Piero Boitani, University of Rome
"A massive work [whose] overall shape and argument is very convincing. [Its essays are] perspicacious, fruitful, perfectly orchestrated and fascinating indeed."

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What was the influence of the Decameron on the genesis and shape of the Canterbury Tales? In this collection, leading scholars of Chaucer and Boccaccio offer original, provocative answers to this question in light of recurring critical resistance to the idea of the Decameron as a text for Chaucer. That resistance, informed by a model of literary influence grounded on the idea of interruption, would keep the Canterbury Tales away from the Decameron, though not the rest of Chaucer from other works by Boccaccio. In the end, of course, that resistance tells us more about Chaucer's reception since the fifteenth century than about Chaucer himself or his sources. Individual essays in this collection examine such issues as Chaucer's place in the literary landscape of trecento Italy that included Boccaccio and Petrarch, both heirs, like Chaucer himself, to Dante's achievement; Chaucer's response to Italy -his imagining social contexts for vernacular poetry independent of court patronage; Boccaccio's and Chaucer's use of localizing techniques that situate the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales in the world around us and its history; ideas of readership and vernacular literary consolation-Boccaccio's and Chaucer's devotion to Boethius yield new understandings of the comforts of mind and body; the emergence in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales of a subjectivity and a concept of agency shaped by the mechanisms of confession that we recognize as modern; and the falsely ascribed anticlericalism of both works. The collection also includes essays on the relationship between specific novelle and specific "Canterbury" tales, some of which have not been linked before or examined in ways the authors here examine them: drawing the parallels, for example, between Decameron 1.1 and the Man of Law's Tale as fictions of Christian and commercial mediation; reading the Knight's Tale in light of changes in trecento historiography; examining both Decameron 10.5 and the Franklin's Tale as examples of Boccaccio's and Chaucer's rewriting of Menedon's story for other social contexts; seeing the Monk as a Boccaccio figure and his tale as an allusion within the Canterbury Tales to Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium, another framed narrative to which the Decameron can be compared; and asking what the relationship might be between the Clerk's Tale and Decameron 10.10 without the intervening sources for Chaucer's work. All this speaks to the powerful presence of the Decameron in Chaucer and to the response of both poets to a cultural climate they shared. In sum, the collection argues for the existence of a vigorous late medieval European vernacular literature in diverse languages and demonstrates productive strategies for reading Chaucer with or against Boccaccio. About the Editors Leonard Michael Koff teaches English and humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is an Associate of its Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Brenda Deen Schildgen teaches Comparative Literature, Italian, and Medieval and Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. Contributors Peter G. Beidler Robert R. Edwards John M. Ganim Linda Georgianna Robert W. Hanning Leonard Michael Koff James H. Mc Gregor Richard Neuse Brenda Deen Schildgen Karla Taylor N. S. Thompson Foreword by Giuseppe Mazzotta Afterword by David Wallace Fairleigh Dickinson University Press London: Associated University Presses

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