chaucer"s poetry wasinfluened by poetry
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folio 5r)
The fate of Marcus Manlius (vol. 1: folio 109r)
Boccaccio and Fortune, and Saturnus' army (vol 2: folio 1r)
Boccaccio’s vision of Petrarch (vol 2: folio 65r)
Boccaccio addresses Manutius, and Phocinus murders Manutius (vol 2: folio 104v)
Miniatures of Boethius teaching students and in prison (folio 4r)
Boethius On the Consolation of Philosophy (with commentary by Nicholas Trivet)
Italy: 1385
MS Hunter 374 (V.1.11)
The Consolation of Philosophy was the most important and influential philosophical treatise of the Middle Ages. A great scholar, Boethius (c.480-524) was an important government official for the Ostrogoth king Theodoric in Rome. He was accused of treason in 522 for defending the rights of the Senate too strenuously, imprisoned, and executed in 524. He wrote the De Consolatione Philosophiae while in custody. In it, the allegorical figure Philosophia converses with Boethius, leading him from self pity to an enlightened, rational view of the human condition. Chaucer translated the work in his Boece, and it also pervades both The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, enriching them with a philosophical gravity.
In this manuscript, each of the five books of the Consolation is introduced by a beautifully floreated and gilt initial. The initial ‘C’ of Book I, shown to the left, incorporates a scene of Boethius instructing his students; below is a depiction of the author in his prison at Pavia. The volume was written for one Gregorius of Genoa. The scribe, Brother Amadeus, signs the work in two places; while modestly claiming to be the least of all scribes (‘ego enim sum minimus omnium scriptorum frater Amadeus’), he has produced a book of surpassing beauty.
Ornamental pages at beginning of work (folios iiiv - 1r)
Preface with illuminated initial 'E' (folio 2r)
Beginning of text (folio 1r)
Virgil Aeneid
Italy: early Fifteenth Century
MS Hunter 375 (V.1.12)
The works of Virgil exerted an enormous influence upon Latin and later Christian literature. One of a number of classical Roman authors found in the medieval curriculum, many fourteenth-century schoolboys would have been familiar with his poetry. Virgil was especially revered in the Middle Ages as he was considered to be almost a Christian. His Fourth Eclogue was seen to be prophetic of the birth of Jesus, while the Aeneid was read allegorically: the voyages of Aeneas in leading the defeated Trojans to their new home in Rome became the Christian soul wandering through life searching for heaven. In Chaucer’s The House of Fame, the dreaming poet sees the story of the Aeneid written on the walls of the Temple of Venus. He paraphrases the famous beginning of Virgil’s poem as: ‘I wol now synge, yif I kan, / The armes and also the man / That first cam, thurgh his destinee’.
This manuscript is written in the humanist book-hand that was created by Poggio Bracciolini in Florence in the early Fifteenth Century. The opening of the poem is displayed to the left. The original inner ornament of the illuminated initial ‘A’ has been washed out and replaced by a pen and ink sketch of a mail-clad warrior with helm and mace.
Beginning of Book 7 (folio 76r)
Beginning of Book 6 (folio 70v)
Ovid Metamorphoses
Italy: 1380
MS Hunter 445 (V.5.15)
Ovid‘s vast Latin poem on the theme of transformation incorporates about 250 tales from Greek and Roman mythology. Of enduring popularity, it was widely read and well known in the medieval period. Many of Chaucer’s contemporaries would have been familiar with its stories via a fourteenth century French translation entitled the Ovide Moralisé. This allegorised version of the work imbued the stories story of Ceyx and Alcyone from Book