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Reviewed by:
  • Chaucer and Petrarch
  • William Robins
Chaucer and Petrarch. By William Rossiter. Chaucer Studies, 41. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. xii + 235. $90.

Alongside the many books on Chaucer-and-Boccaccio, Chaucer-and-Dante, and Chaucer-and-Italy, we can now place William Rossiter's Chaucer and Petrarch, the first book devoted entirely to this fascinating intertextual relationship. The book's central chapters focus—understandably—on clear cases of literary borrowing, even if Petrarch's direct textual presence in Chaucer is of relatively limited scope. Two chapters circle around the "Canticus Troili": a first on the relation between Petrarch's sonnets and Boccaccio's Filostrato, and another on Chaucer's translation of Petrarch's sonnet "S'amor non è" (RVF 132). There are likewise two chapters on the Griselda story: a first on Petrarch's Latin recasting (Seniles XVII.3) of Boccaccio's tale (Decameron 10.10), and a second on how Chaucer rendered the story into English in the Clerk's Tale. Rossiter's book also offers an introductory rumination on medieval translation theory, a helpful first chapter that surveys Petrarchan poetics as well as Chaucer's likely knowledge of Petrarch's works, and a conclusion that ties up loose ends.

In siting his own study within the vast scholarly industry on Chaucer, on Petrarch, and on Boccaccio, Rossiter has had to make some hard choices. Readers eager for a scrutiny of manuscript circulation, say, or of the interplay of lyric and narrative [End Page 413] temporalities, will have to wait for a differently focused work. Rossiter primarily couches his monograph in relation to recent English-language studies of Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (especially those that provide substantial coverage of Petrarch), the literature of which is diligently used and cited. One of the central aims of this book is to rehabilitate Petrarch from the apparent denigration meted out in some of these studies, most obviously in David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity.

Wallace influentially argued that as Chaucer came to understand the distinction fourteenth-century Italians were drawing between republican ideologies of communal government (as exemplified in the guild-based regime of Florence) and absolutist ideologies of signorial rule (especially as elaborated in Viscontian Milan), he grasped just how much Boccaccio's literary production was embedded in a corporatist ethos and Petrarch's in the cultural possibilities called into being by ducal power. Chaucer structured much of his own poetry around a similar interplay between associational and hierarchical models of community, with a certain antipathy for absolutist forms of control, including those with which Petrarchan humanism was bound up.

Rossiter objects to this "anti-Petrarchan bias which has emerged in recent comparative readings" (p. 32) on two grounds. First, he insists that Chaucer principally would have engaged with Petrarch as a gifted writer rather than as a political animal: "The English poet saw something within Petrarch's writings, an expression of a thought unuttered by Dante or Boccaccio which added to his cultural experience of Italian culture. Chaucer's reading of Petrarch ought not to be displaced by our own literary and socio-political preconceptions, but rather understood for what it was: a meeting of individual minds" (p. 33). Such a post-Burckhardtian affirmation of the artistic achievements of the individual suggests that the rupture between Rossiter and Wallace derives as much from initial premises about how to do literary criticism as from divergent conclusions about Petrarch's cultural achievements. As a second ground for demurral, Rossiter argues that because Boccaccio and Petrarch worked with a shared literary inheritance, they ought not to be separated into opposing camps. Differences between them involve nuances of literary possibility within a common cultural framework, rather than stark cultural politics.

On the one hand, then, Chaucer was attracted to specifically Petrarchan potentialities for literary expression, but on the other hand he was attracted to commonalities that united Petrarch with Boccaccio and with medieval poetics more generally. To bring these two lines of sight into focus, Rossiter turns to medieval ideas of translatio, where among other things (the parameters of translatio are traced in a rather labyrinthine way) the transmission of a collective past and the interventions of individual writers are both granted...

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