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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales by Frederick M. Biggs Greg Waite Biggs, Frederick M., Chaucer's Decameron and the Origin of the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer Studies, 44), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; cloth; pp. xii, 275; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844754. The vexed question of Chaucer's knowledge and use of Boccaccio's Decameron is revisited in this study. Frederick M. Biggs argues that three novelle from the eighth day of the Decameron—8.1, 8.2, and 8.10—formed Chaucer's source for the Shipman's Tale, originally intended for the Wife of Bath, and that Chaucer's reading of these novelle crucially reshaped the way he conceived of how to create tales from diverse sources. Furthermore, Chaucer's idea of the Canterbury Tales, thematically and structurally, owes much to the influence of Boccaccio's account of Licisca's outburst in the Introduction to the sixth day of the Decameron, where she reveals her contempt for the attitudes of men regarding women, marriage, power, and class inequality. From this passage and its effects on stories told in the days following, Chaucer learned how to construct frames for his narratives that would create dramatic roles in the debates that they developed. Biggs's analysis hinges on these passages from the Decameron, and is further developed by the working out of a chronology for the early Tales as Chaucer developed and revised his ideas. Biggs focuses upon the apparent quarrel between Chaucer and Gower, involving Gower's retelling, in his Tale of Florent, of the Wife of Bath's Tale, given to her to replace the tale she was originally intended to deliver, but which Chaucer transferred to the Shipman. This Tale was intended originally to have been set against the already written Melibee, originally assigned to the Man of Law. Biggs claims that the Miller's Tale was the third to be written as Chaucer's radical new approach was developing. Within a wide-ranging examination of the tale and its narrative elements, he advances Dom Felice's speech in Decameron 3.4 as one of Chaucer's sources. Biggs may not convince all Chaucerians with his elaborate theory, but this book deserves to be read and recognized for its deep learning and astute critical analysis of Chaucer's tales, the historical and cultural contextualization of them, and beyond that, the nature of source study itself. [End Page 235] Greg Waite University of Otago Copyright © 2019 Parergon