This critical study places Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century story-collection in the context of the wide array of didactic narrative traditions that his tales are largely based on and frequently parody, including Aesopic fables, framed narrative collections of Islamicate origin, medieval compilations of sermon stories and of saints’ lives, and classical anthologies of historical anecdotes. In Boccaccio’s revisions, the inherited stories suggest very different ethical paradigms (more skeptical, more tolerant of natural impulses) than in earlier contexts. The book examines Boccaccio’s texts not only in relation to both premodern notions of literary exemplarity, but also to recent critical claims about narrative’s ability to promote empathy and emotional intelligence. Boccaccio asserts in the Decameron’s Preface that his tales provide readers with useful advice by showing the consequences of human behavior, but the very plethora of different teachings and variant outcomes that are proposed undermines the assumption that a specific narrative lesson can ever be universally applied.

This chapter explores the varying meanings and importance of form in the Canterbury Tales. Overall, the focus is on Chaucer’s understanding of form as integral to interpretation. The opening section contextualizes Chaucer’s approach to form within later medieval poetics, contrasting ideas of formal perfection and imperfection in the work of Dante and the Pearl-poet with Chaucer’s responsive and unpredictable forms. The Canterbury Tales is compared with tale-collections by Gower and Boccaccio, and with Chaucer’s other tale-collections – the ‘Monk’s Tale’ and the Legend of Good Women. The chapter explores the interplay and juxtaposition of forms both across the Tales, and within an individual tale (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Moving to a micro-level, it analyses one specific form – rhyme royal – by close-reading several stanzas from The Man of Law’s Tale. Finally it argues that Chaucer problematizes the conventional allegorical idea of seeing through form to reach meaning, suggesting instead that form and content cannot be divided. Meaning is inherent in Chaucer’s complex, kinetic, and, above all, multiple forms.

Three students of the classicist Piero Vettori turned to the study of vernacular language at midcentury and therafter: Benedetto Varchi, Girolamo Mei, and Vincenzio Borghini.Mei circulated his writings only in manuscript; he wrote especially on metrics and rhyme, and referred to the recently available writings of Aristoxenus of Taranto as well as Aristotle’s Poetics to discuss perception and judgment. Varchi acknowledged Bembo’s immense contributions but like Borghini, felt he had conflated the study of language with literature. Varchi used Aristotelian tools to analyze languages. They distinguished between literature as art and language as natural to humans; hence, its variation follows rules that are subject to rational analysis.Borghini devoted attention to the fourteenth-century vernacular, including an edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron that could withstand the Index of Forbidden Books.He also proposed a plan for teaching vernacular language in Florence’s schools.

Chaucer’s two recorded visits to Italy in the decade of the 1370s is the starting point for considering vernacular literature at a point of transition: the middle of the decade is marked by the death of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and the beginning of the Chancellorship of Coluccio Salutati, a key figure in Florence’s incipient humanism. This chapter briefly examines some of the most important Italian influences on the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, namely: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), and in particular the Comedìa; Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), whose Decameron, Filostrato and Teseida were so important for Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight’s Tale, as well as the Canterbury Tales more generally; and Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who is attributed in the Clerk’s Tale as the source for the story of Griselda (his Latin translation of Boccaccio’s story comprises the seventeeth of his letters of old age, the Res seniles), and whose sonnet from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is included in Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.