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Sweet New Style: Brunetto Latino,
Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Essays,
1981-2010, E-book
GOD'S PLENTY
TERENCE
IN DANTE, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE
Homo sum; humani nil a me
alienum puto.
Heauton Timorumenos 77
(painted on Michel de Montaigne’s study tower’s ceiling)
’Tis sufficient to say,
according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.
John Dryden on Geoffrey Chaucer
Dedicated to Lucy
Walker, who produced Adelphoe
and Phormio in Denver
In the Laurentian Library in Florence are several manuscripts
written out in Boccaccio’s hand. One, Laurentian Pluteo
38.17, is of all Terence’s Comedies.
Another, Laurentian Pluteo 54.32, of all Apuleius’ writings.1 (Plut. 38.17 and Plut
54.32 are available virtually at http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp.)
The marvellous mixture of two excellent African writers, Terence
and Apuleius, creates the Decameron
in Tuscan Italian. Which in turn creates the “God’s plenty” in
Middle English of the Canterbury
Tales. Already, before Giovanni Boccaccio and
Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, in the same century, had
created the Commedia in
Florentine Italian, though in exile from that city whose bread has
no salt. Tragedy is about dysfunctional royalty; comedy, instead,
is about healing democracy.2
These authors borrow from Terence his circular theatre and they
borrow from him his plots, his tales. These authors, copying
Terence, play games of dialogue between noble and labourer,
between women and men, and even children; they play games of tales
within tales, of narrations within narrations, they indulge in
Baktinesque and Gospel Magnificat turnings of the world upside
down, in which the slaves, women and children come out on top to
healing laughter and applause. Such tales like those in Terence
manuscripts can end with 'FELICITER' in rainbow capitals.
It should be noted that Terence, the freed African slave
associated with the Scipios in Rome, wrote in such pure Latin that
his Comedies were used
throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to teach
that language in monasteries, convents and schools, to both men
and women, and especially to children. England possessed one such
(ca. 1150 CE), which came to be owned by St Albans Abbey and is
now in the Bodleian Library (Auct. F.2.13=27603). It is one of the thirteen
illustrated manuscripts from before 1300 that have survived for
us; these typically provide the actors’ masks on their rack and
often illustrate the plays’ scenes.3 Later manuscripts could be
lavishly illuminated, giving rise to printed books with woodblocks
for every scene.
There were two strands to the writing of plays. One was of
straight drama. The other came from the law courts of Athens,
where logographers trained defendants in trials to make their own
speeches—and who to do so astutely studied their clients’
psychology and the context of their crimes in order to present
convincingly what was a lie as a convincing alibi. These became
Theophrastus’ Characters
and Terence’s dramatis personae—and
even Brunetto Latino’s examples of law cases in the Athenian,
Roman, Byzantine, and Florentine agora in his Rettorica and his Li Livres dou Tresor III.4 A drama articulated a
grouping of such character studies, setting the masks, the personae, the characters, as
its machinery, in motion.5
The author thus multiplied his voices, his own multiple
personalities. Terence’s use of intricate double-plotting created
even further complications and ironical conjunctions.6

For example, in the Adelphoe,
of the two younger pair of brothers, Aeschinus is in love with an
Athenian-born Pamphila, who is about to bear a child, while he
pretends to seize a flute-girl, procuring her in reality for his
love-lorn brother Ctesipho. Sannio is the slave dealer seeking
payment for the flute-girl; Geta is the slave appalled at
Aeschinus’ seeming betrayal. The older brothers, Demea, the
father of both boys, and Micio, who has adopted the older one,
disagree on how to raise them, Demea being severe, Micio lenient.
Sostrata, Pamphila’s mother, laments that her wronged daughter has
no dowry, and she has only a ring dropped by Aeschinus. All the
exchanging and disguising is resolved when the father and uncle
switch places: Demea, who had been harsh, becoming too lenient.
The Woman from Andros,
like Shakespeare’s Winter’s
Tale, tells the story of a shipwreck, the father dying,
the baby living. Now grown, that child, Glycerium, in turn gives
birth to a child, its father’s father Simo preventing the marriage
because he believes her to be the sister of a prostitute. Simo
arranges instead for Pamphilus to marry Chremes’ daughter, with
whom Pamphilus’ friend Charinus is in love. Pamphilus is
distraught, nor does the slave Davus’ attempts to resolve the
matter help. Crito arrives and identifies Glycerium as the lost
niece of Chremes and all ends well with the double wedding of
Pamphilus and Glycerium, of Charinus and Chremes’ nameless
daughter.
The other four Terentian dramas play similar games with youthful
heirs courting brides and concubines, their fathers instead
preoccupied with rank and dowries. As if in a quadrille danced at
Bath in a Jane Austen novel, the concerns are about class and
wealth, in Austen’s time being about getting a living in the
Church or a commission in the Army. Jane Austen’s mask is
Elizabeth Bennett (Austen=Augustinian; Bennett=Benedictine).
Terence’s mask is Geta, the slave, who so skilfully stage manages
the whole that all shall be well. Women and slaves outside of
power yet speak truth to that power. Here is Geta in Phormio defending himself to
Demipho with the argument that he cannot accuse or defend anyone
in a court of law: servom
hominem causam orare leges non sinunt / neque testimoni dictiost
(‘The laws don’t allow a slave to argue a case in court or to give
evidence’, 292-93). The endings of both novels and plays then have
their protagonists marry and live happily ever after: vos valete et plaudite.
We should not forget that liturgical dramas of scriptural events
and of saints’ legends were created in the monasteries, whose
libraries contained Terence manuscripts, for the young oblates to
act, thereby learning their Latin and their Gregorian chant
simultaneously—in play. Among these plays was the
Winchester/Fleury Officium
Peregrinorum of Luke 24, in which the disguised Christ,
with intense dramatic irony, appears as a pilgrim to Luke and
Cleopas, who do not recognize him; Jesus then dines with them at
the inn at Emmaus, blesses, breaks the bread, and vanishes.7 Other dramas, such as
the Resuscitatio Lazari
and the Visitatio Sepulchri,
movingly use the scarlet-clad figure of Mary Magdalen, in the
first with Lazarus, her dying leprous brother. All these dramas
were influenced by Terence, whose manuscripts were copied out in
monastic scriptoria and treasured in monastic libraries. Their
continuation, the vernacular cycle plays for lay audiences enacted
by guilds, are also influenced by Terence and explicitly so in
those plays written by the Wakefield Master.8
After Chaucer, there would be a flurry of fine illuminated Terence
Comedies in Paris, often
created to educate the King of France’s sons. Besides the dramatis personae and scenes
of the plays these illustrations, both as manuscript illuminations
and as woodblock prints, could include a diagram of a theatre, as
it was later thought to have been, a structure somewhat like the
Globe of Shakespeare’s production or a baroque opera house with
the spectators ranged in tiers, the mimes on stage, while
Calliopius sings the chorus.9
The 1490, 1493 woodblocks go so far as to show the prostitutes
plying their trade outside these theatres, reflecting Plato’s Symposium’s flute girls, the
Gospels’ Mary Magdalen, Boethius’ ‘whores of the theatre’, and the ‘red light cum
theatre’ districts of Chaucer’s Tabard Inn and Shakespeare’s
London Globe Theatre in Southwark and New York’s Forty-Second
Street.10

I. Terence's Comedies
and Dante Alighieri’s Commedia
For his own theatre of Hell, Dante adopts a structure consisting
of circle upon circle of sinners in whose crimes he, and we,
participate. Their voices create dialogues across time and space.
Finally we meet their ‘author’, the ‘father of lies’, enmeshed in
icy silence with flapping bats’ wings, seeming like a windmill,
amidst giants who seem like towers (Inferno XXXIV). Dante then turns this tragic
theatre upside down, or the right way round, as he and his
now-lost guide Virgil climb into the Antipodes of Purgatory to
find a similar but inverse theatre of comedy, whose
actors/spectators interact upon the cornices of a mountain, now
facing outward instead of inward, to have Dante arrive at
Beatrice, leaving behind Virgil—and tragedy. Ultimately they meet
God, the supreme Author of the drama of mankind, the mirror
reverse of bat-like Satan, into whose playbook all the ‘God’s
Plenty’ of the scattered leaves of the universe are bound and
gathered up into one volume (Paradiso
XXXIII.85-90, 130-31). God is thus a mirror to Dante’s Terentian
motto, homo sum: humani nil a
me alienum puto.
Dante first has his mirroring authorial protagonist/sorcerer’s
apprentice journey through lugubrious Hell, guided by Virgil, the
poet of lacrimae rerum,
the ‘tears of things’. The pagan world viewed life as tragic, to
be confronted with Stoicism or Epicureanism. The ambience of
Christendom, instead, saw reality through the lens of mercy, of
redemption, honoring the outsider from power. Needing Latin to be
kept alive for centuries this now Christian cultural ambience
turned naturally to a writer like Terence, who wrote in a living
Latin, the Latin of families, the Latin presenting the
perspectives of slaves, children, and women, all of whom the
Christian Gospels upheld in a similar world upside down. Hrotsvita
and Heloise could feel comfortable, at home, within the pages of a
Terence manuscript. Dante knew this, but elected even further to
write in the vernacular, Florentine, the language which even women
and children had by then come to most readily understand in
Tuscany (De vulgari eloquentia,
I.1). He also shows us this culture of oral literature in Italian
of women and children in Paradiso
XV.121-26, in a landscape that foretells of Boccaccio’s Fiesolan Decameron:
L’una
vegghiava a studio de la culla,
e, consolando, usava l’idioma
che prima i padri e le madri
trastulla;
l’altra, traendo a la rocca
la chioma,
favoleggiava con la sua
famiglia
di’ Troiani, di Fiesole e di
Roma.
One woman watched with loving care the cradle
and, as she soothed her infant, used the way
of speech with which fathers and mothers play;
another, as she drew threads from the distaff,
would tell, among her household, tales of Trojans,
and tales of Fiesole, and tales of Rome.
In doing so, Dante reflects his teacher Brunetto Latino’s choice
of writing in the vernacular. Brunetto’s family came from La
Lastra in Fiesole, Brunetto’s father and brother being notaries to
the Bishop of Fiesole, the Franciscan Filippo da Perusgia, and
with him were involved with embassies to Constantinople,
preserving classical humanism in the Middle Ages, which was then
taught to Guido Cavalcanti, Francesco da Barberino, and Dante
Alighieri. Brunetto translated the classic works of Aristotle and
Cicero into French and Italian but did so while also expecting his
students to learn to write in a living Latin. Joseph Russo has
argued that Dante could have had access to Terence in Verona.11 It is far more likely
that Dante alreadsy knew Terence as a school boy studying under
Brunetto Latino long before his exile from Florence, in whose
libraries can still be found important manuscripts of Terence
predating Dante’s time. (Florence’s Laurentian Library, http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp
has Plut.38.27 and Plut.38.24a; Plut.38.27 being a manuscript of
the ninth to eleventh century, which came to be owned by Giannozzo
Pucci, for whose wedding Botticelli painted a series of paintings
illustrating the Decameron’s
Fifth Day’s Eighth Tale, and then by a Medici son).
One can glimpse Dante’s love of Terence in the commentary written
by his son, Pietro Alighieri, on the Commedia:
Libri titulus est: Comoedia Dantis Allegherii: et
quare sic vocetur, adverta. Antiquitatis in theatro, quod erat
area semicircularis, et in ejus medio erat domuncula, quae
scena dicebatur, in qua erat pulpitum, et super id ascendebat
poeta ut cantor, et sua carmina ut cantiones recitabat, extra
vero errant mimi joculatores, carminum pronuntiationem gestu
corporis effigiantes per adaptionem ad quem libet, ex cujus
persona ipse poeta loquebantur ... et a tale pulpitum seu
domunculum, ascendebat poeta, qui de more villico caneret,
talis cantus dicebantur comoedia ... Item quod poeta in
comoedia debet loqui remisse et non alte, ut Terentius in suis
comoediis fecit.12
The title of the book is the Comedy of Dante Alighieri: and pay attention
why it is called so. In antiquity in the theatre, which was a
semicircular area, in the center of which there was a small
edifice, which was called scena, in which was a pulpit, into
which climbed the poet or the cantor, in order to recite his
song or sing it, outside of which where miming actors, who, as
the song was pronounced, adapted the gestures of their bodies to
it at will, according to the person concerning whom the poet was
speaking ... and into such a pulpit or little edifice the poet
ascended from which he sang of common things, therefore such a
song was said to be a comedy ... Thus the poet in comedy ought
to speak of low things and not high, just as Terence did in his
comedies.
For Dante uses the word comedia,
as his son states, to mean writing in a humble style. For
instance, in the De vulgari
eloquentia, he says: deinde in hiis que dicenda occurrunt
debemus discretione potiri, utrum tragice, sive comice ... si
tragice canenda videntur, tunc assumendum est vulgare illustre
... si vero comice, nunc quandoque mediocre, quandoque humile
vulgare sumatur (‘about the possible subject matters of
poetry we must have the judgment to understand whether they are to
be written about in tragedy or comedy ... If they are to be sung
tragically, then the illustrious vernacular is to be used ... Or,
if comically, then sometimes the middle level of the vernacular,
sometimes the low', II.4). In one of his Epistles (XIII.10), Dante
notes that the word comedia
signifies ‘rustic song’ (villanus cantus). He add that by nature
comedy ‘deals with certain adverse conditions but ends happily, as
appears from the comedies of Terence’ (comedia vero
inchoat asperitatem alicuius rei, sed eius material prospere
terminatur, ut patet per Terentium in suis comediis).
Concerning its diction, comedy employs an unstudied and low style
(vero
remisse et humiliter), and here Dante supports his
comments by quoting Horace’ Ars
Poetica (93-96). Then he
finally justifies the title of his own work:
et per hoc patet quod Comedia dicitur presens opus.
nam si ad materiam respiciamus, a principio horribilis et
fetida est, quia Infernus, in fine prospera, desiderabilis et
grata, quia Paradisus; ad modum loquendi, remissus est modus
et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et muliercule
comunicant.
And from this it is clear that
the present work is to be described as a comedy. For if we
consider the subject-matter, at the beginning it is horrible and
foul, as being Hell; but at the close it is happy, desirable,
and pleasing, as being Paradise. As regards the style of
language, the style is unstudied and lowly, as being in the
vulgar tongue, in which even women-folk hold their talk. And
hence it, is evident why the work is called a comedy.13
In the Purgatorio, Dante
has Statius ask Virgil where Terence is, and Virgil replies that
he is in the first circle of Hell, a circle reserved for virtuous
pagans like himself:
‘dimmi dov’è Terenzio nostro antico,
Cecilio, Plauto e Varro, se
lo sai;
dimmi se non dannati, ed in
quel vico.’
‘Costoro e Persio, ed io, a
altri assai,’
rispuose il duco mio, ‘siam
con quel Greco
che le Muse lattar più
ch’altre mai,
nel primo cinghio del
carcere cieco.’ (XXII.97-105)
‘Tell me where is our ancient Terence, and Caecilius
and Plautus, where is Varius, if you know;
tell me if they are damned, and in what quarter.’
‘All these and Persius, I, and many others,’
my guide replied, ‘are with that Greek to whom
the Muses gave their gifts in greatest measure.
Our place is the blind prison, its first
circle.’
It is with this encounter with the mask of Statius that we first
learn overtly that Dante has modeled each encounter of two with a
third, as it happens again and again in the Commedia, upon that other
drama, the Officium
Peregrinorum (Purgatorio
XXI.7-9). He equates Statius, the secretly baptized Roman poet,
with the disguised Christ, Virgil as the elderly Cleopas, himself
as the younger Luke, the omniscient writer of the text, presenting
himself as the foolish participant in the text, as one whom Christ
in the Gospel chides for being slow and dull of heart not to
recognise the Saviour.14
Indeed, the Officium
Peregrinorum takes pains to note that an oblate or the
abbot is chosen ad
representandum Christi. He is not Christ but he acts the
role, the mask, the disguise of Christ, further disguised as a
pilgrim who is not recognized as Christ. In a similar mode, Dante
can play games with real people acted out as masks in a fiction,
among them his own teacher, Brunetto Latino, or pagan poets, such
as Homer, Virgil, and Statius.
Terence populates his plays with masks of daughters, wives, and
prostitutes, with merchants, soldiers, sailors, sons, and fathers,
the full spectrum of the social order, as in the prologue of Eunuchus:
qui
magis licet currentem servom scribere,
bonas matronas facere,
meretrices malas,
parasitum edacem, gloriosum
militem,
puerum supponi, falli per
servom senem,
amare, odisse,
suspicari? (36-40)
How is it more permissible to present a running slave or good
matrons or wicked courtesans or a greedy parasite or a boastful
soldier or babies being substituted or an old man being deceived
by his slave or love or hate or suspicions?
Following the same pattern, Dante adds nuns, monks, and friars,
Emperors and Kings, Popes and Cardinals. Dante places these
Theophrastian and Terentian characters, modeled upon historical
persons within a further machinery, that of teaching Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, acquired
for Florence by Brunetto Latino, his Master, who translated the
text into the vernacular French and Italian, as well as that of
the Gospels and Christ’s world-upside-down parables.
In the Commedia, we
listen to dramatic voices, but in Italian, to a dramatic dialogue,
as if from a Terence play. We listen to voices which are placed
even as if in Terence’s mansions, in the various circles of Hell,
Purgatory, and Paradise. Aristotle defines tragedy as a work where
the recognition, the anagnorisis,
comes too late, whereas in comedy it is timely. In Hell, for
instance, the knowledge comes too late, as in the scene with Guido
Cavalcanti’s father, in Inferno
X.61-72,15 while in Purgatorio and Paradiso, knowledge comes in
time for redemption, as with the recognition by Statius of Virgil
to Dante’s laughter of delight (Purgatorio
XXI.97-136).
Though Dante alludes to Terence’s Comedies in his writings, it has been suggested
that he may not have read the plays. The mention of Chremes in Epistola XIII, quoted above,
is taken from Horace’s interpretation of Terence. A reference in Inferno XVIII.133-36 to the
courtesan Thais, a character in the Eunuchus, shows that Dante’s use of the play may
derive from Cicero’s De
amicitia, not from the Eunuchus
itself;16 Hrotsvita
also uses powerfully the figure of Thais from the writings of the
Desert Fathers. But, given his arguments that we saw above,
concerning Terence’ humble style, we can note the ways in which he
switches codes: the poet displays remarkable versatility, from the
proud Ghibelline speech, which as logographer he concocts for
Farinata in Inferno X,
to the common words ‘giri . . . il villan la sua marra’
(‘let the peasant turn his mattock’), about a contadino used in Brunetto
Latino’s Inferno XV.96,
which echoes the discourse between laboring Menedemus and critical
Chremes of the Heauton
Timorumenos (53-174).
We can find the Terentian/Gospel hilarity in the account by the
Dominican St Thomas Aquinas of the life of the Franciscan founder,
St Francis of Assisi. Lady Poverty was wed to Christ, then no one
wanted the afflicted widow until St Francis came and married her.
Immediately, all his followers hurriedly pursued her, as if she
were the village prostitute.17
Giotto or a follower painted that episode in Assisi’s Lower
Church: Lady Poverty in rags, gaunt, emaciated, with thorns about
her, being married to Francis, the singer of love songs to her.18 Shadowed behind that
hilarity are those Terentian episodes of the proud poor maidens
who are ultimately revealed to be Athenian citizens with dowries.
Boccaccio’s, Petrarch’s, and Chaucer’s Grisilda is shaped in their
mould.

Francis weds
Povertà
The Marquis weds Griselda, far right
Despite its tragic ending, the real-life story of Piccarda
Donati resonates with Terentian comedy. Dante places the Donati
family siblings, to whom he was related by his marriage to their
cousin Gemma Donati, separately: Corso Donati in Hell (discussed
in Purgatorio
XXIV.82-87), Forese Donati in Purgatory (Purgatorio XXIII.40-XXIV.25, 74-103), and
Piccarda Donati in Paradise (Purgatorio
XXIV. 10-15, Paradiso III.16-123).
Piccarda’s vocation as a virgin nun was brutally violated by her
brother Corso, who kidnapped her from her Clarissan house and
forcibly married her off to his associate Rossellino della Tosa.
We find her, still faithful to her Vows in spirit in the sphere of
the Moon in Paradise.
Ultimately the feliciter
of Dante’s text shall be St Bernard’s Hymn to the Virgin, heaping
paradox upon paradox, that she is daughter of her son, this
pregnant maiden, this madre
ragazza, who, as Theotokos,
births God in Paradiso
XXXIII.1-39, upon whom Dante and his Beatrice, the wife of
another, gaze.
The Florence of Dante and Boccaccio put into ethical practice the
Seven Acts of Mercy, giving drink to the thirsty, feeding the
hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the stranger, visiting the
prisoner, tending the sick, burying the dead, building vast
hospitals for pilgrims and for abandoned babies, such as the
Buonomini di San Martino, the Arcispedale Santa Maria Nuova, the
most beautiful Ospedale degli Innocenti, which taught the boys
skills and gave the girls dowries, and the Arciconfraternita della
Misericordia members, who tend to the sick and dying and who bury
the dead, who laid the first stone of the new Duomo seven hundred
years ago, and whose feet each Maundy Thursday the Cardinal
washes. Those ‘world-upside-down’ structures continue into the
present and, side by side with the upstart Medici ascendancy,
shaped a Florence which carefully copied out Terence manuscripts.
The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana with its manuscripts of
Terence, Apuleius, Dante and Boccaccio, bound in red kermes
leather with horn labels, brass bosses and iron chains anchoring
them to reading desks, in Michelangelo’s design for them, was open
democratically to the public.
II. Terence's Comedies
and Boccaccio’s Decameron
We are not sure of Dante’s actual reading of Terence, though we
can be certain of his knowledge of him. We know that Giovanni
Boccaccio not only read all of Terence, but he even copied out not
only the Commedia of
Dante but also all the Comedies
of Terence in his own hand, the latter into the manuscript,
Laurentian Plut. 38.17 (http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp).
To create his works, such as the Teseida and the Decameron, Boccaccio blended together classical
writers, among them Statius, Apuleius, and Terence, as well as his
beloved Dante.
Again, like Dante, he creates tales within tales, making use of
the dramatis personae,
the rank of masks, of daughters, wives, prostitutes, merchants,
soldiers, sailors, sons, and fathers, adding to these masks those
of nuns, monks, and friars. The seven women and the three men, who
meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella in plague tide, and who
then journey with their quarrelling tale-telling servants to the
abandoned villas around Fiesole telling ten tales, each day for a
fortnight, create thus a hundred tales, mirroring Dante’s hundred
cantos of the Commedia.
From the midst of tragedy and chaos of the city of Florence during
the plague they come to its beauteous countryside and repeat what
Dante had already described, of women telling tales while they
rocked the cradle and spun the yarn in Fiesole in centuries past.
Pampinea, the first Queen to be crowned to preside over the first
day, appoints Dioneo’s manservant, Parmeno—from the rotuli of Terence’s plays and
racks of masks—to be steward and to organize their lodgings and
meals for each day, while Chremes as a name is re-cycled for
Boccaccio’s Tenth Day’s Eighth Tale. The voices of Terence, the
conversations Dante holds with those whom he encounters in the
Cantos, the tales Boccaccio's brigata
of ten tell, multiply into the countless dialogues of countless
masks within their dramas, ‘God’s Plenty’.
Drama had been seen as therapy in the classical world, especially
at the great theatre by Aesculapius’ temple at Epidauros.
Similarly the telling of tales is about healing and salvation, as
with Scheherazade in a Thousand
and One Nights. Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale is a tale much like those in
Terence, of abandoned babies restored to their parents. Bruno
Bettelheim, survivor of Auschwitz, wrote The Uses of Enchantment, advocating the telling
of tales for children.19 Leslie
Silko showed how the telling of tales among Native people
functions as consolation.20
Germaine Greer in her Guardian
essay, ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’, eloquently advocates the telling
of such tales.21 While
Stith Thompson22 and
Vladimir Propp23
showed how these tales share in specific formulae, as indeed we
find is the case in Terence, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and
Shakespeare. Nor should we forget a marvelous bit of
self-referentiality in Boccaccio’s Sixth Day’s First Tale on how
not to tell a tale, particularly in confusing the characters and
jumbling the plot, that follows upon the servants’ row, in which
Licisca boasts of women’s sexual exploits and infidelities to put
down Tindaro. Chaucer will play the same joke with his offending,
aborted ‘Sir Thopas’ in the Canterbury
Tales. We remember such moments of seeming incompetence
and muddle-headedness on stage engineered by the hero-slaves cum
author, who save the day and organize the plot in Terence's Comedies and in Luke's
Gospel.
Let us now discuss some parallels between Terence’s Comedies and Boccaccio’s Decameron in more detail. In
Terence’s Hecyra,
Pamphilus, in love with the courtesan Bacchis, is married off to
Philumena against his will. She becomes pregnant by him when, in
his drunkenness, he rapes her, not knowing who she is, and takes a
ring from her by force. To hide her pregnancy she leaves her
mother-in-law, Sostrata, and returns to her mother, Myrrina.
Laches believes that the marriage breakdown is due to his wife,
not to his son. The child is born, and Pamphilus acknowledges his
wife and son only when the ring is recognized by Philumena’s
mother, Myrrina, through the kindness of Bacchis, the courtesan
with the heart of gold. All ends well, even though, as Pamphilus
says, in an exception to the rule of comedies (866-69), the
parents and his servant ignore the dark secret of his formerly
unknown consummation of marriage.
In the second prologue to the play, Terence requests that it
inspire others to write to follow suit: mea causa causam accipite et
date silentium, / ut lubeat scribere aliis mihique ut discere /
novas expediat posthac pretio emptas meo (‘For my sake
listen to my plea and grant me silence, so that other authors may
be encouraged to write and it may be worth my while in the future
to put on new plays bought at my own expense,’ 55-57). Boccaccio
indeed retells the story in the Decameron,
as does Shakespeare also in All’s
Well That Ends Well. In Boccaccio’s Third Day’s Ninth
Tale, Neifile, the Queen for that day, recounts the story of the
unwilling husband, Count Bertrand of Roussillon, his pregnant
wife, Gillette of Narbonne, and a ring. Gillette wins Bertrand as
her husband through curing the King of France of a fistula;
Bertrand is reluctant and replies to the king that he would never
marry a she-doctor. Rejected Gillette then follows Bertrand to
Florence where, disguised as a poor pilgrim, she bears him twins.
Shakespeare next turns the tale back into a play with Bertrand and
Helena/Diana for Philumena and Bacchis in Terence, and doubles the
rings: Helena’s is the gift from the king whom she has healed, to
exchange with Bertrand’s ancestral one. Then Helena appears on
stage not bearing two sons in her arms but heavily pregnant (with
twins?). Both Boccaccio and Shakespeare dwell on the Count
Roussillon’s snobbishness in not wedding/bedding the low-born
Helena, while in both works the King of France disagrees with
Roussillon’s arguments, as later would Louis XIV in supporting
Molière and his Tartuffe.
Shakespeare then ends the play with an epilogue straight out of
Terence:
[King] The king’s a beggar, now the play is done.
All is well ended, if this
suit be won,
That you express content;
which we will pay,
With strife to please you,
day exceeding day:
Ours be your patience then,
and yours our parts;
Your gentle hands lend us,
and take our hearts.
Exeunt omnes. (All’s Well, V, Epilogue, 335-40)
But the story of the unwanted wife and the ring in Terence,
Boccaccio, and Shakespeare has very ancient roots in drama: a
similar literary device is found in ancient Sanskrit drama, with a
notable example in Kālidāsa's play Abhijñānaśākuntalam ('The Recognition of
Shakuntala'), which is based on an episode from the earlier Indian
epic, the Mahabharata.
As the title suggests, The
Recognition of Shakuntala revolves around the idea of
recognition. It tells the story of King Dushyanta who, while on a
hunting trip, meets Shakuntala and marries her. A mishap befalls
them when he is summoned back to court: Shakuntala, pregnant with
their child, inadvertently offends a visiting sage and incurs a
curse, by which Dushyanta will forget her completely, until he
sees the ring he has left with her. On her trip to Dushyanta’s
court in an advanced state of pregnancy, she loses the ring and
has to come away unrecognized. The ring is found by a fisherman,
who recognizes the royal seal and returns it to Dushyanta, who
then regains his memory of Shakuntala and sets out to find her.
After more travails, they are finally reunited.
All these versions of the tale, whether in India or in Rome or in
Florence or in London, lend themselves to analysis with Stith
Thompson’s Folklore Index
(1955-58) and Vladimir Propp’s ‘Functions’ (1968): ß =
absentation; g = interdiction; d = violation; e = reconnaissance;
z = delivery; h = trickery; B = mediation; C = beginning
counteraction; ↑= departure; D = first function of the donor
(testing or interrogation); E = the hero's reaction; F = provision
or receipt of a magical agent [ring/rings]; G = spatial
transference between two kingdoms; ↓ = return; O = unrecognized
arrival; M = difficult task; N = solution; Q = recognition; W =
wedding, concluding with the ‘FELICITER’ of Terence manuscripts.
Emilia tells the Second Day’s Sixth Tale. It is a story in which
disaster at first threatens, then it is resolved, much in the
manner of The Woman from Andros,
with the recognition of a shipwrecked child. Set in the times of
Manfred and the Sicilian Vespers, in the landscapes of Lunigiana
and Sicily, it has one very moving speech by the lost son,
Giannotto/Giusfredi, who is imprisoned for having seduced his
host’s daughter. Giannotto/Giusfredi speaks to Currado, father of
the girl:
'Currado', he replied, 'neither
the lust for power nor the desire for riches nor any other
motive has ever led me to harbour treacherous designs against
your person or your property. I loved your daughter. I love her
still, and I shall always love her, because I consider her a
worthy object of my love (amai tua figliuola e amo e amerò
sempre, per ciò che degna la reputo del mio amore).
And, if in wooing her, I was acting in a manner that would
commonly be regarded as dishonourable, the fault I
committed was one which is inseparable from youth (la
giovinezza congiunto), In order to eradicate it one
would have to do away with youth altogether (che se via si volesse tòrre,
converebbe che via si togliesse la giovinezza), Besides
it would be considered half so serious as you and many others
maintain, if old men would remember that they once were young,
and if they would measure other people's shortcomings against
their own and vice versa. (se i vecchi si volessero ricordare
d’essere stati giovani e gli altrui difetti colli loro
misurare e li loro cogli altrui). I committed this
fault not as your enemy, but as your friend. It has always been
my wish to do what you are now proposing, and if I had
thought your consent would be forthcoming, I would have
asked you long ago for your daughter's hand. . . . Send me back
to prison and have me treated as you like. Whatever you do to
me, I shall always love Spina, and for her sake I shall always
love and respect her father' (tanto sempre per amor di lei amerò te
e
avrotti in reverenza).24
These words epitomize Terence’s arguments in many of his comedies,
from Andria to Adelphoe. This is clearly a
Terentian sentiment to be echoed also in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, ‘Wostow nat
wel the olde clerkes sawe/ That “who shal geve a lovere any
lawe?”’ (I.1163-64).
Terence’s Phormio and
the Decameron’s Fifth
Day’s Tenth Tale share the joke, in which what is criticized by
one participant turns out to be a mirroring wrongdoing, which
effectively silences both. Terence’s Phormio would have been better titled the Geta, for he, the slave, is
the true hero and resolver of difficulties. He has been left in
charge of two sons, Antipho and Phaedria, sons of Demipho and
Chremes respectively, two brothers, who are away on business.
Demipho returns first, furious that Antipho has married dowryless
Phanium, through the parasite Phormio’s ruse that an Athenian
citizen left orphaned must be married to her kin. Phaedria is in
love with a flute girl, Pamphila, and cannot buy her from her
slave-dealer, Dorio. In fact, Chremes/‘Stilpho’ has gone to Lemnos
seeking his daughter by a bigamous marriage only to find that she
and her mother had already come to Athens where her mother died,
leaving Phanium in the care of Sophrona, her old nurse. Geta
contrives the price for Pamphila by begging for the dowry for
Phanium to marry Phormio. There is wonderful stage business, to be
copied by Shakespeare in Winter’s
Tale, where Geta tells Antipho and Phormio of
overhearing, off-stage, of Chremes telling Demipho of parenting
Phanium. Phormio then informs Chremes’ first wife, Nausistrata.
She next defends Phaedria’s acquisition of the flute girl on the
basis that Chremes had thought he could get away with having two
wives.
In Boccaccio’s Fifth Day’s Tenth Tale, told by Dioneo, both wives
in Perugia are being unfaithful to their rich elderly husbands.
The story ends with Pietro de Vinciolo agreeing to let his wife’s
lover share supper with them, and more than that. Likewise in Phormio, Nausistrata invites
the parasite to join them at Chremes’ table. A similar tale is
found in Boccaccio’s Seventh Day’s Eighth Tale, told again by
Neifile, of aged Arriguccio Berlinghetti and his young, unfaithful
and noble wife, Sismonda, where again silence is the response and
resolution. (Compare this tale with the Fourth Day’s Fifth Tale on
Lisabetta/Isabella and the Pot of Basil, mirrored in Keats’ poem
on the same and in Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt’s painting of his
dying pregnant wife,25 which,
however, lacks an analogue in Terence but does show the power of
these tales to be mirrored/echoed through time, generation upon
geneeration.)

Medieval society had adopted classical society’s priestly celibacy
for their clergy. Both Boccaccio and Chaucer give stories
concerning scandals of clergy abuse. The Terence play which comes
closest to this is the Eunuch.
Thais, the courtesan, is given by the captain Thraso (who has a
dissolute parasite companion, Gnatho), an Athenian-born girl, who
had been raised with her as her sister. Phaedria, who is in love
with Thais, presents her the old eunuch Dorus. Chaerea, Phaedria’s
brother, in love with Thais’ young ward, disguises himself as a
eunuch instead, on the suggestion of the slave Parmeno, and enters
the house to seduce the maiden. Chremes, her Athenian brother,
then arranges her marriage to Chaerea.
In that play a scene caused Terence’s fellow-Carthaginian
Augustine’s concern (City of God
2.7), where Chaerea, the young disguised hero, is sexually aroused
through seeing the erotic painting of Danae where Zeus comes to
her in a shower of gold. Dante’s rendering of the real-life tale
of Paolo and Francesco is in the tragic, though Christian,
Arthurian mode and that scene of pornographic adultery does not
partake of the imitatio
Terentii, except for this scene, so deplored by
Augustine, when the pair read together of the story of Lancelot
and Guinevere’s adultery against their king and her husband,
Arthur, which becomes Inferno
V.137’s meretricious line, ‘Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse’
(‘A Gallehault indeed, that book and he who wrote it, too’). Boccaccio
even draws that scene as well as writing it out in Riccardian
1035:

This engenders further Boccaccio’s:
COMINCIA IL LIBRO CHIAMATO DECAMERON
COGNOMINATO PRENCIPE
GALEOTTO, NEL QUALE SI CONTENGONO
CENTO NOVELLE,
IN DIECE DÌ DETTE DA SETTE
DONNE
E DA TRE GIOVANI UOMINI
Here begins the book called Decameron, otherwise known
as Prince Galeotto, wherein are contained one hundred stories
told in ten days by seven ladies and three young men.
Dante and Boccaccio have combined Terence’s scene from the Eunuch with the Matter of
Arthur, where, in the story of Guinevere and Lancelot, their
assignation takes place through the machinations of the Prince
Gallehault, and in the story of Tristan and Isolde, the boatman
who leads that pair astray into adultery is likewise named
‘Gallehault’; Dante’s Inferno
V is a ‘Galeotto’ to Paolo and Francesca in Ravenna and even to
himself and ourselves. Terence is writing plays for the red-light
district; the writers of Arthurian romances, Dante, and Boccaccio
are writing ‘pillow books’.
III. Terence's Comedies
and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Chaucer never mentions either Terence or Boccaccio, even though he
does refer to Dante and Petrarch. Arguably his clearest use of
Terence’s Comedies is of
the dramatis personae,
where the General Prologue
presents each pilgrim tale-teller assembled at the Tabard Inn and
ambling along the Canterbury road from London. For Chaucer takes
up the Boccaccian frame tale of tales being told, marshaling his
pilgrims together in a flock, not by the Parson, but by Harry
Bailly, the innkeeper of the Tabard, and includes himself amongst
their number on the journey to Canterbury. The General Prologue (and
especially so in the illuminated Ellesmere Manuscript), thus
functions like the Masks upon the Rack, so typical of early
illustrated Terence manuscripts, such as that at Oxford (Bodleian
Library Auct. F.2.13=27603).
The Table below gives the correspondences between Terence’s
characters and Chaucer’s:
| Mask |
Terence, Comedies |
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales |
| Meretrix |
Bacchis, Heutontimorumenos
Thais, Eunuchus
Philotis, Bacchis, Hecrya
Bacchis (muta), Adelphoi |
Wife of Bath
Prioress |
| Obstetrix |
Lesbia, Andria |
|
| Nutrix |
Canthara, Heutontimorumenos
Sophrona, Eunuchus
Sophrona, Phormio |
|
| Anus |
Syra, Hecyra
Canthara, Adelphoi |
Wife of Bath |
| Ancilla |
Mysis, Andria
Pythias, Eunuchus |
|
| Virgo |
Blycerium (muta), Andria
Antiphila, Heutontimorumenos
Pamphila (muta), Adelphoi |
Second Nun
Prioress |
Matrona
|
Sostrata, Heutontimorumenos
Nausistrata, Phormio
Sostrata, Myrrina, Hecyra
Sostrata, Adelphoi |
Guildsmen's Wives
Wife of Bath |
Servos, Laborator
|
Davos, Byrria, Andria
Syrus, Dromo, Heutontimorumenos
Parmeno, Sanga, Eunuchus
Davos, Geta, Phormio
Parmeno, Sosia, Hecyra
Geta, Parmeno (muto), Adelphoi
|
Cook; Ploughman; Miller, Reeve; Yoeman; Manciple |
| Lorarius |
Dromo, Andria |
|
| Leno |
Dorio, Phormio
Sannio, Adelphoi |
|
| Libertus |
Sosica, Andria |
Franklin |
| Narvarchus |
|
Shipman |
| Mercator |
|
Merchant, Gildsmen |
| Medicus |
|
Physician |
| Puer |
Dromo, Adelphoi |
|
| Adulescens |
Pamphilus, Charinus, Andria
Clitipho, Clinia, Heutontimorumenos
Phaedria, Chaeria, Chremes, Antipho, Eunuchus
Antipho, Phaedria, Phormio
Pamphilus, Hecyra
Aeschinus, Ctesipho, Adelphoi |
Squire |
| Eunuchus |
Dorus, Eunuchus |
Monk; Clerk; Pardoner; Summoner; Friar; Nuns' Priest;
Canon's Yoeman; Parson |
| Advocati |
Hegio, Cratinus, Crito, Phormio |
Man of Law |
| Parasitus |
Gnatho, Eunuchus
Phormio, Phormio |
|
| Miles |
Thraso, Eunuchus |
Knight |
| Senex |
Chremes, Crito, Andria
Chremes, Menedemus, Heutontimorumenos
Demes seu Laches, Eunuchus
Demipho, Chremes, Phormio
Laches, Phidippus, Hecyra
Demea, Hegio, Adelphoi |
Reeve |
Harry Bailly, like
Calliopus, like Chaucer himself, defies pigeon-holing.
In this arrangement, as had Dante and Boccaccio before him,
Chaucer adapts the masks of Classical Latin drama to the divisions
of Christian culture which kept aside God’s servants in sexual
abstinence, as if eunuchs, and which divided society into the
Three Estates of Ploughman, Knight, and Monk, each presented in
the General Prologue.26 The Ellesmere
Manuscript of the Canterbury
Tales27 and
the Luttrell Psalter28
are both exquisite—except for the comic faces and distorted bodies
of some of their characters. Then one realizes that both
illuminators, and also Chaucer himself, were familiar with
Terence’s Comedies, in
which this is the tradition. Terence, as much as Aristotle, gave
medieval culture a mirror in which to view itself, albeit at times
a distorting cruel funhouse, a writer’s desk with pigeonholes, a
set of mocking masks to don.

The Ellesmere Canterbury
Tales Miller

The Luttrell Psalter, Psalm
96, fol. 173
Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde based on Boccaccio’s Filostrato is magnificently illustrated in the
Cambridge Corpus Christi College manuscript, with Chaucer in a
pulpit structure, a domuncula,
preaching the tale to his king, Richard II, who is clad in cloth
of gold, and to his court; behind them can be seen the scene of
the prisoner exchange of the tale.

In a word, it is constructed as the Middle Ages perceived
Terence’s theatre to be with Chaucer as Calliopus.
The Canterbury Tales is also filled with references to
drama, to theatre. The Knight’s
Tale, based on Boccaccio’s Teseida, combines both tragedy and comedy. Its
tale of two young men, cousins, in love with the same maiden, is
resonant of many Terentian plots./30 Arcita is tragically killed
following his victorious duel/tournament played out in an
elaborate theatre built by Theseus, structured like a windrose, a
compass, where the mansions become temples, replete with intense
allegorical meanings (CT KT
I.1885-1892), while Palamon lives and marries Emelye, following
the funeral games, ‘Ne how
the Grekes pleye / the wake pleyes’ (I.2959-60). We
recall that two of Terence’s plays, Hecyra and Adelphoe,
were performed at the funeral games for Lucius Aemilius Paulus.
This classic construct is echoed in medieval plays in England,
such as the Castle of
Perseverance, where the domunculus becomes a castle,29 and in the Cornish dramas30.

The Miller’s Tale
machinery involves the play of Herod and the Noah play (I.3384,
I.3513-82). The Wife of Bath enjoys going ‘to playes of myracles’ (III.558). While
the Franklin’s Tale
plays with the subtle and noble theatre of dinner entertainments,
of ships seeming to sail on oceans and hunting scenes (V.1141-50,
1189-1204), evocative of Boccaccio’s Fifth Day, Eighth Tale,
painted by Botticelli for the wedding of Giovanozzo Pucci.




Chaucer, though he never mentions Boccaccio, is Boccaccio in
English. He rewrites Boccaccio’s Filostrato as Troilus
and Criseyde and Boccaccio’s (Statius’) Teseida as his Knight’s Tale.31 the first story of
the Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer thus creates of the Canterbury
Tales a sequel as it were, a copy, of Boccaccio’s Decameron. In addition to
Chaucer’s intertextual relationship with Boccaccio and thus with
Terence, there are his acknowledged debts to Dante and to
Petrarch: the Wife of Bath (CT
III.1125-1130) uses Dante’s Convivio
(IV.iii), to argue that ‘gentilesse’
is not from the hereditary nobility but accessible to all through
the practice of virtue, an argument also found in Boethius, and
influenced by both Terence and the Gospels; the Friar’s Tale against the
Summonour (CT III.1520)
mentions Dante; the Monk (CT
VII.2407-2462) retells Dante’s infernal tale of Ugolino of Pisa (Inferno XXXIII.1-90), and the
Second Nun (CT
VIII.36-49) translates Paradiso
XXXIII,1-39’s invocation to the ‘Mayde and Mooder, doghter of thy Sone’. Chaucer
passes off Boccaccio’s final tale of the Decameron as Petrarch’s, for Petrarch had
admired it so much that he had translated it into Latin,
concealing its true source; Chaucer gave it to his Clerk of
Oxenforde to tell (CT
V.31-33, 1147-48).
To discuss the Decameron
and the Canterbury Tales
is to understand the second as using analogues of the first,
rather than as considering the Decameron
as an open source. The Hundred Tales of the Decameron veer from courtly
romance to raucous fabliau; and so do the Canterbury Tales. In
addition, we see in Chaucer the legends of saints and the kind of
moral and allegorical romance, found in the pages of the Golden Legend and the Gesta Romanorum. The Miller’s, Reeve’s, and Cook’s Tales are more
fabliaux than romance, more Boccaccio than Terence. The Miller’s Tale is of a
January/May marriage, and so is that of the Merchant. In
Boccaccio, this pattern even becomes the tale of the Tenth Day’s
Fifth Story, where the Lady asks the would-be lover for the
miracle of a May garden in January, which will become the Franklin’s Tale, given a
local habitation and a name in Brittany.
But let us pass over the parallels between Boccaccio and Chaucer
in this chapter on Terence’s influence upon both of them, and
instead delight in the fullness of all these authors, their
humanity, their celebration of diversity. E. E. Cummings best
caught the Terentian aspects of boundary transgression, of pyramid
busting, of pilgrimage liminality, in Chaucer’s great comedy:
honour
corruption villainy holiness
riding in fragrance of
sunlight (side by side
all in a singing wonder of
blossoming yes
riding) to him who died that
death should be dead
humblest and proudest eagerly
wandering
(equally all alive in
miraculous day)
merrily moving through sweet
forgiveness of spring
(over the under the gift of
the sky
knight and ploughman pardoner
wife and nun
merchant frère clerk somnour
miller and reve
and Geoffrey and all) come up
from the never of when
come into the now of forever
come riding alive
down while crylessly drifting
through vast most
nothing’s own nothing
children go of dust.32
Let me also end with a fine aphorism in a Florentine Humanist
Terence manuscript, now in the British Library, that can embrace
all our writers, Terence, Luke, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and
Shakespeare: quid est comedia, comedia est imitatio vite, speculum
consuetudinis et imago veritatis (London, British
Library, Harley 2526, formerly owned by Randulphi de Ricasoli of
Florence).
Notes
Editions and translations used in this essay are: Terence, Publius Terenti Afer, Comoediae recognovervnt brevique adnotatione critica
instrvxerunt, ed. Robert Kauert and Wallace M. Lindsay
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1979) Oxford Classical Texts; The Lady of
Andros, The Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch. Sargeaunt, J,
trans. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1986) Loeb
Classical Library 22; Phormio, The Mother-in-Law, The
Brothers, trans. J. Sargeaunt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) Loeb Classical Library 23; Dante
Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata (Mondadori,
Milan, 1966); Tutte le
opere, ed.Luigi Blasucci, Luigi, ed. (Florence, Sansoni,
1987); The Divine Comedy, trans.
Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1902-1986); Giovanni
Boccaccio, Opere, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: Mursia, 1978); The Decameron,
trans. C.H. McWilliam,
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Geoffrey
Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, Larry D.
Benson and F.N. Robinson (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987); William Shakespeare, The Complete Works. ed. Hardin Craig and David
Bevington (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1973).
1 Italian
Humanist manuscripts of Terence derive from Angelo Poliziano’s
copy, Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Banco Rari 97, made from
the fifth-century Vatican 3226 Bembino manuscript in rustic
capitals.
2 Victor
Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) discusses
pilgrimage and liminality which can be applied equally well to
comedy, in particular to Terence, in which social distinctions are
annihilated, as in Moliere’s Tartuffe
where the maidservant Dorine saves the day, and likewise the
butler in James M. Barrie’s The
Admirable Crichton.
3 Oxford, Bodleian
Library Auct. F.2.13=27603, is published in Major Treasures in the Bodleian
Library: Medieval Manuscripts in Microform, 9, ed. W.O.
Halsall (Oxford, 1978), and discussed
in Otto Pächt and J.J.G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), III.16; Leslie Webber Jones
and C.R. Morey, The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence
Prior to the Thirteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1913).
4 Julia
Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told
Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (Berne: Peter
Lang, 1993), 259-85.
5 Mary Hatch Marshall,
'Boethius’ Definition of Persona
and Medieval Understanding of the Roman Theater', Speculum
26 (1950), 471-82.
6 Sir
William Empson, ‘Double Plots,’ Some Versions of
Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1960), 27-88.
7 Julia Bolton
Holloway, The Pilgrim and the
Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne:
Peter lang, 1995), 27-55.
8 The Towneley Plays. (1897) England,
George F., ed. Early English Text Society, Oxford. EETS 71.
9 Millard
Meiss,
French Painting in the time of Jean de Berry: The
Limbourgs and their Contemporaries (Braziller, New York,
1974) passim and plates 7, 19, 63-64, 171-199, 201-221, 226-227,
230.
10 Arthur M. Hind, An
Introduction
to
the History of Woodcut. (New York: Dover, 1963);
Pierre Courcelle, La
Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire,
antécedents et posterité de Boèce (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1967).
11 Joseph Russo, 'Did Dante Know Terence?', Italica 24 (1947), 217.
12 Pietro
Alighieri, Commentum
di Pietro Alighieri nelle redazioni ashburnhamiana e
ottoboniana, eds. Roberto Della Vedova, Roberto e Maria
Teresa Silvotti (Florence: Olschki, 1978), pp. 8-9.
13 Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, in Tutte le opere, ed.
Luigi Blasucci (Florence: Sansoni, 1981).
14
Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of
Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Berne: Peter Lang, 1987),
pp. 27-84.
15 Erich
Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 151-177.
16 Russo, p.
212.
17 Auerbach, 'St. Francis of Assisi in
Dante’s ‘Commedia’, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959),
pp. 79-98.
18 Meiss,
Painting
in
Florence
and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and
Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century, (New York: Harper
and Row, 1973), p. 109, fig. 102.
19 Bruno
Bettelheim, The Uses of
Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of
Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1977).
20 Leslie
Silko, 'Language and Literature from the Pueblo Perspective', Tales within Tales: Apuleius through
Time, ed. Constance S. Wright and Julia Bolton Holloway
(New York: AMS Press, 2000), pp. 141-156.
21 Germaine
Greer, ‘Grandmother’s
Footsteps’, Guardian
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/15/germaine-greer-old-wives-tales).
22 Stith
Thompson, Motif-Index
of Folk Literature. A Classification of Narrative Elements in
Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances,
Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest- Books and Local Legends (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976), 6 vols.
23 Vladimir
Propp,
Morphology of
the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1968).
24 Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: Mursia, 1963-78), pp. 116-17; Decameron,
trans. G.M. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), pp.
119-120.
25 William Holman Hunt
buried his wife Fanny in Florence's 'English' Cemetery, in a tomb
he sculpted for her.
26 Georges
Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
Jill Mann, Chaucer's Medieval Estates
Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
27 Theo
Stemmler, The Ellesmere Miniatures of the
Canterbury Pilgrims (Mannheim: University of Mannheim,
1977), Poetria Mediaevalis 2.
28 Janet
Backhouse,
ed. The Luttrell
Psalter (London: British Library, 1989).
39 David Anderson,
Before
the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in
Boccaccio’s Teseida (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
30 David
Bevington,
The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom,
Mankind: A Facsimile Edition with Facing Transcriptions
(Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1972).
31 Richard
Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the
Round (London: Faber and Faber, London, 1957); Markham Harris, The Cornish
Ordinalia. A Medieval Dramatic Trilogy (Washington:
Catholic University of America Press, 1969).
32 E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962,
ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1991), 52,
p. 661.
Go to:
Brunetto Latino and Dante
Alighieri
I
Bankers and Their Books: Italian Manuscripts in French Exile
II
Brown Ink, Red Blood: Brunetto Latino and the Sicilian
Vespers
III
The Vita Nuova's Pilgrimage Paradigms
IV
Stealing Hercules' Club: Inferno XXV's Metamorphoses
Geoffrey Chaucer
V Black
and Red Letter Chaucer
VI
Fact and Fiction: Women in Love
VII
Convents, Courts and Colleges
VIII
The Tomb of the Duchess Alice
Terence, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare
IX God's Plenty: Terence in
Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare Newest
Epilogue:
Attica
State Prison, Boethius the Exile, Dante the Pilgrim

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