Chaucer's Italian Tradition. .

Warren Ginsberg. Chaucer's Italian Tradition.

Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. xiv + 298 pp. index. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-472-11234-1.

Warren Ginsberg's latest book testifies to a remarkable amount of thinking outside the box. In the crowded arena of studies on Dantean and Boccaccian influences on Chaucer, Ginsberg leaves aside the philological scrutinies and the hazarded hypotheses of historical encounters between Chaucer and Boccaccio during the former's sojourns in Italy. In Chaucer's Italian Tradition, Walter Benjamin's theories of translation meet fruitful meditations on the hermeneutic dynamics at work among the writings of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch to present an entirely new vision of Chaucer's inspiration, one that factors in sociopolitical contexts of authorship, and perhaps even more crucially, literary symbolic modes of understanding. "The absence of traditionality is in fact the key feature of Chaucer's Italian tradition... In contrast to the French, Chaucer's Italian Tradition does not inhere in his translations of the trecentisti but is a translation of these translations" (270). Ginsberg continues, "I have sought [Chaucer 's Italian Tradition] by asking how, after Chaucer had read [Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch], the modes of meaning in the poems he wrote corresponded to, yet disarticulated, the modes that determined ways in which the Italian works translated each other" (270-71).

Ginsberg structures the volume in three parts, corresponding to Chaucer's interpretations of Italy's Three Crowns. In the first section, Ginsberg reads Dante's authorial self-proclamation in the Purgatory in light of Ovid's playfully self-referential allusions as a way of understanding how Chaucer translates both authors in the "Prologue to the Manciple's Tale." In the second section, which is truly the central part of the book in more ways than mere physical organization, Ginsberg examines how Chaucer interprets Boccaccio's reworkings of Dantean stilnovismo in the Filostrato and the De casibus virorum illustrium to create his own subversion of them in his Troilus and Creseida, the "Knight's Tale," and the "Monk's Tale." Chapter 4, which is billed as a kind of transition chapter, actually presents a densely written, clearly articulated series of illuminations tracing the ethical and aesthetic imperatives of civically informed authorship. Ginsberg's nuanced final section asserts that Chaucer's Clerk becomes si multaneously "the first English Petrarchist and his first English critic" (265), finding furthermore that Chaucer, who learned of the Griselda story "from Petrarch at Padua[,] is never more Boccaccian than when he introduces Griselda of Saluzzo to the Wife of Bath on the toad to Canterbury" (268). This way of reading all four authors against each other hermeneutically, and even existentially at times, is the defining hallmark of Ginsberg's welcome contribution. This volume's highly intricate mappings of authorial influences according to analogues, symbolic modes, and other manners of meaning may seem abstracting or overly indebted to certain theoretical paradigms (particularly to those by Benjamin, Hans Robert Jauss, Paul De Man, and Jacques Derrida) only to those readers who cannot see how Ginsberg has come to new formulations of well-known notions. Ultimately, Chaucer's Italian Tradition succeeds by lending to Ginsberg's truly radical assertions that coveted aura of near-obviousness, that flash of recogniti on prompting readers to ask themselves why they had nor thought of this line of interpretation sooner.

While this study does not presuppose any familiarity with Ginsberg's earlier monograph Dante's Aesthetics of Being (The University of Michigan Press, 1999), his examination of Chaucer's translation of Dantean modes of signification emerges organically from ideas in nuce in the earlier book. In neither book does Ginsberg face specifically Chaucerian understanding of Boccaccio's Decameron, a subject that Ginsberg acknowledges deserves treatment in a separate volume (272). Readers can only hope that the next installment of Ginsberg's groundbreaking critical "trilogy" will not be long in the making.