In the late Middle Ages, Chaucer invents two imaginative domains crucial to his culture and to our understanding of the emergence of selfhood, subjectivity and social arrangements; antiquity and late-medieval modernity. Edwards demonstrates in this study how this was the result of Chaucer's reading and re-writing of the works of Boccaccio, which provide sources and models for portraying the classical past and medieval modernity. In so doing, Edwards provides us with a valuable way of assessing Chaucer's analysis of late medieval culture.

ROBERT R. EDWARDS is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of books on Chaucer, medieval drama, medieval literary theory, and the Italian poet Guido Guinizelli. He has edited the works of John Lydgate and essay collections on love, desire, and sexuality in the Middle Ages.