Product Description: Professor Boitani's latest book explores the areas of the tragic and the sublime in medieval literature by asking what medieval texts mean to modern readers. Boitani, who has written widely on medieval and comparative literature, studies tragic and sublime tensions in stories and scenes recounted by such major poets as Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch, as well as themes shared by writers and philosophers and traditional poetic images...read more

Product Description: Members of the Florentine family of the Donati feature prominently in Dante's Divine Comedy. Their presence is explored by Piero Boitani, as a 'comedy' within the Comedy, in close readings of the three major episodes in which they appear, one for each of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso...read more

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Product Description: The Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden’s phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and “perfect” them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden’s notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book examines the Bible and its medieval and modern rewritings. It looks at some of the most beautiful and intriguing scenes from the Old and New Testament and the direct or indirect Re-Scriptures of these by writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and T...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The theme of the body-and-soul relationship in medieval texts and in modern reworkings of medieval matter is explored in the articles here, specifically the representation of the body in romance; the relevance of bawdy tales to the cultural experience of authors and readers in the middle ages; the function of despair, or melancholy, in medieval and Renaissance literature; and the political significance of late medieval representations of `bodies' in the chroniclers' accounts of the Rising and in Gower's poems...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The essays collected in this volume centre on the idea of `mediaevalitas', exploring it through three major themes: medieval authors reading other medieval authors; modern authors who rewrite medieval works; and modern critics discussing medieval texts in relation to new critical projects such as `New Historicism' and gender analysis...read more

Product Description: Piero Boitani's study is a perceptive and imaginative exploration of the myth of Ulysses in a range of Western literature from Homer to Joyce. Describing the many incarnations of Ulysses, Boitani sees the hero as an ideal observation-point from which to measure the similarities and differences between the otherness ("alterity") of the past and the "modernity" of the present...read more

Product Description: The essays in this volume, from the 1992 J.A.W. Bennett Symposium, explore varied aspects of the interpretation of texts in middle English literature, and, in one case, a modern interpretation of medieval material. A study of the dissenting hermeneutics of the Lollards as against a scholastic synthesis and an analysis of the role of medieval figures in Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls opens the volume...read more

Product Description: The theme of the 1990 Bennett Memorial Lectures in Perugia, Poetics: Theory and Practice, invites a variety of approaches: for instance, the search for a late-medieval poetics in texts by commentators and philosophers; the study of an internal, implicit theory of poetry in the poetic texts themselves; and the application of modern literary theories to medieval works...read more

Product Description: This is the first study devoted to the story of Troilus and Cressida as it has developed through the ages and in various literatures. An international team of scholars examine the way in which the problems of love and death are faced in narrative, poetry, drama, and opera...read more

Product Description: While covering a wide area of 14th century European intellectual, cultural and literary history, these essays examine such important topics as the relationship between intellectuals and hagiography and discuss major authors of thetime.

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This is a wide-ranging and detailed study of English narrative verse in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Piero Boitani describes and analyses the undisputed masterpieces of narrative (such as the works of the Gawain poet, Langland, Gower and Chaucer), as well as the anonymous romances and specimens of religious and comic narrative which form the background to the better-known poems. The book is divided by literary genres or structural systems: chapters on the religious, comic and romance traditions are followed by a discussion of dream and visionary narratives and a chapter on story collections including those of Gower. The rest of the book is devoted to Chaucer, who mastered all these types. (view table of contents)

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This paperback consists of a collection of essays which have aroused considerable interest, since their first publication in 1983, in a question that has been occupying scholars for many years: what did fourteenth-century Italy and its literature mean to Chaucer? In the first part of the book contributors assess the general state of English and Italian culture in the fourteenth century and the complex network of Anglo-Italian relationships in the areas of trade, finance, church organisation and academic exchange. The second part faces the literary problem that Chaucer's borrowing from Italian authors poses: not only what he takes, but how and why. These essays include source studies and comparative analyses of such masterpieces as The Divine Comedy, The Canzoniere, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.

Product Description: The House of Fame is one of Chaucer's most intellectually challenging poems, drawing on diverse traditions such as dream poetry and mythology, but unified by the central concept of Fame. It is this concept, and the `imaginary world' which surrounds it, which Professor Boitani explores in this volume in the Chaucer Studies series...read more