Commentary and Comedic Reception: Dante and the Subject of Reading in The Parliament of Fowls

Commentary and Comedic Reception: Dante and the Subject of Reading in The Parliament ofFowls Daniel Pinti Niagara University No ONE DOUBTS that on, ofthe soucm foe Chaum's Pa,Na­ ment ofFowls is Dante's Comedy. When Chaucer creates the famously bi­ furcated gate that opens into the locus amoenus leading to Venus's temple, he does so by directly invoking the inscription above the gate of hell that inaugurates Dante's journey through the underworld in canto 3 of the Inferno, translating Dante's thrice-inscribed "Per me si va" as "Thorgh me men gon."l Chaucer's Parliament, however, is ostentatiously a poem of many sources; thus an essay that, oddly enough, focuses on not only just one of these sources but indeed perhaps one of the least of them requires some explanation at the outset.2 Considerable scholarly authority weighs against such an essay: Howard Schless claims that "Dante's contribution is not sufficiently extensive to have any funda­ mental effect on the poem as a whole," a claim quoted recently and apThe research for this article was in part supported by a 1997 Summer Research Award from the College of Arts and Sciences, New Mexico State University. An earlier version ofthis argument was presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, West­ ern Michigan University, May 7, 1998. I am grateful to David Wallace for suggesting a number of improvements to this essay. 1 Text and translations from Dante are taken from The Divine Comedy, ed. and trans. Charles Singleton, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970-77). All citations of Chaucer are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Subsequent citations will be made in the text. 2 Among these sources, of course, are Boccaccio's Teseida, Cicero's Somnium Scipionis as preserved in Macrobius's commentary on that work, Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae, and Ovid's Fasti. For a thorough, recent discussion ofthe source material, see the chapter on the Parliament in A. J. Minnis, with V. J. Scattergood and J.]. Smith, The Shorter Poems, Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 311 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER provingly by A. J. Minnis, who "share(s] Schless's opinion."3 Minnis also notes Dorothy Everett's comment that with regard to the Parliament, it is Dante's repeated "Per me si va" that "perhaps more than anything else . . . constitutes [Chaucer's] 'debt' to the Italian poet."4 All three scholars are right, of course-right, that is, in terms of the economics of source study that works on metaphors of "contribution" and "debt," and asks questions about what Chaucer "owes" to Dante, or what Dante ulti­ mately "owned," in the Parliament. I propose, however, to exchange this critical model for a different one, one of "intertextuality," and submit that there is good historical reason for doing so. 5 At least twelve different commentaries or sets of glosses, covering all or part of the Comedy, were composed between 1322 and 1375-that is, by the time of Chaucer's journeys to Italy in 1373 and 1378.6 These early Dante commentar­ ies provide, I believe, a heretofore untapped resource for understand­ ing Chaucer's reading of, and responses to, a distinctively fourteenth­ century Dante. Some of the commentaries in question (like those of the poet's youn3 Howard Schiess, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1984), p. 89, and Minnis, ibid., p. 289. 4 Dorothy Everett, Essays on Middle English Literature, ed. Patricia Kean (Oxford: Ox­ ford University Press, 1955), p. 143; quoted in Minnis, ibid., p. 289. 5 I do not mean to suggest that such an approach is entirely new in studies of the Parliament, much less in Chaucer studies more generally. It should be noted, though, that "intertextuality" can mean many things, including de facto source study. Minnis himself describes the Parliament as "an intricate case of Chaucerian intertextuality" (ibid., p. 265). 6 These early commentaries include those of Jacopo Alighieri (1322), Graziolo de' Bambaglioli (1324), Jacopo della Lana (1324-28), Guido da Pisa (1333), the "Ottimo Commentatore," now thought to be the...