Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio

A comparison of Chaucer and Boccaccio sheds new light on both writers, indicating their mutual use of ancient comic literary traditions. Although many of Chaucer's sources have been exhaustively studied, relatively little work has been done on the influence of his contemporary Boccaccio, a gap which this book aims to fill. It examines the relationship of the comictales, the so-called fabliaux, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron , demonstrating that not only did Chaucer draw