Chaucer And Boccaccio

In the late Middle Ages, Chaucer invents two imaginative domains crucial to his culture and understanding of the emergence of selfhood, subjectivity, and social arrangements; antiquity and late-medieval modernity. Robert Edwards demonstrates in this study how this was the result of Chaucer's reading and re-writing of the works of Boccaccio, which provides sources and models for portraying the classic past and medieval modernity. In so doing, Edwards provides us with a valuable way of assessing Chaucer's analysis of late medieval culture.

This book examines Chaucer's reading of Boccaccio and his representatin of antiquity and modernity in the late Middle Ages.

Robert R. Edwards is Distinguished Professor of English and comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.