ABSTRACT
The true source of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde only became known with the rise of modern scholarship. Giovanni Boccaccio detaches the story from the rest of the history of Troy, expands its particulars, and adds three long opening parts that tell how the lovers meet, fall in love, and consummate their passion. Filostrato is a unique work in Boccaccio’s canon and in many ways, despite its vaguely Ovidian tone, it is unlike any other literary work that would have been known to Chaucer. Boccaccio’s variety of styles and skill at combining high and low literary genres provided a powerful model for Chaucer’s own practice in Troilus and Criseyde. If Boccaccio shares much with the cantare, he was also deeply influenced by a very different contemporary literary form: the dolce stil novo, which first proved that Italian poetry could equal the elegance and delicate emotion of French and even Latin verse.
