Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs (review)

The boldness of Biggs' argument lies in his terse assertion that 'Licisca's outburst began the Canterbury Tales (p. 6). He refers to a moment at the start of Decameron 6, where the day's planning is interrupted by a noisy spat between two servants in the kitchen, Tindaro and Licisca, debating whether women come to their husbands as virgins. Licisca shuts Tindaro down and asserts that no woman she knows maintained her virginity until marriage, as the women in the brigata laugh uncontrollably. These kitchen characters return to work on threat of discipline, but questions of female autonomy dominate much of the rest of the Decameron. Biggs cleverly leverages this incident as the spark that provoked Chaucer to create the interactive frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales, displaying convincingly how Chaucer learned from Boccaccio the art of 'blending the frame into the unfolding arguments of successive tales' (p. 27). Biggs argues as well that Chaucer wrote three particular tales early in his project: the Shipman's Tale (originally intended for the Wife and based on Decameron stories); the Wife of Bath's Tale, which was then quickly adapted by Gower; and the Miller's Tale, which was then adapted as the anonymous Dutch story, Heile van Beersele. Instead of merely theorizing about potential influence, Biggs asserts a timeline and set of interactive literary relationships from Boccaccio to Gower. Nothing can be proved except by internal literary evidence, and it's refreshing for a Chaucer scholar to assert unapologetically the influence of the Decameron. The first chapter after the introduction, playfully entitled 'Boccaccio as Source for Chaucer's Use of Sources,' explores broadly how Chaucer blends, merges, invents, and surpasses his sources in order to contemplate the nature of story, authority, and voice in any number of tales and episodes, for Chaucer learned from Boccaccio how to make his tales invoke each other in a complex web of cross-references and reflective meditations. Biggs even speculates about what catalogued copy of the Decameron Chaucer could have used (pp. 8–10), in fact adding some bibliographic heft to many of his claims, passim, about the availability of sources.

Biggs overstuffs the 52-page excursus with information that he will pursue again in detail in the chapters, as he conducts a running taxonomy of the (old and revised) Sources and Analogues collections. Individual chapters then explore how the Shipman's Tale adapts various Decameron novelle; how the Miller's Tale was soon rewritten as Heile van Beersele; and how the Wife of Bath's Tale provoked the Tale of Florent. In these (at times over-packed and meandering) chapters too, Biggs indulges his own tangents, writes too self-reflexively and makes too many distracting internal references ('I would like to note here,' 'I will argue in a moment,' 'here let me suggest,' etc.). Fifty rigorous pages on the Shipman's Tale's sources ignore the story's obvious humor, preferring dryly to link it to 'the end of a feudal economy' (p. 97) and changes to the 'international banking system' (p. 100); and exposition on the Miller's Tale devolves into an illustrated excursus into tub construction and Dutch domestic architecture. The final chapter contrasts the 'radical' Chaucer and the 'conservative' Gower (p. 180), tracing the latter's adaptation of the Wife of Bath's Tale, which, though having no narrative source in the Decameron, nonetheless 'shapes and is shaped by the decameronian context' (p. 179) of Chaucer's larger engagement with gender and power in other tales. When not muted by micro-detail and clutter, Biggs' voice can be humane and clear, especially in the opening paragraphs of each new chapter. And beyond the clinical, often bloodless cataloguing of Chaucer's engagement with sources and analogues, Biggs offers a broad reading of Boccaccio and Chaucer as anti-authoritarian advocates of freedom, particularly woman's freedom, as explorers of class competition, and as...