The Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio has had a long and colourful history in English translation. This new interdisciplinary study presents the first exploration of the reception of Boccaccio’s writings in English literary culture, tracing his presence from the early fifteenth century to the 1930s. Guyda Armstrong tells this story through a wide-ranging journey through time and space – from the medieval reading communities of Naples and Avignon to the English court of Henry VIII, from the censorship of the Decameron to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from the world of fine-press printing to the clandestine pornographers of 1920s New York, and much more. Drawing on the disciplines of book history, translation studies, comparative literature, and visual studies, the author focuses on the book as an object, examining how specific copies of manuscripts and printed books were presented to an English readership by a variety of translators. Armstrong is thereby able to reveal how the medieval text in translation is remade and re-authorized for every new generation of readers.

This is the first comprehensive critical comparison of English and Italian literature from the three centuries from Dante to Shakespeare. It begins by examining Chaucer's relationship with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and then looks at similar relationships within the areas of humanist education, lyric poetry, the epic, theatrical comedy, the short story and the pastoral drama. It provides a detailed comparison of major works from both traditions including descriptive and critical readings of Italian works. It shows why English writers valued such works and demonstrates the ways in which they departed from or tried to outdo the Italian original. Assuming no prior knowledge of Italy or Italian literary history, this book introduces the student and general reader to one of the most important and fascinating phases in European literary history.

While scholars have long explored connections between Chaucer and Boccaccio, relatively few have asked why Chaucer makes such a habit of obscuring the influence of his favourite vernacular author. Tropes of Engagement asks the question of what motivated Chaucer to camouflage his debt to his most prominent, yet never named, Italian source: Giovanni Boccaccio. Leah Schwebel boldly claims that when Chaucer erases Boccaccio, he is mimicking strategies of translation practiced by his classical and continental predecessors. Tracing popular narratives from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, including the Knight’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Troy Book, Schwebel argues that authorial erasure, invention, and manipulation are recognizable literary tropes of engagement that poets employ to suggest their connection to, and place within, a broader authorial tradition. Combining an attention to the cultural, historical, and material circumstances surrounding literary production with a mode of source study that looks beyond discernable influence, Tropes of Engagement recognizes authors self-consciously erasing and misreading each other as part of a process of mutual and self-promotion.

`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.

The Chaucer Bibliography series aims to provide annotated bibliographies for all of Chaucer's work. This book summarizes 20th-century commentaries on Chaucer's "Pardoner's Prologue" and "Tale."

People in the Middle Ages and the early modern age more often suffered from imprisonment and enslavement than we might have assumed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age approaches these topics from a wide variety of perspectives and demonstrates collectively the great relevance of the issues involved. Both incarceration and slavery were (and continue to be) most painful experiences, and no one was guaranteed exemption from it. High-ranking nobles and royalties were often the victims of imprisonment and, at times, had to wait many years until their ransom was paid. Similarly, slavery existed throughout Christian Europe and in the Arab world. However, while imprisonment occasionally proved to be the catalyst for major writings and creativity, slaves in the Ottoman empire and in Egypt succeeded in rising to the highest position in society (Janissaries, Mamluks, and others).

Influential accounts of European cultural history variously suggest that the rise of nominalism and its ultimate victory over realist orientations were highly implemental factors in the formation of Modern Europe since the later Middle Ages, but particularly the Reformation. Quite probably, this is a simplification of a state of affairs that is in fact more complex, indeed ambiguous. However, if there is any truth in such propositions - which have, after all, been made by many prominent commentators, such as Panofsky, Heer, Blumenberg, Foucault, Eco, Kristeva - we may no doubt assume that literary texts will have responded and in turn contributed, in a variety of ways, to these processes of cultural transformation. It seems of considerable interest, therefore, to take a close look at the complex, precarious position which literature, as basically a symbolic mode of signification, held in the perennial struggles and discursive negotiations between the semiotic 'twin paradigms' of nominalism and realism. This collection of essays (many of them by leading scholars in the field) is a first comprehensive attempt to tackle such issues - by analyzing representative literary texts in terms of their underlying semiotic orientations, specifically of nominalism, but also by studying pertinent historical, theoretical and discursive co(n)texts of such developments in their relation to literary discourse. At the same time, since 'literary nominalism' and 'realism' are conceived as fundamentally aesthetic phenomena instantiating a genuinely 'literary debate over universals', consistent emphasis is placed on the discursive dimension of the texts scrutinized, in an endeavour to re-orient and consolidate an emergent research paradigm which promises to open up entirely new perspectives for the study of literary semiotics, as well as of aesthetics in general. Historical focus is provided by concentrating on the English situation in the era of transition from late medieval to early modern (c. 1350-1650), but readers will also find contributions on Chrétien de Troyes and Rabelais, as well as on the 'aftermath' of the earlier debates - as exemplified in studies of Locke and (post)modern critical altercations, respectively, which serve to point up the continuing relevance of the issues involved. A substantial introductory essay seeks to develop an overarching theoretical framework for the study of nominalism and literary discourse, in addition to offering an in-depth exploration of the 'nominalism/realism-complex' in its relation to literature. An extensive bibliography and index are further features of interest to both specialists and general readers.