Assembling the Times in the Metamorphoses, Filocolo, and Franklin’s Tale

This chapter tracks the legacy of a depiction of temporal magic in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Medea’s creation of extra years for her aged father-in-law Aeson. In the Filocolo, Boccaccio adapts the Medea episode to depict a different kind of temporal magic: the generation of a May Garden in January. This section of the Filocolo was, in turn, the source for Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale. And although Chaucer does not appear to have gone back to Ovid directly, I propose that the tale nevertheless bears the mediated traces of Ovidian poetics. For Ovid associates Medea’s magic with dynamic processes of digression and collection that avoid settling into a single, overarching pattern. This kind of action, where formation unfolds improvisationally in time, resisting stopping points or interpretive codas, has analogues in both Dorigen’s lament and in the Canterbury Tales as a whole.

How Much Is Enough in the Monk’s Tale?

This chapter unpacks a problem in writing the lives of powerful men: how can individual people be extracted from the kinds of physical dependency that characterize life within time? In Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, great men are shown to consume both matter and people around them. Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium explores the implications of such dependency, depicting powerful men who try, and fail, to police the boundaries of their bodies and lives. Chaucer picks up this dynamic as he models the Monk’s Tale on the De casibus, and he explores other kinds of dependency as well. Indeed, in the Monk’s Tale, texts emerge as dependent upon their readers’ time and attention to help bring their form into being.

Introduction

Certain problems link the study of Chaucer and the Italian Trecento with the study of literary form: What is the relation between diachronic formation and synchronic form? How do we make sense of texts that do not seem to be in sync with their original contexts of reception? Is there an ideal context of reception in which a work’s formation might be fully realized? Similar questions emerge in Italian Trecento literature, where new relations between the time of composition and the time of reading were developing. The introduction to this text brings these literary historical developments to bear upon an overarching methodological argument. It proposes that, rather than form transcending time, or emerging in an ideal context of reception then beginning to crumble, readers gradually disclose literary form over the course of a text’s reception. The history of form and the history of readers are therefore intertwined.

Afterword

The afterward briefly summarizes the key arguments of this book: that formation does not end at any one privileged moment, but, rather, that readers help bring form into being; and that the history of form and that of readers is thus intertwined. It then brings this argument to bear upon the House of Fame. It suggests that, drawing upon the afterlife as it is depicted in Dante’s Commedia, Fame’s domain depicts a synchronic realm of reception located outside of any one reader’s temporal experience. Yet this world soon dissolves back into diachronic time and the history of lived acts of reading.

Learning in Time

This chapter tracks a question raised in multiple different versions of the Griselda story: how do educational narratives fit into other kinds of time? In Boccaccio’s Decameron, learning, especially learning associated with women, occurs in and through the passage of time. This dynamic becomes a problem in Petrarch’s Historia Griseldis and Letter to Posterity, which strive to disentangle intentional learning from involuntary changes wrought by the years. In Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, meanwhile, the Griselda story provides insight into how the time taken up by learning can, in and of itself, be a source of suffering. This embeddedness of learning in time has implications for critics, for we often assess the Clerk’s Tale as the outcome of a learning experience (Chaucer reading Petrarch). Such assessments might be incomplete without accounting for the time of reading and learning—both Chaucer’s and our own.

Writing Readers in the Thebaid, Teseida, and Knight’s Tale

Literary experiments in Trecento Italy share with the Canterbury Tales the notion that we might read texts in order to recover the thought behind them. But what does it mean for a reader to seek out a mental property in inanimate matter? Statius’ Thebaid offers one way for medieval authors to work through this question, for it depicts such a reader in Antigone, who perceives her brothers’ minds animating the flames of their funeral pyre. This chapter follows the figure of the lady at the pyre from the Thebaid to the Teseida and the Knight’s Tale. It argues that such reading practices emerge as self-effacing, prefiguring the literary critical notion of “the reader.” And it suggests that Chaucer connects such practices of self-effacing reading with both civilization and political control.

Form and Formation in the Vita nuova, Filostrato, and Troilus and Criseyde

Comparative source studies of Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde have often used Troilus’ formation to explicate its form. Such reading practices have an analogue in Dante’s Vita nova, which frames reading as a way of getting back to composition. But when does the creation of a poem begin and end? This chapter tracks how Dante bounds composition within time and how the Filostrato, drawing on the Vita nova, breaks those same boundaries down. This interaction establishes a prehistory for Troilus. For although Chaucer likely did not know the Vita nova, his poem inherits the problem of setting limits to formation in time. The ideas that inform Troilus thus take shape before Chaucer begins to write. The chain of influences explored here suggests that the ways in which we bound literary formation and bring it to bear upon form are, themselves, only provisional.