Chaucer and an Italian Translation of the Heroides

Extract

It has not been noted hitherto that Chaucer, in making poetic use of the material in Ovid's Heroic Epistles, resorted for convenience to an Italian translation of the Heroides, made in the Trecento. The author of this excellent model of Tuscan prose never achieved literary fame and even the facts of his life are unknown. For information concerning him one must depend upon the meagre statements set down in his introductory note to the rendering of the Epistle of Phaedra. His name in Hebrew, he informs the reader, signifies “Bocca di lanpana”—which is to say that it is Filippo. He refers there to a patroness—“bella donna giovane . . . . il cui nome è fiorito e nominato, secondo la lingua di Francia, di quel bel fiore che l'alto Re d'Francheschi porta nelle sue celestiali insegne”—and describes her coat-of-arms together with her husband's. This Lisa has been identified on manuscript authority—and correctly in probability—as the wife of a Florentine, Simone Peruzzi. She died in 1363. Assuming that she attained to the Biblical three score and ten, one may guess that the work inspired by her in youth was made between 1320 and 1330. On Delphic manuscript evidence scholars have given the author's surname as “Ceffi”—but their conjectures cannot be accepted as fully authoritative. An Italian version of Guido's Historia Trojana was executed by a Filippo Ceffi in 1324.