Chaucer and Italian Textuality by K. P. Clarke (review)

Chaucer traveled to Genoa and Florence in 1373 and to Milan in 1378. Chaucerians have been interested in the ways that the literary forms, social practices, and political institutions he encountered there shaped his poetry ever since. Kenneth P. Clarke fruitfully advances the discussion by reminding us that the design of the texts Chaucer knew had as large a hand in his Italian education as the things he saw and the people he spoke to. The Dante, the Boccaccio, the Petrarch Chaucer met he met in manuscripts, manuscripts whose glosses and commentary, if they contained them, would have inevitably influenced his reading of their works. Chaucer, Clarke argues, was not simply impressed by seeing vernacular poems treated as if they had been written by the great figures of antiquity; ultimately he imitated them by glossing his own poetic creations.

In order to describe the complex materiality of medieval literacy, Clarke adapts Genette’s notion of paratexte—those features like preface, page layout, notes, that in fourteenth-century France and Italy played an increasingly important role not only in a poet’s construction of his book but also in his lettered audience’s interaction with it. In both cases, the boundary between text and margin was blurred. Annotations on the page, whether authorial, scribal, or a reader’s, in their effort to define, nuance, respond to, or resist the meaning of the words they accompany, make visible intricate networks of echoes and sources. The manner in which a glossed manuscript presents itself is inescapably hermeneutic and always a summons to intertexuality.

Clarke begins his investigation of the varieties of paratextual experience Chaucer could have encountered in Italian literary documents by discussing Filippo Ceffi’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides. After briefly laying out the concerns of the accessus that frequently introduced medieval compilations of these letters, Clarke notes that Chaucer also engages issues like authorial intention and its relation to the ethical utility of poetry in the prologues to The Legend of Good Women. Chaucer, however, subverts the commentary tradition even as he follows it; he seems less intent on specifying intentions than on multiplying them. The God of Love reads Chaucer’s motives one way, Alceste in an opposed but no less imposing way; when the poet defends himself, his avowals carry no authority. To my ear, Chaucer recreates the tension that arose when medieval commentators turned Ovid, who had already ironically turned the erotic content of his verse to instructional purposes, into an edifying schoolmaster.

In the 1930s, Sanford Meech argued that Chaucer used Ceffi’s volgarizzazione of Ovid’s epistles. Clarke agrees. I remain doubtful; Clarke does not add new evidence, and his discussion leaves intact the objections that have been raised. In a few instances there are striking similarities, but there are also some significant differences that aren’t taken into account; more generally, one continues to wonder why Chaucer would use Ceffi so sporadically and sparingly. Even if Chaucer didn’t know Ceffi, however, Clarke is right to say he would have appreciated the cultural significance of his Eroidi. The translation was a response to the demand by elite Florentines during the first half of the trecento for Tuscan versions of Roman classics; by positioning Latin source and Italian rendering side by side as equals, by dispensing with scholastic moralizing, Ceffi was promoting the poetic potency of the vernacular. Chaucer possibly knew about the production of such translations; if he did, their existence would counterbalance later humanist scorn for the vulgar tongue, which he also likely heard when he visited Florence.

Clarke then moves to Boccaccio, who would gloss not only Latin poets he copied but Dante and his own works as well. Here, of course, the Teseida is of particular interest to Chaucerians. Thanks to William Coleman, we now have a comprehensive description of the three different redactions of the commentaries that some manuscripts of the poem contain, the longest of which is in Boccaccio’s autograph. Clarke convincingly argues...