DA CHAUCER ALLA

RESTAURAZIONE
Maria Grazia Nicolosi
A.A. 2023-2024
COURTLY LOVE

“A love system that is, by most

people’s personal standards,
perversely bent on perpetual
unhappiness.”
(Menocal 1987: 103)

“A comprehensive cultural
phenomenon, a literary movement,
an ideology, an ethical system, a
style of life, and an expression of the
play element in culture, which arose
in an aristocratic Christian
environment exposed to Hispano-
Arabic influences.”
(Boase 1977: 130)
 FROM BOOK I
Chapter 1. What Love Is
Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight
of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the
opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all
things the embraces of the other and by common
desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s
embrace.
Chapter 3. Where Love Gets Its Name
Love gets its name (amor) from the word for hook
(amus), which means “to capture” or “to be captured,”
for he who is in love is captured in the chains of desire
and wishes to capture someone else with his hook.
 COURTLY LOVE
Chapter 11. The Love of Peasants
And even if it should happen at times, though rarely, that
contrary to their nature they are stirred up by Cupid’s
arrows, it is not expedient that they should be
instructed in the theory of love, lest while they are
devoting themselves to conduct which is not natural to
them, the kindly farms which are usually made fruitful
by their efforts may through lack of cultivation prove
useless to us. And if you should, by some chance, fall in
love with some of their women, be careful to puff them
up with lots of praise and then, when you find a
convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek
and to embrace them by force.
 FROM BOOK II: THE RULES OF LOVE

1. Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.

[...]
3. No one can be bound by a double love.
[...]
14. The easy attainment of love makes it of little
value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized.
[...]
31. Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two
men or one man by two women.
(ca. 1340/3-1400)
GEOFFREY CHAUCER (ca. 1340/3-1400)

“… that noble and famous

clerke Chaucer possessed
such frutefulnesse in
wordes… so swete and
plesaunt sentences… such
sensyble and open style
lackyng neither maiestie ne
mediocrite [= poise].”
Sir Brian Tuke, Preface to
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Complete
Works, 1532
 THE “FATHER” OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
There is critical agreement about Chaucer’s literary merit.
At least since Dryden he has been established as the first
great classic of English literature for mastery of his art
and for bringing English poetry into accord with medieval
European literature (French troubadours and trouvères,
Italian and medieval Latin literature).
What was new and unfamiliar for Chaucer’s contemporaries
is most familiar to us. Hence the difficulty for us to grasp
how remarkable an innovator he was. Chaucer was
notable in helping to raise the status of English by writing
exclusively in his native tongue. His genius owes much
to the English spoken around him by a community made
of country folk, the new middle class as well as the Court.
 BIOGRAPHY
o Son of John, affluent wine-merchant, with connections to the
court of Edward III.
o Geoffrey served as a page to Lionel’s (third son of Edward III)
wife.
o In 1359 he was with the army in France during the first phase of
the Hundred Years’ War, where he was captured, imprisoned
and ransomed the following year.
o In 1360 he became the king’s valet and participated in the peace
negotiations with France for which he was granted a life
pension in 1367.
o In the following years he undertook a number of diplomatic
missions abroad (France, Italy, 1372-3; Flanders, 1377), in
particular in Italy he visited Genoa and Florence, where he
probably met Petrarch.
 BIOGRAPHY
o Made knight of the Shire, Justice of Peace.
o He then occupied an administrative post in London as
Controller of Customs for hides, skins and wool of the Port
of London and lived in a house above the city wall, at
Aldgate.
o Further missions to France and Italy followed.
o In 1386 problems at court led to his withdrawal from
London.
o By 1389 Chaucer had returned and was appointed to a more
important office as Clerk of the King’s Works.
o He died in 1400 and was buried at Westminster Abbey,
traditionally the burial place for royalties, in what became
known as “Poets’ Corner.”
 Romaunt of the Rose (before 1373)

Chaucer’s literary career begins as a translator of the

French allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose.
Chaucer’s translation is at the same time original and
close to the thirteenth-century French model where the
shift away from exclusively military or heroic subjects is
quite evident. The two parts of Le Roman de la Rose are
two different poems (authored by Guillaume de
Lorris and Jean de Meung, respectively): the poets of
both parts were extremely important for Chaucer’s
evolution as a writer.
 Romaunt of the Rose (before 1373)
1. the original courtly love allegory (1236) was authored by
Guillaume de Lorris (c.1200-1238) who wrote 4058 lines and
then abandoned the poem; it begins with a dream of a beautiful
garden, in which a young man learns from experience the
pleasures and pains of conducting a courtly love affair and leaves
his narrator at a narrative impasse with no apparent solution.
2. Jean de Meung (c.1250-1305) completed it in 1275. In his part of
Le Roman de la Rose de Meung contributed a sceptical tone and
attitude akin to the fabliaux, those ribald and anti-clerical tales
popular among the new French and English bourgeoisie. De
Meung extended the poem to 21,780 lines, using Guillaume’s
beginning to chart a journey that was to encompass the
thirteenth-century scholastic world, including meditations on
marriage, friendship, sexuality, reason, and natural cosmology.
 Romaunt of the Rose (before 1373)

Chaucer’s version is a dream-vision too; most of the poem is

concerned with the dreamer’s quest to achieve the rose,
being variously assisted or opposed by allegorical figures
who embody aspects of the beloved. The allegorical and
philosophical treatment of courtly love centred on a richly
symbolic flower was common in the medieval French
romances and allegories of courtly love, in the poetry of the
trouvères, composed in the Northern langue d’oïl, and of the
troubadours, composed in Old Occitan. This literary source
and model feature not only in Chaucer’s dream-vision
poems but also in The Canterbury Tales. The
personifications of the Romaunt of the Rose grew into
characters in Chaucer’s later poems.
 Boke of the Duchesse (Book of the Duchess)
(c. 1368)
Allegorical lament in about 1,300 lines on the death of
Blanche of Lancaster (first wife of John of Gaunt) in
imitation of French models. This elegy is one of the
only two works addressing an aristocratic audience.
Close to Romaunt of the Rose in composition, form and
nature as a dream-poem. The ironically inept narrator
falls asleep and in his sleep he meets a knight in black
who tells him about the now departed and much loved
lady. Unlike conventional love poetry, the knight is
mourning the death of his wife, not the absence or
coldness of a mistress.
 Compleynt unto Pitee (Complaint Unto Pity)
 Written in Chaucerian stanzas. The first poem where significant
traces of Italian sources can be discerned.
 He would have met Italian intellectuals and would have been able
to consult – in circulation – the manuscripts of major authors,
possibly carrying copies with him back to England. There is
nothing in England in the fifteenth century to compare with
Chaucer’s revision of Boccaccio’s Filostrato – which is so detailed as
to have been inconceivable without a manuscript to hand.
 The Italian authors to whom Chaucer turned – in particular Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio – were all concerned to demonstrate the
literary potentialities of their own vernacular tongue, revisiting but
also revising the precedents they discovered in Latin, French, and
Occitan. Chaucer gave close attention both to the formal features
of such experimentation and to the larger aspirations which
inspired them. It was from the Italians that Chaucer learned what a
modern vernacular was capable of achieving.
 House of Fame (ca. 1378-1380)
It is an incomplete dream poem in rhyming octaves and
a comic meditation on reputation that uses many
images from Dante’s Commedia reset in a satiric
context. Drawing on Ovid, Dante and Trecento Italian
culture, Chaucer produced his own masterpiece of
comic fantasy, with a graver undertone of
contemplation of the vanity of human wishes. It ends
abruptly when a “man of gret auctorite” appears as deus
from a stuck machina. No solutions can be offered for
Chaucer’s first glimpse into the dizzy possibilities of
‘making poetry’ exclusively in his own vernacular.
 Parlement of Foulys (Parliament of Fowls)
(ca. 1380-1382)

Based on one of the most popular genres of medieval

literature, the Bird and Beast Fable, it is a delightful
celebration of St Valentine’s Day, when the birds
gather in front of the goddess Nature to choose their
proper mate. Witty and elegantly formed, it was
written to compliment the marriage of King Richard II
to Anne of Bohemia in 1382.
Here the Italian influence is thoroughly assimilated for
the first time, owing something to Boccaccio’s poetry
for its quality close to early Renaissance Italy.
 Parlement of Foulys (Parliament of Fowls)
(ca. 1380-1382)
It is a dream-poem simultaneously comic and courtly,
festive and philosophical consisting of 699 lines in seven-line
rhyme royal stanza in which the nature of love is explored
through a wide range of literary and philosophical sources.
The narrator has just read Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis: he
sees Scipio Africanus in his sleep as a spiritual guide. He is
first taken to a locus amoenus, where Venus’ temple is built,
whose painted walls illustrate the most famous love stories
of classical tradition, then to a meadow where lies the
central allegorical figure, the goddess Nature.
 Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382-86)
 Chaucer’s move into what is called the Italian period is exemplified
by this beautifully modulated narrative which consists of 8,200
rhyme royal lines arranged in Five Books and displaying a complex
rewriting of Homer’s characters from The Iliad. They were first
brought together in the same plot by the twelfth-century French
poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure in his Roman de Troie, but
Boccaccio was the first to use Homer’s episode exclusively in his Il
Filostrato. Like The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde is
silently indebted to Boccaccio. Just like in Boccaccio, the
marvellous, typical of medieval deployments of the genre, is totally
left out.
 Yet Chaucer was not translating Il Filostrato into English: his was
more a deliberate reinterpretation, as proven by its shifts in
emphasis, narrative shape and characterization, for the local, the
national, and the imperial (or colonial) are arrayed uneasily in
Chaucer’s work.
 Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382-86)
 Courtly love tropes here spread in triangulated relationships that open out
to homosocial circulations in the affective interweaving of love and
friendship.
 Chaucer’s criticism of conventions is not abstract but it is presented in
terms of contrasts between flesh-and-blood persons – Pandarus, Criseyde,
Troilus – and of live and developing human relationships. Pandarus is the
first great comic creation in English, in contrast with Troilus, the courtly
lover of trouvère poetry, Criseyde fluctuates between the two: a complex
individual, the first complete character of a woman in English literature.
 This poem is both comedy (charitable contemplation of human frailties,
setting of the social scene) and tragedy (recognition of the impermanence
of human relationships and disastrous conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde’s
love; defeat of Pandarus’s worldly wisdom). The story unravels according to
the pattern of tragedy exemplified by Boethius’s Wheel of Fortune. But the
romance genre requires the happy ending provided in the shape of Dante’s
Commedia whose very words from Paradise are quoted at the end.
(ca. 1386/7- 1400)
“If we ask ourselves wherein consists the immense
superiority of Chaucer’s poetry over the romance-
poetry. [It] is given by his large, free, simple, clear yet
kindly view of human life – so unlike the total want,
in the romance-poets, of all intelligent command of it.
Chaucer has not their helplessness; he has gained the
power to survey the world, from a central, a truly
human point of view.” Matthew Arnold

It exists as an unfinished manuscript miscellany of 24

tales, several of them in Chaucerian stanza, framed by
a “General Prologue” and a final “Recusation” and
linked by interludes between tales. The original plan
had been devised as 120 tales.
THE STRUCTURE

The “General Prologue” presents

characters from all walks of life come
together for a pilgrimage from London to
Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine
of Saint Thomas Becket and it gives a
brief insight into the singularities of the
many travellers’ partaking in the
pilgrimage; they compete to tell the best
stories, both in substance and in delivery.
The “General Prologue” structures the
stories presented within The Canterbury
Tales. While they are unrelated, each
storyteller bases their choice of tale on
the one that was told before. They may
have the goal of cheering the group up
after a very sad story or vice versa.
 HIERARCHICAL ARRANGEMENT
NOBILITY CHURCH THIRD ESTATE
Prioress Merchant
Knight accompanying Nun Oxford Clerk (Chierico, o Studente)
Squire Chaplain (Monaca cappellana) Sergeant of the Law
Yeoman (Valletto d’arme) three other Priests Franklin (Allodiere)
Monk Haberdasher (Merciaio)
Friar Carpenter (Falegname)
Weaver (Tessitore)
Canon (Canonico) Dyer (Tintore)
Yeoman (Valletto) Tapicer (Tappezziere)
Cook
Shipman
Doctor of Physics
Wife of Bath (Drappiera)
Parson (Parroco) Ploughman (Bifolco)
Manciple (Economo di collegio)
Reeve (Intendente di beni)
Miller (Mugnaio)
Summoner (Messo di tribunale
ecclesiastico)
Pardoner (Venditore di indulgenze)
“Geoffrey Chaucer”
 THE SOCIAL CRITIQUE
 While some of the pilgrims match the stereotypical
image their titles evoke, others completely diverge from
what would be expected. Chaucer also has many
members of the church in the set of storytellers (the
Friar, the Summoner, the Nun, the Pardoner). It seems
that a main objective for including these figures was to
highlight corruption within the church. While the
characters are not strictly based on real people, they
reflect numerous social flaws present at the time or
simply shed light on common human foibles. They may
also exaggerate aspects of their story in order to make it
more entertaining but, nevertheless, these distortions
can shine a light on the qualities people valued at the
time.