What Chaucer really did to Il Filostrato

Lewis, C.S. "What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato." Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Stephen A. Barney. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

Lewis here argues that Chaucer’s many amendments, additive and subtractive, to Boccacio’s Il Filostrato are much more than an attempt to put his own stamp on the story. Instead, Chaucer’s process of revision, with its various reductions and expansions, is a process of “medievalization” – the English, Lewis claims, never really had a renaissance, and the Boccacio thus had to be retrofitted to accommodate the societal norms and expectations of Chaucer’s audience. Put simply, Chaucer would have read Il Filostrato and been impressed; he also would have felt that some major changes were necessary if the story was to be appreciated by his English contemporaries. Part of this medievalization, Lewis states, is the conversion of Boccacio’s original to a state much more closely in line with the true tenets of courtly love.

Lewis further argues that modern audiences too readily apply their own sensibilities to Troilus and Criseyde, as they do to most of Chaucer’s work. They label the Troilus as satire, and Pandare as a full-out comic character, for example, when Chaucer’s own audiences would have taken the story more seriously than the modern reader is likely to do. Original readers, he claims, would have been less likely to find humor in the lessons and exemplum themselves, but would instead have found humor in the contrast between those edifying lessons and the stubborn responses of Troilus.

Finally, Lewis claims that the Troilus is more resonant and appealing than Il Filostrato and that, as a result, it can be deduced that the ideal of courtly love is more resonant and appealing to readers – then and now – than are the more jaded beliefs and ideals that appear in the earlier work.

There is more to this article than can easily be summarized. It can be found in the back of the assigned Troilus and Criseyde text.