Abstract

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.