`The notes are a model of economy... The introduction is quite superb... The volume as a whole is a worthy addition to a series which has already begun to establish high expectations.' TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT`It reminds us just how good Boccaccio is.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENTChaucer made extensive use of Boccacio's romances as a basis for his major works, and any analysis of his handling of his sources must depend on a knowledge of the Italian poet's work.

David Wallace's examination of the aims and literary affiliations of Boccaccio's early writings provides an indispensable preface to and context for an informed appraisal of Chaucer's usage of Boccaccio. Previous studies of the relationship between the work of the two poets have tended to consider Chaucer's borrowings without making a thorough study of the traditions which shaped the Italian writer's work. Wallace argues that Boccaccio was not primarily concerned with winning recognition at the Angevin court, but was chiefly concerned with fashioning an identity for himself as an illustrious vernacular author. Chaucer recognised that both the l>Filostrato/l> and l>Teseida/l> derived their basic narrative capabilities from popular tradition analogous to that of the English tail-rhyme romance. Following a detailed analysis of Chaucer's translation practice in l>Troilus and Criseyde/l>, Wallace concludes that it was Boccaccio's attempt to develop a narrative art occupying the middle ground between popular and illustrious, domestic and European traditions that Chaucer found so uniquely congenial and instructive.

As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.

Although the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales have often been linked, this is the first ever major study of the two most popular medieval collections of framed narratives to examine the texts as a whole. The present study goes well beyond shared general similarities and the inconclusive search for source or analogue material in order to look at the internal dynamics of each text and the surprising similarities that emerge there in terms of theories of literature, authority and authorship and the particular reader response envisaged by their authors.

Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Stories for an Uncertain World understands the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales to communicate a radical uncertainty haunting most human endeavors, one that challenges effective knowledge of the future, the past, or the distant present; accurate perception of both complex, equivocal signifying systems, including language, and the intentions hidden rather than revealed by the words and deeds of others; and successful strategy in dealing with the chronic excesses and arbitrariness of power. This comparative study of Decameron novelle and Canterbury pilgrim tales yields the insight that the key to coping with these challenges is pragmatic prudence: rational calculation issuing in an opportunistic, often amoral choice of ingenious deeds and/or eloquent words appropriate (though without guarantee) to mastering a specific crisis, and achieving the goal of agency in the here and now, not salvation in the Hereafter. An initial chapter explores the Aristotelian antecedents, contemporaneous cultural influences, and narrative techniques that intersect to shape the radically uncertain world of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, while succeeding chapters pair, and compare, stories from both collections that illustrate the quest for agency-its successes and its failures—through plots often brilliantly adapted from simpler antecedents, as well as eloquence by turns satiric and insightful. This is storytelling that exposes a culture's fears, as well as its aspirations for mastery over the circumstances that challenge its existence; reading these tales should be a labor of love and the goal of this study is to help assure that the reader's labor shall not be lost.

Pier Pasolini's "trilogy of life" is a series of film adaptations of major texts of the past: The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights. The movies demonstrate a film author's acute aesthetic sensibility through a highly original cinematic rendering of the sources. The first two films, closely examined in this book, offer a personal, purposefully stylized vision of the Middle Ages, as though Pasolini were dreaming Boccaccio's and Chaucer's texts through the filter of his "heretic" consciousness. The unusual poetic visualization of the source works, which could be described as irreverent cinematic homage, has the potential to renew the traditional reading of such literature. This book shows how cinema becomes an alternative form of storytelling. It first studies the two films in detail, putting them in perspective within the trilogy. Next it interprets them, recounting misinterpretations and expounding upon Pasolini's ideological perception, and defends the oft-criticized adaptations. Finally, it discusses how the films represent innovation over strict adaptation. Appendices offer charts with information on the narrative structures of the films and the correspondences between them.

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