Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy (Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture) 019885286X, 9780198852865

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Reading Chaucer in Time

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Reading Chaucer in Time Literary Formation in England and Italy KA R A G A S T O N

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Kara Gaston 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947967 ISBN 978–0–19–885286–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N M E D I EVA L L I T E R AT U R E A N D C U LT U R E General Editors Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue – in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science – but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism.

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Acknowledgments This book has been in formation for a long time. I have benefited from the generosity of many people along the way. Mentors who supported my earliest work in medieval studies include Sarah Anderson, Helen Cooper, John V.  Fleming, Robin Kirkpatrick, and D.  Vance Smith. At the University of Pennsylvania, I was fortunate to work with Kevin Brownlee, Rita Copeland, Emily Steiner, and David Wallace. I am so grateful for their generous mentorship and ongoing friendship. During graduate school I presented material related to this project at the University of Pennsylvania Med/Ren seminar. I thank all of the organizers and participants for creating such an amazing intellectual experience. Elizaveta Strakhov kindly read and commented on dissertation chapters. I  also benefited from the mentorship of several people at Penn beyond my dissertation committee. This book is influenced by courses taken with Margreta de Grazia and Victoria Kirkham. I thank Zachary Lesser and Tsitsi Jaji for help with the early stages of dissertation writing and Jed Esty for his guidance with the job search. I thank my colleagues at the University of Toronto who have generously read and commented on portions of this book in draft: Suzanne Akbari, Liza Blake, Thom Dancer, Alexandra Gillespie, Neil ten Kortenaar, William Robins, Matt Sergi, Audrey Walton, and Danny Wright. Outside of the University of Toronto, Joshua Gang has read a lot of this book and talked with me about just about all of it. I thank K. P. Clarke for his careful reading of the nearly final manuscript. Any remaining errors are my own. I have received generous professional and material support from my department chairs at Toronto: Alan Bewell, Christine Bolus-Reichert, Katherine Larson, and Paul Stevens. I thank Alexandra Gillespie for supporting a two-day book seminar focused on Reading Chaucer in Time in March 2018. My deepest thanks to Andrew Galloway, who read the entire manuscript and came to the seminar as a respondent. I am also grateful to those who participated in the discussion: Alexandra Atiya, André Babyn, Jonathan Brent, Thom Dancer, Jessica Lockhart, Julia Mattison, William Robins, and Danny Wright. I have presented portions of this book to thoughtful audiences at the New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress; the London Chaucer Conference;

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viii Acknowledgments Kalamazoo ICMS; the Chaucer and the Italian Trecento symposium in Rome; and at the Britain, Ireland, and Italy: Cultural Exchanges c.1270–1400 conference in York, England. Along the way this project grew both tangibly and intangibly thanks to conversations and exchanges with scholars of England and Italy including Piero Boitani, K. P. Clarke, Warren Ginsberg, Nick Havely, Kathryn McKinley, and Leah Schwebel. I thank the staff at the archives I have visited for their patience and ex­pert­ise: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City; the library of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library, London; Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence; the Morgan Library, New York City. I also thank the staff of the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Robarts Library, University of Toronto; and the library of the American Academy in Rome. The dissertation work preliminary to this book was supported by a Fulbright Research Grant for Rome, Italy, through the US State Department, and by a Salvatori Research Grant through the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Toronto, this research has been supported by a Connaught New Researcher Award. The Vice Principal’s Research Office at the University of Toronto Scarborough generously assisted with bridging funding. I have also been fortunate to have had research funding from my department and two semesters of teaching release. In particular, I wish to thank my department chair, Katherine Larson, for making sure the second release happened when I most needed it. Portions of Chapter  1 of this book appeared in an earlier form as “ ‘Save Oure Tonges Difference’: Translation, Literary Histories, and Troilus and Criseyde,” The Chaucer Review 48 (2014): 258–83. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “The Poetics of Time Management from the Metamorphoses to Il Filocolo and The Franklin’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 227–56. I am grateful to Penn State University Press and Notre Dame University Press for permission to reprint, and I thank the SAC and Chaucer Review editors and anonymous readers for their feedback. I am grateful to Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture series editors Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon for demystifying the process of writing a first book and for their guidance with revisions. My thanks to Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright with Oxford University Press, as well as Tim Beck and Sathiyavani Krishnamoorthy with SPi Global, for shepherding this book through peer review and publication. I am grateful for the two anonymous readers for OUP for taking so much care with the manuscript and for offering such generative challenges, queries, and suggestions.

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Acknowledgments  ix I thank Arthus Bihis, Ashfak Khan, Gail Narraine, and Sean Ramratten at UTSC for their administrative support. Warm thanks to my undergraduate research assistants, Mary Ellen Brown, Sumaya Musse, and Natasha Ramoutar, for their hard work and inspiration; and to my graduate research assistants, Jonathan Brent and Katherine Walton, who dedicated so much time and effort to this project. Finally, I thank my friends and family, without whom there’s no point. Mom, Dad, and Liz, this book is dedicated to you with love.

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Table of Contents Introduction: Reading for Formation

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1. Form and Formation in the Vita nuova, Filostrato, and Troilus and Criseyde15 2. Writing Readers in the Thebaid, Teseida, and Knight’s Tale48 3. Learning in Time: Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story

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4. Assembling the Times in the Metamorphoses, Filocolo, and Franklin’s Tale116 5. How Much Is Enough in the Monk’s Tale? Setting Boundaries in Humanist Biography

144

Afterword: When Is the House of Fame?

175

Bibliography Index

179 197

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Introduction Reading for Formation

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno proposes that “the artwork is both the result of the process and the process itself at a standstill.”1 Artworks cannot quite leave their formation behind. They carry their own processes of becoming within them. Accordingly, reading works of literature for form often means searching out language that has been crafted, that bears the trace of past work. For Chaucerians, it can often mean using source study to investigate vectors of influence and processes of composition. We track how literary form comes into being in time. But when is the flashpoint at which formation gives way to form? When does literary form happen? In addressing these questions, I begin with reception. Reading Chaucer in time, the aim of this book, strives to integrate both the formation and the form of Chaucer’s poetry into tem­poral experience. It works to resist thinking of formation as a process that achieves its goals in some hermetic, ideal concept of form. It also resists identifying the end of formation in any one specific context of reception, as if form were realized all at once, in a single moment, and then began to crumble away. Rather, there may not be one, privileged moment in time when the form of Chaucer’s poetry is perfectly achieved. The asynchronicity of literary form becomes particularly apparent in the study of Chaucer’s interactions with the literature of the Italian Trecento. Italian literature was fundamental to the formation of Chaucer’s poetry and yet remains difficult to integrate into a synchronic account of its form. From the House of Fame (c.1379–80) to Troilus and Criseyde (c.1382–5) and the Canterbury Tales (1380s–c.1400), much of Chaucer’s poetry adapts, and in some cases seemingly defines itself through its response to, Italian literary culture. But in contrast to Chaucer’s adaptations of French poetry, his use of Italian literature would not have been perceptible to many of his early English readers. Boccaccio’s work 1 Theodor  W.  Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 179. I came to this quotation through the analysis in Maura Nolan, “Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 549–75, at 566–7. Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Kara Gaston, Oxford University Press (2020). © Kara Gaston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001

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2  Reading Chaucer in Time was not copied in England until the fifteenth century.2 The first manuscript of Dante’s Commedia that can be placed in England was sold in London in 1451—although, as Nick Havely shows, certain mobile English clerics were aware of and responsive to Dante’s work earlier.3 Englishman Richard de Bury probably met Petrarch at the papal court at Avignon, but Chaucer would be the first and last English poet known to translate a Petrarchan sonnet until the sixteenth century.4 Chaucer’s Italian interactions thus apparently anticipate, or at least aspire to, multiple different, heterogeneous contexts of reception. And more than this, Chaucer himself might not have fully grasped everything that his Italian sources brought with them into his poetry. Like any historical event, literary formation has no one definitive beginning; every text has a long series of intertextual forces behind it. If we cannot say for sure when formation begins, then is it possible to name a single moment in which it achieves all its ends? The Italian texts that influenced much of Chaucer’s poetry were, themselves, concerned with what an ideal context of reception might look like. Albert Ascoli has recently traced the development of Dante’s concept of authorship from the Vita nuova to the Commedia. Ascoli argues that Dante grounds the truth of the Commedia in his own experience.5 If Dante is a divinely inspired poet, then his act of writing the poem—rather than the reader’s act of interpreting it—becomes the locus of its truth and significance. As Ascoli indicates, this arrangement anticipates humanist and early modern concepts of authorship that associate interpretation with getting back to composition. Indeed, Ascoli, Justin Steinberg, Elena Lombardi, and others have shown Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio exploring new kinds of reading, orient­ed less toward the development of the reader than toward recovering the author’s work.6 2  For the early history of the reception of Boccaccio in England, see Guyda Armstrong, The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 3  Nick Havely, Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See especially the Preface and Chapter 1 on the 1451 manuscript sale and Dante’s English clerical readers. As a further exploration of how contexts of reception are porous and asynchronous, see David Wallace, “Dante in Somerset: Ghosts, Historiography, Periodization,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 9–38, and see the related discussion in David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 139–80. 4 Piero Boitani, “Petrarch and the ‘barbari Britanni,’ ” 9–38 in Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Translators over 700 Years, ed. Martin McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza with Peter Hainsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 17. 5 Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 6  Albert Russell Ascoli, “ ‘Favola fui’: Petrarch Writes His Readers,” 1–35 in the Bernardo Lecture Series (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies SUNY Binghamton, 2010); Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Elena Lombardi, Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age

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Introduction: Reading for Formation  3 As the historically specific writer becomes more important, the reader becomes more generalizable. Lombardi writes of Dante, “Very much like Petrarca openly writing to ‘posterity,’ he dared having in sight a truly hypothetical reader, the collective ‘us’ of a readership through time.”7 Lombardi shows that Dante achieves this arrangement by imagining women readers, figures who could be extracted from specific contexts such as “scholastic models and rules for reading.”8 Taken to its extreme, this model of authorship imagines the reader as a perfect, transhistorical mirror for the work, eternally reflecting it back to itself. As such concepts of reading develop, problems emerge alongside them. The most obvious: it is difficult for a living person to play the role of the ideal reader. To act the part of “the reader,” or to implicate another person in the role of “the reader,” is, potentially, to dissolve lived, irrevocable historical experience into iterable abstraction. It is as if the reader continually sees the text coming into being even as their own life passes by. Italian literature, especially the writing of Giovanni Boccaccio, often brings out this tension. Though Boccaccio experiments with the idealized female reader in texts such as the Teseida delle nozze di Emilia (c.1339–41), he also emphasizes the importance of both reading and writing as lived, temporal events. His Decameron (1349–51–c.1372), for example, imagines women readers who read within time and context and for whom time is crucial: these women take comfort in reading not because of what they find in texts, but because reading distracts them as time works its healing power. His Filostrato (c.1335) depicts its female heroine, Criseida, as a failed Beatrice insofar as she does not die at the proper moment to bring masculine creative endeavors to fruition. Boccaccio’s texts often reveal the fault lines between the notion of an idealized reader and real readers whose schedules might not coincide with that of their text. Chaucer’s poetry absorbs this dynamic through more than one route. This book traces several intertextual paths through which concepts of reading in time, and reading outside of time, reach Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales. (The afterward briefly touches on the first Chaucerian poem of Dante (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). See also John Ahern, “The New Life of the Book: The Implied Reader of the Vita Nuova,” Dante Studies 110 (1992): 1–16; and Susan Noakes, “Hermeneutics, Politics, and Civic Ideology in the Vita Nuova: Thoughts Preliminary to an Interpretation,” Texas Studies 32 (1990): 40–59. 7 Lombardi, Imagining the Woman Reader, 36. It is important to note that Lombardi does not pre­ sent the female readers imagined by Trecento poets as passive or interchangeable: rather, they are pre­ sented as playing an active role in the formation and reformation of texts. 8  Ibid. 37.

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4  Reading Chaucer in Time to adapt Italian literature, the House of Fame.) I track multiple points of contact where Chaucer’s poetry draws upon Italian sources that are themselves premised upon, or structured by, carefully defined relations between formation, form, and reception. I am not arguing that Chaucer himself fully understood this dynamic and launched a comprehensive response to it. But in adapting certain Italian texts, Chaucer grappled at a practical level with the question of how literary formation, form, and reception can be brought to bear upon one another within time. Chaucer’s approach to these problems is not always consistent. But a running theme, relevant both for Chaucer and for broader questions about how and why we read, does emerge across the Chaucerian texts explored in this book. That is: that the notion of the ideal reader can conceal or elide the lived, historical experience of readers within time. The problems that arise as Chaucer and the Italians experiment with new models of reading provide an opportunity for critics today to denaturalize and thereby reassess the significance of reading as an event within time. The connection that Dante helps forge between composition and interpretation still informs practices of formal analysis today. In studying Troilus as an adaptation of the Filostrato, for example, we often use form and formation to explicate one another. It is as if we could always, from within our own moment, see the text coming into being. But one common theme that emerges in Chaucer’s poetry is a disruption of the notion of the reader as transparent mirror for the author’s work. Chaucer supplies examples of reception as an event that unfolds within the reader’s time and is shaped by the reader’s perspective. Indeed, Chaucer repeatedly shows how even the return to a text’s formation occurs in and through the time of its reception. Bringing this claim to bear on my own methodology, this book considers both the durational time of reading and the ways in which we perceive longer trajectories of intertextual formation from within our own specific contexts of reception. I suggest that Chaucer’s relation with his Italian sources is as open-ended as any historical process. We cannot see all of it in a glance. Neither could Chaucer himself. Rather, the form of Chaucer’s poetry reflects forces and pressures that cannot be apprehended in any one historical moment.9 In this sense, form emerges gradually over the course of its reception within time.

9  A similar approach to formation and temporality, described in similar language, can be found in Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Trachtenberg explores the agential power of time itself in late medieval and renaissance building projects, emphasizing that such an approach “seeks to break down the idea not only of absolute termination but the absolute origination of the work” (xviii).

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Introduction: Reading for Formation  5 Chaucer’s poetry and the challenges of reading thus shape the methodological and theoretical approach to form, formation, and reception in this book. I propose that the formation of Chaucer’s poetry achieves its outcomes within history, but not in any one single moment and not in the eyes of an ideal reader who mirrors back an ideal text. Rather, these outcomes come into being, asynchronously, across the history of reading. Accordingly, I aim to treat form as an object of discovery, rather than of recovery, and reading as a way of actively participating in the history of a poem, rather than describing it as if from the outside. At least since C.  S.  Lewis asked what Chaucer “really did” to Boccaccio’s poetry, tracking Chaucer’s actions as writer has provided one way of articulating what his poetry “does.” Lewis brought composition to bear upon form by collapsing both into an expression of fourteenth-century English expectations. Positing a radical difference between “medieval” England and “renaissance” Italy, Lewis argued that Chaucer reformed the Filostrato in order to produce a poem that would suit his tastes.10 For Lewis, the formation of Troilus both emerged from, and pointed toward, one specific context of reception. However, in the decades since Lewis’s essay, critics have reconceptualized Chaucer’s relation with the Italians as a dynamic interaction across multiple contexts. For one thing, as David Wallace puts it, “Chaucer understood before he ‘transformed.’ ”11 Chaucer’s reading of Italian literature had an effect on him; before he changed it, it changed him. If Chaucer is not simply a knee-jerk reviser of a foreign text, then it becomes increasingly important to understand how, and in what contexts, he made sense of his Italian reading. Indeed, as Chaucer’s approach to Italy is no longer predetermined by a totalizing vision of medieval England, Chaucer’s particular knowledge and experience plays a growing role in contextualizing the form of his poetry. Chaucer’s immediate contexts of reception in England would have been far more attentive to his use of French works than Italian ones.12 As Ardis Butterfield shows, Chaucer’s adaptations of French material were part of an ongoing, mutual shaping of emerging literary and linguistic spheres. Chaucer participated in a cross-channel literary culture invested in forming and 10  C. S. Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to ‘Il Filostrato,’ ” Essays and Studies 17 (1932): 56–76, repr. 37–54 in Chaucer’s Troilus: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stephen A. Barney (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980). 11  David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 2. 12  Influential studies of Chaucer’s adaptations from French include Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957); James  I.  Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

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6  Reading Chaucer in Time reforming linguistic and national terms and boundaries. Butterfield has shown how, for both French poets and English ones, the very act of composing is also a political act with implications for literary and national self-definitions.13 In comparison, Chaucer’s interactions with Italian literature are characterized by a greater distance between literary traditions and by more piecemeal acts of reception. The study of Chaucer and the Italian Trecento concerns itself with encounters among individual texts or small groups of texts, often occurring at a relatively esoteric distance from their originating literary culture. To the extent that Chaucer’s adaptations of Italian literature express his understanding of it, it is unclear for whom they do so. As a result, Chaucer himself becomes increasingly important as the locus of interpretive significance for the study of Chaucer and the Italian Trecento. These inter­actions become legible less with respect to their immediate context of reception than, rather, with respect to Chaucer’s own understanding of the Italian material. Accordingly, much research has explored Chaucer’s own, specific inter­ actions with Italian literature, recovering what Chaucer knew of Italian literature, how he got to know it, and what he thought of it.14 Early scholarship often focused on identifying Chaucer’s direct borrowings from Italian sources as a way of determining what texts he knew and used.15 More recently, ­scholars have begun to re-evaluate what the relations between sources and adaptations can look like and what kinds of evidence we ought to use to determine what Chaucer knew of a text and how he used it.16 Meanwhile, building

13  Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years’ War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Butterfield’s argument responds to that of Thorlac TurvillePetre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), who understands the English language as the most important element in the construction of English national identity. See also Andrea Ruddick, English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Joanna Bellis, The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337–1600 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016), both of whom identify nationalist sentiment diffused across different languages. 14  For a longer and more detailed overview of the study of Chaucer and Italy, see K.  P.  Clarke, “Chaucer and Italy: Contexts and/of Sources,” Literature Compass 8 (2011): 526–33. 15 See for example John Livingston Lowes, “Chaucer and Dante,” Modern Philology 14 (1917): 705–35 and Howard  H.  Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984). 16  See for example the essays in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), especially Peter G. Beidler, “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo,” 25–46 and Karla Taylor, “Chaucer’s Uncommon Voice: Some Contexts for Influence,” 47–82; Thomas J. Farrell, “Source or Hard Analogue? Decameron X, 10 and the Clerk’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 37 (2003): 346–64; Leah Schwebel, “The Legend of Thebes and Literary Patricide in Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Statius,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 139–68; Kathryn McKinley, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016); and Frederick  M.  Biggs, Chaucer’s Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017).

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Introduction: Reading for Formation  7 on known lines of influence, studies including David Anderson’s Before the Knight’s Tale, Karla Taylor’s Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy”, Richard Neuse’s Chaucer’s Dante, Thomas Stillinger’s Song of Troilus, and Robert  R. Edwards’s Chaucer and Boccaccio show how Italian literature deeply and significantly informs the composition of Chaucer’s works.17 Focusing on influence, such approaches avoid assigning crucial interpretive significance to intertextual relations that early readers would not have recognized. Chaucer can be influenced by, and respond critically to, Italian literature without necessarily requiring that relation to be made public as a source of poetic meaning. Yet the study of composition almost inevitably helps cast the form of Chaucer’s poetry into relief. Like many medieval adaptors, Chaucer participates in a practice of translatio wherein literary invention takes place in and through the transformation of a source text.18 His changes to his sources thus stand as the mark of his active intervention in a tradition and become a way of characterizing the specific properties of his work.19 Indeed, comparison with Italian sources can inform close readings even in critical studies not explicitly focused on Chaucer and Italy, for it helps generate a descriptive language for Chaucerian literary form.20 Along with tracking composition, critics have argued that part of the significance of Chaucer’s changes to his Italian sources is that they reveal what 17  Taylor argues that Chaucer restricts the worldview of the Commedia, Neuse that Chaucer patterns the Canterbury Tales on Dante. Stillinger tracks the nature of literary authority—attended by questions of temporality and genre—through Italian literature to Chaucer. Edwards and Anderson focus on how Boccaccio’s use of the Latin classics shaped Chaucer’s approach to classical material. See David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Richard Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); Thomas Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). See also the overview and exploration of how Italian literature mediates reflections on power, politics, classical poetry, and the vernacular across Chaucer’s career in James Simpson, “Chaucer as a European Writer,” 55–86 in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 18  On the relation between translation, interpretation, and invention, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On medieval theories of adaptation and authorship, see Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edition (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 19  See for example Karen Elizabeth Gross, “Chaucer’s Silent Italy,” Studies in Philology 109 (2012): 19–44. Gross foregrounds the centrality of composition, as carried out by Chaucer the historical individual, to her study. 20 See for example Matthew Giancarlo, “The Structure of Fate and the Devising of History in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 227–66, at 240–1; Lee Patterson, “Troilus and Criseyde: Genre and Source,” 244–62 in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013).

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8  Reading Chaucer in Time he thought about Italian literature. Karla Taylor and Helen Cooper both argue that certain changes Chaucer makes to material he takes from the Italians show him defining his role as poet against that of Dante.21 David Wallace’s influential Chaucerian Polity takes a different approach: though Wallace identifies judgments about Italian literary culture in Chaucer’s poetry, he also sees those judgments mobilized in specific poetic decisions that do not necessarily rely upon intertextual allusion for their efficacy.22 For Wallace, in recovering Chaucer’s techniques of composition we do not recover his ideas so much as a mode of political action. He writes, “as literary critics” we should not “carry political schemata to the literary text but rather . . . read the text as if it were its own politics.”23 Chaucer’s engagement with the Italians is not just a reflection of political ideas but a way of doing politics.24 In short, no single attitude toward the relation between formation and form unites these approaches, but Chaucer’s relation with the Italians does consistently generate a powerful descriptive language for identifying the distinctiveness of his poetry, its conceptual origins, and its rhetorical or political ends. What are the foundations for this relation? How did it develop? In what specific material and intellectual contexts did Chaucer read Italian literature before he rewrote it? Warren Ginsberg argues that Chaucer developed an understanding of how Italian literary texts operated within their linguistic tradition which then enabled his translation of them.25 Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” Ginsberg argues that Chaucer worked to comprehend his sources in relation to their language and literary tradition, then to recreate that relationship in his own poetry. Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity also considers how Chaucer constructed interpretive contexts for his reading, but frames the question in geographical and political terms. More recently, K.  P.  Clarke has argued that we should understand Chaucer’s encounter with Italian literature in material terms as well. Clarke not only considers the material contexts in which Italian literature circulated, but also the materiality of intertextuality itself. As Clarke shows, intertextual relations emerge not just in the poet’s idea of the work but on the manuscript page.26 21 Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy”; Helen Cooper, “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 39–66. 22  David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 23  Ibid. 3. 24  See also William T. Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010) for a reconsideration of Wallace’s influential arguments about what Petrarch meant to Chaucer. 25  Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 26 K.  P.  Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). On Chaucer’s encounter with material contexts in Italy, see also two essays by Daniel Pinti, “The Comedy

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Introduction: Reading for Formation  9 It becomes increasingly difficult to point to and identify the intertextual form of Chaucer’s poetry outside of specific material contexts of circulation. Problems raised in the study of Chaucer and the Italian Trecento thus intersect with the theoretical problem of where and when we locate literary form in the first place. The past ten years of literary scholarship have seen a great deal of discussion about how we ought to understand form, what the relation is between form and reading, and whether reading for form means abandoning history for aesthetics.27 One starting point in reading for form is to look for language that has been crafted, twisted into shapes that bear the mark of authorial intervention. Yet all aspects of a text must have an origin of some kind or another, and so such formalism often entails distinguishing between the ways in which, or the extent to which, language has been formed. Catherine Gallagher observes, “Distinguishing between kinds of writing not according to their different forms but according to their unequal abilities to be formal was an important step toward the literary formalism with which we are familiar.”28 In the studies of Chaucer and Italy discussed above, such distinctions are often made via intertextual explorations of influence and adaptation. For example, those parts of Troilus that Chaucer adds to the Filostrato, or modifies with respect to his source, seemingly bear the mark of formative action in ways that other parts of the text perhaps do not. I am not suggesting that this approach is flawed; it resonates with medieval approaches to translatio and adaptation. But it suggests how form might slip from our grasp in and

of the Monk’s Tale: Chaucer’s Hugelyn and Early Commentary on Dante’s Ugolino,” Comparative Literature Studies 37 (2000): 277–97 and “Commentary and Comedic Reception: Dante and the Subject of Reading in The Parliament of Fowls,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 311–40. 27  An early discussion of the return to form appears in the March 2000 special issue of MLQ edited by Susan  J.  Wolfson, a group of essays later published (with additions) in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006). Another essay cluster appears in Representations on Form [special issue], ed. Jean Day, Representations 104 (2008). See also the overview of different strains of New Formalism in Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007): 558–69. Perhaps the most influential recent addition to this discussion is Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), which understands forms as structures that connect texts to the wider world. Among medievalists, calls for renewed attention to form include Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); the cluster of essays in Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text [special issue], ed. Arthur Bahr and Alexandra Gillespie, The Chaucer Review 47 (2013); Steven Justice, “Literary History,” 199–214 in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 28  Catherine Gallagher, “Formalism and Time,” 305–27 in Reading for Form, 309–10.

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10  Reading Chaucer in Time through the very methods we use to identify it. That is, we often point to form by pointing to formation. Accordingly, medievalist accounts of the historicity of form often begin with the complexity, contingency, and historicity of formation. This historicity is sometimes positioned as what disrupts or subverts literary form, sometimes as what conditions it.29 The former approach emphasizes moments of rupture, where textual structures break down or texts subvert their professed goals.30 The latter approach allows for modes of formal close reading that integrate the text rather than dividing it, for it positions form as the outcome of a historical (and so complex, contingent, and asynchronous) process. Thus Christopher Cannon understands literary form as the material realization of an informing idea that governs a specific text. As he explains, “In assuming that every attribute of text is either the elaboration or entailment of some originating ‘thought’, this method necessarily recruits a very great part of that structure to any account of a text’s meaning.”31 The notion of an “ori­gin­at­ing ‘thought’ ” potentially pins form to an isolated, hermetic concept of authorial intent. Yet, as Cannon suggests, it is possible to open an informing idea up to all of the complexity of thinking within time and context. Scholarship focused on reception has suggested that the asynchronous process of formation might reveal itself in equally asynchronous acts of reception. Paul Strohm describes the literary text as “an unstable amalgam of unexhausted past and unaccomplished future.”32 Reading Chaucer’s translation of a Petrarchan sonnet in Troilus and Criseyde, Strohm argues that the poem “waits to receive its meaning; observes different temporalities but ‘archives’ them against a later discovery of what they ‘will have meant.’ ”33 Maura Nolan, similarly, argues, “artworks constitute a form of historiography, a ‘force field and a thing’ in which history appears in crystallized form.”34 For Nolan, in reading for form we do not encounter a literary historical idea or an idea about history, but rather the mark of historical and social formation. Nolan thus argues that history “comes to be articulated” asynchronously in the 29 See the overview of such approaches in Thomas  A.  Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, “Introduction,” 1–18 in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 30  See the foundational work of A. C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1964) and the discussion of Spearing in D.  Vance Smith, “Destroyer of Forms: Chaucer’s Philomela,” 135–55 in Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, ed. Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016). 31 Christopher Cannon, “Form,” 177–90 in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 178. 32  Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 80. 33  Ibid. 83. 34  Nolan, “Making the Aesthetic Turn,” 567.

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Introduction: Reading for Formation  11 artwork, “in advance of, or dragging behind, empirical sequences of events and facts.”35 Form, as the mark of a social and intertextual process, is not necessarily synchronous with a single moment within time. Rather, the history of reception gradually discloses it. As reception comes to the fore, it becomes crucial to denaturalize the connection, forged by authors such as Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, between interpretation and composition. The association between form and formation often has the effect of bringing form to life, as if we could always see the text coming into being. Yet the notion that form preserves, as if in amber, some past action can distract from our own lived, durational experience of reading. Medieval concepts of reading that preceded the Trecento poets emphasized its experiential dimension. As Mary Carruthers puts it, “the medieval understanding of the complete process of reading does not observe in the same way the basic distinction we make between ‘what I read in a book’ and ‘my experience.’ ”36 Carruthers shows how for many medieval thinkers, reading becomes part of the reader by integration into the memory. Eleanor Johnson has recently demonstrated how Boethius supplies medieval authors, including Chaucer, with a theory of reading as ethical reformation.37 Johnson shows that what matters in reading a text such as the Consolation of Philosophy is not only the instruction that the text contains, but the way that the text organizes the time of reading into a consolatory structure. Whereas Carruthers and Johnson explore medieval concepts of reading, Julie Orlemanski works to bring an account of medieval poetry as event into modern literary criticism. Orlemanski argues that Chaucer’s poetry “gestures . . . to . . . modes of literary being that can be organized under the rubrics of reception and reference.” That is, as she puts it, “Poems happen, and this happening takes place when formal linguistic and literary attributes . . . are encountered and interpreted by audiences, who are themselves embodied and situated.”38 In contrast, approaches 35  Ibid. 570. 36  Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 211. 37  Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages. 38  Julie Orlemanski, “The Heaviness of Prosopopeial Form in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” 125–45 in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Prendergast and Rosenfeld, 126. Emphases original. See also Julie Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading,” Exemplaria 26 (2014): 215–33. See also the approaches of Lisa H. Cooper, “Figures for ‘Gretter Knowing’: Forms in the Treatise on the Astrolabe” 99–124 in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Prendergast and Rosenfeld, on the perspectival formalism of the astrolabe; Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), which understands genre as constructing itself in and through material and institutional contexts of production and circulation; Samuel Otter, “An Aesthetics in All Things,” Representations 104 (2008): 116–25, which accounts for form as an object of perception.

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12  Reading Chaucer in Time to reading for composition that develop in the Italian Trecento often elide the reader’s time and experience in favor of replaying the act of composition. I suggest that, as Chaucer grapples with his Italian source texts, he hints at the consequences of such elisions. He shows that, even as reading seems to get back to the moment of literary formation, the reader’s own life passes by. The notion of durational reading as hidden or elided experience informs my own methodology throughout this book. In emphasizing the temporality of reading and reception, Reading Chaucer in Time is greatly influenced by Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon Is Now?. Dinshaw tracks reading as a lived, contextualized, and durational event throughout her study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century “amateur” reading.39 I do not attempt to recover the kind of diversity of readerly attachments that Dinshaw reveals or to compile an account of different acts of reading. Rather, Reading Chaucer in Time aims to approach even “professional” reading—especially reading geared toward accounts of literary form—as a concrete event in time. The “detachment” that Dinshaw associates with professional reading offers a way of articulating how form often seems to occur in some time other than our own.40 But the very same kind of granular formal analysis often associated with professional literary study reveals ways in which literary form emerges in time.41 Meter, in particular, marks the point of intersection between structures that we might attribute to a text and experiences that we might attribute to ourselves.42 With this in mind, this book explores how, even for seemingly detached readers, the history of literary form and the history of its readers are intertwined. In order to rethink the ends of formation, the chapters of this book reconsider when formation begins. Each chapter tracks the intertextual origins of a specific Chaucerian work back to other texts, or connections between texts, that very likely exceeded Chaucer’s own horizon of awareness. Even when discussing material that Chaucer knew well, such as the connection between the Teseida and Statius’ Thebaid (c.80–c.92 ce), my purpose is not to determine what Chaucer thought of these works. Rather, I track how certain 39  Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 40 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 38. 41  Recent calls for a return to descriptive reading often emphasize the limited or restrained role of the interpreter: see for example Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 371–91; Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 (2009): 1–21. 42  Though I focus on poetic meter rather than vocal or instrumental music, this sense of the lived concreteness of metrics is informed by Bruce Holsinger’s argument that in the Middle Ages, “the human body represents . . . the very ground of musical experience.” See Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1.

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Introduction: Reading for Formation  13 dynamics that inform Chaucer’s sources might subsequently be smuggled into his poetry, often in partial or piecemeal forms, their significance perhaps becoming accessible only belatedly. Dante’s early experiments in redefining the relation between author and reader in the Vita nuova provide the starting point for Chapter 1. The chapter explicates the way in which the Vita nuova associates form with formation, setting the stage for the Filostrato and Troilus to associate reading with a return to processes of composition. Yet as this dynamic emerges in these texts, a problem also arises: how to arrest formation at just the right moment, to define the “when” in which it achieves its ends? This is a question relevant not only for the ending of Troilus but also for critical methodologies. The chapter thus touches on twentieth- and twentyfirst-century practices of comparative source study, arguing that these approaches reveal the problems with trying to bound formation within time. If formation is not a single, unified, teleological process, then it might not achieve all of its goals in the same moment. The methodological problems emerging in the Vita nuova and Troilus shape the approach of the chapters that follow, which track different ways of assessing what formation achieves in the Canterbury Tales. Chapter 2 explores how the image of the ideal reader, who glimpses the originary thought animating a text, develops from Statius’ Thebaid to Boccaccio’s Teseida and the Knight’s Tale. I argue that across these works, readers who seek out informing thoughts within texts are prone to forget themselves, acting as transparent mirrors for their reading. This kind of readerly self-effacement, I suggest, en­ables Theseus’ political maneuvering at the tale’s conclusion. Chapter 3 also focuses on how readerly experience can be forgotten. It tracks representations of the learning process in the Decameron, Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis (1373), and the Clerk’s Tale. One theme that emerges from the Decameron onward is that learning often takes time. It cannot easily be abstracted out of temporal context, for the passage of time is part of what helps us learn. Petrarch’s adaptation of the final novella of the Decameron, the Griselda story, shows him grappling with the irreducibility of the time of learning. These same dynamics are at work in the Clerk’s Tale. The tale has been read as a critique of the Historia Griseldis. But I propose that, without taking the time of reading and learning into account, our assessments of the tale’s ethics might not be complete. Chapters  4 and  5 both explore processes of formation that seem to lack clear boundaries, goals, or endpoints—or that have those boundaries externally imposed. Chapter 4 tracks digressions built around collection in a series of intertextual exchanges between Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 ce), Boccaccio’s Filocolo (c.1336–8), and Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale. All three of these texts

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14  Reading Chaucer in Time associate digression with activities that do not seem to have an obvious endpoint. Indeed, although Boccaccio eventually sets a boundary to his digressions, Chaucer and Ovid both mobilize processes of formation that could seemingly go on forever, improvisationally gathering more and more material without ever settling into a single overarching form. Such ambitions might also appeal to the Monk, the subject of Chapter 5. But, like the subjects of his brief biographies, the Monk ultimately finds that the formation of his tale is not entirely his to control. From Petrarch’s De viris illustribus (1342–3, subsequent redactions 1351–2, 1368, c.1371–4) to Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (c.1355–60, second redaction c.1373–4), the subjects of masculine biography emerge as subject to material needs. Temporal goods such as food and drink threaten the boundaries of the individual self. In Chapter 5, I explore how similar relations of interdependency connect texts with their readers and disrupt the boundaries of both. These relations can be adversarial: the Monk’s Tale is abruptly bounded and put to a stop by his audience. But these forms of interconnectivity can also be a site of connection and care. Readers are part of the history of texts and vice versa. The Monk’s Tale demonstrates what is at stake in this interdependency. Across this book, then, I argue that in attempting to describe the formation of Chaucerian texts and bring it to bear on literary form, we do not recover some past idea of form but, rather, bring into being an account of form that functions in our own time.43 I argue that the form of Chaucer’s poetry does not exist outside of time, or in some moment in the past, but rather that it emerges in and through the time we spend with these works.

43 Compare the discussion of “substitution” in Alexander Nagel and Christopher  S.  Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2010), 29–44, which similarly aims to show how artworks participate in the moment of their reception rather than being tied to the time of their creation. But see especially p. 32, where Nagel and Wood contrast the reception of literary texts with that of visual artifacts.

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1 Form and Formation in the Vita nuova, Filostrato, and Troilus and Criseyde Troilus and Criseyde seems to be a process as much as a poem.1 It takes the governing fiction of an invocation—that the beginning of the poem cor­res­ponds with the beginning of composition—and pushes it to the breaking point. As David Lawton explains, in the figure of the narrator Chaucer “decides to fictionalise, or dramatise, the moments of composition and the act of performance.”2 As a result, the reader of Troilus, in moving through the poem from beginning to ending, ostensibly re-plays its formation. In other ways as well, readers of Troilus encounter, or seem to encounter, the text in formation. Comparative source study, which allows critics to track the changes that Chaucer made to sources such as Boccaccio’s Filostrato, presents a glimpse of the processes that brought Troilus into being. This reading technique works in two directions. Chaucer’s finished poem helps to contextualize and explain the changes Chaucer made to his sources. And, conversely, those changes set Troilus into relief, helping critics create thick descriptions of the text’s form. But what is involved in using formation to describe form and vice versa? To what extent can we understand a text by understanding how it came into being—and to what extent can we recover processes of becoming from within a completed work? 1 Influential approaches treating the narrator as a fallible character in his own right include E. Talbot Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone, 1970), 84–101 and Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 65–87. Other scholarship has focused on deconstructing the narrator and questioning the extent to which we are meant to consider his attitudes and motivations. See for example Elizabeth Salter, “Troilus and Criseyde: Poet and Narrator,” 231–8 in English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard Waswo, “The Narrator of Troilus and Criseyde,” ELH 50 (1983): 1–25; Murray  J.  Evans, “ ‘Making Strange’: The Narrator (?), the Ending (?), and Chaucer’s ‘Troilus,’ ” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986): 218–28; A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 68–100; David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge: D.S.  Brewer, 1985), 76–90. My approach concerns itself less with characterization, or lack thereof, than with temporality: the device of the narrator allows Chaucer to fictionalize the formation of Troilus itself. 2 Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, 76.

Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Kara Gaston, Oxford University Press (2020). © Kara Gaston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001

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16  Reading Chaucer in Time It is difficult to describe formation without giving it boundaries: a sense of when this process begins and ends. Troilus, in mapping its narrator’s writing process from invocation to the poem’s concluding palinode, presents a fictional picture of a writing process bound within time. But this map of process intersects with and complicates the poem’s other approaches to formation. When Pandarus plots the seduction of Criseyde, the narrator describes a different kind of creative process, using writing advice borrowed from Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova: For everi wight that hath an hous to founde Ne renneth naught the werk for to bygynne With rakel hond, but he wol bide a stounde, And sende his hertes line out fro withinne Aldirfirst his purpos for to wynne. (TC I.1065–9)3

According to this model, the creative process begins with an idea and ends with the execution of that idea. Christopher Cannon uses this section of Troilus in developing an account of literary form as “the forming of an object guided by some thought.”4 Formation is the process that molds matter into the shape of an idea. And form, as its outcome, stands not only for itself but also for the process that produced it. Yet this concept of formation, developed at the end of Troilus Book 1, sits uncomfortably with the Troilus narrator’s apparently forgetful declaration at Book 2’s opening, only twenty-eight lines later, that “now of hope the kalendes bygynne” (TC II.7) The Troilus narrator seems to have lost track of his own informing idea. This is a problem not only for how we characterize the Troilus narrator, but also for how we understand the relation between formation and its outcome. If the creative process is not selfconsistent—if its informing idea slips or shifts partway through, if it is shaped by influences beyond the author’s complete knowledge or control—then what is it exactly that comes to be crystallized as form? The more we understand formation as a diachronic process spread out over time, the less certain we might become about how it begins and when it can

3  All quotations of Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Compare Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, lines 43–9 in Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle: recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: Champion, 1924), 198. 4  Christopher Cannon, “Form,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 177–90, at 177. Emphasis original.

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Form and Formation  17 be said to achieve its goals. In the case of Troilus, Chaucer’s main Italian source, the Filostrato, is not mere raw material but rather both source and influence. Its structures and themes help shape the way that Chaucer, in turn, reshaped it.5 Moreover, these structures and themes have their own history. For example, Dante’s Vita nuova helped shape the Filostrato and to define its ambitions. There is no evidence that Chaucer was familiar with the Vita nuova or had it in mind as he composed Troilus.6 But, I will argue, the artistic ambitions set out in the Vita nuova, by shaping the Filostrato, ultimately help determine what Troilus is able to achieve.7 The larger point here is that literary formation, as a historical process, lacks both a concrete beginning and a clear teleology. The distractible Troilus narrator might be a fiction, but the problems he raises are relevant for critical attempts to bring formation and form to bear on one another. Just as the narrator seems to lose sight of the outcome of his compositional process, so too the many intertextual exchanges and pressures that precede and inform the actual writing of Troilus cannot be reconciled with a single informing idea or artistic goal. What does this mean for our understanding of the form of Troilus? If the process of formation is not bound or controlled by either an idea or an outcome, then there might not be any one moment in which we can say that formation achieves its goal. That is, a poem’s form might not be achieved all at once in the moment that the author stops writing. Rather, form might continually reveal new possibilities depending upon the stories of formation that we bring to bear upon it. This chapter begins by considering some of the ways in which formation and form are brought to bear on one another in comparative readings of Troilus and the Filostrato. Pushing against a narrative of formation that begins with

5  Studies focused on the formal influence of Boccaccio and how he mediates Italian poetics to Chaucer include David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985); Thomas Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Studies that track Boccaccio’s influence as a mediator of classical antiquity include Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); John Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Suzanne Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 6  Parallels between the Vita nuova and Chaucer’s works generally seem to reflect shared cultural or intertextual contexts, not direct adaptation. See Howard Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), 111–12, 143. But see Karen Elizabeth Gross, “Chaucer’s Silent Italy,” Studies in Philology 109 (2012): 19–44, at 31–2, on possible parallels with the “Complaint to Pity.” 7  Compare Robert R. Edwards, “The Desolate Palace and the Solitary City,” Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 394–416, which also tracks how the Vita nuova influences Chaucer through the Filostrato.

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18  Reading Chaucer in Time Boccaccio’s text and ends with Chaucer’s changes to it, the next two sections of the chapter approach certain aspects of the Filostrato as responses to the representation of composition in the Vita nuova. In the final section of the chapter, I argue that these approaches to composition, in turn, help shape Troilus’ struggle to locate and bound acts of writing and speech within time. In Troilus, I argue, there is no moment in which formation fully realizes all of its outcomes at once. This theme both emerges within the poem and might also inform critical approaches to it. Not even authors themselves offer a fully synchronized perspective on everything that goes into a text and everything it achieves. Rather, I propose in the conclusion to this chapter, reading offers the opportunity to produce new accounts of Troilus’s formation and thus gradually disclose its form.

1.1  Form and Formation in Comparative Source Study of Troilus Among Chaucer’s poems, Troilus has an especially strong connection with its  main source text, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filostrato. Chaucer follows his Boccaccian source closely through much of Troilus. He does make significant changes at a large scale: he omits parts of Boccaccio’s poem, changes Boccaccio’s nine sections to five, and adds material from numerous different sources (from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy to Dante’s Commedia to Statius’ Thebaid).8 However, much of Troilus still aligns closely enough with the Filostrato to allow for comparative readings that operate at the level of syntax and lexicon. Indeed, the two poems are so close to one another that we can often reconstruct the process by which Chaucer created individual passages in Troilus. David Wallace explains, “by juxtaposing the Filostrato with Troilus and Criseyde we may observe Chaucer’s engagement in the line-by-line business of makinge.”9 The close comparative study of the two poems provides a window into Chaucer’s specific techniques of translation and adaptation.

8  Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book of Troilus,” ed. B.  A.  Windeatt (London: Longman, 1984), discussed in more detail below, remains an invaluable source for understanding these changes and others. 9  David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 1.

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Form and Formation  19 These techniques of translation are often described and assessed in the context of Troilus’ overarching artistic aims.10 Stephen Barney proposes, in the introduction to his facing-text Norton edition of Troilus and the Filostrato, that “comparison of Chaucer’s poem with the Filostrato, its main source, is the first and essential step toward a criticism of Chaucer’s art.”11 By recovering Chaucer’s decisions as a translator, we potentially gather evidence to justify readings of the poem as a whole. In this way, describing Troilus’ formation becomes a way of characterizing the poem’s form. Thus, for example, when Robert Edwards argues that Chaucer “reconceives Boccaccio’s text to examine the central problems of destiny and choice,” he is able both to reconstruct the process of Chaucer’s translation and to identify central themes of Troilus and Criseyde.12 When Lee Patterson argues that “[Chaucer’s] revisions . . . allow into his poem a more capacious representation of subjectivity . . . than the Filostrato can accommodate,” he describes a process of formation directed toward its outcome in form.13 Through recounting how Chaucer made his poetry, we also characterize what we encounter on the page. Creating a poem is a lengthy undertaking and even the most confident poet likely makes some changes to their plans. What assumptions about formation and form allow us to bring an active, dynamic process to bear upon a static text? B. A. Windeatt’s influential 1984 facing-page edition of Troilus and the Filostrato, a physical tool that enables just such reading, helps illuminate how this process works.14 On the surface, this edition offers readers a synchronic comparison between source and adaptation. Chaucer’s changes to his source text stand out in relief, seemingly revealing the trace of the poet’s touch and, with it, the informing intention behind Troilus. Form, by preserving and justifying the actions undertaken during formation, allows the critic an almost voyeuristic perspective on the writing process. Windeatt proposes that 10  This kind of comparative reading gains an early proponent in C. S. Lewis, “What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato,” 37–54 in Chaucer’s Troilus: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stephen A. Barney (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980), 39. 11  Troilus and Criseyde with facing-page Il Filostrato, ed. Stephen  A.  Barney (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2006), ix. 12 Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio, 45. 13  Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 142. 14  Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book of Troilus,” ed. B. A. Windeatt. Windeatt’s was not the first edition to compare the two texts. Excerpts from the Filostrato are included in William Michael Rossetti, Chaucer’s Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. ms. 3943) Compared with Boccaccio’s Filostrato (London: Pub. for the Chaucer Society by N. Trübner & Co, 1875–83), Part I, published for the Chaucer Society by N.  Trübner & Co., 57 & 59, Ludgate Hill, 1875; Part II, Oxford University Press, London, 1883. See the overview of the history of printing the two texts together in K. P. Clarke, “Chaucer and Italy: Contexts and/of Sources,” Literature Compass 8 (2011): 526–33, at 528.

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20  Reading Chaucer in Time comparative source study “can suggest the experience of watching over the English poet’s shoulder as he works.”15 Mapping the distance between source and adaptation provides a window into some hidden part of the past. Windeatt even seems to glimpse Chaucer’s inner life, proposing that Chaucer’s “imagination is instinctively involved with how things develop” and “moves recurrently” to depict internal processes.16 Formation might be glimpsed within form. Here, Windeatt describes Chaucer’s writerly imagination with all of the present-tense immediacy of any other aspect of a literary text. Of course, neither Windeatt nor any other critic would seriously suggest that the transformation of one text into another is as direct as this unmediated comparison suggests. In the prefatory material to the edition, Windeatt argues that “Ch[aucer]’s composition was a process which involved distinctly different kinds of poetic activity” and that “Ch[aucer]’s composition of the poem was in practice a series of layers.”17 Windeatt’s argument came in response to R. K. Root’s proposal that Troilus was composed in distinct versions. Windeatt has been disputed, partially in aesthetic terms, by Charles Owen Jr.18 Here, however, I am less concerned with the issue of revision than with a question that emerges amidst this discussion: that of when formation can be said to be complete. Windeatt, arguing against Root’s thesis of multiple distinct versions, insists that “to say that TC existed for a while without its philosophical passages is comparable to saying that St Paul’s Cathedral existed for a while without its dome: that is, until the plan implied by the rest of the structure was completed.”19 Whatever twists and turns Chaucer’s com­pos­ition­al process might have had, Windeatt argues that it moved toward an ending. And, for Windeatt, this ending was implied in advance, if not by Chaucer’s personal plan, then at least by the aesthetic and thematic demands of his material. By this model, form 15  B.  A.  Windeatt, “Chaucer and the Filostrato,” 163–83 in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 163. Voyeurism and privacy in Troilus have long been topics of critical consideration. See for example Sarah Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 141–58 and A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120–39. Spearing and Stanbury both emphasize the collaboration of poet and reader in imagining or penetrating private spaces; here, I suggest that the scene of the poem’s formation is itself a private space that source study aims to penetrate. 16  Windeatt, “The Troilus as Translation,” 3–24 in Troilus and Criseyde, 6. 17  Windeatt, “The Text of the Troilus,” 36–54 in Troilus and Criseyde, 36. 18  Compare R. K. Root, The Book of Troilus and Criseyde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1926), lxx–lxxxi. In support of Windeatt, see Ralph Hanna III, “Robert K. Root,” 191–205 in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984). In support of the multiple versions thesis, see Charles Owen Jr., “Troilus and Criseyde: The Question of Chaucer’s Revisions,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 155–72. 19  Windeatt, “The Text of the Troilus,” in Troilus and Criseyde, 51.

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Form and Formation  21 and formation can be described in terms of one another because formation, however long it might take to get there, strives toward the poem’s finished form. But when exactly is the poem’s form complete? Windeatt’s analogy of St. Paul’s Cathedral suggests that the parts of a creation imply what its whole ought to be. His focus on physical structure avoids appealing to some in­flex­ible idea of the poem located within Chaucer’s mind. But fully accounting for all of the parts of Troilus is more difficult than it might seem. In the following two sections, I will discuss how Troilus’ Italian prehistory, the interaction between the Vita nuova and the Filostrato, casts the boundaries of literary structures into uncertainty. This is not a literary historical context that would have been accessible to Chaucer himself, let alone his earliest readers. And yet, it has implications for Troilus. It helps to shape how the very issue that I have been discussing here—the problem of determining when formation gives way to form—plays out across Troilus and Criseyde. As I will discuss, Boccaccio’s response to the Vita nuova entails showing how writers often cannot identify the moment at which their work coheres into a whole. This problem resurfaces in Troilus where it affects the poem’s efforts to make a good ending. And in this sense, Boccaccio’s approach to form and formation might also inform how we, as critics, describe Troilus. It may never be clear exactly what design is presupposed by the formation of Troilus and Criseyde. Rather, the more we describe that process, the more the poem’s form might continue coming into view.

1.2  Getting Back to the Writing Process in the Vita nuova The Vita nuova, Dante’s collection of his own lyric poetry, pairs its poems with both autobiographical context and exegetical divisions. In doing so, it offers a key example of form, formation, and reading brought to bear on one another. The Vita nuova strives to make the circumstances of Dantean com­ pos­ition sharable and portable, so that analyzing the poem’s form becomes almost synonymous with getting back to the poet’s act of composition. Dante makes this possible by turning his own life into the book that contextualizes his lyric poetry. He writes, In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la

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22  Reading Chaucer in Time quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia.  (VN I, 1)20 In my Book of Memory, in the early part where there is little to be read, there comes a chapter with the rubric: Incipit vita nova. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading—if not all of them, at least the essence of their meaning.21

The Vita nuova is a record of part of Dante’s young life; in a sense, it is formed by his own actions, experiences, and earlier compositions. Here, those experiences appear as a text in his memory, one that he transcribes onto the manuscript page.22 Dante’s life thus appears at once as historical and exegetical context for his poems. In this way and others, the Vita nuova aims to make the historically specific, diachronic experience of writing sharable and accessible. Part of this means reorienting the relation between poet and reader. The poems in the Vita nuova originally circulated on their own before being incorporated into the libello. Jelena Todorović and Justin Steinberg have both demonstrated the importance of the tenzone tradition in the early reception of Dante’s lyric poetry.23 In these poetic debates, one poet would issue a challenge to which others would respond in verse. Three such responses to the Vita nuova’s first sonnet, “A ciascun’alma presa,” still survive.24 As Steinberg explains, the tenzone “enacts a social bond among participants, emphasizing the communicative, even epistolary nature of literary production in late medieval Italy.”25 In contrast, when Dante recontextualizes his poems in the Vita nuova, he shifts the location of their significance. Steinberg shows that the Vita nuova foregrounds the private, interior, and domestic sphere in its depictions of poetic inspiration, as opposed to the public sphere of the tenzoni. As he explains, this also entails a shift in the temporality of the lyrics. Steinberg shows how, in returning to “the original moment of inspiration and composition,” Dante “underlines, once 20  Quotations of the Vita nuova are from Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova, ed. Domenico De Robertis (Milan: Ricccardo Ricciardi, 1980). 21  Translations of the Vita nuova are from Dante, “La Vita nuova,” trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1965). I have made occasional silent adjustments for clarity in context. 22  On the Vita nuova’s place in a long history of conceptualizing the memory as a book—and, specifically, as a visual medium, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 18–19 and 278–9. 23  Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 61–94; Jelena Todorović, Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange: Authorship, Manuscript Culture, and the Making of the Vita nova (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016), 135–62. 24 Todorović, Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange, 157–8. 25 Steinberg, Accounting for Dante, 70.

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Form and Formation  23 again, the place of memory and the individual psyche as an alternative to the social place of textual circulation.”26 The poems’ significance becomes bound up in the moment of their creation. This in turn makes it possible to imagine speaking to new readerships, such as the foreign pilgrims whom, near the end of the Vita nuova, Dante describes moving through Florence, oblivious to Beatrice’s death. As John Ahern has shown, the libello explores the possibility of a readership consisting not only of friends but of strangers and outsiders like these.27 Charting a similar move toward autonomy, Olivia Holmes explains that the addition of prose narrative to the collected lyrics transforms their significance: “The poem is primarily a written artifact, and not, for instance, a spontaneous expression of love that is intended for the beloved, but somehow intercepted. . . . It is invested with authenticity and authority, however, by being surrounded by evidence that it was produced by someone who ‘really’ experienced what is recounted in it.”28 The poems emerge as interpretable literary works because they can be read in terms of their origins in Dante’s experience.29 And yet even as the poems are grounded in Dante’s past, that past recedes into the distance. Dante uses different kinds of temporality to distinguish between composition, as an event embedded in diachronic time, and the synchronic, sharable text that composition produces. In the Vita nuova, as in modern literary criticism, the difference emerges in verb tense. Describing 26 Steinberg, Accounting for Dante, 93. Charles Singleton unfolds the different temporalities of Dante as poet and Dante as copyist implied by the metaphor of transcription in An Essay on the “Vita Nuova” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 25–42. On the distinction between the temporality of the libello’s poetry and its prose, see Domenico De Robertis, Il libro della “Vita nuova,” 2nd edition (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), 7–11. See also Sergio Cristaldi, La “Vita nuova” e la restituzione del narrare (Messina: Rubbettino Editore, 1994) and Teodolinda Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006), 175–91, esp. 185–6. 27  John Ahern, “The Reader on the Piazza: Verbal Duels in Dante’s Vita Nuova,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32 (1990): 18–39 and John Ahern, “The New Life of the Book: The Implied Reader of the Vita Nuova,” Dante Studies 110 (1992): 1–16. See also Susan Noakes, “Hermeneutics, Politics, and Civic Ideology in the Vita Nuova: Thoughts Preliminary to an Interpretation,” Texas Studies 32 (1990): 40–59, who argues that Dante imagines an idealized community of vernacular ­readers for the Vita nuova. Most recently, Elena Lombardi, Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) discusses the different kinds of readers inscribed into the Vita nuova and shows how they are presented playing active roles in the composition of poetry. 28  Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 128. See also Robert  M.  Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990) and the overview of these studies, integrated into an account of Dante’s place in early humanist models of authorship, in Albert Russell Ascoli, “Favola fui”: Petrarch Writes His Readers (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies SUNY Binghamton, 2010), 6–10. 29  On the temporality of prose and lyric in the Vita nuova, see Thomas C. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 44–51. On the temporality of lyric in particular, see Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 16 and Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 18–25.

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24  Reading Chaucer in Time his process of writing the Vita nuova’s first sonnet, for example, Dante says, “E cominciai allora questo sonetto, lo quale comincia: A ciascun’alma presa” (“And then I began to write this sonnet, which begins: To every captive soul”) (VN III, 9). The distinction between Dante’s first person, past-tense act of beginning to write (“cominciai”) and the poem’s third person, present-tense act of beginning (“comincia”) clearly distinguishes between two ways of thinking about literary temporality. The timebound, individual, private act of beginning to write is, at least for the moment, distinct from the autonomous, sharable beginning of the poem itself. This dichotomy between writing and the text it produces begins to blur as Dante engages in first person, formal analysis of his own works. The Vita nuova pairs its autobiographical account of writing with the analysis of literary form, using the divisioni familiar to medieval exegetes. For example, the division of “Ciascun’alma presa” reads: Questo sonetto si divide in due parti; che ne la prima parte saluto e domando risponsione, ne la seconda significo a che si dee rispondere. La seconda parte comincia quivi: Già eran.  (VN III, 13) This sonnet is divided into two parts. In the first I extend greetings and ask for a response, while in the second I describe what it is that requires the response. The second part begins: already were.

Readers of the Vita nuova have long noted that, in treating his own poetry as the object of commentary, Dante positions himself as an auctor, whose work shakes free of context and attains a stability across time.30 Here, Dante seems to read from an impersonal perspective. The reflexive “si divide” implies that the sonnet itself breaks into two parts; its divisibility an innate property of its form that can be reactivated at any moment and by any reader.31 Steven Botterill observes that for each poem these divisions are “an autonomous aspect of its own poetic nature,” based more on a poem’s particular arrangement of

30 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 190. Ascoli surveys numerous studies of the construction of authority in the Vita nuova: those focused specifically on the authorizing function of the divisoni include Pio Rajna, “Per le divisioni della Vita nuova,” Strenna dantesca 1 (1902): 111–14; Antonio D’Andrea, “La struttura della Vita nuova: Le divisioni delle rime,” 25–58 in Il nome della storia: Studi e ricerche di storia e letteratura (Naples: Liguori, 1982); Stillinger, The Song of Troilus. 31  De Robertis explains how, in contrast to the narration, which is concerned with the historically specific moment of inspiration, the divisioni give the poetry its status as transhistorical text. See Il libro della “Vita nuova,” 12.

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Form and Formation  25 content than on conventional generic or metrical patternings.32 In accessing this arrangement, the divisioni thus reflect the way in which Dante has written his specific works.33 Linking the analysis of form with the recovery of his own compositional practice, Dante moves toward a model of interpretation that treats the two as reflections of one another. Albert Ascoli has recently demonstrated how the Vita nuova stages interpretation as the recovery of the intent structuring the act of writing. Ascoli argues, “Dante both trades on the traditional auctor/lector dichotomy and points the way beyond it to a more modern concept of an author who is also a reader, and whose understanding of his own text (intendimento) is thus identical to his original intention (intendimento) in composing it.”34 The network of early readers who initially responded to the sonnet begins to be eclipsed by a relation embedded in the text itself: the immediate relation between the writing author and the poem’s reader. This immediacy positions not only the work but also the act of creating it as the object of literary analysis, as if Dante were always there, eternally shaping his work’s form. And yet the Vita nuova is also attentive to the concrete, historical experience of writing poetry. The libello does not imagine writing taking place as if outside of time; rather, it imagines the time of writing as having a significant shape and structure of its own. The connection comes to the fore in the Vita nuova’s moment of crisis, the death of Beatrice. In the chapter before Beatrice’s death, Dante describes how, after writing two sonnets on how Beatrice affects others, he wished to say more about her effects on him. He further explains that a sonnet would not have been enough for him to describe these effects in full, so he chose to write a canzone. The poem that follows, “Sì lungiamente m’ha tenuto Amore” (“So long a time has love kept me”), breaks off abruptly after fourteen lines (VN XXVII, 3). An autobiographical prose section follows, beginning: “Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo” (“How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people”), the incipit to the Book of Lamentations 32  Steven Botterill, “ ‘Però che la divisione non si fa se non aprire la sentenzia de la cosa divisa’ (V.N., XIV, 13): The ‘Vita Nuova’ as Commentary,” 61–76 in La gloriosa donna de la mente: A commentary on the Vita Nuova,” ed. Vincent Moleta (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 70. 33  The specific words Dante uses to divide “A ciascun’alma presa” are themselves charged with significance both with respect to form and with respect to formation. Donato Pirovano observes that the terms “saluto,” “domando,” “significo” (“I extend greetings,” “I ask,” “I describe/I say”) track the poem’s movement from salutation to petition to narration; see Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova—Rime, ed. Donato Pirovano and Marco Grimaldi (Rome: Salerno, 2015), 93. Meanwhile, significo is a charged term that Dante uses elsewhere to describe his labor as a writer. In Purgatorio, Dante declares that, as love speaks within him, “vo significando” (“I go signifying”) (24.54). In Paradiso, he states, “transumanar significar per verba / non si poria” (“To signify transhumanizing per verba is impossible”) (1.70–1). For this connection, see Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 26. 34 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 190.

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26  Reading Chaucer in Time (VN XXVIII, 1).35 This disruption is both representative of and also a result of a change that occurs within the time of writing. Dante explains, “Io era nel proponimento ancora di questa canzone, e compiuta n’avea questa soprascritta stanzia, quando lo segnore de la giustizia chiamoe questa gentilissima a gloriare” (“I was still engaged in composing this canzone, in fact I had completed only the stanza written above, when the God of Justice called this most gracious one to glory”) (VN XXVIII, 1). The rupture in Dante’s poem is not a product of the poem’s own timing, but rather of the time in which it was written. The writing of the poem contextualizes Beatrice’s death, and her death bounds and puts an end to the time of writing the poem. By arresting formation, Beatrice’s death reveals the underlying form of the time in which Dante writes his poetry. As Charles Singleton first argued in the 1940s, Dante understands his compositional time as providential time, structured by a unified, divine plan.36 If this is the case, then what happens within time matters, for all events are contained within a single overarching form. By demarcating a boundary within time, Beatrice’s death reveals its underlying structure. In the next section of the Vita nuova, Dante recites the numerical perfection of Beatrice’s death date, occurring in the ninth decade of her century and the ninth day of the month (at least, “secondo l’usanza di Siria” (“according to the practice [of counting] in Syria”)) (VN XXIX, 1).37 As in every aspect of Beatrice’s existence, the timing of her death reveals the harmonious triple trinity of providential form. Furthermore, the break in Dante’s act of composition inaugurates a new and powerful formal principle. Throughout the rest of the Vita nuova, Dante places the divisioni before his lyric poems, so that the poems might seem “più vedova” (“all the more widowed”) (VN XXXI, 2). Disruption is crystallized as form throughout the rest of the libello.38 The Vita nuova, looking back and copying out the events of Dante’s past, preserves and contextualizes a rupture in time, so that literary structure reveals not only a static, informing idea, but the providential time of its own formation. The Vita nuova thus associates the form of Dante’s lyric poetry with its formation by a historically specific author. Reading the poetry begins to seem like glimpsing the poet at work. But, at least in this stage of Dante’s career, 35  On the significance of Lamentations for Dante’s poetics, see Ronald L. Martinez, “Dante between Hope and Despair: The Tradition of Lamentations in the Divine Comedy,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 5 (2002): 45–76. See also Edwards, “The Desolate Palace and the Solitary City.” 36  See Singleton, An Essay on the “Vita Nuova” 52–4. 37  Here I use my own translation for clarity. 38  On the way that this interruption helps anchor the overarching patterning of lament in the Vita nuova, see Ronald  L.  Martinez, “Mourning Beatrice: The Rhetoric of Threnody in the Vita nuova,” MLN 113 (1998): 1–29.

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Form and Formation  27 connecting the lived, historical experience of writing with the form of the finished work hinges upon a highly particular understanding of the time in which writing takes place. Because Dante writes in the presence of Beatrice— and then has his writing interrupted by her death—his compositional process is defined by providence. Composition and form are interlinked because composition itself has providential form. Albert Ascoli argues that this connection ultimately defines Dante’s claim to authority and paves the way for early modern concepts of authorship. But as Ascoli also points out, the problem with this model of authorship is that it depends upon the writer being Dante Alighieri.39 As I will suggest below, Giovanni Boccaccio shows some skepticism about Dante’s aspiration to bring form and formation to bear on one another.

1.3  Finding the End of Formation in Boccaccio’s Vita nuova Manuscripts The decisive end that Dante sets to his process of composition exists in uneasy tension with medieval scribal culture that enabled the ongoing adaptation of texts throughout their reception history. Thanks to the practice of scribes and glossators, texts could continue to form even after leaving the author’s hands. As a copyist and editor of the Vita nuova, Giovanni Boccaccio not only claims such agency for himself but also raises fundamental questions about the relation between form and process of formation. Boccaccio emphasizes that the formal analysis of synchronic works differs fundamentally from the study of their diachronic composition. And, at the same time, he also blurs the boundaries of composition, questioning how and when we declare literary formation to be complete. Boccaccio copied the Vita nuova twice, both times in collections of Dante’s works. These manuscripts are Toledo, Spain, Archivo y Biblioteca Capitulares, MS Zelada 104.6 (c.1348–55) and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigiano L. V. 176 (1363–6).40 Both of these manuscripts make a significant, 39 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 405. 40  See the descriptions of these manuscripts in Boccaccio autore e copista, ed. Teresa De Robertis et al. (Florence: Mandragora, 2013), 266–8 and 270–2. See also the descriptions in Marco Cursi, La scrittura e i libri di Giovanni Boccaccio (Rome: Viella, 2013), 129 and 133–4. One of these manuscripts can be consulted in facsimile: Il codice chigiano L.  V.  176: autografo di Giovanni Boccaccio (Rome: Archivi edizioni, 1974). See the overview of this scholarship and the discussion of Boccaccio’s use of paratext in his Dante manuscripts in K.  P.  Clarke, “Boccaccio and the Poetics of the Paratext: Rubricating the Vernacular,” Le tre corone 6 (2019): 69–106 and in Martin Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 11 and 50.

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28  Reading Chaucer in Time and influential, intervention: they move Dante’s divisioni from the main text to the margins. In both manuscripts, Boccaccio explains his decision through an extensive editorial note. His first reason for the change has to do with the distinction between literary form and the history of composition; as he writes, La prima, per ciò che le divisioni de’ sonetti manifestamente sono dichiriazioni di quegli: per che più tosto chiosa appaiono dovere essere che testo; e però chiosa l’ho poste, non testo, non stando l’uno con l’altre ben mescolato. Se qui forse dicesse qualcuno “e le teme de’ sonetti e canzoni scritte da lui similmente si potrebbero dire chiosa, con ciò sia cosa che esse sieno non minore dichiarazione di quegli che le divisioni,” dico che, quantunque sieno dichiarazioni, non sono dichiarazioni per dichiarare, ma dimostrazioni delle cagioni che a fare lo ’ndussero i sonetti e le canzoni. E appare ancora queste dimostrazioni essere dello intento principale; per che meritamente testo sono, e non chiose.41 The first reason is that, since the divisions of the sonnets are clearly explications of them, it appears that they should be gloss rather than text. And so I have placed them as gloss, not text, since the one is not well mixed [mescolato] with the other. If someone were perhaps to say here, “the occasions of the sonnets and canzoni he describes could similarly be called glosses, because they are no less explications of them than are the divisions,” I say that, insofar as they are explications, they are not explications made to explicate, but rather demonstrations of the causes that led him to write the sonnets and canzoni. And these demonstrations still seem to belong to the principal intention of the work, so they deserve to be called text and not glosses.

Martin Eisner argues that this passage reflects Boccaccio’s characteristic resistance to mixing different diagetic levels. (Similarly, in the Introduction to the Decameron’s Fourth Day, Boccaccio takes care to avoid mixing [“mescolare”] the narrator’s incomplete story of Filippo Balducci with the novelle told by the brigata.) Eisner writes, “Boccaccio uses the word ‘mescolare’ to call attention to the heteronymous presence of another kind of text (the incomplete novella of Balducci or the divisioni) that has been rhetorically excluded but

41  Here and in the following quotation, I use the transcription from the Chigiano manuscript provided in Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature, 155 n. 18, which I have consulted against the manuscript facsimile in Il codice chigiano L. V. 176: autografo di Giovanni Boccaccio. Translations are based on Eisner’s with minor alterations for clarity in context.

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Form and Formation  29 materially included.”42 Boccaccio maintains a qualitative distinction between different parts of Dante’s libello. In this case, he bases the distinction on the different ways in which explication engages with the form and his­tor­icity of poetry. As Boccaccio indicates, the Vita nuova’s autobiographical narratives, which explain the poems by way of locating them in Dante’s history, are fundamentally different from the formal close analysis carried out by the divisioni.43 One kind of explication is personal and historical; the other is explication for the sake of explication itself. The note distinguishes between formation and form as two different objects of study.44 Boccaccio himself works in both historicizing and formalist registers but holds them at arms’ length from one another. His second reason for shifting the position of the divisioni is biographical, and it emphasizes the challenges of establishing any fixed endpoint for the formation of literary works. According to Boccaccio, the Vita nuova was a youthful work and, over time, Dante had second thoughts about its structure and contents: Secondo che io già più volte udito ragionare a persone degne di fede, avendo Dante nella sua giovanezza composto questo libello, e poi essendo col tempo nella scienza e nelle operazioni cresciuto, si vergognava avere fatto questo, parendogli troppo puerile; e tra l’altre cose di che si dolea d’averlo fatto, si ramaricava d’avere inchiuse le divisioni nel testo, forse per quella medesima ragione che muove me; là onde io non potendolo negli altri emendare, in questo che scritto ho, n’ho voluto sodisfare all’appetito de l’autore. According to what I have many times heard discussed by people worthy of faith, having composed this little book in his youth and then grown in knowledge and works, he was ashamed of having made it. It seemed too childish to him; and among the other things that he lamented having done, he regretted having included the divisions in the text, perhaps for the same reason that motivates me. Since I could not emend it in other copies, in this one that I have written I wanted to satisfy the author’s desire. 42 Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature, 57. 43  See Jason M. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 25–44, who reads Boccaccio’s editorial intervention as a way of inscribing the Vita nuova into “traditional modes (both Latin and vernacular) of reading and interpreting poetry” (44). 44  There may be more to this move than Boccaccio’s note indicates. See Clarke, “Boccaccio and the Poetics of the Paratext” 91, on how Boccaccio takes advantage of the full manuscript page in this presentation of Dante’s libello. And see Laura Banella on how the movement of the divisioni to the margins also reflects an overarching presentation of the Vita nuova as a didactic text, one in keeping with the glossed copy of Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega that follows it in the Chigiano manuscript. Laura Banella, La Vita nuova del Boccaccio (Rome: Editrice Antenore, 2017), especially 19–20.

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30  Reading Chaucer in Time Boccaccio proposes that, with the passing of time, Dante eventually changed his mind about the structure of his libello. Appealing to Dante’s life story, he critiques the Vita nuova on its own terms. If the book is a record of Dante’s life, Boccaccio extends that record and, in the process, absorbs and dissolves the actual moment of composing the Vita nuova, as if the work could continue being written for an entire lifetime—and even into the gossip that extends beyond that lifetime—until it suited Dante’s final intentions.45 In claiming to have both a formal reason, based on the nature of different kinds of explication, and a biographical one for moving the divisioni to the margins, Boccaccio replicates Dante’s dual literary critical practice. But he links form with biography only in hypothetical terms. Boccaccio speculates that perhaps (“forse”) Dante came to share Boccaccio’s own, specific, formal understanding of the relationship between text and gloss. Perhaps, on the other hand, Dante’s reasons were different. The time of composition is lengthy and much of it is private. It can involve recalculation and regret. Should the finished text of the Vita nuova be what Dante wanted when he was young, or what he—according to the opinion of others—came to want years later? How can form reflect the complexity of an entire lifespan? How can an editor interpret an author’s wishes and how can the editor weigh authorial intent against the full realization of a work’s potential? For Boccaccio, the writing of the Vita nuova has its own temporality and this compositional time is amorphous and unbound.46 Even Dante’s death does not necessarily put an end to its formation. Though Boccaccio edited the Vita nuova decades after his early response to Dante’s work in the Filostrato, these editions help to demonstrate the problem with teleological models of literary formation. For Dante, the diachronic process of formation has a hidden providential form of its own, one made perceptible when writing stops at just the right moment. When the end of composition literally coincides with the ending of a poem, then that poem may disclose the structure of the time in which it came into being. But Boccaccio recognizes that the lengthy process of diachronic formation may not end on time. It may not end at all. Boccaccio does not identify one de­cisive moment in which Dante’s plan, or even the inherent structure of his text, is fully

45 Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature, 55 draws a similar connection between Boccaccio’s editorial activity and Dante’s editing of his own lyrics, reading MS Chigiano L. V. 176 as an extension of Dante’s own revision of his earlier work. 46 Compare Susan Noakes, Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 84–5, who argues that, for Boccaccio, Dante’s final, adult intentions are fixed and authoritative.

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Form and Formation  31 articulated. This editorial position, I will suggest, has a narrative counterpart in the Filostrato, a text that struggles to bound formation in time.

1.4  Mapping and Bounding the Creative Process in the Filostrato In many ways a response to the Vita nuova’s depiction of its amorous poetprotagonist, Boccaccio’s own early work, the Filostrato, also uses a prose framing device—a dedicatory epistle—to situate poetic composition within the context of lived experience. No direct borrowing suggests that Chaucer knew this epistle; here I do not advance it as a source that Chaucer responds to but rather as a route into structural problems explored throughout the Filostrato. The epistle is only the most overt of the ways in which Boccaccio tracks the time of literary composition and the structure of his poem against one another. In developing the Filostrato as a parallel to the Vita nuova, Boccaccio, like Dante, experiments with representing the time of com­pos­ition— with making form and formation coterminous. Yet here, just as in his Vita nuova edition, Boccaccio cannot quite bound the lengthy, complex, mysterious time of formation. Though it links the Vita nuova and Troilus and Criseyde, the Filostrato is often described as less philosophical, less ambitious, and more earthly than either of these. Discussions of the poem often hinge upon assessing Boccaccio’s attitudes toward the pragmatic and fleshly concerns of his protagonists.47 When compared with Chaucer’s poem, Boccaccio’s work has been described as less “serious” and more “cheerful,” a narrative of earthly love that lacks the philosophizing or psychologizing impulse of Troilus and Criseyde.48 From a different angle, the explicit misogyny of the Filostrato also represents an obstacle to the poem achieving philosophical detachment or psychological depth.49 Yet, as noted above, the Vita nuova itself relies upon a woman’s well-timed death for its ambitious claim to providential form. The Filostrato’s misogyny is 47  For readings that see a moral perspective in the poem, see Janet Levarie Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 14–33 and Victoria Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1993), 202–3. For other approaches, see Fabian Alfie, “Love and Poetry: Reading Boccaccio’s Filostrato as a Medieval Parody,” Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 32 (1998): 347–74 and Laura Kellogg, “Boccaccio’s Criseida and Her Narrator, Filostrato,” Critical Matrix 6 (1991): 46–75. 48 Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 55; Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, 75. Both Wetherbee and Wallace also point out that this distinction is not an absolute one: there are inklings of deeper religious and philosophical possibilities in Boccaccio’s text. 49 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 141–3.

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32  Reading Chaucer in Time part of Dante’s legacy, a consequence of Boccaccio using the Vita nuova to  understand and to interrogate the boundaries and nature of literary composition. I argue that it is not just that the Filostrato brings a more earthly or carnal perspective to its amorous subject matter than do Dante and Chaucer; rather, the Filostrato brings Dantean concepts of providential com­pos­ition to bear on uncooperative earthly experience. From its outset, the Filostrato describes creative processes that take up time and leave little trace behind. Its opening epistle begins with the words “molte fiate già” (“many times already”), and goes on to describe the pleasure with which the youthful narrator joined in questioni d’amore, the pastime of noble, and idle, Neapolitan youth (Fil. Pro.1).50 The Filostrato narrator specifically enjoyed discussing one question: whether it is better to see the beloved in person, to imagine her with the mind’s eye, or to talk about her. He explains how he always maintained the second of these positions, not least because the mind’s eye offers the pleasures of fantasy: “Potere secondo il disio di colui che pensa disporre la cosa amata, e lei rendere secondo quello benivola e rispondente, come che ciò solamente durasse quanto il pensiero” (“To be able to render the beloved object kindly disposed according to the desire of him who was thinking about her, and to render her kind and responsive in accordance to that desire, even though that might last only as long as the thought”) (Fil. Pro.5). The young man fantasizing about his beloved creates images for his consumption alone, which do not outlast the moment of their composition. These fantasies come and go without leaving any trace on the external world.51 The breaking points that, for Dante, bound private experience and inscribe it into sharable, synchronic form fail to do the same for Boccaccio. The Filostrato’s opening epistle seems to describe a transformative change. According to the narrator, his position on his favorite questione rapidly changes once his beloved Filomena leaves Naples for her vacation in Sannio. As Boccaccio writes,

50  Text of the Filostrato is from Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 2: Filostrato, Teseida delle nozze di Emilia, Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, Filostrato, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964). Translations from Robert P. ap Roberts and Anna Bruni Seldis in Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, ed. Vincenzo Pernicone (New York, NY: Garland, 1986) with some silent changes for clarity in context. I have also consulted the translations in N.  R.  Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980), 19–102. The Filostrato lacks a critical edition but see the discussion of the poem’s manuscripts in Giuseppe Marrani, “Filostrato,” 75–83 in Boccaccio autore e copista, ed. Teresa De Robertis et al. (Florence: Mandragora, 2013). 51  See the discussion of questioni d’amore in Alessia Ronchetti, “Between Filocolo and Filostrato: Boccaccio’s Authorial Doubles and the Question of ‘Amore per diletto,’ ” The Italianist 35 (2015): 318–33.

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Form and Formation  33 Oh me, quante volte per minor doglia sentire [gli occhi] si sono essi spontanamente ritorti da riguardare li templi e le logge e le piazze e gli altri luoghi ne’ quali già vaghi e disiderosi cercavano di vedere, e talvolta lieti videro, la vostra sembianza, e dolorosi hanno il cuor costretto a dir con seco quel misero verso di Geremia: “O come siede sola la città la quale in qua addietro era piena di popolo e donna delle genti!”  (Fil. Pro.12–13) O me, how many times, in order to feel less suffering, [my eyes] have spontaneously turned from looking at the temples and the loggias and the squares and the other places in which formerly, longing and desirous, they sought to see, and sometimes joyfully saw, your countenance, and sorrowfully they forced my heart to recite to itself that unhappy verse of Jeremiah: “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people and mistress of the nations!”

Where once the narrator imagined his beloved in fantasies that vanished as soon as they came into being, now he says that time and space take on a concrete reality. The past is better than the present and the narrator’s eyes enjoy relief when they survey “quella contrada, quelle montagne, quella parte del cielo, fra le quali e sotto la quale io porto ferma oppinione che voi siate” (“that country, those mountains, that part of the sky among which and under which I firmly believe you to be”) (Fil. Pro.13). Filomena’s presence, he finds, establishes a qualitative difference between here and there, past and present. Yet the narrator’s language fails to plot itself against this new world. He delivers the same line from Lamentations that, in the Vita nuova, marks a breaking point where poetic form and lived experience converge. But rather than presenting it as a boundary, he instead whispers it to himself as many times (“quante volte”) as he resists seeing the places where he remembers Filomena. Just as his fantasies accomplish nothing, so too his language fails to make a firm distinction in time and space. The language that, in the Vita nuova, shows how Beatrice’s death arrests writing, becomes for Boccaccio the mantra that fills up an amorphous meantime between Filomena’s departure and return. Boccaccio inscribes the composition and performance of the Filostrato into this meantime. The narrator explains how, desperate to express his sorrow but anxious to protect Filomena’s honor, he decides to recite his story by relating the story of someone else: “E il modo fu questo: di dovere in persona d’alcuno passionato sì come io era e sono, cantando narrare li miei martiri” (“And the way was this: to contrive, in the person of someone emotionally overcome as I was and am, to relate my sufferings in song”) (Fil. Pro.26). The narrator finds a way to express himself in someone else’s story. And he emphasizes that the significance of the poem for him is as much tied up in its performance as in

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34  Reading Chaucer in Time its initial composition. He describes how he went about singing his sorrows “from time to time” (“e una e altra volta”) (Fil. Pro.29). Instead of inscribing the Filostrato into the singular timeline of written composition, Boccaccio instead associates it with the repetitive temporality of performance, expanded to fill the time spent waiting for Filomena.52 Boccaccio’s protagonist, Troiolo, similarly waits on his beloved to determine the boundaries of his own creative activities. As discussed above, Beatrice collaborates in the creation of Dante’s poetry by dying at the right moment, her loss confirming the providential timing of Dante’s composition. In his editions of the Vita nuova, Boccaccio expresses skepticism over setting a decisive boundary to composition, pointing out that Dante goes on living, and potentially rethinking his early work, for decades. In the Filostrato, meanwhile, it is the female beloved who lives for too long. In Book 4, as the lovers contemplate their separation, Criseida is overcome by sorrow, faints, and seems to die. Troiolo is distraught but also inspired. He promptly prepares to commit suicide, launching into a melodramatic lament, complete with a reference to the war-torn city (“e tu città la qual io lascio in guerra” [“and you, city which I leave at war”]) that hints at the famous line from Lamentations (Fil. IV.123.1). Here it is Troiolo who imagines that his death will widow the city, a narcissistic twist that captures the protagonist in the moment of Dantean fantasy. However, the dramatic conclusion of this display is undermined by Criseida’s sudden revival: … ricevimi, Criseida—volea dire, già con la spada al petto per morire, quand’ella, risentendosi, un sospiro grandissimo gittò, Troiol chiamando. (Fil. IV.123.7–8 – 124.1–2) “. . . receive me, Criseide”—he meant to say, holding his sword already at his breast, ready to die, when she, recovering her senses, heaved a very great sigh, calling on Troiolo.

At some point, in the long quotation preceding these lines, the poem has stopped actually quoting Troiolo and instead begun to describe what he was 52  The emphasis on performance suits the association of the Filostrato with the oral genre of the cantare. On this connection, see Vittore Branca, Il Cantare trecentesco e il Boccaccio del Filostrato e del Teseida (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1936) and Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, 75–93.

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Form and Formation  35 about to say. Though Boccaccio has seemingly been quoting his protagonist for two stanzas, he ends the passage with “volea dire”—“he intended to say.” (The passage can be punctuated differently depending upon exactly when Troiolo is imagined to stop speaking.) An inverted Dante, Troiolo is cut off in both his words and his gesture, not by Criseida’s death but by her revival. And instead of inscribing a clear break in time, as Beatrice’s death does, Criseida’s interruption of Troilo happens at some ambiguous point within his speech. Her interruption leaves some imprecise quantity of his words unspoken and his plans unrealized. She even adds insult to injury by interrupting him with an enormous sigh. This is a comic moment, but it also reveals the extent to which Troiolo’s sense of form relies upon the death of his beloved. Criseida would make a better Beatrice—and Troiolo a better Dante—if she had died. The possibility of Troiolo controlling the ending of his own story depends upon Criseida’s death. Instead he, like the Filostrato narrator, remains subject to his beloved’s timing. As soon as Criseida wakes up, she takes control over the timeline of the affair, assuring Troiolo that she will return “al decimo giorno, / sanza alcun fallo” (“on the tenth day, without fail”) (Fil. IV.154.7–8). The poem’s narrator shares with his protagonist the necessity of living according to a woman’s timing.53 Criseida and Filomena both tap into a kind of power that women can wield over men in Boccaccio’s poetry: that of time and timing. The double ending of the Filostrato betrays its narrator’s own impotence in the face of a woman fully in control of the time in which he writes. The poem comes to an end before the narrator’s waiting period does. Boccaccio concludes the work with an elaborate metaphor of the ship in port—one that suggests a definitive end to writing. “Noi siam venuti al porto” (“we have arrived at port”), he declares, crediting the guiding star of his lady: “Quella stella, che esperto / fa ogni mio pensiero al fin dovuto” (“That star which makes each of my thoughts expert in achieving its proper end”) (Fil. IX.3.1, 7–8). Filomena, whom Boccaccio invokes at the beginning of the poem, guides the poet’s thoughts to their natural conclusions. With Filomena’s guidance, he has achieved both the ending of his poem and, perhaps also, the manifestation of his thoughts in poetry. Yet almost as soon as Boccaccio raises this possibility, he undermines it. The Filostrato narrator declares that he is ready to weigh anchor now that the

53  Compare the comments on how the Filostrato narrator accuses Filomena and claims to trust her at the same time in Warren Ginsberg, Tellers, Tales, and Translation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68–9.

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36  Reading Chaucer in Time poem has reached its end (“estimo dunque che l’ancore sieno / qui da gittare, e far fine al cammino” (“I judge, therefore, that the anchors are to be cast here and an end made to the journey”) (Fil. IX.4.1–2)—only to abruptly imagine a further journey: Poi tu, posata alquanto, te n’andrai alla donna gentil della mia mente: oh, te felice che la vederai, quel ch’io non posso far, lasso dolente! (Fil. IX.5.1–4) Then you, somewhat rested, will betake yourself to the noble lady of my thoughts. Oh happy you who will see her, which I, sorrowing wretch, cannot do!

Boccaccio reopens and reduplicates the image of the ship at sea, imagining a further journey in which the poem might actually reach the hands of the beloved. The poem both reaches beyond its own boundaries and expands those boundaries, describing its reception as part of its journey. The achievement of the poem’s goals extends beyond what the work itself can contain. In other ways as well, this extra ending suggests that the Filostrato might not fully be able to encompass and articulate the time of its own formation. As Vittore Branca notes, this leave-taking is a convention of cantari but also recalls the congedo, or address to the poem, typically appended to lyric canzoni.54 In lieu of a concrete yardstick for measuring the time of writing, per­form­ance, or reading, Boccaccio’s poem experiments with distortions in scale and size. As these final lines make clear, progress through this lengthy poem does not map onto meaningful progress through space or time. Like his protagonist, Boccaccio remains unable to account fully for the time his poem comes into being; he also relies on a female addressee to dictate when the text achieves its goal. Though he describes her, in Dante’s terms, as the lady of his mind, at the same moment he demonstrates that terminology to be insufficient for a lady whose physical presence matters. The poem depends upon Filomena to put an end to this second journey. And so it mixes its praise of her with something like hatred. Only five stanzas before this one, Boccaccio closes the narrative portion of the poem by encouraging his readers to pray to Love “che per rea donna al fin non siate morti” (“that in the end you will not die for an evil woman”) (Fil. VIII.33.8). Whether Boccaccio’s misogyny or 54  Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), 872 n. 1. See also the discussion of epic versus lyric temporality in this passage in Stillinger, The Song of Troilus, 125.

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Form and Formation  37 that of his narrator, it emerges as a reflex of the impotence of male lovers and poets to define their own achievements. Here women have control over the outcome of processes of formation and development. The poem abuses its dedicatee to the extent that she, not it, defines its end.

1.5  Contextualizing Formation in Troilus and Criseyde Troilus and Criseyde depicts the writing process taking up time and yet somehow also as if unfolding outside of history. The project of writing Troilus might be a long one, but it is one that the poem plots against no temporal or historical context other than the achievement of the work itself. The narrator wants “to ryme wel this book til I have do,” measuring the end of the writing process against the “book” it creates (TC II.10). This depiction of writing as a process, but not one grounded in any one specific historical context, aids the poem’s conflation of the time of writing with the time of performance. In almost the same breath, the Troilus narrator presents himself as if at the writing desk and as if reading aloud to an audience. The poem is seen as taking up time, but that time is measured and bound solely by the unfolding of the poem itself. This decontextualized “when” in which the poem comes into being makes a strange fit with the Troilus Book 2 prologue, which emphasizes the concrete particularity of contexts of creation and reception. There, the narrator emphasizes that his protagonists’ actions are grounded in historically specific customs. The narrator claims that he will follow his source exactly—“as myn auctour seyde, so sey I”—without altering the love customs he finds therein (TC II.18). Therefore, he argues, his poem ought to be considered as reflecting the tastes of a different past: Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do; Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages, In sondry londes, sondry ben usages. (TC II.22–8)

In order to make sense of his work, the Troilus narrator argues, his listeners or readers need to understand the protagonists’ actions within a different

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38  Reading Chaucer in Time historical context from their own. Yet when it comes to defining the expectations of readers in any one historical moment, a confusing heterogeneity emerges. As the Troilus narrator attempts to describe the difference of the past, he pushes his comments on cultural and linguistic alterity to their extreme conclusion. Where initially he associates alterity with ancient times and “sondry londes,” within another twenty lines, he shifts to the level of the individual. The narrator declares, “scarsly ben ther in this place thre / That have in love seid lik, and don, in al” (TC II.43–4). No one individual’s actions will perfectly match up with another’s expectations. If this is the case, then there is no one ideal context of reception for the poem: no one person for whom all of the work makes perfect sense. Individual difference becomes such a general condition that it can be described in generic terms: “this place” could be any place. No one readership will perfectly harmonize with the poem. The source of this passage, Dante’s Convivio, further exposes the het­ero­ gen­eity of contexts of literary production and reception by opening them to diachronic change.55 As Dante indicates, to write in the vernacular is to engage in a process of transformation. He explains, Onde vedemo nelle cittadi d’Italia, se bene volemo aguardare, da cinquanta anni in qua molti vocaboli essere spenti e nati e variati; onde se ’l picciol tempo così transmuta, molto più transmuta lo maggiore. Sì ch’io dico, che se coloro che partiro d’esta vita già sono mille anni tornassero alle loro cittadi, crederebbero la loro cittade essere occupata da gente strana, per la lingua da[lla] loro discordante.  (Conv. I.5.9) Thus in the cities of Italy, if we care to take a close look, we find that within the last fifty years many words have become obsolete, been born, and been altered; if a short period of time changes language, much more does a greater period change it. Thus I say that if those who departed this life a thousand years ago were to return to their cities, they would believe that they were occupied by foreigners, because the language would be at variance with their own.56

55  On whether Chaucer actually knew and used Convivio, see Alastair Minnis, “ ‘Dante in Inglissh’: What Il Convivio Really Did for Chaucer,” Essays in Criticism 55 (2005): 97–116. For an early and extensive discussion, see John Livingston Lowes, “Chaucer and Dante’s Convivio,” Modern Philology 13 (1915): 19–33. For comments on the circulation of knowledge about Convivio, see J. Huizinga, “An Early Reference to Dante’s Canzone ‘Le dolci rime d’amor,’ in England,” The Modern Language Review 17 (1922): 74–8. 56  All quotations of Convivio are from Convivio, ed. Franca Brambilla Ageno (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995). Translations are from Dante’s Il Convivio (The Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing (New York, NY: Garland, 1990).

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Form and Formation  39 The surprise that Dante’s imaginary time traveler experiences is not simply that language is different at different times and places. Rather, it is much more intimate and transformative: a realization that despite the strangeness of this transformed language, it is still one’s own, and the people who are speaking it are not “gente strana,” but rather one’s own fellow citizens. Indeed, the same vernacular that connects its speakers with family and citizens in the present also connects them with the past and the future. On the one hand, vernacular poetry has a vanishingly small context. Virtually every speaker of the ver­ nacu­lar uses it differently and it changes from moment to moment. But on the other hand, it also has an impossibly long context, for writing and speaking in the vernacular means taking part in a process of continuous change that unfolds over centuries. Chaucer’s Troilus shares a similar problem: the context in which he operates is too large for him to make sense of. Chaucer inherits Boccaccio’s depiction of endings anticipated and deferred, wrested from the control of the poem’s protagonist. However, rather than exploring this temporal distortion primarily in terms of gender, Chaucer expands it into an unavoidable, even universal condition. He follows Boccaccio in showing Criseyde’s death as a near-miss, where the potential for one kind of ending, and with it one kind of form, is raised in order to be elided. But whereas, in Filostrato, Criseida wakes up and interrupts Troiolo’s suicide attempt, in Troilus God is to blame: “And thow, Criseyde, o swete herte deere, Receyve now my spirit!” wolde he seye, With swerd at herte, al redy for to deye. But as God wolde, of swough therwith sh’abreyde, And gan to sike, and “Troilus” she cride. (TC IV.1209–13)

Troilus could never have achieved his goal because God wants (“wolde”) something different from what he wants to do, or even what he “wolde” say. Troilus is not only too slow to realize his fantasy, but entirely powerless to do so. God determines when formation begins and ends. Having inherited a text, the Filostrato, in which men and women contest the point at which formation gives way to form, Troilus gives the end of formation over to providence. In some ways this is an indirect return to the providential timing of Beatrice’s death in the Vita nuova. But if in Dante’s text providence gives immediate and convenient boundaries to processes of coming-into-being, in Chaucer’s, the opposite occurs. Locating becoming in a providential context means leaving

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40  Reading Chaucer in Time it unbound. Whereas in the Vita nuova Beatrice’s death was providential, in Troilus Criseyde’s survival is. And whereas in the Vita nuova providence makes itself felt at the moment Dante stops writing, in Troilus, the fullest outcome of events, including perhaps the event of writing, is deferred until the end of time.

1.6  The End of Formation and the Ending of Troilus When is the best time to assess what the formation of Troilus and Criseyde achieves? The poem’s conclusion offers a convincing stand-in for the moment at which formation ends and gives way to form. Since Chaucer maps the cre­ ation of his poem against its unfolding, the ending of Troilus appears as if it were the end of the writing process. But does it make sense to take the poem’s ending as the result, outcome, or culmination of the writing process? In dealing with these questions, it would help to disentangle the end of the Troilus’ formation from the ending of Troilus. But in lieu of an external context to shape and bound the poem’s formation, it is hard to say by what standard Chaucer declared his work finished. The poem stands as a paradoxical measure of its own completeness. On the other hand, Chaucer does, in certain sense, step outside of his regular process of adaptation at the poem’s conclusion. For he turns to different source texts in order to set its boundaries. He draws upon Boccaccio’s Teseida for Troilus’ apotheosis and on Dante’s Paradiso, Canto 14, for the poem’s final prayer. In this section, I consider how Dante’s poem contextualizes Troilus’s achievement. But I argue that it does so specifically for readers who encounter Chaucer’s poem within their own time. Indeed, the formation of Troilus finds its ends in acts of reading which are, themselves, provisional, incomplete, and subject to time and change. Dante provides useful ways of thinking about how temporality lurks within even the most stable structures. Paradiso, for all of its associations with eternal, transcendent perspectives on history, also values the incompleteness of temporal life. These issues emerge in Paradiso 14 as Dante questions what heavenly bliss stands to gain from the recovery of the physical body. If, even before the last judgment, the saved soul already reflects divine light in heaven, how can its state possibly be augmented by the resurrection of the body?57 Dante receives a response from the soul of Solomon, who explains,

57  See the discussion of these questions in Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 15–16.

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Form and Formation  41   Ma sì come carbon che fiamma rende e per vivo candor quella soverchia sì che la sua parvenza si difende:   così questo folgór che già ne cerchia fia vinto in apparenza de la carne che tutto dì la terra ricoperchia. (Par. 14.52–7)58      And like a coal that gives off flame, but in its vivid whiteness surpasses the flame,      so that its appearance still remains,    so this brightness that encircles us will be surpassed in appearance by the flesh that today is covered up by earth.

Whereas on Earth the body encases the soul, in heaven the soul and its divine light surrounds and encloses the body. This inside-out imagery picks up on the description of the transformation of the resurrected body in 1 Corinthians 15:35–54. Paul describes the body as the seed sown by man in the flesh but raised by God in the spirit. The transformation unfolds “in momento, in ictu oculi, in novissima tuba” (“in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet”) (1 Cor 15:52).59 God translates the flesh into spirit taking almost no time at all, in the instant that time comes to an end. The result is a corrected version of the gluttony of Saturn or Chronos, who figures the destructive power of time as a father eating his own children. Instead, Paul imagines the destructive power of time itself brought to an end by being enclosed within a greater truth: “Cum autem mortale hoc induerit immortalitatem, tunc fiet sermo, qui scriptus est: Absorpta est mors in victoria” (“And when this mortal hath put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory”) (1 Cor 15:54). Eternity supplants Saturn by absorbing and devouring time, an eschatological structure enacted on Dante’s individual spirits by the enclosure of the body within the soul. For Dante, eternity does not destroy temporal experience so much as recover the connections forged there. As Solomon speaks, the surrounding souls passionately cry “Amme!” (“amen”), expressing their desire for their bodies (Par. 14.62). Dante suggests that they cry out “forse non pur per lor, ma per le mamme, / per li padri, e per li altri che fuor cari / anzi che fosser sempiterne 58  Text and translation of Paradiso are from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 3: Paradiso, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 59  Latin text is from the Vulgate Bible and translation from the Douay-Rheims Bible, both consulted online at Douay-Rheims Bible Online, accessed 2 May 2018, www.drbo.org.

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42  Reading Chaucer in Time fiamme” (“perhaps not for themselves alone, but for their mamas, for their fathers, and for the others who were dear before they became sempiternal flames”) (Par. 14.64–6). The sempiternal (that is, with beginning but without end) ought to absorb and consume the merely temporal, the past that has already come to an end and been supplanted. But instead, the souls themselves think about this time as a distinct object of desire. This may be because processes of formation and development constitute the place of the individual person within their community. As Fernando Vidal suggests, the series of relationships evoked here charts the development of language against different kinds of interpersonal connections. The sentence moves from the intimacy of the child’s relationship with the mother—and the childish term “mamme”— to the more distant “padri,” and finally to the possibility of friends and romantic love.60 Solomon and the souls in heaven have long since “put away the things of a child” (there is another echo of 1 Corinthians here) and the speech that says “mamme” (1 Cor 13:11). But the souls’ fervency suggests that they long to recover the connections necessitated by their own dependency. Whereas God extracts incorruptible truth from corruptibility in the twinkling of an eye, people need time to develop, to learn, and to interpret. This time is not incidental but rather constitutive of both individuals and communities. The recovery and enclosure of the body at the end of time thus comes not as a destructive consumption, but rather as an embrace of the social and emotional significance of coming into being in context and in time. Troilus sees the world from the eighth sphere, but we see Troilus from within incomplete, historical time. This chiastic relation plays out as Troilus looks down at the earth and the poem’s readers look back at him. As Troilus gazes downward, the poem grounds his perspective in prosaic language that suggests settled synchrony. Chaucer writes, And down from thennes faste he gan avyse This litel spot of erthe that with the se Embraced is, and fully gan despise This wrecched world, and held al vanite To respect of the pleyn felicite

60 Fernando Vidal, “Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 930–74, at 932–3. See also Ettore Bonora, “Struttura e linguaggio nel XIV del Paradiso,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 146 (1969): 1–17; Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 138; Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 157–61.

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Form and Formation  43 That is in hevene above; and at the laste, Ther he was slayn his lokyng down he caste, And in hymself he lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste, And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste, And sholden al oure herte on heven caste; And forth he wente, shortly for to telle, Ther as Mercurye sorted hym to dwelle. (TC V.1814–27)

The Earth, located in the center of the universe, is empty “vanite”; the spheres that surround it, however, are a site of complete happiness; they are “pleyn” in the sense of plenus, “full.” The spheres contain happiness with no ending; the Earth at their center offers temporary, approximate, and therefore ultimately vain pleasures. From Troilus’ perspective, this universe can be glimpsed as a unified, synchronic spatial structure. Developing a precise spatial and visual arrangement, the poem sets “this” world into quantitative comparison (“to respect of ”) with the happiness “that” is in heaven, only to then have Troilus turn his gaze back “ther” where he died. Meanwhile, as Troilus condemns worldly preoccupations, Chaucer’s long, prosaic, enjambed sentence suggests a shift from poetry to prose in accordance with the turn from the pleasures of love to the serious sentence of morality. To the extent that poetry continues, it recapitulates and rejects its own key terms. The second stanza of the passage above interlinks its rhyme scheme with the first, reiterating the first stanza’s concluding couplet: “laste”/“caste.” The second version of the rhyme corrects what came before: instead of locating events in time (“at the laste”), “laste” now refers to the rejection of time and temporality itself (things that “may nat laste”). Instead of describing a change in the direction of Troilus’ gaze, “caste” now insists upon a permanent fixation of the heart on heaven. The repeated rhyme recapitulates earthly perspectives in order to exchange them for heavenly ones, a lesson learned through reading poetry but finally understood with the stable certainty of prose.61

61  Compare Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, 84–101, which builds its beautiful reading of these lines around the notion that we are seeing the narrator’s thinking playing out in real time as he writes the ending of the poem. See also John Steadman, Disembodied Laughter: Troilus and the Apotheosis Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 143–67 on the larger tradition of these lines.

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44  Reading Chaucer in Time Yet in reading through the poem, we encounter Troilus’ perspective from within our own time and on earth. At the center of this interlinked set of rhymes, sonically bridging the repeated “laste”/“caste” couplet, is the line “hem that wepten for his deth so faste”: the description of the people who loved Troilus and who suffer because of his absence. These people continue to respond to Troilus’ story though, from his perspective, it has come to an end. Even as Troilus’ perspective seemingly contains history, he continues to be the object of attention from within history. Whether or not these characters are right to weep for Troilus, in doing so they participate in kinds of emotional connection similar to those that define temporal life for Dante’s saved souls. Furthermore, Chaucer’s reference to “this litel spot of erthe” makes clear that this is also the historical world that the poem and its readers inhabit. (Susan Crane describes a similar syntactic and perspectival identification with “the lytel erthe that here is” in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.)62 We see Troilus from within time even as he seemingly sees us from without. Troilus’ perspective upon what temporal processes achieve might be complete, but ours is not. This opens our own reading up to the kinds of attachments and dependency that Dante associates with life in time. In Paradiso 14, Dante struggles not so much in expressing the eternal truths of heaven but rather in capturing the excess that comes with sharing acts of speaking and writing in time. When he quotes the souls of the wise singing a song together, he compresses what is an extended experience in Paradise, writing,   Quell’ uno e due e tre che sempre vive e regna sempre in tre e ’n due e ’n uno, non circunscritto, e tutto circunscrive,   tre volte era cantato da ciascuno di quelli spirti. (Par. 14.28–32) That One and Two and Three that ever lives and always reigns in Three and Two and One, not circumscribed, but circumscribing all things, three times was sung by each of those spirits.

This chiasmus encloses the three persons of the Trinity within the one, so that diversity lies inside of unity. Even as Dante describes God circumscribing all, 62  Susan Crane, “ ‘The lytel erthe that here is’: Environmental Thought in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 1–30. See esp. 7–8, which demonstrate how Chaucer’s perspective remains earthbound even when describing celestial visions.

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Form and Formation  45 the structure of these lines also anticipates the inverted concentric circles that the pilgrim will glimpse in Paradiso 28, where hierarchies of angels surround a tiny, divine “punto” (“point”) (Par 28.16). However, the beauty of these lines tends to obscure the fact that Dante has not actually captured the sensory experience of hearing the song. The song is repeated three times in heaven and sung by multiple different voices. Dante quotes only one terzina, in the single voice of his own poem, and leaves the reader to imagine the rest. For all of their beauty, these lines are only an idea of the song of the souls. Lost in the transition from Dante’s aesthetic experience to his reiteration of it is the togetherness, the excess, and the joyful experience of repetition itself. The formal problem is not (only) that of representing the static structure of paradise, but also using static, synchronic quotation to capture the act of shared singing. Chaucer translates these lines at the opening of the final stanza of Troilus and Criseyde, using Dante’s formal depiction of divine enclosure to begin setting a boundary to his own work. Instead of delivering the chiasmus as reported speech, he directly states it in the poem’s main narrative voice. That voice seems to change at the moment that the poem begins to end; Dante’s language, though unmarked, exerts a palpable transformative influence. Indeed, Chaucer follows Dante’s word order—and more specifically, the relationship between Dante’s syntax and versification—extremely closely. He writes, Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive, Us from visible and invisible foon Defende, and to thy mercy, everichon, So make us, Jesus, for thi mercy, digne, For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne. (TC V.1863–9)

This translation tracks the sonic contours of Dante’s poem so closely that it shifts his grammar when necessary in order to keep up. In order to preserve the Italian line breaks and rhyme sounds, Chaucer uses the English adjectival phrase “on lyve” to translate the Italian verb “vive,” requiring him to move the relative pronoun (“che,” translated “that”) to the line break. Where Dante strings together a paratactic chain of divine attributes, Chaucer instead embeds a grammatical rupture at the heart of his chiasmus. This change allows Chaucer’s poetry, first and foremost, to follow along with the rhythmic flow of Dante’s language.

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46  Reading Chaucer in Time At the same time, in turning to Dante to set boundaries, these final lines add new perspective on what Troilus has been doing all along. As Chaucer follows Dante in counting off the persons of the Trinity, this verbal movement doubles as the counting off of metrical feet, with “thow oon,” “and two,” “and thre” each consuming an iamb. The count ends at the caesura only to resume following the caesura in the next line. This organization reflects the syntactic structure of Dante’s chiasmus, which bifurcates each of the first two verses in the terzina into a counting clause and a descriptive clause. Even as these verses number the Trinity, they also number Chaucer’s meter, so that metrics and lexicon briefly coincide. The transformative sense of gravity that accompanies these lines thus reflects not just the chiasmus, and not just their weighty subject matter, but also the heavy pauses inscribed between every single iamb in these two half-lines of counting. This rhythm gives Dante’s language a new role: it now counts the iambs of Chaucer’s text. Troilus’ basic rhythmic building blocks suddenly rise to its surface, becoming perceptible and intelligible as a way of measuring progress through both time and language. It isn’t only that Chaucer adapts Dante in order to create Troilus. Rather, Dante’s poetry provides another perspective from which not only to see Troilus’ form but also to recollect the experience of reading the poem.63 Is there a single privileged vantage point, akin to Troilus’ view from the eighth sphere, from which readers can assess the process of Troilus’ formation and determine its outcome once and for all? Troilus suggest that such perspective might come at the ending of time. In the meantime, readers can make provisional attempts to articulate what literary formation accomplishes here and now. Whereas Troilus laughs at the limited perspective of those who came before him, the saved souls in Paradiso recognize that limitation—and the consequent need for others—is what makes earthly endeavors socially, personally, and emotionally significant. It is hard to say what literary form could do in the eternal spheres that would be more significant than the gradual unfolding of its history of reception here on earth. Whether or not Troilus or Troilus take this approach, I think it might present a useful perspective for reassessing some of what is at stake in the relation between form, formation, and reading. When form and formation are treated as mirrors of one another, then it seems that there must be some flashpoint at

63 Compare the discussion of “self-difference” in George Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 128.

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Form and Formation  47 which one gives way to the other; at which formation achieves its temporal and teleological end in form. Yet in practice, this crucial moment might never arrive. I do not think the answer to this is to neglect formation. Rather, it might be useful to think of formation unfolding in an unbound timeline, one that still has the potential to produce fresh and unexpected ends. If the history of formation is that long, then we are contained within it too.

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2 Writing Readers in the Thebaid, Teseida, and Knight’s Tale It is difficult to separate the Knight’s Tale from its teller for, as numerous critics have shown, chivalric identity is itself bound up in the public expression of interiority.1 And in recognizing and naming the attitudes that seem to inform the Knight’s Tale, we participate in its project of putting chivalric thinking on display. This is a dynamic that emerges within the tale as well as around it. Repeatedly within the tale, women are called upon to witness masculine in­ter­ior­ity, not only when it is embodied in the knights themselves, but also in inanimate matter such as the flames of Arcite’s funeral pyre, whose wild movement seems to attest to his madness. Indeed, here, the recognition of Arcite’s emotions extends to seeing them where they do not exist. There is no mind within the flames, but there almost seems to be one. Recognizing the tale as reflecting some aspect of the Knight’s thinking, or of chivalric thinking, in its structure or its themes similarly enlivens the poem via animating empathy. This chapter therefore asks, what might the readers of Chaucer’s poem share with someone like Emelye? How, and with what consequences, do we come to perceive thought within a text? The idea of reading that searches out the thought within texts links the project of the Canterbury Tales with literary experiments unfolding in fourteenthcentury Italy. As touched upon in the previous chapter, Dante’s Vita nuova reduces the distance between authorial intent and readerly understanding,

1  The perception of the Knight’s thought within his tale has long been connected with the work’s emphasis on order. The most influential early discussion of order in the Knight’s Tale is Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957). For the link between the theme of order and the expression of the chivalric mind see Robert  W.  Hanning, “ ‘The Struggle between Noble Designs and Chaos’: The Literary Tradition of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” The Literary Review 23 (1980): 519–41. For the connection between the very act of shaping a narrative and the expression of chivalric identity, see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 168–230, who understands the tale as embodying the self-articulation of knightly subjectivity. For a psychological reading of the Knight’s narratorial style, see Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 99–133.

Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Kara Gaston, Oxford University Press (2020). © Kara Gaston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001

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Writing Readers  49 even as it also defines the author as a historically specific person. Albert Ascoli argues that this move culminates in Dante’s Commedia, where Dante presents himself as both a historically specific individual and as possessed of divinely granted insight.2 Getting back to Dante the human is also a way of getting back to the universal truth of Dante’s text. Ascoli contrasts this model of authorship with medieval models expounded by Judson Boyce Allen, Alastair Minnis, Mary Carruthers, Rita Copeland, John Daeganis, and others that emphasize the primacy of medieval readers over authors, both as the site of a text’s ethical importance and as the producers of its meanings.3 Dante becomes both the historical originator of the text and the locus of its in­ter­ pret­ive significance.4 As interpretation becomes associated with getting back to the author’s shaping thought, the reader’s role is also transformed. Justin Steinberg points out that Dante often inscribes readers into the Commedia as if to short-circuit the actual, material circumstances of reception.5 Ascoli argues that Dante’s model of authorship anticipates Petrarch, for whom “the supposedly distinct and autonomous reader is revealed as no more than a projection, an em­an­ation of the author.”6 In the midst of this shifting approach to the reader lies Boccaccio and the female readers to whom he so often addresses his works. 2 Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3  See Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 29–42. See also Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4  The model of authorship that Dante and Petrarch help inaugurate has informed debates over authorial intention in the centuries since. Questions at stake include: Can we get back to the author’s intention? Should we try to? How do we define intention as a psychological and/or historical property? Against reading for intention, see Monroe Beardsley and W.  K.  Wimsatt Jr., “The Intentional Fallacy,” 3–18 in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, ed. W. K. Wimsatt Jr. (Louisville, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1982). See also Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). But see Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002) for a model that both recognizes volition in poetry and sees that volition as historically, metrically, and linguistically conditioned. 5  Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 6  Albert Russell Ascoli, “Favola fui”: Petrarch Writes His Readers (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies SUNY Binghamton, 2010), 1–35, at 14. See also Albert Russell Ascoli, “Worthy of Faith?: Authors and Readers in Early Modernity,” 435–51 in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007).

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50  Reading Chaucer in Time Elena Lombardi, who tracks how the idea of the female reader enables shifting concepts of authorship in Trecento Italy, writes of Boccaccio’s poetry: In the forefront of the work, however, very much as in Dante’s Vita Nuova, there stands a woman, literate in the vernacular and educated in the pleasures of courtly literature, who guarantees the material unity, originality, and linguistic and stylistic choices of the book. She embodies the fantasy of an ad hoc audience, one that can be guided, wooed, and seduced. Finally, the woman reader not only guarantees productivity, but is also responsible for the wholeness and circulation of his work: she closes the circle of inspiration and publication, granting a smooth internal logic to it; she is, in a very bodily manner, the publisher of the book.7

This ideal reader is perfectly responsive: she represents the fantasy of a reader who picks up upon the author’s decisions and manifests them in her response to the text. As Lombardi explains, she flattens the distance between “in­spir­ation and publication” because she recognizes and reflects the author’s intentions. In her, therefore, the whole work is achieved, over and above what we see of it in any one partial context of reception.8 What would it mean to live the role of such a reader? I raise this question with caution in the context of the Canterbury Tales, wishing to avoid reopening debates about the relation between Chaucer’s pilgrims and their tales. The question of whether, and with what consistency, the Canterbury Tales use ­narratorial style to produce an impression of some aspect of their tellers is an old and complex one.9 Recent work by David Lawton, in particular, cautions

7  Elena Lombardi, Imagining the Woman Reader in The Age of Dante (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 196. 8  Boccaccio can be seen presenting his work to Fiammetta on fol. 1r of Boccaccio’s autograph manuscript, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Acquisti e Doni 325. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, ed. Edvige Agostinelli and William Coleman (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2015), which emphasizes the plan of illustrations that Boccaccio had for the Teseida and includes an image of the illustration on p. CV. 9  The now outdated notion that the tales are precisely suited to coherently defined tellers finds influential early articulation in George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry: Lectures Delivered in 1914 on the Percy Turnbull Memorial Foundation in the Johns Hopkins University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915). This chapter cautiously draws upon the approach of H.  Marshall Leicester Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), which suggests that the tales produce the impression of a narrator with subjectivity. Arguments against taking the tales as coherent narratorial performances include David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge: D.S.  Brewer, 1985) and A.  C.  Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), who cautions against novelistic reading that probes the minds of Chaucer’s pilgrims.

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Writing Readers  51 against treating the Canterbury Tales as fully or primarily geared toward ­characterizing their narrators.10 Accordingly, this chapter focuses less on the specific relation between teller and tale than on modes of reading that might pave the way for recognizing thought within such texts. That is, reading that looks for some kind of mental property—often a thought, but also potentially an emotion, a hint of interiority, or an impression of intentionality—within inanimate matter. I leave the category of what readers discover within their material strategically broad, for my focus here is on what is involved in looking for mental properties that transcend living minds. I propose that the Knight’s Tale demonstrates the implications of such reading, but not so much with respect to the tale or teller—rather, for its community of readers. As Lombardi indicates, Boccaccio works out new relations between reader and author in and through the figure of the female reader. Indeed, his Teseida delle nozze di Emilia presents almost a literal, visual representation of Lombardi’s woman at “the forefront of the work” by means of an adaptation of a Statian motif: the image of the lady who gazes into a funeral pyre. In the Thebaid, this is Antigone at the pyre of her brothers, Eteocles and Polynices. As she looks at the warring flames, she recognizes her brothers’ minds within them, driving their hateful motion. Antigone is a canny reader, but she ends up caught up in her own text, re-enacting this same kind of rivalry, almost as if infected by her reading.11 Statius thus provides a representation of how recognition of thought within matter can have, as its consequence, the reproduction or mirroring of that thought within the reader. The image of the lady at the pyre informs the role of the female addressee in Boccaccio’s Teseida. There, the poet’s beloved, Fiammetta (little flame), is asked to identify the emotions and intentions within his work. Fiammetta, in turn, is echoed within the text by Emilia, who sees her male lover within both prophetic fires and a funeral pyre. Though Emilia does not fully understand what she sees, Fiammetta does—Boccaccio describes her as inflamed by the work, giving it its title and preparing it for publication. Fiammetta, fixed in place gazing upon the text, mirrors the intentions enclosed within it. 10  David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). See especially ch. 7, “Chaucer’s Poetics of Voice: The Case of Fragment V,” 151–80. 11  The relation between love and war in the Teseida has long been a topic of critical discussion. Boccaccio claims that the Teseida fills the lack, identified by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia II.ii.8, of an Italian poet writing in the vernacular on themes of war. On the Teseida’s linking of martial and amorous themes, see Victoria Kirkham, “ ‘Chiuso parlare’ in Boccaccio’s Teseida,” 305–51 in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY Binghamton, 1983) updated and reprinted in Victoria Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1993), 17–53.

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52  Reading Chaucer in Time Chaucer’s adaptation of the Teseida in the Knight’s Tale has been read as a recovery of classical or Statian themes from within the Italian text.12 In this one respect, however, I suggest that the Knight’s Tale builds upon Boccaccio. Chaucer probably did not have access to the framing epistle which the Teseida uses to help define Fiammetta’s role as reader. As William Coleman shows, his manuscript likely lacked both the opening epistle that addresses Fiammetta, and the glosses (chiose) that, in many Teseida manuscripts, frame the poem for interpretation.13 But Chaucer did take from the Teseida the image of Emelye, first at a prophetic fire and then at a funeral pyre, glimpsing a hint of  Arcite’s desire and his suffering with the flames. Meanwhile, in the Knight’s Tale, even more so than in the Teseida, Emelye’s role as reader of the flames is linked with the suppression of her historical specificity and individual experience. Called upon to serve as the mirror of masculine suffering, she conceals what is specific about herself and acts a role similar to our modern concept of “the reader.” This chapter tracks these models of reading from Statius to Boccaccio and Chaucer. It then proposes that, for Chaucer, this readerly dynamic is associated both with civilization and with political coercion. In both the Theban myth and myths of rhetoric, the kind of animating empathy that recognizes thoughts outside of the self allows for cooperation. But this kind of self-effacing reading can also mean giving oneself over to voicing someone else’s ideas.

2.1  Models of Reading in Statius’ Thebaid In the Thebaid, reading is a dangerous business. Scholarship on the Thebaid’s influence on medieval literature has often focused on historical recursivity and on recursive models of authorship. Scholars including Dominique Battles, Lee Patterson, Robert Edwards, Leah Schwebel, Elizaveta Strakhov, and ­others have shown both that history tends to repeat itself in Theban stories and, also, that writing about Thebes can be a way for writers to inscribe themselves into

12 David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 17–43. 13  William  E.  Coleman, “The Knight’s Tale,” 87–247 in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005). See also Piero Boitani’s discussion of whether or not Chaucer knew the chiose in Chaucer and Boccaccio (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977). On the glosses as a mode of selfauthorization, see K.  P.  Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–9.

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Writing Readers  53 (sometimes endless) recursions to literary origins.14 What role do readers have in this dynamic? How does Theban recursivity inform what it means to read? The two readers I will touch on in this section—Antigone and the prophet Amphiaraus—both resist the hatred that defines the war in Thebes. And yet these characters find themselves written into, or written by, the ma­ter­ial that they read. It is as if, in pointing to the hatred they see in the Theban story, they become part of that story. How does this happen? Antigone will provide the through line for connecting the Thebaid with medieval poetry. But whereas Antigone sees the aftermath of a battle, her medieval counterparts will also witness prophetic texts. In some ways, prophetic texts could not be more different from works that originate in, and purport to express, the thought of a historically specific author. And yet, both demand similar postures from their readers, for they subordinate the lived experience of reading to the articulation of meaning that transcends time. Therefore, in linking these acts of reading, it might be helpful to begin with the Thebaid’s doomed prophet: Amphiaraus. In Book 3 of Statius’ poem, two Argive prophets, Amphiaraus and Melampus, ascend to the top of Mount Aphesas in order to perform an augury and determine whether the gods favor the Argive attack on Thebes. The seers are attempting to find a different answer to their queries than they have received so far. Statius explains that they have already seen evil prophesied in the entrails of cattle and sheep. Looking to the birds seemingly offers the opportunity to find some new meaning. Instead, what confronts the prophets is a picture of the events that await them: the entire story of the Theban war enacted in allegory. It is as if, as readers of the prophecy, Amphiaraus and Melampus are extracted from their context in time and space and positioned as eternal witnesses to the fate of the Seven against Thebes. Amphiaraus’ augury represents history by using an allegorical system that evades contextually specific conventions. Initially, Amphiaraus asks the gods to show a favorable omen on the left side of the sky, a symbolic system that (anachronistically) reflects Roman augurial conventions which associate the

14  Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the OF Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); Robert  R.  Edwards, “Medieval Literary Careers: The Theban Track,” 104–28 in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History; Leah Schwebel, “The Legend of Thebes and Literary Patricide in Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Statius,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 139–68; Elizaveta Strakhov, “ ‘And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace’: Reconstructing the Spectral Canon in Statius and Chaucer,” 57–74 in Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, ed. Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015).

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54  Reading Chaucer in Time left with good fortune.15 But the scene he sees in response does away with culturally specific symbols. Amphiaraus describes seeing seven eagles, in which he recognizes the seven Greek kings, attacking the encircled swans. The eagles seem to be winning until their fortune suddenly turns; as Amphiaraus describes it:                               Quae saeva repente victores agitat leto Iovis ira sinistri? hic excelsa petens subita face solus inarsit summisitque animos, illum vestigia adortum maiorum volucrum tenerae deponitis alae, hic hosti implicitus pariter ruit, hunc fuga retro volvit agens sociae linquentem fata catervae hic nimbo glomeratus obit, hic praepete viva pascitur immoriens; spargit cava nubila sanguis. quid furtim illacrimas? illum, venerande Melampu, qui cadit, agnosco. (Theb. 3.537–47)16 What fierce wrath of baleful Jove suddenly drives the victors to death? One, seeking the heights, has all at once taken fire from the sun’s torch and abated his pride; another his young wings let down as he attempts the tracks of bigger birds; this one plunges entangled with his foe; him flight rolls backward as he leaves his allied squadron to their fate; another perishes caught up in a stormwrack; another dying feeds upon a living bird, blood bespatters the hollow clouds. Why do you weep secretly? Venerable Melampus, I know the one that falls.

This avian drama represents the fates of the seven Greek kings who lead the forces against Thebes. Six of them die there; one, Adrastus of Argos, flees. The eagle burned by the sun, for example, predicts how Capaneus, scaling the walls of Thebes, will be struck by divine lightning. The augury allegorizes the events of the war to come. It is legible with reference to the specific events that are about to unfold. Indeed, this scene represents a great deal of Statius’ poem 15 Eleni Manolaraki, “ ‘Consider in the Image of Thebes’: Celestial and Poetic Auspicy in the Thebaid,” 89–108 in Ritual and Religion in Flavian Epic, ed. Antony Augoustakis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 106. See also Elaine Fantham, “The Perils of Prophecy: Statius’ Amphiaraus and his Literary Antecedents,” 147–62 in Flavian Poetry, ed. Ruurd R. Nauta, Harm-Jan van Dam, and Johannes J. L. Smolenaars (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 16  Text of the Thebaid is from Statius, Thebaid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). I supply Bailey’s translation with light alterations for clarity in context.

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Writing Readers  55 in microcosm. Amphiaraus and Melampus do not see symbols that they need to interpret as portending good or ill. Rather, they see history itself mapped out before them. How does Amphiaraus recognize himself within the birds’ movements? The final eagle, falling from the sky, represents the seer: on arriving in Thebes, Amphiaraus will die by falling through a gaping hole in the battlefield. Amphiaraus recognizes his own fate: “illum, venerande Melampu, / qui cadit, agnosco.” But how does Amphiaraus know the bird? It signifies him only insofar as it enacts his death; that is, the very future that it anticipates. The scene that the birds enact is eternal: it represents characters and the fate that will befall characters in one and the same image. It is as if fate is not something that happens, over time, to preexisting characters, but rather character and fate are perceptible within one and the same moment.17 And so Amphiaraus’ historical situation, reading the scene before he travels to Thebes, hardly matters: the truth of the text stands outside of the specific position of its interpreter. Statius almost, but not quite, elides the prophet’s response to what he sees in the moment of reading. The interjection at line 546, “quid furtim illacrimas?” (“why do you weep secretly?”) could be attributed to either Amphiaraus or Melampus. It is possible that Amphiaraus, the main speaker in the passage, sees Melampus weeping and addresses him. In this case, Amphiaraus would be assuring Melampus that, though Melampus laments it, Amphiaraus recognizes his own fate. On the other hand, is equally possible that Melampus has interrupted Amphiaraus when he sees that, even as the seer describes the birds, he is weeping. In this case, Amphiaraus still declares “I know the one that falls,” but as an explanation of why he weeps. As Statius’ readers, we cannot know the truth of this moment. The avian allegory plays out in the sky as an eternal text, but the specific event of its reception is largely hidden. Even as Amphiaraus helplessly anticipates his death, the birds’ motion makes him and the other Argives forever recognizable. Indeed, commentary on this scene tends to treat the birds’ actions both as representations of events and as representations of characters. The Thebaid’s most influential commentary, 17  Manolaraki, “ ‘Consider in the Image of Thebes,’ ” 100–1. On this synchronic approach to prophecy, see also Martti Nissinen, “Prophecy and Omen Divination: Two Sides of the Same Coin,” 341–51 in Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, ed. Amar Annus (Chicago, IL: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010). On the contrast between the readers’ perspective and that of the characters, see Randall  T.  Ganiban, Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 44–70. On the relation between death and definitions, see Frederick M. Ahl, “Statius’s ‘Thebaid’: A Reconsideration,” 2803– 912 in Aufsteig und Niedergang der Römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der Neueren Forschung, vol. 2, ed. Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 2901.

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56  Reading Chaucer in Time a late fourth-century literal and historical exposition attributed to Lactantius Placidus, shifts between the two outlooks.18 Lactantius writes of the bird caught in a cloud: “HIC NIMBO GLOMERATVS OBIT Hippomedontem significat fluminis periturum esse uertigine” (“THIS ONE PERISHES CAUGHT UP IN A STORM-WRACK: It means that Hippomedon is going to be destroyed by the whirling of a river”).19 Embedding the future active infinitive “esse periturum” within an indirect statement, Lactantius reads the image as a representation of events to come within the poem. But conversely, Lactantius writes of the eagle that gnaws its enemy: “HIC PRAEPETE VIVA / (PASCITVR IMMORIENS) Tydeum dicit, qui interfectoris sui Melanippi oblato sibi capite cerebrum eius, dum moreretur, absorbuit” (“THIS ONE [DYING FEEDS] UPON A LIVING BIRD: It means Tydeus, who with the head of his killer Melanippus given to him, while he was dying, devoured its brain”).20 This time, the image does not signify what Tydeus will do so much as Tydeus himself.21 Amphiaraus recognizes himself in this prophecy because of what his future in the poem will be like. He sees himself as Statius’ reader might see him. In the Thebaid, prophetic reading is powerless reading; reading that reiterates but cannot change the text it sees. Amphiaraus and Melampus cast off their fillets and garlands and flee, with Amphiaraus enclosing himself and refusing to share what he has learned. Capaneus and the mob of Argives eventually 18 See the overview of Lactantius’ commentary and traditions of Statian commentary in Rita Copeland, “Gloss and Commentary,” 171–91 in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Ralph  J.  Hexter and David Townsend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 181–5. See also Paul M. Clogan, “The Manuscripts of Lactantius Placidus’ Commentary on the Thebaid,” Scriptorium 22 (1968): 87–91 and Robert Dale Sweeney, Prolegomena to an Edition of the Scholia to Statius (Leiden: Brill, 1969). Chaucer appears to have encountered a copy of Statius that had some glosses based on Lactantius’ commentary: see Paul M. Clogan, “Chaucer and the Thebaid Scholia,” Studies in Philology 61 (1964): 599–615. 19  Lactantii Placidi: In Statii Thebaida commentum, vol. 1, ed. Robert Dale Sweeney (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997), III.544. Translations mine. 20  Ibid. III.544–5. 21  A later medieval commentary builds on this approach to the scene. The twelfth-century “In principio” commentary associated with Anselm of Laon finds much of the poem’s emotional and moral significance echoed in the bird scene. For example, of the high-flying eagle that represents Capaneus, the commentator writes, “SUMMISIT humiliavit moriens, quia cum vinceret elatus deos contempnebat” (“LOWERED: He is abased in dying, for, when he was winning on high, he had contempt for the gods”). Of the youngest eagle: “ADORTUM agressum tenere ale contra maiores volucres non sufficiunt. Nunc tenera etas bello perdit” (“ATTEMPTING: His wings were not enough to maintain advances against greater birds. Now tender age is destroyed in war”). My transcriptions and translations are based on Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 842, f. 33r (consulted in microform). See the overview of the four surviving manuscripts of “In principio” and an edition of its accessus in Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 226–34. For the commentary’s provenance and more excerpts, see Violetta de Angelis, “I commenti medievali alla Tebaide di Stazio: Anselm di Laon, Goffredo Babione, Ilario d’Orléans,” 75–136 in Medieval and Renaissance Scholarship: Proceedings of the Second European Science Foundation Workshop on the Classical Tradition in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Birger Munk Olsen (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

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Writing Readers  57 hound him out of hiding, only to refuse to listen to his warnings. Amphiaraus tries to avoid the war, but is betrayed by his wife. He finally dies not due to any chance accident but through a hole that gapes open on the battlefield like the mouth of fate itself. This series of disasters perhaps says less about reading than it does about the inevitability of fate. But what about characters who do not see the truth about the future but, rather, the truth about the past? Statius parallels prophetic knowledge with historical knowledge in Book 3 when he critiques both:                               Unde iste per orbem primus venturi miseris animantibus aeger crevit amor? divumne feras hoc munus, an ipsi, gens avida et parto non umquam stare quieti, eruimus quae prima dies, ubi terminus aevi, quid bonus ille deum genitor, quid ferrea Clotho cogitet? (Theb. 3.551–7) Whence first for hapless mortals grew worldwide this sick craving for what is to come? Shall we call it a gift of the gods or do we ourselves, a greedy race never content to rest with what we have, dig out which day is the first and where life ends, what that kindly begetter of the gods and what iron Clotho have in view?

Statius condemns efforts to uncover origins and to reveal endings in one and the same breath. Both are presented as violations of the natural order of things. And yet in these very lines, he himself attempts to understand the origins of such desire, questioning when, and from what source, such desires emerged. The study of both history and prophecy entail searching out truths that exceed the perspective of any one individual life. In that very aspiration, they rupture the natural order of things. Getting outside of one’s own boundedness in history and context brings with it the threat of losing that context; of becoming caught up in a story that redefines the self. The notion that history and prophecy both aim to transcend the limitations of the individual reader’s context illuminates certain similarities between Amphiaraus’ reading, which precedes the Theban war, and Antigone’s reading, which comes at its conclusion. In Book 12, after the heroes have all either been killed or fled the scene of the war, Antigone and Argia meet on the Theban battlefield as they search for the body of Polynices. Though Creon has forbidden the burial or cremation of Polynices and his Greek allies, the two women are determined to care for the body. Their collaboration offers the

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58  Reading Chaucer in Time possibility of a different ending to the Theban story. Though they mistrust one another at first, the two women eventually find a way to work together and even share their sorrow. Statius describes them taking turns weeping on Polynices’ body: Hic pariter lapsae iunctoque per ipsum amplexu miscent avidae lacrimasque comasque, partitaeque artus redeunt alterna gementes ad vultum et cara vicibus cervice fruuntur. (Theb. 12.385–9) Here both collapse and with joint embrace eagerly mingle tears and hair over the body, dividing the limbs between them; then they go back to his face, lamenting by turns, and enjoy his beloved neck in alteration.

Dividing Polynices’ body and issuing alternating laments, Argia and Antigone offer an alternative to the “alterna . . . regna” (“alternating reigns”) that initially tore Thebes apart (Theb. 1.1). The two women soon begin sharing their stories, embodying what briefly appears to be a new future for Thebes and Argos. Unfortunately, their very efforts to put the past to rest cause it to resurface once again. The women find a smoldering pyre and add Polynices to it, only to see the flames on the pyre rise up and dramatically divide, as if fighting one another. Antigone reads the flames and recognizes what is hidden within them: Occidimus, functasque manu stimulavimus iras. frater erat; quis enim accessus ferus hospitis umbrae pelleret? en clipei fragmen semustaque nosco cingula, frater erat! cernisne ut flamma recedat concurratque tamen? vivunt odia improba, vivunt. nil actum bello. (Theb. 12.437–41) We are lost, we have stirred up dead anger. It was his brother. Who else would be savage enough to repel the approach of a stranger shade? See, I recognize the fragment of shield and this charred belt. It was his brother. Do you see how the flame pulls back and yet runs at the other? It lives, the monstrous hate, it lives! War has achieved nothing.

Antigone is able to recognize her brothers within the flames because of how those flames act. The hatred and repulsion expressed by the movement of the

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Writing Readers  59 pyre expresses an emotion that she can only associate with Eteocles—although the charred crest she spots confirms her identification. What relation do the flames have with the people that lie within them? On the one hand, the flames act as surrogate bodies for the souls that they contain. They pull back and charge at one another as people would. They express the minds and emotions of the brothers who lie within them. On the other hand, the flames blur the line between the expression of interiority and the allegorical representation of the brothers.22 The hatred that burned inside of the two now shows on the outside. Whatever is superfluous to that hatred—faces, bodies, doubts— burns away. Antigone exclaims, “vivunt odia,” recognizing both her brothers and the emotion that they once embodied, one that now embodies them. And further, Antigone sees that this hatred—she does not distinguish between the br­others’ hatred and hatred as a property in itself—lives on in her own time. Antigone, as if confirming what she sees, very soon begins to display a similar hatred. The divided flame causes a tremor that attracts attention and the two women are soon arrested. Whereas they worked together to start the pyre, they fight each other over who should accept the responsibility and ­punishment for it.23 Statius writes: Ambitur saeva de morte animosaque leti spes furit: haec fratris rapuisse, haec coniugis artus contendunt vicibusque probant: “ego corpus,” “ego ignes” “me pietas,” “me duxit amor.” … nusquam illa alternis modo quae reverentia verbis, iram odiumque putes. (Theb. 12.456–9; 461–2) They are ambitious of a cruel end, courageous hope for death maddens within them. Against each other they claim to have stolen the body, she her brother’s, she her husband’s, and win credence in turn. “I took the body.” “I lit the fire.” “Piety made me.” “Me love.” . . . Gone the mutual respect in their exchanges, you might think it anger and hate. 22  David Vessey reads all of the Seven against Thebes as allegories of the emotions: see David Vessey, Statius and the Thebaid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 23  On the literary and social contexts of Antigone and Argia’s connection, see Nikoletta Manioti, “Becoming Sisters: Antigone and Argia in Statius’ Thebaid,” 122–42 in Family in Flavian Epic, ed. Nikoletta Manioti (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

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60  Reading Chaucer in Time The two women begin to strive against one another because of their desire for death. Both of them cry out their motivations and strive to confront Creon, making their defiance public. Statius recognizes in their striving not piety and love, but rather the same “odium” that Antigone herself sees in the two flames. Or rather, he suggests that we might perceive anger and hate within the women, just as they perceive it in the flames. What has caused this change? Statius does not make it entirely clear. Yet it seems the two women have found that the expressivity of death and dead matter—the possibility of turning death into a statement—exceeds whatever they might accomplish when alive. The hatred that Antigone sees transcends the individual lives of her brothers; she too seems to seek out this kind of transcendent expressivity. Vying to sacrifice themselves in order to make their piety public, Antigone and Argia, who had tried to inter the hateful past, end up reiterating it. The brothers seem to live on in Antigone and Argia, precisely as the women strive for death. Such reading does little to help the Theban situ­ation but, as I will suggest in the next section, it is highly suggestive as a model of literary interpretation. What more could an author hope for than to have their thought live on, forever reflected in a self-sacrificing reader?

2.2  Fiammetta: The Ideal Reader of Boccaccio’s Teseida In presenting the Teseida to Fiammetta, whose name means “little flame,” Boccaccio integrates the violent imagery of the Thebaid into his poem’s framing device. And from the outset, the imagery of the flame comes coupled with problems of reading. Teseida begins with an epistle that Boccaccio’s poet-persona addresses to Fiammetta. He explains how she ignited within him a “fiamma” (“flame”) that, he says, her present disdain can never extinguish (“A Fiammetta”).24 As much as the poet claims to have been altered through his contact with Fiammetta, she gains her name from her effect on him. Indeed, as Janet Levarie Smarr notes, the Fiammetta of Teseida has virtually no characterization at all and no clear connection with the more fully realized women named Fiammetta in other Boccaccean poems.25 The Fiammetta of Teseida is both a creation of the text and the person meant to judge and assess it. 24  Quotations of the Teseida are from Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 2: Filostrato, ed. Vittore Branca, Teseida delle nozze di Emilia, ed. Alberto Limentani, Comedìa delle ninfe fiorentine, ed. Antonio Enzo Quaglio (Milano: Mondadori, 1964). Translations are from N. R. Havely, ed. and trans., Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980). I have made minor alterations to the translation for clarity in context. 25  Janet Levarie Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 61.

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Writing Readers  61 Specifically, Fiammetta’s role as reader is to recognize the person who lies hidden within Teseida. The poet-persona offers the text to her as “verissimo testimonio” (“truest testimony”) to his continued declarations of love (“A Fiammetta”). And as he further explains, her role is not only to recognize his love for her, but also to recognize that this love informs his poem. He indicates, “E che ella da me per voi sia compilata, due cose fra l’altre il manifestano” (“And two features among others make it plain that this was composed by me, for you”) (“A Fiammetta”). The first of these is the outline of his own history with Fiammetta hidden beneath the main narrative: Sotto il nome dell’uno de’ due amanti e della giovane amata si conta essere stato, ricordandovi bene, e io a voi di me e voi a me di voi, se non mentiste, potreste conoscere essere stato detto e fatto in parte: quale de’ due si sia non discuopro, ché so che ve ne avvedrete. . . . Potrete adunque e qual fosse innanzi e quale sia stata poi la vita mia che più non mi voleste per vostro, discernere.  (“A Fiammetta”) What the story relates concerning one of the two lovers and the young woman he loves may be taken by you, if you well recall and were sincere, to correspond to what was said and done by both of us. I shall not reveal which of the two I mean, for I am sure you will know. . . . You can thus perceive what my life was like before, and how it has been since you refused to have anything more to do with me.

This arrangement, where Fiammetta is meant to assess the two lover-­protagonists of the poem, puts her in the position of Antigone, looking at a bifurcated ­surface and asked to recognize the people within it. Boccaccio’s narrator, meanwhile, makes three interrelated claims: (1) to represent his past in one of the Theban youths; (2) to thereby express his emotional state; and (3) to make this self-representation the grounds and proof of his intent to write for Fiammetta. As Warren Ginsberg puts it, Boccaccio locates his “authorial stand-in at the center and circumference of his work.”26 To read the poem is  to recognize its poet, so that the poet is both the poem’s origin and its ­outcome. Fiammetta has little place in this arrangement except to verify it. If Boccaccio is at both the center of the work and its circumference, Fiammetta the reader mediates between the two. Fiammetta is an ideal reader, capable of grasping a work in its entirety: indeed, she guarantees the work’s wholeness. The second piece of evidence 26  Warren Ginsberg, Tellers, Tales, and Translation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 66.

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62  Reading Chaucer in Time that the narrator cites as proof that he wrote for Fiammetta is, precisely, that he has followed his own inclinations. As he explains, L’altra si è il non avere cessata né storia né favola né chiuso parlare in altra guisa, con ciò sia cosa che le donne sì come poco intelligenti ne sogliano essere schife, ma però che per intelletto e notizia delle cose predette voi dalla turba dell’altre separata conosco, libero mi concessi il porle a mio piacere. (A Fiammetta) The second is that I have never avoided speaking allegorically in a story, fable, or other form just because women, being of little intelligence, will usually make fun of it. But since I know you are distinguished from the rest of that crowd by virtue of your understanding and knowledge of the things I have mentioned, I feel free to set them down as I wish.

Fiammetta’s understanding of the genres and modes in which the poet writes frees him up to write in those genres and modes. Fiammetta stands above and beyond the crowd of ladies who lack such understanding. As an ideal reader, she opens up space for the poet to write for her in a way that expresses his own free choice. The poet thus claims such sweeping creative freedom that the one unifying form of the work becomes its intentionality: the very fact that it is meant to be this way. As noted above, Chaucer likely did not know the Teseida’s introductory epistle. What he would have encountered instead is an echo of this arrangement within the poem. Fiammetta’s proxy within the poem, Emilia, is also confronted by a bifurcated surface: a double flame that represents the poem’s two male protagonists. This episode comes in the series of Book 7 set-pieces describing how Palemone, Arcita, and Emilia each pray to their patron deity. The two young men’s prayers have received the most critical attention, with their descriptions of journeys to the temples of Venus and Mars, passages accompanied by even lengthier interpretive glosses that treat the temples as allegories of lust and rage.27 But Emilia’s prayer also involves allegory, for the flames represent the emotional and physical fate of the two Thebans.28 Moreover, in part because of the resonance between this double flame with the one that contains Polynices and Eteocles, here the line between allegorical 27  See for example Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1977). 28 Susan Noakes, Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 92, who notes that the flickering flames map onto associations of light and darkness that attend the two Thebans throughout the poem.

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Writing Readers  63 representation and the expression of interiority begins to blur. Boccaccio describes how, as Emilia turns her eyes toward the flames, they seem to change: La giovinetta le lagrime spinse dagli occhi belli, e dimorando attenta più ver lo foco le luci sospinse; né stette guari che l’una fu spenta, poi per sé si raccese, e l’altra tinse e tal divenne qual talor diventa quella del solfo, e, le punte menando, in qua in là gia forte mormorando. E parean sangue gli accesi tizzoni, da’ capi spenti tututti gemendo lagrime tai, che spegnieno i carboni; le quali cose Emilia vedendo, gli atti non prese né le condizioni debitamente del fuoco, che ardendo si spense prima e poscia si raccese, ma sol di ciò quel che le piacque intese. (Tes. 7.91.1–8, 92.1–8) The maiden wiped away the tears from her lovely eyes, and still attending to the fires she fixed her gaze most closely upon them. And she had not been doing so long when one went out and then rekindled itself; and the other turned the color a flame is sometimes given by sulfur—its tongues flickering this way and that and murmuring loudly as it burned. And the burning brands became bloody, and from all their unlighted ends they shed drops that extinguished the coals. And as she witnessed this Emilia did not properly understand either the behavior or the appearance of the fire that had first gone out and then been rekindled—for she saw in it only what she chose to see.

On the one hand, the two Thebans can be recognized in how the flames map out a series of actions. The flame that presumably represents Palemone goes out then blinks back on again, suggesting the fall and rise of Palemone’s fortunes, or, perhaps, of his hopes. On the other hand, Arcita’s flame, rather than merely extinguishing with his failure, hints at something different: embodied suffering. It appears to change color and its brands seem bloody. It resembles a body capable of expressing its pain: it issues a murmuring, a sound on the

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64  Reading Chaucer in Time line between noise and voice. The fire doesn’t just show what happens to Arcita, but seems to embody him. Boccaccio hints at interiority in this scene by merging Statius’ pyre imagery with Dante’s adaptation of that same imagery in Inferno 26.29 In Inferno, the inhabitants of the eighth bolgia in the seventh circle of hell (whose sin is never named but seems to be fraudulent counsel) are fully contained within flames.30 The shells of fire that surround them render their speech, which had been persuasive while they lived, painful and harsh in the afterlife. When the pilgrim comes across a double-tipped flame, he describes it as “sì diviso / di sopra, che par surger de la pira / dov’ Eteòcle col fratel fu miso” (“so divided above that it seems to be rising from the pyre where Eteocles was put with his brother”) (Inf. 26.52–4). Dante makes the Statian connection between expressive flames and funeral pyres explicit. As Polynices’ and Eteocles’ pyre seemed to replace their bodies, so these infernal fires fully supplant the bodies of the people within them. In the context of these strange bodies, Dante explores how interiority emerges as an object of perception. When Ulysses speaks, the motion and sound of his flame blur the line between speaking and seeming to speak:   Lo maggior corno de la fiamma antica cominciò a crollarsi mormorando, pur come quella cui vento affatica;   indi la cima qua e là menando, come fosse la lingua che parlasse, gittò voce di fuori. (Inf. 26.85–90) The greater horn of the ancient flame began to shake, murmuring like one a wind belabors; then, bending its peak here and there, as if it were a tongue that spoke, it cast out a voice.31

The motion of the flame lies on the boundary between speech and wind, animate and inanimate activity. It murmurs as if blown about but moves its tip as 29  On the allusions to Dante in this passage, see Ronald L. Martinez, “Before the Teseida: Statius and Dante in Boccaccio’s Epic,” Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991): 205–19. 30  On the sin punished in this bolgia, see Leah Schwebel, “ ‘Simile lordura,’ Altra Bolgia: Authorial Conflation in Inferno 26,” Dante Studies 130 (2012): 47–65. 31  Text and translation from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). I have lightly modified Durling’s translation for comparison with the Teseida.

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Writing Readers  65 if it were a tongue. It seems to reflect the presence of a mind, but Dante must make an intuitive leap to interpret these actions as evidence of one. This is an ironic fate for Ulysses, whom Winthrop Wetherbee shows represents an antisocial impulse, searching out the “mondo sanza gente,” the “world without people” (Inf. 26.117).32 Ulysses both demands and disdains the audience of his own rhetoric. He addresses his shipmates as “frati,” “brothers,” yet boasts of the control his “orazion picciola” (“little oration”) holds over them (Inf. 26.112, 122).33 He claims it makes them “aguti”—“sharp”—a term that Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez indicate is strongly associated with fire imagery (Inf. 26.121).34 On earth, Ulysses strove to transcend his boundaries. In the afterlife, Ulysses has, in a sense, succeeded in leaving the concrete particularity of his body behind. But now he relies upon a sympathetic reader to recognize a mind within the flames. Emilia does not say what she makes of the fires on her altar or whether she recognizes a mind within them. Before the omen unfolds, she simply states that she will bend her will to whatever it reveals: “La mia volontà, ch’è ora mista, / dell’una parte si farà parente” (“My choice, which is now uncertain, will incline to one side”) (Tes. 7.87.5–6). Emilia promises to reflect what the flames teach her, but ultimately does not understand them—or else chooses to read according to her own will. This leaves someone else to make sense of the flames—perhaps Fiammetta—and so merges the interpretation of the poem as a whole with the kind of animating empathy that glimpses pain within the flickering of an altar fire. Emilia gives way to an ideal reader, situated outside of specific context, more capable of grasping the truth of the poem. The Teseida explicitly writes such a perspective into its own paratext. The narrator sends the poem off in a sixteen-line sonnet, asking the muses to carry his literary crumbs to Fiammetta: Le quai [miche] vi priego che voi le portiate liete alla donna in cui la mia salute vive, ma ella forse nol si pensa,   e con lei insieme il nome date e ’l canto e ’l corso ad esse, se ne le cal tanto. (Tes. 12.Sonetto)

32  Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 86. 33  On the ethical and political failure of Ulysses’ rhetoric, see Gabriella Ildiko Baika, “Tongues of Fire and Fraud in Bolgia Eight,” Quaderni d’italianistica 32 (2011): 5–26. 34  Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Durling, 413.

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66  Reading Chaucer in Time Which [crumbs], I pray you to bring joyfully to the lady in whom my salvation lives, though perhaps she thinks nothing of it, and, together with her, give them a name and a place and a course, if she should care that much for them.35

The poem obliquely raises the possibility of Fiammetta’s indifference to it, admitting that she might give no thought at all to the narrator. It briefly grants her a mental freedom, autonomy, and privacy that means she may not pay attention to his salvation or to his poetry at all. Yet this possibility of readerly disinterest and indifference—a reader with a private life that the poem can neither anticipate nor access—is raised in order to be dismissed.36 The Muses reply to the narrator’s send-off in a sonnet that uses the same set of rhymes. Together, the two poems constitute a tenzone, a debate in verse, but a fictionalized one. The exchange absorbs the possibility of Fiammetta’s indifference into a larger story of her response to the poem. Fiammetta is said to approve of the poem and to become kindled with flame. Her name now clearly identifies her as the product of the text. As the ­concluding sonnet explains, “Poi di fiamma d’amor tututta accensa, / ci porse priego che non fosser mute / le ben scritte prodezze e la biltate; / ‘Teseida di nozze d’Emilia,’ o vate, / nomar il piacque” (“Then, all aglow with the flame of love, she entreated us that such fine accounts of bravery and of beauty should not remain without a name, and chose, O poet, to call them The Teseida and the marriage of Emilia”) (“Risposta delle muse”).37 Like Antigone, Fiammetta reflects what she sees: she catches fire from the poem. And, also like Antigone, she names what she sees: she gives the poem the double title that captures both its martial and its amorous content. Her perspective makes the work whole. Fiammetta makes the poem public property by herself becoming public property. She is inscribed within the Teseida as the ideal reader, her gaze ­continually and exclusively fixed upon her reading. She acts the part of the prophet, almost like Amphiaraus, who sees the text as if from without and comprehends it perfectly—and, in this way, she guarantees the coherence of its form. Having named the poem, she prepares it to go to “ogni etate” (“every age”) and “ogni canto” (“every place”); she names it not just for herself, but for 35  My translation, as this passage is not included in Havely’s excerpts, but with assistance from the glosses in Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere minori in volgare, ed. Mario Marti (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970). 36  Compare Disa Gambera’s observation that “Emilia’s independence . . . is systematically curtailed” in order to enable male-authored lyric and narrative poetry; Disa Gambera, “Women and Walls: Boccaccio’s Teseida and the Edifice of Dante’s Poetry,” 39–68 in Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism, ed. Thomas Stillinger and F. Regina Psaki (Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 2006), 56. 37 The Teseida’s title informs critical appraisals of the poem that focus on its union of martial and amorous content. See for example Carla Freccero, “From Amazon to Courtly Lady: Generic Hybridization in Boccaccio’s Teseida,” Comparative Literature Studies 32 (1995): 226–43 and Winthrop Wetherbee, “History and Romance in Boccaccio’s Teseida,” Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991): 173–84.

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Writing Readers  67 everyone (“Risposta delle muse”). Fiammetta’s role as the ideal reader emerges as a kind of inverse reaction to the poem’s insistence that it reveals a specific, particular mind informing the text. The author is not just anyone, but the reader now can be.

2.3  Emelye: The Self-Effacing Reader in the Knight’s Tale The Knight’s Tale does not directly address a reader comparable to Fiammetta. Instead, the Knight participates in the Canterbury story exchange, so that his audience within the text consists of a whole group of varied, and not necessarily compliant, listeners. However, the fictional pilgrims are one thing; what about Chaucer’s readers? If the Knight’s informing thought emerges it is because we recognize it in the tale. If there is no Fiammetta within the Knight’s Tale, might we still play her role without realizing it? In the Knight’s Tale, the scene of Emelye at her altar lacks the overt connection with framing devices that it has in the Teseida. But Emelye shares with many literary critics the job of recognizing chivalric thought within inanimate matter. And she exemplifies the reader who could be anyone—who puts aside the personal, private dimension of her experience as she reflects what she sees. Emelye does not share the assertive role of Antigone. She does not even give the impression of having opinions and preferences, as Fiammetta does. She seems an idealized and generalized love object. But as Christine Chism points out, it is not so much that Emelye does not change or lacks complexity, but rather that her change, indecision, and conflicting emotions are relegated to “utmost privacy.”38 Emelye’s silence is necessitated by her position as a woman and a conquered person. As critics including Susan Crane, Elizabeth Scala, Jennifer Garrison, Karl Steel, and others have shown, the staging of chivalric, masculine interiority occurs at the cost of female agency, individuality, and autonomy. Emelye, used to write someone else’s public story, keeps her own past private.39 38  Christine Chism, “Sisterhood and Brotherhood in the Knight’s Tale,” Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (2017), https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/knt1/. 39  Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 173; Scala, Absent Narratives, 113–23; Jennifer Garrison, “Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Danger of Masculine Interiority,” The Chaucer Review 49 (2015): 320–43; Karl Steel, “Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye,” 151–60 in Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, ed. Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012); Suzanne  C.  Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, & Chaucer (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 75–101; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 106–7.

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68  Reading Chaucer in Time Emelye is not just anyone, but she becomes an ideal reader by playing such a role. Her function as an audience for masculine interiority hinges upon an absolute distinction between what is public and sharable and what remains private. Chism observes that it is in the closed space of the temple of Diana that Emelye recalls her Amazonian past and prays for her desires. The outside of this temple is meanwhile decorated with women who have been transformed from private persons into public expressions of masculine interiority: Ther saugh I how woful Calistopee, Whan that Diane agreved was with here, Was turned from a womman til a bere, And after was she maad the loode-sterre. … Ther saugh I Dane yturned til a tree— I mene nat the goddesse Diane, But Penneus doghter, which that highte Dane. Ther saugh I Attheon an hert ymaked, For vengeaunce that he saugh Diane al naked. (CT I.2056–9, 2062–6)

Engraved on the side of the temple as evidence of Diana’s power is Callisto, transformed into a bear by Juno then stellified by Jove. She is usually identified with the constellation Ursa Major rather than the star Polaris—several Canterbury Tales manuscripts gloss the line “ursa maior”—but associating her with the North Star allows Chaucer to emphasize her afterlife as a beacon for sailors.40 Fiammetta herself is described at the end of Teseida as “l’Orsa che con la sua luce / qui n’ha condotti” (“that Bear which with its light has brought us here”): the poet’s guiding star (Tes. 12.86.7–8).41 The association with the North Star connects Callisto to the next woman on the temple, Daphne, the public sign both of masculine poetic triumph and of Apollo’s own desire. This violent publicizing of masculine identity contrasts with the absolute policing of female privacy in the next image. Acteon is transformed into a hart for accidentally seeing Diana bathing.

40 These are Ad2, Ch, Cp, Dd, El, Ha1, Hg, La, Py, To. See Stephen Partridge, “Glosses in the Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: An Edition and Commentary,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 1992, I–19. 41 Boccaccio’s chiose observe that she has acted “come vero segno”—“like a true sign”—and associate her with the North Star, clearly identified as being in Ursa Minor (Tes. 12.86.7 chiose).

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Writing Readers  69 The events plotted out by Emelye’s altar fires also distinguish between ­shar­able, public texts and private experience. To some extent, the flashing of the fires enacts the simple upward and downward movement of Fortune’s wheel, the administrator of earthly gain and loss. Chaucer organizes his account of the fires using a repetitive, limited descriptive vocabulary. He writes, But sodeynly she saugh a sighte queynte, For right anon oon of the fyres queynte And quyked agayn, and after that anon That oother fyr was queynt and al agon; And as it queynte it made a whistelynge, As doon thise wete brondes in hir brennynge, And at the brondes ende out ran anon As it were blody dropes many oon. (CT I.2333–40)

The first fire is extinguished (“queynte”) and then revived (“quyked”). The second fire is then described as “queynte” twice over, once in the perfect and once in the imperfect tense. Alternating between these two basic terms for what fires can do—ignite and extinguish—Chaucer writes the scene in binary. These basic positions can be exchanged between the fires; they are not particular to either one of them. In the context of this simple depiction of gain and loss, the fire Emelye sees hints at individualized personhood by suggesting the capacity to suffer. Chaucer follows Boccaccio in conflating the allegorical blinking of the fires with intertextual allusions to persons concealed within flames and brands. However, rather than turning to Inferno 26 to make this association, Chaucer instead draws on the long textual tradition of the bleeding branch that hides a person within. In Aeneid 3, the trees growing on Polydorus’ grave bleed when Aeneas attempts to break them. In Metamorphoses 2, the Heliads (Phaethon’s sisters) are turned into poplars and, as they change, their mother attempts to pull the bark from them and draws blood. In Metamorphoses 8, an oak sacred to Ceres bleeds when Erysichthon attempts to cut it down. And in Metamorphoses 9, Lotis, hiding in a Lotus tree, bleeds when Dryope picks some of its blossoms.42 The branch in Emelye’s fire might also suggest Meleager, fated to die when a certain brand is consumed by fire. As the brand 42  See the detailed exploration of these passages as sources for Inferno 13 in Janis Vanacker, “ ‘Why Do You Break Me?’ Talking to a Human Tree in Dante’s Inferno,” Neophilologus 95 (2011): 431–45.

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70  Reading Chaucer in Time burns, Ovid writes, “it either groaned or seemed to have” (“aut dedit aut visus gemitus est ipse dedisse,”) as if embodying the person who dies along with it (Met. 8.513).43 In all but one of these examples, bleeding is a sign of a mind or body hidden within the tree—or else, as for Meleager, groaning animates an  object that is nearly interchangeable with a person. To this tradition Chaucerians might also add the laurel, depicted on Diana’s temple in the ­person of Daphne. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer describes the laurel itself shaking and speaking in the act of prophecy: Troilus waits “first to sen the holy laurer quake, / Er that Apollo spak out of the tree” (TC III.542–3).44 With the possible exception of this final example, these trees seem to suggest embodied suffering; not just the representation of a person, but the expression of a mind contained within matter. The passage that supplies the closest verbal parallel to Chaucer’s poem joins the image of the speaking tree with the sound made by the hissing flame. In the place of the Ulysses material in Teseida, Chaucer appears to be drawing on a moment in Inferno 13. There, Dante’s pilgrim tears a twig from a bush that is revealed to contain the shade of suicide Pier delle Vigne. The pilgrim recognizes that a mind is contained within the plant when words and blood issue from it. Dante compares the dripping fluid and the hissing air of speech to a burning green branch: “Come d’un stizzo verde ch’arso sia / da l’un de’ capi, che da l’altro geme / e cigola per vento che va via” (“As when a green log is burnt at one end, from the other it drips and sputters as air escapes”) (Inf. 13.40–2).45 Dante’s simile compares Pier’s branch to another branch: the green twig that drips water and whistles when it is burned. Just as in Inferno 26, Dante uses a simile to blur the lines between animate and inanimate action. But here, instead of comparing a tongue of fire to a human tongue, he instead compares blood and language to a stick. The simile, which threatens to collapse Pier back into arboreal matter, suits the subject matter of suicide by mimicking the dissolution of self. But just the opposite is true as well: the suicides are also continually, painfully brought back into perceptible being. Dante is not the only one who breaks branches; the souls of the profligate, pursued through the wood, also snap and break the trees. In the wood of the

43  P.  Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. William  S.  Anderson (Leipzig: BSB Teubner, 1977). My translation. 44  See Daniel  J.  Ransom, “Apollo’s Holy Laurel: Troilus and Criseyde III, 542–43,” The Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 206–12, on how Chaucer might have gotten this idea. 45  Just as the divided flame of Ulysses and Diomedes alludes to Thebaid 12, the wood of the suicides is also a setting imbued with the history of Thebes. See Ronald L. Martinez, “Dante, Statius, and the Earthly City,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1977.

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Writing Readers  71 suicides, the emergence of mind within matter happens through a violent and chaotic collaboration between the trees and the other inhabitants of the wood. In Dante, Ovid, and Virgil, the characters who cause trees to speak and bleed are often closely involved in the stories that those trees tell. They ­collaborate in producing the impression of minds within matter, and they are frequently implicated in what they discover. In the Aeneid, for example, when Aeneas accidentally uproots the shoots that have grown from the young Trojan Polydorus’ grave, he learns that he has not fully comprehended his own history. Polydorus exclaims from the ground, “non me tibi Troia / externum tulit” (“I, born of Troy, am no stranger to you”) (Aen. 3.42–3).46 Dead Trojans are embedded in the very ground of Thrace; Aeneas’ past confronts him here just as it confronts him in Carthage. The collaborations that cause trees to speak tend to have significance for all involved. In contrast, Emelye does not break any branches in her prophecy scene. She seems to have little active role in producing this impression of interiority. Chaucer’s Dantean simile, “as doon thise wete brondes in hir brennynge,” does not appeal to her subjective sense of events. It is unclear whether this line is even a simile at all: Is Chaucer comparing the branch on Emelye’s altar fire to a different branch? Or is he simply describing how it behaves; that is, like a burning branch? Either way, Emelye’s perspective, as the person who potentially recognizes a mind within the wood, does not enter the picture. On the other hand, at the level of lexicon, Emelye’s role in producing the impression of interiority in the flames is evoked emphatically, if obliquely. The word “queynte,” repeated four times in five lines, is a euphemism for female genitalia. Yet it is not grammatically used in this sense here.47 Peggy Knapp observes that the limitation of the word’s significance to its non-sexual registers reflects the Knight’s own rejection of the physical world.48 Timothy O’Brien proposes that that same physical world emerges in any case, with the word and the bleeding branch together indicating “parturition, life’s uncertainty and tenuousness, and even menstruation.”49 I would suggest that, more specifically, the bleeding brand anticipates Emelye’s rape and loss of virginity. 46  Text and translation from Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 47  The term inspired many readers to consider it either in terms of moralization or vulgarity: see D. W. Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 499–500; W. F. Bolton, “The Topic of the Knight’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 1 (1967), 217–27; Larry D. Benson, “The ‘Queynte’ Punnings of Chaucer’s Critics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings 1 (1984): 23–47. 48  Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 41. 49  Timothy O’Brien, “Fire and Blood: ‘Queynte’ Imaginings in Diana’s Temple,” The Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 157–67, at 164.

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72  Reading Chaucer in Time Indeed, it applies more readily to her experience than to that of Arcite, who dies because of “clothered blood” that refuses to drain (CT I.2745). The word that describes Emelye’s physical suffering is thus evoked but used as the medium that expresses Arcite’s interiority. Emelye’s body and experience will be used for similar purposes. If Emelye confronts herself in this scene, it is as someone whose experience has been turned into someone else’s medium of self-expression.50 Finally, the transformation of Emelye’s body into the medium to express masculine emotions means using irrevocable time and experience to express a transhistorical truth. Palamon and Arcite’s fates exchange places as Fortune’s wheel turns, as Chaucer’s on-off vocabulary suggests. But Emelye’s loss of ­virginity is as irrevocable as the passage of time. As Harry Bailey puts it, “ ‘Los of catel may recovered be, / But los of tyme shendeth us,’ . . . / It wol nat come agayn, withouten drede, / Namoore than wole Malkynes maydenhede” (CT II.27–30). The loss of virginity stands as a historically specific event, one that cannot be undone or replayed.51 But as with so much of Emelye’s experience, the irrevocable temporality of such events can become the grounds for reproducing the public, iterable emotions of the Theban knights. As she declares when she prays to Diana, if she cannot remain a virgin, “sende me hym that moost desireth me” (CT I.2325). In the absence of attaining her own desires, Emelye’s life will publish what lies within someone else’s heart.

2.4  Collaborative Labor and the Experience of Reading the Knight’s Tale Reading also demands irrevocable offerings from readers. As the Knight ­himself emphasizes, time is lost when we listen to stories and it cannot be 50  Compare the use of rape for the expression of noble masculine interiority with the discussion of rape as a tool of homosocial bonding among the mercantile/artisan pilgrims in Carissa Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 26–66. 51  This discussion of irrevocability and reading is informed by scholarship grappling with the question of whether, and how, to bring the Cecily Chaumpaigne charge of raptus against Chaucer to bear upon readings of Chaucer’s texts. On this critical problem, see Christine M. Rose, “Reading Chaucer Reading Rape,” 21–60 in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine  M.  Rose (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, uses the rape charge as an interpretive lens on Chaucer’s poetry. Christopher Cannon, “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties,” 255–80 in Representing Rape uses Chaucer’s poetry to interpret the uncertainties of the rape charge. See Sebastian Sobecki, “Wards and Widows: Troilus and Criseyde and New Documents on Chaucer’s Life,” ELH 86 (2019): 413–40 for new evidence regarding Chaucer’s efforts to arrange a marriage for his ward, Edmund Staplegate—although as Sobecki cautions, this evidence does not exonerate the poet of rape.

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Writing Readers  73 re­covered. And yet in talking about texts, we describe them as if they were always taking place. Similarly, the notion of suppressing individual private experiences of reading to achieve something public and sharable is a familiar one. The association of reading with the reader’s self-effacement evokes familiar literary critical paradigms. For example, critics often distinguish between interpretations that reflect the reader’s perspective versus reading that insists upon the alterity of the text.52 But Emelye’s self-effacement has less to do with avoiding bias than with distinguishing between what is generalizable, shar­able, and replicable as opposed to what is individual, private, and irrevocable. The emergence of literary form ultimately requires both of these elements: the properties of works that we can point to at any moment and the lived experience of those properties within time. Form emerges through a collaboration between text and reader. But certain parts of this collaboration may be lost, forgotten, suppressed, or willingly stripped away. Theseus’ construction of the funeral pyre presents a test case for thinking about irrevocability and how we account for it in making sense of literary form. The matter that goes into the flames is permanently hidden. From a certain perspective, the only difference between Emelye’s altar fire and Artica’s pyre is quantitative scale. The pyre contains a body and the fire does not, but the material is burned to ash either way. And besides that, the pyre contains quite a bit of material that does not matter much in and of itself. For example, Chaucer catalogues the trees cut down and used to create the pyre thus: But how the fyr was maked upon highte, Ne eek the names that the trees highte, As ook, firre, birch, aspe, alder, holm, popler, Wylugh, elm, plane, assh, box, chasteyn, lynde, laurer, Mapul, thorn, bech, hasel, ew, whippeltree— How they weren feld shal nat be toold for me. (CT I.2919–24)

Similar catalogues of trees also appear in the description of funeral pyres in Teseida 11.22–4 and Thebaid 6.98–106. In both cases, the poets develop elaborate descriptions of the trees on the model of Metamorphoses 10.86–105, where Ovid catalogues the trees that gather to hear Orpheus’ song. The Thebaid, for example, emphasizes the use-value of the trees that it lists, such 52 For a brief history of this distinction in medieval studies, see Steven Justice, “Who Stole Robertson?” PMLA 124 (2009): 609–15.

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74  Reading Chaucer in Time as “piceae, flammis alimenta supremis,” “audax abies et odoro vulnere pinus,” “alnus amica fretis nec inhospita vitibus ulmus” (“spruces, ailment for funeral flames,” “the daring fir and the pine with aromatic wound,” “the alder, friend to seas and the vine-welcoming elm”) (Theb. 6.100, 104, 106). Boccaccio borrows some of these same descriptors for his own catalogue. Chaucer uses this approach to listing trees in the Parliament of Fowls. His account of the trees in the poem’s dream garden emphasizes use-value and symbolic significance, including “the saylynge fyr; the cipresse, deth to playne”; “the olyve of pes, and eke the dronke vyne” (PF 179, 181).53 The Knight, however, has no need for descriptive epithets and omits them. Regardless of their particular natural qualities, symbolic meaning, or usefulness, these trees are all being put to the exact same purpose.54 Once the pyre begins to burn, what it seems to contain differs from the matter that has actually gone into it. Chaucer declares that Arcite’s pyre “brente as it were wood” (CT I.2950). Like the flame that contains Ulysses or the bush that contains Pier delle Vigne, the pyre blurs the lines between ­animate and inanimate motion. The movement of the fire suggests a mind hidden within. But this mind is never far from the matter actually contained within the flame. As Suzanne Akbari indicates, “wood” puns on wood, the material used to create the flames.55 The distinction between seeing wood in the flames and seeing a mind within them hinges upon a momentary perception: on the brief recognition of something transcendent within matter. Arcite soon burns to “asshen cold,” the pun hinting at how he has literally merged with the ash trees contained within the flames (CT I.2957).56 When we read through a poem like the Knight’s Tale, we lend, if not matter, then at least time and embodied experience to the text. And Chaucer’s poem trades upon this experience in order to create the impression of thought ­hidden within its lines. The Knight famously describes Arcite’s funeral using occupatio, the rhetorical device whereby the speaker says what they are not going to say. This technique comes as the culmination of a series of asides 53  See Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 67–8 on both how the trees are described in the Parliament in terms of their use-value and how the passage itself is built around poetic display rather than ecological description. 54  Yet despite this performative indifference, Chaucer may have chosen the trees carefully. For the specifically English qualities of this grove, see Brenda Deen Schildgen, “Reception, Elegy, and ­Eco-Awareness: Trees in Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 65 (2013): 85–100. 55 Suzanne Akbari, “Static Time: Ekphrasis in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and House of Fame,” Presentation delivered at the Canada Chaucer Seminar, Toronto, ON, Canada, 22 April 2017. 56  Rudd comments on both of these tree puns when they occur earlier in the poem. See Rudd, Greenery, 51–2.

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Writing Readers  75 emphasizing the deliberate shaping of the poem throughout the Knight’s Tale. Occupatio, by performing this practice of choosing, selecting, shaping, and excising, foregrounds the Knight’s compositional process. His use of occupatio has been read as a symptom of his desire to evade time and his anxiety about temporality and change.57 Of course, this impression of the teller wrest­ ling with his material is part of what creates the sense that the Knight has a mind in the first place. The Knight, like a poet, appears caught in the process of forming the work. The details of the pyre and the funeral are subordinated to this impression of active, motivated formation. Just as this material, in being burned, gives a hint of Arcite’s mind, so too this list of material, in the moment of being denied, creates an impression of the Knight’s thinking. Meanwhile, the reader’s role becomes increasingly important in unifying the work. For occupatio relies upon a distinction between what is supposedly said and what is actually heard. It makes the reader’s experience paramount so that the Knight can emerge by denying that experience. In other ways as well, reading participates in bringing form into being. For example, to return to the catalogue of trees described above: in the lines from the Parliament, attaching descriptive details to each tree allows Chaucer ­flexi­bil­ity in matching syntax to the demands of meter. In contrast, the Knight’s Tale’s list of trees consists of almost nothing but proper nouns, which can be modified only so much. The resulting list stretches the boundaries of metered verse. For reference, here are the lines again: But how the fyr was maked upon highte, Ne eek the names that the trees highte, As ook, firre, birch, aspe, alder, holm, popler, Wylugh, elm, plane, assh, box, chasteyn, lynde, laurer, Mapul, thorn, bech, hasel, ew, whippeltree— How they weren feld shal nat be toold for me. (CT I.2919–24)

It is possible to read these lines with five stressed syllables each, alternating the stresses on each tree name. But it is equally possible to read every tree name with an initial stress, which would give the first line of this passage seven stressed syllables, the second eight, and the third six. In the absence of strongly articulated meter, the lines gain a sense of unity by manipulating the rhythms of rhetorical prose. Isocolon, the rhetorical device that embeds 57 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 212–13; Scala, Absent Narratives, 123.

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76  Reading Chaucer in Time parallelism into prose sentences, helps harmonize these verses. The first of the three lines cataloguing trees begins with an iamb, “as ook,” a metrical deep breath before the line devolves into a series of choppy monosyllables that are difficult to scan. (These are interrupted only by the muted presence of final –e on some words.) After three such short tree names, the line concludes with the disyllabic “alder,” the monosyllable “holm,” and then the final disyllabic “popler.”58 This rhythm repeats through the next line, which begins with the disyllable “wylugh,” followed by four monosyllables, and then ending with the same rhythm as the line before: disyllable, monosyllable (albeit with final –e), disyllable. The third line repeats the pattern but alters it just enough to signal a conclusion. Again, it begins with a disyllable, lists two monosyllables, and then—earlier in the line to accommodate the greater length of the concluding term—caps off the pattern with a disyllable, a monosyllable, and finally the climactic, trisyllabic “whippeltree.” This is virtuosic poetry, but it also relies upon the flexibility of the reader to both recognize this pattern and accept it as part of the larger poem. For no one single metrical or structural principle encompasses the entire poem. Rather, the reader plays a role in constructing the poem by recognizing different kinds of rhythms and structures as part of the same whole. These acts of reading accomplish something like what Fiammetta does for the Teseida: they make the poem whole by approaching it as the integral product of a formative thought. What does the work of reading have to do with the political stakes of the Knight’s Tale? Depictions of collaborative labor in the Knight’s Tale supply yet more insight into how the different kinds of work that go into the production of art may be remembered or forgotten. Theseus commissions two major building projects over the course of the poem. The first of these is the stadium, which employs specialized labor. Chaucer explains, “For in the lond ther was no crafty man / That geometrie or ars-metrike kan, / Ne portreyour, ne kervere of ymages, / That Theseus ne yaf him mete and wages” (CT I.1897–1900). These artisans are identified by their training as “crafty” men, employed to measure the building and decorate it. They are not named, but they are paid for their time in “mete and wages.” A reminder of their labor survives both in complex sentence structures such as “hath Theseus doon wroght,” signaling 58  On the voicing or not voicing of final –e, see Marina Tarlinskaja, English Verse: Theory and History (The Hague: Mouton, 1976); Steven  R.  Guthrie, “Babcock’s Curve and the Problem of Chaucer’s Final –E,” English Studies 69 (1988): 386–95; Donka Minkova, The History of Final Vowels in English: The Sound of Muting (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991). See Benjamin Barootes, “ ‘In fourme of speche is chaunge’: Final –e in Troilus and Criseyde, Book II, Lines 22–28,” The Chaucer Review 53 (2018): 102–11 for a fuller bibliography on this topic and for the idea that Chaucer may have deployed muted final –e strategically for poetic effect.

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Writing Readers  77 Theseus’ mediated agency, and in the art itself (CT I.1913). The engravings on the stadium mark the presence of these artisans and transmit a record of their thought and action—their canny knowledge of geometry and arithmetic, for example—across time. Theseus’ second building project, the funeral pyre, is also collaborative, but rather than commemorating those who work on it, it uses them to commemorate an idea. The laborers who build the pyre are described en masse: “Heigh labour and ful greet apparaillynge / Was at the service and the fyr-makynge, / That with his grene top the hevene raughte; / And twenty fadme of brede the armes straughte” (CT I.2913–16). Chaucer refers to “labour” rather than individual, trained laborers. The pyre-laborers produce little more than sheer size. There is no mention of them being paid for their time. The poem describes the builders’ work in the passive voice: “Of stree first ther was leyd ful many a lode. / But how the fyr was maked upon highte, / Ne eek the names that the trees highte / . . .” (CT I.2918–20). This shift into the passive also marks the beginning of the Knight’s occupatio. The sentence that begins by gram­mat­ical­ly eliding the laborers’ work ends up creating the appearance of the Knight laboring at his tale. These workers, in sacrificing their time in order to reveal Theseus’ idea, may offer an analogue for readers. Indeed, as I will argue in the following section, in some accounts the history of reading and of communal labor are linked.

2.5  Rhetoric, Self-Effacement, and Civilization in the Thebes Tradition Why would anyone participate in this kind of collaboration? Why give up time to bring some other intentionality into being? Theseus’ Prime Mover speech, which uses persuasive rhetoric to ask for politically advantageous action from his subjects, provides a site for thinking through these questions. Critics have long considered whether the speech succeeds in making sense of the events of the tale and whether the ideals it espouses are coherent and valuable ones.59 Here, I wish to consider more generally how Theseus uses

59 Readings that celebrate Theseus’ speech often emphasize its provisionality; see for example Leicester, The Disenchanted Self, 363–71 and Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 140. For influential critiques of the speech, see David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 185–95; V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 136–47; Elizabeth Salter, The Knight’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), 9–36; David

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78  Reading Chaucer in Time rhet­oric in and of itself to create conditions for cooperation—or coercion. Before turning directly to the speech itself, however, it might be useful to touch upon how rhetoric’s own origin story links the reception of language with the origins of civilization. The myth of the origin of rhetoric recited in the first book of Cicero’s De inventione (84 bce) locates it at the beginnings of civilization, bridging the gap between solipsistic isolation and the possibility of community. Cicero describes how, before rhetoric, early humans roamed the fields like beasts.60 He proposes that one man recognized “how great an opportunity for the most tremendous things existed in the souls of humans, if someone could draw it out” (“quanta ad maximas res opportunitas in animis inesset hominum, si quis eam posset elicere”) (De inventione I.2).61 This great man gathered the people “into one place” (“unum in locum”), there “persuading them to do every useful and honorable thing” (“eos in unamquamque rem inducens utilem atque honestam”) (De inventione I.2). Newly gathered together, obeying laws and holding faith, the people “considered it good not only to expend their labor for the sake of the common benefit, but even to give their lives for it” (“non modo labores excipiendos communis commodi causa, sed etiam uitam amittendam existimarent”) (De inventione I.3). Rhetoric brings with it a recognition of an abstract good that lies outside of the embodied self, one to which the individual body is not only intellectually subordinated but also physically sacrificed. A Theban analogue to the mythology of the De inventione demonstrates the breadth of this civilizing claim. It is not just that great rhetoricians ­persuade people to follow the common good but, rather, that their language gives people something to have in common in the first place. The Theban king Amphion was said to have caused the rocks of the Boeotian countryside to form the walls of Thebes through nothing but the power of his song. Amphion is mentioned near the beginning of the Thebaid, where he supplied Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 118. 60 See the discussions of late antique and medieval readings of the De inventione in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475, ed. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 104–24 and 405–34. 61  Text of the De inventione is from Cicéron, De L’invention, ed. and trans. Guy Achard (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994). Translations are my own but I have consulted Achard’s French translation and the translations of lemmata in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, ed. Copeland and Sluiter. John Freccero cites just this idealized notion of rhetoric in his description of how the rhetoric of Dante’s Ulysses fails; see John Freccero, “Dante’s Ulysses: From Epic to Novel,” 136–51 in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 144–5.

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Writing Readers  79 commentators with an allegory for the power of eloquence. An early ­fifteenth-century Italian Thebaid commentator writes, Iste siquidem Amphyon sui cantus dulcedine lapides ad muros Thebanos currere fecit, quod nichil aliud est quam istum Amphion[em] eius admirabili discretione atque facundia, homines tardos et stupidos more bestiarum sibi vitam propagantes ad humanum et divinum cultum or[e] duxisse, atque ad civitatem constructionem reduxisse; montes appellamus homines incultos, stupidos et tardos instar montis.62 Accordingly, this Amphion, with the sweetness of his song, made stones hasten into the walls of Thebes, which is nothing more than that this Amphion, with his admirable discernment and eloquence of speech, led slow and stupid men, dragging out their life with the custom of beasts, to human affairs and the worship of the gods by means of his speech, and re-introduced a process of building to the city; we call the mountains uncultivated men; stupid and slow in the likeness of a mountain.

The commentator’s euhemeristic reading takes the king’s mystical song as the eloquence that he uses to cultivate his bestial people. The song awakens their sense of humanity: it teaches them a new way to know themselves. And this knowledge becomes the basis both for a community and for the material construction of a city. Boccaccio provides much the same reading of Amphion in his Genealogia deorum gentilium (1360, revised 1363–6 and 1372–5): Eum autem cythara movisse saxa in muros Thebanos construendos dicit Albericus, nil aliud fuisse, quam melliflua oratione suasisse ignaris atque rudibus et duris hominibus et sparsim degentibus, ut in unum convenirent et civiliter viverent, et, in defensionem publicam, civitatem menibus circumdarent. Albericus says that his constructing the walls of Thebes by moving the stones with his cithara was nothing other than that, by means of mellifluous oration, he persuaded the men who were ignorant, rude, and rough, and who lived dispersed, to convene in one place, and live a civilized life, and to surround the city with walls for public defense.63 62  Quoted in David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 247. Anderson edits the accessus to this commentary, which he suggests was composed around 1420, from Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS Lat. XII.61. The translation is mine. 63  Text and translation from Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), V.30.6. This passage is quoted,

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80  Reading Chaucer in Time Departure from bestial existence and entry into human affairs means, by ­def­in­ition, the merging of individual purposes into a common goal and entry into a community. In all of these readings, humanity begins not with recognition of one’s own self, nor even with the direct recognition of a mind in another human body, but rather with the shared recognition of some thought hidden within someone else’s creation. The realization of the human self, and of humanity in others, begins with the reception of language. These citizens are readers before they are humans, and they share a text before they construct a shared city. In the very act of uncovering the allegorical significance of Amphion’s song, readers re-enact the cultivating work associated with the powers of eloquence, bringing the stones in the Amphion story alive by understanding them as people. Chaucer does not directly allude to Amphion in the Knight’s Tale. (He does mention him in the Manciple’s Tale, where the artful but tyrannical Phebus is declared to be twice the singer Amphion is [CT IX.116–18].) However, the Theban king shares with Theseus the ability to organize a civilization by means of language. Theseus’ famous Prime Mover speech asks citizens to understand themselves, first and foremost, as his audience. If Amphion ­awakens humanity within stony people, Theseus asks his listeners to consider how they resemble the “harde stoon,” the “brode ryver,” and the “ook” (CT I.3021, 3024, 3017). Here, it’s not that these things have minds, but, rather, that both these things and Theseus’ listeners all “moot deye” (CT I.3034). Death not only dissolves the individual, but also merges them with the rocks, trees, and towns turned to dust; all matter that must go “that ilke weye” (CT I.3033). Having thus reduced individual lives to indistinguishability, Theseus’ speech offers an alternative common denominator for its audience. It invites his subjects to put aside their own experience and respond instead to its ­textual avatar, an expression of the human condition set apart from any one human. The speech positions itself as the grounds for civilization precisely because it begins with the dissolution of individual citizens. Accordingly, Theseus can begin to make sense of Palamon and Emelye’s experience by making sense of his own oration. His performance ends where Statius’ Thebaid begins, by grappling with the conclusion of a “longe serye” (CT I.3067). In the opening of the Thebaid, Statius struggles to slice through the past and determine a starting point for his poem within Theban history, declaring “longa retro series” (“far back goes the tale”) (Theb. 1.7). Theseus from a different edition, by Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes, 157, where Battles also discusses the civilizing theme in the Theban myth, tracking it from Boccaccio to Lydgate.

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Writing Readers  81 avoids this problem by substituting the extension of his poem for the extension of events in time. He concludes: What may I conclude of this longe serye, But after wo I rede us to be merye And thanken Juppiter of al his grace? And er that we departen from this place I rede that we make of sorwes two O parfit joye, lastynge everemo. (CT I.3067–72)

Statius’ “longa retro series,” with a tweak in grammar, becomes Theseus’ “longe serye”—this may even be a direct transliteration, as it is the only instance of this term recorded in the Middle English Dictionary.64 Whereas Statius uses the term to refer to history, here, the phrase could equally refer to the series of examples that constitutes the speech itself. By focusing on the latter, Theseus is able to use the end of speaking to produce a sense of meaningful closure. Concluding the “long serye” that he and his listeners have shared, he invites his audience to respond, not to their past experience, but to the ideas in his oration. Theseus takes the situation of Palamon and Emelye, turns it into a text, and asks them to extract meaning from it. They re-enter the community not as autonomous individuals, working through their own experiences, but as readers who respond to a shared text. And although their story ends in marriage rather than hatred and war, their lives mirror what they see in their text just as Antigone’s did. Theseus’ civilization relies on and enforces a certain amnesia. Building on a tradition that imagines great orators awakening humanity in their listeners, it forgets that language lies dormant until those who read it, or hear it, recognize the animating thought within.

2.6  Conclusion: Collaborations between Readers Over the course of this chapter, I have worked to emphasize role of readers in recognizing thought within matter. If texts need readers to perceive minds within them, then a figure like the Knight emerges through a collaboration 64  “Serīe, n.,” Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, 2018), accessed April 24, 2019, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary.

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82  Reading Chaucer in Time between the text and its readers. This might not be a fair collaboration. It is certainly one that tends to emphasize what all readers share rather than what the individual reader gives to the text—their time, energy, opportunities, etc. In many ways, this chapter hardly escapes the practices of reading that it critiques. I have not written about when and where I read the Knight’s Tale, how many times I read it, or how I could have spent my time if I had not been reading. On the other hand, the chapter may approach something closer to treating reading as an event by locating the Knight’s Tale within a specific literary historical trajectory, beginning with Statius and ending with Chaucer. As Statius himself writes, “longa retro series” (“far back goes the tale”), and the decision to slice up literary history so that it begins with the Thebaid reflects my own horizon of knowledge as much or more as it does Chaucer’s. Reading in time might not have to be small scale (concerned with the day of reading, the minutes of time taken up by reading) in order to reflect an individual ­person’s position within history. It might be possible to share perspectives on texts without eliding their embodied, specific, limited, individuality. Equally, attending to the circumstances of reception does not necessarily have to isolate readers within their own time. Rather, it might be the grounds for collaboration. The Thebaid itself, in one of its few, and guarded, moments of optimism, presents a model of collaboration that begins with ac­know­ledged incompleteness. Almost immediately after Antigone sees her brothers’ pyre, a different set of women also testify to the impiety and violence at Thebes. The Argive widows arrive at the Altar of Clemency, tell their story, and entreat Theseus for help. The Altar is one of the few sites of refuge in the Thebaid, and Statius emphasizes that it is a common good, one associated, in its own way, with the origins of civilization. He explains how it was created by the gods: “Ceu leges hominemque novum ritusque sacrorum / seminaque in vacuas hinc descendentia terras, / sic sacrasse loco commune animantibus aegris / confugium” (“Just as they gave laws and a new man and sacred rites and seeds hence descending into empty soils, even so they hallowed in the place a common refuge for living creatures in trouble”) (Theb. 12.501–4). The Altar of Clemency is a shared refuge that emerges alongside civilization. But it does not rely upon adherence to a shared ideal. Winthrop Wetherbee explains: “Unlike Virtus, who can inspire Menoeceus to heroic action, Clementia exists only to draw a sorrowing humanity together through love and compassion.”65 Menoeceus kills himself for Thebes, the ultimate model of an individual sacrificed to an idea. In contrast, Clementia’s temple becomes public property not 65 Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame, 180.

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Writing Readers  83 by using individuals for their labor, or by demanding their adherence to ideas, but rather by acknowledging their dependency on others.66 Similarly, we might imagine readers, under the aegis of the shared text, assembling many partial, truncated experiences. The relation among readers might be as im­port­ant a part of literary history as that between the individual reader and their text.

66  Here it may also be relevant that Clementia herself is never personified or conflated with a god. See Thomas Baier, “L’ara Clementiae nella Tebaide di Stazio (XII 481–518),” Aevum 81 (2007): 159–70.

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3 Learning in Time Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story

The Clerk’s Tale measures much of its achievement against its departure from Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis. The Clerk presents his encounter with Petrarch as a learning experience that ends with a critical reappraisal of the source material. He promises to tell a “tale which that I / Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk” and praises Petrarch as a “lauriat poete” (CT IV.26–7, 31). But he also confidently alters his Petrarchan source, putting it into a vernacular language, declaring its opening proem “a thyng impertinent,” and ending with a bawdy envoy that seemingly undercuts Petrarchan moralization (CT IV.54). Within medieval pedagogical trajectories, the move from imitation to transformation demarcates a student who, themselves transformed by education, no longer blindly follows the material but uses it for their own purposes.1 Yet the story the Clerk tells plots a much less direct course from encounter to understanding. The Griselda story tracks a would-be educational narrative against other kinds of lived experience within time. Griselda suffers for twelve years because of her husband’s futile efforts to understand her. When Walter finally seems to learn his lesson, it is not because of any particular insight, but rather through exhaustion. How might the transformative power of time disrupt narratives of educational formation? Can we account for learning— whether the Clerk’s, Chaucer’s, or our own—in ways that reflect not just the outcome of a lesson, but also the time and experience spent getting there? The Clerk’s Tale, like Troilus, at least partially defines its form in terms of its formation; specifically, in terms of its adaptation of a source text, Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace have influentially read Chaucer’s techniques of adaptation in the Clerk’s Tale as an interrogation and reassessment of the Historia and its lessons. The Historia is a Latin translation of the final novella of the Decameron. Petrarch included it in an epistle

1  This model of translation has been discussed extensively in Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See especially pp. 26–30. Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Kara Gaston, Oxford University Press (2020). © Kara Gaston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  85 to Boccaccio that appears near the end of his collected letters of old age, the Seniles. Dinshaw and Wallace have shown how translation itself emerges as a theme in Petrarch’s version of the story.2 Petrarch, like Walter, sees the inner value in humble material and makes it perceptible to all. In re-translating the Griselda material, Chaucer may therefore be responding not only to the Historia itself, but to its relation with its source. This in turn raises the question of whether Chaucer knew all or part of the Decameron. Recent studies have uncovered both specific language and larger, ideological parallels shared between Chaucer and Boccaccio.3 Leah Schwebel argues that Chaucer’s revisions undo certain aspects of Petrarch’s translation, returning Griselda to the humble vernacular.4 However, Chaucer’s relations with the Italian can potentially obscure the broader and more complex formation of his Griselda story. In creating the Clerk’s Tale Chaucer also used the anonymous Old French adaptation of Petrarch, Le Livre Griseldis, and he may have known Philippe de Mézières’s version of it, Le Miroir des Dames Mariées (1385–9).5 These French sources go unmentioned in the Clerk’s Tale, a reminder that the text’s ­representation of its own formation is not comprehensive and might be strategically misleading. What the Italian tradition of Griselda does provide is a strong sense that formation takes time and that people cannot always map their own learning processes. In the Decameron, the story offers a pointedly unsatisfactory conclusion to a collection that openly admits it cannot directly provoke change in its readers or its world. Boccaccio offers the Decameron to readers waiting out painful experiences in love. Though the Decameron intersects with the structures of pedagogical and consolatory literature, it does not offer itself as a consolation, arguing rather that time is the only treatment for such suffering. Readers might change while they read the Decameron, but they do so on the schedule of their own trauma, not according to a pedagogical timeline. The Griselda story, which depicts the tyrannical Gualtieri exploiting his wife’s 2  Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 132–55; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 261–98. 3  For a recent study of close verbal parallels between the Clerk’s Tale and Decameron 10.10, see Jessica Harkins, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10,” The Chaucer Review 47 (2013): 247–73. 4  Leah Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in The Clerk’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 47 (2013): 274–99. 5  See the seminal discussion of the Clerk’s Tale and its sources in J.  Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942) as well as the overview in Thomas  J.  Farrell and Amy  W.  Goodwin, “The Clerk’s Tale,” 101–67 in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, ed. Robert  M.  Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002). As Goodwin notes at 130, the date of Le Livre Griseldis is not known.

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86  Reading Chaucer in Time time while claiming to teach her a lesson, opens up this distinction between familiar narratives of learning and more elusive processes of involuntary change over time. Griselda does not change but Gualtieri, exhausted, finally does. After focusing on Boccaccio in section 3.1, I argue in section 3.2 that this may be part of what leads Petrarch to meditate upon the Decameron, and the Griselda story in particular, in the context of accounts of his own intellectual development near the end of the Seniles. Petrarch represents his encounter with Decameron 10.10 as a demonstration of his interpretive prowess. And yet his version of the story explores delayed and inexplicable learning processes. Petrarch’s Walter struggles to convert intellectual knowledge into felt truth. He seems to change not because he achieves understanding but, rather, from fatigue. By retelling the Griselda story, Petrarch alludes to aspects of intellectual and moral development that cannot be integrated into a narrative of intentional, willed learning. Petrarch and Boccaccio supply a lens for reassessing how we might evaluate learning experiences—whether the Clerk’s learning or our own learning as readers—in the Clerk’s Tale. Their allusions to hidden transformations, which may occur during reading but cannot be mapped onto the progress of a text, serve as a reminder that reading gains much of its power simply by taking up time. Though Chaucer’s Clerk often strives to take back what he has just said, to quote Petrarch in order to undo him, reading in time cannot be undone. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 consider the limits of the Clerk’s efforts to integrate his tale’s formation into a straightforward story of study and adaptation—and of Chaucer’s efforts to represent his interactions with Petrarch via the Clerk’s. Just as the Clerk cannot quite master the formation of his text, he similarly cannot fully determine the way it shapes the intellectual formation of its readers. The tale tests the limits of any text to articulate its own achievement. It reveals that much of what texts accomplish, whether for good or ill, they accomplish in and through the lived experience of reading.

3.1  Learning in Time in the Decameron The Decameron represents itself as a source of some lessons but also, more importantly, as an experience in time. Boccaccio offers his story collection as a consolation to women suffering the pangs of love. In his authorial persona, he explains that he himself once suffered from love that nothing but time could cure. God sets a limit to all earthly things, he says, and it pleased God that “il mio amore, oltre a ogn’altro fervente e il quale niuna forza di

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  87 proponimento o di consiglio o di vergogna evidente, o pericolo che seguir ne potesse, aveva potuto né rompere né piegare, per se medesimo in processo di tempo si diminuì in guisa” (“this love of mine, which had stood firm and unyielding against all the pressures of good intention, helpful advice, and the risk of danger and open scandal, should in the course of time diminish of its own accord”) (Dec. Pro.5).6 It does not lie within lovers’ power to put an end to their love, regardless of their intentions, the advice they receive, or the danger in which they suffer. Rather, love ends of its own accord, as it pleases another, through a “processo di tempo,” a process of time. Texts may not be able transform people, but they can produce the illusion of transformative change by allowing time to do its work in secret. Boccaccio claims that women, in particular, suffer when they are in love because they have no distractions from their situation. Under the command of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, they sit “quasi oziose” (“in apparent idleness”), unable to distract themselves from their love (Dec. Pro.10). This is a state that lends itself to literary pursuits. Brenda Deen Schildgen observes that for Boccaccio, otium—idleness—offers a crucial precondition for both the study and the enjoyment of literary texts: “Leisure becomes a prerequisite for play, an essential component of consolation.”7 However, for Boccaccio’s idle ladies, the relationship is reversed: it is not so much that free time allows for consolatory literature, but rather that literature allows for time’s consolations. According to Boccaccio, what one does to occupy spare time does not necessarily matter in itself. Men have all sorts of options for distraction: A loro, volendo essi, non manca l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare: de’ quali modi ciascuno ha forza di trarre, o in tutto o in parte, l’animo a sé e dal noioso pensiero rimuoverlo almeno per alcuno spazio di tempo, appresso il quale, con un modo o con altro, o consolazion sopraviene o diventa la noia minore. (Dec. Pro.12) 6  Text of the Decameron from Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Amedo Quondam, Maurizio Fiorilla, and Giancarlo Alfano (Milan: BUR Rizzoli, 2013). Translations based on The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (New York: Penguin, 2003), with silent adjustments for clarity in context. 7  Brenda Deen Schildgen, “Boethius and the Consolation of Literature in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” 102–27 in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 118. See also the discussion of play and edification in Anne Middleton “The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 121–50 and the discussion of pleasure in Andrew Galloway, “Petrarch’s Pleasures, Chaucer’s Revulsions, and the Aesthetics of Renunciation in Late-Medieval Culture,” 140–66 in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013).

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88  Reading Chaucer in Time If they wish, they can always walk abroad, see and hear many things, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding, and gambling, or attend to their business affairs. Each of these pursuits has the power of engaging men’s minds, either wholly or in part, and diverting them from their gloomy meditations, at least for a certain period, after which, some form of consolation will ensue, or the affliction will grow less intense.

The options that men have for passing the time range from the traditionally upper-class occupations of hunting and hawking to trade and even gambling, all of which are here summarized as a repetitive list of infinitive verbs. The particular activities that a person engages in seem to matter less than action itself, for they merely provide diversions as time works its healing power. For women, unable to participate in many of the pursuits open to men, reading is simply another way to spend the time. The kind of unhurried reading that allows for passive development stands in stark contrast to the outcome-oriented reading of male scholars. At the end of the Decameron, defending his story collection against charges that it is too long, Boccaccio once again points out that he wrote it for ladies with time on their hands. And as he explains, these ladies have very different needs from students: Le cose brievi si convengon molto meglio agli studianti, li quali non per passare ma per utilmente adoperare il tempo faticano, che a voi donne, alle quali tanto del tempo avanza quanto negli amorosi piaceri non ispendete. E oltre a questo, per ciò che né ad Atene né a Bologna o a Parigi alcuna di voi non va a studiare, più distesamente parlar vi si conviene che a quegli che hanno negli studii gl’ingegni assottigliati.  (Dec. Con.21) Brevity is all very well for students, who endeavor to use their time usefully rather than while it away, but not for you, ladies, who have as much time to spare as you fail to consume in the pleasures of love. And besides, since none of you goes to study in Athens, or Bologna, or Paris, you have need of a lengthier form of address than those who have sharpened their wits with the aid of their studies.

Boccaccio builds a contrast between ladies and (presumably male) scholars based on how they use their time. The distinction between lady and scholar hinges not on vernacularity versus Latinity, but instead on how time and texts are used: on whether one learns directly from texts or, rather, from the time spent reading. Further, to the extent that ladies might read like scholars and

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  89 gain understanding from their reading, they would require a longer lesson ­anyway, not having learned how to learn at a university. The distinction between ladies and scholars thus organizes a comparison between two different ways of thinking about the time of reading. One, primarily associated with women, locates the efficacy of reading in the time that it takes, so that length and the experience of reading is a crucial component of literature. The other, primarily associated with scholars, focuses on efficient progress through a lesson. These two approaches to the time of reading collide in the experience of Gualtieri, the protagonist of Decameron 10.10. Teodolinda Barolini shows that Boccaccio’s version of the Griselda story makes Gualtieri, rather than Griselda, its central character. Barolini explains, “In characterizing Gualtieri, Boccaccio returns to the gendered template established in the Proemio, where men can use their freedom to distract themselves from the pains of love.”8 Gualtieri fills his days with noble activities (“in niuna altra cosa il suo tempo spendeva che in uccellare e in cacciare”—“he spent his time in nothing other than hawking and hunting”) (Dec. 10.10.4). He is free to use his time as he pleases, a freedom threatened by the need to marry, to produce an heir, and to plan for the future. Gualtieri’s subjects are afraid that he will die without a successor and, in asking him to think about this, they ask also that he consider the limits of his own lifespan, his lack of control over life and death, and the need to think beyond the present. Gualtieri rebukes such advice, even as he agrees to marry, pointing out how difficult it is to find someone who will “adapt well to one’s own way of living” (“co’ suoi costumi ben si convenga”) (Dec. 10.10.6). The Marquis desires a partner who will adapt to him; there is no question of him adapting to her. As Barolini explains, “Gualtieri’s goal is not to be changed.”9 Meanwhile, he is happy to fill his time without accomplishing anything. Once he is married, Gualtieri continues to resist forward temporal movement by treating the first twelve years of marriage as a test and a learning experience, a precursor to a deferred future reality. Gualtieri arranges twelve years with Griselda as a story that he manipulates as if from the outside, forcing Griselda and the rest of the populace to respond to insinuations and suggestions he will later deny. Thus, for example, he first plants certain suggestions into Griselda’s mind by telling her that the people resent her and her infant 8  Teodolinda Barolini, “The Marquis of Saluzzo, or the Griselda Story Before It Was Hijacked: Calculating Matrimonial Odds in Decameron 10.10,” Mediaevalia 34 (2013): 23–55, at 31. See the similar comments regarding Walter’s attitudes in Chaucer’s version of the story in Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 222. 9  Barolini, “The Marquis of Saluzzo,” 42.

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90  Reading Chaucer in Time daughter. When Gualtieri’s servant arrives and declares he has been commanded to take the child, Griselda is left to read between the lines: “Madonna, se io non voglio morire, a me convien far quello che il mio signor mi comanda. Egli m’ha comandato che io prenda questa vostra figliuola e ch’io . . .” e non disse più. La donna, udendo le parole e vedendo il viso del famigliare, e delle parole dette ricordandosi, comprese che a costui fosse imposto che egli l’uccidesse. (Dec. 10.10.30–1) “My lady, if I do not wish to die, I must do as my lord commands me. He has ordered me to take this daughter of yours and to . . .” and he said nothing further. The lady, hearing these words and perceiving the man’s expression, recalling what she had been told, concluded that he had been instructed to murder her child.

Griselda reads the text that Gualtieri creates for her and comes to the obvious conclusion that her daughter is going to be killed. Gualtieri plays on this memory, in turn, when Griselda has a son, telling her that he must “fare di quello che io altra volta feci” (“do what I did before”) and so implying that he will kill her son as well (Dec. 10.10.35). Gualtieri creates a text for Griselda from the unreal matter of hints and suggestions, even as she lives the consequences of his subterfuge. Having treated twelve years of life as a story for Griselda’s benefit, Gualtieri considers himself capable of changing their significance in a single moment. As he tells Griselda, “intendo di rendere a te a un’ora ciò che io tra molte ti tolsi” (“I intend to restore to you in a single instant that which I took from you over many”) (Dec. 10.10.62). The deception, which he constructed over twelve years, can be requited in a single instant that, he claims, accomplishes just as much. Gualtieri evaluates his text much as Boccaccio’s students evaluate their texts: based on the lessons that they teach, not the time they take. But rather than compressing his study for that reason, he expands it. In a perverse reflection of the notion that women have too much time, and too little to do with it, Walter consumes twelve of Griselda’s years with little concern for their value. Yet his tests push these gendered assumptions about the time of reading to their limits. As readers have long noted, time is exactly what Gualtieri fails to repay Griselda. One of the most extensive set of glosses on the Decameron, the marginal annotations by Florentine merchant Francesco d’Amaretto

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  91 Mannelli, even imagines Griselda responding: “Pisciarti in mano Gualtieri! chi mi ristora di dodici anni? le forche?” (“Go piss on your hand, Gualtieri! Who’ll give me back twelve years? The gallows?”).10 K. P. Clarke shows that this practical concern with Griselda’s time “resonate[s]” with themes in the European Griselda tradition. Clarke notes that Mannelli also speculates that Griselda would have outgrown her old cloak, a concept that appears in both the French Le Livre Griseldis and in Chaucer.11 Griselda’s actual response to Gualtieri is, in its own way, more unsettling than an insult. Her unchanging patience defuses his justification for his tests: their claim to teach something. Gualtieri insists, as he finally puts an end to the testing, that he did so in order to teach both Griselda and the populace a lesson: “volendoti insegnar d’esser moglie e a loro di saperla torre e tenere” (“wanting to teach you how to be a wife, and them how to choose and keep a wife”) (Dec. 10.10.61). Gualtieri presents himself in the position of schoolmaster, creating a pedagogical text for Griselda and the others. But Griselda has never given any indication, at any point in the novella, of learning anything. Learning requires that the past give way to a qualitatively different future. And yet Griselda, wise from beginning, is defined by changelessness. Moments before Gualtieri admits the truth, he marvels at how this constancy can co-exist with Griselda’s manifest intelligence: Veggendo che di niente la novità delle cose la cambiava, e essendo certo ciò per mentecattaggine non avvenire, per ciò che savia molto la conoscea, gli parve tempo di doverla trarre dall’amaritudine la quale stimava che ella sotto il forte viso nascosa tenesse.  (Dec. 10.10.58) Seeing that no event, however singular, produced the slightest change in her  demeanor, and being certain that it was not because of stupidity, because he knew her to be very intelligent, it seemed to him that it was time to take from her the bitterness which he assumed was hidden beneath her strong visage.

Griselda presents no outward signs of learning anything, to the point that Gualtieri would question her intelligence if he did not know better. He stops 10 See the extensive discussion of Mannelli’s glosses in K.  P.  Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113–28. This gloss is quoted at 122. Here I supply Clarke’s text and translation of the gloss, which appears in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Pluteo 42, 1, fo. 170r. This gloss is also discussed in Richard Firth Green, “Griselda in Siena,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 3–38, at 18, as Green considers the hierarchical structure of Griselda’s trials. 11 Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality, 124–5.

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92  Reading Chaucer in Time his test not because she has learned a lesson, but rather because he feels it has gone on long enough—an assessment based on his own assumptions about what lies beneath her placid surface. Gualtieri not only fails as a schoolmaster, but also finds his own knowledge cast into uncertainty. Griselda never enables him to translate his years of abuse into a narrative of education. She preserves the full count of her twelve years of suffering by refusing to exchange them for a lesson learned. Griselda’s changelessness leaves Gualtieri struggling to map the distance from ignorance to learning in a meaningful way. The ending to the tests seems arbitrary, for it would be impossible to subject Griselda’s constancy to all of the possible scenarios that might break it. Gualtieri’s arbitrary endpoint sets the stage for the Decameron’s own irresolution.12 The Decameron does not end because a lesson has been learned, or because the plague has passed, but rather out of a concern for habit and appearances. Panfilo, the final king out of the ten members of the brigata, determines that the time has come to return to Florence. His reasoning amounts to little more than concern for propriety: “Acciò che per troppa lunga consuetudine alcuna cosa che in fastidio si convertisse nascer non ne potesse, e perché alcuno la nostra troppo lunga dimoranza gavillar non potesse” (“Lest aught conducive to tedium should arise from a custom too long established, and lest, by protracting our stay, we should cause evil tongues to start wagging”) (Dec. 10.Concl.6). Time has a power of its own, starting rumors and inspiring habits, that cannot be disentangled from its use to achieve a pedagogical end. The ending of the brigata’s story exchange does not reflect progress made by the stories themselves, but rather considers the way that they fit into other kinds of ongoing experience. Accordingly, the Decameron itself does not entirely achieve a redemptive or consolatory conclusion. The brigata’s festivities conclude on a disquieting note with Fiammetta’s final song, a description of her ongoing anxiety that her beloved will not be faithful. Fiammetta articulates an anxiety similar to that which seems to grip Walter: the inability to trust in fidelity that there is no reason to doubt. Her song praises her lover’s virtue (“virtute,”) his manners, youth, wisdom, and speech (Dec. 10.Concl.11). And yet, she laments,

12  See Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 129 for the suggestion that Dioneo’s concluding comments within the novella demonstrate that “nothing is definitive and final in this narrative universe.” See also Marilyn Migiel, A  Rhetoric of the Decameron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 162. Migiel argues that readings of the Decameron that emphasize progress rely upon the excision of gender imbalances.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  93 Ma per ciò ch’io m’aveggio che altre donne savie son com’io, io triemo di paura, e pur credendo il peggio . . . (Dec. 10.Concl.12) But because I see that other women are as wise as I am, I tremble with fear, and even believing the worst . . .

Fiammetta’s jealousy continues to burn despite what she knows about her lover’s virtue. As Dino Cervigni observes, the song “upends many a critical reading of the Decameron, particularly all attempts to see some kind of progression, improvement, and transformation in the development of the themes and characters.”13 Boccaccio’s opening address to women already admitted exactly this: individual learning does not follow the timing imposed on it by the lessons taught in texts. Moreover, texts, whether or not they claim to teach a lesson, achieve part of their impact simply by taking up time. The Decameron cannot necessarily contain lessons bottled up in its form, for if it accomplishes such outcomes, it does so by being read in time.14

3.2  Petrarch’s Delayed Lessons: The Posteritati and Historia Griseldis The influential readings of Dinshaw and Wallace, discussed above, recognize the Historia Griseldis as a performance of interpretive prowess. Petrarch demonstrates that, just as Walter sees through Griselda’s humble clothing, so too is he capable of penetrating the humble exterior of Boccaccio’s text to discover the value within. Petrarch also reveals himself through his interpretive translation of the Griselda story, demonstrating both his mastery over the material and the ethical intention that guides him in discovering a universal lesson at the heart of the text. Petrarch is, seemingly, the opposite of the ladies whom Boccaccio addresses in the prologue to the Decameron. Rather than passively benefiting from the experience of reading, he actively grasps the meaning in his text and brings it to the surface. But as Petrarch himself indicates, in the 13  Dino  S.  Cervigni, “Fiammetta’s Song of Jealousy: Are the Young People Still at Play?” Annali d’Italianistica 31 (2013): 459–507, at 482. 14  David Wallace observes, “the remedy for plague and the cure for love are one and the same: time must pass.” See Wallace, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 16.

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94  Reading Chaucer in Time Historia and elsewhere, this model of good reading struggles to encompass the learning process—the process of intellectual formation—that makes him a good reader in the first place. What does it mean both to shape and to articulate oneself through reading? Petrarch famously explores such problems in his Secretum (1347–9), a dialogue between Petrarch’s proxy, Franciscus, and a fictionalized Augustine of Hippo, Augustinus. The Secretum raises the problem of how it may be possible to read correctly before the will has been corrected by reading. For example, at one point Franciscus complains about the many disruptions that keep him from his studies. In response, Augustine recommends some reading in Seneca and Cicero on the topic of tranquility. Franciscus responds, “singula hec haud negligenter legisse me noveris” (“you know that I have read each one of these very carefully”) (Sec. II.15.9).15 But, as he further explains, the lesson has failed to stick. He continues, “libro autem e manibus elapso assensio simul omnis intercidit” (“as soon as the book was out of my hands, my agreement with it slipped entirely from my mind”) (Sec. II.15.9). Reading is only persuasive while it lasts; once the book is closed, Franciscus no longer feels the truth of what he has read. Augustinus recommends memorization and sheer repetition as a solution: “Noli viribus ingenii fidere, sed illas in memorie penetralibus absconde multoque studio tibi familiares effice” (“Don’t rely on your intelligence, but implant them deep in your memory and make yourself familiar with them through close study”) (Sec. II.16.2). It is not enough to take an intellectual lesson from reading. Rather, texts must become second nature. Gur Zak suggests that this meditative approach to reading reflects monastic practices of study.16 In effect, Franciscus must make his reading part of himself by means of experience and habit. And yet, learning also means departing from the text. Good reading is not passive but, rather, requires an assertion of the will. When Franciscus promises simply to follow Augustinus, the latter responds: Haud hoc postulo. Sicut enim quod doctissimus quidam ait: “Nimium altercando veritas amittitur,” sic ad verum multos sepe perducit modesta contentio. Neque igitur, qui pigrioris et torpentis ingenii mos est, passim omnibus acquievisse conveniet, nec rursus comperte veritati studiosius obluctari, quod clarum litigiose mentis inditium est.  (Sec. I.6.4) 15  Text and translation of the Secretum from Francesco Petrarca, My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 16  Gur Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112–13.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  95 That’s not what I am asking for. While a great scholar says that “by arguing too much one loses sight of the truth,” many have been led to it by disciplined disagreement. You shouldn’t therefore agree with everything on all occasions, as might a rather lazy and sluggish intellect, nor on the other hand struggle obstinately against accepted truths, which is a clear indication of a litigious mind.

Victoria Kahn explains: reading never simply guides the reader; rather, “every interpretation, morally sound or not, is a function of the will.”17 Thus even though Petrarch must make his reading familiar, he also needs to assert his will and his active intellect by questioning and interpreting what he reads. But if the reader’s good will is the precondition of learning, then how is transformative learning, that shapes the will, possible? In the writings of the historical Saint Augustine, the problem is solved by the intervention of divine grace. But as Zak and Carol Quillen emphasize, Petrarch explores secular practices of reading not necessarily illuminated by divine grace in the Secretum.18 And Franciscus, for all of his clever reading, tends not to feel the truth of the lessons that he learns. The Secretum ends in stasis, with Petrarch failing to change his life. Among the problems that emerge from this stalemate: how can we locate voluntary transformations—whether of the self or of a text—in relation to involuntary ones? If Petrarch finally does change, will it be because he willed it? Will he be able to explain it? When Petrarch describes, in his Seniles, how he read the Decameron, he contextualizes the question of how to read well within an exploration of how to spend one’s time well.19 Petrarch encounters the Decameron while busy with numerous other activities. He emphasizes the length of the text and how little time he has for reading: “Nam si dicam legi, menciar. Siquidem ipse magnus valde, et ad vulgus et soluta scriptus oratione, et occupacio mea maior et tempus angustum erat” (“I would be lying if I were to say that I had read it, since it is very lengthy and written in vernacular prose for the masses. 17  Victoria Kahn, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum,” PMLA 100 (1985): 154–66, at 161. 18 Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self, 116–20; Carol Everhart Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 182–9. But compare Alexander Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology, and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 63–112, which suggests that the role of divine grace in right reading, crucial in the writing of the historical Saint Augustine, is implicit in the Secretum. 19  On the exploration of time management that unfolds across Seniles 17, see K.  P.  Clarke, “On  Copying and Not Copying Griselda: Petrarch and Boccaccio,” 57–71 in Boccaccio and the European Literary Tradition, ed. Piero Boitani and Emilia Di Rocca (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014).

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96  Reading Chaucer in Time There was also much work to do and my time was limited”) (HG 2–4).20 This protestation itself suggests some familiarity with the Decameron, for Petrarch carefully distinguishes himself from the idle women for whom Boccaccio writes.21 Petrarch has other cares and concerns, matters of great importance ranging from “bellicis undique motibus inquietum” (“the disturbance of battles all around”) to “fluctuante re publica” (“restlessness in the state”) (HG 5, 6). Thus, Petrarch explains, he “skimmed” (“excucurri”) through the book, focusing on its beginning and ending, and enjoying the journey for the most part (HG 7). Petrarch’s busy schedule organizes his reading of the Decameron. He fits it into his time rather than the other way around. Yet Petrarch’s encounter with the Griselda story also evokes a different kind of timeline, that of an educational trajectory. Petrarch tells Boccaccio, “Historiam ultimam . . . posuisti, que ita michi placuit meque detinuit ut, inter tot curas pene mei ipsius que immemorem me [fecere], illam memorie mandare voluerim, ut et ipse eam animo quociens vellem non sine voluptate repeterem” (“You have placed last a story . . . that so pleased and engaged me that, amid enough duties to make me almost forget myself, I wanted to memorize it, so that I might recall its pleasures as often as I wished”) (HG 23–6). The cares that Petrarch cites as if to distinguish himself from female readers are here reconfigured as distractions that make him forget himself. The pleasures of the Griselda story become both a way back to the self and a way of informing the self via repetitive reading and study. Just as Augustinus advised, Petrarch memorizes the text and makes it familiar. It becomes part of his mental repertoire, available to him whenever he might need it. Petrarch’s reading of the Griselda story fits into a familiar educational trajectory, yet not one that he entirely explains. Like the student ready to produce their own innovative work, Petrarch eventually moves from memorization to active adaptation. He translates in a way that reveals both his comprehension of the source text and his innovative agency. He explains, “Ita tamen, ne horacianum illud poetice artis [obliviscerer]—Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus interpres—historiam tuam meis verbis explicui, [imo] alicubi aut paucis in ipsa narracione mutatis verbis aut additis” (“Not forgetting Horace’s advice in the Ars poetica—“Do not force yourself to translate too faithfully, word by word”—I have unfolded your story in my own way, freely changing or adding 20  All quotations and translations of the Historia Griseldis are from “Historia Griseldis,” ed. Farrell, 108–29 in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1 with light alterations for clarity in context. 21 Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality, 107–8 similarly emphasizes Petrarch’s awareness of the structure of the Decameron.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  97 a few words throughout”) (HG 38–41). Petrarch internalizes the text and then graduates from passive learning to active adaptation. Yet what marks this transition? Petrarch only points to a sudden impulse, explaining, “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 scribere sum aggressus” (“And so one day I was as usual dividing my thoughts in many ways. Angry at them and at myself, as I was saying, I tossed aside routine business and addressed myself to write this story of yours”) (HG 34–6). The moment that Petrarch writes his translation offers a parallel to, rather than building upon, the moment in which he initially read it. Clarke describes it as “almost . . . serendipitous.”22 In both cases, the impulse to engage with the work comes as an escape from distractions and a return to Petrarch’s own investments. Indeed, what seems to separate the two moments is not intellectual or moral progress, but rather the distracting cares that keep Petrarch away from study. Rather than tracking intellectual development achieved through reading, this move from memorization to adaptation is instead presented as a series of insights that are both contextualized amidst other cares and concerns and, at the same time, presented as an escape from those concerns. Can educational timelines be fully abstracted from the rest of life’s activities? The problem of plotting transformative learning along a meaningful timeline re-emerges as Petrarch recites his own life story. Petrarch apparently planned to complete the Seniles with his Posteritati (Letter to Posterity), an uncompleted autobiographical epistle. Though the Posteritati is often printed as the eighteenth and final book in modern editions of the Seniles, Monica Berté and Silvia Rizzo have recently argued that Petrarch’s plans changed toward the end of his life and that he instead shaped Seniles Book 17 into a fitting conclusion for the collection.23 This very problem—the pressure that time exerts upon decision making—thematically links the Posteritati with the Griselda story. The Posteritati was begun in the 1350s and revised with additions in the early 1370s, around the same time that Petrarch translated Boccaccio’s novella (1373). Like the Griselda story, the Posteritati deals with trajectories of growth and learning—and, in particular, with the possibility that Petrarch might have learned his most important lessons despite, rather than because, 22  Clarke, “On Copying and Not Copying Griselda,” 67. 23  Monica Berté and Silvia Rizzo, “ ‘Valete amici, valete epistole’: l’ultimo libro delle Senili,” Studi medievale e umanistici 12 (2014): 71–108. Rizzo and Berté’s new edition of the Seniles does not include the Posteritati. See Francesco Petrarca, Res Seniles Libri XIII–XVII, ed. Silvia Rizzo with Monica Berté (Florence: Le Lettere, 2017).

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98  Reading Chaucer in Time of his own will. Petrarch describes his maturation as an almost involuntary growth from vanity to wisdom: “Adolescentia me fefellit, iuventa corripuit, senecta autem correxit, experimentoque perdocuit verum illud quod diu ante perlegeram, quoniam adolescentia et voluptas vana sunt; imo etatum temporumque omnium Conditor” (“Adolescence misled me, youth swept me away, but old age set me right, and taught me by experience that truth I had read long before: that adolescence and pleasure are vain; or rather, it was the Creator of all ages and times who set me right”) (Sen. XVIII, 1.2).24 Age forces Petrarch to know fully truths that he had heard before without accepting: that youth passes and the body declines. His knowledge is now deeply felt and believed and brings with it the change in his will that his own Augustinus predicted. But this change in the will lies on the edge of what might be described as voluntary—or even what might be described as learning. Petrarch does not choose to change his ways, nor does he grasp the truth of aging in intellectual terms. He learns by experiencing time’s passage; by simply waiting until he is too old to continue enjoying youthful pleasures. Petrarch’s amorous suffering similarly ends with a timely coincidence. He writes, “Amore acerrimo sed unico et honesto in adolescentia laboravi, et diutius laborassem, nisi iam tepescentem ignem mors acerba sed utilis extinxisset” (“I struggled in my adolescence with the most intense but constant and honorable love, and would have struggled even longer, had not a premature but expedient death extinguished the flame that was already cooling”) (Sen. XVIII, 1.5). Petrarch does not choose to set love aside, but rather benefits from a timely death. But he equivocates on this point, suggesting that his desire was “cooling” before it extinguished. As he goes on to explain how age eventually eradicated the remains of desire, he points out that this did not happen so slowly that the change should be attributed to age alone: “Mox vero ad quadragesimum etatis annum appropinquans, dum adhuc et caloris satis esset et virium . . . factum illud obscenum . . . aspexissem” (“As soon as I was approaching my fortieth year, while I still had plenty of ardor and strength, I . . . completely threw off . . . that obscene act”) (Sen. XVII, 1.6). Petrarch still had heat and vigor when he cast off lust. Here he uses timing to separate the voluntary from the involuntary, to identify the operation of his will and divine grace in a transformation that could, very easily, seem to be the work of nothing but time. Even when Petrarch credits God for the transformation, he 24 Latin text from Pétrarque, Lettres de la vieillesse/Rerum senilium, tome V (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013). Translations are from Francis Petrarch, Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII, 2 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  99 emphasizes this same point: “Deo gratias agens, qui me adhuc integrum et vigentem tam vili et michi semper odioso servitio liberavit” (“Thanks be to God who freed me, while still sound and vigorous, from so vile a slavery, always hateful to me”) (Sen. XVII, 1.6). Petrarch carefully specifies the timing of his transformation, making both his own volition and God’s grace apparent. Yet by protesting in this way, he also raises the possibility that his moral and intellectual development might well be intertwined with biological and physical timelines. Read in this context, the familiar association between Walter and Petrarch takes on new connotations. As Dinshaw and Wallace show, Walter and Petrarch share the ability to see through humble coverings, whether a vernacular text or Griselda’s poor clothing, and to recognize hidden value. But Walter and Petrarch also share the inability to accept and respond to the truth of what they read. Both recognize the truth almost immediately, yet somehow still require time to accept what they know. Petrarch’s translation also brings this connection out. He restructures the novella’s opening dilemma—Walter’s failure to think ahead—as a problem of learning and the will. Boccaccio simply declares that Gualtieri is preoccupied with hunting and hawking and has no thought of marriage or children. Petrarch, however, identifies a larger issue behind this behavior. His Walter is admirable in all ways but one: “Nisi quod presenti sua sorte contentus, incuriosissimus [futurorum erat]” (“Except that, content with his present lot, he was entirely incurious about what was to come”) (HG 66–7). It is not just that Petrarch’s Walter wants to avoid change: he also lacks intellectual engagement in his own future. As Patricia Ingham explains, curiositas is a Ciceronian derivation tracing its etymological origins back to “cura, or care.”25 The term’s implicit connection between knowledge and affective investment “underwrote centuries of debate concerning the relation of the pursuit of knowledge to questions of value: what kinds of things, and what kinds of intellectual pursuits, are deserving of our care and our careful attention?”26 Walter’s lack of curiosity reflects a failure both of the intellect and of the will. No desire drives him to learn about the future. Petrarch gives the appearance of progress and learning to Walter’s story but—just as in his autobiographical writing—struggles to map the distance from comprehension to felt, transformative truth. Where Boccaccio has 25  Patricia Clare Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 9. On the significance of curiositas for Petrarch and Boccaccio, see Kenneth P. Clarke, “Griselda’s Curious Husband: Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Seniles 17,” Studi sul Boccaccio 44 (2016): 301–12. 26 Ibid.

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100  Reading Chaucer in Time Gualtieri unconvincingly claim to have taught Griselda something, Petrarch has Walter claim, perhaps equally unconvincingly, to have learned something. In Petrarch’s text, Walter concludes his series of tests by declaring: “Sciant qui contrarium crediderunt me curiosum atque experientem esse, non [impium]” (“Let those who believed the opposite know me both curious and testing, not impious”) (HG 382–4). The progress from “incuriosissimus” to “curiosum” suggests intellectual growth, with Walter correcting the failing that the narrator initially identified. But to the extent that Gualiteri grows, he does so not from his own desire, but rather through an involuntary impulse. Petrarch describes how the desire to test Griselda “cepit”—“seized”—him as if from the outside (HG 192). Far from reflecting his own desire to learn, Walter’s testing instead comes as the result of an involuntary compulsion. Though couched in the language of curiosity, Walter’s testing suggests an attempt to avoid learning: to be certain of the truth without making any effort to accept it as true. Griselda’s oath of fidelity is both elegant and expansive, clearly and effectively foreclosing the possibility of disobedience: “Si voluntas tua, sique sors mea est, [nil] ego umquam sciens, ne dum faciam, sed [eciam] cogitabo, quod contra animum tuum sit; nec tu aliquid facies, et si me mori iusseris, quod moleste feram” (“If this is your will and my fate, I will never knowingly do—no, I will not even think anything contrary to your will; nor will you do anything to which I object, even if you command my death.”) (HG 158–61). “Satis est” (“enough”), Walter declares, apparently content (HG 161). As Jill Mann indicates, the Latin satis frames the acceptance of Griselda’s oath in terms of Walter’s sense of satiety.27 This is the same term that, in the Secretum, Augustinus uses to describe reading that sufficiently takes root inside the self, conveying not only abstract knowledge, but felt certainty. But Walter, like Franciscus, finds that after Griselda’s words come to an end, he no longer feels their truth. His tests aim to recover, again and again, the experience of knowing that Griselda is faithful. Kathryn Lynch describes it as “his insatiable hunger to know what he presumably already knows.”28 The word Petrarch uses to describe Walter’s desires is experior—to test or to experience—a term that captures the intersection between intellectual apprehension and lived certainty. Though Walter has had enough “experimenta” of Griselda’s fidelity, Petrarch indicates, he still presses on: “In suscepta severitate [experiendique] sua dura illa libidine procedebat” (“He persevered in his established sternness 27  Jill Mann, “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 17–48, at 33–6. 28  Kathryn L. Lynch, “Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer’s Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in The Clerk’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 41–70, at 47.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  101 and his cruel desire to test/experience”) (HG 272–3, 283–4). Walter’s tests blur the lines between knowing a truth and living it, seeking not so much to expand the intellect as, rather, to bypass the need for abstract knowledge. The tests Walter uses to attain this experience offer an empty version of an educational trajectory, failing to define what learning could even look like in this context. K. P. Clarke has noted the connection between experior and curiositas in the Griselda story, proposing that it evokes the similarly extreme ambition to know the world displayed by Dante’s Ulysses.29 Whereas Ulysses explores physical territory, however, Walter seeks to experience that which, if his wife is faithful, has no concrete substance. Griselda has made her promise in the negative. Its truth is demonstrated by a lack of change. But Walter seeks experiential evidence of her intent, looking not for the absence of her will, but for its presence. Mark Miller’s observation, though it refers to the Clerk’s Tale, also applies to the Historia Griseldis: “According to the logic of Walter’s obsession, Grisilde’s obedience at any moment can only show that she will go that far; there could always be some further point at which she would balk.”30 Walter’s obsession can only be satisfied temporarily because he seeks to ­experience actively that which is constant and unchanging. As he tests Griselda, he fixes his eyes upon her, looking for change: “Defixis ergo in uxorem oculis, an ulla eius mutacio erga se fieret contemplabatur assidue” (“With his eyes therefore fixed on his wife, Walter carefully considered whether any change toward himself had occurred”) (HG 274–5). Walter looks for change, not for constancy. Change offers perceptible evidence that his tests have had an effect. Constancy, on the other hand, absorbs the tests as if they never happened. If Griselda does not change, then Walter has no evidence that he has learned about her. Walter is eventually left to base his satisfaction on nothing other than the quantity of his tests and the exhausting amount of time that has passed. Petrarch writes, “Talia dicentis alacritatem intuens, atque constanciam tociens tamque acriter offense mulieris examinans” (“He looked at her cheerfulness saying such things, and considered the constancy of the woman, so often and so roughly offended”) (HG 374–5). Talia, tociens, and tam intensify Griselda’s patience and the nature and amount of her suffering without subjecting them to a specific yardstick. The quantity of testing emerges as an arbitrary property of the story. Derek Brewer and Richard Firth Green point out that the abduction of the two children, plus Griselda’s expulsion, suggests the tripartite structure of a fairy tale. But, as they also note, Walter adds a fourth, excessive test when

29  Clarke, “Griselda’s Curious Husband,” 306–12.

30 Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 225.

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102  Reading Chaucer in Time he asks Griselda back to prepare the palace for his wedding.31 The narrative structure that might have produced a sense of an ending gives way to compulsion. As Michael Raby puts it (referring to the Clerk’s Tale), Walter is “caught in the grip of lustful habit,” blurring the lines of his volition; Raby observes, “Habits are formed in the intersection of the voluntary and the involuntary.”32 Time both enforces the habit and eventually puts an end to it. Petrarch says that Walter is “unable to bear it any longer” (“ferre diucius non valens”) when he finally declares “satis . . . mea Griseldis” (“enough, my Griselda”) (HG 376). Instead of declaring intellectual satisfaction, here the word reflects Walter’s exhaustion. There is little clear connection between the quantity of tests Walter initiates and the quality of understanding they produce. The Decameron confronts Petrarch with a model of reading that tracks onto his own professed anxieties: that deep and lasting learning might not be voluntary; that it might occur through nothing other than the passage of time; that it might not reflect the learner’s will. Containing the Griselda story within an account of his own intellectual self-formation that reasserts his progress from memorization to adaptation, Petrarch partially defuses its power. But he also amplifies its problems of learning, as if considering his own experience at arm’s length. The moral that he attaches to the story, for example, further troubles the connection between intellectual self-formation and the realization of the self. Petrarch explains, 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. (HG 396–9)33 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. 31  Derek Brewer, “Towards a Chaucerian Poetic,” Proceedings of the British Academy 60 (1974): 219–52, at 238. See also Green, “Griselda in Siena,” 16. Compare David Raybin, “Muslim Griselda: The Politics of Gender and Religion in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Girl from the Coast,” Exemplaria 21 (2009): 179–200. 32  Michael Raby, “The Clerk’s Tale and the Forces of Habit,” The Chaucer Review 47 (2013): 223–46, at 236 and 225. 33  See Thomas Farrell’s discussion of the textual instability of these lines, especially the term mutabilis (sometimes copied imitabilis) in Farrell and Goodwin, “The Clerk’s Tale,” 129 n. 26.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  103 Petrarch finds a universal lesson in Griselda’s story. But this active and willful reading conflicts with Griselda’s model for living. To actively imitate Griselda means to persist, a contradiction that Petrarch hints at in juxtaposing “constanciam”—the constancy Griselda exemplifies—with “excitarem”— describing the inspiring jolt that the story is intended to provide its readers. Griselda exemplifies a self-renunciation that she articulates in the negative, in terms of what she will not do. Her example fits uncomfortably into a pedagogical trajectory built around perceptible change, offered as proof of the learner’s own active volition and intellectual mastery. Leaping to imitate Griselda’s example might mean making no change at all. Conversely, such changes might come about even without the learner’s active leap. Petrarch cannot quite excise time from learning. Some part of his intellectual formation remains subject to time.

3.3  Representing the Learning Process in the Clerk’s Tale Although we cannot be certain whether Chaucer had access to the full epistle containing the Historia Griseldis, his response to it clearly concerns itself with study and adaptation. Chaucer’s Clerk is inseparable from his educational background, a training that supplies him with intellectual matter (the “twenty bookes” at the head of his bed) and treats everything else as extraneous (CT I.294). His horse is “leene,” his coat is “thredbare” and even his language is stripped down to the basics (CT I.287, 290). The Clerk uses language briefly and efficiently: Noght o word spak he moore than was neede, And that was seyd in forme and reverence, And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence; Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche. (CT I.304–8)

The Clerk speaks according to his training and in the interests of teaching others. Like the “studenti” that Boccaccio contrasts to idle, female readers, he works efficiently and with the purpose of inspiring moral virtue. There is very little to the Clerk besides what he has learned and what he teaches. For Petrarch, the struggle to learn spans an entire lifetime. In contrast, by

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104  Reading Chaucer in Time assigning the Griselda story a fictional Clerk characterized by little other than the desire to learn and to teach, Chaucer evades the complex temporality of learning as it unfolds in the real world. Instead, he presents this adaptation of the Griselda story as the outcome of an idealized learning process fully extracted from time and context. The Clerk easily moves between stages of textual reception that are often separated by time. He initially presents himself as a student of Petrarch, reciting a story that he “lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,” but tells the story as a learned adaptor, capable of making the material his own (CT IV.27). The Clerk’s prologue concludes with an explication of how he altered his source in order to express its meaning more efficiently: But forth to tellen of this worthy man That taughte me this tale, as I bigan, I seye that first with heigh stile he enditeth, Er he the body of his tale writeth, A prohemye, in the which discryveth he Pemond and of Saluces the contree, And speketh of Apennyn, the hilles hye, That been the boundes of West Lumbardye, And of Mount Vesulus in special, Where as the Poo out of a welle smal Taketh his firste spryngyng and his sours, That estward ay encresseth in his cours To Emele-ward, to Ferrare, and Venyse, The which a long thyng were to devyse. And trewely, as to my juggement, Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent, Save that he wole conveyen his mateere; But this his tale, which that ye may heere. (CT IV.39–56)

Warren Ginsberg suggests that in this passage the Clerk claims a “double posture as humble pupil and bold redactor.”34 The Clerk both shows his knowledge of Petrarch and reads his source critically, reshaping the material to make it his 34  Warren Ginsberg, “From Simile to Prologue: Geography as Link in Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer,” 145–64 in Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian and Latin Literature in Honor of Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 159.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  105 own. Meanwhile, these same changes also help construct the Clerk as a character by revealing who he is as a reader. The Clerk’s attitudes, abilities, and achievements can be measured in the distance from the source text to the adaptation. He is, in this sense, the perfect student: simultaneously the product of his reading and the source of a re-writing. By presenting the process of adaptation as part of how the Clerk’s Tale conveys meaning, Chaucer once again blurs the line between formation and form. The dilemma that animates Troilus returns all the more pressingly here, moreover, because no “Lollius” stands in for Petrarch. The Clerk’s source is also Chaucer’s, and therefore the Clerk’s critique of his source seems to be part of Chaucer’s response to Petrarch. The question thus emerges of how, and whether, to distinguish the “Clerk’s” rewriting from Chaucer’s own. One place this issue unfolds is on the poem’s margins, where the distinction begins to slip between the world of the text and the contexts of its creation and reception. In some cases, glossing seems to be part of the Clerk’s performance, for the Clerk’s Tale incorporates some paratextual material into the main text. As if returning to the grammar schoolroom, the “Clerk’s” translation of Petrarch’s proemium includes basic glosses to aid comprehension. The reference to “Apennini” in Petrarch’s text becomes “Apennyn, the hilles hye, / That been the boundes of West Lumbardye,” making it clear both what the Apennines are and where they are (CT IV.45–6). The Clerk’s Tale also clarifies, as Petrarch does not, that the Po flows “estward” to reach Emilia, Ferrara, and Venice (CT IV.50). This glossorial practice aligns with the literal and historical focus that Christopher Baswell identifies with the teaching of classical texts in the “lower schools.”35 As Baswell shows, schoolroom glosses on Virgil’s Aeneid “consistently [aim] to regain some sense of the original setting of the Aeneid . . . perceived as different in language, religion, social order, and geography.”36 The Clerk’s Tale similarly aids its reader in grappling with its Italian setting. This glossorial work suits both the Clerk’s schoolroom associations and Chaucer’s own practical considerations as he recontextualizes his source. Moreover, by writing these glosses into the Tale’s rhymed verse, Chaucer ostensibly avoids any need to distinguish between text and paratext; the Clerk’s fictional creation and his own real one.

35  Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48. See also Christopher Cannon, From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) on the use of grammar school form and style in Middle English poetry. 36 Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 48.

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106  Reading Chaucer in Time The problems avoided in the description of the Po Valley become pressing in many manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, where the Clerk’s Tale has a complex paratextual apparatus, including glosses that emphasize the relation between source and translation. The program of glosses that accompanies the Clerk’s Tale in many manuscripts (including Ellesmere and Hengwrt) appears to be closely connected with Chaucer’s composition of the poem. Germaine Dempster has shown that these glosses, many of which supply passages from the Historia Griseldis, represent a version of Petrarch closer to what Chaucer used than any surviving manuscript of the Historia Griseldis.37 K.  P.  Clarke has demonstrated how the Clerk’s Tale glosses amplify, via comparison, many of the distinctive aspects of Chaucer’s English text: its emphasis on direct dialogue, on Griselda’s virtues, and on her voice.38 Clarke understands the glosses as tools for interpreting The Clerk’s Tale as a completed work. In contrast, Thomas Farrell emphasizes their role in calling attention to the work’s active formation, arguing that they “alert us to the artistic manipulation of the story.”39 Farrell associates the stylistic changes that become apparent through comparative source study with both the Clerk’s distinctive rhetorical style and also Chaucer’s changes to his source. The glosses thus reopen the question of how we can come to use composition as evidence for interpretations of a text. They trouble the distinction between the actual creation of the text and the way the text represents its formation as part of its form. If the Clerk’s Tale glosses call attention to the formation of the poem, they also present a highly specific, and limited, vision of that formation. Chaucer’s rewriting of the Historia Griseldis involved at least one mediating French text. J. Burke Severs showed in 1942 that, along with Petrarch, Chaucer also used the anonymous French Le Livre Griseldis, itself a translation and adaptation of

37  See Germaine Dempster, “Chaucer’s Manuscript of Petrarch’s Version of the Griselda Story,” Modern Philology 41 (1943): 6–16. See also the discussion of the Clerk’s Tale glosses in John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of all Known Manuscripts, vol. 3 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 527 and in Stephen Partridge, “Glosses in the Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: An Edition and Commentary,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 1992, 1.14–11.16. See also Partridge’s list of the Clerk’s Tale glosses, IV.1–IV.9. 38 Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality, 134–6. The question of the authenticity of the glosses is connected with recent discussions about Chaucer’s scribe: see Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138. See also the questions raised about attribution in Lawrence Warner, “Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 55–100. 39  Thomas  J.  Farrell, “The Style of the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ and the Functions of Its Glosses,” Studies in Philology 86 (1989): 286–309, at 292. Compare the comparative reading of Chaucerian source glosses in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts,” 207–44 in Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  107 the Historia Griseldis. Yet as Clarke notes, the French text is left out of the story of study and composition that the Clerk recites—and it is also left out of the glosses.40 Should the glosses therefore be associated with the Clerk’s fictional labor or Chaucer’s actual compositional process? One example of paratextual material that seems to suit the Clerk particularly well are the section markers in Clerk’s Tale manuscripts. In the majority of Canterbury Tales Type A manuscripts, the Clerk’s Tale is divided into five sections that do not appear in any surviving manuscript of Petrarch’s text. (A sixth section appears in the Riverside Chaucer but not in Ellesmere, Hengwrt, or any Type A manuscripts.)41 These five parts mimic the familiar didactic structure of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Indeed, simply by dividing the text, the changes emphasize the Clerk’s role as scholar. Marked off with Latin headings, and, in three cases, with glosses from Petrarch’s text, the divisions suggest an exegetical function. It is as though the Clerk has used divisio textus to bring out the underlying structure of his source. And yet interestingly, as Severs points out, these divisions have an analogue in one manuscript out of the twenty-one witnesses of the French Livre Griseldis, Bibliothèque National ms. fr. 12,459. This text is divided into six parts, of which parts 1, 2, 3, and 5 begin in the same places within the tale as do Chaucer’s corresponding sections. This correspondence, though far from proof of direct influence, serves as a general reminder that the drama of interpretive adaptation played out on the margins of the Clerk’s Tale simplifies a more complex relation between the tale and its multiple sources. If the relation between Latin text and vernacular adaptation is treated in fictional or abstract terms, then the movement from encounter to critique can, seemingly, unfold in no time at all. The tale is peppered with the rhetorical device known as correctio, whereby a speaker refutes or denies what they have just said. The Clerk uses the device as if to negotiate his relation with his own source, a dynamic enhanced by the fact that many of these passages are accompanied by source glosses.42 For example, Petrarch’s description of Griselda’s astonishment when Walter arrives on her doorstop attracts direct comment in Chaucer’s translation. Whereas the Latin text, supplied in the Clerk’s Tale glosses, observes that Griselda is “insolito tanti hospitis adventu stupidam” (“stunned by the unaccustomed arrival of such a guest”) (HG 151), the English poem reads, “No wonder is thogh that she were astoned / To seen so greet a gest come in that place; / She nevere was to swiche gestes woned” 40 Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality, 158. 41 Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale, 194–6. 42  Compare Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality, 158–9, who points out that the calm of the glosses contrasts the Clerk’s excited exclamations.

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108  Reading Chaucer in Time (CT IV.337–9). Griselda might be astonished but the narrator is not. Similarly, when Petrarch describes Walter’s marriage as “humili quidem sed insigni” (“humble but worthy”) (HG 181)—another passage inscribed into the Clerk’s Tale as a marginal gloss—the tale supplies a step-by-step reaction to the language it is reproducing: “Thus Walter lowely—nay, but roially— / Wedded” (CT IV.421–2). Correctio hinges on the notion that the speaker’s past can be retroactively managed. But, like occupatio, correctio gains its power from the fact that once a word has been heard, it cannot be unsaid. These retroactive corrections anticipate Walter’s own strategies of disavowal. When he finally reveals the truth behind his actions, Walter fills his explanation of his intent with expostulations and corrections as he explains himself to both Griselda and the assembled crowd: “Grisilde,” quod he, “by God, that for us deyde, Thou art my wyf, ne noon oother I have, Ne nevere hadde, as God my soule save!” … “And folk that ootherweys han seyd of me, I warne hem wel that I have doon this deede For no malice, ne for no crueltee, But for t’assaye in thee thy wommanheede, And nat to sleen my children—God forbeede!— But for to kepe hem pryvely and stille, Til I thy purpos knewe and al thy wille.” (CT IV.1062–4, 1072–8)

In putting an end to the tests, Walter declares what really has and has not occurred over the past twelve years. He assures Griselda that, contrary to impressions, she is still his wife and he has never had another. He enforces the seriousness of these words, as opposed to the lies he told in the past, with multiple, emphatic oaths to God. Continuing on, he also uses correctio, exclaiming “God forbeede!” at the very idea of killing his children, as though his horror at this particular clause in his sentence could also correct the twelve years he spent giving just this impression. Filling his language with intensifying oaths and retroactive impressions of horror, Walter uses the self-reflexive structure of these lines to carry out a large-scale recovery and rearticulation of his own past actions. Walter takes his own past and interprets it in such a way that he transforms its meaning—at least, he tries to do so. This allows him to impose a pedagogical structure on his entire life with Griselda, so that

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  109 her experience becomes the text through which he learns a lesson. Walter and the Clerk both downplay the role of time in their learning, instead focusing on the transformational moment in which they master their texts and assert their intent. Indeed, the Clerk, with his abstracted and fictionalized life of learning, can simply present his interpretation of the Griselda story without worrying about other timelines and contexts. But the margins of Chaucer’s text hint at the broader contexts in which learning takes place. And, intentionally or not, this dynamic has methodological implications for what we make of the tale. To assess the events of the Clerk’s Tale in terms of how it critiques or undoes Petrarch omits one of the tale’s sources of violence: the time of learning.

3.4  Learning in Time in the Clerk’s Tale Sometimes it seems as if as reading takes place while we hold our breath, waiting for time to begin again. The Clerk’s Tale stretches this sense of stasis to excess. Walter claims that he holds his children “stille”—hidden—during the twelve-year pause that it takes to determine Griselda’s “wille” (CT IV.1077–8). His words recall the patience Griselda displays, marked by the same rhyming pair, as she waits upon her father’s threshold to know Walter’s intent: And doun upon hir knes she gan to falle, And with sad contenance kneleth stille, Til she had herd what was the lordes wille. (CT IV.292–4)

Griselda holds “stille”—silent and motionless, but also perhaps hidden, secret, or private—until she hears what Walter desires.43 The same rhyme appears again when the sergeant takes her first child: Chaucer writes, “as a lamb she sitteth meke and stille, / And leet this crueel sergeant doon his wille” (CT IV.538–9). Griselda hides her emotions as she watches Walter and his subordinates enact their will. She appears changeless as a reflex of her intense privacy, “stille” both in the sense of hidden and in the sense of being stable. Walter, by contrast, does not hold himself still but, rather, his children. He makes everyone else wait for him, as if he could return to the same world that he left behind 43  “Stille, adj,” 1a, 3a, 5a, Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, 2018), accessed March 25, 2019, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary.

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110  Reading Chaucer in Time when he began his tests. Walter expects the world to hold still until he himself is ready to transform it. In the meantime, his children have grown up. As Walter’s councilors warn him, stillness produces its own kind of transformative change. Encouraging him to marry, they remind him that time’s movement is both hidden and constant, revealing itself most dramatically when one tries to ignore it: And thogh youre grene youthe floure as yit, In crepeth age alwey, as stille as stoon, And deeth manaceth every age, and smyt In ech estaat, for ther escapeth noon; And al so certein as we knowe echoon That we shul deye, as uncerteyn we alle Been of that day whan deeth shal on us falle. (CT IV.120–6)

These lines closely translate the similar admonition in the Historia Griseldis: “Volant enim dies rapidi, et quamquam florida sis etate, continue tamen hunc florem tacite [senectus] ingreditur, morsque ipsa omni proxima est etati” (“The rapid days fly by, and even in the flower of your youth, silent and relentless age always stalks that flower: death is near at any age”) (HG 81–3). Chaucer’s English translation follows the Latin closely. With an accusative and no preposition, Petrarch’s term ingredior suggests “follow,” positioning age outside of youth. Thomas Farrell translates it as “stalks,” and the Livre Griseldis translates it with the doublet “suist et chasse”—“follows and chases.”44 In contrast, Chaucer’s “in crepeth” is a calque, rendering the word with such etymological precision that he alters its force, describing instead age that creeps into youth, destabilizing the distinction between the two. This process of transformation is geological in its constancy, creating the impression of stillness precisely because it never ends. Chaucer balances this description of endless change with orderly prosodic patterning that marks off time as the poem moves through it. The stanza repeats the anaphora of “and”/“in” for its first four lines, seeming to establish a familiar, almost rote, pattern of movement through time only to break it with the blunt declaration “that we shul deye.” The arrival of

44  Farrell, “Historia Griseldis,” section 81. The French text and translation are from Goodwin, ed., “Le Livre Griseldis,” section 31. Compare Clarke, “On Copying and Not Copying Griselda,” 65, on Petrarch awaiting new labors.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  111 death in the stanza, moreover, also comes with a subtle transformation of the lines’ addressee, shifting from the respectful second person singular “youre” in the first line to the universal “us” by the stanza’s final line. In the time of waiting, reading, and passively absorbing the stanza, its readers might find their sense of themselves transformed. The Clerk’s Tale produces this same impression of hidden change across its entire length. Its closing gestures produce disorienting impressions of precisely how much time has passed during its telling, both within the world of the story and for the Clerk’s own audience. The Clerk observes that Walter and Griselda’s son did not test his wife because, by the time he got married, the times had changed: His sone succedeth in his heritage In reste and pees, after his fader day, And fortunat was eek in mariage, Al putte he nat his wyf in greet assay. This world is nat so strong, it is no nay, As it hath been in olde tymes yore. (CT IV.1135–40)

Within a single generation and a single stanza, the events of the tale recede into the past. Walter’s son does not test his wife as his father did, not because he is less cruel, but because the world itself is different. Chaucer pairs this generational shift with a shift into the present tense. Walter’s son lives in the same era as the Clerk himself, a “now” sharply distinguished from Walter’s time yet still existing side by side with it, even sonically linked to it by the rhyme on “assay”/“nay.” Perhaps thirty years pass between Griselda’s redemption and her son’s marriage, but the Clerk acts as if generations have come and gone. The story seems to end in a different time period than it began. The Clerk amplifies the sense that a change has occurred, however imperceptibly, as he turns from the matter of Griselda to address the Canterbury pilgrims: But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go: 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,

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112  Reading Chaucer in Time 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. (CT IV.1163–9)

Figurative “Grisildis” are hard to find “now-a-dayes,” the Clerk claims. In mapping the distance between the world of the story and his own lived ­experience, the Clerk distinguishes not only between the ideal and the real, but also between different ways of locating himself within time. Putting an end to the story, the Clerk re-enters the world of “now-a-dayes.” He stages this move through time using the familiar language of metals. James Dean points out that the allusion to gold, in the context of time and historical decline, suggests the lost Golden Age of man.45 The stanza represents historical decline as hidden and internal, a shift in quality that becomes apparent only in retrospect. Dean also suggests that the time of Griselda is “special,” set apart from regular historical time.46 But readers encounter the story in their own time. Abruptly bringing his readers into “now-a-dayes,” the Clerk returns to and defamiliarizes the present moment. Griselda does not belong to the present: she is too perfect for it. But she has an effect on how we experience our present nevertheless. It might not (only) be that time has gone by in the reading of the tale, but also that after reading the tale we experience our own time differently. One way to recall this hidden, subterranean time is by attending to meter. Perhaps one of Chaucer’s most innovative changes to his source is simply putting it into verse. And versification comes to the foreground in the Clerk’s concluding envoy. The envoy has been read as an antifeminist contrast between the idealized Griselda and shrewish, scolding wives who are “products of intentionally repellent antifeminist satire.”47 But these nagging wives also offer a weird but compelling model for reading, insofar as their very reality comes from their refusal to dissolve experience into a lesson learned. The Clerk’s envoy begins with a resistance to textualization. He encourages women to avoid Griselda’s example and also to avoid inscription into the kind of exemplary tradition in which she participates, advising wives, Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille 45  James Dean, “Time Past and Time Present in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” ELH 44 (1977): 401–18. 46  Ibid. 404. 47 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 153.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  113 As of Grisildis pacient and kynde, Lest Chichevache yow swelwe in hire entraille! (CT IV.1185–8)

The envoy considers lives lived off the record. Wives can stay out of exemplary collections by behaving in ways that are far from exemplary. But as the Clerk acknowledges, even the lives of faithful wives have a tendency to slip from view. “Chichevache” is the lean cow said to feed on faithful wives. The obvious misogynist joke is that she has little to eat. But more than this, the Griselda story demonstrates how difficult it is to be satisfied by the food of fidelity. In the context of Griselda’s changelessness, Walter remains continually unsatisfied by what he learns, constantly consuming examples of her constancy but never finding them filling. Connecting such unsatisfying exemplarity with the writing of clerks, the envoy reduces didactic genres to empty fodder. Clerks will always make examples of wives—both good ones and, as the Wife of Bath’s Prologue shows, bad ones. The Clerk’s envoy imagines this project as a kind of endless consumption, similar to Walter’s own, in which no amount of examples satisfies. In contrast to this, the envoy offers its own mode of satisfaction, based more on time and experience than on exemplary learning. The envoy is a double ballade, consisting of six six-line stanzas, each rhyming ababcb. Chaucer uses the same three rhymes throughout the entire envoy to create an effect of accumulation, building toward both creative and sonic exhaustion. Meanwhile, the ballade also describes language measured in cumulative and quantitative terms, advising wives to “folweth Ekko, that holdeth no silence, / But evere answereth at the countretaille” (CT IV.1189–90). In contrast to the Clerk’s informed and active representation of his own reception of the Griselda story, the envoy advises that wives, like Echo, passively repeat what they hear. This mode of reception extracts the listener’s will from the equation but holds speakers to account for everything they say by answering “at the countretaille”; that is, the half of the tally stick kept by a creditor. A tally stick would be marked with notches, then split down its length, thus preserving the same count of notches on either side.48 The countretaille does not translate debt into another medium or express it in writing—indeed, as Williard Stone notes, it was a

48  Williard E. Stone, “The Tally: An Ancient Accounting Instrument,” Abacus 11 (1975): 49–57. See also Tony Moore, “ ‘Score it upon my Taille’: The Use (and Abuse) of Tallies by the Medieval Exchequer,” Reading Medieval Studies 39 (2013): 1–24.

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114  Reading Chaucer in Time useful tool for illiterate sheriffs collecting taxes on behalf of the exchequer.49 Contrasting the Clerk’s image of the golden coin alloyed with brass, which requires the user to discover what lies beneath its surface, the countretaille assesses matter in quantitative terms that it shares with the Clerk’s apparently mindlessly repetitive wives.50 Repetition does not map out the distance to a lesson learned, but it might provoke change by simply using up time. The dynamic interaction of memory and expectation mediated by verse leaves the reader of poetry caught, like Griselda, in the moment of waiting for the text to reveal its will. In the envoy, alliteration emphasizes the sheer cumulative heft of this time spent waiting. The envoy concludes with a heavily alliterative stanza: If thou be fair, ther folk been in presence, Shewe thou thy visage and thyn apparaille; If thou be foul, be fre of thy dispence; To gete thee freendes ay do thy travaille; Be ay of chiere as light as leef on lynde, And lat hym care, and wepe, and wrynge, and waille! (CT IV.1207–12)

Richard Osberg suggests that the appeal to cliché in these lines “may suggest the increasing verbal desperation and hackneyed character of the Clerk’s portrait of ‘arch wyves.’”51 Certainly, at the very end of twelve stanzas rhyming on the same terms, the constraint of rhyme makes itself felt that much more strongly. But Chaucer carefully arranges his alliterating terms to span half-lines, introducing patterns familiar from alliterative verse into his poetry—and then ostentatiously continuing on, once the pattern ends, to alliterate an extra half-line with “freendes.” The stanza finally closes with both metrical and alliterative excess, describing husbands left to “wepe, and wrynge, and waille.” Alliteration and metrics transform progress into accumulation: the poem does not progress beyond itself, but rather adds up over time. The envoy employs verse like a tally stick, as a medium that accounts for reading within time. 49  Stone, “The Tally,” 52. 50  Compare the discussion of female power, materiality, and commodities in the envoy in Andrea Denny-Brown, “Povre Griselda and the All-Consuming Archewyves,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 77–115. 51  Richard H. Osberg, “ ‘I kan nat geeste’: Chaucer’s Artful Alliteration,” 195–227 in Essays on the Art of Chaucer’s Verse, ed. Alan T. Gaylord (New York, NY: Routledge, 2001), 223. On the address to wives, see also John  M.  Ganim, “Carnival Voices and the Envoy to the ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ ” The Chaucer Review 22 (1987): 112–27 and Elizabeth Scala, “Desire in the Canterbury Tales: Sovereignty and Mastery between the Wife and Clerk,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 81–108.

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Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story  115 Stories of learning, such as the Clerk’s, that begin with interpretation and end with critique, stake a claim to declare what has been achieved through an encounter with a text. But learning takes time and, as Petrarch’s frustration with his own slow reformation shows, it might even rely on time to take root. On the one hand, a figure such as Griselda, who never learns—and never needs to learn—calls attention to how texts demand time regardless of whether or not they teach anything. On the other, figures such as the ladies for whom Boccaccio writes the Decameron show how educational transformation might take place while reading but not necessarily on the timeline mapped out by a text. All of this suggests that texts might not always be able to articulate or enclose their own achievements. Whether a text teaches a lesson or perpetrates violence, those outcomes might rely upon the world outside of the text in order to come into being. So too, readers may be transformed by their reading in ways that they cannot fully recount or explain. However, the envoy to the Griselda story suggests at least one tool for plotting reading against other kinds of experience. Meter and prosody can provide a way of recollecting reading as an event within time.

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4 Assembling the Times in the Metamorphoses, Filocolo, and Franklin’s Tale Collection, signifying both an object and an action, offers another inroad into the connection between formation and form. Collecting shares certain aspects of its temporality with the educational narratives I explored in the previous chapter. Both use older material for a new purpose. But whereas ­students rewrite old material, collectors recontextualize it. Collectors can ­create contexts: by assembling a collection, they generate the context in which a particular work takes on significance. And as new material is added to the whole, it has the potential to reform and redefine the collection itself. For example, when the Franklin intervenes in the Canterbury story exchange, interrupting the Squire’s rambling romance and offering his compact lay as its antidote, he shifts the timing of the collection from within. The Franklin’s intervention calls attention to the improvisational time of formation. How might Chaucer’s story collection define and redefine its own rhythms and boundaries as it develops? How in turn do critics assemble, define, and redefine the Tales’ ­literary historical context? Despite the Franklin’s claim that he directly recites an ancient Breton lay, Chaucer based the Franklin’s Tale on a part of Book 4 of Boccaccio’s Filocolo. There, a group of young nobles exchange questions of love (questioni d’amore), one of which tells the story of a woman who makes a rash promise to a ­cunning suitor. In the Italian text, however, the lady asks not for the removal of rocks from the coastline, as Dorigen does, but rather for a May Garden in January.1 Yet I will argue that even as Chaucer replaces the Garden, he retains its formal and thematic implications. For Boccaccio’s May Garden episode carries out an exploration of literary time management: that is, of the way that literary form assembles discrete moments into part of a single, overarching 1  See David Wallace’s account of the wisdom of this substitution, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 67. Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Kara Gaston, Oxford University Press (2020). © Kara Gaston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001

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Assembling the Times   117 shape and structure. The May Garden thematizes the way that poetic timing can resist or evade the pressure of other timelines. An anachronistic pocket of springtime, it offers an escape from the cyclical time of the passing seasons. The protagonist of Chaucer’s tale, Dorigen, also has reason to resist certain ways of measuring and managing time. She not only promises to love Aurelius, but also to do so promptly: “Looke what day that endelong Britayne / Ye remoeve alle the rokkes, stoon by stoon, / . . . / Thanne wol I love yow best of any man” (CT V.992–3, 997).2 As soon as Aurelius succeeds in making the rocks apparently disappear, Dorigen finds herself on the clock. Her lengthy complaint attempts to “buy time” and postpone the fulfillment of her oath.3 Chaucer, then, asks the same question as Boccaccio does in the Filocolo: is it possible to create extra time within demanding natural or social schedules? For Dorigen, this question has pressing stakes: as long as she “buy[s] time,” she retains power over her body. In coordinating an exploration of time management against issues of ­gender and power relations, Chaucer not only responds to Boccaccio, but also resurrects a central theme of Boccaccio’s own source text, Book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.4 The Filocolo derives the story of the May Garden’s creation from Ovid’s description of an even more impressive manipulation of time: Medea’s rejuvenation of her aged father-in-law, Aeson. Section  4.1 of this chapter focuses on Ovid, reading the Medea episode in the context of the Metamorphoses’s extended exploration of the various ways in which men and women, politicians and poets, attempt to manage one another’s time. Time in the Metamorphoses emerges as contested territory. Ovid, paralleling his poetic carmen (song) with Medea’s magical carmina (spells), presents his poetry as a challenge to imperial efforts to regulate time and thereby assign meaning to history. From what point within time can anyone justifiably claim to gather up the past and make sense of it? Ovid indicates that even his own perspective on time is provisional and transient. Section 4.2 turns to Boccaccio’s Filocolo. In Boccaccio’s text, too, literature plays an important role in measuring and managing time. However, Boccaccio,

2  On the complex and unstable legal basis for the oath, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 293–335. 3  Susan Crane, “The Franklin as Dorigen,” The Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 236–52, at 248. 4  Nicola Zingarelli, “La Fonte Classica di un Episodio del Filocolo,” Romania 14 (1885): 433–441, at 438. Dorigen has previously been read in comparison with various speakers in Boccaccio’s works: see Michael Calabrese, “Chaucer’s Dorigen and Boccaccio’s Female Voices,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 259–92. Here, I propose that her complaint should be instead placed in an aesthetic trad­ition that includes both male and female participants.

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118  Reading chaucer in time writing from a Christian perspective, takes a more assured approach to the overarching structure of the time in which he writes than does Ovid. The Filocolo advances an interpretation of time in which Christ’s advent allows for the recovery and fulfillment of everything that came before it. Boccaccio ­parallels this Christian time management with the way that he manages the expansive, seemingly unregulated unfolding of his own text. The Filocolo layers digression upon digression, challenging efforts to describe the text as part of a single, coherent plan. But for Boccaccio, a redemptive Christian ­ending eventually provides the perspective from which to assemble his text—and history as a whole—and make sense of them. Although Chaucer does not directly draw on Ovid when adapting Boccaccio’s text, his changes to the Filocolo resurrect the Metamorphoses’s sense that time is contested territory and its manipulation an important source of power.5 Chaucer—and Dorigen—tap into this power by drawing upon the temporality of formation. Dorigen’s lengthy complaint offers an a­ nalogue to the digressive temporalities of Chaucer’s source texts. But the complaint differs from its predecessors in that it never establishes a firm perspective from which to declare itself complete and to articulate its own accomplishment. The complaint’s resistance to measurement, moderation, and integration into the Tale’s larger narrative is also Dorigen’s resistance to the management of her time by others. Indeed, as section 4.4 suggests, Dorigen’s complaint reflects the structure of the Canterbury Tales as a whole insofar as both seem to be caught in the act of collecting. Both the complaint and the Tales position themselves as texts in formation, with each new add­ ition supplying the grounds for ongoing, dynamic, and improvisational expansion. Just as processes of formation can dynamically redefine their own endpoints, the beginnings of formation might also be unstable. The ­ Metamorphoses offers only one possible starting point for tracking how Chaucer’s poem comes into being. As I discuss in the final section of this chapter, depending upon how critics assemble literary history, we will come

5  There is no direct evidence that Chaucer knew the entire Filocolo. Robert Edwards has pointed to a number of fragmentary witnesses of the Questioni d’amore circulating independently, proposing Chaucer may have used one such manuscript: see Robert R. Edwards, “Source, Context, and Cultural Translation in the Franklin’s Tale,” Modern Philology 94 (1996): 141–62. However, for readings that emphasize affinities between Chaucer’s writing and the Filocolo as a whole, see Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings, and Dominique Battles, “Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Filocolo Reconsidered,” The Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 38–59. I do not propose that Chaucer actually used the Medea episode in his response to Boccaccio. However, Kenneth Bleeth does suggest that Medea’s claim to be able to root up rocks inspired Chaucer’s adaptation of the rash oath: see Kenneth A. Bleeth, “The Rocks in The Franklin’s Tale and Ovid’s Medea,” American Notes and Queries 20 (1982): 130–1.

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Assembling the Times   119 to different conclusions about when and how formation begins and therefore also about what it achieves. The form of the Franklin’s Tale might continue to come into being as its readers assemble new contexts of interpretation for it within time.

4.1  Contested History in Ovid’s Metamorphoses The Aeson episode in Book 7 of the Metamorphoses connects spell-casting with poetic composition in order to explore how both organize time. The ­episode begins when Jason and Medea return from Colchis with the Golden Fleece. Jason, alarmed at how old his father Aeson suddenly seems, begs his new wife for help. With characteristic guile, he asks: “Si tamen hoc possunt (quid enim non carmina possunt?) / deme meis annis et demptos adde parenti!” (“If your spells can do it—and what can they not?—subtract a few of my years to add to the years of my father”) (Met. VII.166–7).6 Even as Jason flatters Medea, this request challenges her to prove the efficacy of her spells. If she is really as powerful as she seems, she ought to be able to manipulate time. And when the power of magic comes under scrutiny, so too does the power of poetry, since the term carmen can mean both “spell” and “song” or “poem.” The Metamorphoses itself is, in Ovid’s words, a “perpetuum . . . carmen,” an “unbroken poem” or “unbroken spell” (Met. I.4). Medea’s response rejects Jason’s temporal mathematics but confirms this relationship between spell and poem. She asks, “Ergo ego cuiquam / posse tuae videor spatium transcribere vitae? / nec sinat hoc Hecate” (“Do you truly think that I could ever transfer a part of your life to another? Hecate wouldn’t allow it”) (Met. VII.172–3). Medea spurns the notion of merely transferring or copying (transcribere) the years from one location to another with her spell. She accepts Jason’s challenge, but positions herself as poet rather than copyist. Her carmen begins with an outsized imitation of poetic conventions, invoking the night, Hecate, earth, the winds, mountains, rivers, the gods of the forest and of the night. Medea continues by reciting her previous achievements, a résumé that evokes the ambitions of Ovid’s own poetic past.7 She boasts of having reversed 6 All quotations of the Metamorphoses are from P.  Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson (Leipzig: BSB Teubner, 1977). Translations are based on Ovid: Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004) with minor alterations for clarity in context. 7  For a different approach to parallels between Ovid and Medea, see Barbara Pavlock, The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 41–2.

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120  Reading chaucer in time rivers to their origins and made mountains tremble, imagery that recalls the chaos wreaked by her own relative, Phaëthon, in Metamorphoses 2 (Met. VII.199–200).8 There, Helios’ chariot scorches the mountains and turns the Nile back to its source. Phaëthon’s chariot ride not only throws the landscape into chaos, but also disrupts the passage of time. When the bereaved sun hides his face in sorrow, days and nights are on the verge of losing their meaning. Ovid writes, “Si modo credimus, unum / isse diem sine sole ferunt” (“If we can believe what is said, one day passed without the sun”) (Met. II.330–1). Andrew Zissos and Ingo Gildenhard observe that “this sly reference to the sun’s role as guarantor of temporal regularity problematizes linear chron­ ology . . . one day went by without the sun—but how?”9 Ovid’s poem, audaciously measuring off days without the sun, offers instead its own mode of regulating the passage of time. When Phaëthon arrives at the court of the Sun, he is amazed to see assembled there the Days, Months, Years, and Centuries. Denis Feeney points out that these figures are recent innovations with respect to the originary chaos with which the Metamorphoses begins. Ovid’s carmen perpetuum contains and exceeds them.10 Its poetic timing absorbs and manages solar time. Similarly, Zissos and Gildenhard observe that events in Book 2 diverge from a “ ‘natural’ temporal sequence,” a narrative analogue to Phaëthon’s wild chariot ride. Ovid rewrites time so that “narrative ‘reality’ seems to be torn between competing variants, creating an obvious disruption of continuity and linear progress.”11 In the very act of matching chaotic ­narrative time to the account of Phaëthon’s flight, Ovid implicitly demonstrates his own virtuosic control over the poem’s form and content. Unlike Phaëthon, the poet need not stick to the tracks of the sun in order to trace out the path of time. Ovid’s challenge to solar time anticipates his challenge to imperial tem­por­al­ity and historiography, a project in which Medea plays an important role. The structuring of time represented both a key element of Augustan politics and a  defining characteristic of much of Ovid’s pre-exilic poetry.12 Andrew 8 On Medea’s genealogical association with cycles of the days, nights, and seasons, see Alain Moreau, Le Mythe de Jason et Médée: La va-nu-pied et la sorcière (Paris: Belles lettres, 1994), 111. 9  Andrew Zissos and Ingo Gildenhard, “Problems of Time in Metamorphoses 2,” 31–47 in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception, ed. Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 38. Emphasis original. 10 Denis Feeney, “Mea tempora: Patterning of Time in the Metamorphoses,” 13–30 in Ovidian Transformations, 25. 11  Zissos and Gildenhard, “Problems of Time,” 39. 12  See Mary Beard, “A Complex of Times: No More Sheep on Romulus’ Birthday,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 33 (1987): 1–15; Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus, and the Fasti,” 221–30 in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie, and Mary Whitby (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987); Alessandro Barchiesi, Il Poeta e il Principe: Ovidio e il Discorso Augusteo (Rome: Laterza, 1994); Stephen Hinds, “After Exile: Time and Teleology from Metamorphosis to Ibis,” 48–67 in Ovidian Transformations.

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Assembling the Times   121 Wallace-Hadrill observes that Augustus’s public calendars “turn[ed] all Roman time into Augustan time,” defining history, the daily calendar, and even the cosmic passage of time through Augustus’ advent.13 Ovid’s poetic almanac, Fasti, brings the Roman calendar into conversation with—and, potentially, into competition with—the governing structures of poetry.14 The Metamorphoses also treats the measurement of time as contested territory, beginning with a promise to describe history from before the creation to “mea . . . tempora”—“my time” (Met. I.4). With these words, the poet claims as his own the era of Augustus. Feeney argues that Ovid’s “mea tempora” represents a redefinition not only of the time of Augustan Rome, but also of im­per­ial temporality, explaining, the “patterning of time [in the Metamorphoses] is his [Ovid’s], and not anyone else’s.”15 Part of this patterning involves rearticulating Rome’s cultural debt to Greece. As Feeney shows, Ovid rewrites elem­ents of his chronology in order to eliminate the possibility of “a time of pristine Romanness before foreign influence.”16 A similar sense of embeddedness in time contextualizes the Metamorphoses’s rhythms within a longer process of literary historical formation. Ovid binds his poem to the Greek past by conflating his process of invention with Medea’s. Having finished her invocation, the sorceress embarks on a nine-day chariot ride across the Greek mainland that takes her to the mountains Ossa,  Pelion, Othrys, Pindus, and Olympus, then to the rivers Apidanus, Amphrysus, Enipeus, Peneus, Sperchios, Boebe, and Anthedon. By sending his surrogate within the poem gathering herbs for her carmen within Greece, Ovid implicitly acknowledges his own debt to Greek culture. But here spell and poem do not merely resemble one another; rather, they work in concert, for with every site Medea visits, Ovid gathers more material into his poem, expanding his catalogues of mountains and rivers. Meanwhile, as it dwells on the spell, Ovid’s poem pulls more and more of Medea’s story and the Greek past into its own time of composition, rather than confining the Metamorphoses to a Roman moment that would leave such material behind. Medea’s collection of ingredients also helps to contextualize the formation of Ovid’s poem. Within such long processes of formation, the problem emerges of determining a meaningful boundary within time from which to look back, gather up the past, and make sense of it. The context for the formation of a person,

13  Wallace-Hadrill, “Time for Augustus,” 226. 14  Along with the secondary sources cited above in n. 12, see Molly Pasco-Pranger, Founding the Year: Ovid’s Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 16, which focuses ex­pli­ cit­ly on the interaction between poetic “didactic structure” and “the calendrical model.” 15  Feeney, “Mea tempora,” 13.    16  Ibid. 24.

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122  Reading chaucer in time like that of a poem, may transcend how that person knows themselves in any given moment. For example, Medea’s rejuvenation spell brings Aeson face to face with a youth that now seems strange and distant. Medea begins by bringing Aeson’s life to an end. She drains his blood, then pours her own potion into his veins. The old man wakes up one part at a time:    Stricto Medea recludit ense senis iugulum veteremque exire cruorem passa replet sucis; quos postquam conbibit Aeson aut ore acceptos aut vulnere, barba comaeque canitie posita nigrum rapuere colorem, pulsa fugit macies, abeunt pallorque situsque, adiectoque cavae supplentur corpore rugae, membraque luxuriant: Aeson miratur et olim ante quater denos hunc se reminiscitur annos. (Met. VII.285–93) Medea unsheathed her sword and drew a cut in the old man’s throat, so letting the blood drain out of his body. She then replaced it with juice from the pot. When Aeson had fully absorbed this, either by mouth or by way of the wound, his hair and his beard lost all of their whiteness and quickly turned to a lustrous black. His leanness, pallor, and withered features had all disappeared; those wrinkled and creased old cheeks filled out with their firm new flesh; his limbs grew supple and strong. In utter amazement and wonder, Aeson remembered that this was he forty years ago.

Different fragments of Aeson’s identity are gathered together as he awakens. Imitating this coming-together of parts, Ovid places different aspects of Aeson into the subject position of each sentence as his body returns to life. The old man’s frailty flees; his pallor vanishes; his beard and hair change color. Only at the end of this series of transformations does Aeson himself occupy the subject position. Yet, at the very moment that his different parts cohere, Aeson’s identity emerges as fragmented across time. This passage modifies Ovid’s common technique of describing a metamorphosis from the perspective of astonished onlookers, instead positioning the old man as an onlooker to himself as he used to be.17 Aeson’s rejuvination comes as an encounter with an earlier version of himself. Such alienation might be compared to that of the time traveler: as Carolyn Dinshaw explains, when the Rip Van Winkle-style 17 See Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Books 6–10, ed. William S. Anderson (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 275.

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Assembling the Times   123 sleeper awakens and “confronts others around him, two different tem­por­al­ities are manifest simultaneously; the present moment is multiple, the fact of temporal heterogeneity revealed.”18 For Aeson, temporal heterogeneity appears not in his contact with others, but in his apprehension of himself. Constructing an identity in this context demands yet another type of collection: Aeson’s self emerges as an assembly of heterogeneous fragments spread out across time. In granting Aeson this perspective, Medea’s carmen transforms his relationship to time. Rather than simply adding more moments onto his life, the spell creates time in which Aeson looks back over his past. He occupies a coda to his own life; time from within which he might gather the scattered moments of his life and achieve a representation of his lifetime.19 At this point, Ovid’s poetry creates for the reader a similar kind of coda: a moment in which the reader’s temporal movement through poem’s rhythms comes into view. Line 293 of the passage quoted above, “ante quater denos hunc se reminiscitur annos,” describes Aeson’s sudden, disconcerting, glimpse of his own past self. His dividedness is reflected in the line’s two pronouns: “hunc” (“this”) describing the self that Aeson sees; and “se,” the self with which he identifies. The line’s scansion emphasizes the complex relationship between these two pronouns: “āntĕ quătēr dēnōs hūnc sē rĕmĭnīscĭtŭr ānnos.” The metrical division between the third and fourth feet of this line coincides with the syntactical division between the words “hunc” and “se.” This mo­ment­ary alignment of meter and lexicon both calls attention to metrical arrangement and also emphasizes the distance between these two terms of self-identification. The pause may be indicative of the gap of years across which Aeson sees himself, as well as the shock involved in associating the “hunc” that he sees with the “se” that he knows so well. But the two terms are also bound together by the same meter that performs this division. Meter inscribes breaks and divisions into the reading experience even as it supplies an underlying source of continuity.20 Its constant, hidden presence comes abruptly 18  Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 41–2. 19  This reading is strongly influenced by the account of “messianic time” as “an operational time in which we take hold of and achieve our representation of time” in Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 68. Compare the similarly Christological interpretation of this passage in the Ovide moralisé, which reads Aeson’s death as a figure for baptism and redemption through Christ. See Joel N. Feimer, “Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Ovide moralisé: Translation as Transmission,” Florilegium 8 (1986): 40–55. Cf. “Ovide moralisé”: poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle publie d’après tous les manuscrits connus, vol. III, ed. Cornelis De Boer, Martina D. De Boer, and Jeannette Th. M. Van ‘t Sant (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1931), 7.1081–1246. 20  Compare Alessandro Barchiesi’s comments on temporal discontinuity and poetic continuity in the Fasti: “Giorni, mesi e feste sono un invito alla separazione culturale del tempo vissuto, ma la separazione si percepisce solo su una continuità di fondo,” Barchiesi, Il Poeta e il Principe, 75.

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124  Reading chaucer in time into view as the alignment between metrics and content creates a jangling overemphasis on the beginnings and endings of feet. The poem offers its reader the possibility of recognizing their own recent past: the time of reading, spread out across the hours, but recollected in a single moment.21 However, such perspective is only provisional, for it is also inscribed within time. Even as Ovid uses poetic numbers to order and arrange time, he himself is subject to the passage of days and years. Susan Stewart, focusing on the Metamorphoses’s Book 15 Pythagoras monologue, argues, “Ovid realizes that his own account is taking place in time and that, as he has seemed to embrace time within his writing, so will time eventually overcome that inscription.”22 However, the lines that she cites—a recognition that “desinet ante dies et in alto Phoebus anhelos / aequore tinguet equos, quam consequar omnia verbis / in species translata novas” (“the day will end, and Phoebus will plunge his panting steeds in the ocean deep before I complete my recital of change to new forms”)—are not in the poet’s own voice: they are uttered by Pythagoras (Met. XV.418–20). Indeed, for Ovid, part of the problem of speaking within time is the inability to represent himself fully. Instead, his voice is fragmented between different speakers. And moreover, as long as Ovid continues to write, he pushes the destination of his poem—mea tempora, “my time”—into the future. His own voice and his own lifetime evade representation.23 The Aeson episode gathers material from a strange past—Greek literary heritage, a youth almost forgotten—and recovers it as part of Aeson’s present. It hints at the strange histories that infiltrate all lives, bits of the past that shape individuals without their full awareness. Medea’s spell, and the poem that contains it, defamiliarizes the imperial structures of time that aim to bound, define, and interpret individual subjects. Similarly, the Metamorphoses’s gendered struggle over time and timing, though perhaps not actively on Chaucer’s mind as he composed the Franklin’s Tale, had the potential to infiltrate his work via Boccaccio.

21  Agamben himself identifies messianic time with the rhythms of poetry, but focuses on lyric: he closely reads an Arnaut Daniel sestina, with its coda-like concluding tornada. As he argues, “the tornada returns to and recapitulates the rhyming end words [from the rest of the sestina] in a new sequence, simultaneously exposing their singularity along with their secret connectedness,” The Time That Remains, 82. 22  Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 201. 23  Helga Nowotny’s account of “the longing for the moment” provides an evocative and relevant account of identity fragmented across time: “the search for the moment can . . . point inwards, to the unfolding of one’s own, temporal self, to the development of an identity repeatedly reassembled from fragments.” See Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience, trans. Neville Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 152.

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Assembling the Times   125

4.2  Managing the Past in Boccaccio’s Filocolo The Filocolo not only directly adapts material from the Metamorphoses’s Aeson episode, but also explores, at multiple different scales, the question of how the creation and reception of literary texts fit into other temporal structures. Like the Metamorphoses, the Filocolo also uses interpretive codas as sites where the past is both enclosed and recovered. However, Boccaccio digresses even more egregiously than Ovid, and his codas, when they arrive, are correspondingly more definitive. The thirteen Questioni d’amore that make up the text’s central digression exemplify this productive tension between the work’s overarching structure and its generative literary impulses. Queen Fiammetta proposes the question exchange to her “court,” a group of young nobles gathered in a garden, promising that the questions will let the group forget the passage of time. As she says, “Secondo il mio avviso, noi non avremo le nostre quistioni poste, che il caldo sarà, sanza che noi il sentiamo, passato” (“In my opinion, we shall no sooner have asked our questions than the heat will have passed without our noticing it”) (Fil. IV.17.6).24 Fiammetta presents as a ­virtue the distracting impulses that early readers of the Filocolo often saw as a vice. As Victoria Kirkham notes, early critics of the Filocolo identified quite a bit of material that “did not seem to ‘belong’ ” to Boccaccio’s text, of which the Questioni d’amore are only the most egregious.25 Kirkham shows, in contrast to such readings, that the Questioni follow a pattern that repeats throughout the Filocolo: enthusiastic digression followed by retraction and conversion. Indeed, Fiammetta does not depict the question exchange as an escape or avoidance of the coming evening. Rather, she situates the Questioni in the context of an endpoint that is, ultimately, to be desired. Whereas, for Ovid, literary digression threatens the boundaries of selfknowledge, for Boccaccio it reinforces them. At the center of the Questioni d’amore, Caleon, overcome with love for Fiammetta, asks whether one ought to fall in love at all. Fiammetta responds by admitting that the group has been discussing love for pleasure, “al quale, veramente, niuno, che virtuosa vita disideri di seguire, si dovria sommettere” (“to which, in truth, nobody who wants to lead a virtuous life ought to submit” (Fil. IV.44.8). With the game’s founding assumptions destroyed, the action can only resume when Pola, the 24  All quotations from Il Filocolo refer to Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 1: Caccia di Diana, Filocolo, ed. Antonio Enzo Quaglio (Milan: Mondadori, 1967). Translations are from Giovanni Boccaccio: Il Filocolo, trans. Donald Cheney with Thomas G. Bergin (New York, NY: Garland, 1985) with minor alterations for clarity in context. 25 Victoria Kirkham, Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 187.

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126  Reading chaucer in time next questioner, argues, “impossibile mi pare che la giovane età degli uomini e delle donne, sanza questo amore sentire, trapassare possa” (“it seems impossible to me that men and women should pass through their youthful years without experiencing this love”) (Fil. IV.47.2). She will therefore set aside Fiammetta’s words “for now” (“al presente”), and proceed as if such love were acceptable (Fil. IV.47.2). As Pola’s words show, the young people have a carefully plotted understanding of the shape their lives take, locating their youth as part of a larger process of individual formation that leads inevitably to ­wisdom and recantation. They already have the perspective that Ovid’s Aeson achieves at the conclusion of Medea’s spell: they can see their own present moment as one within a series of moments gathered into a lifetime. Similarly, the exchange itself aspires less to rewrite time—as Ovid does—than to use storytelling to distract from the passing day that already inevitably contains the young people. This preemptive sense of closure facilitates the question exchange, for without the expectation that the young people are in a tem­por­ary state, its subject matter could not be justified. Menedon’s is the longest of the Questioni d’amore, a digression within a digression that scrutinizes the relation between expansion and closure in ­processes of literary formation. Here, as elsewhere in the Questioni d’amore, an anticipated outcome impinges upon storytelling from the outset. Menedon begins by explaining that he will use “una novella, che non fia forse brieve” (“a  story which perhaps cannot be shortened”) to explain his question (Fil. IV.31.1–2). He argues that this narrative will be necessary for the group to come to a decision, a questionable proposition that would, decades later, be belied by Boccaccio’s stripped-down revision of Menedon’s Question for Decameron 10.5. Much of the length of Menedon’s Question comes from the extended description of the magician Tebano’s creation of the May Garden, a translation of Ovid’s description of Medea’s magic. The Decameron omits this digression. Yet Menedon’s egregious, seemingly superfluous magical narrative has a parallel in the May Garden itself: a garden within a garden that locates one experience of time within another. Precisely because they are superfluous, the garden and its creation may be necessary in enabling the reader to grasp the digressive structure of the Filocolo as a whole. Lucia Battaglia Ricci argues that gardens such as Fiammetta’s constitute part of a “gioco di specchi” (“game of mirrors”) that connects the storytellers at the heart of the Filocolo with the storytelling persona carefully developed in its opening section—and with Boccaccio himself.26 Similarly, Menedon’s May Garden, along with the digression that describes its creation, is the central term within an interlocking 26  Lucia Battaglia Ricci, Boccaccio (Rome: Salerno, 2000), 85.

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Assembling the Times   127 series of generative digressions and loci amoeni in the Filocolo. Indeed, as Warren Ginsberg observes, Boccaccio’s description of Tebano’s magic “revels in its eye-catching virtuosity,” incorporating exotic details in a tour de force performance of literary prowess.27 When the text seems most energetically digressive, it most tidily fits into Boccaccio’s overarching plan. Boccaccio contextualizes the dynamic power of digression within fixed overarching structures. At the level of grammar and syntax, the passage simultaneously evokes familiar structures and puts off their completion. One of Boccaccio’s key transformations of Ovid is to encapsulate Medea’s entire invocation within a single grammatical unit. Ovid’s Medea begins with a seven-line call to Hecate and various gods of the natural world, ending with the imperative “adeste” (“be present”) (Met. VII.198). She then recounts previous miracles accomplished with the aid of the gods, concluding with her recent exploits in Colchis. She finally reaches the point: “Nunc opus est sucis, per quos renovata senectus / in florem redeat primosque recolligat annos” (“Now I have need of the juices to make an old man in his weakness recover his youthful strength and return to the bloom of his prime”) (Met. VII.215–17). Boccaccio’s translation preserves the content of the invocation with only slight alterations.28 However, Boccaccio changes the placement of the imperative relative to the rest of the invocation. Rather than wrapping up the first part of the invocation by calling on the gods to “be present,” Tebano proceeds directly, by way of a relative pronoun, from the opening call to the Gods to a recitation of his past exploits. Only after he lists his previous triumphs does he reach the imperative, delivering it in almost the same breath as he announces his new project: . . . siate presenti, e ’l vostro aiuto mi porgete. Io ho al presente mestiere di sughi e d’erbe, per li quali l’arida terra, prima d’autunno, ora dal freddissimo verno, de’ suoi fiori, frutti e erbe spogliata, faccia in parte ritornare fiorita, mostrando, avanti il dovuto termine, primavera.  (Fil. IV.31.26–7) . . . be present, and give me your aid. I have the need now for juices and herbs through which to make the arid land, which has been despoiled of its ­flowers, fruits, and herbs, first by autumn and now by coldest winter, return in part to flower, and to make a show of springtime before its proper season.

27 Warren Ginsberg, “ ‘Gli scogli neri e il niente che c’è’: Dorigen’s Black Rocks and Chaucer’s Translation of Italy,” 387–408 in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 398. 28  These changes remove explicit connections with the Medea story and soften the passage’s darkest pagan connotations: Tebano invokes Ceres rather than Tellus and leaves out some direct references to events in Colchis.

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128  Reading chaucer in time Delaying the invocation’s grammatical resolution, Boccaccio amplifies the passage’s suspense. In the process, he displays his control over grammar and syntax. And by combining the arrival of the imperative with the announcement of Tebano’s new project, he pairs grammatical closure with interpretive clarity. The auxiliary, second sentence of the invocation assembles and makes sense of everything that has come before, subordinating it to a single purpose even as Boccaccio has enclosed it within a single sentence. There are suggestions within Menedon’s Question that a similarly overarching structure lies, half-hidden, behind the events of history. The Question’s pagan protagonists each propose different ways of accounting for the past, both of which emerge as merely provisional.29 When the story’s would-be lover, Tarolfo, encounters the magician Tebano, the latter is wandering the plains of Pharsalia, “lo misero piano che già tinto fu del romano sangue” (“that wretched plain which had once been stained with Roman blood”) (Fil. IV.31.10). The blood that once soaked the ground is useful fer­til­izer from Tebano’s perspective, for he spends his time gathering herbs growing there (“cogliendo erbe”) (Fil. IV.31.11). The image of Tebano literally gathering up the legacy of the dead has its figurative parallel in the magician’s warning to Tarolfo: “Non sai tu la qualità del luogo come ella è? Perché inanzi d’altra parte non pigliavi la via? Tu potresti di leggieri qui da furiosi spiriti essere vituperato” (“Don’t you know what kind of place this is? Why didn’t you choose some other place to wander? Here you could easily be attacked by angry ghosts”) (Fil. IV.31.15). Tebano, whose very name evokes the recursive disasters of Thebes, sees a landscape organized and interpreted by the events of history. The extreme violence that took place at Pharsalia transforms the 29  Boccaccio’s later interpretation of the Aeson episode in his Genealogia deorum gentilium emphasizes the subjectivity of time. There, he proposes that Aeson’s rejuvenation is a matter of perspective: from Aeson’s point of view, upon seeing Jason, “tam grandis letitia addita est, ut etas, que tendebat in mortem, in etatem retrocessisse floridam videretur” (“Such a great joy was added, that his age, which was drawing towards death, seemed to have reversed into a flowering youth”). See Tutte le opere, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 8, XIII.25.2. A similar sense that this episode is an important locus for thinking about the experience of time emerges in Giovanni del Virgilio’s commentary on Ovid (1322–3), which explains, “nam dum Eson videret filium venisse cum tam magnis divitiis et tam pulcra uxore ita gavisus est quod videbatur iuvenis esse. Quod Medea quia magica erat sciebat facere aliquas medicinas cum quibus ipse Eson manebat in bona etate. Nam hoc sciunt facere medici. Vnde dictum est, arte nurus magice vixit yocundior Eson. Et redit in iuvenem prosperitate senex.” (“For while Aeson saw his son had come with such great riches and such a beautiful wife he rejoiced so much that he seemed to be a young man. Medea (since she was magical) knew how to make certain medications with which Aeson maintained himself in thriving age. For doctors know how to do this. Hence it is said that, by the magical art of his daughter-in-law, Aeson lived more pleasantly. And through prosperity the old man returned to youth.”) My transcription based on Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Plut. 36 16, f. 81r. I have modernized capitalization and punctuation, regularized u/v, and expanded abbreviations silently. On the composition and dating of the Allegorie, see Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, revised edition, ed. A. J. Minnis, A. B. Scott, with David Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 316–17 and 360–6.

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Assembling the Times   129 battlefield into a space where the past threatens to repeat itself. Collecting herbs from the field, Tebano seems willing to take advantage of such an inheritance even as he fears its implications. Tarolfo, however, responds by articulating a proto-Christian perspective that homogenizes time and space. He argues, “In ogni parte puote Iddio igualmente: così qui come altrove gli è la mia vita e ’l mio onore in mano” (“God is equally powerful everywhere; here as elsewhere my life and honor are in his hands”) (Fil. IV.31.15). Tarolfo does not allow the events of human history to create divisions within the landscape, insisting instead upon a divine perspective that is indifferent to the changeable events of the sublunary world. Nevertheless, his response creates its own problems. Tarolfo leaves the battle of Pharsalia wholly in the past, as if it had no relevance at all for his own time and place. His words might be read as a refusal to gather, assemble, or make sense of history at all. Later in the Question, this attitude leaves Tarolfo struggling to anticipate an endpoint for Tebano’s spell. As he waits for the magician to finish his journey, he fears that he may have been made a fool of (“stato . . . beffato”) (Fil. IV.31.36). (Boccaccio’s reader, caught within an extended digression, might share his concerns.) Yet if Tarolfo had a completely realized Christian perspective from which to measure and read the spell’s timing he might arrive at a different conclusion, for Boccaccio transforms the nine days and nights of Medea’s spell into a three-day journey. This new timespan anticipates not only the resurrection of spring, but also the conversionary trajectory of the Filocolo as a whole.30 As a corrective to Tebano and Tarolfo’s divergent efforts to make sense of the past, the three-day spell hints that both Boccaccio’s text and history itself have meaningful structures that account for—even necessitate—their various parts. When perspective on time finally arrives in the Filocolo, it comes to the characters as a sudden, divinely granted insight. In the same instant, Boccaccio provides the reader with a similar insight: a system for re-assembling the text that has come before, generated through imagery of gathering itself. Steven Grossvogel observes that the meeting between Tebano and Tarolfo evokes Lucan’s De bello civili not only in being staged on the plains of Pharsalia, but also through specific allusions to the meeting of Sextus and the witch Erichtho, as well as to Cato’s sacrifice of his wife Marcia.31 Lucan also plays an important role earlier in the Filocolo. Boccaccio’s early description of the slaughter of the Romans by Marmorino’s pagan troops includes a description 30  For the Christological allusions of the May Garden spell, see Steven Grossvogel, Ambiguity and Allusion in Boccaccio’s Filocolo (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1992), 218–19. 31 Grossvogel, Ambiguity and Allusion, 212.

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130  Reading chaucer in time of a battlefield stained with blood (“la tinta terra”—“the discolored earth”) that is based on lines from the Pharsalia (Fil. I.32.8).32 When Tebano comes across such a field, he uses it to gather herbs for his spells. At the end of the Filocolo, however, the scene of gathering material from a battlefield is replayed to different effect. After their conversion, Florio and Biancifiore return to the site of Romans’ defeat and discover the bleached bones of the dead. They decide “to gather up the scattered bones” (“ricogliere . . . le sparte ossa”) but despair of separating the human bones from those of animals until a divinely provided vision conveniently color-codes them (Fil. V.89.1). The lovers collect the proper bones and return them to Rome. Very soon after this, the Filocolo itself comes to an end. Post-conversion, Florio and Biancifiore operate from a perspective that makes the past legible and interpretable. Collecting these bones and putting them into their places, Florio and Biancifiore assemble and interpret the fragments of past events. In contrast to the Metamorphoses, this claim to make sense of history does not occur within an ongoing struggle over the shape and structure of time. Rather, it comes as the fulfillment of a long-deferred, half-forgotten promise. These final scenes allow the reader, too, to gather and assemble the events of the romance. For example, the contrast between the Christian lovers’ burial of the dead and Tebano’s herb-gathering retroactively uncovers significance in the magician’s act. His name ties him to the city that famously forbad the burial of the Greek dead, and his magic similarly relies on keeping the dead unsettled: on extracting herbs from a plain that, from his perspective, is still haunted by unsatisfied ghosts. The conclusion to the Filocolo both puts the dead to rest and, figuratively, inters Tebano himself. He is fixed in place as a figure that foreshadows the romance’s concluding scenes and yet never achieves the insight that comes with Christian conversion. The Filocolo’s concluding interpretive coda comes with the force of an insight that recovers, rather than supplants, what came before it. The end of the Filocolo brings not only a reinterpretation of the events of the romance, but also a reinterpretation of history. The priest Ilario explains at length to Florio that time is transformed by Christ’s birth at the beginning of the sixth age, “piena di grazia, nella quale dimoriamo” (“full of grace, in which we live”) (Fil. V.54.1). Christ’s birth turns the sixth age into the age of grace, in which history itself can be reinterpreted and redeemed such that it becomes possible “a salire a quella gloria donde ne cacciò disubidendo il primo padre” (“to rise

32 James H. McGregor, The Image of Antiquity in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, Filostrato, and Teseida (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1991), 130–1.

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Assembling the Times   131 to that glory from which our first father exiled us through his disobedience”) (Fil. V.54.6). Boccaccio thus uses Christian temporality to articulate both what his text achieves and what history itself achieves. But what happens when processes of formation never reach meaningful boundaries; when an interpretive coda never arrives?

4.3  Collection and Coercion in the Franklin’s Tale This appears to be the case for at least some parts of Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale. When Chaucer extracts the plot of Menedon’s Question from the Filocolo, he strips away most of Boccaccio’s closed structures and redemptive endings. Neither Fiammetta’s ruling on the Question nor the Filocolo’s redemptive conclusion survive in Chaucer’s version. Instead, in the Franklin’s Tale, claims to understand the shape of time and the significance of historical events en­able political and sexual power grabs.33 I suggest that Chaucer counters such efforts with poetry whose overarching structures remain provisional, in progress. In particular, the poem’s central crux, Dorigen’s lament, reorganizes itself with the addition of each new exemplum. It indefinitely defers the ending of its own formation and the crystallization of its form. In adapting Menedon’s Question for the Franklin’s Tale, Chaucer eliminates both the request for the May Garden and the magical Ovidian interlude describing its creation. Yet echoes of these elements still appear within the tale. Dorigen makes her rash promise, to love Aurelius if he eliminates the rocks on the coast of Brittany, in the month of May and in a “gardyn ful of leves and of floures” (CT V.908).34 Aurelius subsequently prays to Apollo to remain in opposition with the moon for “thise yeres two,” thereby creating an extended high tide (CT V.1068). Just as in Menedon’s Question, here too the unwanted suitor looks to evade natural temporal cycles.35 Tebano’s magic has 33  The association between women, temporality, and magic emerging from Ovid’s legacy might have been a natural fit for Chaucer. As Susan Crane writes, in both Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and other English vernacular romances, feminine magic is associated with a resistance to completeness, encapsulation, and interpretation: “woman’s uncanniness lies in her difference from men but also in an inner differing that defies understanding.” See Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 157. 34  See Linda Charnes, “ ‘This Werk Unresonable’: Narrative Frustration and Generic Redistribution in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 300–15, at 308, for the argument that the garden embodies a movement into new generic expectations. 35 See Jamie  C.  Fumo, “Aurelius’ Prayer, Franklin’s Tale 1031–79: Sources and Analogues,” Neophilologus 88 (2004): 623–35. Fumo proposes that the prayer that begins Tebano’s spell may actually be a source for Aurelius’ prayer. See Richard L. Hoffman, Ovid and the Canterbury Tales (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 170–1 (cited in Fumo, 628–31, 634 n. 18) on the role of Apollo as regulator of the seasons.

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132  Reading chaucer in time a further counterpart in the Clerk of Orléans’s careful observations of lunar motion, a magical performance that is also matched by literary ostentation: Chaucer replaces Boccaccio’s Ovidian borrowing with a proliferation of ­technical, astrological language.36 However, whereas Tebano’s magic works upon time itself, the clerk works within time. His magic is only a temporary illusion: “For a wyke or tweye, / It semed that alle the rokkes were aweye” (CT V.1295–6). Indeed if, as Karla Taylor argues, his trick is simply the product of the careful observation of the tides, he has done nothing more than recognize the right time to act.37 A ­cre­ative figure who produces illusory images of knights, ladies, and courtly life, the Clerk of Orléans represents a possible counterpart for Chaucer himself, just as Medea does for Ovid. However, even more so than Medea and Ovid, the Clerk is caught within time. His carmina cannot escape or evade it, only use it. Instead of granting his characters an overarching perspective on the events of their lives, Chaucer instead depicts them using their limited sense of t­ iming to exert power over one another. Aurelius, for all of his professions of haplessness, is a canny reader of social and mundane timing. In contrast to a lover such as the Book of the Duchess’s Black Knight, who simply realizes “upon a day” that he must speak to White or burst, Aurelius bides his time in order to strike at the right moment (BD 1182). When he first decides to proposition Dorigen, he carefully steers the conversation in the right direction, then chooses the best time to speak: “Forth, moore and moore, / Unto his purpos drough Aurelius, / And whan he saugh his tyme, he seyde thus” (CT V.964–6). Aurelius’s ability to think on his feet, recognizing when to speak and when to be silent, embodies kairos: what David Wallace glosses as “the timeliness of an utterance and its appropriateness to the particular circumstances obtaining at the moment of speaking.”38 Aurelius is equally strategic when he breaks the news of his success to Dorigen. He knows Dorigen’s schedule well enough to 36  As David Wallace observes, whereas Boccaccio enacts an “exotic imitatio,” Chaucer “dazzles with a virtuoso display of technical vocabulary”; Chaucer and the Early Writings, 67. See also V. A. Kolve, “Rocky Shores and Pleasure Gardens: Poetry vs. Magic in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” 165–95 in Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991). 37 Karla Taylor, “Chaucer’s Uncommon Voice: Some Contexts for Influence,” 47–82 in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 73. 38  David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 233. Compare the treatment of kairos in Robert  W.  Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 5–6 and 53–104. Hanning also explains that the term refers to a “subjective” and social sense of timing, but places more emphasis than does Wallace on the “far-reaching consequences” of particular “critical moments” of action (61).

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Assembling the Times   133 anticipate her arrival: “To the temple his wey forth hath he holde, / Where as he knew he sholde his lady see” (CT V.1306–7). He addresses her, once again, with perfect timing that belies his fear: “And whan he saugh his tyme, anonright hee, / With dredful herte and with ful humble cheere, / Salewed hath his sovereyn lady deere” (CT V.1308–10). Aurelius is as observant a reader of social cycles as the Clerk is of the tides, and both are able to choose the right moment to turn time to their advantage. In contrast to the limited aspirations of Aurelius and the Clerk, Dorigen strives to articulate her place within the larger patterns that govern experience. As she gazes at the black rocks that seemingly threaten her husband with shipwreck, she questions the “purveiaunce” of a perfect God (CT V.865). Yet as she does so, the terms of her inquiry shift and change: Se ye nat, Lord, how mankynde it destroyeth? An hundred thousand bodyes of mankynde Han rokkes slayn, al be they nat in mynde, Which mankynde is so fair part of thy werk That thou it madest lyk to thyn owene merk. (CT V.876–80)

In arguing that the rocks destroy “mankynde”—and that this is a bad thing— this passage oscillates between different interpretations of the word. The Middle English Dictionary gives three definitions for the noun “mankynde,” of which the first, “the human race, people in general,” is most immediately relevant for Dorigen’s argument.39 This definition is itself subdivided into two specific meanings, one collective (“the human race”) and the other referring to individual examples of the human race (“an individual human being.”) Dorigen’s first use of the term “mankynde” rests uncomfortably between these two meanings: is all of “mankynde” really threatened by the rocks? Or do the rocks represent a threat to any one member of the human race unlucky enough to encounter them? The following line clarifies: the rocks have destroyed one hundred thousand individuals: “bodyes of mankynde.” Even as this phrase focuses in upon individual experience, however, it fixes “mankynde” in its collective meaning, for “mankynde” is the whole in which individual “bodyes” participate. This redefinition proves troublesome to Dorigen’s argument as it continues, for mankind will persist without Arveragus or the other hundreds 39  “Man-kind(e), n.,” 1a, 1b, Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan, 2018) accessed April 19, 2019, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary.

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134  Reading chaucer in time of thousands who have died. Dorigen argues that God made “mankynde . . . lyk to thyn owene merk.” Yet the rocks do not destroy the formal cause or the divine idea of “mankynde,” but rather individual “bodyes” of it. Dorigen’s ­lexicon is heterogeneous and divided across time, its meanings changing from moment to moment.40 It reflects the tem­por­al­ity of speech and thought as processes unfolding within time and, as a result, it proves resistant to being gathered up and interpreted from one single, static perspective. Understanding Dorigen’s language in this way—as a process that unfolds over time—may help in explicating one of the poem’s central cruxes, Dorigen’s complaint. After Dorigen discovers that the rocks have apparently vanished, she realizes that she must either break her oath or be unfaithful to her ­husband. Caught between these two seemingly inevitable endpoints to her story, Dorigen begins to consider suicide, delivering an extended lament dedicated to examples of faithful women, many of them suicides, from the ancient past. Though the complaint is Chaucer’s addition to the story, in many ways it seems a continuation of the tradition of collection and digression that begins with Ovid’s account of Medea’s magic and continues through the Filocolo. Dorigen’s complaint is more than twice the length of Chaucer’s description of the Clerk’s magical calculations. And as a collection of exempla, it shares the emphasis on gathering and assembly that characterizes the Ovidian description of magic. Even if the complaint is not a direct response to the magical interludes of Metamorphoses and Filocolo, in Chaucer’s poem digression continues to be a way of responding to masculine efforts to use temporality as a means of control. Like Ovid’s Medea, Dorigen uses digression to push against temporal structures that are political, rhetorical, and gendered. The most obvious of these is translatio imperii, the concept of history as imperial progress. The complaint’s first series of exempla begins, “Whan thritty tirauntz, ful of ­cursednesse, / Hadde slayn Phidon in Atthenes atte feste” (CT V.1368–9). Chaucer’s translation of the Adversus Jovinianum here closely follows Jerome, who writes, “Triginta Atheniensium tiranni, cum Phidonem [necassent in convivio]” (“When the thirty tyrants of Athens had killed Phidon at a

40  Compare the comments on the rocks in Kellie Robertson, “Exemplary Rocks,” 91–122 in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 106. As Robertson argues, the rocks organize people, exposing their ideas and investments: whereas Dorigen sees danger, Aurelius sees opportunity. The rocks might also be read as introducing yet another form of measuring time—the geological scale—into the poem. See also Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Time Out of Memory,” 37–61 in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (New York, 2009).

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Assembling the Times   135 banquet”).41 In switching from inflected syntax to uninflected, Chaucer moves the relative adverb “when” to the beginning of the sentence, adding emphasis to the moment of action. Still translating Jerome closely, Chaucer reiterates the language of time throughout the opening six exempla.42 The maiden Stymphalides installs herself in Diana’s temple “whan that hir fader slayn was on a nyght” (CT V.1389). Hasdrubales’s wife slays herself and her children “whan she saugh that Romayns wan the toun” (CT V.1401). Each of these exempla derives the word “when” from Jerome. But elsewhere Chaucer adds the term. Jerome introduces Lucretia by referencing his own rhetorical timing and moral hierarchy: “Ad Romanas feminas transeam; et primam ponam Lucretiam, que violate pudicitie nolens supervivere, maculam corporis cruore delevit” (“Let me now move to Roman women; and I put Lucretia first, who, not wishing to outlive her violated chastity, removed the spot from her body with her own blood”).43 Chaucer, however, locates Lucretia within the “when” of Tarquin’s attack: she slays herself “whan that she oppressed was / Of Tarquyn” (CT V.1406–7). The Adversus Jovinianum includes many different kinds of “when,” including social occasions such as the moment that Porcia the younger overheard praise for a remarried woman (“Porcia minor, cum laudaretur apud eam quedam bene morata que secundum habebat maritum, respondit”—“Porcia the younger, when a certain upright woman who had a second husband was praised in her hearing, answered”).44 In assembling a series of exempla in which the “when” is that of imperial violence, Chaucer transforms Jerome’s rhetorical “when” into a historiographical one.45 The “when” of masculine, imperial force provides the coordinates for making sense of female suicide and virtue.46 But at the same time, the suicides themselves

41  Adversus Jovinianum 1.41, Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves, vol. 1, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997). 42  Donald C. Baker has proposed that the timing of suicide is a central concern throughout these examples. Noting that, unlike most of the other women, Lucrece commits suicide after rape, he proposes that Dorigen “is not wondering whether to commit suicide, but . . . asking herself when.” See Baker, “A Crux in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale: Dorigen’s Complaint,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 56–64, at 62. 43  Adversus Jovinianum 1.46. 44  Adversus Jovinianum 1.46. 45  See Warren S. Smith, “Dorigen’s Lament and the Resolution of the Franklin’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 374–90, at 382, who argues that Chaucer alters the tone of the material that he takes from Jerome, substituting “grief for the suffering maidens” and “contempt for their barbarous tor­ turers” for Jerome’s praise of chastity. 46  Dorigen’s temporal account of causality offers an interesting analogue to the analyses of causality that critics have identified elsewhere in Chaucerian complaints. See Megan Murton, “Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 75–107 and Carolyn Van Dyke, “ ‘To Whom Shul We Compleyn?’: The Poetics of Agency in Chaucer’s Complaints,” Style 31 (1997): 370–90.

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136  Reading chaucer in time transform each “when” into the occasion of resistance, arresting the forward movement of empire.47 In the very process of describing this decisive action, Dorigen uses ­language to evade defining her own time. She appears to sense herself being written into a predetermined narrative: evoking Boethian terminology more often associated with divine providence than with Fortune’s wheel, she laments that Fortune has wrapped her in a “cheyne, / Fro which t’escape woot I no socour, / Save oonly deeth or elles dishonour” (CT V.1356–8). Her complaint responds to this limited future by evading occupying any one moment within time. As she transitions between exempla and her own situation, her grammar moves dexterously from past to future, avoiding the present tense: “What sholde I  mo ensamples heerof sayn, / . . . / I wol conclude that it is bet for me / To sleen myself than been defouled thus. / I wol be trewe unto Arveragus” (CT V.1419–24). Wan-Chuan Kao compares such language to “Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of emotion as ‘a (hallucinatory) “presenting” of the impending future, which . . . leads a person to live a still suspended future as already present, or even already past, and therefore necessary and inevitable—“I’m a dead man,” “I’m done for.” ’ ”48 As Kao observes, even as Dorigen articulates her future, she holds it off, remaining in “a temporal nowhere, tiptoeing around other people’s death wishes without an unequivocal course of action or guidance.”49 Such inaction might be read as comparing unfavorably with the women of the first six exempla, but it also suggests an alternative means of resisting the “deeth or elles dishonour” imposed upon Dorigen.50 As long as Dorigen continues to speak, she moves forward in time. Her complaint is seemingly always in formation, never formed. Whereas translatio imperii locates events within a fixed temporal framework, Dorigen’s complaint seems always to be creating and recreating its structure. As the complaint continues, it unfolds as an extemporaneous, improvisational process of formation. Each new example springs from the ephemera of the last. The seventh to tenth exempla use the resources of grammar, rhyme, and meter to propel themselves from line to line: 47 See David Raybin, “ ‘Wommen, of Kynde, Desiren Libertee’: Rereading Dorigen, Rereading Marriage,” The Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 65–86, at 72–4, for a reading that also emphasizes the power dynamics at work in Dorigen’s complaint. 48  Wan-Chuan Kao, “Conduct Shameful and Unshameful in The Franklin’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012): 99–139, at 135, citing Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 292 n. 2. 49  Ibid. 135. 50  The complaint is often read as an expression of confusion or distress: see for example James Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” Modern Philology 45 (1947): 36–45.

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Assembling the Times   137                                       

I wol be trewe unto Arveragus, Or rather sleen myself in som manere, As dide Demociones doghter deere By cause that she wolde nat defouled be. O Cedasus, it is ful greet pitee To reden how thy doghtren deyde, allas, That slowe hemself for swich manere cas. As greet a pitee was it, or wel moore, The Theban mayden that for Nichanore Hirselven slow, right for swich manere wo. Another Theban mayden dide right so; For oon of Macidonye hadde hire oppressed, She with hire deeth hir maydenhede redressed.   (CT V.1424–36)

The series of exempla begins as part of one long either-or sentence. But in a recapitulation of the overall digressive structure of the complaint, the ­seemingly unavoidable choice outlined in its first two lines quickly gives way to an analogy, beginning “as dide Demociones doghter.” This digression ­differs significantly from Boccaccio’s. Whereas in Menedon’s Question, grammatical closure is deferred only to arrive all the more emphatically, Dorigen’s complaint abandons anticipated endpoints altogether. The story of Demotion’s daughter extends two lines, leaving “be” in line 1427 unrhymed and setting the stage for another story. The account of Cedasus’ (Scedasus’) daughter ends with a complete couplet, but connects with the next example through ­comparison. The poem highlights this incessant forward movement with the internal rhyme in line 1433. The rhyme on “slow . . . wo” simultaneously encapsulates the exemplum and propels the complaint into the next line, which completes the couplet with a third rhyme introducing another Theban maiden. It is as if Dorigen discovers within the ephemera of each exemplum the resources to keep writing. Thus even when this series concludes with the  rime riche on “oppressed / redressed,” an ostensibly satisfying stopping point, the poem uses the very notion of performing rhetorical prowess to  move forward. The lament continues with a flourish of occupatio: “What shal I seye of Nicerates wyf, / That for swich cas birafte hirself hir lyf?” (CT V.1437–8). This sense of productive contingency becomes increasingly significant as the lament’s concluding lines each grow out of what are, seemingly, the least

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138  Reading chaucer in time relevant aspects of the line before. The lament concludes by developing not content but names: The parfit wyfhod of Arthemesie Honured is thurgh al the Barbarie. O Teuta, queene, thy wyfly chastitee To alle wyves may a mirour bee. The same thyng I seye of Bilyea, Of Rodogone, and eek Valeria.   (CT V.1451–6)

The exempla become increasingly compressed until the complaint concludes with “Bilyea, / Of Rodogone, and eek Valeria,” none of whom receive any description at all. Rhyme scheme and meter emerge as the only visible mo­tiv­ation for including these women’s names. The content of these exempla is often irrelevant. Bilyea, for example, is famous only for enduring her husband’s bad breath. Yet her name becomes the starting point for a gratifyingly tripartite list of names that finally lands on Valeria, echoing the tri-syllabic conclusion of the line before. It is as if the complaint develops line by line, seizing upon whatever detail of style or substance allows for its perpetuation, neither establishing a norm for the exempla nor reducing them to the parts of an overarching, static plan. Critics making their own attempts to assemble and organize the complaint differ on its governing structure. Donald Baker identifies a three-part movement from unmarried suicides to wives who commit suicide to good wives who survive.51 Gerald Morgan assimilates the three parts of the complaint to the veneration of classical values—“chastity, fidelity, and honor.”52 In contrast, Warren Smith proposes breaking the lament into two sections of eleven exempla each, one consisting of women who commit suicide, the other of outstanding wives.53 That multiple systems of assembling and arranging Dorigen’s exempla are possible suggests that such acts of organization are themselves provisional. Nevertheless, measurement and division, including that of the complaint, have often served as a basis for interpretations of the Franklin’s Tale. Steele Nowlin suggests that the proliferation of units of almostthree throughout the poem “suggests the imposition of a Christian time-frame 51  Baker, “A Crux in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” 61–2. 52 Gerald Morgan, The Shaping of English Poetry: Essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer, and Spenser (Oxford: P. Lang, 2010), 156 and 166–7. 53  Smith, “Dorigen’s Lament and the Resolution of the Franklin’s Tale,” 386.

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Assembling the Times   139 onto the pagan world of the tale.”54 Susanna Fein, meanwhile, cites Smith’s reading of the complaint in support of “an underlying imagery of duality” associated with Boethian harmony between elements.55 She is, however, careful to note that division into two is only one possible approach to the complaint. I would argue that Chaucer resists representing the complaint as complete in order to render provisional efforts to gather, assemble, or organize its parts. Boccaccio digresses only to conclude with a conversionary coda, using the end of the Filocolo to gather the entire text into a single coherent picture. But Chaucer does not provide the recapitulation of a coda so much as an extension of Dorigen’s exemplary language. He writes, Thus pleyned Dorigen a day or tweye, Purposynge evere that she wolde deye. But nathelees, upon the thridde nyght, Hoom cam Arveragus, this worthy knyght.   (CT V.1457–60)

The complaint itself becomes an exemplum: it stands in for a particular way of using time. And in the process, it resists the impulse of readers (and rulers) to put events in their place. Chaucer transforms the “when” of events such as the rape of Lucrece into the “thus” of Dorigen, who passes time without ever staking a claim to make something of it.56 The time of Dorigen’s complaint cannot even be identified with the time of the written lament, which stands in as a synecodche for a longer period of speech.57 Indeed, multiple manuscripts of the complaint include a gloss referring the reader to Jerome for more exempla: “Singulas has historias et plures hanc materiam concernentes recitat beatus Ieronimus contra Iouinianum in primo suo libro capitulo 39” (“Blessed Jerome recites each of these stories and more concerning this material in con54 Steele Nowlin, “Between Precedent and Possibility: Liminality, Historicity, and Narrative in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 47–67, at 62. 55  Susanna Fein, “Boethian Boundaries: Compassion and Constraint in the Franklin’s Tale,” 195–212 in Drama, Narrative, and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003), 206. 56 Compare the comments on temporality and poetics in Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 144–5. 57  As Emma Lipton observes, throughout the Tale, Chaucer manipulates the relationship between “the duration of the purported events of the narrative” (“story-time”) and the time that it takes to read the Tale (“discourse-time”), sometimes setting the two into opposition and at other points allowing them to coincide. See Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 33.

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140  Reading chaucer in time tra Jovinianum, in the first book, chapter 39”).58 This gloss appears on line 1462, the end of Dorigen’s complaint as printed, in Ellesmere and Additional 35286, but earlier in the complaint in other manuscripts. In some manuscripts, it appears immediately after the first exemplum; in others, after the initial list of unmarried suicides. Manly and Rickert suggest that this shows that the complaint may have once ended earlier.59 The analysis of form once again gives way to the analysis of formation, for the complaint’s ending appears almost accidental, a precarious point from which to gather, assemble, or define its structure.60 This is, in some ways, to Dorigen’s advantage, but it might also have been to Chaucer’s, should he have wished to continue writing. The complaint’s form is subject to the dynamic process of its formation, and it is unclear whether, and by what standard, its formation could be called complete.

4.4  Finding the Ends of Formation In Boccaccio’s Filocolo, the digressive impulses associated with the May Garden are ultimately contained with multiple overarching structures. The magic that creates the May Garden unfolds within three days. It helps set into motion the redemptive generosity at the end of the Question. The Question receives an answer from Fiammetta. The entire question exchange episode is enclosed within Florio’s quest, and the quest itself is eventually enclosed within a conversion narrative. In contrast, Dorigen’s complaint is not integrated into a comparable set of structures. Dorigen’s expostulation accomplishes nothing at all at the level of plot. No one hears her or responds to her. At the end of the tale, the Franklin poses the question, “which was the mooste fre, as thynketh yow?” but no one answers (CT V.1622). No link follows the Franklin’s Tale in which the pilgrims discuss the question. Missing connective tissue of this kind registers another problem of assembly and collection: the incomplete formation of the Canterbury Tales themselves. Part of the challenge of discussing the incompleteness of the Canterbury Tales is determining by what standard they can in fact be said to be unfinished. As Robert Meyer-Lee has recently emphasized, discussions of the 58  John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, vol. 3 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 513. My translation. 59 Ibid. 60  As Stephen Knight puts it, the exempla “seem to tail off into etcetera, etcetera.” See Knight, “Rhetoric and Poetry in the Franklin’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 4 (1969): 14–30, at 27.

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Assembling the Times   141 incompleteness of the Canterbury Tales tend to need something to measure incompleteness against. Here, the distinction between form and formation becomes critical. Thus, Meyer-Lee explains, when we organize the Canterbury Tales into fragments, If . . . this representation is not a neutral notice of discontinuity but expresses an editorial desire to mark discontinuity in a specific form, it does so not only to encode an explanation of the circumstances of the cessation of the work, but also, more audaciously, to organize the work according to an argument about how it would appear if Chaucer had finished it.61

As Meyer-Lee shows, such approaches combine an argument about Chaucer’s writing process (that it was broken off) with a separate argument about form (that the Canterbury Tales as they exist are incomplete relative to a specific formal standard). It does not necessarily solve this problem to say, as critics have, that Chaucer left some of his poetry intentionally incomplete.62 This opens a different question. For if Chaucer intended to leave his Tales incomplete, then he presumably finished the process of writing them. Or, if he did not write everything he might have, he at least fully achieved the structural goal of incompleteness. If formation is complete by the author’s standard, does it mean anything to say that the form of a text is incomplete?63 Since authors can change their mind, there is an added temporal dimension to the  problem: what version of the author’s intent can we use to assess completeness?64 In grappling with these questions, Derek Pearsall proposes an approach to the Canterbury Tales similar to, though not precisely the same as, the one I have taken to Dorigen’s complaint in this chapter. Pearsall argues that Chaucer revised the General Prologue in order to add the four-tale-per-pilgrim plan. The purpose of this, he proposes, was to allow Chaucer to continue writing as 61  Robert J. Meyer-Lee, “Abandon the Fragments,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 47–83, at 59. Emphasis original. 62  See for example Donald K. Fry, “The Ending of the House of Fame,” 27–40 in Chaucer at Albany, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (New York, NY: Burt Franklin, 1975) and Jacqueline T. Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 48–72. 63 See the similar discussion in John Burrow, “The Biennial Chaucer Lecture: Poems Without Endings,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 17–37. Burrow’s distinction between the contingent and the interpretively significant parallels the distinction between formation and form under investigation here. 64 Compare the discussion of revision in Derek Pearsall, “Authorial Revision in Some LateMedieval English Texts,” 39–48 in Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism, ed. A. J. Minnis and Charlotte Brewer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992).

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142  Reading chaucer in time long as he lived: “The accident of mortality was in a way ‘planned into’ this new design.”65 According to this model, Chaucer inscribes an idea of the completed form of the text into the General Prologue that ensures the collection will always be incomplete. And therefore, he can continue adding to it until the contingency of death stops him. Meanwhile, the addition of each new tale alters the shape of the overall structure, presenting a different perspective from which to assess the work’s overarching form. For Pearsall, Chaucer creates a space in which formation can happen until it happens to stop. If Pearsall’s model destabilizes the end of formation in time, it says less about the beginnings of formation. One of the goals of this chapter, and of this book, has been to reconsider how to define the point at which texts begin to form. In the Metamorphoses, when Aeson looks at his newly rejuvenated body, he sees a self that he barely remembers and yet it is part of his history. Similarly, when Medea gathers herbs from Greece for her spell, she parallels the influx of foreign, Greek influence into Ovid’s poetry. There may be foreign matter gathered into the form of Chaucer’s poetry as well. Even without knowing it, Chaucer may have absorbed some of the dynamics of Ovidian digression, contained within the Filocolo, and integrated them into the Franklin’s Tale. There might be stranger material included within the tale than even Chaucer could have known. And in this sense, even an author who does claim an interpretive coda from which to articulate their achievement is, still, contained within time. Such perspectives are provisional. As different readers assemble the story of a text’s formation, the form of that text may emerge differently. This chapter has tracked how texts manage time, including the time of their own unfolding, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the Filocolo and the Franklin’s Tale. Both poets and princes strive to measure time and give it structure, thereby staking claims to gather up and make sense of what takes place within time. In the Franklin’s Tale, Dorigen’s complaint resists such efforts by staging itself as a text in formation. The complaint seems to develop improvisationally from line to line. It becomes difficult to identify any priv­il­eged vantage point from which to assess the complaint’s overall structure. This problem of perspective is echoed at the level of literary history. As it becomes

65  Derek Pearsall, “Pre-empting Closure in ‘The Canterbury Tales’: Old Endings, New Beginnings,” 23–38 in Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 24. Compare Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15, who argues that Chaucer exploits the distinction between concept and execution.

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Assembling the Times   143 more challenging to slice into literary history and determine when formation begins, it is consequently more difficult to identify a privileged perspective upon the end of formation; a moment in which a poem’s form is fully perceptible. Dorigen’s complaint exemplifies processes of formation that unfold without a plan, that do not declare themselves achieved in any one decisive moment, and that readers assess from within their own unstable vantage points in time.66 66  Compare Judson Boyce Allen: “Medieval poems tend to operate as if incomplete—or rather, as chapters or books in the whole poem made of ethics—the whole poem of the real world.” See Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 151.

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5 How Much Is Enough in the Monk’s Tale? Setting Boundaries in Humanist Biography

Boccaccio observes in his De casibus virorum illustrium that time is a glutton, represented well by Saturn devouring his own children, for everything generated by time is also consumed by it. Mimicking a return to the womb, time’s destructive force makes it as if certain things and events never existed at all. The problem is not only existential but epistemological, for we often seem to be capable of making sense of the past even when we cannot access much of it. Boccaccio asks, “quot . . . quorum . . . nomen etiam in tempore consumptum est adeo ut nulla penitus ex eis sit memoria apud nostros?” (“how many are there whose names have been devoured by time, so that we have no memory of them at all?”) (DCV I.V.3).1 If people can be completely forgotten, what significance did their lives have? If certain corners of history are inaccessible, then is it possible for anyone to completely know themselves? Petrarch’s influential experiment in writing exemplary biography, the De viris illustribus, defines its subjects in and through what it excludes from their lives. Petrarch excises from the De viris everything that he considers not to be exemplary, a category that extends from food and drink to the wives and slaves of powerful men. For Petrarch, the line between the exemplary and the forgettable reflects not only a moral distinction, but also a temporal one. Is a thing used up in the moment—perhaps by being consumed by an illustrious man—or does it project itself across time? The illustrious men of Petrarch’s biographies transcend history in part by devouring the time and matter of the world around them. This dynamic comes under critique in Boccaccio’s response to the De viris, his De casibus virorum illustrium. There, Boccaccio emphasizes that even powerful men need temporal, consumable goods. Because these men live within time, they consume temporal things and become entangled in material relations with others. Boccaccio shows how efforts to deny such need

1  Citations of the De casibus are from Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 9: De casibus virorum illustrium, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria (Milan: Mondadori, 1983). Translations are my own. Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Kara Gaston, Oxford University Press (2020). © Kara Gaston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  145 or to police the boundaries of the individual person against such infiltration becomes a kind of self-destructive paranoia. Living within time inevitably blurs the lines of the individual person, so that the powerful men of the De casibus cannot fully separate themselves from the people and matter they consume. When Chaucer takes up the De casibus for his Monk, he explores not only how the lives of great men are sustained, but also their literary afterlives. As is well known, Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale draws on the De casibus as a generic ­analogue, with several manuscripts appending the subtitle De casibus virorum illustrium to the Monk’s text.2 Six of the figures covered in the tale also appear in the De casibus (Adam, Samson, Croesus, Zenobia, Nero, and Pompey), though as Thomas Bestul notes, Boccaccio is not the “primary source” for Chaucer in any of these.3 Rather, the relation between the De casibus and the Monk’s Tale is often seen as a generic experiment, with Chaucer trying on certain aspects of Italian humanist biography writing.4 This chapter, similarly, focuses on thematic and structural parallels rather than specific passages shared between Chaucer and Boccaccio. For the Monk’s Tale shares the De casibus’s interest in how great men depend on, and can be undone by, the matter they consume. And I argue that Chaucer expands upon this dynamic of interdependency by bringing it to bear on the Monk’s own performance. The Monk, a “myghty man,” resembles the subjects of his tragedies (CT VII.1951). And like them, he too is inscribed into relations of dependency and consumption. The Monk needs his audience’s attention and he eats up their time, both the time of the Canterbury pilgrims and the time of the reader. His performance has often been critiqued for this obliviousness to audience, taken to reflect either his psychological failings or the limitations of the literary

2  See the overview of the relation between the two texts in Thomas H. Bestul, “The Monk’s Tale,” 409–47 in Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: D.S.  Brewer, 2002). On the transmission of the De casibus in England, see Guyda Armstrong, The English Boccaccio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 42–96. On the role of monasteries in transmitting secular learning, see David Aers, Chaucer (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1986), 17–19; David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 2: The End of Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 112. See also Amanda J. Gerber, “ ‘As olde bookes maken us memorie,’ Chaucer and the Clerical Commentary Tradition,” Florilegium 29 (2012): 171–200 on commentary traditions mediating monastic knowledge for lay readers. 3  Bestul, “The Monk’s Tale,” 411. As Bestul notes, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris was also a source for the tragedy of Zenobia. 4  For Chaucer’s engagement with humanist genres, see David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). See also Richard Neuse, “The Monk’s De casibus: The Boccaccio Case Reopened,” 247–77 in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Associated University Presses, 2000).

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146  Reading Chaucer in Time tradition he mediates.5 On the other hand, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg argues that the “sterility of repetition” is precisely the point of the Monk’s offering and that the Knight and Host, like many readers of Chaucer, seek out a “revolutionary future” and so cannot recognize the tale’s offering of a recursive past.6 Whichever reading one supports, the Monk’s Tale seems on some level to be divided from its audience. Neither the Canterbury pilgrims nor even Chaucer’s reader can necessarily be taken for granted as a self-effacing, interchangeable target for his performance. Rather, readerly experience takes on a force of its own. The tale thus opens onto another kind of fraught interdependency: that between text and reader. Themes of eating, connected both to reading and to the passage of time, serve as a through line for many kinds of interdependency explored in this chapter. Medieval reading has long been associated with eating. According to the metaphor of ruminatio, the reader chews on and digests the text.7 Texts are often metaphorized as nourishment; young students are said to require milk before moving onto more challenging fare.8 The Monk, who is associated with the role of “celerer,” serves a literary meal to the pilgrims along these lines (CT VII.1936). But the frictions that emerge between the tale and its audiences disrupt and complicate this straightforward relation. The Monk serves the pilgrims the tale, but also relies on them for their time and attention. The pilgrims—and Chaucer’s reader—take in the text, but also give their time to it. Indeed readers help to sustain the reputations of powerful men after their deaths, just as servants, wives, and vegetables helped sustain those men in life. Readers may find themselves devoured by these figures and forgotten, as all temporal things are eventually devoured. Illustrious men may find themselves infiltrated by the prying gaze of audiences that they do not know and cannot control. In the Monk’s Tale, the metaphor of literature as nourishment opens onto multiple kinds of interdependency between text and 5  Jahan Ramazani influentially reads the Monk’s abbreviation as an aggressive subordination of both his subjects and death itself to repetition. See Ramazani, “Chaucer’s Monk: The Poetics of Abbreviation, Aggression, and Tragedy,” The Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 260–76. See also Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 310–12. Wallace recognizes the power of the Monk’s performance but, at the same time, emphasizes how he is cut off from the rest of the pilgrims like the powerful men he describes. 6  L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 150. Other scholars have also defended the Monk’s Tale on different grounds. See David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 95, where the Monk is compared to a “learned historian-poet.” And see Michaela Paasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 141–5, who finds formal diversity within the Monk’s tragedies. 7  Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 205. 8  See the overview of metaphors of reading as eating in Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 134–6.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  147 their readers, some framed more optimistically than others. In at least a few moments, the kinds of need explored in the tale—the ways in which lives become intertwined as one gives over time to sustain the other—show that temporality can itself be the grounds of connectivity and care between people and across time.

5.1  You Are What You Eat: The Boundaries of the Individual Life in the De viris illustribus and the De casibus virorum illustrium The Monk’s Tale has been influentially criticized for the way it cuts down the lives it describes to the bare outline of events.9 Though the tale takes such considerations to the extreme, the problem of what to include and what to cut in biography is a familiar one. It is an explicit subject of consideration in Petrarch’s collection of humanist biography, the De viris illustribus. The De viris survives in multiple versions, all of which are troubled by the problem of boundaries. Where the first redaction (1342–3) focuses on Romans, supplying twenty-three lives, the second prefaces these with twelve lives of biblical and ancient heroes (1351–2). At the request of Francesco da Carrara, Petrarch returned to the exclusively Roman plan around 1368, revising his previous work. He also added material he had been working on in the meantime: an expanded life of Scipio and the De gestis Cesaris, an enormous text in its own right (1351–2 to 1366). Late in life, Petrarch would return to the work once more, this time condensing or reducing several of the lives (c.1371–4).10 As this series of revisions, expansions, contractions, and shifts in attention demonstrates, history writing is a problem of scale and boundaries.

9  Ramazani, “Chaucer’s Monk.” 10  Ronald G. Witt lays out the most recent thought on the relation between the different versions of the De casibus in “The Rebirth of the Romans as Models of Character (De viris illustribus),” 103–12 in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For early work on the ordering of the versions of the De viris, see Carlo Calcaterra, “La concezione storica del Petrarca,” Annali della Cattedra Petrarchesca 9 (1939–40): 3–25, republished in Nella selva del Petrarca (Bologna: Cappelli, 1942), 415–33. (Note that only this republished version of Calcaterra’s argument supports putting the Adam-Hercules version after the Romans version.) See also Guido Martellotti, “Linee di sviluppo dell’umanesimo petrarchesco,” Studi Petrarcheschi 2 (1949): 51–80. Witt departs from Calcaterra and Martellotti in differentiating between the Adam-Hercules “ancient heroes” model and a subsequent, never produced “all-ages” plan for the De viris. On Boccaccio’s knowledge of the De viris and its various versions, see Francesco Petrarca, De viris illustribus: Adam-Hercules, ed. Caterina Malta (Messina: Università degli studi di Messina, 2008), cxcviii. In support of this, Malta cites Vinicio Pacca, Petrarca (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1998), 162 and Zaccaria in Boccaccio, De casibus, 912.

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148  Reading Chaucer in Time In Petrarch’s De viris, the question of what to include hinges upon a ­distinction that Petrarch saw as inherent in history itself. Ronald Witt shows that, for Petrarch, ancient Rome, “the glorious age of antiquity marked by secular achievement,” offers an exemplary model to the present that distinguishes it from any other time.11 Witt explains: “Part of the meaning of [Petrarch’s] rhetorical question ‘What else, then, is all history if not the praise of Rome?’ lay in his belief that, apart from the history of the Romans . . . real history could not be written.”12 The history of Rome, because it is glorious, is history for all time. The exemplary value of Roman history turns it into a model for other times and places. This is not to say that Petrarch considers individual Romans all to have been perfect. Just as he distinguishes Rome from the more ignominious history surrounding it, in considering the ancient Romans as individuals, Petrarch attends to their flaws and even castigates them.13 The preface to the 1351–2 version of the De viris conflates this distinction— between the exemplary and the ignominious—with another one: that between the public and the private spheres of individual lives. There, as Petrarch explains his principles of inclusion, he indicates that it is almost impossible to find someone who is entirely illustrious. Just as a beautiful face may have a flaw, he says, so too “illustres sepe animos aliqua insignis nature iniuria afficit” (“the most illustrious minds are often afflicted by nature with some grave defect”) (DVI Pref.29).14 He therefore explains that he has striven, “ut et prodessem simul ac placerem” (“so that I might be both useful and pleasing,”) to arrange his biographies around the principles of utility and enjoyment (DVI Pref.30). This emphasis on what is useful seems to align with Petrarch’s overall focus on the exemplary, glorious aspects of history, as Witt emphasizes. But when Petrarch gives an example of what he has excluded from his biographies, he does not focus on the admirable or shameful qualities of the great men themselves. Rather, he establishes a distinction between great public works and the private households that enable them. Petrarch explains, Quid enim, ne res exemplo careat, quid nosse attinet quos servos aut canes vir illustris habuerit, que iumenta, quas penulas, que servorum nomina, quod coniugum artificium peculium ve, quibus cibis uti solitus, quo vehiculo,

11 Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 280, but see the full discussion pp. 276–81. 12  Ibid. 281. 13  Ibid. 280. 14  Text is from Petrarca, De viris illustribus: Adam-Hercules, ed. Caterina Malta. Translations from the preface are based on Benjamin G. Kohl, “Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus,” History and Theory 13 (1974): 132–44. I have made minor alterations to Kohl’s translations for clarity in context.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  149 quibus phaleris, quo amictu, quo denique salsamento, quo genere leguminis delectatus sit?  (DVI Pref.31) For what [use] is it, to give some examples, to know what slaves or dogs an illustrious man has had, what beasts of burden, what cloaks, what were the names of his servants, what was the nature of his married life, his profession, or his personal property? What use is it to know what sort of food he liked best, or what he preferred as a means of transportation, as a breastplate, as clothing, or finally, even for sauces and vegetables?

This astonishing catalogue of the irrelevant ranges from individual taste in food and clothing to the role of slaves and of wives in the illustrious man’s life.15 It focuses on the domestic sphere, particularly the sustenance of the body, via food, service, shelter, and transportation. Wives and slaves are reduced to a status commensurate with food, here apparently serving as supports for the illustrious man’s works. The people and the matter in this list are not useless: the illustrious man requires them for his own survival. But this is exactly why they do not make it into the history. They are used by the individual for the survival of his body within time. Their utility is fully consumed by one person and so has no place in a history that strives to speak to all times and places. This approach to public history produces a strange effect: even as it narrows down Petrarch’s historiographical focus, it also greatly expands the boundaries of  the individual historical subject by absorbing the illustrious man’s household into his person. It sets the stage for Boccaccio, in his De casibus virorum illustrium, to represent the boundaries of the individual as both radically expanded and heavily policed. The De casibus, Boccaccio’s own ­collection of exemplary biographies of great men, produced between the mid-1350s and 1360, then revised in 1373–4, has a universalizing scope that extends from Adam to Jean le Bon and the Battle of Poiters in 1356.16 Though Boccaccio credits the Romans with an exceptional place in world history, he ultimately integrates Rome into the larger story of Fortune herself. As Simone Marchesi explains, his emphasis is on consistency: the predictability, across 15  See also Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 303, commenting on the flattening of distinctions between wives, slaves, dogs, and vegetables in the shared moment of exclusion. 16  Simone Marchesi, “Boccaccio on Fortune (De casibus virorum illustrium),” 245–54 in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). As noted in Marchesi at pp. 245–6, the De casibus circulates in a short redaction of 1360 and a later redaction of 1373–4; the latter is the basis for the Ricci and Zaccaria text cited in this chapter. See P. G. Ricci, “Le due redazioni del De Casibus,” Rinascimento 13 (1962), 3–29. But see also Jon Usher, “A Quotation from the Culex in Boccaccio’s De Casibus,” The Modern Language Review 97 (2002): 312–23 for a re-evaluation of the date of the second redaction.

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150  Reading Chaucer in Time all time, of Fortune’s blows.17 More specifically, I would also suggest that Boccaccio pushes against the notion that great men, or exemplary lessons, can be isolated from the temporal matter that surrounds them. Indeed, there is something problematic about Petrarch’s collection of biographies that eschews food, wives, and clothing and yet includes Adam (undone when his wife gives him an apple) and Hercules (undone when his wife gives him a shirt). Boccaccio, accordingly, shows how the expansion of the self to include the household brings with it an anxiety over what might creep into and undo the self. Where Petrarch’s illustrious men consume the world around them, Boccaccio’s desperately strive to guard the entrances of their households and their bodies—and, according to Boccaccio, they ought to guard their minds as well. In De casibus Book 1, the story of Theseus, misled by Phaedra, leads to a warning against credulousness. There Boccaccio compares misleading language to poisoned food, observing that princes guard both their homes and their bodies with soldiers and taste-testers, but fail to regulate what enters through their ears: Viderem . . . domi, clausis ianuis vigiles hostiarios habere, neminem preter inermem et examinatum introducere; in mensa poculorum et epularum pregustatores tenere, ne forsan aliquid nocuum saluti corporee immicti queat; aures vero atque animum quibuscunque loquentibus habere propatulum, quasi non aculeos non insidias non venena ingerant verba. (DCV I.XI.10) I saw that . . . at home, they keep guards at their closed entryways, introducing no one unless they are unarmed and searched. At the table they keep tasters of their drinks and their dishes, lest perhaps anything could be mixed in that is harmful to physical health; the ears, however, and the soul, they hold open to anyone’s speech, as if words could not bring in spikes or plots or poisons.

The powerful man seeks to close off all routes of infiltration, whether into the home or into the stomach. Yet this very analogy suggests that the boundaries of the self are already in question. The prince guards his house and his body with equal vigor, as if they were both extensions of the self. This attention to physical boundaries comes as a reflex of the powerful man’s inscription into a 17  Marchesi, “Boccaccio on Fortune,” 247–9. The figures covered in Boccaccio’s De casibus are far more varied than those of the De viris; for a broad outline of Boccaccio’s subjects, see Annalisa Carraro, “Tradizioni culturali e storiche nel De Casibus,” Studi sul Boccaccio 12 (1980): 197–262.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  151 larger household from which he cannot close himself off. He depends upon food and drink, on shelter, and on a retinue. His boundaries are already in question even before any literal poisoning. The most insidious matter of all is language, which becomes part of the self even without the great man noticing. Words infiltrate and change him whether he can account for the change or not. The problem of policing the boundaries of the self reaches an extreme in a major set-piece of De casibus Book 1: the debate between brothers Thyestes and Atreus. This disruptive episode comes as Boccaccio, who narrates his own process of history writing throughout the De casibus, attempts to turn from the history of Thebes to that of Theseus. This shift engages familiar ideas about history’s structure. The turn to Theseus potentially reintegrates Thebes, with its characteristic cyclical disasters, into an orderly, linear historical progression. But before Boccaccio can accomplish this, he claims to be interrupted by Thyestes, a son of Pelops. Thyestes insists upon telling the story of his violent conflict with his brother, Atreus. Thyestes committed adultery with Atreus’ wife, Aerope. In Boccaccio’s text, Thyestes says nothing about this and instead describes Atreus’ revenge against him: serving Thyestes his own children as a meal. Thyestes is thus the ultimate example of the great man poisoned at his table. But the situation is more complex than this, for the two brothers’ attitudes to their households were potentially toxic from the beginning. Atreus, enraged, soon appears before Boccaccio to tell his own side of the story. He presents his revenge as a form of perfect closure, one that collapses both Aerope and Thyestes’ families into nothing more than physical extensions of the two brothers: “Meum violaverat thorum: suam violavi mensam; in meo utero suos genuerat filios: in suo alvo condendos existimavi” (“He had violated my bed: I violated his table. He had conceived his children in my womb: I determined to bury them in his stomach”) (DCV I.IX.19–20). Atreus’ revenge manipulates the paradoxical urges of great men both to police their boundaries and to expand them. Atreus collapses the distance between himself and his wife so completely that he claims her womb for himself. As part of his household, she is part of him; her womb is his womb. And this figurative expansion of the self sets the stage for Thyestes’ downfall. The infanticide denies Thyestes any ability to expand himself over the generations by means of his children. Instead, his children return to where they came from—or at least, almost to where they came from. In presenting the father’s stomach as a parallel to the mother’s womb, this passage replicates the logic of the myth of Saturn. The image of the father devouring the children imitates, but does not

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152  Reading Chaucer in Time perfectly accomplish, a return to the womb. Indeed, the fact that Atreus was not completely in control of his wife—her womb is not actually identical to his stomach—is one of the sources of his disaster. He cannot fully know or police the people he subsumes. In forcing his way into the De casibus, Thyestes pushes against a Petrarchan model that sets the boundaries of public history as only what is useful and glorious. David Wallace has shown how Boccaccio’s De casibus critiques the standards of Petrarch’s masculine and Roman public history. Wallace focuses on an episode from late in the De casibus, where Brunhilde, Queen of the Franks, forces herself into the history just as Thyestes does, only to struggle with the narrator over the truth of her story. Brunhilde insists that her eyewitness account is truer than Boccaccio’s sources. For Wallace, the unreliability of language constitutes a challenge to Petrarchan historiography. He argues, Petrarch’s insistence on confining his De viris to great figures of Roman antiquity commits him to a mighty, masculine labor of reading and collation in search of the best and most authoritative texts. But all texts are female: texts are born out of earlier texts and their defects multiply from one generation to the next.18

Wallace emphasizes that history writing is unstable because texts are unstable. But Atreus’ manipulation of the boundaries of individual people suggests also that history writing is unstable because its subjects are unstable. The boundaries of people, especially illustrious men, are too porous to isolate one person from their social formation. The very fact that so much temporal matter, and so many people, are forgotten means that something unaccountable lies within powerful men. In the De casibus, the truly autonomous individual would also be an unhistorical individual. Later in Book 1, following the familiar Boethian logic that possessions generate anxiety by creating the possibility for loss, Boccaccio imagines a lifestyle of perfect sufficiency, characterized by neither augmentation nor depravation. And, like Boethius, in doing so, he goes back almost to the prehistoric Golden Age. Boccaccio writes, Tu [paupertas] sola, dum nature leges observas, nocuas solertias subigis, caducos vilipendis honores, discursus hominum varios transfretationes nauticas et sudores rides armorum, et dum supervacanea despicis, estivos 18 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 306–7.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  153 soles nuda facile pateris, hyemales brumas summa patientia superas, umbris contenta nemorum, et rudi pluvias evitasse sub tecto; si fames instet adversa, longe fortiori pectore perfers quam habundantiam qui potant gemmis et auro. (DCV I.XVI.2) You, Poverty, alone, as long as you observe the laws of nature, subdue dangerous wiles, despise perishable honors; you laugh at the various running to and fro of men; the sea-voyages, the sweat of wars. And while you despise the superfluous, naked you easily endure the summer sun, you overcome the winter chill with greatest patience. You are content with the shade of the woods and to have escaped the rain beneath this rustic roof; if hunger threatens you, you long endure it with a stronger heart than those who drink from precious vessels endure abundance.

The second book of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy pairs prose dialogue that critiques the desire for inferior goods—wealth, in particular—with poetry that praises the former age (“prior etas”) that came before trade, mining, and war (CP 2m5.1).19 The prehistoric past offers a model of self-sufficient satisfaction with the bare minimum. Boccaccio, in contrast, conflates poverty with the former age, as though the poor life in the present were equivalent to prehistoric life. Where Boethius says that, for the people of the former age, “the lofty pine tree gave them shade” (“umbras [dabat] altissima pinus”) (CP 2m5.12). Boccaccio declares that poverty is “content with the shade of the woods.” Boethius declares that the former age did not know war or trade; Boccaccio points out that poverty laughs at trade and war. The content self-sufficiency of the poor life constitutes excision from history. To be self-sufficient is to retreat from material connectivity with others, achieving a personal, pre-historical Golden Age. And the opposite is true as well: the De casibus exposes the porousness of individuals who are contained within history. Being in history inscribes the individual into relations of dependency and physical connection, rupturing the boundaries of the self.

5.2  Interdependency and Audience in the Monk’s Tale If the most important thing is how life ends, does it matter how it is sustained in time? Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale uses the notion of a fall to reduce the lives it 19  Latin vulgate text of the Consolation from Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan, with the assistance of A. J. Minnis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005). Translations my own.

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154  Reading Chaucer in Time describes to the simplest common denominator and so bring out their ­universality. The Monk explains that he will “biwaille in manere of tragedie” the downfall of “hem that stoode in heigh degree, / And fillen so that ther nas no remedie / To brynge hem out of hir adversitee” (CT VII.1991, 1992–4). This single truth is what makes the stories he tells into universal examples worth sharing across time. He explains, “Whan that Fortune list to flee, / Ther may no man the cours of hire withholde,” and warns readers “be war by thise ensamples trewe and olde” (CT VII.1995–6, 1998). The Monk’s Tale draws out the universal truth of downfalls, endings, and death from its historical subject matter. Yet telling the story of how powerful men fall often means looking outside of the powerful man to the matter that sustains him. The biographies within the tale share the De casibus’s paranoid sense that the need for food, water, and shelter can be a source of corruption or poisoning, with threats of infiltration emerging in the context of interconnected desires for autonomy and purity. Adam’s unfallen state is described, above all, as inviolate: “With Goddes owene fynger wroght was he, / And nat bigeten of mannes sperme unclene” (CT VII.2008–9). Samson must carefully regulate his drinking: he “nevere ciser drank ne wyn” (CT VII.2055). The downfall of great men often begins with overt acts of violation and contamination. Belshazzar’s kingdom falls when he holds a “feeste” using the sacred vessels of the Temple of Jerusalem to serve the wine (CT VII.2191). Judith beheads Holofernes as he lies in his tent “dronke” (CT VII.2568). Sometimes, even the most basic human needs and the most intimate associations lead to destruction. Alexander is “empoysoned” by his “owene folk” (CT VII.2660). Nero, once so “pompous of array” that he refused to re-wear clothes, is cast “out of his dores” by his people and fails to find shelter: “He knokked faste, and ay the moore he cried / The fastere shette they the dores alle” (CT VII.2471, 2529, 2531–2). Even setting aside willful acts of desecration, the powerful man’s struggle to remain pure is complicated by the need for food, water, and shelter. His autonomy is undone the minute he must depend upon external matter and other people to sustain him. The more the powerful figures of the Monk’s Tale strive to subsume the world around them, the more they may be undone from within. King Antiochus aims to dominate the landscape at the broadest of scales: “He wende he myghte attayne / Unto the sterres upon every syde, / And in balance weyen ech montayne, / And alle the floodes of the see restrayne” (CT VII.2584–7). This prideful ambition to extend the self across land, sea, and stars leads to a kind of internal corruption. Antiochus’ figurative “werkes venymus” provoke divine punishment that rots him from the inside out (CT VII.2577). God strikes

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  155 him with an “invisible wounde” that agonizes him from within: “In his guttes carf it so and boot / That his peynes weren importable” (CT VII.2600, 2601–2). Subsequently immobilized by a fall from his chariot, he must rely upon others to carry him about: “He neyther myghte go ne ryde, / But in a chayer men aboute hym bar” (CT VII.2612–13). Eventually, a visible, physical infection strikes in the form of “wikked wormes” that make him smell so foul that he can no longer be cared for: “No man ne myghte hym bere to ne fro. / And in this stynk and this horrible peyne, / He starf ful wrecchedly in a monteyne” (CT VII.2616, 2625–7). Antiochus’ efforts to encompass his world end in corruption from within and isolation from without. Coming almost as a contrapasso to his prideful efforts to absorb the entire landscape into himself, Antiochus is left alone and absorbed into the landscape. Chaucer thus shares Boccaccio’s concern with the interconnectivity of lives lived within time and history, and the framing device of the Canterbury Tales allows him to further explore its implications. Whereas Boccaccio connects problems of infiltration with the difficulty of defining the subjects of history writing, Chaucer also touches upon defining the boundaries of the history writer. The Monk is, himself, associated with consumable goods. As noted above, monastic reading is connected with eating via the notion of ruminatio. Mary Carruthers explains: Reading is to be digested, to be ruminated, like a cow chewing her cud, or like a bee making honey from the nectar of flowers. Reading is memorized with the aid of murmur, mouthing the words subvocally as one turns the text over in one’s memory. . . The process familiarizes a text to a medieval scholar, in a way like that by which human beings may be said to “familiarize” their food.20

The meditative reader makes the text part of themselves as they make their food a part of themselves. This is not rote memorization, as a young student might do, but rather a chewing over that eventually stands to transform the text as well. Whatever new composition might emerge as the outcome of this process—and Carruthers emphasizes the fundamental connection between ruminative reading and composition—arises as an expression of the self. Accordingly, the Monk’s reference to one hundred tragedies makes little distinction between the boundaries of his text and the boundaries of self-disclosure: “Or ellis, first, tragedies wol I telle, / Of whiche I have an hundred in my celle” 20 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 205. Italics original.

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156  Reading Chaucer in Time (CT VII.1971–2). He does not explicitly refer to a one hundred tragedy text. Instead, in referring to the contents of his “celle” (a term that can refer either to a monastic cell or to the memory), he conflates the limits of the text with his own limits.21 If elsewhere the imagery of food and drink entails weakness and necessity, in the Monk’s prologue, it is associated with control. Harry Bailey declares that the Monk seems to be a “sexteyn, or som celerer”—offices that, respectively, included the care of sacred vessels and the serving of food and drink (CT VII.1936). Far from being merely symbolic duties, these offices covered the practical administration of landholding and provisions. Scott Norsworthy even notes that “at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, one of the biggest and wealthiest Benedictine monasteries in England, governorship of the surrounding town and manors was in the hands of just these two officials.”22 For Harry Bailey, control over food and drink connotes mastery in general: “As to my doom, / Thou art a maister whan thou art at hoom” (CT VII.1937–8). Harry flips the imagery of food and eating around; rather than being infiltrated by what he eats, the Monk manages and controls food. This presentation of the Monk differs somewhat from that in the General Prologue, where he is associated with domination and provisioning—he is a hunter—but is also driven by great appetites. The figure who emerges in the prologue to the Monk’s Tale, in contrast, maintains an austere control over himself. In contrast to figures such as Atreus and Thyestes, the Monk’s celibacy enforces the boundaries of his body. Harry argues that, being “of brawnes and of bones / A wel farynge persone,” the Monk would do better to have children than commit to celibacy (CT VII.1941–2). But the Monk is not provoked by this. He “took al in pacience,” listening to Harry’s words without letting them change his aspect or attitude (CT VII.1965). The Monk enters the story exchange as a provider rather than a receiver, his autonomy and his control seemingly absolute. What, if anything, does the Monk need from others? Perhaps their attention. As he plans out his tale, he hints that the limits of the performance will depend upon what the pilgrims want. “If yow list to herkne hyderward, / I wol yow seyn the lyf of Seint Edward,” he proposes, hesitating a bit as he considers his audience (CT VII.1969–70). The Monk’s definition of tragedy, similarly,

21  “Celle, n.” 2a, 6, Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan, 2018), https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary, accessed April 21, 2019. Compare the comments in Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, 132, which associate the speaking figures in Boccaccio’s De casibus with the images used in arts of memory. 22  Scott Norsworthy, “Hard Lords and Bad Food-Service in the Monk’s Tale,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 313–32, at 314.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  157 catches upon the question of what his audience might want or need in order to make sense of the tale as they hear it. Much critical attention has been given to the Monk’s concept of tragedy.23 Here I simply want to add that the theoretical work of defining a genre is shaped by a practical attention to the Monk’s specific context of reception. The Monk begins by describing the plot of tragedy, then touches upon what different tragedies can look like: Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. And they ben versified communely Of six feet, which men clepen exametron. In prose eek been endited many oon, And eek in meetre in many a sondry wyse. Lo, this declaryng oghte ynogh suffise. (CT VII.1973–82)

The first part of this treatment of tragedy, associating the genre with unhappy endings, likely derives from Nicholas Trevet’s commentary on the Consolation of Philosophy.24 It reflects a commonplace, received understanding of tragedy that also appears in such texts as Isidore’s Etymologies and that focuses on plot. Tragedy describes the fall of a man who once had high standing. The Monk augments this definition with a description of the metrical form of some tragedies. What does this excess information accomplish? If what defines tragedy is that it tells the story of the fall of a great man, does it matter 23  For an early discussion of what the Monk shares with Italian humanist conceptions of tragedy, see Renate Haas, “Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ An Ingenious Criticism of Early Humanist Concepts of Tragedy,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 36 (1987): 44–70. See also the discussion of Chaucer’s knowledge about tragedy, as well as ideas about tragedy circulating in England in his time, in Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997). Kelly argues that Chaucer knew little of these Italian experiments. But see Winthrop Wetherbee III, “The Presidential Address: Chaucer and the European Tradition,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 3–21 for the argument that Chaucer was aware of experiments in tragedy happening elsewhere in Europe. See also Jonathan Stavsky, “Tragic Diction in Chaucer’s Boece, the Canterbury Tales, and Hoccleve’s Series,” 155–69 in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and Its Afterlives, ed. A. Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018). 24  There is some debate over the version of Trevet that Chaucer used for this passage: see Henry Ansgar Kelly, “The Evolution of The Monk’s Tale: Tragical to Farcical,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 407–14, at 409. See also A.  J.  Minnis, “Chaucer’s Commentator: Nicholas Trevet and the Boece,” 83–166 in Chaucer’s Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993).

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158  Reading Chaucer in Time what else a specific tragedy does?25 The Monk’s approach to definition ­balances a focus on what unites the genre with examples of the metrical and prosodic diversity the genre can contain. Rather than establishing an absolute definition that transcends context, the Monk appears to assess the act of defining genre in terms of the needs of the moment. He concludes, “this declaryng oghte ynogh suffise.” Enough for what? Presumably the Monk has said enough to prepare his listeners for the tale they are about to hear. As much as the Monk occupies the position of provider, he also relies on the people to whom he provides his tale. They help determine what he says and how much of it he says. Yet in many ways, the possibility of active reception that digests and remakes the text seemingly stops here. The tale is ossified into an expression of the Monk’s mindset, rather than offered as fodder for listeners and readers to re-shape. Even the suggestion that the Monk shapes his text to suit his listeners can ultimately be taken as a representation of the Monk’s intention, character, and practice as a storyteller. What role do readers play once texts are seemingly frozen in place as a reflection of their powerful makers? The following section explores how one of the subjects of the Monk’s tragedies, Hercules, reshapes the world to reflect his power. But even Hercules cannot bound his own life story. Similarly, the Monk’s Tale’s readers still have a role to play in molding literary form.

5.3  Reading, Rewriting, and the Boundaries of Self-Knowledge in the Monk’s Tale Reading can be a kind of self-expression, a transformation of the text into a display of interpretive prowess. In some ways, this approach to reading links the Monk’s literary activity with the lessons that his text teaches about how to respond to Fortune. For as Boethius argues, one of the best ways to respond to Fortune’s blows is to interpret them. In Book 4 of the Consolation, Boethius argues that that the ups and downs of Fortune are nothing more than tests of the good and punishment for the wicked. Once interpreted in this way, 25  Compare Witt’s comments on early humanist approaches to tragedy. Though the humanists do not distinguish clearly between tragedy and epic, the rediscovery of Seneca’s Tragedies leads Lovato dei Lovati (c.1240–82) to write a brief essay on Seneca’s meters, what Witt describes as perhaps “the first comprehensive analysis in the Middle Ages of an ancient author’s meters.” See Ronald  G.  Witt, “Humanism and Continuities in the Transition to the Early Modern,” 553–72 in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Ralph  J.  Hexter and David Townsend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 559. See also Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 123–4.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  159 Boethius argues, Fortune can be transformed into a source of empowerment. Philosophy wraps up the case with a passage that equates interpretive prowess with heroic power: Firmis medium viribus occupate! Quicquid autem infra subsistit aut ultra progreditur, habet contemptum felicitatis, non habet premium laboris. In vestra enim situm est manu qualem vobis fortunam formare malitis; omnis enim que videtur aspera nisi aut excercet aut corrigit punit.  (CP 4p7.50–4)26

Chaucer translates this passage in his Boece: Ocupye the mene by stidefast strengthes; for al that evere is undir the mene, or elles al that overpasseth the mene, despyseth welefulnesse (as who seith, it is vycious), and ne hath no mede of his travaile. For it is set in your hand (as who seith, it lyth in your power) what fortune yow is levest (that is to seyn, good or yvel). For alle fortune that semeth scharp or aspre, yif it ne exercise nat the good folk ne chastiseth the wikkide folk, it punysseth. (Boece 4p7.96–106)

If people are willing to interpret their fortune as part of a divine plan, then they have the power—it is “set in [their] hand”—to make of it what they want. In responding to Fortune as a test of virtue, the strong reader transforms seemingly random events into the opportunity to move closer to the Good. However, this interpretive empowerment depends upon knowledge of the “mene.” In order to identify punishments and tests, it is necessary to recognize insufficiency and excess: whatever “is undir” the mean or “overpasseth” it. The meter that follows this argument in the Consolation associates ­moralizing interpretation with physical heroism. The meter consists of three classical exempla of figures who overcome adversity: Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Hercules. Although the meter’s explicit emphasis is on physical strength and perseverance, it hinges on the power of reinterpretation. Following on Fortune’s argument that Fortune is what we make of it, the meter provides two deeply ambiguous examples: Agamemnon, sacrificing his daughter to reach Troy; and Odysseus, losing his companions but defeating Polyphemus. The Agamemnon example, in particular, is troubling: is this a demonstration of determined self-sacrifice (with Iphigenia absorbed, like so many wives and daughters, into her father) or one of wicked excess? Just as Fortune must be 26  Latin text from Machan, Sources of the Boece.

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160  Reading Chaucer in Time interpreted by those who experience its blows, Boethius offers these exempla to the reader for reinterpretation and recontextualization. The Hercules exemplum, which dominates Boethius’ meter, would become the source for the Monk’s tragedy of Hercules. In the context of the Consolation, Hercules’ story explores the power and the limits of interpretation by having the hero enact the role of interpreter. Hercules takes a great deal of material and reduces it to a single repetitive message. Boethius provides a tightly organized catalogue of the hero’s deeds: Herculem duri celebrant labores. Ille Centauros domuit superbos, Abstulit scevo spolium leoni Fixit et certis volucres sagittis, Poma cernenti rapuit draconi Aureo levam gravior metallo, Cerberum trahit triplici cathena. Victor inmitem posuisse fertur Pabulum sevis dominum quadrigis. Ydra combosto periit veneno, Fronte turpatus Achelous amnis Ora dimersit pu[d]ibunda ripis. (CP 4m7.13–24)  Hercules is celebrable for his harde travailes. He dawntide the proude Centauris (half hors, half man), and he byrafte the dispoilynge fro the cruel lyoun (that is to seyn, he slouhe the lyoun and rafte hym his skyn); he smot the briddes that hyghten Arpiis with certein arwes; he ravysschide applis fro the wakynge dragoun, and his hand was the more hevy for the goldene metal; he drowh Cerberus, the hound of helle, by his treble cheyne; he, overcomer, as it is seyd, hath put an unmeke lord foddre to his crwel hors (this is to seyn, that Hercules slowh Diomedes, and made his hors to freten hym); and he, Hercules, slowh Idra the serpent, and brende the venym; and Acheleous the flod, defowled in his forheed, dreynte his schamefast visage in his strondes. (Boece 4m7.28–45)

Boethius’ verse is carefully structured, but it shifts as it moves forward. The list begins with three deeds, neatly confined to a single verse each. After this, the poem begins to alternate one- and two-line-long accounts of deeds. In each case, Boethius avoids contamination between the various deeds: each is

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  161 separated and precisely fills its allocated one or two verses. The meter’s ordered prosody corresponds with the action it describes, as Hercules drags, slays, and smites an unruly array of monsters. The verb “fixit,” which signifies “pierce” but also “fix” and “establish,” suits both the strong organization of this metrical catalogue and Hercules’ own activity. Even those creatures who survive Hercules’ activity are put in their places, both physically and poetically. Boethius describes how Achelous the river god, disfigured by Hercules, hides his face on the banks. As he does so, he foregrounds two words, putting “fronte” (forehead) at the beginning of line 23 and “ora” (face) at the beginning of line 24. In his very efforts to hide his face, Achelous gives away his shame, his posture testifying to Hercules’ victory. The meter thus depicts Hercules as a great re-interpreter and rewriter of the world around him. Boethius captures this interpretive prowess through prosody, using the regular rhythms of verse to map out a world that has been reduced to a single meaning. The Monk’s Tale preserves, and perhaps even amplifies, Boethius’ use of prosody to suggest a world organized according to a single interpretive principle. Hercules suggests an analogue for the Monk in miniature: a rewriter capable of taking many different figures and using them to convey one sole, repetitive message.27 The tale reduces the number of verbs used to describe Hercules’ actions until almost every verse of the tragedy’s first two stanzas repeats the same verb: Of Hercules, the sovereyn conquerour, Syngen his werkes laude and heigh renoun; For in his tyme of strengthe he was the flour. He slow and rafte the skyn of the leoun; He of Centauros leyde the boost adoun; He Arpies slow, the crueel bryddes felle; He golden apples rafte of the dragoun; He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle; He slow the crueel tyrant Busirus And made his hors to frete hym, flessh and boon; He slow the firy serpent venymus; Of Acheloys two hornes he brak oon; And he slow Cacus in a cave of stoon; 27 Larry Scanlon describes the Monk’s tragedies as “products of interpretive intervention.” See Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 225.

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162  Reading Chaucer in Time He slow the geant Antheus the stronge; He slow the grisly boor, and that anon; And bar the hevene on his nekke longe. (CT VII.2095–2110)

This passage preserves Boethius’ heavy prosodic organization. It assigns one deed to each line for the first of these stanzas, using anaphora to foreground Hercules’ agency over and over again. The second stanza breaks the anaphoric pattern twice, but these exceptions are contained and regulated by the overwhelming repetitiveness of the passage as a whole. Indeed, as the second stanza continues, Chaucer’s poem virtually stops using any verb to describe Hercules’ actions besides “slow.” Hercules—like the Monk himself—reduces the world to a catalogue of the slain. Yet this very display of prowess marks the limits of Hercules’ control and the beginnings of his dependency upon others. The aggression with which Hercules rewrites his world ultimately turns him from interpreter into spectacle. In Boethius’ version, Hercules’ hoisting of the heavens comes as a fitting conclusion to his work, for it makes him worthy of his own apotheosis: having conquered the world, Hercules leaves it behind. In Chaucer’s poem, hoisting the heavens is simply a convenient place to end a stanza. Instead of ascending to the heavens, Hercules becomes famous on earth: “Thurghout this wyde world his name ran” (CT VII.2113). And this earthly audience proves complex and evasive. The figurative “wyde world” in these lines contrasts the physical world that Hercules attempts to bound a few lines later: “At bothe the worldes endes, seith Trophee, / In stide of boundes he a pileer sette” (CT VII.2117–18). “In stide of ” can indicate “instead of ”—that is, acting in place of—which leaves open the possibility that the pillars are only substitutes for true boundaries.28 Hercules aggressively sets his environment into order. But he himself ends up being a spectacle, gazed upon by a world that he cannot quite contain or define. By the conclusion of Hercules’ tragedy, the hero who once put the world in order struggles to control the boundaries of his own story. Like many of the powerful men in the Monk’s Tale, he is undone by means of a person close to him and a material, temporal necessity: his “lemman” Deianira sends him “a sherte” that “envenymed was” (CT VII.2119, 2122, 2124). Hercules is literally poisoned, and he is also figuratively infiltrated by uncertainties about the 28  “Stede (n.(1)),” 4b, Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan, 2018), https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary, accessed April 15, 2019.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  163 boundaries of his life. The true cause of Hercules’ death remains ambiguous. The Monk hesitates to blame Deianira: “But nathelees, somme clerkes hire excusen / By oon that highte Nessus, that it maked. / Be as be may, I wol hire noght accusen” (CT VII.2127–9). In the first stanzas of the Hercules tragedy, Hercules reduces everything to the commonality of being slain by him. But when Hercules himself is slain, it becomes difficult to account for who killed him. Even he has a hand in it: “In hoote coles he hath hymselven raked, / For with no venym deigned hym to dye” (CT VII.2133–4). Hercules’ suicide constitutes a final effort to control boundaries—in this case, the boundary of his own life—but it comes in response to action already set in motion by numerous other subjects. The poem inscribes Hercules into a network of causality that infiltrates and poisons the strong man before he knows it. In this context, the tragedy’s concluding Boethian admonition “ful wys is he that kan hymselven knowe” rings hollow (CT VII.2139). For, as the poem also admits, “Hym that folweth al this world of prees / Er he be war is ofte yleyd ful lowe” (CT VII.2137–8). It is difficult to entirely know one’s own self in time, for the self is dependent upon the actions of others and infused with the effects of past actions and the anticipation of future ones. The Monk, similarly, struggles to control the boundaries of his own readerly self-disclosure. The repetitive themes running through his tragedies parallel Hercules’ actions in that they subordinate the world to a single interpretive principle. The Monk also parallels Hercules in finding himself on display, his body and bloodlines imaginatively evoked by Harry Bailey in the tale’s prologue. And finally, the Monk shares with Hercules the problem of knowing himself within time. As the Monk admits, he does not recite his tragedies in chronological order, but rather “as it now comth unto my remembraunce” (CT VII.1989). The Monk claims to compose almost as Dorigen does, in the Franklin’s Tale: from moment to moment, rather than according to a single, coherent informing idea. The resulting text continually raises its own governing standards and overarching form as a question. The Monk’s Tale begins with an exception: “At Lucifer, though he an angel were / And nat a man” (CT VII.1991–2000). And from there, the question of what is standard and what is exceptional only becomes more complex. At its outset, the tale seems to establish a standard alignment between metrical divisions and thematic ones, assigning one stanza to each of the first two tragedies. Then suddenly, the third tragedy (Sampson) breaks this pattern and spills into seven stanzas. From there, only two other tragedies—both “modern instances” that provide little information—have the single stanza structure. Should the shift away from the single stanza structure be seen as a departure from the tale’s initial

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164  Reading Chaucer in Time rule? Was there ever meant to be a rule? Should priority be given to the patterns with which the tale opens, or that with which it ends? The tale’s unpredictable organization opens up conflict between the text’s structure and the reader’s experience of that structure. Reading through a text in time does not necessarily leave the kind of indelible mark that interpretive rewritings do. But hints of this kind of hidden experience can be found on some Monk’s Tale manuscripts. For example, the question arises of how to demarcate the formal and thematic divisions of the tale when those divisions seem provisional or in flux. Ellesmere decorates the opening of each of the Monk’s tragedies with a large decorated majuscule.29 Hengwrt, similarly, supplies a large majuscule at the front of each tragedy and marks subsequent stanzas with a paraph.30 But on the other hand, as if unable to determine what is now the exception and what is the norm when the tragedies and the stanzas go out of sync, British Library Harley 7333 (c.1425–75) decorates the opening of each stanza, regardless of whether or not it begins a tragedy (ff. 108r–112r).31 British Library Lansdowne MS 851 (1400–25), begins with rubrics for the tragedies of Lucifer and Adam, then continues applying rubrics to every single stanza—even when they supply nothing but “de eodem”/“de eadem” (“on the same”)—up until partway through the tragedy of Cenobia, when the scribe finally gives up (ff. 207v–217r). It is as if the Lansdowne scribe is waiting for a return to normalcy that never arrives. The process of working through the poem, of balancing memory and expectation over the course of the Monk’s complex performance, inscribes its own timing onto this copy of the tale. The Knight’s interruption, similarly, bounds and shapes the Monk’s Tale in a way that reflects the experience of listening to it. When the Knight finally says “good sire, namoore of this! / That ye han seyd is right ynough, ywis,” he measures the tale’s achievement against the tolerance of listeners rather than against the Monk’s own goals (CT VII.2767–8). The Middle English “ynough” can signify “sufficient” but also “plentiful.”32 Here, the Knight seems to use the latter meaning. It is less that the tale has achieved some specific goal than that 29  San Marino, Huntingdon Library, MS Ellesmere 26 C9, ff. 169r–178v. Consulted in digitized form at https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7. 30  Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392, ff. 89r–98v. Consulted in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscripts, with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript, ed. Paul  G.  Ruggiers (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 350–89. 31  On the provenance of this manuscript and its relationship to scribe John Shirley, see A. S. G. Edwards, “The Unity and Authenticity of ‘Anelida and Arcite’: The Evidence of the Manuscripts,” Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 177–88. 32  “Inough, adj.,” and “inough, adv.,” Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, 2018), accessed April 28, 2019, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-englishdictionary.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  165 the Knight’s patience has been exhausted. As the Knight further explains, “litel hevynesse / Is right ynough to muche folk, I gesse” (CT VII.2769–70). The Knight assesses the tale’s literary properties in terms of its effects on listeners: the heaviness of the tale matters because of the heaviness its readers experience. The tale’s boundaries do not reflect an overarching idea of form, or the Monk’s own mind, but, rather, the experience of his audience. Even so, in some ways, this act of reception helps the Monk’s Tale function as one of the Canterbury Tales.33 It enables Chaucer to include the expansive De casibus genre within the story collection, allowing the tale to stand for its genre via synecdoche while still capturing the expansive, lengthy nature of Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s texts.34 It does so by bringing the temporality of reception to bear upon the formal boundaries of the tale. And in this way, one more boundary is violated: the form of the Monk’s Tale comes into being through more than just the Monk’s efforts. Rather, it is also shaped by the demands of reading in time.

5.4  Sharing Time: Hugelyn and His Sons Texts demand time from their readers and reading in time infiltrates and transforms texts. The Monk’s Tale engages with such dynamics at their most aggressive, with the Monk consuming his audience’s time and the audience, in turn, forcefully shutting him down. But if texts and readers are to be intertwined in one another’s histories, might there be other ways to value these relations? To consider this question, it may be useful to turn to the one tragedy in the tale that focuses not upon the hunger of great men, but rather on the agency of the people potentially being devoured. In many ways the Monk’s tragedy of Hugelyn seems to be an outlier within the tale. Though it encompasses many of the tale’s overarching themes—hunger, isolation, boundaries, and the difficulty of connecting with other people—it is  the only tragedy in the collection to be based upon Dante’s Commedia.

33  For the argument that the Knight’s interruption registers the Monk’s failure, see Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983), 177–9. For readings that approach the Knight’s interruption in terms of his social status, see Terry Jones, “The Monk’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 387–97 and Stephen Knight, “Colloquium on The Monk’s Tale: ‘My Lord, the Monk,’ ” 381–6 in the same volume. 34 See the similar argument in Jennifer  R.  Goodman, “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Rise of Chivalry,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 127–36. And see also John Burrow’s comparison of the Monk’s Tale with the Squire’s Tale in “The Biennial Chaucer Lecture: Poems Without Endings,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 17–37, at 30–1.

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166  Reading Chaucer in Time Critical studies often extract it from the rest of the tale, focusing on the relation between Chaucer and Dante outside of the rest of the tale’s concerns. For example, Helen Cooper, comparing Dante’s condemnation of Count Ugolino of Pisa with Chaucer’s more ambivalent treatment of “Erl Hugelyn of Pyze,” argues that the Monk’s Tale’s uncertainty about the facts and its sympathetic approach to Hugelyn represent a critique of Dante’s unremitting judgments of human lives.35 As she puts it, “[Chaucer’s] thoughts were very different, and often precisely different, from Dante’s: in summary, that Dante as a poet was a giant among dwarfs, but that he was wrong.”36 Cooper says little about the rest of the tale and attributes the attitudes expressed in the Hugelyn episode directly to Chaucer rather than to his Monk. The same is true of Piero Boitani’s comparative reading of the same material, which focuses on the different emotional register of Chaucer’s Hugelyn tragedy versus the Ugolino story.37 The Hugelyn tragedy thus presents a possible exception within the Monk’s Tale, a complex literary performance that, by reason of this very complexity, seems to bypass the heavy repetitiveness of both the Monk and the De casibus genre and instead to originate directly with Chaucer reading Dante. And yet within the Commedia, the Ugolino episode shows Dante grappling with problems similar to those that would come to inform humanist biography. Namely: what is the relation between those events, people, and experiences that are remembered and those that are consumed by time? Isolated within his tower, Ugolino offers a paradigmatic example of experience lost to history. Even for Dante, the final days of Ugolino were a mystery. Some, but not all, of Ugolino’s death was a matter of public record. Giovanni Villani’s Florentine Chronicle (c.1320–c.1448) describes events from the outside perspective: “I Pisani, i quali aveano messo in pregione il conte Ugolino e due suoi figliuoli, e due figliuoli del conte Guelfo suo figliuolo . . . feciono chiavare la porta della detta torre, e le chiavi gittare in Arno, e vietare a’ detti pregioni ogni vivanda, gli quali in pochi giorni vi morirono di fame” (“The Pisans, who had put Count Ugolino, and his two sons, and two sons of Count Guelfo, his son, in prison . . . had the door of the aformentioned tower locked, and the keys thrown into the Arno, and the aforementioned prisoners refused any food, and

35  Helen Cooper, “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 39–66. See also Piero Boitani, “The Monk’s Tale: Dante and Boccaccio,” Medium Aevum 45 (1976): 50–69. Boitani’s comparison between the two passages focuses less on judgment than on emotion; he argues that Dante’s Ugolino evokes horror, whereas Hugelyn’s story inspires pathos. 36  Cooper, “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer,” 42. Emphasis original. 37  Boitani, “The Monk’s Tale,” especially 54–63.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  167 they, after a few days, died there of hunger”).38 The description is straightforward and indisputable. With the key to the tower thrown in the river, of course the prisoners die. But the walls of the tower and the lost key prevent anyone from knowing what happens in the meantime. The tower suggests a figure for the boundaries of the individual self: inner experience walled off from what can be written into history or shared with others. The problem that emerges is not just one of knowledge—of the fact that no one can know what happened in those final days—but also about whether such knowledge matters. What value is there in experience lost to time? As Dante tells Ugolino’s story, he moves deeper and deeper into the contours of private, hidden historical experience. Ugolino’s mouth sets the boundary and the horizon for the account: Canto 33 begins with the words “la bocca” (“his mouth”) as the shade raises his head, wipes his mouth, and begins to speak (Inf. 33.1).39 The mouth is the smallest and most intimate of the multiple confining holes and cavities that Piero Boitani identifies in this canto: the pit of Cocytus, the hole in the ice in which the sinners are confined, and the tower in which father and sons die.40 Within these spaces lies private history; as Ugolino tells Dante, it is well known that Ruggieri had him killed, but “quel che non puoi aver inteso, / cioè come la morte mia fu cruda, / udirai” (“what you cannot have heard, that is, how cruel my death was, you shall hear”) (Inf 33.19–21). Dying is always secret and private. Ugolino’s death in the tower expands this secret experience and so focuses the question of what might be recovered along with such hidden pockets of history. This promise to recover a private, individual, temporal truth contrasts with the notion that the truth that matters is universal and eternal. Hunger provides a transition between these two ways of thinking about human lives. In the absence of the temporal matter of food or drink, the starving person potentially starts to reveal something universal about themselves. For example, on the second day without food, Ugolino says that he sees “per quattro visi il mio aspetto stesso” (“on four faces my own appearance”) (Inf. 33.57). Donna Yowell suggests that this projection of the self onto the faces of Ugolino’s sons

38 Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, vol. 1, ed. Giuseppe Porta (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1990), VIII.128.13–19. I provide a version of the translation in Villani’s Chronicle: Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani, trans. Rose  E.  Selfe, ed. Philip H. Wicksteed (London: Archibald, Constable & Co., 1906), VII.128, which I have lightly altered for clarity in context. 39  Text and translation are from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 40  Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37–8.

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168  Reading Chaucer in Time illustrates his failure as a reader, for he denies his sons any difference from himself.41 The clearest analogue to this passage is Tydeus’ glimpse of himself in the face of his enemy Melannipus in Statius’ Thebaid: “Singultantia vidit / ora trucesque oculos seseque agnovit in illo” (“He sees the gasping visage, the fierce eyes, and recognizes himself in the other”) (Theb. 8.752–3).42 Tydeus looks into the eyes of his enemy and sees himself. Moments later, this absorption of the other into the self becomes literal and Tydeus begins devouring Melanippus. This is the scene that helps shape Dante’s depiction of Ugolino and Ruggieri. Yet these depictions of violent self-aggrandizement rub shoulders with images of shared experience and humanity. Ronald Martinez proposes in his notes to this line in Inferno that Ugolino might be describing the visible progress of starvation writing itself upon the boys’ faces.43 In Purgatorio, among the starving gluttons, Dante sees the image of the word “omo,” “man,” traced in the hollowed eyes and noses of the suffering souls (Purg. 23.32). It is as if, as matter is stripped away, something essential potentially reveals itself. Where is the line between recognizing what is shared and failing to value the autonomous experience of others? Ugolino’s failure to appreciate his son’s autonomy may partially reflect his devaluation of time and the temporal. For Ugolino, as the sun rises, things become ever more emptied out: he says of the dawn: “l’altro sol nel mondo uscìo” (“the next sun exited into the world”) (Inf. 33.54).44 At least on the surface of it, this seems a reasonable approach to time, treating it as a source of loss and decay, revealing the vanity of temporal things. But Ugolino is left with only a limited vocabulary for describing temporal experience. He simply counts it off, and this ultimately becomes a ruthless countdown of his own children. He tells Dante,   Poscia che fummo al quarto dì venuti, Gaddo mi si gittò disteso a’ piedi, dicendo: “Padre mio, ché non m’aiuti?”   Quivi morì; e come tu mi vedi, Vid’ io cascar li tre ad uno ad uno tra ’l quinto dì e ’l sesto; ond’ io mi diedi,   già cieco, a brancolar sovra ciascuno,

41  Donna L. Yowell, “Ugolino’s ‘bestial segno’: The De vulgari eloquentia in Inferno XXXII–XXXIII,” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 104 (1986): 121–43, at 133–4. 42  Text and translation are from Statius, Thebaid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 43  Inferno, ed. and trans. Durling, 527. 44  My translation for clarity in context.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  169 e due dì li chiamai, poi che fur morti.   Poscia, più che ’l dolor, poté ’l digiuno. (Inf. 33.67–75)  After we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself stretched out at my feet, saying: “My father, why do you not help me?” There he died; and as you see, I saw the three fall one by one between the fifth day and the sixth; and I already blind, took to groping over each of them, and for two days I called them, after they were dead. Then fasting had more power than grief.

Ugolino uses the count of the days to count off his sons, as if it were possible to imagine time as something divisible by people. After Gaddo dies at his feet, he simply counts how the other three (“li tre”) die, one by one (“uno ad uno”) between the fifth and sixth days in the tower. Time, for Ugolino, is only a way of organizing the losses that it brings about. Ugolino’s sons imagine an entirely different value system, in which temporal experience, precisely because it is fleeting and disposable, becomes the medium of self-sacrificing love. They beg their father, “tu ne vestisti / queste misere carne, e tu le spoglia” (“you clothed us with this wretched flesh, so do you divest us of it”), an offer that positions them as analogues to Christ (Inf. 33.62–3). Ugolino’s failure to recognize this and to respond to them has been at the heart of the most influential scholarship on the episode. John Freccero points out that Ugolino “is condemned by Dante not only as a traitor but also for his inability to grasp the spiritual meaning in the letter of his children’s words.”45 Ugolino fails to recognize the spiritual and eternal in the material and temporal. But I would add that his failure is double: he also devalues the literal, material offer of time that the children make. The door to the tower is nailed closed: Ugolino will die, whether or not he devours his sons. The only thing that they offer him is time, and time is exactly what Ugolino holds cheap. Yet for the sons, the empty gesture of giving their father a little bit of extra time is a way of expressing love. Recognizing none of this, Ugolino seems poised to play the part of Saturn, whose gluttony expresses the vanity of temporal things. His final “poscia” (“then”) ends his count of days without 45  John Freccero, “Bestial Sign and Bread of Angels (Inferno 32–33),” Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 53–66, at 57, reprinted in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 152–66, at 158. See also Robert Hollander, who points out that Ugolino asks for Dante’s pity while giving none to his sons: Hollander, “Inferno XXXIII, 37–74: Ugolino’s Importunity,” Speculum 59 (1984): 549–55, at 549.

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170  Reading Chaucer in Time completing it. The length of time Ugolino spent alone in the tower, the one fact that Dante withholds, would reveal the truth of his story. According to Macrobius, a man cannot live beyond the seventh day without food. Were Ugolino to live much longer than that, the truth would become clear.46 That may be one reason why he stops counting time. Ugolino reduces time to numbers, then fails to enumerate it when it matters. The hidden experience that he offered to share dies with him. The Ugolino story links the epistemological questions explored throughout the Monk’s Tale with ethics. At the practical level, it offers another inroad into the problem of how to set boundaries to the individual life within time. The tragedy tests the interrelated questions of (1) how much specific information is enough to make sense of a life and (2) when is the right time to make sense of a life. Where Dante calls attention to aspects of the story that are hidden, interiorized, and private, Chaucer’s version tends to shift attention to uncertain or estimated quantities. The Monk explains that Hugelyn was put into a tower “litel out of Pize” with his three children: “the eldest scarsly fyf yeer was of  age” (CT VII.2409, 2412). Locked in the tower, the group (reduced by ­synecdoche to Hugelyn alone) has an approximate amount of food: “Mete and drynke he hadde / So smal that wel unnethe it may suffise, / And therwithal it was ful povre and badde” (CT VII.2420–2). The door is finally closed for good “on a day,” an expression both seemingly precise and completely meaningless (CT VII.2423). (Everything happens on a day.) These descriptions imply the existence of specificity without actually supplying details.47 Concrete figures— five years of age, for example—are evoked in order to be adjusted or blurred. Yet quantity does matter very much here. The difference between food that “unnethe . . . may suffise,” and food that does not suffice, for example, is small but crucial. In Hugelyn’s situation, quantity, however arbitrary a property it might seem, begins to matter. These epistemological questions of quantity become entangled with ethics when Hugelyn’s sons offer their father a little extra quantity of time. Though the tale significantly alters the role of the children, it retains the sense that they appreciate the temporal in a way their father does not. Even more so than in Inferno, the children speak directly about their material, temporal 46 Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, I.vi.78. Consulted in Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius, ed. and trans. William Harris Stahl (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1952). 47 Compare the discussion in Steven Justice, “Chaucer’s History-Effect,” 169–94 in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 172.

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  171 needs. Hugelyn’s youngest son asks for bread, rather than calling for it in dreams, as the boy does in Dante’s version. The child articulates his needs clearly and straightforwardly: His yonge sone, that thre yeer was of age, Unto hym seyde, “Fader, why do ye wepe? Whanne wol the gayler bryngen oure potage? Is ther no morsel breed that ye do kepe? I am so hungry that I may nat slepe. Now wolde God that I myghte slepen evere! Thanne sholde nat hunger in my wombe crepe; Ther is no thyng, but breed, that me were levere.” (CT VII.2431–8)

This stanza builds itself around a chiastic repetition of the words “breed,” “hungry,” “slepe,” “slepen,” “hunger,” and “breed.” The chiasmus both opens and closes on the fact of starvation and the desire for bread. The boy’s repetition of basic nouns suggests both hungry speech and childish speech. For both kinds of expression insist upon the literal significance of language, supplying no substitute for the material needs they describe. Hugelyn, in contrast, concentrates not on bread but on the moral of his story. Slipping into verbal patterns that characterize the narrative voice of the Monk’s Tale as a whole, Hugelyn recognizes himself falling into the familiar model of the great man brought down by fortune. But he falls so quickly into this mode that he laments his fate before it fully unfolds: Thus day by day this child bigan to crye, Til in his fadres barm adoun it lay, And seyde “Farewel, fader, I moot dye!” And kiste his fader, and dyde the same day. And whan the woful fader deed it say, For wo his armes two he gan to byte, And seyde, “Allas, Fortune, and weylaway! Thy false wheel my wo al may I wyte.” His children wende that it for hunger was That he his armes gnow, and nat for wo, And seyde, “Fader, do nat so, allas! But rather ete the flessh upon us two.

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172  Reading Chaucer in Time Oure flessh thou yaf us, take oure flessh us fro, And ete ynogh”—right thus they to hym seyde, And after that, withinne a day or two, They leyde hem in his lappe adoun and deyde. (CT VII. 2439–54)

As Hugelyn bites his arms in despair, he complains against Fortune as if his story were already at its nadir. Usually, such direct appeals to Fortune are delivered in the main narrative voice of the Monk’s Tale and appear at the beginning or ending of a tragedy. The Monk declares “allas, Fortune” at the ending in the tragedy of Cenobia and near the opening of Hugelyn’s own story (CT VII.2367, 2413). “Wyte” and “false” can be found in the final three lines of the tragedy of Alexander: “Allas, who shal me helpe to endite / False Fortune, and poyson to despise, / The whiche two of al this wo I wyte?” (CT VII.2668–70). All of these appeals to Fortune mark the boundary of a tragedy by delivering its larger moral. Hugelyn, however, declares his story done while two of his sons are still alive. Hugelyn’s sons, in taking almost the opposite approach to temporality, reveal an alternate way of connecting with others. In a dangling half-line of dialogue, set off by a strong caesura, they encourage their father to take their bodies and “ete ynogh.” Enough for what? The children cannot offer Hugelyn enough to sustain him once and for all; his hunger will return. All that they can offer is extra time. As noted above, the Middle English “ynough” often indicates “too much.” In more than one sense, the boys’ offer is excessive. They offer their father more time and flesh than he would have on his own. Offering their father “ynogh,” that is, more than enough, they transform empty time into a medium for expressing love. How much time is enough to give to the dead, the doomed, and the genre of tragedy? Even as Hugelyn’s sons offer to extend their father’s life, they also echo and amplify the sounds of his speech. Hugelyn’s lament to Fortune comes at the end of a stanza characterized by alliteration and internal rhyme on “wo,” “two,” and “weylaway.” His final lament picks up these sounds in an emphatic line of alliterating monosyllables: “thy false wheel my wo al may I wyte.” Each of the alliterating “w” sounds in this line is a stressed syllable, bringing meter into lockstep with sonic and verbal rhythms. The line seems to recapitulate the sounds of the rest of the stanza as if to strike a decisive conclusion. But when the sons’ perspective enters the poem in the next stanza, these very same sounds come back even more emphatically. There is alliteration on “wende” and “was” and excessively heavy internal rhyming with “gnow,”

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How Much Is Enough in the Monk ’ s Tale?  173 “wo,” “do,” “so,” “two,” and “fro”—most of these terms contained within the sons’ offer of their flesh. The sons not only offer to extend their father’s life, but also enter into his language and extend its sonic resonance over time. The intense repetitiveness compounds over time, a miniature version of the pounding repetition of the Monk’s Tale as a whole. The poem offers its reader more than enough experience. Its very monotony raises and leaves open the possibility of when, and for what reasons, one might choose to keep reading or decide enough is enough. The Monk’s Tale turns a historiographical problem into a way of exploring the ethics of living within time. The powerful men of the tale consume matter and benefit from concealing what they take in, projecting an image of themselves as autonomous and exempt from temporal needs. The tale depicts them brought low through this very ambition; poisoned by the parts of themselves they neglect or cannot know. But along with critiquing the powerful, the tale also hints at other kinds of interdependency forged by living in time. Hugelyn’s sons recognize that temporality itself provides the grounds for interconnection. Conversely, Chaucer also shows how, not only for powerful men but for everyone, the boundaries of the self will always be porous. The same kind of estimative language that characterizes Hugelyn returns in a much humbler setting at the opening of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. There, it describes the “povre wydwe” who eats a moderate diet (CT VII.2821). Yet because the widow lives in time, she provides far more examples of moderation than are necessary. “She eet ful many a sklendre meel,” the Nun’s Priest observes, elaborating both on what she eats and on what she does not eat at length (CT VII.2833). She eschews wine of all kinds (“neither whit ne reed”), but eats “milk and broun breed, in which she foond no lak, / Seynd bacoun, and somtyme an ey or tweye” (CT VII.2842, 2844–5). The meals themselves might be small, but over the course of a lifetime they constitute a superfluity of examples. This is more than enough sufficiency, lived experience that exceeds its own exemplary significance.48 The widow lives an almost entirely autonomous life, subsisting modestly upon the products of her small farm. But this does not mean that her life extracts itself from time and history. Rather, time inscribes an excess of experience and matter into her life that cannot be fully recalled or accounted for. 48  Compare the discussion in Peter W. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 132–9, who notes that quantity is raised, seemingly uselessly, as an object of interpretation. See also Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114–16 on the entanglement of noble and agrarian matter in the description of the widow’s home.

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174  Reading Chaucer in Time This excess makes it difficult for a person or a text to fully know themselves. People need food, drink, and other material necessities to live. And texts, despite their seeming autonomy, also need to be sustained by temporal matter. They need readers to enliven them, to help shape their boundaries, and so to disclose their form. Meanwhile, just as literary form emerges over the course of a text’s reception, readers live lives formed and shaped by the texts that take up their time. Texts and readers become intertwined as part of one another’s history. Such relations can easily be structured by domination and self-effacement. On the one hand, as critics have long noted, interpretation can be a way for the heroic reader to assert mastery over the text. On the other, as this book has suggested, texts can also dominate their readers. Readers may even be counted among the forgettable, temporal people whom illustrious men consume in order to sustain their reputations. Throughout the Monk’s Tale, such relations often appear at their most violent. But the tale also provides reminders that relations between texts and readers are not always one-sided but, rather, may be generous and mutually constitutive. Readers sustain texts and texts make up part of the lives of readers. Hugelyn’s sons suggest one way of recovering this history and valuing it.

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Afterword When Is the House of Fame?

Just as Chaucer’s pilgrims never quite reach Canterbury, the critical moment at which formation gives way to form seems always to be on its way but never quite accomplished. In the meantime, literary formation achieves its ends in lived acts of reading. Readers become intertwined in forming Chaucer’s poetry and vice versa. This book suggests that the Italian influence on Chaucer helps motivate these dynamics, often by importing into Chaucer’s poetry ­different ways of imagining idealized or unhistorical contexts of reception. In Chaucer’s poetry, such perspectives are often shown to rely upon the violent elision or forgetting of the historical experience of reading. Nevertheless, it is also possible to understand the interaction between readers and texts within time as a kind of generative interdependency, with each becoming part of the other. In closing, I turn to Chaucer’s presumed earliest use of Italian literature in order to assess its form retroactively, from the perspective of the poet’s later career. In some ways, the House of Fame’s interaction with Dante’s Commedia anticipates the problems and potentials that emerge in Chaucer’s later Italian adaptations. Fame’s midair house does not stand outside of time, but it does evade ­diachronic history. This may be, in part, because of how Chaucer uses some of the mechanics of Dante’s eternal world to depict the afterlife of speech and writing. The influence of the Commedia on the House of Fame is well-known and permeates the poem at multiple different scales, from the tripartite journey structure to specific verbal borrowings to the questions both poets raise about whether and how we can trust what we find in writing.1 Dante and 1  Studies of Dante’s influence on the House of Fame often contrast the unreliability and mutability of Chaucer’s world of language with the truth claim of the Dantean afterlife. See for example Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 20–49; John M. Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 101–54; Helen Cooper, “The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 39–66. On the other hand, Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (Cambridge: D.S.  Brewer, 1984) emphasizes continuities between Chaucer and a broader tradition of fame that included Dante. Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Kara Gaston, Oxford University Press (2020). © Kara Gaston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852865.001.0001

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176  Reading Chaucer in Time Chaucer also share the fiction that they visit realms populated by figures that travel from elsewhere and take on form when they arrive. In Purgatorio, Dante explains the souls of the dead fall to the shores of the afterlife, where the air congeals around them in the form of the body that was (Purg. 25.31–108).2 For Chaucer, spoken words fly up to Fame’s palace, where they take the form of “the same wight / Which that the word in erthe spak, / Be hyt clothed in red or blak” (HF II.1076–8). This is not necessarily a direct adaptation of Dante.3 But Dante’s shades and Chaucer’s embodied speech acts share one key feature: they leave their original material, earthly context, travel to a new setting, and there constitute their forms out of something other than their initial temporal matter. The journey to Fame’s house thus suggests a world of reception. Indeed, the forms who wander through Fame’s house can perhaps best be understood to emerge through practical, embodied practices of transmission and reading. Critics including Mary Carruthers, Ruth Evans, and Rebecca Davis have emphasized how Fame’s house reflects both textual and mnemonic structures for storing and accessing (or failing to store and access) information.4 Carruthers explains that, in the image of embodied speech acts, Chaucer “gives us a precise image of how litterae, written in black and red, are signs of voces (both voices and words) and voces re-present in our memories those no longer immediately present to us.”5 The reader’s memory, actively responding to the words on a manuscript page, becomes the space where the body of the original speaker re-forms itself. Yet there is no single reader to awaken the 2 See The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 3 J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame: An Exposition of the House of Fame (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 98 proposes the connection to Dante. Edgar Finley Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets (New York, NY: Russell & Russell, 1964), 82 points out that rumors are also personified in Ovid’s House of Rumor (Met. 12.53–8). But Ovid’s rumors seem always already to be personified: the ­similarity, if not line of influence, between Chaucer and Dante lies in the dynamic of travel and re-embodiment in a new context. For the text of the Metamorphoses, see P.  Ovidii Nasonis ­ Metamorphoses, ed. William  S.  Anderson (Leipzig: BSB Teubner, 1977) and Ovid: Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004). 4  Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Ruth Evans compares the House of Fame to an archive: see Ruth Evans, “Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 43–69. On the House of Fame as a memory palace, see Beryl Rowland, “The Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame,” University of Ottawa Quarterly 51 (1981): 162–71. See also Rebecca Davis, “Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 101–32, who argues that Chaucer develops forms ­capable of accommodating motion. Kathryn McKinley has recently discussed the visual and ekphrastic poetics of the House of Fame in and against Italian contexts: see McKinley, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016). 5 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 280.

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Afterword: When Is the House of Fame?  177 forms that populate the House of Fame. Chaucer evokes both material and mental contexts of reception to structure the world of fame. But he externalizes them, extracting them from any one manuscript or act of reading, and instead locates them in the upper air. This is the sense in which the journey to Fame’s house parallels the journey to the afterlife. Not because Fame preserves information well (it doesn’t) but because in the House of Fame, Chaucer represents reception as if existing outside of mind and matter. In this strange space, it is possible to encounter many historical acts of speech and writing as if they were all taking place simultaneously. This situation becomes overwhelming as Geffrey enters the wicker House of Rumor, encountering such a crowd of people that, he says, “certys, in the world nys left / So many formed by Nature, / Ne ded so many a creature” (HF III.2038–40). Geffrey sees bodies in the House of Rumor that outnumber both the living and the dead. Chaucer may be drawing upon Inferno 3 for this comparison. There, Dante uses a similar comparative structure in describing the crowd of lukewarm souls rejected by both heaven and hell: “I’ non averei creduto / che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta” (“I would not have believed that death had undone so many”) (Inf. 3.56–7).6 The souls Dante sees are, by definition, otiose and excessive to history. Dante’s comparison both evokes and dismisses the great numbers of people who (according to him) did not count. But the comparison in the House of Fame works differently. It makes sense that speech acts outnumber people; individual people speak multiple times. The fact that Geffrey compares the two at all exposes the problems with modelling the afterlife of language upon the Dantean afterlife of people. The rumors Geffrey encounters multiply and compound the people they stand for. They reflect multiple different versions of their originators, snapshots of diachronic speaking assembled in a single synchronic space. They outnumber what any one mind could organize or make sense of within time. Geffrey thus encounters a whole history of speaking as if it were all occurring in a single moment. Even as the poem depicts this almost synchronic, almost (but not quite) otherworldly space of reception, it also shows it dissolving back into historical time. Some of the rumors that Geffrey sees flying about make their way down to Earth by slipping through the cracks of the wicker house, truth and lies often becoming entangled in the process. Geffrey also has a role to play in 6  Text and translation are from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert  M.  Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). This connection is suggested in John Fyler’s notes on the House of Fame, which he edited, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 989 nn. 2034–40.

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178  Reading Chaucer in Time bringing what he sees in the air down to Earth. He hurries “alther-fastest” around the wicker house to try to hear as many tidings as possible (HF III.2131). But he does not articulate all of his experience immediately. Some things, he says, “that I had herd of som contre / [. . .] shal not now be told for me” (HF III.2135–6). Not everything that Geffrey hears will be repeated right away. This mysterious news from some unnamed foreign country resonates suggestively with the Italian reading just beginning to infiltrate Chaucer’s poetry as he wrote the House of Fame. Some such influences, as Geffrey indicates, may not be ready to be displayed openly. Some experiences may not be remembered or understood well enough to be fully told. Yet nevertheless Geffrey remains confident that what he hears and sees will eventually make itself known: For hit no nede is, redely; Folk kan synge hit bet than I; For al mot out, other late or rathe, Alle the sheves in the lathe. (HF III.2137–40)

In Inferno, Dante’s lukewarm souls are lost to the passage of time, making no mark at all on history. In the House of Fame, by contrast, the future has the potential to recover the silent past. The synchronic space of Fame’s domain is not the endpoint for language. Rather, language has its ends in history, whether they come about quickly or slowly. My goal in this book has been to consider how literary form emerges here on Earth, rather than in an ethereal space or some privileged moment in time. I have therefore explored some ways in which literary formation achieves its  ends, gradually and asynchronously, within the time of reception. With this in mind, I have also attempted to understand reading as a constituent part of lived experience, whereby both texts and their readers come into being together. Geffrey himself exemplifies this. For he is very much like the red-and-black-clad forms he encounters in Fame’s domain. He is also a form of a speaking person generated in and through the reception of a text: the reception of the House of Fame.7 In this sense, readers do not enter Fame’s house from the outside. Rather, they create it in reading.

7  Compare Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 64, who describes “Chaucer sending himself, via his narrating ‘Geffrey,’ as a tiding to the future.”

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Bibliography Manuscripts Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Plut. 36 16 Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 842 London, British Library Harley 7333 London, British Library Lansdowne MS 851

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186 Bibliography Grossvogel, Steven, Ambiguity and Allusion in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1992. Grudin, Michaela Paasche, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Guthrie, Steven  R., “Babcock’s Curve and the Problem of Chaucer’s Final –E,” English Studies 69 (1988): 386–95. Haas, Renate, “Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ ” An Ingenious Criticism of Early Humanist Concepts of Tragedy,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 36 (1987): 44–70. Hagedorn, Suzanne, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Hanna III, Ralph, “Robert K. Root,” 191–205 in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers, Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984. Hanning, Robert  W., The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Hanning, Robert  W., “ ‘The Struggle Between Noble Designs and Chaos’: The Literary Tradition of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” The Literary Review 23 (1980): 519–41. Harkins, Jessica, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10,” The Chaucer Review 47 (2013): 247–73. Harris, Carissa, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Havely, N. R., Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980. Havely, Nick, Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hinds, Stephen, “After Exile: Time and Teleology from Metamorphosis to Ibis,” 48–67 in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception, ed. Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999. Hoffman, Richard  L., Ovid and the Canterbury Tales, London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Hollander, Robert, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1977. Hollander, Robert, “Inferno XXXIII, 37–74: Ugolino’s Importunity,” Speculum 59 (1984): 549–55. Holmes, Olivia, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Holsinger, Bruce, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Houston, Jason, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Huizinga, J., “An Early Reference to Dante’s Canzone ‘Le dolci rime d’amor’ in England,” The Modern Language Review 17 (1922): 74–8. Ingham, Patricia Clare, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves, vol. 1, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Johnson, Eleanor, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Jones, Terry, “The Monk’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 387–97. Justice, Steven, “Who Stole Robertson?” PMLA 124 (2009): 609–15.

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Bibliography  187 Justice, Steven, “Literary History,” 199–214 in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin, University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Justice, Steven, “Chaucer’s History-Effect,” 169–94 in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Kahn, Victoria, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum,” PMLA 100 (1985): 154–66. Kao, Wan-Chuan, “Conduct Shameful and Unshameful in The Franklin’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012): 99–139. Kellogg, Laura, “Boccaccio’s Criseida and Her Narrator, Filostrato,” Critical Matrix 6 (1991): 46–75. Kelly, Henry Ansgar, Chaucerian Tragedy, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. Kelly, Henry Ansgar, “The Evolution of The Monk’s Tale: Tragical to Farcical,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 407–14. Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, “Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts,” 207–44 in Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Kirkham, Victoria, “ ‘Chiuso parlare’ in Boccaccio’s Teseida,” 305–51 in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini, Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY Binghamton, 1983. Kirkham, Victoria, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1993. Kirkham, Victoria, Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Kittredge, George Lyman, Chaucer and His Poetry: Lectures Delivered in 1914 on the Percy Turnbull Memorial Foundation in the Johns Hopkins University, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915. Knapp, Peggy, Chaucer and the Social Contest, New York, NY: Routledge, 1990. Knight, Stephen, “Rhetoric and Poetry in the Franklin’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 4 (1969): 14–30. Knight, Stephen, “Colloquium on The Monk’s Tale: ‘My Lord, the Monk,’ ” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 381–6. Knowles, David, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 2: The End of Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Kohl, Benjamin G., “Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus,” History and Theory 13 (1974): 132–44. Kolve, V.  A., Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. Kolve, V. A., “Rocky Shores and Pleasure Gardens: Poetry vs. Magic in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,” 165–95 in Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. Lactantii Placidi: In Statii Thebaida commentum, vol. 1, ed. Robert Dale Sweeney, Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997. Lawton, David, Chaucer’s Narrators, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985. Lawton, David, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Lee, Alexander, Petrarch and St. Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology, and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy, Leiden: Brill, 2012.

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188 Bibliography Leicester Jr., H. Marshall, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Levine, Caroline, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Levinson, Marjorie, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007): 558–69. Lewis, C.  S., “What Chaucer Really Did to ‘Il Filostrato,’ ” Essays and Studies 17 (1932): 56–76, repr. in 37–54 in Chaucer’s Troilus: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stephen A. Barney, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980. Lipton, Emma, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Lombardi, Elena, Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Love, Heather, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 371–91. Lowes, John Livingston, “Chaucer and Dante’s Convivio,” Modern Philology 13 (1915): 19–33. Lowes, John Livingston, “Chaucer and Dante,” Modern Philology 14 (1917): 705–35. Lynch, Kathryn L., “Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer’s Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in The Clerk’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 41–70. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius, ed. and trans. William Harris Stahl, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1952. de Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Manioti, Nikoletta, “Becoming Sisters: Antigone and Argia in Statius’ Thebaid,” 122–42 in Family in Flavian Epic, ed. Nikoletta Manioti, Leiden: Brill, 2016. Manly, John M., and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, vol. 3, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1940. Mann, Jill, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Mann, Jill, “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 17–48. Mann, Jill, Feminizing Chaucer, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Manolaraki, Eleni, “ ‘Consider in the Image of Thebes’: Celestial and Poetic Auspicy in the Thebaid,” 89–108 in Ritual and Religion in Flavian Epic, ed. Antony Augoustakis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Marchesi, Simone, “Boccaccio on Fortune (De casibus virorum illustrium),” 245–54 in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Marrani, Giuseppe, “Filostrato,” 75–83 in Boccaccio autore e copista, ed. Teresa De Robertis et al., Florence: Mandragora, 2013. Martellotti, Guido, “Linee di sviluppo dell’umanesimo petrarchesco,” Studi Petrarcheschi 2 (1949): 51–80. Martinez, Ronald L., “Before the Teseida: Statius and Dante in Boccaccio’s Epic,” Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991): 205–19. Martinez, Ronald L., “Dante, Statius, and the Earthly City,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1977. Martinez, Ronald  L., ‘Mourning Beatrice: The Rhetoric of Threnody in the Vita nuova’, MLN, 113 (1998): 1–29. Martinez, Ronald L., “Dante between Hope and Despair: The Tradition of Lamentations in the Divine Comedy,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 5 (2002): 45–76.

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Bibliography  189 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. McGregor, James H., The Image of Antiquity in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, Filostrato, and Teseida, New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1991. McKinley, Kathryn, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016. Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text [special issue], ed. Arthur Bahr and Alexandra Gillespie, The Chaucer Review 47 (2013). Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–1475, ed. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, revised edition, ed. A. J. Minnis, A. B. Scott, with David Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Meyer-Lee, Robert  J., “Abandon the Fragments,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 47–83. Middle English Compendium, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, 2018. Middleton, Anne, “The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 121–50. Migiel, Marilyn, A Rhetoric of the Decameron, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Miller, Jacqueline T., Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Miller, Mark, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Minkova, Donka, The History of Final Vowels in English: The Sound of Muting, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991. Minnis, A.  J., “Chaucer’s Commentator: Nicholas Trevet and the Boece,” 83–166 in Chaucer’s Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius, ed. A.  J.  Minnis, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993. Minnis, Alastair, “ ‘Dante in Inglissh’: What Il Convivio Really Did for Chaucer,” Essays in Criticism 55 (2005): 97–116. Minnis, Alastair, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Mooney, Linne R., “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138. Moore, Tony, “ ‘Score it upon my Taille’: The Use (and Abuse) of Tallies by the Medieval Exchequer,” Reading Medieval Studies 39 (2013): 1–24. Moreau, Alain, Le Mythe de Jason et Médée: La va-nu-pied et la sorcière, Paris: Belles lettres, 1994. Morgan, Gerald, The Shaping of English Poetry: Essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer, and Spenser, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Murton, Megan, “Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 75–107. Muscatine, Charles, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957. Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York, NY: Zone Books, 2010. Nelson, Ingrid, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Neuse, Richard, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.

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190 Bibliography Neuse, Richard, “The Monk’s De casibus: The Boccaccio Case Reopened,” 247–77 in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Nissinen, Martti, “Prophecy and Omen Divination: Two Sides of the Same Coin,” 341–51 in Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, ed. Amar Annus, Chicago, IL: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010. Noakes, Susan, “Hermeneutics, Politics, and Civic Ideology in the Vita Nuova: Thoughts Preliminary to an Interpretation,” Texas Studies 32 (1990): 40–59. Noakes, Susan, Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Nolan, Maura, “Making the Aesthetic Turn: Adorno, the Medieval, and the Future of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 549–75. Nolan, Maura, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Norsworthy, Scott, “Hard Lords and Bad Food-Service in the Monk’s Tale,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 313–32. Nowlin, Steele, “Between Precedent and Possibility: Liminality, Historicity, and Narrative in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 47–67. Nowotny, Helga, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience, trans. Neville Plaice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. O’Brien, Timothy, “Fire and Blood: ‘Queynte’ Imaginings in Diana’s Temple,” The Chaucer Review 33 (1998). Orlemanski, Julie, “The Heaviness of Prosopopeial Form in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” 125–45 in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Orlemanski, Julie, “Scales of Reading,” Exemplaria 26 (2014): 215–33. Osberg, Richard H., “ ‘I kan nat geeste’: Chaucer’s Artful Alliteration,” 195–227 in Essays on the Art of Chaucer’s Verse, ed. Alan T. Gaylord, New York, NY: Routledge, 2001. Otter, Samuel, “An Aesthetics in All Things,” Representations 104 (2008): 116–25. P. Ovidii Nasonis, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson, Leipzig: BSB Teubner, 1977. P. Ovidii Nasonis, Ovid: Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn, London: Penguin, 2004. “Ovide moralisé”: poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle publie d’après tous les manuscrits connus, ed. Cornelis De Boer, Martina D. De Boer, and Jeannette Th. M. Van ‘t Sant, Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1931. Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception, ed. Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999. Owen Jr., Charles, “Troilus and Criseyde: The Question of Chaucer’s Revisions,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 155–72. Pacca, Vinicio, Petrarca, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1998. Partridge, Stephen, “Glosses in the Manuscripts of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’: An Edition and Commentary,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 1992. Pasco-Pranger, Molly, Founding the Year: Ovid’s Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman Calendar, Leiden: Brill, 2006. Patterson, Lee, Chaucer and the Subject of History, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Patterson, Lee, “Troilus and Criseyde: Genre and Source,” 244–62 in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013.

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Bibliography  191 Pavlock, Barbara, The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Pearsall, Derek, “Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts,” 39–48 in Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism, ed. A.  J.  Minnis and Charlotte Brewer, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992. Pearsall, Derek, “Pre-empting Closure in ‘The Canterbury Tales’: Old Endings, New Beginnings,” 23–38 in Essays on Ricardian Literature: In Honour of J.  A.  Burrow, ed. A.  J.  Minnis, Charlotte  C.  Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Petrarch, Francis, Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII, 2 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Petrarch, Francis, De viris illustribus: Adam-Hercules, ed. Caterina Malta, Messina: Università degli studi di Messina, 2008. Petrarch, Francis, Lettres de la vieillesse/Rerum senilium, tome V, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013. Petrarch, Francis, My Secret Book, ed. and trans. Nicholas Mann, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Petrarch, Francis, Res Seniles Libri XIII–XVII, ed. Silvia Rizzo with Monica Berté, Florence: Le Lettere, 2017. Pinti, Daniel, “The Comedy of the Monk’s Tale: Chaucer’s Hugelyn and Early Commentary on Dante’s Ugolino,” Comparative Literature Studies 37 (2000): 277–97. Pinti, Daniel, “Commentary and Comedic Reception: Dante and the Subject of Reading in The Parliament of Fowls,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 311–40. Prendergast, Thomas A., and Jessica Rosenfeld, “Introduction,” 1–18 in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas  A.  Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Quillen, Carol Everhart, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Raby, Michael, “The Clerk’s Tale and the Forces of Habit,” The Chaucer Review 47 (2013): 223–46. Rajna, Pio, “Per le divisioni della Vita nuova,” Strenna dantesca 1 (1902): 111–14. Ramazani, Jahan, “Chaucer’s Monk: The Poetics of Abbreviation, Aggression, and Tragedy,” The Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 260–76. Ransom, Daniel  J., “Apollo’s Holy Laurel: Troilus and Criseyde III, 542–43,” The Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 206–12. Raybin, David, “ ‘Wommen, of Kynde, Desiren Libertee’: Rereading Dorigen, Rereading Marriage,” The Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 65–86. Raybin, David, “Muslim Griselda: The Politics of Gender and Religion in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Girl from the Coast,” Exemplaria 21 (2009): 179–200. Reading for Form, ed. Susan  J.  Wolfson and Marshall Brown, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006. Representations on Form [special issue], ed. Jean Day, Representations 104 (2008). Ricci, Lucia Battaglia, Boccaccio, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Ricci, P. G., “Le due redazioni del De Casibus,” Rinascimento 13 (1962): 3–29. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, ed. Larry Benson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Robertson Jr., D. W., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Robertson, Kellie, “Exemplary Rocks,” 91–122 in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012.

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192 Bibliography Ronchetti, Alessia, “Between Filocolo and Filostrato: Boccaccio’s Authorial Doubles and The Question of ‘Amore per diletto,’ ” The Italianist 35 (2015): 318–33. Root, R. K., The Book of Troilus and Criseyde, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1926. Rose, Christine  M., “Reading Chaucer Reading Rape,” 21–60 in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Rossetti, William Michael, Chaucer’s Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. ms. 3943) compared with Boccaccio’s Filostrato, London: Pub. for the Chaucer Society by N. Trübner & Co, 1875–83, Part I, published for the Chaucer Society by N. Trübner & Co., 57 & 59, Ludgate Hill, 1875; Part II, Oxford University Press, London, 1883. Rossiter, William, Chaucer and Petrarch, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Rowland, Beryl, “The Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame,” University of Ottawa Quarterly 51 (1981): 162–71. Rudd, Gillian, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Ruddick, Andrea, English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Salter, Elizabeth, The Knight’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale, London: Edward Arnold, 1962. Salter, Elizabeth, “Troilus and Criseyde: Poet and Narrator,” 231–8 in English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Scala, Elizabeth, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Scala, Elizabeth, “Desire in the Canterbury Tales: Sovereignty and Mastery between the Wife and Clerk,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 81–108. Scanlon, Larry, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Schildgen, Brenda Deen, “Boethius and the Consolation of Literature in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” 102–27 in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Schildgen, Brenda Deen, “Reception, Elegy, and Eco-Awareness: Trees in Statius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 65 (2013): 85–100. Schless, Howard, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation, Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984. Schwebel, Leah, “ ‘Simile lordura,’ Altra Bolgia: Authorial Conflation in Inferno 26,” Dante Studies 130 (2012): 47–65. Schwebel, Leah, “Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in The Clerk’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 47 (2013): 274–99. Schwebel, Leah, “The Legend of Thebes and Literary Patricide in Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Statius,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 139–68. Severs, J. Burke, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942. Shannon, Edgar Finley, Chaucer and the Roman Poets, New York, NY: Russell & Russell, 1964. Simpson, James, “Chaucer as a European Writer,” 55–86 in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Singleton, Charles, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. Sledd, James, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” Modern Philology 45 (1947): 36–45.

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Bibliography  193 Smarr, Janet Levarie, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Smith, D.  Vance, “Destroyer of Forms: Chaucer’s Philomela,” 135–55 in Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, ed. Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016. Smith, Warren S., “Dorigen’s Lament and the Resolution of the Franklin’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 36 (2002): 374–90. Sobecki, Sebastian, “Wards and Widows: Troilus and Criseyde and New Documents on Chaucer’s Life,” ELH 86 (2019): 413–40. Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan, with the assistance of A. J. Minnis, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Spearing, A. C., Criticism and Medieval Poetry, London: Edward Arnold, 1964. Spearing, A.  C., The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval ­Love-Narratives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Spearing, A.  C., Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Stanbury, Sarah, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 141–58. Statius, P.  Papinius, Thebaid, ed. and trans. D.  R.  Shackleton Bailey, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Stavsky, Jonathan, “Tragic Diction in Chaucer’s Boece, the Canterbury Tales, and Hoccleve’s Series,” 155–69 in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and Its Afterlives, ed. A. Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver, Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018. Steadman, John, Disembodied Laughter: Troilus and the Apotheosis Tradition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972. Steel, Karl, “Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye,” 151–60 in Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, ed. Myra Seaman, Eileen  A.  Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012. Steinberg, Justin, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Stewart, Susan, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Stillinger, Thomas, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Stone, Williard E., “The Tally: An Ancient Accounting Instrument,” Abacus 11 (1975): 49–57. Strakhov, Elizaveta, “ ‘And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace’: Reconstructing the Spectral Canon in Statius and Chaucer,” 57–74 in Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, ed. Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Strohm, Paul, Theory and the Premodern Text, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Sweeney, Robert Dale, Prolegomena to an Edition of the Scholia to Statius, Leiden: Brill, 1969. Tarlinskaja, Marina, English Verse: Theory and History, The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Taylor, Karla, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy,” Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). Taylor, Karla, “Chaucer’s Uncommon Voice: Some Contexts for Influence,” 47–82 in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Todorović, Jelena, Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange: Authorship, Manuscript Culture, and the Making of the Vita Nova, New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016.

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194 Bibliography Trachtenberg, Marvin, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Travis, Peter W., Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus,’ ed. B. A. Windeatt, London: Longman, 1984. Troilus and Criseyde with Facing-page Il Filostrato, ed. Stephen A. Barney, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2006. Turville-Petre, Thorlac, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Usher, Jon, “A Quotation from the Culex in Boccaccio’s De Casibus,” The Modern Language Review 97 (2002): 312–23. Van Dyke, Carolyn, “ ‘To Whom Shul We Compleyn?’: The Poetics of Agency in Chaucer’s Complaints,” Style 31 (1997): 370–90. Vanacker, Janis, “ ‘Why Do You Break Me?’ Talking to a Human Tree in Dante’s Inferno,” Neophilologus 95 (2011): 431–45. Vessey, David, Statius and the Thebaid, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Vidal, Fernando, “Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 930–74. Villani, Giovanni, Villani’s Chronicle: Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani, trans. Rose E. Selfe, ed. Philip H. Wicksteed, London: Archibald, Constable & Co., 1906. Villani, Giovanni, Nuova cronica, vol. 1, ed. Giuseppe Porta, Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1990. Wallace, David, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985. Wallace, David, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Wallace, David, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wallace, David, “Dante in Somerset: Ghosts, Historiography, Periodization,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 9–38. Wallace, David, “Italy,” 218–34 in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Wallace, David, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew, “Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus, and the Fasti,” 221–30 in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie, and Mary Whitby, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987. Warner, Lawrence, “Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 55–100. Waswo, Richard, “The Narrator of Troilus and Criseyde,” ELH 50 (1983): 1–25. Wetherbee, Winthrop, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Wetherbee, Winthrop, “History and Romance in Boccaccio’s Teseida,” Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991): 173–84. Wetherbee, Winthrop, “The Presidential Address: Chaucer and the European Tradition,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 3–21. Wetherbee, Winthrop, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Wimsatt, James I., Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

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Bibliography  195 Windeatt, B. A., “Chaucer and the Filostrato,” 163–83 in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Witt, Ronald  G., “Humanism and Continuities in the Transition to the Early Modern,” 553–72 in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Ralph J. Hexter and David Townsend, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Witt, Ronald G., In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Leiden: Brill, 2000. Witt, Ronald G., “The Rebirth of the Romans as Models of Character (De viris illustribus),” 103–12 in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Yowell, Donna  L., “Ugolino’s ‘bestial segno’: The De vulgari eloquentia in Inferno ­X XXI–XXXIII,” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 104 (1986): 121–43. Zak, Gur, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Zingarelli, Nicola, “La Fonte Classica di un Episodio del Filocolo,” Romania 14 (1885): 433–441. Zissos, Andrew, and Ingo Gildenhard, “Problems of Time in Metamorphoses 2,” 31–47 in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception, ed. Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999.

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Index Adorno, Theodor  1 Adversus Jovinianum 134–6 Aers, David  77n.59, 145n.2 Agamben, Giorgio  123n.19, 124n.21 Ahern, John  2n.6, 23 Ahl, Frederick  55n.17 Akbari, Suzanne  74 Alfie, Fabian  31n.47 Aligheri, Dante circulation of his works  1–2 concepts of authorship  2–3, 48–50 Convivio 38–9 De vulgari eloquentia 51n.11 Inferno  64–5, 70–1, 101, 165–70, 177–8 Paradiso  40–2, 44–6 Purgatorio 175–6 Vita nuova  12–13, 16–18, 21–31 Alimentary language  113, 146–56, 167–74 Allen, Judson Boyce  48–9, 143n.66 Anderson, David  6–7, 52n.12, 56n.21, 79n.62 Armstrong, Guyda  2n.2, 145n.2 Ascoli, Albert  2–3, 23n.28, 24–7, 48–50 Audience, see Reception Augury, see Prophecy Authorship  2–3, 7n.18, 22–3, 26–7, 48–50, 52–3 Bahr, Arthur  9n.27 Baier, Thomas  83n.66 Baika, Gabriella Ildiko  65n.33 Baker, Donald  135n.42, 138–9 Banella, Laura  29n.44 Barchiesi, Alessandro  120n.12, 123n.20 Barney, Stephen  19 Barolini, Teodolinda  23n.26, 42n.60, 89 Barootes, Benjamin  76n.58 Barr, Helen  173n.48

Baswell, Christopher  105 Battles, Dominique  52–3, 79n.63, 118n.5 Beard, Mary  120n.12 Beardsley, Monroe  49n.4 Bellis, Joanna  6n.13 Bennett, J. A. W.  176n.3 Benson, Larry  71n.47 Berté, Monica  97–8 Best, Stephen  12n.41 Bestul, Thomas  145 Bible  25–6, 33, 41–2 Biggs, Frederick  6n.16 Biography  13–14, 21–2, 29–30, 147–53, 166–7 Bleeth, Kenneth  118n.5 Boccaccio, Giovanni approaches to reading  3, 49–50 circulation of his work  1–2 as scribe  27–31 De casibus virorum illustrium 13–14, 144–5, 149–53 Decameron  3, 13, 84–93 Filocolo  13–14, 116–18, 125–31, 140 Filostrato  3, 12–13, 16–18, 21, 31–7, 39 Genealogia deorum gentilium 79–80, 128n.29 Teseida  3, 13, 40, 51–2, 60–7, 73–4 Boethius  11–12, 18, 106–7, 152–3, 157–62 Boitani, Piero  2n.4, 52n.13, 165–7, 175n.1 Bolton, W. F.  71n.47 Botterill, Steven  24–5 Bourdieu, Pierre  136 Branca, Vittore  34n.52, 36–7 Body  12n. 42, 40–2, 59, 63–5, 69–72, 78, 97–8, 148–53, 156, 175–7 Bonora, Ettore  42n.60 Brewer, Derek  101–2

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198 Index Burrow, John  141n.63, 165n.34 Butterfield, Ardis  5–6 Calabrese, Michael  117n.4 Calcaterra, Carlo  147n.10 Cannon, Christopher  10, 16, 72n.51, 105n.35 Cantare  34n.52, 36–7 Carraro, Annalisa  150n.17 Carruthers, Mary  11–12, 22n.22, 48–9, 146n.7, 155–6, 176–7 Cervigni, Dino  93 Charnes, Linda  131n.34 Chaucer, Geoffrey manuscripts of his works  106–7, 139–40, 164 studied as adaptor of French literature  5–6, 84–5, 106–7 studied as adaptor of Italian literature  5–9, 15–21, 52, 84–5, 106–7, 116–18, 131–2, 145, 175–6 unfinished nature of his works  21, 40, 140–3, 164–5 Boece  157n.24, 159–60 Book of the Duchess 132–3 Canterbury Tales  116, 118, 140–3 Clerk’s Tale  13, 84–6, 103–15 “Complaint to Pity,”  17n.6 Franklin’s Tale  13–14, 116–19, 131–40 General Prologue  103–4, 156 House of Fame  141n.62, 175–8 Knight’s Tale  13, 48–52, 67–78, 80–1 Manciple’s Tale 80 Monk’s Tale  13–14, 145–7, 153–74 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 173 Parliament of Fowls  44, 73–4 Troilus and Criseyde  12–13, 15–21, 37–47, 69–70, 105 Chism, Christine  67–8 Cicero  78, 99 Clarke, K. P.  6n.14, 8–9, 19n.14, 27n.40, 29n.44, 52n.13, 90–1, 95n.19, 96–7, 96n.21, 99n.25, 101, 106–7, 107n.42, 110n.44 Clogan, Paul  56n.18 Coda  122–3, 125, 130–1, 139–40, 142 Cohen, Jeffrey  134n.40 Coins, see Financial language Coleman, William  50n.8, 52 Commentary, see Gloss

Complaint 134–40 Composition  2–8, 15–34, 74–5, 106–7, 155–6 see also Formation Community  22–3, 41–2, 44–7, 77–83 Cooper, Helen  7–8, 165–6, 165n.33, 175n.1 Cooper, Lisa  11n.38 Copeland, Rita  7n.18, 48–9, 56n.18, 78n.60, 84n.1 Crane, Susan  44, 67, 117n.3, 131n.33 Cristaldi, Sergio  23n.26 Culler, Jonathan  23n.29 Curiosity 99–100 Curtius, Ernst Robert  146n.8 D’Andrea, Antonio  24n.30 Dagenais, John  48–9 Davis, Rebecca  176–7 De Angelis, Violetta  56n.21 De Bury, Richard  1–2 De Man, Paul  49n.4 De Robertis, Domenico  23n.26, 24n.31 Dean, James  112 Dempster, Germaine  106 Denny-Brown, Andrea  114n.50 Dinshaw, Carolyn  12, 15n.1, 67n.39, 72n.51, 84–5, 93–4, 99, 112, 122–3 Division  24–5, 27–9, 106–7, 138–9, 164 Donaldson, E. Talbot  15n.1, 43n.61 Durling, Robert  23n.28 Eating, see Alimentary language Edmondson, George  46n.63 Education  84, 88–9, 93–109 Edwards, A. S. G.  164n.31 Edwards, Robert  6–7, 17nn.5,7, 19, 26n.35, 52–3, 52n.12, 118n.5 Eisner, Martin  28–9, 30n.45 Ellesmere manuscript  106–7, 139–40, 164 Evans, Ruth  176–7 Exempla  112–13, 134–40, 144–5, 148–50, 159–61, 173 Facing-page editions  19–20 Fantham, Elaine  54n.15 Farrell, Thomas  6n.16, 85n.5, 106, 110–11 Federico, Sylvia  178n.7 Feeney, Denis  119–21 Feimer, Joel  123n.19

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Index  199 Fein, Susanna  138–9 Female readers  2–3, 35–7, 48–52, 57–72, 81–3, 86–93, 109–10, 112–14 Financial language  111–14 Fleming, John  17n.5 Food, see Alimentary language Form as approached in this book  1–5, 12–13, 175 as collaboration with readers  72–7, 81–3, 156–8 and formation  15–21, 84–5, 105–6, 140–3 temporality of  1–2, 10–11, 23–7, 175–7 theoretical approaches to  9–13 Formation intellectual  84, 93–103 social 152 see also Form Fortune  69, 72, 136, 149–50, 158–60, 171–2 Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye  145–6, 156n.21 Freccero, John  78n.61, 169–70 Fry, Donald  141n.62 Fumo, Jamie  131n.35 Fyler, John  175n.1, 177n.6

Grossvogel, Steven  129–30, 129n.30 Grudin, Michaela Paache  146n.6

Gallagher, Catherine  9–10 Galloway, Andrew  87n.7 Ganiban, Randall  55n.17 Ganim, John  114n.51 Garrison, Jennifer  67 Geoffrey of Vinsauf  16 Gerber, Amanda  145n.2 Giancarlo, Matthew  7n.20 Gildenhard, Ingo  119–20 Gillespie, Alexandra  9n.27 Ginsberg  8–9, 61, 104–5 Giovanni del Virgilio  128n.29 Gloss  8n.26, 27–9, 52, 55–6, 56n.21, 62–3, 68, 78–80, 90–1, 105–8, 128n.29, 139–40, 145n.2, 157–8 Golden Age  112, 152–3 see also Financial language Goodman, Jennifer  165n.34 Goodwin, Amy  85n.5 Gragnolati, Manuele  42n.60 Grant, Alan  11–12 Green, Richard Firth  101–2, 117n.2 Gross, Karen Elizabeth  7n.19, 17n.6

Jerome 134–6 Johnson, Eleanor  9n.27, 11–12, 139n.56 Jones, Terry  165n.33 Justice, Steven  9n.27, 73n.52, 170n.47

Haas, Renate  157n.23 Hagedorn, Suzanne  17n.5 Hanna, Ralph III  20n.18 Hanning, Robert  48n.1, 132n.38 Harkins, Jessica  85n.3 Harris, Carissa  72n.50 Havely, Nick  1–2 Hengwrt manuscript  106–7, 164 Hinds, Stephen  120n.12 Hoffman, Richard  131n.35 Hollander, Robert  62n.27, 169n.45 Holmes, Olivia  23 Holsinger, Bruce  12n.42 Houston, Jason  29n.43 Huizinga, J.  38n.55 Imperialism  120–1, 134–6 Incompleteness  20–1, 40–7, 140–3 see also Interruption Ingham, Patricia  99 Interruption  25–6, 34–5, 39–40, 164–5 Isidore of Seville  157–8

Kahn, Victoria  95 Kao, Wan-Chuan  136 Kellogg, Laura  31n.47 Kelly, Henry Ansgar  157nn.23,24 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn  106n.39 Kirkham, Victoria  31n.47, 51n.11, 125 Kittredge, George  50n.9 Knapp, Peggy  71–2 Knight, Stephen  139–40, 165n.33 Kolve, V. A.  77n.59, 132n.36 Lactantius Placidus  55–6 see also Statius Lawton, David  15, 50–1, 146n.6 Lee, Alexander  95n.18 Leicester, H. Marshall Jr.  50n.9, 77n.59 Levine, Caroline  9n.27 Levinson, Marjorie  9n.27

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200 Index Le Livre Griseldis  84–5, 106–7 Lewis, C. S.  5, 19n.10 Lipton, Emma  139n.57 Love, Heather  12n.41 Lowes, John Livingston  6n.15, 38n.55 Lombardi, Elena  2–3, 23n.27, 49–51 Lovato dei Lovati  158n.25 Lynch, Katherine  100–1 Macrobius 170n.46 Malta, Caterina  147n.10 Manioti, Nikoletta  59n.23 Mann, Jill  50n.9, 77n.59, 100–1 Mannelli, Francesco d’Amaretto  90–1 Manolaraki, Eleni  54n.15, 55n.17 Manuscripts of Boccaccio’s works  32n.50, 50n.8, 52 of Chaucer’s works  68, 106–8, 139–40, 145, 164 of Chaucer’s sources  106–7 of Dante’s works  27–31 imagery of  176–7 of the Thebaid 56nn.18,21 Marchesi, Simone  149–50 Marcus, Sharon  12n.41 Martinez, Ronald  23n.28, 26nn.35,38, 64–5, 64n.29, 70n.45, 167–8 Martellotti, Guido  147n.10 Mazzotta, Guiseppe  92n.12 McGregor, James  130n.32 McKinley, Kathryn  6n.16, 176n.4 Memory  11–12, 21–3, 94, 114, 144, 155–6, 164, 176–7 Meter  12, 45–6, 75–6, 112–15, 123–4, 136–8, 157–8, 172–3 Meyer-Lee, Robert  140–1 de Mézières, Philippe  84–5 Middleton, Anne  87n.7 Migiel, Marilyn  92n.12 Miller, Mark  89n.8, 101 Minnis, Alastair  7n.18, 38n.55, 48–9, 157n.24 Misogyny  31–2, 36–7, see also Female readers Mooney, Linne  106n.38 Moore, Tony  113n.48 Morgan, Gerald  138–9 Moreau, Alain  120n.8

Murton, Megan  135n.46 Muscatine, Charles  5n.12, 48n.1 Nagel, Alexander  14n.43 Nelson, Ingrid  11n.38, 23n.29 Neuse, Richard  6–7, 145n.4 Nissen, Martti  55n.17 Nolan, Maura  1n.1, 9n.27, 10–11 Noakes, Susan  23n.27, 30n.46, 62n.28 Norsworthy, Scott  156 Nowotny, Helga  124n.23 Nowlin, Steele  138–9 O’Brien, Timothy  71–2 Occupatio  74–5, 77, 104–5, 137 Orlemanski, Julie  11–12 Osberg, Richard  114 Ovid Fasti 120–1 Metamorphoses  13–14, 69–70, 73–4, 117–25 Owen, Charles Jr.  20–1 Pasco-Pranger, Molly  121n.14 Pavlock, Barbara  119n.7 Petrarch, Francis concepts of authorship  49–50 De viris illustribus  13–14, 144–5, 147–50 Posteritati 97–9 Secretum 94–5 Seniles  13, 84–6, 93–7, 99–103, 106–8 Partridge, Stephen  68n.40, 106n.37 Patterson, Lee  7n.20, 19, 31–2, 48n.1, 52–3, 75n.57 Pearsall, Derek  141–2 Pinti, Daniel  8n.26 Prendergast, Thomas  10n.29 Prophecy  52–8, 62–4, 69–72 Providence  25–7, 31–2, 39–40, 133–4, 136 Questioni d’amore  32, 125–7 Quillen, Carol  95 Raby, Michael  101–2 Ramazani, Jahan  146n.5, 147n.9 Ranja, Pio  24n.30 Ransom, Daniel  70n.44 Rape 71–2

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/01/20, SPi

Index  201 Raybin, David  102n.31, 136n.47 Reading, see Female readers, Form, Reception, and Time Reception and adaptation  84, 104–5, 155–6 asynchrony of  1–2, 5, 10–11, 176–8 changing approaches to in Italy  2–3, 11–12, 22–3, 49–50 theoretical approaches to  11–12, 14n.43 see also Female readers, Form Rhetoric  64–5, 77–81, 134–6 Rhetorical devices  74–7, 107–8, 137, 139–40, 164–5, 170 Ricci, Lucia Battaglia  126–7 Ricci, P. G.  149n.16 Rizzo, Silvia  97–8 Robertson, D. W. Jr.  71n.47 Robertson, Kellie  134n.40 Rome  120–1, 148–50 Ronchetti, Alessia  32n.51 Root, R. K.  20–1 Rose, Christine  72n.51 Rosenfeld, Jessica  10n.29 Rossiter, William  8n.24 Rowland, Beryl  176n.4 Rudd, Gillian  74nn.53,56 Ruddick, Andrea  6n.13 Ruminatio  146–7, 155–6 see also Alimentary language Salter, Elizabeth  15n.1 Saturn  41, 144, 151–2, 169–70 Scala, Elizabeth  48n.1, 67, 75n.57, 114n.51, 142n.65 Scanlon, Larry  161n.27 Schwebel, Leah  6n.16, 52–3, 64n.30, 84–5 Schildgen, Brenda Deen  74n.54, 87 Schless, Howard  6n.15, 17n.6 Severs, J. Burke  106–7 Shannon, Edgar Finley  176n.3 Simpson, James  7n.17 Singleton, Charles  23n.26, 26 Sledd, James  136n.50 Sluiter, Ineke  78n.60 Smarr, Janet Levarie  31n.47, 60 Smith, D. Vance  10n.30 Smith, Warren  138–9 Sobecki, Sebastian  72n.51 Spearing, A. C.  10n.30, 15n.1, 20n.15

Stanbury, Sarah  20n.15 Statius Thebaid  13, 18, 51–60, 64, 73–4, 80–3, 167–8 Thebaid commentary  55–6, 78–9 Stavsky, Jonathan  157n.23 Steadman, John  43n.61 Steel, Karl  67 Steinberg, Justin  2–3, 22–3, 49–50 Stewart, Susan  49n.4, 124 Stillinger, Thomas  6–7, 17n.5, 23n.29, 24n.30, 36n.54 Stone, Willard  113–14 Strohm, Paul  10–11 Strakhov, Elizaveta  52–3 Synecdoche  139–40, 164–5, 170 Tally stick  113–14, see also Financial Language Taylor, Karla  6–8, 132, 175n.1 Tenzone  22–3, 66 Thebes  52–5, 57–60, 64, 70n.45, 78–80, 128–30, 151 see also Statius Time and Christianity  41, 129–31 and connectivity  40–7, 146–7, 165–74 durational time of reading  11–12, 86–93, 109–15, 123–4, 164–5, 172–3 and irrevocability  72, 90–1 and power  35–7, 119–25, 132–40 transformative effects of  38–9, 86–93, 97–9, 109–12 Thebaid, see Statius Todorović, Jelena  22–3 Tragedy  156–8, 171–2 Translatio imperii 134–6, see also Imperialism Translation  6–9, 18–19, 93–4, 96–7 See also Form, Reception Trachtenberg, Marvin  4n.9 Travis, Peter  173n.48 Trevet, Nicholas  157–8 Turville-Petre, Thorlac  6n.13 Ulysses  64–5, 78n.61, 101 Usher, Jon  149n.16

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/01/20, SPi

202 Index Vanacker, Janis  69n.42 Van Dyke, Carolyn  135n.46 Vessey, David  59n.22 Vidal, Fernando  41–2 Villani, Giovanni  166–7 Virgil  69–71, 105 Wallace, David  2n.3, 5, 7–9, 17n.5, 18, 31–2, 34n.52, 77n.59, 84–5, 93–4, 99, 116n.1, 118n.5, 132–3, 145n.4, 146n.5, 149n.15, 152 Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew  120–1 Warner, Lawrence  106n.38 Waswo, Richard  15n.1

Wetherbee, Winthrop  17n.5, 31–2, 64–5, 66n.37, 82–3, 157n.23 Wimsatt, James I.  5n.12 Wimsatt, W. K.  49n.4 Windeatt, B. A.  18n.8, 19–21 Witt, Ronald  147n.10, 148, 158n.25 Wolfson, Susan  9n.27 Wood, Christopher  14n.43 Yowell, Donna  168n.41 Zak, Gur  94–5 Zingarelli, Nicola  117n.4 Zissos, Andrew  119–20