Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy

This book explores the relation between how literary texts are created and how we experience them as readers. When we read a text, should we focus on our own experience of it or on how the text was originally formed by its author? Does the unique perspective of an individual reader matter? This book explores how such questions emerge in Geoffrey Chaucer’s interactions with three authors of fourteenth-century Italy: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. It proposes that the ways in which medieval poets grapple with these ideas have implications for readers today as well.