Chaucer and Boccaccio

"In the late Middle Ages, Chaucer invented two imaginative domains - antiquity and modernity - that proved crucial to his culture and to our subsequent understanding of the emergence of selfhood, subjectivity and social arrangements. This study shows how Chaucer's effort to imagine these two worlds grew out of a reading and rewriting of Boccaccio's work.

The poems of Chaucer's artistic maturity are thus connected to literary tradition, and particularly the European vernacular, at the same time that they perform the cultural work of examining the mythic origins of medieval institutions and expressing the experience of social and historical change. Edwards provides us with a valuable way of approaching Chaucer's poetry and his complex vision of late medieval culture."--BOOK JACKET.