Chaucer’s Latin Boccaccio: The Influence of Early Humanist Compendia on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography

Honey, Jessica (2024) Chaucer’s Latin Boccaccio: The Influence of Early Humanist Compendia on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis offers new insights into the influence of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Latin historiographical compendia, De casibus virorum illustrium (Concerning the Falls of Illustrious Men) and De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women), on Geoffrey Chaucer. It is the first full-length study dedicated to the subject. In it, I ask three key questions relating to this intellectual meeting: 1) How did Chaucer encounter Boccaccio’s Latin texts? 2) Which features of Boccaccio’s work – material, textual, and paratextual – did Chaucer reproduce and interrogate in his own compendia? 3) How was Boccaccio’s distinctive historiographical style, influenced by the predicates of early Italian humanism, interpreted by other late-medieval vernacular writers? This thesis shifts the narrative on Chaucer and Boccaccio’s relationship by envisioning Chaucer as part of a network of early readers of Boccaccio’s Latin works. I compare Chaucer’s transmission of Boccaccian material in his own compendia, the Monk’s Tale and the Legend of Good Women, to the responses and engagement of other early readers and scribes in a sample of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts of De casibus and De mulieribus. Using this material contextualisation, I propose new connections between Boccaccio’s compendia and Chaucer’s experimentations in humanist form. I trace the distinctive and dynamic relationship between author and audience staged by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and two other significant translators of De casibus: the French clerk, Laurent de Premierfait, and Chaucer’s most significant successor, John Lydgate. In considering these progressive stages of engagement with Latin Boccaccio, I show the strikingly different ways these vernacular writers responded to Boccaccio’s innovative historiographical forms and dense Latin prose, and what their responses, and stylistic adaptations, indicate about their own readership.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	09 Oct 2024 08:35
Last Modified:	09 Oct 2024 08:35
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96963
DOI:

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