Chaucer and Italian Textuality

ISBN-13: 9780199607778 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 256 str.

K P Clarke

Opis

When Chaucer came into contact with Italian literary culture in the second half of the fourteenth century he was engaging with a productive, lively and highly varied tradition. Chaucer and Italian Textuality provides a new perspective on Chaucer and Italy by highlighting the materiality of his sources, reconstructing his textual, codicological horizon of expectation. It provides new ways of thinking about Chaucer's access to, and use of, these Italian sources, stimulating, in turn, new ways of reading his work. Manuscripts of the major works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch circulated in a variety of formats, and often the margins of their texts were loci for extensive commentary and glossing. These traditions of glossing and commentary represent one of the most striking features of fourteenth-century Italian literary culture. These authors were in turn deeply indebted to figures like Ovid and Statius, who were themselves heavily glossed and commented upon. The margins provided a space for a wide variety of responses to be inscribed on the page. This is eloquently demonstrated in the example of Francesco d'Amaretto Mannelli's glosses in Decameron, copied by him in 1384. This material dimension of Chaucer's sources has not received sufficient attention; this book aims to address just such a material textuality. This attention to the materiality of Chaucer's sources is further explored and developed by reading the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale and the Clerk's Tale through their early fourteenth-century manuscripts, taking account not just of the text but also of the numerous marginal glosses. Within this context, then, the question of Chaucer's authorship of some of these glosses is considered.

Recenzje

Moving between English and Italian sources, Clarke shows the great effort of synthesis required to interpret works through the lens of medieval textual culture. At the same time, his book reminds us that historical inquiry often discovers its own investments. The exciting findings of his study are Ceffi's turn from allegory and moralization in Ovid, the salacious marginal comments attached to the Teseida, the authentication of the Wife of Bath's exegetical prowess, and the imagined alternative to Griselda's abjection, ventriloquized by a male reader who wants her to speak otherwise. In the interplay of medieval texts and commentary, we find both historical alterity and modern affinities of reading.

O autorze

Kenneth Clarke studied Italian and History of Art at Trinity College, Dublin and the Alma Mater Studiorum, at Bologna, and went on to do his doctorate in medieval English at University College, Oxford. He is the Sykes Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he currently teaches medieval Italian and English literature.