans. by Laurence Scott, 2nd edn (Austin, TX, 1979), p. 20. Bettridge and Utley, ‘Origin of the Griselda Story’, p. 162. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, pp. 20–1. It must be noted, however, that no direct source for Boccaccio’s tale has been found.

146  Chaucer and Petrarch

allegorical mainstays which are absent from Boccaccio’s tale are reintroduced by Petrarch’s translation. For example, Boccaccio (or Dioneo) begins his tale thus: ‘Già è gran tempo, fu tra’ marchesi di Sanluzzo il maggior della casa un giovane chiamato Gualtieri’ (‘A long time ago, there succeeded to the marquisate of Saluzzo a young man named Gualtieri’, Dec. X. 10. 4). Whereas the terseness of Boccaccio’s style in the Decameron allows him to elaborate no further than the name of the place in which the tale is set, Petrarch begins with a lengthy description of the locus amoenus, that setting for the allegory which, as Piehler states, ‘is composed of images taken from the external world and transfigured by spiritual vision’.43 The actual region of Sanluzzo thus becomes edenic, a paradise terrestre, and thereby sets the tone for Petrarch’s blurring of the generic boundary between historia and fabula: Est ad Ytalie latus occiduum Vesulus ex Apennini iugis mons unus altissimus, qui, vertice nubila superans, [liquido sese] ingerit etheri, mons suapte nobilis natura, Padi ortu nobilissimus, qui eius e latere fonte lapsus exiguo, orientem contra solem fertur, mirisque mox tumidus incrementis brevi spacio decurso, non tantum maximorum unus amnium sed fluviorum a Virgilio rex dictus, Liguriam gurgitem violentus intersecat; dehinc Emiliam atque Flamineam Veneciamque discriminans, multis ad ultimum et ingentibus hostiis in Adriaticum mare descendit. Ceterum pars illa terrarium […] et civitates aliquot et oppida habet egregia. Inter cetera, ad radicem Vesuli, terra Saluciarum vicis et castellis satis frequens, marchionum arbitrio nobilium quorundam regitur virorum. On the western side of Italy, a lofty mountain named Vesulus reaches its peak out of the Apennines and into the rarified air above the clouds. This mountain, famous in its own right, is most renowned as the source of the Po. The river falls from a small spring on the mountainside and, carried toward the rising sun, is quickly swollen in a brief space by numerous tributaries. Thus it becomes not only one of the great streams but (as Virgil calls it) the king of rivers. It rushes through the Ligurian rapids; from there it bounds Emilia, Flaminia, and Venice and finally descends to the Adriatic Sea in a great delta. That part of the country […] contains many towns and notable cities. The land of Saluzzo lies among the others at the root of Vesulus, full enough of villages and castles and ruled by the will of certain noble marquises. (Sen. XVII. 3. 50–62)

Petrarch has clearly chosen to translate Boccaccio’s tale as an allegory which is consonant with his conception of Latin’s superiority over the vernacular. The hyperbolic language he employs, ‘altissimus’, ‘superans’, ‘nobilissimus’, imbues the landscape with a transcendent, aureate vision, rhetorically removed from the historical reality of the place, which is nevertheless expressed through the proem’s specificity and proper nouns. Petrarch is effec43

Piehler, Visionary Landscape, p. 13.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  147

tively filling in the gaps left by the Italian version in order to circumscribe his Latin reworking within the tropic certainties offered by the allegorical form. Yet it is necessary to clarify exactly what is signified – apart from the tale’s ascent from the vernacular of ‘nostro materno eloquio’ (‘our mother tongue’, Sen. XVII. 3. 1) to the language of the patria – by the ‘impertinent’ use of this ‘heigh style’ (IV. 54, 18).44 That the Clerk really thought the proem ‘impertinent’ must be taken with a pinch of irony, as the judgement is undermined on two fronts. The first is the Clerk’s rhetorical use of negatio, whereby an author forswears something only to capitulate to it; in this instance the Clerk translates a great deal of Petrarch’s opening almost verbatim after dismissing it. The second is the caveat that accompanies the dismissal: ‘Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent, | Save that he wole conveyen his mateere’ (IV. 54–5); that is, it serves as an introductory vehicle for the tenor of the tale.45 The proem’s allegorical function has been explored in detail by Emilie P. Kadish, who argues that ‘by tone and content it sets the mood for the story and directs attention to Griselda’.46 This is achieved through a form of speculum familiar to readers of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. In Petrarch’s sonnet sequence, the natural world often reflects the poet–lover’s mind, or rather the interior is projected upon the exterior.47 However, it must be stressed that this is not what criticism terms ‘the pathetic fallacy’, which suggests a form of misreading; Petrarch is deliberately arranging a rhetorical and metaphorical balance. In the Rime sparse, too, one finds the landscape following the template of Madonna Laura, as not only her bodily parts but also her name is scattered across it: she becomes the wind (‘l’aura’); the dawn and its golden rays, which blind the poet (‘l’aurora’ and ‘l’ora’); and of course the poeticized, eroticized laurel tree (‘lauro’).48 It is this same form of rhetorical equivalence, I would argue, that one encounters when reading the proem to Petrarch’s Griseldis, and that Kadish exposits: 44 45

46

47

48

See Middleton, ‘The Clerk and His Tale’ (pp. 128–30) and Dinshaw, Sexual Poetics (pp. 149–50) for a discussion of the shift from maternal to paternal language. The Clerk is evidently making a mockery of the Host’s stipulation, a point to which I return in the following chapter. On the possibility that ‘heigh style’ is a translation of ‘stilo alio’ (‘another style’), see Warren Ginsberg’s notes to the tale in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987), pp. 879–4 (at p. 880, n. 41). Emilie P. Kadish, ‘The Proem of Petrarch’s Griselda’, Mediaevalia, 2 (1976), pp. 189–206 (at p. 191). See also, by the same author, ‘Petrarch’s Griselda: An English Translation’, Mediaevalia, 3 (1977), pp. 1–24. It is not surprising to find that Petrarch’s poetical model was Virgil, whose technique, according to Whitman, ‘has deeper implications for the development of allegory. By passing so smoothly between the outer and inner worlds, he tends to blur the distinctions between them. The clear, hard outlines of the Homeric world, which limited the possibilities of allegory, are softening in focus’ (Allegory, p. 52). For a discussion of Laura sparse, see Nancy J. Vickers, ‘The Body Re-membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description’, in John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols Jr, eds, Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (London, 1982), pp. 100–9.

148  Chaucer and Petrarch Nature is here presented as sign or symbol of a reality that transcends both the physical world and its viewer […] The physical beauty and perfection of the mountain and river – a vision of natural grandeur – are, as the story unfolds, to be equalled and exceeded by a vision of the spiritual beauty of a human being, a woman outwardly very frail both by nature and by reason of her humble social position. […] The natural phenomena described in the poem represent not geography but poetry, in the sense that Petrarch understood poetry: a veil which tantalizingly conceals truth.49

Interestingly, Kadish compares the unveiling of the proemical scene with the same letter that Durling refers to in his discussion of Petrarch’s allegorical landscape, namely the letter detailing the ascent of Mount Ventoux (‘Ventoso’). Arguing that in the proem Petrarch ‘introduced a mountain at once as physical and as abstract as Monte Ventoso’, Kadish also describes how the clouds pierced by Mount Monviso ‘now form a kind of veil to mask from mortal eyes the sacredness of a mysterious union’.50 In this sense, Petrarch’s use of the mountain – whose summit rises above the clouds into the ether beyond (‘qui, vertice nubile superans, [liquido sese] ingerit etheri’) – as an allegorical symbol looks back not only to the account of Mount Ventoux, but also to the shadow of the Augustinian mountain, in which it was written and with which it forms an intertextual union that clarifies the typological mystery. In other words, the constancy of Griseldis, as it is prefigured by the proem’s topography, reveals the Augustinian castigation of ‘the foolishness of men who willingly undertake a task as difficult and as pointless as the ascent of an earthly mountain but shrink before that much more crucial task of raising their souls to God’.51 It is also possible that the Latin text’s edenic, rhetorically elevated and geographically enclosed mise-en-scène owes something to the hortus conclusus within which the Decameron opens.52 In the translation’s framing epistle, Petrarch informs Boccaccio that he had received the work, but had been too busy (‘occupacio me maior’) to read it carefully, and so ‘[excucurri] eum, et festini viatoris in morem, hinc atque hinc circumspiciens, nec subsistens’ (‘skimmed through the book like a hurried tourist, glancing 49 50 51

52

Kadish, ‘Proem of Petrarch’s Griselda’, pp. 193–6. Ibid., pp. 193–201. Ibid., p. 200. The Augustinian reference is Confessions, X. x. 15. See Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991), p. 18; and Durling (‘Il Petrarca, il Ventoso’). The ‘hortus conclusus’ (‘enclosed garden’) is a mainstay of allegorical composition, the most famous medieval example being that of the Roman de la Rose, 130–1: ‘Si vi un vergier grant et lé | Tout clos de haut mur bataillié’ (‘I saugh a gardyn right anoon | Ful long and brood, and everydell | Enclosed was, and walled well’, A 136–8). See Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Armand Strubel (Paris, 1992), p. 48. For the English translation, see The Romaunt of the Rose, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 685–767 (at p. 688).



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  149

here and there, but not stopping’). Yet Petrarch also reveals that ‘curiosius aliquanto quam cetera libri principium finemque perspexi’ (‘I considered the beginning and end of the book more closely than the rest’, Sen. XVII. 3. 4–19), as the artes rhetoricae dictate that these are the points where the most potent matter ought to be located. His reading thus focussed upon the opening description of the plague, which causes Boccaccio’s company to flee from Florence to a country retreat, and upon the tale of Griselda. The idealized description of the estate to which the brigata appears in the author’s introduction, prior to the first novella, and does bear some resemblance to Petrarch’s elevated ‘Saluciarum’: Era il detto luogo sopra una picola montagnetta, da ogni parte lontano alquanto alle nostre strade, di varii albuscelli e piante tutte di verdi fronde ripiene piacevoli a riguardare […] con pratelli da torno e con giardini maravigliosi e con pozzi d’acque freschissime. The spot in question was some distance away from the road, on a small hill that was agreeable to behold for its abundance of shrubs and trees, all bedecked in green leaves […] Delectable meadows and gardens lay all around, and there were wells of cool, refreshing water. (Dec., Intro. 90)

Boccaccio’s landscape almost serves as a miniature or bonsai version of Petrarch’s Latin grandeur. His ‘una picola montagnetta’ is dwarfed in comparison with Petrarch’s ‘mons unus altissimus’, yet the comparison still exists, and Boccaccio’s setting, although smaller, is no less abundant, and no less marvellous.53 Yet Boccaccio does not omit the ‘seminal image’ from the Decameron’s closing tale – that is, the allegorical figure’s ‘preliminary or invocatory state’, whereby the ‘manifestation of the deity’ or the personified virtue is summoned to the locus amoenus.54 Unsurprisingly, Petrarch amplifies the invocation in order to leave the reader in no doubt as to the tale’s signification, or rather to his individual, initial interpretatio of its signification.55 This becomes evident when we compare the two passages: più volte il pregaron che moglie prendesse, acciò che egli senza erede né essi senza signor rimanessero. [Gualtieri’s vassals] repeatedly begged him to marry so that he should not be left without an heir nor they without a lord. (Dec. X. 10. 5) 53 54 55

For a discussion of Boccaccio’s giardino as constituting an allegorical, paradisiacal space, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play, pp. 107–17. Piehler, Visionary Landscape, p. 15. A central tenet of Petrarch’s thought is his emphasis upon the centrality of individual experience, his belief in what Hans Baron terms ‘solitudinarian universalism’ in his Petrarch’s Secretum: Its Making and Its Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1985), p. 244. This tenet naturally applies to Petrarchan hermeneutics, as the latter is exemplified by his account of the divergent Paduan and Veronese responses.

150  Chaucer and Petrarch unus cui vel auctoritas maior erat vel facundia maiorque cum suo duce familiaritas, Tua, inquit, humanitas, optime marchio […] Libera tuos omnes molesta [solicitudine], ne si quid humaniter forsan accideret, tu sine tuo successore abeas, ipsi sine votivo rectore remaneant. One of them, either more assured or more eloquent, and better acquainted with his lord, spoke. ‘Because of your kindness, O great marquis […] Free us all from this nagging worry, lest, if anything mortal should befall, you might leave us no heir, and your people be left without an avowed ruler.’ (Sen. XVII. 3. 71–90)

Nevertheless, the invocation of the avatar, or the personification, poses a problem here, in that the roles have been reversed from the Cupid and Psyche model.56 It is Griselda/Griseldis, and not Gualtieri/Valterius (to recall Petrarch’s Latinized names), who is summoned into being by the collective; whereas in the original myth it is the male figure (Cupid) who is the divinity, and the female figure (Psyche) who is the mortal. Petrarch’s emphasis upon the invocation, transfigured into the vassals’ request that Valterius take a wife, underlines Griseldis’s supernatural essence, yet the trials to which she is put maintain male authority. What, then, is to be made of this reversal? A possible explanation is to be found in the epistolary framework to the tale, where Petrarch posits the ostensible aetiology of his translation: Hanc historiam stilo nunc alio retexere visum fuit, non tam ideo, ut matronas nostri temporis ad imitandam huius uxoris pacienciam, que michi vix mutabilis videtur, quam ut legentes ad imitandam saltem femine constanciam excitarem, ut quod hec viro suo prestitit, hoc prestare deo nostro audeant […] Habunde ego constantibus viris asscripserim, quisquis is fuerit, qui pro deo suo sine murmure paciatur quod pro suo mortali coniuge rusticana hec muliercula passa est.

56

I am using ‘avatar’ to signify the earthly incarnation or representation of a divinity. Piehler explains how medieval allegory inherits the ‘seminal image’ from pagan (classical) ritual: ‘In pagan religious rites, the preliminary to the manifestation of the deity was an elaborate process of nomination and evocation, translating him [the god] from a mere awareness of a desire for his presence to the full participation in the spiritual state he expresses and manifests. Surprisingly, the structure of such pagan ritual remains, with only slight modification, in the structure of allegory right up to the sixteenth century. Typically, a medieval allegory enacts the transformation of some bare personification or other static and unstructured image into a full visionary potentia in its appropriate locus […] I have arbitrarily named the imago in its preliminary or invocatory state, a “seminal image” ’ (Visionary Landscape, p. 15). Griselda, as ‘imago’, thus exists in her ‘preliminary or invocatory state’ as the unspecific (or ‘unstructured’) wife-to-be invoked by the vassals’ ‘desire for [her] presence’. She is translated into ‘full participation’ when she is revealed in person, and in place (Giannucolo’s hut), by Gualtieri; when she involves herself in the management of the marquis’s estate; and extratextually when her exemplary patience provides a spiritual model through Petrarch’s exposition of the tale.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  151 I thought it fitting to re-tell this story in a different style, not so much to urge the matrons of our time to imitate the patience of this wife (which seems to me almost unchanging) as to arouse readers to imitate her womanly constancy, so that they might dare to undertake for God what she undertook for her husband. […] I would have rated among the most steadfast of men one of whatever station who endured without complaint and for God what this little country wife endured for her mortal husband. (Sen. XVII. 3. 396–405)

Valterius is allowed to retain a vestige of his divine origins; apparently he submits his wife to random acts of cruelty in a symbolic reflection of Providence unfurling as human fate. If this is the case, and, as Mazzotta argues, ‘Petrarch makes of the ordeals of Griselda and the cruel arbitrariness of Gualtieri the allegory of the soul tested by God’, then it may be argued that Petrarch is aware of the tale’s mythological precedent and has aligned it with a Christian gloss.57 The original folk-tale, after all, tells of a pagan god (Cupid) testing a representation of the soul (Psyche). Yet, despite Petrarch’s Christian exegesis of his translation, the argument which refutes the tale’s allegorical interpretation, by extension, denies its Christian tenor: However Christian Petrarch was, the subtext of his Griselda is not Christian. […] Griselda’s story occurred in Christian time, in the medieval not the ancient past, so that they [Philippe and Chaucer] simply ignored stylistic devices that linked Petrarch’s prose to the ancient past and the restraint of Christian allusion that universalized his style. Petrarch thought of Griselda in terms of Pagan martyrs, Philippe, and implicitly Chaucer, thought of Christian martyrs.58

There is justification for reading Griseldis as a classical paradigm. Indeed, Martellotti had posited a stylistic link between Petrarch’s translation and his earlier work, De viris illustribus.59 Morse points to Petrarch’s naming of exemplary pagan martyrs at Seniles XVII. 4 – ‘Portiam, vel Hipsicrateam, vel Alcestim et harum similes’ (‘Porcia, Hypsicratea, or Alcestis and others like them’, 546/670) – as evidence of Griseldis’s classical virtue.60 Also, Boccaccio’s description of Portia, whose ‘love for her husband was so complete and so pure that he was by far the first and most important of her wifely concerns’ (‘delixet integre atque caste ut, inter ceteras muliebres curas, is

57 58 59 60

Mazzotta, The World at Play, p. 123. Morse, ‘Exemplary Griselda’, pp. 80–1. Martellotti, ‘Momenti narrativi’, p. 7. It may be significant of Petrarch’s fusion of historia and fabula that he names both the historical (Porcia [Portia], Hypsicratea) and the mythological (Alcestis) figure. Alcestis is of course best known to Chaucer’s audiences through the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, a work which drew on the De mulieribus claris (see below).

152  Chaucer and Petrarch

esset longe prima atque precipua’) in De mulieribus claris certainly resembles Griseldis’s declaration to Valterius that ‘[n]il placere enim tibi potest quod michi displiceat. Nichil penitus vel habere cupio vel amittere metuo, nisi te’ (‘[n]othing can please you which will displease me. There is nothing I deeply desire to possess or fear to lose, except you’, Sen. XVII. 3. 205–6).61 Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the Christian elements within and outside of the tale. For example, before her daughter was taken, Griseldis ‘benedixit ac signum sancte crucis impressit’ (‘blessed her, and marked her with the sign of the holy cross’, Sen. XVII. 3. 221), and she did the same for her son; whereas we are told that Boccaccio’s Griselda only blessed her daughter (‘benedettala’), and no mention is made of how she bade farewell to her son. Petrarch also cites James 1: 13 in his exposition of the tale: ‘intemptator malorum sit, et ipse neminem temptet’ (‘God is the appropriate tester of evils […] but he tempts no one himself ’, Sen. XVII. 3. 400–1), which reinforces the link between Griseldis’s trials and Divine Providence.62 Furthermore, in terms of a Christian subtext to apparently pagan matter, one need look no further than Petrarch’s detailed allegoresis of the first eclogue of his ostensibly Virgilian Bucolicum carmen, which appears in that same letter to his brother where his conception of allegory is found (Familiares X. 4). Yet there is no need here to set up a further dichotomy; as Petrarch reconciles historia and fabula, so does he conjoin the classical with the Christian as part of what Charles Trinkaus has termed his ‘double consciousness’ of ‘an experienced and a revealed truth’.63 Petrarch’s ability to perceive antiquity as representing ‘the possibility of a cultural alternative’ did not prevent him from adhering to Augustine’s method of reinforcing the Christian via the classical.64 Just as it is possible for the tale to be read both as allegoria and as exemplum,

61

62 63 64

See Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris, ed. by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan, 1964–98), 10 (1970): p. 326, and for the translation Famous Women, trans. by Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 168. In the preface to this treatise, Boccaccio links his work directly to Petrarch’s De viris illustribus: ‘Scripsere iam dudum non nulli veterum sub comendio de viris illustribus libros; et nostro evo, latiori tamen volumine et accuratiori stilo, vir insignis et poeta egregious Franciscus Petrarca, preceptor noster, scribit’ (‘long ago there were a few ancient authors who composed biographies of famous men in the form of compendia, and in our day that renowned man and great poet, my teacher Petrarch, is writing a similar work that will be even fuller and more carefully done’: pp. 22–4 in Zaccaria’s edition). The actual verse is: ‘Deis enim intentator malorum est: ipse autem neminem tentat’ (‘God cannot be tempted with evil, nor tempteth he any man’). Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher, p. 52. T. M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), p. 90, original emphasis.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  153

so Griseldis, and even Valterius, may maintain classical virtues without this diminishing their portrayal of Christian grace.65 However, the quasi-divinity which we are invited to read into Valterius’s actions is undermined by Petrarch’s conspicuous description of him as ‘suo mortali coniuge’ (‘her mortal husband’). It remains possible to read Petrarch’s Valterius rather as an allegorical figuration of the human being, who mistakenly aspires to godhead in an attempt to justify his cruelty, his ‘matta bestialità’. As Mazzotta posits, just as ‘God, who in his omniscience governs the design of history, [so] Gualtieri claims that he has manipulated the plot of the story’.66 This act of mimesis is borne out by the Marquis’s asseveration that all he did was directed towards a foreseen end (‘ciò che io faceva a antiveduto fine operava’, Dec. X. 10. 61). Alternatively, Wallace has argued that ‘Walter is not to be compared to God, but he might be seen as an agent of God; he might as a tyrant, be compared to the Black Death’, yet this is dependent upon our reading Valterius as a tyrant, and upon the exact identification of him with Boccaccio’s Gualtieri.67 Petrarch’s Valterius is an ameliorated ­Gualtieri, and would a tyrant be spoken to by his vassals as Valterius is by his? Their representative does not only demand that Valterius submit to the lawful yoke of matrimony before all else (‘collumque […] legitimo subicias iugo, idque quam primam facias’), but also explains that it is his kindness that allows them to speak with him in such a way and makes them feel fortunate to have such a lord (‘[t]ua […] humanitas […] hanc nobis prestat audaciam; ut et tecum singuli quociens res exposcit devota fiducia colloquamur […] ut felices nos tali domino iudicemus’, Sen. XVII. 3. 72–81). Even if we were to interpret such statements as the platitudes of an oppressed, fearful people, Valterius’s response ought to show that this is not the case, and also that he initially acknowledges the Providential source of his privileged position: Cogitis, inquit, me, amici, ad id quod michi in animum nunquam venit. Delectabar enim [mea] libertate, que in coniugio rara est. Ceterum subiectorum michi voluntatibus me sponte subicio, et prudencie vestre fisus et fidei. […] Quicquid in homine bonum est, a deo est: illi ergo et status et matrimonii mei sortes, sperans de solita sua pietate, commiserim; ipse michi inveniet quod quieti mee sit expediens ac saluti. Itaque quando vobis ita placitum est ita uxorem ducam: id vobis bona fide polliceor. Vestrumque desiderium [nec] frustrabor equidem nec morabor.

65 66 67

For the possibility of Valterius as vir illustris, see Martellotti, ‘Momenti narrativi’, passim and McLaughlin, ‘Petrarch’s Redrressing’, pp. 49–50. Mazzotta, The World at Play, p. 124. D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), p. 281.

154  Chaucer and Petrarch You urge me, friends, toward something which never entered my mind. I was accustomed to enjoy my freedom, which is rare in marriage. Even so, I submit myself freely to the will of my subjects, confident in your prudence and faith. […] Whatever good is in a person comes from God. So I will commit the fate of my rank and my marriage to him, trusting in his usual faithfulness; he will find what is best for my peace and well-being. And therefore, because it pleases you, I will choose a wife. I promise it in good faith, and will neither frustrate nor delay your wish. (Sen. XVII. 3. 91–101)

Valterius is then an agent of God, but in accordance with medieval feudalism; his right to rule is God-given, but he must rule according to the wishes, needs and benefit of his subjects. Once he acts against the common good – which he does in his mistreatment of his wife, who ‘non virum modo sed totam patriam letam fecit’ (‘made not only the marquis, but the whole country happy’, Sen. XVII. 3. 191–2) – then he mistakes his divinely ordained position for a form of divinity in itself; a situation which creates the potential for tyranny.68 Therefore, if we are to consider Valterius a tyrant at any point, it should not be at the beginning of the tale but at the point where he is seized by his strange craving, Boccaccio’s ‘matta bestialità’. Valterius’s concern with self-aggrandizement after this point blinds him to the more valid allegorical manifestation of the deity represented by Griseldis’s figura Christi. Indeed, Marga Cottino-Jones has argued for just such a reading of Boccaccio’s original: Griselda stands out as a sacrificial character, a pharmakos, a figura Christi who is called on to offer herself as the innocent victim needed to restore her surrounding community to the harmony and happiness emblematic of a Golden Age condition of existence […] Two central myths are also present and identifiable with the two main protagonists of the story, Gualtieri, the Marquis, signifying the Divine Father Archetype, and Griselda, typifying the Christ archetype.69

One cannot help but suspect that such a reading of Boccaccio’s tale has been tinted by an awareness of Petrarch’s allegoresis; and, again, it is doubtful that Petrarch conceived of Valterius as entirely ‘signifying the Divine Father Archetype’, yet also saw him as an emblem of human vanity, someone with an inflated sense of what would later be termed the Dignity of Man (dignitas hominis). However, Marcus’s interpretation of Griselda as representing Christ and, by extension, Christian virtue is reinforced not only by her public disrobing – a key scene in both Boccaccio and Petrarch to which I shall return subsequently – but also by her occupation. Boccaccio describes 68 69

Wallace’s reading of Walter against the strictures of Egidio Colonna’s De regimine principium is illuminating. Marga Cottino-Jones, ‘Fabula vs. Figura: Another Interpretation of the Griselda Story’, Italica, 50 (1973), pp. 38–52 (at p. 41).



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  155

his Griselda as a ‘guardiana di pecore’ (Dec. X. 10. 24), whilst Petrarch’s expanded description informs us that ‘[p]atris senium inestimabili refovens caritate, et pauculas eius oves pascebat, et colo interim digitos atterebat’ (‘Comforting the age of her father with immeasurable love, she used to graze his few sheep, wearing away her fingers meanwhile by spinning thread’, Sen. XVII. 3. 118–20). She is therefore a shepherdess, who undergoes physical pain tending her Father’s flock; the analogy is waiting to be made, although it is but one allegorical interpretation out of any number which Boccaccio’s deliberately sparse tale instigates. Indeed, the account of Griselda as the perfect daughter who wears her fingers away spinning thread also recalls the image of the perfect wife found in the book of Proverbs: Mulierem fortem quis inveniet? procul et de ultimis finibus pretium eius. Confidit in ea cor viri sui, et spoliis non indigebit. […] Quaesivit lanam et linum, et operata est consilia manuum suarum. Manum suam misit ad fortia, et digiti eius apprehenderunt fusum. Manum suam aperuit inopi, et palmas suas extendit ad pauperem. […] Fortitudo et decor indumentum ejus […] Surrexerunt filii eius, et beatissimam praedicaverunt; vir eius, et laudavit eam. Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. […] She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. […] Strength and honour are her clothing […] Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. (Proverbs 31: 10–28)

Apart from the similarity between Petrarch’s ‘colo interim digitos atterebat’ and the Vulgate’s ‘digiti eius apprehenderunt fusum’, there is a number of phrases and terms in the chapter which correspond to key elements both in Petrarch’s translation and in Boccaccio’s original. The asseveration that the husband shall have no need of spoiling his wife (‘et spoliis non indigebit’) suggests both Gualtieri’s stripping of Griselda (‘la fece spogliare ignuda’, Dec. X. 10. 19, emphasis added) and Dioneo’s warning against such mistreatment (Dec. X. 10. 3). Similarly, Griselda’s second spoliation reveals her modesty, fortitude and humility, which are the garments of the virtuous wife: ‘Fortitudo et decor indumentum eius.’ That the virtuous wife should reach out to the poor and help the needy (‘Manum suam aperuit inopi, et palmas

156  Chaucer and Petrarch

suas extendit ad pauperem’) is likewise confirmed by Griselda, as ‘omnes ad salutem publicam demissam celo feminam predicarent’ (‘everyone said the woman had been sent from heaven for the common welfare’, Sen. XVII. 3. 188). What becomes apparent is the tale’s perversion of the scriptural tenets: the virtuous wife does not need to be spoiled or tested; her children bless her – in both Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s versions Griselda blesses her children before offering them up; and her husband praises her, whereas Valterius turns Griseldis away. Each of these subversions of Scripture reinforces the charge of ‘matta bestialità’. There remains the connected allegorical reading of Griseldis as personifying the virtue of patience, the classical and medieval figure Patientia. This reading is qualified not only by the fact that the ‘external visible act most strikingly associated with patience is simply unswerving and silent endurance, passive bearing-up under all hardship’, but also by the fact that in the late medieval period ‘the concept of the “good cause” becomes entwined with discussions of the “degrees” of patience, those levels of performance which separate the merely “good” from the perfect’. On this conception, the patient Christian ought to apprehend ‘unpleasant events, not as random ill fortune, but as a controlled Providential act’, whereby patience is ‘elevated to a fully heroic self-control, the constant recreation of an ordered innerkingdom. And this inner citadel may be created only through continuous adjustment of the will to follow reason.’70 All of these prescriptions resonate within Petrarch’s translation. Griseldis’s degree of patience rises in accordance with the elevation of her misfortune: first her daughter is taken away, being followed by her son (which would have been considered a greater loss, as he was the heir apparent), and finally she loses her husband, the love of whom outstrips that of her children, as Valterius is aware. The endurance of these hardships endows Griseldis with perfection, as opposed to mere goodness. Also, the passive acceptance of these ‘unpleasant events’ in accordance with submission to Providence is congruent both with Valterius’s misreading of himself as divinity and with his wife’s more acute understanding that this misapprehension is itself providential. Furthermore, her stoical forbearance or fortitudo in adversis not only allows Griseldis to be compared with ‘Porcia, Hypsicratea, or Alcestis and others like them’, but also contributes to the ‘double consciousness’ which underpins the translation, as ‘medieval Christianity inherited [concepts of patience] from late classical ethical systems’.71 Finally, the conception of the patient subject’s ‘inner-kingdom’ reinforces the allegorical import of the proem in relation to Griseldis’s habitus, as well as

70

71

Ralph Hanna III, ‘Some Commonplaces of Late Medieval Patience Discussions: An Introduction’, in Gerald J. Schiffhorst, ed., The Triumph of Patience: Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Orlando, FL, 1978), pp. 65–87 (at pp. 68–77). Ibid., p. 69.



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  157

Wallace’s argument that she suffers in order that the body-politic might not, which in fact reinstitutes her as a figura Christi.72 Alternatively, Griseldis, for Petrarch, may represent a personal ideal; whereas ‘Laura in the Rime Sparse had been as likely to signify doubt and lost days as much as peace, Griselda was an emblem of the constancy that human beings could achieve’.73 Griseldis is potentially another Laura, the donna angelicata or the heavenly lady of the RVF, but in an idealized (that is, submissive) version. Moreover, this interpretation gains credence from Petrarch’s transformation of his beloved, haughty donna into ‘la pastorella alpestra e cruda’ (‘the cruel mountain shepherdess’) in RVF 52. Also, ­Griselda’s interpretative or hermeneutic multiplicity – which will be discussed in the next chapter – tends to transform her into a mirror of her reader, as Petrarch vocatively addresses Laura: ‘o fiamma, o rose sparse in dolce falda | di viva neve in ch’ io mi specchio’ (‘O flame, O roses scattered on a sweet drift of living snow, in which I mirror […] myself ’, RVF 146. 5–6); that mirroring action being further reflected in the sonority between ‘ch’io’ and ‘specchio’. The cumulative effect of these interpretations is an indication of the ‘metaphorical turning’ involved in translatio. The unifying principle of Petrarch’s initial allegoresis is the elevation of Griseldis and the dilution of Valterius’s godhead via a more ennobled rhetoric, what Copeland terms ‘vertical translation’: the process whereby a text passes from a lower to a higher linguistic existence.74 Also, through Petrarch’s translatio we are able to witness the multiformity of interpretation, the polysemia or variety of potential interpretations created by the artful bareness of Boccaccio’s original text. In other words, Petrarch has translated an implicitly allegorical model, which is formed around the potential entropy of the hermeneutic process – the possibility of a variety of readings, some of which may directly oppose one another – and then he has 72

73 74

‘Griselde’s suffering begins when she becomes the object of the tyrannical gaze […] Griselde contains the effects of Walter’s gaze, and later of his acts, within herself ’: Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 291. I would concur that Petrarch’s Griseldis assumes such responsibility, but I do not agree that Valterius is a tyrant ab initio. Mazzotta (The World at Play, pp. 123–4) and McLaughlin (‘Petrarch’s Rewriting’, p. 56) recede both beyond the allegorical figure and beyond the figura Christi by suggesting a possible interpretation of Griselda as Job – which reinforces Petrarch’s own allegoresis of her as the soul’s response to Providence. Compare ‘[n]uda de domo patris egressa, nuda ibidem revertar’ (‘Naked I came from my father’s house; naked I shall return there’, Sen. XVII. 3. 320) with Job 1: 21: ‘Nudus egressus sum de utero matris meæ, et nudus revertar illuc’ (‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither’). The reference is not lost on Chaucer, who calls Job by name (IV. 932). For all the references to the Vulgate, see B. Fischer et al., eds, Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, rev. by Roger Gryson, 5th edn (Stuttgart, 2007); for the English translation I have used Douay-Rheims throughout. Kirkpatrick, ‘The Griselda Story’, p. 234. In this case from Italian to Latin. See Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation’, p. 48.

158  Chaucer and Petrarch

reinforced the allegorical elements through amplificatio in order to provide an ostensibly univocal semantic and moral purpose, which is nevertheless itself on the verge of interpretative fragmentation. Furthermore, this entropic or fragmentary possibility is realized in the fourteenth century by the diverse translations of Petrarch’s translation, including that of Chaucer. The question of how Petrarch transmutes Boccaccio’s tale into an allegory of translation is another matter, yet one that is – like the matter of the translated allegory – intertwined with the former’s exegetical, epistolary framework. At the core of the transmutation is the disrobing and redressing of the textualized Griselda: Quam quidem an mutata veste deformaverim an fortassis ornaverim, tu iudica. Illic enim orta, illuc redit; notus iudex, nota domus, notum iter, ut unum et tu noveris et quisquis hoc leget: tibi non michi tuarum rationem rerum esse reddendam. Quisquis ex me queret an hec vera sint, hoc est an historiam scripserim an fabulam, respondebo illud Crispi: Fides penes auctorem meum scilicet Iohanem sit. Whether the change of vestment has disfigured it or perhaps adorned it, you be the judge. It returns to where it began, knowing its judge, its home, and the way there. You and whoever reads it know that you (not I) must answer for what you have written. If anyone asks me whether the story is true, that is – whether I have written a history or a fable – I will respond with Sallust’s words: ‘Credibility must be sought with the author,’ that is, my friend Giovanni. (Sen. XVII. 3. 43–48)75

Petrarch is here aligning the framing epistle with the redaction, focussing as he does upon one of the most crucial points in Boccaccio’s tale, the translation of Griselda from peasant to princess: Allora Gualtieri, presala per mano, la menò fuori e in presenza di tutta la sua compagnia e d’ogn’altra persona la fece spogliare ignuda: e fattisi quegli vestimenti che fatti aveva fare […] La giovane sposa parve che co’ vestimenti insieme l’animo e’ costumi mutasse. Whereupon Gualtieri, having taken her by the hand, led her out of the house, and in the presence of his whole company and of all of the other people there he caused her to be stripped naked. Then he called for the clothes and shoes which he had had specially made […] Along with her new clothes, the young bride appeared to take on a new lease of life. (Dec. X. 10. 19–24)

75

Chaucer includes a similar disclaimer at the opening of Book II of Troilus: ‘out of Latin in my tonge it write. | Wherfore I nyl have neither thank ne blame | Of al this werk, but prey yow mekely, | Disblameth me, if any word be lame, | For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I’ (lines 14–18).



Griselda between Boccaccio and Petrarch  159

That Petrarch understood the importance of this scene – and it may be thus called due to the crowd of onlookers attempting to interpret both Griselda and Gualtieri’s choice – is attested to by his careful balance of translatio and amplificatio: nudari eam iussit, et a calce ad verticem novis vestibus indui, quod a matronis circumstantibus ac certatim sinu illam gremioque foventibus verecunde ac celeriter adimpletum est. Sic horridulam virginem, indutam, laceramque comam recollectam manibus [comptamque] pro tempore, insignitam gemmis et corona velut subito transformatam. he commanded her to be stripped and decked with new clothes from head to foot. The surrounding ladies, taking her to their hearts in turn, modestly and quickly fulfilled his orders. The uncouth girl was thus clothed, her tangled hair rearranged by hand and hurriedly smoothed. Adorned with gems and a crown, suddenly she appeared transformed. (Sen. XVII. 3. 164–68)

The most interesting allegorical interpretation Petrarch applies to Boccaccio’s text, it may be argued, is what Marcus terms an allegory of form and Mazzotta ‘an allegory of order’.76 That is to say, Boccaccio’s tale may be read as a reflexive illustration of its own creative process and of the reader’s response to it – and it is vital to remember that day ten of the Decameron boasts a number of tales concerning artists of one kind or another. As Marcus argues, ‘if the people of Saluzzo constitute an internal reading public, offering a critical response to the tale as intimate witnesses of its action, then Gualtieri functions as the figure of the artist who manipulates the tale of Griselda as if from above’, and ‘Gualtieri’s particular mimesis of the deity would thus take the form of the deus artifex in keeping with his aesthetic function as the author of Griselda’s story’.77 This self-referential element of Boccaccio’s tale is exactly what Petrarch is referring to in his accompanying epistle when he mentions this change of dress (‘mutata veste’). Petrarch aligns himself with Valterius the Artist, the mortal author who mimics the actions of the deus artifex – which corresponds to his own emphasis upon the Marquis’s aspirations to godhead – and by extension parallels Boccaccio’s authorial status through the translative process.78 Petrarch inherits, or rather adopts, the self-awareness with which Boccaccio imbues his tale, and so the Tale of Griselda, which allegorically tells the story of itself, becomes the Translation of the Tale of Griselda, which provides the concomitant allegoresis of itself. This interpretation or allegorical translatio, however, is dependent upon our reading of Griseldis as text, 76 77 78

Mazzotta, The World at Play, p. 120. Marcus, Allegory of Form, p. 106. See Dinshaw, Sexual Poetics, pp. 133–7 and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 282–6 for analogies between Petrarch and Valterius.

160  Chaucer and Petrarch

a reading which has been encapsulated by Dinshaw’s discussion of the ‘text as alien woman to be passed between men, stripped and reclothed’ and of ‘the representation of allegorical reading as a trade, reclothing, marriage and domestication of a woman’: Griselda reads herself as an allegorical image, and thereby ‘authorizes’ us to read her allegorically […] She reads herself as a religious symbol, moral allegorical image. We read her, in addition, as an allegorical image of a text, or as providing an homologous relation to a text. […] We read Griselda then, both literally and figuratively.79

Petrarch strips away what he sees as the tale’s ignoble vernacular clothing and redresses it, has it ‘rearranged’, ‘smoothed’ and ‘transformed’ into the more respectable Latin, and after doing so returns his Griseldis, the allegorical personification of her own text, ‘to where it began’, just as Valterius returned her to Giannucolo before finally reclaiming her. Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda is translated into the text of Griselda by Petrarch’s reading, and as part of that same metaphorical or allegorical turning whereby she is textualized; so she becomes the translation of Griselda (into Griseldis), something seemingly fixed – by Petrarch – and in flux – through the translations of Chaucer and Philippe amongst others. In conclusion, Petrarch is practising a form of translatio which, through its very definition, contains elements of metaphor and interpretation, of allegory and allegoresis, if we are to understand the latter elements as an extension of the former, as Petrarch would have done. He reacts creatively to an underlying allegorical tenor or potential which Boccaccio insists that the readers must delineate for themselves if it is to serve any purpose, moral, spiritual or otherwise: ‘Ciascuna cosa in se medesima è buona a alcuna cosa, e male adoperata può essere nociva di molte; e così dico delle mie novelle’ (‘All things have their own special purpose, but when they are wrongly used a great deal of harm may result, and the same applies to my stories’, Dec., Concl. 13). However, Petrarch, in addition to the Christian exemplum he expounds, reinforces the interpretation of the tale as signifying its own process, and in doing so refutes any charges that his allegorical redressing results in its being displaced from itself, or renders it an ‘aesthetic failure’.80 His version of the tale is itself an allegory of the translation, and the translation, an allegory of the tale – a true Petrarchan paradox, and one which, as we shall see, Chaucer embraced.

79 80

Dinshaw, Sexual Poetics, pp. 133–47. Morse, ‘Exemplary Griselda’, p. 52.

5 ‘Of hire array what sholde I make a tale?’: Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer The tale of Patient Griselda inspires translatio by virtue of the fact that the ideal it ostensibly represents stands in complete opposition to contemporary sensibilities. Her alterity provokes critical revision, perhaps even misprision. Griselda is translated both within her tale, from peasant to noblewoman, and outside of it, from one linguistic and hermeneutic modality to another. Yet misprision has always accompanied Griselda, and, as the Clerk’s Tale makes clear, this account of a wife’s remarkable obedience and faithfulness (‘Insignis obedientia et fides uxoria’, Sen. XVII. 3. 49–50) was no less defamiliarizing to its fourteenth-century audience than it is to its twenty-firstcentury equivalent.1 As Anne Middleton has argued, ‘[e]very reader from Petrarch on has been forced by it to confront some “modernity” in himself – the habits or values he holds as a reader – that must be explained’.2 Indeed the number of articles and studies that have been written in recent years on the Clerk’s Tale and on its sources not only bears witness to the story’s unwillingness to provide us with a clear definition of its ‘significaunce’, but also serves as a testament to Griselda’s textuality.3 And Griselda is text, according to critics such as Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, both of whom have argued that in the ‘literary history of the Griselda tale we see that once again woman is associated with a text to be

1

2

3

The inclusion of the word ‘insignis’ (‘extraordinary’) in Petrarch’s peritext may be seen to testify to this. However, Charlotte Morse has shown that this title, which appeared in the early printed editions of Petrarch’s Opera omnia and is often used today, does not appear in the majority of manuscripts containing the tale. See her paper ‘What to Call Petrarch’s Griselda’, in Charlotte Cook Morse et al., eds, The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen , Studies in Medieval Culture, 31 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992), pp. 263–303. A. Middleton, ‘The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts’, SAC, 2 (1980), pp. 121–50 (at p. 121). For a counterpoint to Middleton’s view, see Charlotte Morse, ‘The Exemplary Griselda’, SAC, 7 (1985), pp. 51–86. For an account of the important criticism prior to 1990, see Charlotte Morse, ‘Critical Approaches to the Clerk’s Tale’, in C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds, ­Chaucer’s Religious Tales (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 71–83. I refer throughout this chapter to important and influential discussions which postdate Morse’s survey.

162  Chaucer and Petrarch

read and interpreted by men’.4 This view is borne out by the language of the various versions of the tale, and of their frameworks. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Boccaccio describes how Gualtieri had been pleased for a long time by Griselda’s costumi, and how, after their marriage, it appeared as if she had changed her soul and manners along with her vestments (‘parve che co’ vestimenti insieme l’animo e’ costumi mutasse’, Dec. X. 10. 24). Similarly Petrarch, referring to this scene in the letter which accompanied his translation, asks Boccaccio to judge if he has embellished or disfigured the tale by changing its ‘dress’ from the vernacular to Latin. This conception of the tale as being concerned with hermeneutics and translation did not escape Chaucer, as Laura Ashe has recently argued: ‘[the Clerk] must be regarded as a reader […] Implicitly, he is saying, a tale may not stand alone. A tale is opaque and incomplete without its being actively deciphered; that is to say it must be given meaning by the participation of its interpreter.’5 The tale of Griselda, as we have seen, emerges out of, and enables, the intertextual. This chapter will then examine Chaucer’s reception of the Griseldan text as it is born out of that heteroglossia – what Bakhtin terms the ‘dialogic imagination’ – and the ways in which The Clerk’s Tale returns the tale to that plurality.6 Such a reading of the Clerk’s tale allows for a further comparison between Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s translative, selfconscious poetics, and for a probing of the extent to which the English poet reads Petrarch’s tale as monologic – as a number of recent critics have claimed – or as dialogic. As part of this process, it becomes necessary not only to examine the obvious ruptures which interpose between Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s audiences and a contemporary readership, but also to look at the increasing synergy of postmodern and premodern forms of Rezeptionästhetik; a synergy made manifest by intertextual semantics and political poetics.7 By examining the tale in relation to the critical and theoretical frameworks which have accompanied it up until the present day – polyvalent 4

5 6

7

C. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, (Madison, WI, 1989), p. 133. David. Wallace reiterates this view when he argues that ‘[p]oet and despot [Petrarch and Walter] have much in common, much to offer one another. The trope that expresses their commonality of interests and strategies in most compelling fashion is that of their invention, translation, and violent subjugation of woman: woman as text’: Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), p. 262. See also Andrea Denny-Brown, ‘Povre Griselda and the All-Consuming Archewyves’, SAC, 28 (2006), pp. 77–115, for a recent reinvestigation of ‘Griselda’s sartorial symbolism’ (p. 77). Laura Ashe, ‘Reading like a Clerk in The Clerk’s Tale’, MLR, 101 (2006), pp. 935–44 (at p. 936). Heteroglossia (‘other tongues’, translated from the Russian raznorečie) is Bakhtin’s term to describe the plurality of discourse, the polyvalence of every utterance. See his Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX, 1981), p. 263. Rezeptionästhetik is a central term in the reception theory of H. R. Jauss. See Chapter 1, p. 44, n. 29.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  163

hermeneutic structures which I have broadly separated into the intertextual and the political, although these groupings are not discrete – it will become evident just how the tale pre-empts, and indeed triggers, a series of responses which we, as part of Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s diachronic audience, are still endeavouring to define. Prior to examining what Chaucer really did to Petrarch’s Griselda, it is worth considering how the translation relates to Petrarch’s other Latin works, which greatly outnumber those written in the vernacular.8 As Emilie Kadish points out (following Martellotti), the Latin Griselda is unique amongst Petrarch’s works in that it constitutes his only sustained attempt at narrative prose; given this particularity, it is worth tracing briefly the trajectory of Petrarch’s writings which precede this singular work.9 Yet that trajectory is not straightforward, in view of Petrarch’s habit of rewriting and revisiting works. It is thought that Petrarch’s first ever poem was written in Latin: a metrical epistle to commemorate the death of his mother Eletta, in 1318 or 1319.10 From there he would proceed to write a number of Epistolae metricae to various friends and patrons. His first major work, De viris illustribus (On the Lives of Illustrious Men), was begun in 1337(?); yet, like so many of his other works, he revised it repeatedly, making various alterations to its overall scope in the early 1350s, and again in the 1370s, prior to his death; it was ultimately ‘completed’ by Lombardo della Seta in 1379. The work, a moral anthology of historical examples, is important for the blueprint it provides of Petrarchan historicism, its purpose and its scope. His next major Latin work, also thought to have begun around 1337, was the Africa, based upon the biography of the Roman general Scipio Africanus.11 It was for this work that he would receive the laurel crown in 1341, but the epic would remain unfinished. While he ought to have been working on the Africa, as he later told Mainardo Accursio (Familiares VIII. 3, dated May 1349), the idea came to him to compose a series of pastorals, which would become the Bucolicum carmen (see also Familiares X. 4, written to his brother Gherardo in December of the same year, which provides the allegoresis of the first eclogue). These twelve 8

9 10 11

Aside from the RVF and some poems which where excluded from it (Rime disperse), Petrarch’s only other work in the vernacular is the Trionfi (Triumphs), which in many ways offers a thematic correspondence both to the RVF and to the Latin works. See Aldo S. Bernardo, Petrarch, Laura and the Triumphs (Albany, NY, 1974). See E. P. Kadish, ‘The Proem of Petrarch’s Griselda’, Mediaevalia, 2 (1976), pp. 189–206, at p. 189. See E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, IL, 1961), p. 5. The 1337 date, like so many of the dates of Petrarch’s works, is debatable. As Kenelm Foster points out, both the Africa and the De viris illustribus benefitted from Petrarch’s critical revision of the extant portions of Livy’s text between 1326–9. See his Petrarch: Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 4–5. The figure of Scipio Africanus clearly links the two works.

164  Chaucer and Petrarch

eclogues address various themes such as poetry, death, spirituality, politics and love. As with the Africa, their import for the modern reader perhaps lies more in their commitment to a Virgilian form than in their content, which retains the traditional allegorical tenor of medieval commentaries on classical poetry – as exemplified by the Ovide moralisé, whose author Pierre Bersuire was a friend of Petrarch’s. The Rerum memorandum libri (On Memorable Things), begun in 1343, is an ethical humanist disquisition on the four cardinal virtues; but, like the Africa, it remained unfinished. It is commonly held that Petrarch’s writings take on a more Christian humanist tenor following 1345. The De vita solitaria, written in 1346, and the De otio religioso, written in 1347, offer two perspectives on the ideal of otium and its necessary corollary of solitude. The latter treatise, written after a visit to the Carthusian abbey at Montrieux where Petrarch’s brother Gherardo resided after taking orders in 1343, is a conventional paean to the virtue of the monastic vita contemplativa. The De vita solitaria is more important in that it displays the fusion of humanism and Christianity which would thenceforth characterize Petrarch’s thought, and as such stands in distinction to the classicism of the Rerum memorandum libri, which had been suddenly discontinued in 1345. Petrarch’s dialogue, the Secretum (1347–53?) – which is ostensibly carried between himself and St Augustine but in fact between the two aspects of himself (or rather of his literary self) – employed a form which was to be used again in the De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies against Good and Evil Fortune). This dialogue, written between 1354 and 1366, promotes Stoic temperance while displaying Petrarch’s Christian humanism. It has a varied heritage in terms of form and genre, incorporating allegory, debate and exemplum, all within the encyclopaedic model of the medieval summa. Petrarch’s Psalmi penitentiali were written in the year of the Plague, 1348 – the year in which he also inscribed the news of Laura’s death in his Virgil codex. In 1339, whilst in Liege, Petrarch found a copy of Cicero’s Pro Archia, following which, in 1345, he discovered a number of Cicero’s letters in the Cathedral Library at Verona. This last find prompted Petrarch to make a collection of his own letters: the Rerum familiarum libri (Letters on Familiar Matters), the Rerum senilium libri (Letters of Old Age), and the anti-curial collection known as the Liber sine nomine (Book without a Name). A letter written to the soldier Giovanni Mandelli in 1358 became the Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostri Yehsu Christi (Guide to the Sepulchre of Our Lord Jesus Christ), whilst other letters formed the basis of the Invectives. The earliest of these, the Invective contra medicum, stemmed from a letter which Petrarch had sent to Pope Clement VI in 1352 (Familiares V. 19), which exhorted him to forgo the throng of physicians attending him in favour of a single ‘medicum’ upon whom he could rely. One of the papal doctors took umbrage at Petrarch’s letter, to which Petrarch retaliated. The physician responded in turn, as again did Petrarch, before revising his two responses as



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  165

Invective (1355), which include an influential defence of poetry. Also in 1355 Petrarch composed his Invectiva contra quendam magni status hominem, sed nullius scientie aut vertutis (Invective against a Man of High Rank with No Knowledge or Virtue), which adopted themes from classical satire and directed them against Cardinal Jean de Caraman. The next invective, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others), is ostensibly an apologia – in fact a rhetorical routing – born of charges of ignorance made against Petrarch by four Aristotelians who visited him in 1366, while he was living in Venice. The work, which lays out much of Petrarch’s humanist moral philosophy, was first drafted in 1367, although it was revised and eventually dedicated to Donato Albanzani in 1371. The final invective, Contra eum qui maledixit Italie (Against a Detractor of Italy), developed out of a letter which Petrarch wrote to Urban V in 1368 (Sen. IX. 1), urging him to return the See to its rightful place in Rome. Petrarch’s letter provoked the theologian Jean d’Hesdin to compose a treatise denouncing Rome, to which Petrarch could not but respond vituperatively. The invective, which was written in 1373 (the same year as the Griselda translation), returns to that linchpin of Petrarchan humanism, the idea of Rome formulated in response to the Babylonian captivity of the Church: ‘Muri quidem et palatia ceciderunt, gloria nominis immortalis est’ (‘True, her walls and palaces have fallen; but the glory of her name is immortal’, 39).12 Rome’s glory stems from the fusion of classical virtue and magnanimity and from its Christian heritage as the seat of Peter, sanctified by the blood of martyrs. Indeed, what should be immediately apparent is the fusion of Christian and classical elements, which characterizes Petrarch’s Latin works and culminates in the translation of Boccaccio’s Griselda.13 Also, the variety of forms prepare for the rewriting which was to be Petrarch’s final prose work: Petrarch wrote exempla, histories, allegories and dialogues, all of which contribute to the tale’s complexity. Furthermore, Petrarch’s translation of Boccaccio’s tale from the vernacular into Latin might be read as an indication of his linguistic preference – although not necessarily a deliberate manifestation of cultural elitism. As Kenelm Foster has pointed out, Petrarch did not view Latin and the vernacular as two separate languages, as much as two modalities of the same language. By translating the tale he was making it available to those outside of Italy.14 The translation of Griselda, as we shall see in this chapter, constitutes ‘a oneness that is unlike them all’. 12

13 14

See Francesco Petrarca, Contra eum qui maledixit Italie, ed. by Monica Berté (Florence, 2005), p. 26; for the English translation see Francesco Petrarca, Invectives, ed. by David Marsh (Cambridge, MA), p. 375. On Petrarch’s Christian humanism, see C. Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (Chicago, IL, 1970), pp. 3–50. Foster, Petrarch: Poet and Humanist, p. 26.

166  Chaucer and Petrarch

* The tale of Griselda’s patient suffering of her husband Walter’s perverse curiosity certainly provides a prime example of late medieval intertextuality. According to Roland Barthes, each text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text.15

This form of textual mosaic may be brought into a fruitful relationship with James Simpson’s description of medieval literary production, whereby ‘artists build on to artefacts from the past accretively rather than beginning afresh’, producing ‘a complex of layering of textuality, where texts from different sources are juxtaposed to form a composite yet heterogeneous whole’.16 Such a ‘complex layering of textuality’ renders it almost impossible to approach The Clerk’s Tale as a discrete literary artefact. Any informed reading of Chaucer’s translation cannot ignore its Petrarchan source, or indeed its initial appearance as the closing tale of the final day of Boccaccio’s Decameron. A number of commentators have nevertheless attempted to read Chaucer’s translation as such a monadic artefact, their recurrent justification being an unsupported statement that Chaucer vastly improves upon his source materials, which precedes the citation of passages which ostensibly display that improvement, yet which are in fact faithful translations.17 One example of such treatment is Michael Masi’s recent dismissal of both Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s versions of the tale: Chaucer may have known the tale from Boccaccio or from Petrarch’s Latin the De Obedientia ac Fide Uxoria Mythologia. Both of these versions 15 16

17

R. Barthes, Image–Music–Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London, 1977), p. 160. J. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), p. 64. See also Rita Copeland’s discussion of the ‘merging of the ancient practice of enarratio with translation as exercitatio, or discovery of literary language’, whereby gloss and paraphrase are fused: ‘Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation in the Middle Ages’, SAC, 9 (1987), pp. 41–75, at p. 51. Some commentators have suggested that Chaucer did in fact know the Decameron. See Donald McGrady, ‘Chaucer and the Decameron Reconsidered’, ChR, 12 (1977), pp. 1–26; N. S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1996), pp. 1–4; Helen Cooper, ‘Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work’, SAC, 19 (1997), pp. 183–210; Leonard Michael Koff, ‘Imagining Absence: Chaucer’s Griselda and Walter without Petrarch’, in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison, NJ, 2000), pp. 278–316; John Finlayson, ‘Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale’, Studies in Philology, 97 (2000), pp. 255–75.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  167 were widely known in the Middle Ages and doubtless were usually read as stories directed against inconstant or shrewish women. No strong feelings of appreciation for the other literary merits of these two Italian writers should deter us from seeing the story for what it is. It is not a happy story in favour of women and its intent appears to have been usually one of admonition for all women […] However, when [Chaucer] decided to adopt it as part of the Marriage Group, the tale takes on a clear function, one quite different from what we see in Boccaccio and Petrarch.18

Such a reading neglects the narrative frames of both Boccaccio’s Italian and Petrarch’s Latin versions, and in doing so it ignores what Robert Edwards has termed ‘the problem of hermeneutics’ which accompanies each retelling of the tale.19 However, before discussing this problem, it is necessary to provide a brief recapitulation of the tale’s intertextual trajectory up until it reaches Chaucer. As we saw in the previous chapter, it has been argued that the Griselda story harks back to the Cupid and Psyche folktale, and that it is this mythical origin that explains the plot’s occasional lapses in credibility. Alternatively, it has been claimed that the tale is predicated upon the dimensions of another folktale, that of ‘the patience of a princess’. Both potential aetiologies appear to be based upon similar narrative functions, although they are populated by different dramatis personae, as Propp termed the generic folktale characters.20 Whichever was the true source – if either – it underwent a rationalizing or acculturating process in order to correspond with the literary tastes of a more sophisticated audience.21 However, the tale’s mythological genealogy imbues it with an allegorical hermeneutic potentia, whilst the process of rationalization endows it with a socio-political dynamics – namely that of the nature and propriety of the relationship between landlord and tenant, male and female, in the late medieval period: points to which we shall return subsequently. It is this tale, of a nobleman who marries and mistreats a young peasant girl, that Boccaccio includes as the closing tale of his Decameron. In Boccaccio’s tale, Gualtieri, the Marquis of Sanluzzo, marries Griselda, a local serf. Following their marriage, Gualtieri proceeds to subject Griselda to a series of trials as a means of testing her obedience to his wishes. Firstly he takes away their daughter, under the pretence that he has ordered her death on

18 19 20 21

Michael Masi, Chaucer and Gender (New York, 2005), pp. 120–1. Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 128–52. See Chapter 4, p. 000. See Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Saratoga, 1979), p. 99. In any case, one must recall Barthes’s assertion that the intertextual ‘is not to be confused with some origin of the text’; we could not pinpoint the ultimate historical moment of the tale’s terminus a quo.

168  Chaucer and Petrarch

account of a fabricated complaint to the effect that his people cannot countenance the offspring of an ignoble girl; the same happens to their son; and finally he obtains a counterfeit papal bull decreeing an annulment.22 Griselda is sent home to her father, Giannucolo, only to be summoned back in order to oversee the preparations for Gualtieri’s marriage to a new, more worthy bride. Ultimately Gualtieri abandons his perverse masquerade and the new bride is revealed as being Griselda’s and Gualtieri’s daughter. Griselda is tearfully reunited with her children, and Gualtieri declares that he has orchestrated all of these events in order to teach her how to be a wife, to teach his subjects how to choose a wife, and to arrange a peaceful existence for himself (Dec. X. 10. 61). Petrarch received Boccaccio’s tale and translated it into Latin just over twenty years later (c.1373) – although he claimed to have heard it many years previously – in order that it might be available to those who were unfamiliar with his and Boccaccio’s Italian dialect.23 Petrarch’s rewriting was in turn translated into French by Philippe de Mézières (c.1384–9) and by the anonymous author of Le Livre de Griseldis, before being incorporated by the compilator of the exemplum book entitled the Ménagier de Paris (c.1394).24 Chaucer worked from a copy of Petrarch’s Latin original and from a text of the anonymous, undated Livre de Griseldis – ‘the latter a rather close translation of the former’ – as part of a process which Severs terms ‘double translation’.25 However, critics such as John Finlayson have recently refuted a widespread prejudice, allegedly initiated by Severs, which ‘misrepresented, suppressed, or cavalierly rejected possible relationships, particularly in reference to Boccaccio, in pursuit of establishing the originality and artistic 22

23

24

25

On the matter of the bull, see Larry Scanlon, ‘What’s the Pope Got to Do with It?: Forgery, Didacticism, and Desire in the Clerk’s Tale’, in New Medieval Literatures, 6 (2003), pp. 129–65. Scanlon points out that a papal bull annulling the marriage would be anomalous; bulls were issued to validate unions rather than dissolve them. Petrarch refers to ‘nostro materno eloquio’ (‘our mother tongue’, Sen. XVII. 3. 1) in the tale’s framing epistle, and, as John Larner points out, dialects in trecento Italy varied widely. See his paper ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, in Piero Boitani, ed., Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 7–32, at p. 9. Dinshaw and Wallace, following Middleton, claim that Petrarch actually reduced the tale’s circulation by translating it for an elite, humanistic, and above all masculine group of readers (legentes), although the translation by Christine de Pizan in the early years of the fifteenth century may be seen to question the universality of such a claim. See Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. by Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York, 1982), pp. 170–6. The tale was also subject to intralingual paraphrase, as Sercambi produced a further Italian version from Boccaccio’s original, and to generic paraphrase, as in 1395 it became a French verse play entitled L’Estoire de la Marquise de Saluce Miz par Personnages et Rigmé. See J. B. Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven, CT, 1942), pp. 3–37; Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, eds, Le Menagier de Paris (Oxford, 1981); and the studies by Middleton, ‘The Clerk and His Tale’ and Morse, ‘The Exemplary Griselda’. Severs, Literary Relationships, pp. 215–25.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  169

s­ uperiority of Chaucer’.26 This form of rejection may be seen as underpinning Masi’s dismissal of Chaucer’s sources, and Finlayson is surely correct in his desire to give both Petrarch and Boccaccio the credit they deserve when one examines Chaucer’s translation. Yet this is not to deny the complexity of Chaucer’s reception; rather, it is to trace the complexity which that reception inherits as a means of providing an authentic evaluation. A detailed comparative reading ensures that Chaucer’s achievement is measured realistically, and not by means of a critical patellar reflex which that claims Chaucer’s translation is ‘best’ simply because the other versions are not by him. In order to gauge the Clerk’s Tale, we need to read it against its Petrarchan model and observe how ‘the ways in which Petrarch restages the interpretive problems that Boccaccio valued in his own tale […] [provide] a reading of Petrarch that may or may not conform to the way in which his Griselda story is represented in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale’.27 In other words, Boccaccio’s tale, Petrarch’s translation and Chaucer’s translation of that translation (which may have been directly influenced by the Boccaccian original, according to some commentators) constitute what may be termed the Griseldan intertext, with all the attendant problems and complexities concomitant with that ‘vast stereophony’. Crucially, the focus on interpretative dilemmas returns us to the point of departure for understanding the Clerk’s Tale. At the close of Chaucer’s translation, we are presented with a variety of hermeneutic responses which prevent any definitive moral from emerging. The first response is that which ‘Petrak writeth’ (IV. 1147), which does not propose ‘that wyves sholde | Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee, | For it were inportable’ (IV. 1142–4), but rather ‘sith a womman was so pacient | Unto a mortal man, wel moore us oghte | Receyven al in gree that God us sent’ (IV. 1149–51). However, the Clerk proceeds to declare that, in any case, It were ful hard to fynde now-a-dayes In al a toun Grisildis thre or two; For if that they were put to swiche assayes, The gold of hem hath now so badde alayes With bras, that thogh the coyne be fair at ye, It wolde rather breste a-two than plye.  (IV. 1164–69) 26

27

Finlayson, ‘Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale’, p. 257. See also the aforementioned studies by Edwards, Campbell and Ashe, in addition to Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love, pp. 279–312; Luca Carlo Rossi, ‘In margine alla “Griselda” latina di Petrarca’, Acme, 53 (2000), pp. 139–60; Amy W. Goodwin, ‘The Griselda Game’, ChR, 39 (2004), pp. 41–69 and ‘Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: Sources, Influences and Illusions’, SAC, 28 (2006), pp. 231–5; and the introductions by Thomas Farrell and Goodwin in R. M. Correale and M. Hamel, eds, Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer Studies, 29, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2002–5). Whilst these commentators may disagree on certain points, they are united by their serious discussion of the tale’s intertextual genealogy. Goodwin, ‘The Griselda Game’, p. 44.

170  Chaucer and Petrarch

Yet this misogynistic nostalgia for a bygone golden age is in turn countered by the Lenvoy de Chaucer: O noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence, Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille, Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille […] Folweth Ekko, that holdeth no silence, But ever answereth at the countretaille. Beth nat bidaffed for youre innocence, But sharpely taak on yow the governaille. Emprenteth wel this lessoun in youre mynde, For commune profit sith it may availle.  (IV. 1183–6, 1189–94)

And, finally, there is the response of the Host, who claims that he ‘were levere than a barel ale | My wyf at hoom had herd this legende ones!’ (IV. 1212c–12d). We may consider such a variety of responses as falling within Barthes’s intertextual remit, in that it is ‘woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages’; yet there is a more specific form of intertextuality also in operation here, namely Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination.28 In his Bakhtinian analysis of the Clerk’s Tale, William McClellan argues that Bakhtin’s dialogism is based upon ‘the traditional rhetorical concept of polemic [which] points to the active engagement of an utterance, in its moment of generation, with another’s word or utterance’.29 However, in addition to defining the relationship between two separate utterances, Bakhtin’s polemic also ‘specifies the critical relationship that exists between the various voices co-habiting within an utterance’, as a means of asserting that ‘all discourse is multi-voiced and overdetermined’.30 McClellan thus distinguishes the three voices (four, if the Host is to be included) which close the tale as constituting a dialogic relationship. The first, allegorical, Petrarchan voice McClellan

28

29 30

For Bakhtinian readings of Griselda, see Lars Engle, ‘Chaucer, Bakhtin, and Griselda’, Exemplaria, 1 (1989), pp. 429–59; ‘Bakhtin, Chaucer, and Anti-Essentialist Humanism’, Exemplaria, 1 (1989), pp. 489–97; and William McClellan, ‘Bakhtin’s Theory of Dialogic Discourse, Medieval Rhetorical Theory, and the Multi-Voiced Structure of the Clerk’s Tale’, Exemplaria 1 (1989), pp. 461–88; ‘Lars Engle – “Chaucer, Bakhtin, and Griselda”: A Response’, Exemplaria, 1 (1989), pp. 499–506. See also John M. Ganim, ‘Bakhtin, Chaucer, Carnival, Lent’, SAC, Proceedings No. 2 (1986), pp. 59–71, and S. H. Rigby, Chaucer in Context (Manchester, 1996), pp. 18–77. McClellan, ‘Bakhtin’s Theory’, p. 470. Ibid. McClellan also posits a direct correlation between Bakhtinian dialogism and late medieval disputatio, the scholastic methodology with which Chaucer’s Clerk would have been familiar.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  171

claims to be ‘the voice of tradition, origination, authority and high seriousness’; the second voice would be ‘the clerkly voice of pathos’; whilst the third voice, associated with Chaucer, would be ‘the voice of parody [which] is irreverent, playful, and antagonistic to both the moral injunction of allegory and the emotional appeal of pathos’.31 Lars Engle would appear to agree with McClellan over the matter of the first voice, when he claims that Chaucer introduces a ‘counter-movement in the tale to the scheme inherited from Petrarch’ and that, in doing so, he ‘is making a monologic poem into something approaching the dialogic of the novel’.32 Such a statement, however, seems to be a reversion to the critical reflex mentioned above, which fails to grant Chaucer’s sources the complexity they merit. By examining the narrative frames and the responses which inform Chaucer’s dialogism, we may be able to trace the hermeneutic difficulties which have rendered the Clerk’s tale one of the most taxing amongst those told on the way to Canterbury. Whilst a Bakhtinian perspective upon the Clerk’s Tale undoubtedly serves to open up the tale’s intertextual development to scrutiny, there are some doubts as to the monologic reading of its Petrarchan source, which sees it as ‘an attempt to tame the possibility that the tale is dialogical, articulating several incompatible viewpoints’.33 Petrarch’s translation was in the first instance a response to Boccaccio’s vernacular tale, and as such it corresponds with the Bakhtinian view of polemic, which underpins his dialogic theory. By extension, it cannot be the voice of ‘origination, authority’, as Petrarch returns authorship and responsibility to Boccaccio in the letter which accompanied his translation. However, the charges of monologism are made against Petrarch’s allegoresis of the tale, which Chaucer translates, and where he does not exhort women to behave towards their husbands as Griselda did towards Walter, but rather advises that all people should attempt to suffer for God what this peasant girl suffered for her mortal husband (‘quod pro suo mortali coniuge rusticana hec muliercula passa est’, Sen. XVII. 3. 405). Yet this allegoresis is only one of the readings of the tale that Petrarch provides. Petrarch’s wider framework for the translation, the four letters which comprise the seventeenth book of the Rerum senilium libri, ensure an interpretative plurality. Middleton argues, furthermore, that ‘it is likely that Chaucer knew not only the introduction and conclusion to the story in Seniles XVII. 3, but the whole of Seniles XVII’.34 31 32 33 34

McClellan, ‘Bakhtin’s Theory’, pp. 483–4. For a reading of the power of the pathetic in the Clerk’s Tale, see Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 100–28. Engle, ‘Chaucer, Bakhtin and Griselda’, pp. 453–4. Ibid., p. 438. Middleton, ‘The Clerk and His Tale’, p. 135. Morse, however, argues that ‘it is rare for Sen. 17.4 to be copied with Sen. 17. 3’ (‘What to Call Petrarch’s Griselda’, p. 265). This does

172  Chaucer and Petrarch

This knowledge would refute the possibility that Chaucer read Petrarch’s translation monologically, not least of all because of Seniles XVII. 4. As we know, this letter, written about a year later (in 1374, the year when Petrarch died), contains Petrarch’s account of how he showed his translation to two mutual friends, one of whom was a Paduan, the other a Veronese. The Paduan’s response was akin to what McClellan describes as Chaucer’s ‘second voice’, the voice of pathos: ‘cum epistolae medium vix transisset, subito fletu praeventus substitit […] ego in optimam partem traxi, mitissimumque viri animum intellexi’ (‘scarcely past the middle of the letter, he stopped, being overcome by sudden weeping […] I interpreted it in the best light and understood the man’s heart was very sensitive’, Sen. XVII. 4. 546/669). This voice, like Chaucer’s Clerk, may be seen to exemplify the reading of the tale as historia. It is perhaps unlikely that the Clerk would ask ‘what neded it | Hire for to tempte […] I seye that yvele it sit | To assaye a wyf that it is no nede, | And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede’ (IV. 457–62) if he thought that the tale had no basis in reality. Moreover, the argument for the Clerk’s voice being entirely given to pathos is rendered questionable by his misogynistic nostalgia at the close, where he complains that contemporary women are alloyed ‘bras’ compared to the ‘gold’ standard set by Griselda.35 Indeed, the Clerk’s closing comments to the effect that it ‘were ful hard to fynde now-a-dayes | In al a toun Grisildis thre or two’ have much in common with the response of Petrarch’s Veronese friend: legit eam totam, nec alicubi substitit, nec frons obductior, nec uox fractior, nec la[c]hrymae, nec singultus interuenere, et in finem. Ego etiam (inquit) flessem. Nam et piae res, et verba rebus accommodata fletum suadebant, nec ego duri cordis sum, nisi quod ficta omnia credidi, et credo. Nam si uera essent, quae usquam mulier, uel Romana, uel cuiuslibet gentis hanc Griseldim aequatura sit: ubi quaeso tantus amor coniugalis? ubi par fides? ubi tam insignis patientia atque constantia? he read it all without stopping anywhere, nor did his brow darken or his voice break; no tears, no sobs interrupted him, and in the end he said, ‘I too would have wept, for the touching subject and the words fit for the subject

35

not make it impossible that Chaucer encountered one of these rare manuscripts; my own reading of the Clerk’s Tale and of its frameworks would tend to agree with Middleton on the basis of verbal echoes of Sen. XVII. 4. See also Goodwin, ‘The Griselda Game’, p. 41. Elaine Tuttle Hansen claims that ‘the Clerk playfully does precisely what he has just told the audience not to do’ in offering ‘this comment on material women, who fall so short of the ideal female malleability that his tale prescribes’: Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, CA, 1992), p. 202. Lesley Johnson likewise argues that ‘Griselda’s singularity, her scarcity value, becomes a criticism of the quality of women now in circulation’: ­‘Reincarnations of Griselda: Contexts for the Clerk’s Tale?’, in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds, Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London, 1994), pp. 195–220 (at p. 210). See also Koff, ‘Imagining Absence’, p. 285. The view is akin to the nostalgic impulse behind The Former Age.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  173 prompted weeping, nor am I hard-hearted; but I believed, and still do, that the whole thing was made up. For if it were true, what woman anywhere, whether Roman or of any nation whatever will match this Griselda? Where, I ask, is such great conjugal love, equal fidelity, such signal patience and constancy?’ (Sen. XVII. 4. 546/669–70)

Although the questions of Chaucer’s Clerk and of Petrarch’s Veronese reader are the same (‘Where does one find a woman like Griselda?’), they are rendered distinct by the interpretative context – the Clerk appears to read an historia (women like Griselda are rare ‘now-a-dayes’, or no longer to be found), whereas the Veronese reads a fabula (women like Griselda are never to be found). This of course is precisely the problem Petrarch addresses when he defers authority to Boccaccio in Seniles XVII. 3; and it is to Boccaccio’s narrative frame – and to its possible influence on Chaucer’s tale – that we must now briefly turn. As we have seen, the epistolary context to Petrarch’s translation of the Griselda tale refutes a monologic interpretation by virtue of its varied Rezeptionästhetik. It also refutes monologism by virtue of its being a detailed response to Boccaccio’s original tale, from which it inherits its ‘problem of hermeneutics’. Furthermore, critics such as Koff, Finlayson and Cooper have made the claim that Chaucer might have had direct knowledge of Boccaccio’s Decameron seem less fanciful. In the absence of any new evidence it remains impossible to prove such a claim, yet we know that Boccaccian inflections may be heard in the Clerk’s voice due to the Petrarchan intertext. In fact, the section which is often cited as proof of the Clerk’s susceptibility to pathos almost appears to bypass Petrarch and to rejuvenate the spirit of the Boccaccian original: Ther fil, as it bifalleth tymes mo, Whan that this child had souked but a throwe, This markys in his herte longeth so To tempte his wyf, hir sadnesse for to knowe, That he ne myghte out of his herte throwe This merveillous desir, his wyf t’assaye; Nedelees, God woot, he thoght hire for t’affraye. He hadde assayed hire ynogh bifore, And foond hire evere good; what neded it Hire for to tempte, and alwey moore and moore, Though som men preise it for a subtil wit? But as for me, I seye that yvele it sit To assaye a wyf whan that it is no nede, And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede. (IV. 449–62)

The equivalent passage in Petrarch’s version appears much more subdued by comparison:

174  Chaucer and Petrarch Cepit, ut fit, interim Walterum, cum iam ablactata esset infantula, mirabilis quedam quam [laudabilis] doctiores iudicent cupiditas, satis expertam care fidem coniugis experiendi altius et iterum retemptandi. As can happen, however, Walter was seized by a desire – wiser heads will call it more amazing than worthy. When the child had stopped nursing, he decided to test further the already proven faithfulness of his dear wife, and to repeat the test again. (Sen. XVII. 3. 192–4)

It is also to be noted that Le Livre Griseldis is very faithful to Petrarch’s original here, and so probably it does not provide Chaucer with his Clerk’s moral outrage: Et veez cy que je ne sçay quelle ymaginacion merveilleuse print ledit marquis, laquelle aucuns saiges veulent louer, c’est assavoir de experimenter et essaier sa femme plus avant, laquelle il avoit desja assez essayee et approuvee, et de la tenter encores par diverses manieres. Now look, I do not know where the marquis got the strange notion, which some wise men wish to praise, to assay his wife and to test her more than before, whom he had already tried and tested enough, and to tempt her again in diverse ways. (III. 162–5)36

However, Boccaccio’s original, spoken by the disruptive Dioneo prior to the tale’s beginning, is much closer to Chaucer’s later rewriting: vo’ ragionar d’un marchese, non cosa magnifica ma una matta bestialità, come che ben ne gli seguisse alla fine; la quale io non consiglio alcun che segua, per ciò che gran peccato fu che a costui ben n’avenisse. I want to tell you of a marquis, whose actions, even though things turned out well for him in the end, were remarkable not so much for their munificence as for their senseless brutality. Nor do I advise anyone to follow his example, for it was a great pity that the fellow should have drawn any profit from his conduct. (Dec. X. 10. 3)

The Clerk’s castigatory intervention may then be seen as somehow connecting with the Boccaccian subtext to Petrarch’s translation. Chaucer, consciously or unconsciously, restores the outrage which Petrarch felt it necessary to omit as part of his project to ameliorate Gualtieri as Valterius. In doing so, however, Chaucer has reinforced the voice of polysemia, of semantic and hermeneutic disruption. Indeed, the fact that the tale is told by the ludic Dioneo should alert us to potential misrule.37 36

37

Le Livre Griseldis, trans. by Amy W. Goodwin, in Correale and Hamel, eds, Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, pp. 140–67 (at pp. 148–51). There are nevertheless some parallels, in particular ‘merveilleuse’ and ‘merveillous’; ‘essaier’ and ‘assaye’; not to mention the use of the first person. However, the sense of outrage is less evident in the Livre. One might argue that the Clerk’s failure to adhere to the Host’s rules equates him with



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  175

Dioneo not only directs the reading of the tale from his opening condemnation of its protagonist (or rather antagonist), but he also offers an alternative ending, when he argues that Walter would have been better rewarded for his cruelty had Griselda been the kind of woman who, ‘quando, fuori di casa, l’avesse fuori in camiscia cacciata, s’avesse sì a un altro fatto scuotere il pilliccione, che riuscito ne fosse una bella roba’ (‘being driven from the house in her shift, had found some other man to shake her skin-coat for her, earning herself a fine new dress’, Dec. X. 10. 69). According to Mazzotta, ‘Dioneo implies that storytelling is an endless activity and that the “right” finale lies elsewhere’.38 Indeed, the response of the brigata is far from being uniform, as the ladies in the group proceed to discuss the tale at length, some taking one side, some another, some blaming one aspect, some praising another (‘[l] a novella di Dioneo era finita, e assai le donne, chi d’una parte e chi d’altra tirando, chi biasimando una cosa, un’altra intorno a essa lodandone, n’avevan favellato’). Dioneo’s tale is literally discussed until the sun goes down (‘il sole era già basso’, Dec. X. Concl. 1). The hermeneutic position ascribed to Dioneo is thus reinforced by the brigata’s response, but also by Boccaccio himself in the author’s conclusion, which follows the last day of storytelling. Here he argues for the Augustinian position that each thing in itself is good for something but may be badly used, and the same may be said for his tales (Dec. X. 10. 911). According to Augustine, all creation is inherently good but may be used to ends which are not. The correct use of the will he terms caritas; the incorrect use, cupiditas.39 Ashe makes the interesting argument that ‘Griselda’s manner of reading is precisely Christian, not to say Augustinian: she reads always with that “right intention”; she seeks in her reading to pursue her love, what Augustine calls “the double love of God and neighbour [caritas]”. She discards all readings which would lead her away from that perfect love, as Augustine advises the reader of Scripture to do.’40 It is tempting to suggest that Chaucer’s Griselda inherits this Augustinian hermeneutics directly from Boccaccio; but it is more likely that it comes from Petrarch, a devotee of Augustine. As we saw in the previous chapter, it has been noted that Boccaccio’s ‘matta bestialità’ is an Aristotelian description filtered through Dante.41 However, the

38 39 40 41

Dioneo. On Dioneo, see Emma Grimaldi, Il privilegio di Dioneo: L’eccezione e la regola nel sistema Decameron (Naples, 1987), in particular the final chapter, ‘Per una finale inquietudine’ (pp. 379–407). Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton, NJ, 1986), p. 130. Augustine, Confessions, II. 5; De civitate Dei, XII. 1–6, XIV. 7; and De doctrina christiana, III. 10. 16. Ashe, ‘Reading like a Clerk’, p. 939. See Charles Haines, ‘Patient Griselda and Matta bestialitade’, Quaterni d’italianistica, 6 (1985), pp. 233–40, in addition to the works by Mazzotta, Edwards and Goodwin cited above. See also the previous chapter, pp. 143–4.

176  Chaucer and Petrarch

anti-­scholastic Petrarch characteristically translates this Aristotelian phrase into an Augustinian one: ‘matta bestialità’ becomes ‘mirabilis […] cupiditas’, which Chaucer in turn translates as ‘merveillous desir’. In any case, Boccaccio stipulates that the meaning of the tale is dependent upon the disposition of the reader, upon what we may call their Rezeptionästhetik and their Erwartungshorizont (‘horizon of expectations’).42 However, Dioneo appends his own reading of the tale, which would appear to illustrate his own disposition and which lends force to the politicized readings of the Clerk’s Tale, which have become one of the primary means of its interpretation in recent years: Che si potrà dir qui? se non che anche nelle povere case piovono dal cielo de’ divini spiriti, come nelle reali di quegli che sarien più degni di guardar porci che d’avere sopra uomini signoria. What more needs to be said, except that celestial spirits may sometimes descend into the houses of the poor, whilst there are those in royal palaces who would be better employed as swineherds than as rulers of men? (Dec. X. 10. 68)

This reading obviously resonated with Petrarch, who incorporated it into the narrative of his tale (‘pauperam quoque tugurria non numquam gratia celestis invisit’, Sen. XVII. 3. 113–14), and with Chaucer, who translated it into his: ‘hye God sometyme senden kan | His grace into a litel oxes stalle’ (IV. 206–7). We will now turn precisely to these multiform politicized readings, which take into account the discursive ideology of power; its effect upon the ruler and the ruled in Chaucer’s tale; and the construction of gender and its effects both upon the body politic and upon the embodied text. In particular, the Griseldan intertext’s political discourse, which has been inherent at least since Boccaccio’s rationalization of it, allows us to glimpse Chaucer’s understanding of Petrarch’s socio-political landscape: which means, both the extent to which the two shared the same values and the key points of ideological divergence between them.43 One of the most crucial scenes in Chaucer’s tale is that in which Walter, after being exhorted to marry by his subjects, decides that he will wed Griselda, the only daughter of a man who ‘[a]monges this povre folk […] was holden povrest of hem alle’ (IV. 204–5). Yet it is not Griselda’s physical virtues that

42

43

See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Brighton, 1982), p. 44. We may recall Petrarch’s comment in Sen. XVII. 3 that he read only the beginning and the end of the Decameron and as such would have been aware of Boccaccio’s reader-theory. For a discussion of Chaucer’s socio-political concerns, see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA, 1989).



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  177

attract Walter’s gaze – or, at least, not only her physical virtues44 – but rather her obedience and gravity: And ay she kepte hir fadres lyf on-lofte With everich obeisaunce and diligence That child may doon to fadres reverence. […] Commendynge in his herte hir wommanhede, And eek hir vertu, passynge any wight Of so yong age, as wel in chiere as dede. For thogh the peple have no greet insight In vertu, he considered ful right Hir bountee, and disposed that he wolde Wedde hir oonly, if ever he wedde sholde. […] ‘Grisilde,’ he seyde, ‘ye shal wel understonde It liketh to youre fader and to me That I yow wedde, and eek it may so stonde, As I suppose, ye wol that it so be. But thise demandes axe I first,’ quod he, ‘That, sith it shal be doon in hastif wyse, Wol ye assente, or elles yow avyse?  (IV. 229–31, 239–45, 344–50)

In terms of political enfranchisement, Griselda does not have the option of withholding ‘assente’. The aberrant juxtaposition of ‘thise demandes axe I’ – aberrant because a demand is not ‘asked’ but made – illustrates her position within the patriarchy of medieval Italian feudalism (or post-feudal

44

I do not necessarily agree with Mark Miller’s reading of Griselda as ‘asexual […] a rather plain girl’ in his Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 2004), p. 228. Chaucer’s acknowledgement that ‘to speke of vertuous beautee | Thanne was she oon of the faireste under sonne’ (IV. 211–12) does not entail reading his description of her as ‘fair ynogh to sighte’ (IV. 209) as meaning that she is ‘plain’. I would suggest that it is a means of amplifying her virtue, as opposed to abbreviating her beauty. In Boccaccio’s version, Dioneo tells us that Griselda ‘era, come già dicemmo, di persona e di viso bella: e così come bella era, divenne tanto avvenevole, tanto piacevole e tanto costumata’ (‘She was endowed, as we have said, with a fine figure and beautiful features, and lovely as she already was, she now acquired so confident, graceful and decorous a manner’, Dec. X. 10. 24). Also, to claim that Griselda is ‘asexual’ is to render her even more inhuman than she has been made in certain readings. For a counterpoint to this view, see Kathryn Lynch, ‘Despoiling Griselda’, SAC, 10 (1988), pp. 41–70, who has noted that Walter spies ‘his future wife during the libidinally charged activity of hunting’ (p. 51); and Robin Waugh, ‘A Woman in the Mind’s Eye (and Not): Narrators and Gazes in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and in Two Analogues’, Philological Quarterly, 79 (2000), pp. 1–18, who argues that ‘her marriage might well allow her a chance at erotic adventure’ (p. 8).

178  Chaucer and Petrarch

mercantile society).45 As John Larner has noted, ‘the eldest male [of a given family or household] was an absolute ruler, his total power guaranteed by the sentiments of religion and the decisions of jurists’.46 Whereas Petrarch relates that the governance of his family and its lands had fallen to Walter, Boccaccio explicitly states that Gualtieri was the eldest of the household (‘fu tra’ marchesi di Sanluzzo il maggior della casa un giovane chiamato Gualtieri’, Dec. X. 10. 4, emphasis added).47 Walter’s attraction to Griselda may then be read as twofold: she has been thoroughly interpellated by the patriarchal code (‘ay she kepte hir fadres lyf on-lofte’), which may be transferred into wifely obedience (‘be ye redy with good herte | To al my lust […] And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day?’, IV. 351–4); she may also provide Walter with a means of testing the fidelity of his people.48 Yet neither of these intentions is as clear as Walter would have them be, due to the tale’s characteristic hermeneutic uncertainty. In relation to Griselda’s patriarchal interpellation, there is the recent critical question of her possible subversion.49 This subversion can be figured and interpreted in

45

46 47

48

49

Neither Petrarch’s nor Chaucer’s setting of the tale in the past (‘A markys whilom lord was’, ‘Grisilde is deed’, IV. 64, 1177) is as explicit as Boccaccio’s ‘[g]ià è gran tempo’ (Dec. X. 10. 4), which may be read as ‘once upon a time’ (fabula), or ‘a long time ago’ (historia) depending upon the reader. It must be noted that “demande” can also mean simply “question” (MED, 1 (a)). John Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch 1216–1380 (London, 1980), p. 65. Boccaccio himself, although not a nobleman, would have been aware of the responsibilities of the ‘maggior’, since after the plague he ‘found himself head of the family’. See V. Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, ed. by Dennis J. McAuliffe, trans. by Richard Monges (New York, 1976), p. 76. There has been, of course, a variety of interpretations of Walter’s decision to marry Griselda and a great number of readings which have their basis in gender studies and feminist criticism. In addition to the studies already cited by Lynch, Dinshaw, Mann, Hansen, Johnson, Waugh, Campbell, Denny-Brown and Ashe, see also Deborah Ellis, ‘Domestic Treachery in the Clerk’s Tale’, in Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson, eds, Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Detroit, MI, 1987), pp. 99–113; Anne Laskaya, ­Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 99–117; Catherine Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainesville, FL, 1997), pp. 53–75; Ann W. Astell, ‘Translating Job as Female’, in Jeanette Beer, ed., Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI, 1997), pp. 59–69; Gail Ashton, ‘Patient Mimesis: Griselda and the Clerk’s Tale’, ChR, 32 (1998), pp. 232–8; and Tara Williams, ‘ “T’assaye in thee thy wommanheede”: Griselda Chosen, Translated, and Tried’, SAC, 27 (2005), pp. 92–127. See for example Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, pp. 190–5; Dinshaw, ­Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 133; Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, pp. 119–20; Johnson, ­‘Reincarnations of Griselda’, pp. 197–8; Cox, Gender and Language, pp. 57–8; and Ashton, ‘Patient Mimesis’, p. 237 – all of whom, in different ways, examine Griselda’s subversion. I am using interpellation in the Althusserian sense of an ideological hailing of the subject, which addresses that subject as a particular persona, whom the subject misrecognizes as a ‘true’ self. See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (London, 1971), pp. 121–73 (at pp. 160–70).



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  179

different ways. It can be read as strength through silence and subservience, stimulating fear of the unknown and of the unintelligible, which returns us to the original dilemma: the problem of reading Griselda and the variety of interpretations her figura elicits. And this pertains to Griselda’s being simultaneously, as it were, an open and a closed book not only within the tale, but also outside of it: her textuality produces pathos, whereby female suffering is refigured as potency. Indeed there are as many critical interpretations as there are Griseldas. To illustrate this point, Linda Georgianna refutes the idea of Griselda’s silent subversion, arguing that it ‘is not that she grows silent, as critics sometimes imply. On the contrary, Chaucer has amplified her speeches considerably’, and that the ‘reading of the Clerk’s Tale as a novel, and of Griselda’s speeches as developing strategies for gaining social control, flies in the face of the text’s repeated insistence that there is no ambiguity, hidden meaning, or substantial change in her assent’.50 It is thus possible to argue that Griselda’s potential subversion does not lie in herself per se, but through the exercise of power over her, which produces the unsettling effect, or impression, of her being unintelligible: in many ways this is the power of the martyr over the persecutor, which leaves the reader in an uncomfortable position. What appears to be a constant amongst the myriad interpretations is Walter’s role as a reader or, more specifically, as a humanist reader – one of the legentes for whom Petrarch wrote his tale: ‘For thogh the peple have no greet insight | In vertu, he considered ful right | Hir bountee’. Along this perspective, Petrarch’s explanation, in the prefatory letter to Boccaccio, of how he changed the garment of Boccaccio’s original tale elicits a direct comparison of himself with Walter. This comparison is congruent with the idea that Petrarch’s writing is a ‘a tool for tyranny’ on account of his relationship with the Visconti of Milan (where he lived from 1353 to 1361) – an idea which allows Chaucer to emerge as a proto-feminist republican by comparison, thereby reinstating the familiar binary opposition – Petrarch’s negative to Chaucer’s positive – but from a new historicist perspective.51 And, whilst the range and knowledge of Wallace’s study cannot be denied, there are perhaps a few aspects of his image of Petrarch the despotic propagandist which are rendered indeterminate by the interpretative dilemmas which 50 51

Linda Georgianna, ‘The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent’, Speculum, 70 (1995), pp. 793–821 (at pp. 207–8). Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 285. See W. Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), for a counterpoint to Wallace’s assertion that Chaucer read Petrarch as a poetic despot compared to the liberal Boccaccio: ‘by 1373, Boccaccio had long since reconciled with Petrarch, and Florence had actually allied itself with its northern rival [Visconti-ruled Milan] not too many years before. One can doubt, then, that during the months Chaucer visited Florence he heard many complaints about Petrarch’s choice of associates’ (pp. 245–6). See also Branca (Boccaccio, pp. 99–100); E. H. Wilkins, Petrarch’s Eight Years in Milan (Cambridge, MA, 1958); and Chapter 1 of the present study, p. 37.

180  Chaucer and Petrarch

accompany his translation. Firstly there is the matter of Petrarch’s reformed Walter, as this is argued for by critics such as Martellotti and McLaughlin.52 Valterius is an ameliorated, more humanistic version of ­Gualtieri, as is evinced not only by his ostensibly superior perspicacity but also by his willingness to defer to learned counsel. In Boccaccio’s original, Gualtieri is asked by his vassals, en masse, to take a wife; and their plurality is expressed in each instance of address, but never in direct speech: ‘il pregaron’ (‘[they] begged him’), ‘[i] valenti uomini risposon’ (‘the gentlemen replied’), ‘[i] buoni uomini tutti lieti risposero’ (‘the good folk joyously gave him their blessing’, Dec. X. 10. 5–13). In Petrarch’s Latin, however, Valterius is addressed directly by a learned rhetor, representative of the vox populi: ‘unus cui vel auctoritas maior erat vel facundia maiorque cum suo duce familiaritas […] Moverunt pie preces animum viri’ (‘One of them, either more assured or more eloquent, and better acquainted with his lord, spoke […] These pious prayers moved the heart of the man’, Sen. XVII. 3. 71–2, 91).53 The effect of the orator’s speech, not to mention its content, confirms its delivery in the grand or ‘heigh style’, which Chaucer’s Clerk claims to find ‘impertinent’.54 This persuasive figure, it may be argued, is a partial projection of Petrarch himself, as is the poet–lover of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Franciscus in the Secretum, or – albeit in a different way – as ‘Geffrey’ is a projection of Chaucer in the House of Fame. For example, in the letter to Boccaccio which precedes his translation – a letter to which Chaucer might have had access – Petrarch accounts for his relationships with contemporary magnates: Huc etiam illud effers: bonas me partes temporum sub obsequio principium perdidisse. Hic, ne erres, verum accipe. Nomine ego cum principibus fui, re autem principes mecum fuerunt. Nunquam me illorum consilia et perraro convivia tenuerunt. Nulla michi unquam condition probaretur, que me vel modicum a libertate et a studiis meis averteret. Itaque cum palatium omnes, ego vel nemus petebam vel inter libros in thalamo quiescebam. At this point you also bring up that I wasted a good part of my time in the service of princes. So that you may not err in this, here is the truth: I was with the princes in name, but in fact the princes were with me; I never attended their councils, and very seldom their banquets. I would never approve any conditions that would distract me even for a short while from my freedom and from my studies. Therefore, when everyone sought the palace, I either sought the forest or rested in my room among my books. (Sen. XVII. 2. 1146–8/650)

52 53 54

See Chapter 4, p. 153. The verbal form ‘moverunt’, although it expresses the third person plural, is still directly linked to the speech of the learned individual. See Chapter 4, p. 147.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  181

Similarly, in his unfinished Letter to Posterity, Petrarch writes that ‘[m]aximi reges mee etatis et amarunt et coluerunt me, cur autem nescio’ (‘[the] greatest rulers of this age have loved and courted me; but I know not why’); however, ‘tantum fuit michi insitus amor libertatis, ut cuius vel nomen ipsum illi esse contrarium videretur, omni studio declinarem’ (‘such love for freedom was implanted in me that I studiously avoided anyone whose very name seemed incompatible with it’, Sen. XVIII. 1. 4–6/673). Boccaccio and the other Florentine discepoli may have cited his affiliation with the Visconti as a direct counter to this claim; yet Petrarch himself evidently believed that his relationship with the Milanese despots and other such rulers was directed towards a moral goal. As we have seen, when describing the time he allegedly wasted, Petrarch told of how he was sent to sue for peace between Venice and Genoa, to do the same between Liguria and Charles IV, and to congratulate King John of France on his release from an English prison, all of which added up to a total of seven months.55 The humanist who can exercise theologia rhetorica ought to direct it to moral ends, which contribute to the benefit of the res publica or to ‘commune profit’ (IV. 431). This element of Petrarchan humanism is expressed through the figure of the public orator, which has no equivalent in Boccaccio’s original and is an element Chaucer recognizes, not only when he translates this figure as ‘oon of hem, that wisest was of loore’ (IV. 87), but also when the Host requires that the Clerk keepe his rhetorical terms, colours and tropes ‘in stoor til so be ye endite | Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write’ (IV. 17–18). Petrarch stresses the import of the individual here; but individuality does not automatically denote tyranny. A second element of Wallace’s critique which the translative process opens to interrogation is to be found when he cites Petrarch’s description of his “attacking” Boccaccio’s feminine text as an illustration of misogyny: ‘Petrarch, finding himself “delighted and fascinated” by “so charming a story” (“tam dulcis ystoria”) suddenly snatched up his pen one day and (he tells Boccaccio) “attacked this story of yours” (“ystoriam ipsam tuam scribere sum aggressus”)’.56 As we saw in the Introduction, however, the translation of this section of the letter is very much open to debate.57 Yet, as further proof of Petrarch’s misogyny, Wallace cites a letter to Pandolfo Malatesta the Younger in which Petrarch reluctantly gives advice on the kind of woman the Lord of Rimini should marry:

55

56 57

See Chapter 1, pp. 64–5. Wallace rightly says that ‘[t]hroughout his life Petrarch was constantly striving to stretch time out, to profit from every minute’: Chaucerian Polity, p. 266. Ibid., p. 277. See Introduction, pp. 12–13.

182  Chaucer and Petrarch Siquidem puella nobilis a prima etate tibi dedita et suorum divulsa blanditiis ac sussurris anilibus, castior humiliorque et obsequentior fiet et sanctior; levitatem quoque maturius puellarum exuens, matronalem induet gravitatem; denique seu tibi virgo nupserit, seu vidua, ex quo vos genialis thalamus contraxerit, unum illa te audiens unum videns unum cogitans, in te unum tuosque mores transformabitur oblitaque comitum ac nutricum in solis coniugii requiescet affectibus. a noble maiden, devoted to you from an early age and distanced from her people’s flatteries and old women’s gossipings, will be more chaste and humble, more obedient and holy; quickly casting off her girlish frivolity, she will don the seriousness of a married woman. In short, whether a virgin or a widow, once she joins you in the nuptial bed, hearing, seeing, and thinking of you alone, she will be transformed into your image alone and will adopt your ways, and once her friends and nurses are forgotten, she will devote herself only to the joys of marriage. (Fam. XXII. 1. 103/209–10)

Such a prescription is undoubtedly repellent to the twenty-first-century western liberal mindset; yet it was not necessarily so to its fourteenth-century equivalent, and this remains one of the problems that the modern reader must face. A key element in any contemporary rereading is the factor of alterity, which must be incorporated rather than avoided. Petrarch was writing within a well established medieval misogynistic tradition, one which did not exclude Chaucer or Boccaccio.58 Yet even here there are occasional interpretative ambivalences. For example, in the absence of experience, Petrarch tends to revert to ‘auctoritee’. As he says at the opening of the letter, he has no experience of being married – unlike Pandolfo himself – and so ‘de altero vero vel scriptis auctorum veterum vel relatibus modernorum coniugum vel proprio quodam motu animi coniecturam facio!’ (‘[I] must make inferences about [marriage] based on ancient writings or on reports from contemporary married men or my own personal feelings’, Fam. XXII. 1. 101/208). Hence we cannot ascertain the extent to which these are Petrarch’s ‘own personal feelings’ or reiterations of contemporary thought. Indeed Petrarch’s comments on the kind of bride suitable to a ruler bear some resemblance to contemporary marriage tracts, for instance the fourteenth-century Avvertimenti di maritaggio.59 Furthermore, the translation of the repeated Latin word unum as ‘your’ alters the dynamics of the passage slightly, as Petrarch’s ideal of love is based upon contem-

58 59

See Dinshaw’s introduction to Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, pp. 3–27. Boccaccio, after all, wrote the Corbaccio. See Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, p. 74, and Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, eds, Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650 (Cambridge, 1998). See also Cox’s discussion of English marriage tracts such as Hali Meiðhad and their availability to Chaucer (Gender and Language, pp. 66–9).



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  183

porary Pauline doctrine and Ciceronian amicitia.60 This emphasis upon the unum of marriage is the thought which underpins Petrarch’s comment that ‘ut duorum non nisi unus animus videretur, [isque] non communis amborum sed viri dumtaxat unius, uxor enim per se nichil velle’ (Sen. XVII. 3. 276–78, emphasis added) which Chaucer translates thus: ‘it semed thus: that of hem two | Ther nas but o wyl, for as Walter leste, | The same lust was hire plesance also. | And, God be thanked, al fil for the beste’ (IV. 715–18). However, the Pauline and the Ciceronian ideal of union only succeed through reciprocity, which is clearly lacking in this case.61 And so, even when related to contemporary thought and covalent source materials, the concept of marriage upon which the Clerk’s Tale is predicated yields to an interpretative plurality. This matrimonial model may also be seen as underpinning Walter’s relationship with his subjects: ‘But nathelees I se youre trewe entente, And truste upon youre wit, and have doon ay; Wherfore of my free wyl I wole assente To wedde me […] But I yow preye, and charge upon youre lyf, What wyf that I take, ye me assure To worshipe hire, whil that hir lyf may dure, In word and werk, both heere and everywheere, As she an emperoures doghter weere. ‘And forthermoore, this shal ye swere: that ye Agayn my choys shul neither grucche ne stryve; For sith I shal forgoon my libertee At youre requeste, as ever moot I thryve, Ther as myn herte is set, ther wol I wyve; And but ye wole assente in swich manere, I prey yow, speketh namoore of this matere.’ […] He graunted hem a day, swich as hym leste, On which he wolde be wedded sikerly, And seyde he dide al this at hir requeste. And they, with humble entente, buxomly, Knelynge upon hir knees ful reverently, 60 61

See Ephesians 5: 28, 31, and Cicero’s De amicitia (translated in the volume On Friendship; The Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. by J. G. F. Powell, Warminster, 1990), pp. 27–73. For a discussion of Pauline marriage precepts in the late medieval period, see the studies by Michael Sheehan and Erik Kooper in Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector, eds, The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex and Marriage in the Medieval World (Albany, NY, 1991), pp. 32–56. See also the Merchant’s Tale, IV. 1263–1392.

184  Chaucer and Petrarch Hym thonken alle; and thus they han an ende Of hire entente  (IV. 148–51, 164–75, 182–89)

Walter has effectively pledged his troth to his people. His present ‘assente’ may be seen to suggest that he has entered into union with them at the moment of acquiescence (sponsalia per verba de praesenti), although he has not yet fulfilled their wishes, which might suggest that he will enter into perfect union with them upon the fulfilment of his promise (sponsalia per verba de futuro).62 Furthermore, the language Walter uses in his prenuptial arrangement with his subjects is repeated when he proposes his ‘demandes’ to Griselda: I seye this: be ye redy with good herte To al my lust, and that I frely may, As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte, And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day? And eek whan I sey ‘ye’, ne say nat ‘nay’? Neither by word ne frowning contenance? Swere this, and heere I swere oure alliance.  (IV. 351–7)

Chaucer adheres closely to Petrarch’s Latin here, as Valterius asks Grisildis ‘an volenti animo parata sis ut de omnibus tecum michi conveniat, ita ut in nulla unquam re a mea voluntate dissencias et, quicquid tecum agere voluero’ (‘[whether] your willing spirit is prepared never to dissent from my will in any thing which concerns you and me; whether you will permit me to do whatever I wish with you’, Sen. XVII. 3. 154–6).63 Interestingly, the Bernardo–Levin–Bernardo version translates the subordinate clause as ‘just as I agree with you in everything’, creating a reciprocity which is noticeably absent from Chaucer.64 Nevertheless, in both cases Griselda constitutes a means of consolidating Walter’s relationship with his subjects, as indeed she is one of those subjects, and continues to think of herself as being such (IV.  813–33).65 The Clerk’s Tale, and its Latin source, may then be read in

62

63

64 65

For a discussion of these two marital expressions, see Karl P. Wentersdorf, ‘Some Observations on the Concept of Clandestine Marriage in Troilus and Criseyde’, ChR, 15 (1980), pp. 101–26 (at p. 103). See also the Merchant’s Tale: ‘Al that hire housbonde lust, hire liketh weel; | She seith nat ones “nay,” when he seith “ye.” | “Do this,” seith he, “Al redy, sire,” seith she’ (IV. 1344–6). The verbal parallels confirm that Walter lives Januarie’s fantasy and that May undermines Walter’s position. See Sen. XVII. 3, 660, in the volume Rerum senilium libri: Letters of Old Age, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore, MD, 1992). The Clerk’s outrage against Walter’s subjects, always ‘undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane’ (IV. 996), testifies to their failure to maintain their troth; the ‘sclaundre of Walter ofte and wyde spradde’ (IV. 722), contrary to their pledge to ‘neither grucche ne stryve’. Their inconstancy is of course to be measured against Griselda.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  185

accordance with what Gayle Rubin termed the ‘traffic in women’, Griselda being subsumed by a patriarchal kinship ritual.66 Whilst such a reading negates Griselda’s actions, the subject of agency is recurrent in the critical responses to her ‘assente’ and may be found outside of the binary opposition constituted by victimhood and subversion. For example, Wallace argues not only that ‘Grisilde’s suffering begins when she becomes the object of the tyrannical gaze’, but also that she ‘contains the effects of Walter’s gaze’.67 By containing his tyrannical speculation, Griselda may be seen to continue in her role of acting for the ‘commune profit’; whilst this gaze is focused upon her, Walter’s other subjects may live in peace.68 From this perspective, her relinquishment of will in that original ‘assente’ does not end her agency, but rather transposes it. Petrarch’s Latin translation is predicated upon the interaction between the individual and the community in relation to the demands of desire and duty – a theme which Chaucer understood and translated into his tale.69 The political hermeneutics produced by Griselda’s tale is, then, by no means separate from the intertextual interpretation. Griselda may be read as a patriarchal victim or as subversive of that patriarchy; as a feminine text to be read by male legentes or as the mimesis of such a text, which returns and undermines the enquiring masculine gaze; as a disenfranchised feudal subject or as an autonomous agent, whose single-mindedness reminds her would-be persecutor of his abjection. Indeed the intertextual and the political readings consummate their relationship through Chaucer’s act of translatio, which transposes the text from its historical Italian moment into its English equivalent, as Michael Hanrahan illustrates when he argues that the Clerk’s Tale’s ‘fundamental interest in succession and inheritance not only figures a crisis of late Ricardian rule – an heirless realm – but also enables Chaucer to

66 67 68

69

See Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975), pp. 157–210. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 291. Chaucer also uses this phrase in The Parliament of Fowls (47, 75), a vision predicated upon the dreamer’s reading of the Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio) – which in turn is the concluding book of Cicero’s De republica – hence Griselda may be seen as acting in accordance with Ciceronian civic values. See The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1987), pp. 383–94 (at pp. 385–6). Walter’s persecution of his wife is therefore detrimental to ‘commune profit’, and it is at this point, following his mirabilis cupiditas, that he may be called truly tyrannical – and not primarily on the basis of the fact that he does not have an heir, as some commentators have argued. The reading of Griselda as sacrificial lamb corresponds in fact with the allegorical interpretations of her by Cottino-Jones and Mann, both of whom see in her a figura Christi. See Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, p. 255. See also Georgianna (‘Grammar of Assent’, pp. 814, 818) and Miller (Philosophical Chaucer, p. 234) on Griselda’s agency in relation to the demands of faith; this in addition to Koff (‘Imagining Absence’, p. 301) and to A. C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, 2nd edn (London, 1972), pp. 76–106.

186  Chaucer and Petrarch

imagine alternatives to the king and realm’.70 This political crisis is reflected in the reasons Walter’s subjects give for wanting him to marry: ‘taak a wyf, for hye Goddes sake! […] [lest] a straunge successour sholde take | Youre heritage’ (IV. 135, 138–9). And, whilst that ‘straunge successour’ does not emerge in Chaucer’s tale, he did appear outside of it, in 1399, in the figure of Henry Bolingbroke. Apart from the usurpation of Richard by Bolingbroke – which in any case postdates Chaucer’s translation – Hanrahan also points to Philippe de Mézières’ exhortation, after the death of Queen Anne, that Richard should marry ‘a wife such as Griselda, the wife of the Marquis of Saluzzo’.71 There is also the intertextual link between the figure of Anne, which appears in contemporary chronicles, and Griselda – in that the former was an initially unpopular choice of a bride for the king, but eventually came to be depicted ‘as helping to maintain the social order and civic peace through her intercessory roles in the struggles of Richard’s reign’, just as the Clerk says of Griselda: ‘Ther nas discord, rancour, ne hevynesse | In al that land that she ne koude apese […] she from hevene sent was, as men wende, | Peple to save and every wrong t’amende’ (IV. 432–41). In other words, both intercede for the good of the res publica, for ‘commune profit’. However, as Hanrahan notes, Anne’s role in the chronicles ‘is not limited to that of mediator. She is also implicated in certain scandals that plagued Richard’s court.’72 Just as Walter’s subjects are inconstant and fickle (IV. 995), so, it is implied, are their historical English counterparts, in that they, too, ‘conceive of an additional alternative available to Richard – a second wife’.73 It is interesting to note, in light of this, that the Clerk’s very Petrarchan interjection against the labile vulgus actually has no equivalent in Petrarch’s version itself – although it may be drawing on the Triumph of Time – and it is tempting to think that Chaucer is railing against those who both praised and vilified Anne.74

70

71

72 73 74

Michael Hanrahan, ‘ “A straunge successour sholde take youre heritage”: The Clerk’s Tale and the Crisis of Ricardian Rule’, ChR, 35 (2001), pp. 335–50 (pp. at 336–7). See also Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 295–8, and Lee Patterson, Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales (New York, 2006), pp. 51–65. Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II: A Plea Made in 1395 for Peace between England and France, trans. by G. W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1975), p. 42. Philippe, a friend of Petrarch’s, was of course the first person to translate the tale into French. See Hanrahan, ‘Crisis of Ricardian Rule’, p. 342. Ibid., p. 345. It has been claimed that the Clerk’s Tale is in fact a revised version and that the original may have been written whilst Anne was still alive – that is, prior to 1394. See J. M. Manly and E. Rickert, The Text of The Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols (Chicago, IL, 1940), 2: pp. 499–501; J. Burke Severs, ‘Did Chaucer Revise the Clerk’s Tale?’, Speculum, 21 (1946), pp. 295–302; and Germaine Dempster, ‘Manly’s Conception of the Early History of the Canterbury Tales’, PMLA, 61 (1946), pp. 379–415 and ‘A Period in the Development of the Canterbury Tales Marriage Group and of Blocks B2



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  187

There is, furthermore, a Chaucerian equivalent to Richard’s second marriage – that is, to ‘the king’s symbolic marriage to the city of London in 1392’.75 As we have seen, Walter effectively weds his subjects by marrying Griselda, their ‘assente’ to him is couched in the same terms as Griselda’s agreement to their ‘alliance’. Both unions are couched in language reminiscent of late medieval marriage vows, in which the wife’s pledge is identical to the husband’s, with the exception that she must vow ‘to be cheerful and obedient, at bed and at board’, whilst he presumably would be free to ‘grucche’ as much as he pleased.76 Thus, when Walter publicly strips Griselda, revealing her body to his subjects, he is effectively revealing his power over the body politic; in presenting Griselda as a corpus, a ‘text to be read and interpreted by men’, he also presents his intention to rewrite that text and, by doing so, to transcribe his people in his own image. Whether he succeeds in this intentional complex is dependent of course upon the individual reader’s moral and hermeneutic choice. This marriage between the ruler and the ruled, not to mention the fears over a ‘straunge successor’, may also be seen to illustrate residual anxieties over civic division following the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Marion Turner has recently discussed Chaucer’s works in relation to ‘contemporary discourses of treason and urban fragmentation, discourses that were under particular pressure in the closing decades of the fourteenth century’.77 However, Turner does not provide any discussion of the Clerk’s Tale. This is perhaps understandable, given the dating of the Clerk’s Tale in relation to the Peasants’ Revolt. Yet Walter’s espousal of the body politic by means of his prenuptial agreement with Griselda and his stipulation that neither his vassals nor his new bride ‘grucche’ against him in any matter, given his own submission of liberty for the sake of the public good, would appear to suggest that some

75

76

77

and C’, PMLA, 68 (1953), pp. 1142–59. Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (London, 1925), p. 161, n. 1 claims that the lines ‘O stormy peple! Unsad and evere untrewe! | Ay undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane!’ (IV. 995–6) draw on Triumphus temporis: ‘benché la gente ciò non sa, né crede: | cieca, che sempre al vento si trastulla | e pur di false opinion si pasce’ (I. 132–34). “Fane” here reads as “vane” – see MED, s.v. ‘fane’ n.1, 3. Hanrahan, ‘Crisis of Ricardian Rule’, p. 345. Hanrahan draws a distinction here between Ricardian and Chaucerian texts by saying that the second marriage does not take place in the latter – that is, in the marriage between Walter and his daughter – which is true; but he does not take into account the unum formed by Walter and his people. Conor McCarthy, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook (London, 2004), p. 83. However, as D. L. d’Avray has noted, in the post-Lateran IV (1215) and pre-Tridentine (1545) period, ‘a simple exchange of assent was enough to make a valid marriage’: ‘Marriage Ceremonies and the Church in Italy after 1215’, in Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, eds, Marriage in Italy, pp. 107–15 (at p. 107). See, also by D. L. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford, 2005). Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (Oxford, 2007), p. 32.

188  Chaucer and Petrarch

anxiety over political division remained, at least within the discursive realm.78 And, whilst Chaucer is translating here, he was very much aware – like Wyatt after him – of how another’s words could be transplanted into another social context. In order to close this discussion of the Clerk’s Tale’s political and gendered dimensions, I shall return to its opening, in particular to how the Clerk is portrayed as operating within the discursive power relations of the Canterbury group and how this portrayal serves to ‘conveyen his mateere’ (IV. 55). As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Host requires the Clerk to tell a tale but restricts him to speech which is unadorned – a naked text: For what man that is entred in a pley, He nedes moot unto the pley assente. […] Youre termes, youre colours, and youre figures, Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write. Speketh so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye, That we may understonde what ye seye.’ This worthy clerk benignely answerde: ‘Hooste,’ quod he, ‘I am under youre yerde […]’ (IV. 10–11, 16–22)

The Clerk, however, whilst promising ‘obeisaunce’ to the Host, breaks ranks by means of such ‘termes […] colours […] and figures’, and without Harry’s realization. By employing the trope of negatio, the Clerk can tell how Petrarch, ‘with heigh stile he enditeth, | Er he the body of his tale writeth, | A prohemye […] The which were a long thing to devyse’ (IV. 41–3, 52), even as he judges it to be ‘a thyng impertinent’ (IV. 54), and at the same time he can include that proem almost in its entirety (IV. 43–51, continued in IV. 57–63). For those commentators who choose to read Griselda as subversive there is a precedent here, in that a promise is made to an authority figure (‘I am under youre yerde’) and then broken, without appearing to be so. It may even be argued that Chaucer aligns the Clerk with the seemingly passive heroine of his own tale from the outset: ‘ “Sire Clerk of Oxenford”, oure Hooste sayde, | “Ye ryde as coy and stille as dooth a mayde | Were newe spoused” ’ (IV. 1–3). The Clerk attempts to resist this alignment by comparing himself to Petrarch – ‘This worthy clerk benignely answered: […] I wol yow telle a tale 78

Paul Strohm notes that treason in the fourteenth century could ‘embrace court and bedchamber, state policy and personal desire’, to the extent that a wife’s disobedience to her husband could be seen as a threat or a challenge to the political status quo: Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination in Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, NJ, 1992), pp. 122–3. See also Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, pp. 42–3.



Griselda between Petrarch and Chaucer  189

which that I | Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk’ (IV. 21, 26–7). However, the Clerk’s own language betrays him – at the opening of the tale we are told that Petrarch ‘is now deed’ (IV. 29), and at its close the Lenvoy de Chaucer reveals that ‘Grisilde is deed’ (IV. 1177). Miller claims that Harry Bailey’s ‘conventional association between clerical meditativeness and effeminacy’ is not as misplaced as it might appear, at least not in the case of the Clerk, as his reticence and apparent aloofness correspond to Griselda’s apparent emotional withdrawal.79 Dinshaw also notes the correspondence between the Clerk and Griselda, but adds that, apart from their being ‘in lowly positions in relation to the others’, there is ‘a level of aggression too, that both Griselda and the Clerk demonstrate against the others; albeit quiet, it is deep’.80 One way in which this aggression is revealed, I would argue, is rhetorically, through the Clerk’s deliberate, skilful negation of Harry’s strictures, and through Griselda’s own not inconsiderable powers of speech – as has been pointed out, the claim for her silent subversion is undermined by the fact that she has only marginally fewer lines of dialogue than her husband. In the prologue to the tale, therefore, we glimpse its ‘mateere’: the Host’s attempted feminization of the Clerk as a means of subordination is undone by the latter’s rhetorical dexterity. One might even consider the Clerk as being akin to Dioneo, in that both break the narrative strictures placed upon them. Harry Bailey, like Walter, attempts to decipher this feminine text but only succeeds in applying his own interpretation, which is what the tale itself elicits from succeeding generations of readers. Rhetoric, in the Clerk’s Tale, reassumes its political and moral aetiology, its operation for the benefit of the ‘commune profit’. Chaucer evidently understood Petrarch’s humanist project. The General Prologue’s description of the Clerk, despite his predilection for ‘logyk’ and his desire to own ‘[t]wenty books, clad in blak or reed, | Of Aristotle and his philosophie’ (I. 286, 294–5), suggests a Petrarchan nature at certain points: ‘Of studie took he moost cure and moost heede […] Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, | And gladly wolde he lerne’ (I. 303, 307–8). We might compare this description to Petrarch’s account of himself in the Letter to Posterity: ‘Ingenio fui equo potius quam acuto, ad omne bonum et salubre studium apto, sed ad moralem precipue philosophiam’ (‘I had a well-balanced rather than a keen intellect, fit for all kinds of good and wholesome study, but especially inclined to moral philosophy’, Sen. XVIII.1. 6/673). It is of course the Clerk’s, or rather Chaucer’s, good and wholesome ‘studie’ that brings the tale into being and maintains its problematic interpretation. The Clerk’s Tale thus has a habit of returning its readers to the ­multiplicity of interpretation, and in doing so it prompts and legitimizes continuous

79 80

Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, p. 239. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 136.

190  Chaucer and Petrarch

r­ evision. It is in many ways unavoidable that we read the Clerk’s Tale from a modern critical perspective, in accordance with diverse hermeneutic ­schemata; yet it is equally unavoidable that we acknowledge just how closely such schemata resemble those available to Chaucer’s own audience. Conceptions of the postmodern intertext, as we have seen, lend themselves to the late medieval methodology of cumulative textual production which Chaucer’s tale exemplifies, just as it may be seen to provide a voice for the politically disenfranchised, or a critique of political abuse. We would of course be mistaken in positing direct correspondences on a universal model – there are various, obvious ruptures which defy such contiguity; the fourteenth-century mindset is undoubtedly alien in certain respects to its twenty-first-century counterpart. Yet there are also affinities, moments of recognition in which the boundary between the self/other binary becomes diaphanous. The heteroglossia of the Clerk’s Tale not only offers us a multiplicity of perspectives upon its own period of production but also allows for a renewed speculation upon our own. It must also be acknowledged that Chaucerian heteroglossia is dependent upon the hermeneutic potential which Petrarch transposed from Boccaccio’s original into his Latin translation. Various factors in Petrarch’s version, for example the amelioration and ambiguity of Walter, necessitate misprision and challenge the readers to examine their own moral codes and valences; a challenge that Chaucer accepts and presents, in turn, to his own audience(s). The plurality of interpretations that one encounters in the Clerk’s Tale mirrors that of the epistolary framework of Petrarch’s translation, which itself reflects the Boccaccian Rezeptionästhetik of the Decameron’s conclusione dell’autore. The Clerk’s Tale and the Canticus Troili, furthermore, are based upon works which in many ways exemplify Petrarch’s primary concerns: the division of the self and the concomitant rupture between the self and the community – two lacunae which the subject may attempt to bridge through a literary expression which also seeks to communicate ‘absentibus, nonnunquam et posteris post annorum milia’: with those who are, to return to our original point of departure, ‘far away, sometimes even [with] those who follow after thousands of years’, Sen. XVII. 2. 1156/653).

Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditynges’ Whilst Chaucer and Petrarch may not have met in life, they do in death. John Lydgate’s praise of Chaucer in poems such as The Floure of Curtesye transposes the Clerk’s encomium to Petrarch: Chaucer is deed, that had suche a name Of fayre makyng, that, without[en] wene, Fayrest in our tonge, as the laurer grene. We may assay for to countrefete His gaye style, but it wyl not be; The welle is drie, with the lycoure swete. (The Floure of Curtesye, 236–41)

In the Life of Our Lady, Lydgate not only echoes Chaucer’s praise of Petrarch but also notes the importance of translation to the literary polysystem: And eke my maister Chaucer is ygrave The noble Rhetor, poete of Brytayne That worthy was the laurer for to have Of poetrye, and the palme atteyne That made firste, to distille and rayne The golde dewe, dropes, of speche and eloquence Into our tunge, thurgh his excellence (II. 1628–34)1

That Lydgate had the Clerk’s prologue in mind may be surmised from the fact that, just a couple of lines earlier, he had referred to ‘the Retorykes swete| Of petrak Fraunces that couthe so endite’ (II. 623–4).2 Interestingly, the two passages mark a distinction between interlingual and intralingual translation. Chaucer’s role as translator of the Italian avant-garde is lauded on the one

1

2

See The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by Henry Noble MacCracken, 2 vols, EETS, ES 107, OS 192 (London, 1911, 1934), 2: pp. 410–18 (at p. 417). For the Life of Our Lady, see A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, Joseph A. Lauritis et al., eds (Pittsburgh, PA, 1961). On Lydgate’s praise of Chaucer, see David R. Carlson, ‘The Chronology of Lydgate’s Chaucer References’, ChR, 38 (2004), pp. 246–54. Lydgate would later translate Boccaccio’s De casibus (through Laurent de Premierfait’s French rewriting) as The Fall of Princes. Boccaccio’s praise of Petrarch in Book VIII is couched in Lydgate’s Chaucerian encomia.

192  Chaucer and Petrarch

hand; on the other, later poets ‘may assay for to countrefete | His gaye style, but it wyl not be’. Lydgate accords Chaucer the same status as Petrarch had achieved in Italy, the reference to ‘the laurer grene’ rendering him England’s ‘lauriat poete’ (IV. 31). Yet prior to posthumous reputation, in their literary attempts to make a good end in accordance with the ars moriendi, both Chaucer and Petrarch occupy the same impulse: Vergine, quante lagrime ò già sparte, quante lusinghe et quanti preghi indarno, pur per mia pena et per mio grave danno! […] Mortal bellezza, atti et parole m’ànno tutta ingombrata l’alma. […] e ’l cor or conscïentia or morte punge. Raccomandami al tuo figliuol, verace homo et verace Dio, ch’accolga ’l mïo spirto ultimo in pace. Virgin, how many tears have I already scattered, how many pleadings, and how many prayers in vain, only for my pain and my heavy loss! […] mortal beauty, acts, and words have burdened all my soul […] and now conscience, now death pierces my heart: commend me to your Son, true man and true God, that He may receive my last breath in peace. (RVF 366. 79–85, 133–37)3

These lines, which close the Rerum vulgariuim fragmenta, are driven by the same impetus and the same liturgical tradition which leads Chaucer to make his Retraction at the close of the Canterbury Tales: Wherfore I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; and namely for my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees […] thanke I oure Lord Jhesu Crist and his blisful Mooder, and all the seintes of hevene, bisekynge hem that they from hennes forth unto my lyves ende sende me grace to biwayle my giltes and to studie to the salvacioun of my soule […] Qui cum Patre et Spiritu Sancto vivit et regnat Deus per omnia secula. Amen. (X. 1084–91)

Chaucer’s penitence over his ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’ corresponds to Petrarch’s ‘mortal bellezza, atti et parole’, the translation of fleshly attractions into words, the life lived secundum carnem rather than

3

See Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, ‘La preghiera alla Vergine: Dante e Petrarca’, Filologia e critica, 20 (1995), pp. 365–74.



Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditnges’  193

secundum spiritum. Similarly, Chaucer’s ‘studie to the salvacioun of my soule’ recalls Petrarch’s ‘ch’accolga ’l mïo spirto ultimo in pace’, whilst both employ echoes of the mass to support their entreaties – the Nicene Creed in Petrarch and the traditional prayer ending in Chaucer.4 These similarities between the respective conclusions of Chaucer’s and Petrarch’s vernacular careers ought to provide a fitting end to a study which has traced the various intertextual relationships between the two poets; yet there remains the matter of addressing conclusively the recent critical commentary, which insists upon putting them asunder. I will then close by reconsidering some influential arguments, which have emphasized apparently irreconcilable differences between Chaucer and Petrarch. This is not to deny that differences and lacunae interpose; undoubtedly they do, and frequently. Yet the extent and depth of their supposedly antithetical perspectives merit a brief reinvestigation in the light of what we have discovered of the relationship Chaucer–Petrarch. We have circumnavigated David Wallace’s fascinating and detailed critique of Petrarch’s allegedly elitist cultural project at various points throughout this study, yet we have not addressed the charges per se, as they relate to a fundamental division between Chaucer and Petrarch. Wallace discloses five Chaucerian critiques of what he terms the Petrarchan Academy; they are based upon the Clerk’s Tale and are as follows: (i) Chaucer reverses the direction of Petrarch’s translation, from Latin to the vernacular, thereby exemplifying cultural elitism. (ii) Chaucer emphasizes the political mechanisms between ruler and ruled. (iii) Chaucer restores the female body to itself, giving it autonomy. (iv) Chaucer places the tale into the mouth of a logician, whereas Petrarch was anti-scholastic. (v) Chaucer’s tale is open-ended, not monologic.5 These charges may be responded to as follows: (i) Petrarch’s translation of the tale into Latin was not in order to preserve the tale within an exclusively masculine sphere of Latinate readership, but in order to make it available to non-Italians, who could then choose to translate it back into a variety of vernaculars, as Chaucer, Philippe de Mézières and Christine de Pizan did. As Petrarch says at the opening 4

5

Such as the close to the Eucharistic prayer or the Communion Rite. The formulation is often used in Advent prayers, Corpus Christi and liturgies of the hours. Petrarch’s ‘verace| homo et verace Dio’ recalls the credo’s ‘Deum uerum de Deo uero’ (‘True God from True God’). See A. E. Burn, Facsimiles of the Creeds from Early Manuscripts, Henry Bradshaw Society, 36 (London, 1909), pp. 13–14. See D. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA, 1997), pp. 286–93.

194  Chaucer and Petrarch

of the letter: ‘subito talis interloquendum cogitacio supervenit, fieri posse ut nostri [eciam] sermonis ignaros tam dulcis historia delectaret’ (‘suddenly it occurred to me that this beautiful story would perhaps also delight those ignorant of Italian’, Sen. XVII. 3. 29–30). Thus Petrarch’s translation, rather than seeking to limit the availability of the tale to an elect, did in fact seek to widen its audience considerably. (ii) Petrarch is just as concerned with the equitable relations between the ruler and the ruled as is Chaucer. His addition of the humanist vox populi, replacing Boccaccio’s portrayal of an undifferentiated mass, bears witness to this fact. (iii) Chaucer’s Griselda achieves her self-possession through a mimesis of Petrarch’s Griseldis, who imbues her with a rhetorical skill absent from Boccaccio’s original and with the capacity to read and speak her own corpus. (iv) Chaucer probably did not know of Petrarch’s anti-scholastic writings such as On His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others, and the Clerk in any case venerates Petrarch. (v) Petrarch’s tale is not monologic, as was evidenced in Chapter 5. It was in the first instance a response to Boccaccio’s tale, and is ultimately opened up to a variety of hermeneutic possibilities, for example in the Paduan–Veronese dichotomy of Sen. XVII. 4. The matter of Petrarch’s preference for Latin over the vernacular is not as straightforward as it would initially appear (and the same might be said for Dante’s conception of the vulgari eloquentia). Indeed, Petrarch’s translation of Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda into Latin can be balanced by his various translations from Latin into the vernacular. The Rerum vulgarium fragmenta co-opt a variety of classical Latin texts, making them available to a vernacular audience, as critics such as Jennifer Petrie and Rosanna Bettarini have shown.6 Some time ago, E. H. Wilkins noted that one of Petrarch’s most famous poems, ‘Solo et pensoso’ (RVF 35), took as its source an elegy from Propertius: Solo et pensoso i piú deserti campi vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti, et gli occhi porto per fuggire intenti ove vestigio uman l’arena stampi. Altro schermo non trovo che mi scampi dal manifesto accorger de le genti,

6

See Jennifer Petrie, Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the Canzoniere (Dublin, 1983); Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima: Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna, 1992), pp. 32–8; and Rosanna Bettarini, Lacrime e inchiostro nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna, 1998), pp. 9–27.



Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditnges’  195 perché nel atti d’alegrezza spenti di fuor si legge com’io dentro avampi: sí ch’io mi credo omai che monti et piagge et fiumi et selve sappian di che tempre sia la mia vita, ch’è celata altrui. Ma pur sí aspre vie né sí selvagge cercar non so ch’Amor non venga sempre ragionando con meco, et io co·llui. Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow, and I keep my eyes alert so as to flee from where any human footprint marks the sand. No other shield do I find to protect me from people’s open knowing, for in my bearing, in which all happiness is extinguished, anyone can read from without how I am aflame within. So that I believe by now that mountains and shores and rivers and woods know the temper of my life, which is hidden from other persons; but still I cannot seek paths so harsh or so savage that Love does not always come along discoursing with me and I with him. (RVF 35)

The source upon which Petrarch is drawing here appears in the opening book of Propertius’s Elegies: Haec certe deserta loca et taciturna querenti, et vacuum Zephyri possidet aura nemus. hic licet occultos proferre impune dolores, si modo sola queant saxa tenere fidem. […] qui modo felicis inter numerabar amantes, nunc in amore tuo cogor habere notam. […] an quia parva damus mutato signa colore, et non ulla meo clamat in ore fides? vos eritis testes, si quos habet arbor amores, fagus et Arcadio pinus amica deo. ah quotiens vestras resonant mea verba sub umbras, scribitur et teneris Cynthia corticibus! […] pro quo continui montes et frigida rupes et datur inculto tramite dura quies; et quodcumque meae possunt narrare querelae, cogor ad argutas dicere solus aves. sed qualiscumque’s, resonent mihi ‘Cynthia’ silvae, nec deserta tuo nomine saxa vacent.

196  Chaucer and Petrarch This is at least a lonely spot that will keep silent about my grievances, and the zephyr’s breath holds sway over the empty grove. Here I can freely pour forth my secret anguish, unless the rocks fail to keep faith. […] I, who lately was reckoned among happy lovers, must now wear a mark of shame in the register of your love. […] Or is that I give scant token of my feelings by change of complexion and there is no loyalty that cries aloud on my lips? You trees will be my witnesses, if trees know any love Beech and Pine beloved of the god of Arcady. Ah, how often my words echo beneath your shade, and Cynthia’s name is written on your delicate bark! […] My reward for all this is endless hills, cold rock, and comfortless repose in the trails of the wilderness. And all that my satisfaction can express I am forced to utter in solitude to the twittering birds. Yet, whatever you are, let the woods echo to my song of ‘Cynthia,’ let the lonely rocks reverberate with your name! (I. 18. 1–4, 7–8, 17–22, 27ff.)7

The cause for the retreat into the natural world remains the same in both works. The Propertian speaker complains of being a figure of ridicule, a subject of gossip: ‘nunc in amore tuo cogor habere notam’ (I. 18. 8). Petrarch’s poet– lover likewise fears his love becoming public knowledge, and so he flees their gaze, finding refuge in an environment where no human vestige may be found. Petrarch’s ‘deserti campi’ are thus equivalent to Propertius’s ‘deserta loca’. However, whereas Propertius is given to personification and animism – for example, the rocks keep faith with him and the trees will speak on his behalf – Petrarch prevents himself from slipping entirely into the pathetic fallacy by the conspicuous inclusion of ‘mi credo’ in the opening line of the sestet. The need to emphasize his belief in nature’s understanding of his desires, either to himself or to his implied reader, rather serves to undermine the communion – as does the adverb ‘omai’, ‘by now’. And Petrarch does not infuse his vernacular sequence only with classical poetry, but also with Latin Christian texts. Apart from the various scriptural echoes scattered throughout the sequence, there is a number of ecclesiastical and patristic references which have a particular emphasis upon Augustinian loci.8 In particular, the famous opening poem of the Rerum vulgarium

7 8

Propertius, Elegies, ed. and trans. by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 98–101. On Petrarch’s relationship with Augustine, see Carol Everhart Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998) and Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime sparse (Columbia, MO, 1985), pp. 95–126. The scriptural background to the RVF was noted at least as long ago as Ugo Foscolo’s second essay on Petrarch; see his Saggi e discorsi critici. Studi sul Petrarca, Discorso sul testo del ‘Decameron’, Scritti minori su poeti italiani e stranieri



Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditnges’  197

fragmenta recalls the second book of Augustine’s Confessions, detailing the saint’s adolescence, which Petrarch knew by heart: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now. (RVF 1. 1–4)

The theme of Petrarch’s sonnet, regret over his ‘primo giovenile errore’, recalls Augustine’s aphorism ‘tristitia rebus amissis contabescit quibus se oblectabat cupiditas’ (‘[r]egret wastes away for the loss of things which cupidity delighted in’, Confessiones II. vi. 13), and his opening declaration, ‘[r]ecordari volo transactas foeditas meas et carnales corruptions anima emeae’ (‘I intend to remind myself of my past foulnesses and carnal corruptions’, II. i. 1).9 Petrarch’s audience, ‘Voi’, finds a divine equivalent in the Confessions: ‘conligens me a dispersione, in qua frustatim discissus sum dum […] et iactabar et effundebar et diffluebam et ebulliebam per fornicationes meas’ (‘You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I had been fruitlessly divided […] I was tossed about and spilt, scattered and boiled dry in my fornications’, II. i. 1–ii. 2).10 Augustine’s language of scattering and division here corresponds to Petrarch’s ‘rime sparse’ and ‘altr’uom’, the proemical sonnet effectively providing a poeticized, public confession for the sequence which follows. However, Petrarch’s most obvious translations from Latin into the vernacular are predicated upon his wholehearted appropriation of Ovid, his fusion of the elegiac voice of the the Amores with the ‘mutatas […] formas corpora’ of the Metamorphoses (I. 1–2).11 This in fact leads us to another recent critique. In his impressive and influential work Reform and Cultural Revolution, James Simpson, whilst discussing the influence of Petrarch upon Tudor poetics and upon the ‘Ovidian tradition, which extends in English writing from Chaucer right through to Surrey and beyond’, argues that ‘Ovid, not Petrarch is the key

9

10

11

(1821–1826), ed. by C. Foligno, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo (Florence, 1953), 10: 37–78. See Augustine, Confessions, ed. by James J. O’Donnell, 3 vols (Oxford, 1992), 1: 16–22 (pp. 16–21) and Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991), pp. 24–34 (at pp. 24–32). The opening also draws on the book of Lamentations 1: 12: ‘o vos omnes qui transitis per viam, adtendite et videte si est dolor sicut est dolor meus’ (‘all ye that pass by […] behold, and see there if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow’). All quotations are taken from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by W. S. Anderson (Stuttgart, 1993).

198  Chaucer and Petrarch

figure in what is taken to be a characteristically “Renaissance” elegiac tradition’, and that it is ‘incontrovertibly clear just how distorted is this account of Petrarch’s influence’.12 Whilst I agree with Simpson’s acknowledgement of this tradition, there appears to be a false dichotomy at the source of the argument. Petrarch, like the majority of his contemporaries, was devoted to Ovid, and the decision to place him in opposition to an established Ovidian influence suggests that Petrarch’s lyrics were different – not of that tradition which Simpson rightly views as a concatenating principle between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of the reasons for Petrarch’s enormous (posthumous) influence upon later English poetics – which I do not believe to be a distortion – is his appeal to a literary aesthetics formed through interaction with Ovidian predecessors, notably with a Chaucerian Ovid. However, Simpson himself concedes Petrarch’s ‘Ovidian inheritance’ in a more recent article.13 One need look only at RVF 23, better known as the canzone delle metamorfosi, in order to vouch for the centrality of Ovid’s work within Petrarch’s sequence. In this canzone Petrarch describes himself as undergoing a series of Ovidian metamorphoses: Qual mi fec’io quando primer m’accorsi de la trasfigurata mia persona, e i capei vidi far di quella fronde di che sperato avea già lor corona […] Né meno anchor m’agghiaccia l’esser coverto poi di bianche piume […] ond’io presi col suon color d’un cigno. […] ed ella ne l’usata sua figura tosto tornando, fecemi, oimè lasso, d’un quasi vivo et sbigottito sasso. […]

12 13

J. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002) pp. 121–53. See ‘Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Africa and Trionfi’, JMEMS, 35 (2005), pp. 489–508 (p. 490), and also by Simpson, ‘Chaucer as a European Writer’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. by Seth Lerer (New Haven, 2006), pp. 55–86, wherein he reiterates Chaucer’s ‘Ovidian point of view’ (p. 55). Daniel Wakelin has recently compared the perspectives of both Wallace and Simpson in relation to periodization. See Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007): ‘Both praise the “medieval” or “pre-modern” years before 1400 and both compare those years to the demonized “Renaissance” or “early modern” years of Henry VIII’s reign. Both blame humanism’ (p. 5).



Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditnges’  199 io sentí’ me tutto venir meno, et farmi una fontana a pie’ d’un faggio. […] voce rimasi [scossa] de l’antiche some, chiamando Morte, et lei sola per nome. […] i’ senti’ trarmi de la propria imago, et in un cervo solitario et vago di selva in selva ratto mi trasformo: et anchor de’ miei can’ fuggo lo stormo. What I became, when I first grew aware of my person being transformed and saw my hairs turning into those leaves which I had formerly hoped would be my crown […] I fear less for having later been covered with white feathers […] and I took on with the sound of a swan its color. […] and she to her accustomed form quickly returning made me, alas, an almost living and terrified stone. […] I felt myself entirely melt and become a fountain at the foot of a beech […] I remained a voice shaken from my former burden, calling Death and only her by name. […] I felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stag from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I flee from the belling of my hounds. (RVF 23. 41–160)

Petrarch here progresses through a series of Ovidian references, transplanted from the narrative into the lyric voice, providing the internal monologue of the metamorphosed, who are so often deprived of speech; frustrated aphonia often being concomitant with Ovidian transformation. The primary metamorphosis is, naturally, the laurel, which signifies the transformation of the lover into the beloved; this is drawn from Ovid’s account of Daphne in the opening book of the Metamorphoses (I. 452–567).14 The second transformation is also to be found in Ovid’s opening book and recalls the fate of Cygnus, who became a swan through grief over the death of Phaeton (I. 747–II. 380). The petrifaction of the third metamorphosis refers to the unfortunate Battus, who was turned into a stone for betraying the trust of Mercury (II. 676–707); the latter’s role is here assumed by Laura, in a characteristic gender reversal.15 A further reversal characterizes the fifth metamorphosis, whereby the poet–

14

15

See RVF 51. 5–6: ‘io non posso transformarmi in lei| piú ch’i’ mi sia’ (‘I cannot take on her form any more than I have already’). The theme is reiterated in the Secretum: ‘Quidni enim in amatos mores transformarer?’ (‘How could I not be transformed in accordance with the character of such a beloved?’, III. 144 / 110). Petrifaction is a common theme in the RVF, allowing Petrarch to pun on his own name as he does with that of Laura, as the Italian stone, petra, is paronomastically becoming Petrarca.

200  Chaucer and Petrarch

lover becomes Echo to Laura’s Narcissus, a disembodied voice enjoined to a circumscribed discourse (Metamorphoses III. 344–510).16 The final metamorphosis – discounting the canzone’s closing references to Danae, Semele and Ganymede – is one of Petrarch’s favourites (he returns to it in RVF 52): that of Actaeon, who was torn apart by his hounds for gazing transgressively upon the nakedness of the virgin–hunter goddess Diana (Metamorphoses III. 138–252). This transformation closes the sequence, as it is the mirror image of that which began it, the metamorphosis of Daphne. The tales of Daphne and Actaeon are both essentially hunt narratives, but with reversed gender roles. That Chaucer understood, like Petrarch, that the two transformations constituted a narrative dyad can be evinced from his reference to them in the Knight’s Tale: Ther saugh I Dane, yturned til a tree – I mene nat the goddesse Diane, But Penneus doghter, which that hight Dane. Ther saugh I Attheon an hert ymaked, For vengeaunce that he saugh Diane al naked; I saugh how that his houndes have hym caught And freeten hym, for that they knewe hym naught.  (I. 2062–8)

Chaucer’s discussion of the possible confusion of Daphne with Diana while he attempts to distinguish between the two myths in fact serves to reinforce their kinship and highlights the semiotic slippage which characterizes both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Petrarch’s reading of this text. Overall, the aetas Ovidiana serves to link Chaucer and Petrarch rather than separating them; it reinforces the fact that, as this study as a whole has attempted to illustrate, in so many aspects of his thought and writings, Chaucer is not as removed from Petrarch as he might initially appear to be. In fact, as in their academically reconstructed histories, there are moments in which they seem to occupy the same space, even if it is only on the same page. However, these particular disagreements over Petrarch’s relationship with Chaucer do not constitute a wholesale rejection of Wallace’s and Simpson’s wider critical concerns. I agree entirely with Simpson’s view of the ‘disabling logic of periodization’, and I support Wallace’s intention to remove the illusory ‘magic curtain’ which separated Florence from London.17 Indeed these shared frustrations over periodization can be reinforced by Chaucer’s relationship with Petrarch. The former often symbolises late medieval poetry’s finest hour, whilst the latter is frequently seen as a harbinger of the Renaissance. Yet one might reverse this ratio by considering the Chaucer who was adopted 16 17

On Laura’s narcissism see RVF 45, ‘Il mio adversario’; Petrarch’s adversary here is Laura’s mirror, punning on the Latin adversus. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 44; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 1.



Conclusion: ‘translacions and enditnges’  201

by Henry VIII as the official Tudor poet of England, later to be praised by Sidney in his Defence of Poesy: ‘I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age go so stumblingly after him.’18 Likewise, there is the “medieval” Petrarch who wrote the De remediis and was criticized by the fifteenth-century humanist Poggio Bracciolini for committing archaeological errors.19 One might point to a similar undermining of traditional positions today. Simpson has addressed those critical arguments which transplant Chaucer from a late medieval setting (as Sidney had done), making him a Renaissance Man (that is, an uomo universale), whilst Angelo Mazzocco has recently readdressed the critically contentious issue of Petrarch’s status as the ‘father of humanism’.20 If we are still to think in terms of the medieval and the Renaissance, then the least we can say is that both Petrarch and Chaucer contained elements of both. Rather, both were in and of the fourteenth century, and both understood what this entailed, even if we today sometimes do not. In many ways, they spoke the same language.

18

19

20

See Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 1989), pp. 212–50 (p. 242). However, Sidney had earlier viewed Chaucer and Petrarch as performing equivalent roles: ‘in the Italian language the first that made it aspire to be a treasure-house of science were the poets Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. So in our English were Gower and Chaucer, after whom, encouraged and delighted with their excellent fore-going, others have followed, to beautify our mother tongue’ (p. 213). One recalls Petrarch’s ‘nostro materno eloquio’, but also Chaucer’s translation of Dante’s ‘ne la mia mente potei far tesoro’ (Par., I. 11) as ‘in the tresorye hyt shette| Of my brayn’ (HF, 524–25). In the introduction to De varietate fortunae (c. 1448). Leonardo Bruni, in his youth, also appears to have been sceptical towards Petrarch’s contribution to humanism. See Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, 1966), pp. 254–67. See Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 45–50 and Angelo Mazzocco, ‘Petrarch: Founder of Renaissance Humanism?’, in Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism, ed. by Angelo Mazzocco (Leiden, 2006), pp. 215–42.

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Index Acciaiuoli, Niccolò, 57 Accursio, Mainardo, 163 Actaeon, 200 aegritudo amoris, 125–6 Alain of Lille (Alanus de insulis), 8 n.31, 119 n.34 Albanzani, Donato, 71, 80, 165 Alcestis, 151, 156 Alighieri, Dante, 2, 4 n.16, 8 n.31, 15, 22, 30, 33, 36 n.3, 40–1, 52–4, 63 n.81, 68–71, 73–6, 78, 83, 85, 86 n.60, 95, 101, 112, 129 n.57, 133–4, 141, 175, 194, 201 n.18; and historicism, 54; exiled from Florence, 36 n.3, 75; presence of work in fourteenth-century England, 40–1; Works: Commedia, 2, 30, 41, 74, 76–7, 106, 133, 136; Inferno, I, 73, II, 25, III, 129 n.57, V, 127 n.50, VII, 74 n.13, 129 n.57, IX, 136 n.13, XI, 143 n.35, XXVI, 52, 75; Paradiso, I, 25, 134 n.5, 201 n.18, III, 129 n. 57, VIII, 78 n.24, XIV, 95 n.82, 129 n.57, XXV, 134 n.5; Purgatorio, XXII, 52, 70, XXVI, 128 n.53, XXXIII, 94 n.78, Convivio; De vulgari eloquentia, 2, 73; Eclogues, 134 n.5; Epistle to Can Grande, 136 n.13; Vita nuova, 41 n.22, 89 n.65, 92 n.74, 92 n.76, 105, 111, 141 n.28 Althusser, Louis, 18, 178 n.49 Andreas Capellanus, 119 n.34 Angevin Court, 50 Anne, Queen of England, 186 Anticlericalism, 50–3 Aristotle and Aristotelianism, 19, 98, 135, 144 n.35, 165, 175–6; Nichomachean Ethics, 143 n.35 Arnold, Matthew, 3 ars memorativa, 94, 99 ars moriendi, 192 Ashe, Laura, 162, 169 n.26, 175, 178 n.48 Auerbach, Erich, 19 n.70, 110, 141 n.30 Augustine, St, 20, 28, 54, 63, 110, 141, 175–6, 196–7; Confessions, 148

n.51, 175 n.39, 197; De civitate Dei, 138 n.21, 175 n.39; De doctrina Christiana, 141–2, 175 n.39 Avignon, 36–7, 50; Curia, 39; Petrarch in, 36–7; Petrarch’s first meeting with Laura, 50 n.49; Removal of the Papal See to, 36; supposed birthplace of Laura, 50 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 162, 170–1 Baldelli, G. B., 81, 82 n.35 Balduino, Armando, 30, 84–5, 87, 89 n.68 ballade, 31, 116–17 Baranski, Zygmunt, 2 n.3, 13 n.48, 76 n.18 Bardi Banking Family, 39, 41–2, 71 n.7; Simone dei Bardi, 41 Baron, Hans, 55 n.64, 75 n.15, 149 n.55, 201 n.19 Barrili, Giovanni, 87 n.62 Barthes, Roland, 65 n.88, 166, 167 n.21, 170 Battus, 199 Bembo, Pietro, 109 n.2 Benjamin, Walter, 4–6 Benson, C. David, 144 n.38, 161 n.3 Benson, Larry D., 116 n.28, 130 n.60, 147 n.45, 185 n.68 Berman, Antoine, 6, 7 n.26 Bernard of Gordon, 126 Bernardo, Aldo S., 11 n.39, 12, 35 n.1, 76 n.18, 83 n.46, 109 n.2, 133 n.3, 163 n.8, 184 Bersuire, Pierre: Ovide moralisé, 143, 164 Bettarini, Rosanna, 48 n.38, 86 n.59, 110 n.6, 119, 194 Bettridge, William Edwin, 144–5 Bible: 2 Corinthians, 3, 89 n.65; Ephesians, 183 n.60; James, 152; Job, 157 n.72; John, 3 n.10; Lamentations, 197 n.10; Luke, 9; Matthew, 9, 88 n.64, 127; 1 Peter, 3 n.10; Proverbs, 155; Revelations, 89; Romans, 3, 89 n.65

228  Index Billanovich, Giuseppe, 85 Black Death (Plague), 149, 153, 164, 178 n.47 Bloom, Harold, 69–72, 80, 106–7, 132–3 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 2, 12, 25 n.87, 30, 33, 37, 42, 49, 63 n.81, 68, 78, 97–8, 107, 109, 112, 115, 117, 120, 128, 167, 173, 179–82, 194, 201 n.18; first meeting with Petrarch, 80; imitation of Petrarch, 70, 81, 83, 133; influence of Dante, 78–9; influence of Petrarch, 78–80, 106; links to Bardi, 42; praise of Petrarch, 58; perceived inferiority to Petrarch, 71, 77, 106, 133; sends Petrarch a copy of the Commedia (MS Vat. Lat. 3199), 76; Works: Amorosa visione, 103, 133 n.3; Corbaccio, 182 n.58; Decameron, 2, 31, 84, 129, 138, 145–6, 148–9, 159, Conclusione dell’autore, 160, 190, Introduction, 149, Decameron, X. 10, 10–11, 24, 31, 110, 132–60, (passim), 162, 166–8, 174–8, 180, Dioneo, 32, 146, 155, 174–5, 177 n.44; De casibus virorum illustrium, 13, 30, 55, 57–60, 64, 66, 191 n.2; De mulieribus claris, 55, 59, 80 n.28, 109, 151 n.60, 152; De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi, 85, 92; Epistole, 13 n.50, 71 n.7, 83, 85, 135 n.8; Filocolo, 83, 129; Filostrato, 2, 26–7, 30–1, 59 n.73, 69–108 (passim);, 115 n.25, 116, 121–2, 130, 132–3; Ninfale fiesolano, 89; Trattatello in laude di Dante, 41, 75–6, 105; Teseida, 20, 78 n.24, 84, 86 n.58, 102, 115 n.25, 116, 121 n.39, ‘Ytalie iam’, 76–7 Boethius, 20, 62, 101, 122; De consolatione philosophiae, 14, 53 n.55, 62 n.80, 94, 122 Boffey, Julia, 116 Boitani, Piero, 1, 11 n.41, 15, 39, 40 n.17, 41 n.20, 42 n.23, 44 n.30, 49 n.45, 52 n.50, 55 n.60, 59–60, 62, 75 n.15, 76 n.18, 77 n.23, 101 n. 89, 110, 115 n.25, 121 n.38, 121 n.39, 125, 133 n.2, 134 n.6, 135 n.9, 168 n.23 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3–4, 6 Bosco, Umberto, 134 n.5 Bracciolini, Poggio, 201 Branca, Vittore, 13 n.49, 37 n.6, 41 n.22, 50 n.46, 57 n.66–7, 66 n.89, 70 n.6, 71

n.7, 73, 78, 80 n.28, 82–4, 85 n.56, 86, 89 n.68, 90, 100 n.88, 105, 109 n.4, 121 n.39, 133 n.3, 134–5, 138 n.20, 152 n.61, 178 n.47, 179 n.51 Brewer, D. S., 17 n.65 Brisset, Annie, 4 n.16 Brownlee, Kevin, 77 n.23, 137 n.17 Bruni, Francesco, 37 Bruni, Leonardo, 201 n.19 Cachey Jr, Thomas, 76 n.18 Cacus, 98 Campbell, Emma, 169 n.26, 178 n.48 canso, 114–15 cantare, 30, 102, 105, 116 canterini, 74, 80, 81 n.33, 87 n.62, 105, 121 canzone, 86, 114–15, 121, 127, 198 Cardenal, Peire, 105 n.97 Carmentis, 98 Carruthers, Mary J., 94 n.78 Cavalcanti, Guido, 30, 83, 86 n.60, 91 n.73, 119 n.34 Cavalcanti, Mainardo, 13 n.49, 57 Charles IV, 181 Chaucer, Geoffrey: alleged meeting with Petrarch, 29, 38–40; family home in Vintry Ward, 40–2, 110; as Customs Controller, 29, 42, 110; as Father of English Poetry, 5; as Grant translateur, 5, 110; concept of translation, 15, 119; in royal household, 29; journeys to Italy, 6 n.25, 29, 32, 38–44; 65–6, 116, 128; knowledge of Decameron, 176 n.17, 173; knowledge of Italian language, 29; methods of translation, 25–9, 112–13, 118, 120; opinion of Petrarch, 2, 15; shared with Petrarch an experience of court, 50; view of history, 30, 54; Works: Against Women Unconstant, 116 Anelida and Arcite, 102; Boece, 14, 20 n.73, 62, 140; The Book of the Duchess, 126–7; The Canterbury Tales, 129, Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, 2, 16, 20, 24, 27, 29, 32–3, 40, 46, 109, 129, 132–3, 137, 141, 143, 147, 161–94 (passim), General Prologue, 15–20, 28, 51, 67, 108, 189, Harry Bailey (Host), 132, 141, 147 n.45, 174 n.37, 188–9, Knight’s Prologue and Tale, 20, 86, 121 n.39, 126 n.47, 200, Legend of

Good Women, 9, 67–8, 116, 151 n.60, Manciple’s Prologue and Tale, 8, Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale, 9, Melibee, 28 n.95, Merchant’s Prologue and Tale, 24, 183 n.61, 184 n.63, Monk’s Prologue and Tale, 2, 8, 30, 40, 46, 55, 58–64, 66–8, 109, 110 n.4, 127 n.50, Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale, 9, Parson’s Prologue and Tale, 8–9, Retraction, 192–3, Summoner’s Prologue and Tale, 7, 9, 52, Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 7; A Complaint to his Lady, 48–9, 102, 116–17; The Complaint Unto Pity, 116; The Former Age, 53, 172 n.35; The House of Fame, 25, 124, 127, 129 n.57, 180, 201 n.18; The Parliament of Fowls, 116, 127, 185 n.68; The Romaunt of the Rose, 9, 26 n.90, 28, 148 n.52; A Treatise on the Astrolabe, 20, 26–7, 29; Troilus and Criseyde, 2, 5 n.20, 11, 26–31, 48, 64, 68, 70, 78 n.24, 81, 92 n.76, 94–5, 100–8, 113, 116, 119–21, 124, 127–30, 132–3, 158 n.75, Canticus Troili, 2, 24, 30, 32, 46, 93 n.77, 108–31 (passim), 190; Truth, 108 n.101 Chaucer, John, 40 Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna Maria, 143 n.35 Childs, Wendy, 42, 43 n.28 Christ, 18, 20, 89, 98, 154, 192; Beatitudes (oratio Montana), 88–9, 94; figura Christi, 154, 157 Christine de Pizan, 168 n.23, 193 Cicero (Marcus Tullius), 6–7, 12, 14, 28, 56, 72–3, 75, 110, 134–5, 141 n.30, 183; Works: De amicitia, 80, 183 n.60; De finibus, 7 n.29; De legibus, 97–8, De officiis, 12; De oratore, 8 n.32, 15 n.56, 141 n.30; De republica, 185 n.68; Pro Archia, 164; Somnium Scipionis, 80 n.32, 185 n.68 Clement VI, 37, 164 Cola da Rienzo, 67 Coleman, Janet, 44 n.30 Colonnesi, 50 n.48, 62; Colonna, Agapito, 62; Colonna, Giacomo, 50 n.48, 98; Colonna, Giovanni, 50 n.48 contemptus mundi, 102 Copeland, Rita, 6–8, 14, 15 n.56, 16 n.62, 25 n.87, 136, 139–40, 143, 157, 166 n.16

Index  229 Contini, Gianfranco, 86 n.59, 86 n.61, 89 n.67, 100 n.88, 114 n.17 Cooper, Helen, 17 n.65, 58, 63, 166 n.17, 173 Cottino-Jones, Marga, 154, 185 n.68 Corrazzini, Francesco, 82 Correale, Robert M., 11 n.39, 12, 14 n.52, 169 n.26, 174 n.36 Courtly love, (amore cortese / amour courtois), 49, 91–2 Crescini, Vincenzo, 82 Culture of authority, 71–3 Cupid, 92, 144–5, 150–1, 167 Cygnus, 199 da Borgo San Sepolcro, Dionigi, 85, 87 n.62 da Brossano, Francesco, 83 da Carrara, Francesco, 56–7 da Lentini, Giacomo, 91 n.72, 114–15 da Monteforte, Pietro Piccolo, 71 n.7, 134 da Sulmona, Barbato, 87 n.62 Danae, 200 Daniel, Arnaut, 86 n.60 Daphne, 23, 199 da Pistoia, Cino, 78, 83, 85–6 d’Arezzo, Guittone, 78 dator formarum, 13, 14 n.51 d’Avray, D. L., 187 n.76 de Beauveau, Louis, 86 de Berkeley, Sir Edward, 43 de Bury, Richard, 40 de Caraman, Jean, 165 Defamiliarization (ostranenie), 5 Delany, Sheila, 9 n.34 de Man, Paul, 4 n.15 de Mari, John, 39, 43 de Mézières, Philippe, 137 n.17, 151, 160, 168, 186, 193 Denny-Brown, Andrea, 162 n.4, 178 n.48 de Nolhac, Pierre, 92 n.74 de Provan, Sir James, 39, 43 del Bene, Sennuccio, 77, 84 n.49, 85, 87 n.62, 96–7, 99 del Garbo, Dino, 91 n.73 del Garbo, Tommaso, 60 della Seta, Lombardo, 163 della Torre, Arnaldo, 82, 83 n.46 de Lorris, Guillaume, see Roman de la Rose de Machaut, Guillaume, 49, 116–17 de Meun, Jean, see Roman de la Rose

230  Index de Premierfait, Laurent, 191 n.2 del Virgilio, Giovanni, 134 n.5 Deschamps, Eustace, 5 n.20, 110, 116–17 d’Hesdin, Jean, 165 Dialogism, 32, 162, 170 Diana, 200 dignitas hominis, 154 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 7 n.28, 14 n.51, 137, 147 n.44, 159 n.78, 160–1, 162 n.4, 168 n.23, 178 n.48–9, 182 n.58, 189 dolce stil nuovo (stilnovism), 14, 30, 48, 77, 89 n.65, 92, 104–5, 111, 121 donna angelicata, 14, 50, 92, 104 n.95, 105, 157 Durling, Robert M., 70 n.6, 73 n.13, 77 n.23, 105 n.97, 139, 143 n.35, 148 Echo, 200 Eco, Umberto, 3, 5 Eckhardt, Caroline D., 25–6, 28 Edward III, King of England, 29, 39, 41 Edwards, Robert R., 1 n.1, 54, 83, 167, 169 n.26, 175 n.41, 183 n.61 Egidio Colonna, 154 n.68 Engle, Lars, 170 n.28, 171 Evander, 98 Eve, 23 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 24–5, 48 Fiammetta, 81–4, 86 Filomena, 81–2, 86 Finlayson, John, 166 n.17, 168–9, 173 Fish, Stanley E., 17 n.65 Fleming, John V., 11 n.41, 122 Fortune, 60–1, 63, 74 n.13, 76 Foscolo, Ugo, 196 n.8 Foster, Kenelm, 134 n.6, 163 n.11, 165 Foucault, Michel, 65 n.88 Freccero, John, 21 n.75, 70 Frederick II, 114, 119 n.36 Fyler, John M., 8 n.31, 15 n.57, 124 Ganymede, 200 Gascoigne, George, 123 n. 42 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 23 n.80; Poetria nova, 23 n.80 Georgianna, Linda, 179, 185 n.69 Ghibellines, 36 n.3 Gilson, Simon, 73 n.12, 75–6, 77 n.21, 78, 85 n.55 Ginsberg, Warren, 1, 4 n.15, 5, 41 n.20, 43–4, 55 n.60, 68, 147 n.45, 179 n.51, 185 n.69

Glossing (glossa), 7–9 God, 8, 10, 27, 95, 112, 120, 132, 137, 148, 151–4, 169, 171, 173, 175–6, 183, 186, 192; and Divine Providence, 60–1, 151–3, 156, 157 n.72; as deus artifex, 159; as Logos, 20–1, 28; theology as poetry of, 18, 140; Word of, 19 Goodwin, Amy W., 169 n.26–7, 174 n.36, 175 n.41 Gower, John, 201 n.18 Gozzi, Maria, 83 n.44 Greene, Thomas M., 5 n.21, 22 n.77, 23, 36 n.5, 54, 105 n.97, 152 n.64 Guelphs, 36 n.3 Hainsworth, Peter, 10 n.38, 13 n.48, 39 n.14, 77 n.23, 108 n.101, 112 n.12 Hamel, Mary, 11 n.39, 12, 14 n.52, 169 n.26, 174 n.36 Hanly, Michael G., 86 n.57 Hanna III, Ralph, 156 n.70, 156 n.71 Hanrahan, Michael, 185–6, 187 n.75 Hauvette, Henri, 89 Havely, N. R., 50 n.46, 52 Hawkwood, Sir John, 43 n.28, 46, 65 Henry IV (Henry Bolingbroke), 129, 186 Henry VIII, 130, 198 n.13, 201 heteroglossia, 127, 162, 190 Hieronymus (St Jerome), 3–4, 8 n.30, 28, 54; Epistle to Pammachius, 3, 7, 8 n.30, 18–21 Hoccleve, Thomas, 69 Hollander, Robert, 78 Homer, 9 n.35, 69, 133, 147 n.47 Horace, 6 n.22, 7, 19, 22, 28, 111, 120; Works: Ars poetica, 6 n.22, 7 n.29, 10–11; Carmina, 22 n.77 Horobin, Simon, 9 n.36 hortus conclusus, 148 Howard, Donald R., 38 n.8, 63–4 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 25, 108, 113, 129–30, 197 Humanism, 2, 5, 10, 30, 33, 38, 40 n.17, 43–4, 47, 53–5, 60, 62, 65, 67–8, 72–3, 76, 78, 98, 106, 109, 110 n.4, 128, 134, 136, 139, 164–5, 168 n.23, 179–81, 189, 194, 198 n.13, 201 Hundred Years War, 39 Iambic pentameter, 113 Intertext, 32 Iser, Wolfgang, 17 n.65, 135

Italy: as literary idea, 32, 44, 67; city states, 29–30, 42–4; Arezzo, 35–6; Florence, 35–7, 39, 43–4, 50 n.46, 71 n.7, 129, 149, 179 n.51, 200; Genoa, 39, 43–4, 65, 181; Incisa, 36; Liguria, 181; Milan, 37–8, 43, 50, 64, 179; Naples, 50, 71 n.7, 87; Padua, 29, 40, 56–7; Pavia, 38; Rome, 36, 67, 165, as antithesis of Avignon, 36, 46 n.33, 53, 57, 165, Petrarch’s first visit to, 98, Petrarch’s reverence for, 36, 67, 98, as rightful home of Papal See, 36, 67, 165; Venice, 65, 165, 181 Jakobson, Roman, 16–17 Jauss, H. R., 17 n.65, 44 n.29, 162 n.7, 176 n.42; Erwartungshorizont, 49, 176; rezeptionästhetik, 30, 42, 106, 162, 173, 176, 190 Jerome, St, see Hieronymus John of Gaunt, 66 n.90, 129 n.59 Johnson, Lesley, 172 n.35, 178 n.48–9 Kadish, Emilie P., 147–8, 163 Keats, John, 69–70 King John of France, 181 Kirkpatrick, Robin, 1 n.2, 36 n.3, 43 n.28, 48 n.41, 133, 157 n.73 Kleinhenz, Christopher, 114–15 Koff, Leonard Michael, 55 n.60, 166 n.17, 172 n.35, 173, 185 n.69 Kohl, Benjamin G., 5 n.21, 23 n.78, 55 n.64, 56 n.65 Laelius (Lello di Pietro Stefano Tosetti), 85 n.55, 87 n.62 Langland, William: Piers Plowman, 135 Larner, John, 41, 44, 168 n.23, 178, 182 n.59 Latini, Brunetto, 89 Laura, 23–4, 47, 82, 94, 199; death of, 164; doubts over her existence, 50 n.49, 92; Petrarch’s first meeting with, 90 n.69, 92 n.74; Petrarch’s portrayal of, 23–4, 92, 94, 98, 100, 105, 147, 157, 199–200 Lawton, David A., 26 n.93 Le Livre Griseldis, 109, 137, 168, 174 Lewis, C. S., 5, 6 n.22, 28, 72 n.9, 136 n.14, 141–3 Lionel, Duke of Clarence, 38

Index  231 Lipson, Carol, 20 n.74, 26 Livy, 56, 163 n.11 Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei, 91 locus amoenus, 146, 149 Lollards, 8, 21; Lollard Bible, 21; Lollard Knights, 8 Lollius, 85 n.55, 106, 133 London, 40–3 Lowes, J. L., 11 n.41, 126 n.46 Lucifer, 61 Lydgate, John, 69, 191–2; Works: Life of Our Lady, 191; The Fall of Princes, 191 n.2; The Floure of Curtesye, 191 Lynch, Kathryn L., 177 n.44, 178 n.48 Macrobius, 102 Machan, Tim William, 7 n.29, 14 n.53, 14 n.55, 25 n.87,106 Malaspina, Moroello, 85 Malatesta, Pandolfo, 47, 87 n.62, 181 Mandelli, Giovanni, 164 Manly, John M., 186 n.74 Mann, Jill, 51 n.50, 64, 171 n.31, 178 n.48–9, 185 n.68 Mann, Nicholas, 60 n.76, 109 n.2 Marcus, Millicent Joy, 144, 154, 159, 167 n.21 Mare amoroso, 89 Marriage, 24, 38, 41, 153–4, 160, 162, 167–8, 176–8, 181–4, 186–7 Martellotti, G., 12 n.45, 13 n.50, 23 n.78, 35 n.1, 56 n.65, 136 n.16, 138, 139 n.22, 151, 153 n.65, 163, 180 Martinelli, Bortolo, 51 n.49, 90 n.69, 127 n.49 Martini, Simone, 23 Masi, Michael, 166–7 Matthew of Vendôme: Ars versificatoria, 23 n.80 Mazzocco, Angelo, 36 n.5, 201 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 5 n.21, 23 n.81, 37 n.5, 48, 54 n.59, 98, 110 n.7, 144 n.35, 149 n.53, 151, 153, 157 n.72, 159, 175 McClellan, William, 170–2 McLaughlin, Martin, 2 n.3, 10 n.38, 13 n.48, 39 n.14, 77 n.23, 108 n.101, 112 n.12, 137, 139 n.22, 153 n.65,157 n.72, 180 Ménagier de Paris, 168 Mercuri, Roberto, 52, 76 n.18 Mercury, 199

232  Index Middleton, Anne, 137 n.19, 147 n.44, 161, 168 n.23–4, 171 Miller, Mark, 142 n.31, 177 n.44, 185 n.69, 189 Milton, John, 69–70 Minnis, A. J., 14 n.55, 25 n.87, 54 Minta, Stephen, 109 n.2 Mommsen, Theodor E., 5 n.21, 57 n.66, 80 n.31 Morgan, Gerald, 118 n.33, 126 n.46 Morse, Charlotte C., 137, 144, 151, 160 n.80, 161 n.1, 161 n.2, 161 n.3, 168 n.24, 171 n.34 Muscetta, Carlo, 84–5, 93 Muses, 25 Nabokov, Vladimir, 6 Naked text, 8–9, 188 Narcissus, 200 Natali, Giulia, 84, 90 n.70, 120, 121 n.38 Nebuchanezzar, 61 Nero, 58, 63 Neuse, Richard, 1 n.1, 55 n.60, 58 n.71, 59 n.75, 73 n.12 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 3 Nicene Creed, 193 Nida, Eugene, 3 n.12 Odysseus (Ulysses), 9 n.35, 75, 76 n.18 Oedipal complex, 69 Orpheus and Eurydice, 73 n.13 ottava rima, 31, 93, 114–17 Ovid, 99, 104, 107, 111, 126–7, 133, 197–200; Works: Amores, 126, 197; Ars amatoria, 126 n.48; Fasti, 97; Metamorphoses, 73 n.13, 126, 197–200; Remedia amoris, 97 Panizza, Letizia, 10 n.38, 13 n.48, 39 n.14, 77 n.23, 108 n.101, 112 n.12 paradise terrestre, 146 Patientia, 156 Patterson, Lee W., 3 n.8, 186 n.70 Paul, St, 3, 6–10, 28, 98, 183 Pearsall, Derek, 38, 39 n.14, 40, 101 Peasants’ Revolt, 187 Periodization, 42–4, 54–5, 128, 131, 198 n.13, 200–201 Pernicone, Vincenzo, 82, 84 Perry, Kathleen Anne, 127 n.49 Peter of Cyprus, 66 Peter, St, 98, 165

Petracco, Eletta, 36, 163 Petracco, Pietro (Ser), 35–6, 75 Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch): adaptation of Decameron X.10, 10–11, 24, 31, 110, 132–60 (passim), 162, 165, 168, 173, 180, 185, 190, 194; anxiety over Dantean influence, 74–5, 77–8, 106, 111, 133; circulation of lyrics, 47–8, 81, 84–5; concept and methodology of translation, 10, 14, 94, 139; coronation upon the Capitoline Hill, 47, 50, 97, 134, 163; and despotism, 55, 64–5, 129, 179; fame during his lifetime, 47; family in exile, 35–6; and fragmentation, 48; and historicism, 22–23, 30, 54–7, 67; and humanism, 10, 30, 53, 62, 67–8, 72, 76, 98, 106, 109, 110 n.4, 134, 139, 165, 181, 189, 194, 201; and imitation, 21–23; MSS: Vat. Lat. 3195, 109 n.1, 117 n.32; Vat. Lat. 3196 (Chigi), 117 n.32; rivalry with Dante, 70, 111, 136; sense of exile, 76; and sonnet form, 70; and theologia poetica, 18, 104; and theologia rhetorica, 58, 110 n.9, 142, 181; Petrarchan Academy, 33, 193; view of barbari Britanni, 39; Works: Africa, 47, 163–4; Bucolicum carmen, 22 n.77, 44, 152, 163; Canzionere (see Rerum vulgarium fragmenta); Contra eum qui maledixit Italie, 36 n.4, 46 n.33, 165; De otio religioso, 164; De remediis utriusque fortunae, 13 n.50, 47, 60, 134, 164, 201; De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, 9, 10 n.37, 13, 63, 98 n.86, 165, 194; De viris illustribus, 22–23, 30, 47, 55–7, 59, 63, 80 n.28, 151, 152 n.61, 163; De vita solitaria, 107 n.100, 164; Epistole metricae, 163; Invectiva contra quendam magni status hominem sed nullius scientie aut virtutis, 61, 165; Invective contra medicum, 18–19, 118 n.33, 164; Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostri Yehsu Christi, 164; Latin elegy on mother’s death, 163; Liber sine nomine, 36 n.4, 164; Philologia (lost comedy), 85; Psalmi penitentiali, 164; Rerum familiarium libri (Familiares), 29, 164: Fam. I. 8, 22 n.77, Fam II. 10, 62, 118 n.33, Fam IV. 1, 139, Fam IV. 3, 50, Fam V. 19, 164,



Index  233 Fam. VI. 2, 62, 98, Fam. X. 4, 9–10, 18, 20 n.72, 140, 152, 163, Fam. XI. 5, 37 n.6, Fam. XVI. 14, 39, Fam. XVIII. 16, 65, Fam. XXI. 15, 30, 74–7, 79, 80 n.28, 134 [to Boccaccio], Fam. XXII. 1, 182, Fam. XXII. 14, 39, Fam XXII. 15, 128 n.53, Fam. XXIII. 19, 21–22, 24; Rerum memorandarum libri, 164; Rerum senilium libri (Seniles), 29: Sen. I. 3, 80 n.32, Sen. I. 6, 80 n.32, Sen. III. 1, 80 n.32, Sen. III. 9, 54 n.58, Sen. V. 2, 70–3, 79, 134, 87 n.62, 128 n.53, 133, Sen. VII, 36, Sen. VIII.3, 61, Sen IX. 1, 165, Sen. IX. 2, 37, Sen. XII. 1, 53 n.54, Sen. XII. 2, 39, Sen. XIII. 11, 47, 87 n.62, Sen. XVII. 2, 31, 64–5, 76, 132, 180, 190, Sen. XVII. 3 (Griselda), 1, 10–15, 24, 26, 32, 120, 128 n.55, 129 n.55, 132–90 (passim), 193–4, Sen. XVII. 4, 13 n.50, 138, 151, 172–3, 194, Sen. XVIII. 1 (Epistle to Posterity), 35–6, 50, 181, 189; Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 24, 30–1, 47, 109–12, 118 n.33, 126, 129, 132, 134, 147, 180, 194, 196–7: RVF 1, 102, 104–5, 110, 120, 196–7, RVF 9, 104 n.95, RVF 15, 104 n.95, RVF 18, 92 n.76, RVF 20, 92 n.76, RVF 21, 102, RVF 23, 86 n.60, 198–200, RVF 35, 101, 107, 194–5, RVF 45, 48, 200 n.16, RVF 52, 14, 157, RVF 61, 27, 83, 88, 90–5, 100, RVF 70, 86, RVF 77, 23 n.81, RVF 78, 23 n.81, RVF 90, 104 n.95, 105, RVF 112, 83, 84 n.49, 85–6, 96–9, 101, 107, RVF 125, 111, RVF 126, 111, RVF 127, 111, RVF 128, 45–6, 47 n.36, 61, 111, RVF 129, 111, RVF 132, 1, 2, 26–7, 30, 93 n.77, 103, 105, 108 n.101, 109 n.1, 110–13, 117–21, 123, 125–7, 130, RVF 133, 110–11, 130, RVF 134, 110–11,RVF 136, 36 n.4, 51, 111, RVF 137, 36 n.4, 51, 111, RVF 138, 36 n.4, 51, 111, RVF 146, 157, RVF 189, 103, RVF 190, 127 n.51, RVF 224, 103, RVF 263, 110, RVF 264, 110, RVF 275, 104 n.95, RVF 287, 77–8, RVF 310, 104 n.95, 108, RVF 366, 110, 192; Rime disperse, 163 n.8; Rime sparse (see Rerum vulgarium fragmenta); Secretum, 55 n.64, 56, 164, 180; Testament, 80 n.31; Trionfi (Triumphs),

47, 58–9, 133 n.3, 163 n.8: Triumph of Fame, 58–9; Triumph of Love, 78, 89, 103, Triumph of Time, 47, 186, 187 n.74 Petrarca, Gherardo, 9–10, 140–1, 163 Petrie, Jennifer, 111 n.10, 194 Phaeton, 199 Piehler, Paul, 142, 146, 149 n.54, 150 n.56 Plato, 18–20, 119 n.36; Works: Hippias minor, 9 n.35; Republic, 18–19; Timaeus, 20 n.73 poesia d’arte, 102 poesia popolare, 102, 121 polysemia, 157, 174 Polysystem, 24–5, 48, 191 Portia, 151, 156 Portinari, Beatrice, 41, 78, 82, 89 n.65, 95, 105 Portinari, Folco, 41 Pratt, R. A., 63 n.81, 66, 86 n.57 Propertius, 194–6 Propp, Vladimir, 144–5, 167 Provençal lyrics, 48, 111, 117 Psyche, 144–5, 150–1, 167 psychomachia, 33, 110–11 Pulsoni, Carlo, 76 n.18–19 quatorzain, 118, 123 Quintilian, 6 realpolitik, 6 reine sprache, 4, 20 Reynolds, Joshua, 69 Rhetorical and Critical Terms and Phrases: abbreviatio, 20; actio, 8 n.32; allegoresis, 31, 139–40, 143, 154, 157, 160, 171; allegory, 31, 135–7, 139, 141, 143–9, 152–3, 157 n.72, 158–60, 165, 167, 170; anaphora, 88, 93, 99, 103, 110, 112; antithesis, 110, 118; amplificatio, 20, 158–9; artes rhetoricae, 23 n.80, 149; chiasmus, 2, 110; dispositio, 8 n.32; effictio, 23; ekphrasis, 18; elocutio, 6 n.22, 8 n.32; enarratio poetarum, 6 n.22, 8, 28; exemplum, 136–7, 152, 160, 165; excercitatio, 28, 140; fabula, 137–8, 139 n.23, 146, 151 n.60, 152, 173, 178 n.45; figura, 18; historia, 137–9, 146, 151 n.60, 152, 172–3, 178 n.45; imitatio, 22, 112; interpretatio,

234  Index 139–40, 143, 149; inventio, 6 n.22, 8 n.32; isocolon, 110; memoria, 8 n.32; mimesis, 23; negatio, 147, 188; oxymoron, 49, 110, 118, 124; paradox, 110–11, 160; periphrasis, 140; reiteratio, 16; translatio, 16, 22–4, 28, 80, 123, 127, 130, 139–40, 145, 157, 159–61, 185 rhyme royal, 30–1, 112–16, 119, 124 Ricci, Pier Giorgio, 13 n.49–50, 41 n.22, 82–3 Richard II, King of England, 41, 43 n.28, 66, 129, 185–7 Rickert, Edith, 186 n.74 rime incrociate, 123 Rizzo, Silvia, 11 n.39 Robert of Naples, 50, 52 n.52 Robinson, F. N., 49 Robinson, J. H., 11 n.39, 12–13, 38 n.7, 64, 79 n.27 Rolfe, H. W., 11 n.39, 12–13, 38 n.7, 64, 79 n.27 Roman de la Rose, 26 n.90, 49, 53, 58, 104, 135–6, 148 n.52 Roman de Troyle, 86 Rubin, Gayle, 185 Salutati, Coluccio, 47, 108 n.101, 117 Sampson, 61 Santagata, Marco, 48 n.38, 50 n.48, 77 n.23, 101, 103 n.94, 110 n.6, 111 n.11, 127 n.49, 194 n.6 Scanlon, Larry, 168 n.22 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 3 n.9, 4–5 Schless, Howard, 1 n.1, 11 n.41, 29, 40–1, 42 n.23, 73 n.12 Scipio Africanus, 163 Semele, 200 Seneca, 28, 58, 63; Ad Lucilium (Ep. LXXXIV), 21–2 Sereni, Vittorio, 112 Severs, J. B., 11 n.39, 109 n.3, 144, 168, 186 n.74 Shakespeare, William, 69, 133 Shoaf, R. A., 1 n.1, 11–12, 14, 23–4, 119, 127, 128 n.52 Shklovsky, Viktor, 5 n.18 Sicilian school, 111, 119 Sidney, Sir Philip, 201 Silber, Gordon R., 81, 89 n.67, 97 Simpson, James, 5, 6 n.22, 33, 44, 58 n.68, 107, 130, 166, 197–8, 200–201

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 39 n.16 Smarr, Janet Levarie, 82 n.35 Socrates, 9 n.35, 19 Sonnet form, 30, 70, 93, 112, 114–15, 119; linked to strambotto, 31 Spearing, A. C., 1 n.2, 14 n.51, 15 n.58, 38 n.7, 69, 185 n.69 speculum naturae, 91, 147 Spenser, Edmund, 113 Spiller, Michael R. G., 113 n.16, 114–15, 123 Steiner, George, 3 n.9, 4 n.16, 6, 9, 17–18 strambotto, 31, 114–17; strambotto siciliano, 114–15; strambotto toscano, 114–16 Strohm, Paul, 2 n.6, 8 n.30, 17 n.65, 176 n.43, 188 n.78 Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 127 n.49, 196 n.8 Surdich, Luigi, 84 Tartaro, Achille, 84–5 ten Brink,Bernhard, 116 terza rima, 49, 117, 133 n.3 Thompson, N. S., 23 n.79, 24, 25 n.86, 95, 166 n.17, 169 n.26 Thomson, Patricia, 1, 1 n.2, 31, 108 n.101, 110 n.6, 115 Torraca, Francesco, 82 Tottel’s Miscellany, 108 n.101, 130 Translation, 1–29 (passim); as act of aggression, 11–15; as afterlife (Überleben), 5; fundamental problems confronting translator, 3, 12–15, 119, 124, 127–8; interlingual and intralingual translation, 16–17, 20, 28–9, 80, 168 n.24, 191; secular vs sacred translation, 7; spirit and letter (literal vs non-literal translation), 3–9, 17–18, 21, 28; translator–poet binary opposition, 5; and Weltansicht, 17 translatio studii, 10 Trapp, J. B., 17 n.65, 23 n.81 Trinkaus, Charles, 98 n.86, 110 n.9, 142, 152, 165 n.13 Trovato, Paulo, 76 n.18, 94 n.78 Turner, Marion, 129 n.56, 129 n.58, 187, 188 n.78 Tuttle Hansen, Elaine, 172 n.35, 178 n.48–9 Tuve, Rosemund, 141, 143 Ulysses see Odysseus

Urban V, 36, 67, 165 Utley, Francis Lee, 144–5 Valerius Maximus, 56 Velli, Giuseppe, 76 n.18, 76 n.20 Vellutello, Alessandro, 127 n.51 Venuti, Lawrence, 3 n.9, 7 n.26 Vickers, Nancy J., 23 n.80, 147 n.48 Vidal, Peire, 89, 101 Vincent of Beauvais, 58 Virgil, 52, 73, 74 n.13, 111, 133–4, 143 n.35, 147 n.47, 152; Petrarch’s codex of, 50 n.49, 90 n.69, 92 n.74, 164; Works: Aeneid, 22 n.77, 72 n.10, 105 n.97; Eclogues, 74 n.13 Visconti family, 37, 65, 179; Bernabò, 43 n.28, 63–6; Galeazzo, 38, 64; Gian Galeazzo, 63; Violante, 38 vulgus, 60, 72, 87 n.62 Wakelin, Daniel, 198 n.13 Wallace, David, 1, 2, 31, 33, 36 n.3, 41 n.20, 42–3, 49 n.45, 50 n.46, 55–6, 57 n.66, 59, 63–4, 67, 83, 102 n.91, 115, 116 n.26, 117, 128–9, 133 n.2, 153,

Index  235 154 n.68, 157, 159 n.78, 161, 162 n.4, 168 n.23, 179, 181, 185, 186 n.70, 193–4, 198 n.13, 200 Watson, Thomas, 108 n.101 Waugh, Robin, 177 n.44, 178 n.48 Weiss, Roberto, 76 n.21 Whitman, Jon, 135–6, 143, 147 n.47 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, 1, 1 n.2, 30–1, 36, 47, 81–2, 84–5, 87 n.62, 92 n.74, 98 n.85, 109 n.1, 110 n.6, 114, 115 n.21, 117 n.32, 163 n.10, 179 n.51, 194 Windeatt, B. A., 11, 25 n.87, 27, 85 n.55, 86 n.57, 88 n.65, 113, 133 n.2 Wimsatt, James I., 5 n.20, 49, 116–17 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 25, 113, 127 n.51, 129–30, 188 Wycliffe, John, 127 n.50 Young, Karl, 82 Zaccaria, Vittore, 13 n.49, 80 n.28, 109 n.4, 152 n.61 Zancani, Diego, 112 n.12, 130 n.60 Zenobia, 58

CHAUCER STUDIES I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII

MUSIC IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER, Nigel Wilkins CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS’ TRADITION, J. D. Burnley ESSAYS ON TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Mary Salu CHAUCER SONGS, Nigel Wilkins CHAUCER’S BOCCACCIO: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, edited and translated by N. R. Havely SYNTAX AND STYLE IN CHAUCER’S POETRY, G. H. Roscow CHAUCER’S DREAM POETRY: Sources and Analogues, B. A. Windeatt CHAUCER AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY, Alastair Minnis CHAUCER AND THE POEMS OF ‘CH’ in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, James I. Wimsatt CHAUCER AND THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF FAME, Piero Boitani INTRODUCTION TO CHAUCERIAN ENGLISH, Arthur O. Sandved CHAUCER AND THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, David Wallace CHAUCER’S NARRATORS, David Lawton CHAUCER: COMPLAINT AND NARRATIVE, W. A. Davenport CHAUCER’S RELIGIOUS TALES, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MODERNIZATIONS FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES, edited by Betsy Bowden THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Charles A. Owen Jr CHAUCER’S BOECE AND THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF BOETHIUS, edited by A. J. Minnis THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EQUATORIE OF THE PLANETIS, Kari Anne Rand Schmidt CHAUCERIAN REALISM, Robert Myles CHAUCER ON LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND SIGHT, Norman Klassen CONQUERING THE REIGN OF FEMENY: GENDER AND GENRE IN CHAUCER’S ROMANCE, Angela Jane Weisl CHAUCER’S APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES, Anne Laskaya CHAUCERIAN TRAGEDY, Henry Ansgar Kelly MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Peter G. Beidler CHAUCER AND COSTUME: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue, Laura F. Hodges CHAUCER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VISIONS, Kathryn L. Lynch SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [I], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel

XXX FEMINIZING CHAUCER, Jill Mann XXXI NEW READINGS OF CHAUCER’S POETRY, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard XXXII THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHAUCER TRADITION, Simon Horobin XXXIII ETHICS AND EXEMPLARY NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER AND GOWER, J. Allan Mitchell XXXIV CHAUCER AND CLOTHING: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Laura F. Hodges XXXV SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [II], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel XXXVI THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN: Context and Reception, edited by Carolyn P. Collette XXXVII CHAUCER AND THE CITY, edited by Ardis Butterfield XXXVIII MEN AND MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec XXXIX IMAGES OF KINGSHIP IN CHAUCER AND HIS RICARDIAN CONTEMPORARIES, Samantha J. Rayner COMEDY IN CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO, Carol Falvo Heffernan XL

spine 24.5mm 14 jan 10

WILLIAM T. ROSSITER

Chaucer and Petrarch

Chaucer introduced Petrarch’s work into England in the late fourteenth century but there has up to now been no sustained examination of Petrarch’s influence on his work. This first book-length study of Chaucer’s reading and translation of Petrarch examines his translations of Petrarch’s Latin prose and Italian poetry in the context of his experience of Italy through his travels there in the 1370s, his interaction with Italians in London, and his reading of the other two great Italian medieval poets, Boccaccio and Dante. Chaucer’s engagement with early Italian humanism and the nature of translation in the fourteenth century are also considered, with an examination of Chaucer’s pronouncements upon translation and literary production. Chaucer’s adaptations of Petrarch’s Latin tale of Griselda and the sonnet ‘S’amor non è’, as the Clerk’s Tale and the ‘Canticus Troili’ from Troilus and Criseyde respectively, illustrate his various translation strategies. Furthermore, Chaucer’s references to Petrarch in his prologue to the Clerk’s Tale and in the Monk’s Tale provide a means of gauging the intellectual relationship between two of the most important poets of the time.

Chaucer and    P etrarch

is Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool Hope

University. Cover: The Story of Patient Griselda, Part I (c.1493 –1500) by the Master of the Story of Griselda (National Gallery, London).

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Rossiter

Chaucer Studies

William T. Rossiter