ABSTRACT
The basis is a translation o f Boccaccio’s H Filostrato, written some half-century earlier. Chaucer treats it even more ruthlessly than Teseida: sometimes he translates line by line, sometimes runs roughly parallel, at other times totally diverges from, and in general greatly changes. For all the poet’s claimed reliance on the ‘authority’ of ancient writers he takes only what he wants - the attitude o f a conqueror rather than a dependent. The poem is most richly stored with all Chaucer’s wide reading and his experience of daily life. He did not need and did not use the rather close translation into French prose attributed to one Beauvau, as some scholars have claimed. Coinci dental readings are trivial and the French was almost certainly written in the middle o f the fifteenth century.
