Source, context, and cultural translation in the Franklin's tale

Modern Philology

Volumn 94, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 141-161

  Edwards, Robert R ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950545341     PISSN: 00268232     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/392378     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. Pio Rajna, "L'Episodio delle questioni d'amore nel Filocolo del Boccaccio," Romania 31 (1902): 40-43;
2. and "Le Origini della novella narrata del 'Frankeleyn' nei Canterbury Tales del Chaucer," Romania 32 (1903): 204-67.
3. Menedon's story appears in Giovanni Boccaccio, Filocolo, ed. Antonio Enzo Quaglio, vol. 1 of Tutte le opere de Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Verona, 1967-), bk. 4, chaps. 31-34. All references to the Filocolo use this edition and cite the text according to book, chapter, and sentence.
4. Earlier scholarship is summarized in J. S. P. Tatlock, "The Franklin's Tale," in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales, " ed. W. F. Bryan and Germain Dempster (Chicago, 1941), p. 377.
5. Douglas A. Burger, "The Cosa Impossibile of Il Filocolo and the Impossible of the Franklin's Tale," in Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, Mich., 1986), p. 168, renews the claim that Chaucer drew on a story common to Boccaccio and a lost Breton lay.
6. Karl Young, "Chaucer's Use of Boccaccio's Filocolo," Modern Philology 4 (1906-7): 169-77
7. and The Origin and Development of the Story of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer Society, 2d ser., vol. 40 (London, 1908)
8. (hereafter cited as The Origin and Development) suggests correspondences that John Livingston Lowes, "The Franklin's Tale, the Teseide, and the Filocolo" Modern Philology 15(1917-18): 689-728, develops at length.
9. Sanford Meech, Design in Chaucer's "Troilus" (Syracuse, N.Y., 1959).
10. David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1985), pp. 39-60.
11. Victoria E. Kirkham, "Two New Translations: The Early Boccaccio in English Dress," Italica 70 (1993): 80.
12. Robert A. Pratt, "Chaucer and the Visconti Libraries," ELH 6 (1939): 197, estimates that on his 1378 journey, when he probably encountered Petrarch's and Boccaccio's works, Chaucer spent a month and a half in Lombardy. Wallace (p. 60) explains the practical limits that bear on Chaucer's potential borrowing from such a text.
13. Lowes, pp. 705-13, suggests parallels with the Canterbury Tales and Legend of Good Women as well as a further parallel with Troilus.
14. Thomas Bergin, Boccaccio (New York, 1981), p. 92, repeats Lowes's point.
15. Young, The Origin and Development, pp. 143-47, lists six substantive circumstantial parallels between the Filocolo and Troilus and Criseyde.
16. All quotations from Chaucer's works will be from The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987)
17. (hereafter cited as The Riverside Chaucer).
18. Young, The Origin and Development, p. 147, n. 3;
19. Meech, p. 73.
20. See Henry Ansgar Kelly, Love and Marriage in the Age of Chaucer (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975);
21. and Janet L. Smarr, "Boccaccio's Filocolo: Romance, Epic, and Religious Allegory," Forum Italicum 12 (1978): 38;
22. while John B. Maguire, "The Clandestine Marriage of Troilus and Criseyde," Chaucer Review (1973-74): 262-78, argues a case for clandestine marriage without invoking the scene from the Filocolo.
23. Quaglio, ed., p. 903; for discussion, see Jonathan Usher, "Boccaccio's Experimentation with Verbal Portraits from the 'Filocolo' to the 'Decameron,' " Modern Language Review 77 (1982): 585-96.
24. Meech, p. 68.
25. while Stephen Barney says, "The account of the lovers' meeting, which differs from Boccaccio's, probably derives in part from the passage in Boccaccio's Filocolo (2.165-83) in which a meeting is arranged between Florio and Biancofiore [sic] " (The Riverside Chaucer, p. 1039). Florio and Biancifiore's meeting is not arranged, however. Helen Cooper is more openly skeptical about the Filocolo's influence on the scene (The Canterbury Tales, Oxford Guides to Chaucer [New York, 1989], p. 233).
26. See Antonio Enzo Quaglio, "La tradizione del testo del 'Filocolo,' " Studi sul Boccaccio 3 (1965): 55-102;
27. Vittore Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, I: Un primo elenco dei codici e tre studi (Rome, 1958), pp. 37-40
28. with subsequent additions and corrections in Vittore Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, II: Storia e letteratura, raccolta di studi e testi, no. 175 (Rome, 1991), pp. 12, 31-33. Quaglio dates his manuscript RA (Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, 1699) to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;
29. Albano Sorbelli, Inventari da manoscritti delle biblioteche d'Italia, 101 vols. (Florence, 1915), 22:130, dates it to the fifteenth century.
30. See also Giancarlo Savino, "Un 'Filocolo' elegantemente copiato da Antonio Baldinotti," in Miscellanea di studi in memoria di Anna Saitta Revignas (Florence, 1978), pp. 333-37. Renaissance library inventories frequently refer to other manuscripts, now lost, and several early printings are important to the textual history.
31. Antonio Enzo Quaglio, "Un nuovo frammento del 'Filocolo,' " Studi sul Boccaccio 4 (1967): 9-10.
32. Jacopo Serminocci also versified the Love Questions;
33. see Paolo Cherchi, "Sulle 'Quistioni d'amore' nel Filocolo" in his Andrea Cappellano, i trovatori e altri temi romanzi (Rome, 1979), p. 210n;
34. and Quaglio, ed., p. 854.
35. Armando Petrucci, Catalogo sommario dei manoscritti del fondo Rossi: Sezione Corsiniana (Rome, 1977), pp. 84-85.
36. Quaglio, "Prime correzioni ai 'Filocolo': Dal testo di Tizzone verso quello del Boccaccio," Studi sul Boccaccio 1 (1963): 48. The α manuscripts are the following: K, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek (formerly Kassel, Landesbibliothek, II, Poet. 3), s. xv;
37. O1, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canoniciano. ital. 85, s. xv;
38. R4, Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, 1699, s. xiv-xv;
39. and Ve1, Verona, Biblioteca Civica, 2868, s. xv (1469).
40. Quaglio, "La Tradizione del testo del 'Filocolo,' " p. 93
41. corrects the misprint in Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, I, p. 39
42. in the dating of Ve1. The β family of manuscripts is the source for the vulgate tradition of the Filocolo, which continues in printed editions from Tizzone through Salvatore Battaglia, ed., Il Filocolo (Bari, 1938).
43. RL, fol. 2r.
44. Vr1, fol. 16r.
45. Text in Lionello Sozzi, "Per la fortuna del Boccaccio in Francia: I testi introduttivi alle edizioni e traduzioni cinquecentesche," Studi sul Boccaccio 6 (1971): 18;
46. cf. Patricia M. Gathercole, "Boccaccio in French," Studi sul Boccaccio 5 (1969): 288.
47. Patricia M. Gathercole, "Boccaccio in English," Studi sul Boccaccio 7 (1973): 358;
48. see also H. G. Wright, "The Elizabethan Translations of the 'Quistioni d'Amore' in the 'Filocolo,' " Modern Language Review 36 (1941): 289-303.
49. Vittore Branca and Giorgio Padoan, "Bolletino bibliografico," Studi sul Boccaccio 3 (1965): 319-20.
50. Quaglio, "Prime correzioni al 'Filocolo,' " p. 244.
51. Natalino Sapegno, Storia letteraria del trecento (Milan, 1963), p. 289;
52. Francesco Guardini, "Boccaccio dal Filocolo al Decameron: Variazioni di poetica e di retorica dall'esame di due racconti," Carte italianel (1985-86): 28-46
53. Victoria E. Kirkham, "The Filocolo of Giovanni Boccaccio with an English Translation of the Thirteen Questioni d'amore" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1971), pp. 194-95, points out that the group arranges itself around a fountain with Fiammetta and Caleon, her frustrated suitor, as the focal points and that this group is framed by the garden walls and the pair of dream visions.
54. On the thematic meaning of the sequence of tales, see Paolo Cherchi, "Sulle 'Quistioni d'amore' nel Filocolo" (n. 22 above), p. 214.
55. Victoria E. Kirkham, "Reckoning with Boccaccio's Questioni d'amore" Modern Language Notes 89 (1974): 47-59;
56. and Janet L. Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover (Urbana, Ill., 1986), pp. 34-60, both describe the correspondingly intricate structure of the Filocolo itself.
57. Kirkham, "The Filocolo of Giovanni Boccaccio," p. 168, argues that Ovid's story of Medea is the center of Boccaccio's interests.
58. Vr1, fol. 8r. (4.33.9);
59. see D. W. Robertson, Jr., "Chaucer's Franklin and His Tale," Costerus 1 (1974): 1-26;
60. Alan T. Gaylord, "The Promises in The Franklin's Tale," ELH 31 (1964): 321-45
61. and "From Dorigen to the Vavasour: Reading Backwards," in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany, N.Y., 1991), pp. 177-200.
62. A reaction to the skeptical view of the Franklin appears in Jill Mann, "Chaucerian Themes and Style in the Franklin's Tale," in Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, 1982), 1:133-53;
63. Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London, 1985), pp. 144-60;
64. Nicholas J. Perella, "The World of Boccaccio's Filocolo? PMLA 76 (1961): 338.
65. See Salvatore Battaglia, "Schemi lirici nell'arte del Boccaccio," Archivum Romanicum 19 (1935): 61-78
66. reprinted in his La coscienza letteraria del medioevo (Naples, 1965), pp. 625-44;
67. Francesco Bruni, "Il Filocoloe lo spazio della letteratura volgare," in Boccaccio e dintorni: Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca (Florence, 1983), 2:20.
68. Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the "Roman Antique" (Cambridge, 1992), p. 129, notes that the debates in the Love Questions correspond to "medieval academic theories of writing and interpretation" and stem from a narrative situation that is "morally ambiguous or doubtful."
69. see Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London, 1982), pp. 252-55. The countess of Champagne offers two rationales, each different from Fiammetta's; the first praises the virtue of poverty, while the second justifies choosing wealth when a woman is beset with poverty.
70. For a contrasting view, see R. A. Shoaf, "The Franklin's Tale: Chaucer and Medusa," Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 274-90.
71. For a good discussion of the characters and the nature of their values, see Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 49-55.
72. J. Douglas Canfield, Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration (Philadelphia, 1989), p. 51, argues that the importance of social bonds is underwritten in the tale by religious faith, but the presence of such faith in the tale's pagan world is evident only in the characters' asseverations and anachronistic phrases.
73. John Fyler, "Love and Degree in the Franklin's Tale" Chaucer Review 21 (1986-87): 322, suggests that Arveragus reserves the name of sovereignty in marriage "for shame of his degree" (V.752), i.e., because of his comparatively low social status.
74. In her notes to the Franklin's Tale, Joanne Rice (The Riverside Chaucer, p. 901) indicates that Ellesmere and Hengwrt are unique in reading serement, which she derives from Latin sacramentum. In medieval French, serement means a corporation or "métier," which one normally took an oath to join;
75. see Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, 10 vols. (Paris, 1938). Chaucer's use is identical to Boccaccio's.
76. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, Wis., 1991), p. 196.
77. MED s.v. "fre," definitions 1a, 1c, 2a, and 2b.
78. By contrast, Derek Brewer, "Honour in Chaucer," Essays and Studies 26 (1973): 1-19, argues that trouthe remains a value. It is worth nothing that trouthe in Troilus and Criseyde marks that work's failed attempt to reproduce the stable social world of the Love Questions and the Filocolo.