Description
Cambridge University Press, Published 1985. Paperback, xii, 313 pp.; 23 cm; First Paperback Edition; with one black-and-white plate.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition. Glossy red pictorial paper covers with light bumping and creasing to edges and corners, and fading to spine. Binding tight. Ownership signature of the Chaucer scholar Charlotte C. Morse in ink at top corner of inside front cover. Pages mildly toned but clean and unmarked. Twelve essays on what fourteenth-century Italy meant to Chaucer, first published in 1983 and reissued here in the Cambridge Paperback Library. The volume grew from a project long urged by J. A. W. Bennett, to whose memory it is dedicated, and reprints his essay on Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio by permission of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Contributors include John Larner on Chaucer's Italy, Janet Coleman on English culture in the fourteenth century, Wendy Childs on Anglo-Italian contacts, David Wallace and Barry Windeatt on Boccaccio, Robin Kirkpatrick on the Commedia and the Griselda story, Nicholas Havely on the friars, and Peter Godman on Boccaccio's Latin works, closing with Enrico Giaccherini's bibliography of the subject. Covers reproduce two pieces of trecento sculpture, a detail from the tomb of Giovanni da Legnano in the Museo Civico, Bologna, showing clerks at a lecture (Giovanni is the Lynyan named in the prologue to the Clerk's Tale), and the equestrian statue of Bernabo Visconti in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Frontispiece is a detail from Nardo di Cione's Last Judgement in the Cappella Strozzi, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, showing Dante among the blessed. Morse (1942-2022) was Professor Emeritus of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and served on the editorial board of The Chaucer Review; her research centered on the Canterbury Tales and particularly the Clerk's Tale, the Griselda story treated in Robin Kirkpatrick's essay in this volume. Contents: Contributors; Preface; Note on the Texts; Note on the Illustrations; Introduction; Chaucer's Italy (John Larner); English Culture in the Fourteenth Century (Janet Coleman); Anglo-Italian Contacts in the Fourteenth Century (Wendy Childs); Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio (J. A. W. Bennett); What Dante Meant to Chaucer (Piero Boitani); Chaucer and Boccaccio's Early Writings (David Wallace); Chaucer and the Filostrato (Barry Windeatt); Style, Iconography and Narrative: the Lesson of the Teseida (Piero Boitani); The Wake of the Commedia: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron (Robin Kirkpatrick); The Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer (Robin Kirkpatrick); Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Friars (Nicholas Havely); Chaucer and Boccaccio's Latin Works (Peter Godman); Chaucer and the Italian Trecento: a Bibliography (Enrico Giaccherini); Index.