Introduction: Forms of translatio

Summary

The purpose of this study is to address an absence at the heart of critical responses to Chaucer's reception of the tre corone. Whilst there has been a series of book-length studies of Chaucer's relationships with Boccaccio and Dante, there is a notable lacuna in relation to his reading and understanding of Petrarch and Petrarchism. This, however, is not to say that there have not been important and influential essays, articles and studies within studies – the invaluable commentaries of E. H. Wilkins, Patricia Thomson, Piero Boitani, David Wallace and Warren Ginsberg, for example – but a sustained focus has yet to be placed upon the relationship which gathers together the accumulated evidence and arguments and draws upon them. The present study hopes at least to lay the groundwork for such a focus.

It may of course be argued that there has been no lengthy study of Chaucer's reading of Petrarch on account of a relative shortage of material. The works which we can confirm that Chaucer translated are the sonnet ‘S’amor non è’ (RVF 132) and the Latin tale of Griselda. However, what Chaucer translated from Petrarch and what he understood or read of him are not necessarily the same thing. And whilst the present study is predicated upon Chaucer's translations, it also incorporates the various literary, historical and social contexts which inform them and our reading of them. By familiarizing ourselves with these various contexts we are able to discover further possible Petrarchan elements elsewhere in Chaucer's work, such as in the post-stilnovistic idiom of Troilus and Criseyde or the quasi-humanism of the Monk's Tale. Furthermore, as Ginsberg has recently argued, Chaucer read Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio intertextually. And so by examining Chaucer's relationship with Petrarch we also trace the English poet's hermeneutic interaction between Italy's Three Crowns, which might profitably be thought of as three points on the same corona. Boccaccio in particular is integral to Chaucer's reading of Petrarch, as the Clerk's Tale draws on Petrarch's Latin revision of the final tale in Boccaccio's vernacular masterpiece, the Decameron, whilst the Canticus Troili's translation of Petrarch's RVF 132 is inserted into a work which is founded upon Boccaccio's Filostrato. Furthermore, Petrarch's humanism is outlined against Dante's ennoblement of the vernacular, as the latter is theorized in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia and embodied by the Commedia.