The focus of
Before the Knight's Tale is the transformation of Statius's
Thebaid into Boccaccio's
Teseida and Chaucer's subsequent reshaping of this rich literary tradition in the Knight's Tale. David Anderson examines Boccaccio's imitative art in its historical context, defining his model of classical epic and his imitative strategy in the Teseida. Two medieval prologues to the
Thebaid, with a series of Boccaccio's own glosses on a passage in
Thebaid 7, are made available for the first time in the appendixes.
Reviews"[An] important contribution . . . to the study of the
Teseida, of Boccaccio, and of a decisive moment in the development of medieval literature." *
Speculum *
Book InformationISBN 9780812281088
Author David AndersonFormat Hardback
Page Count 282
Imprint University of Pennsylvania PressPublisher University of Pennsylvania Press