Chaucer's Italy

Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but, as Owen's enlightening short study of Chaucer's Italian years makes clear, the poet's life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today. Chaucer enjoyed numerous international sojourns over the course of his eventful life, but there was one part of Europe that influenced his work like no other: Italy. Tracing Chaucer's journeys and his links to destinations such as Florence, Certaldo, Arqua, Pavia, and Milan, Richard Owen introduces us to the princes, knights, and authors with whom Chaucer mixed. Richard Owen's illuminating new account leaves no doubt that, without the influence of Italian luminaries such as Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, the English canon ' fathered' by Chaucer would never have existed as we know it.