Michael Calabrese

Chaucer's Dorigen and Boccaccio's Female Voices

The specific Boccaccian analogues for Chaucer Franklin’s Tale have received detailed critical treatment. Scholars consider Menedon’s story in the Filocolo the likely source, and even though there is no absolute critical consensus that Chaucer knew the Decameron, the version of the story in that collection (10, 5) has nonetheless fruitfully been compared to Chaucer’s tale. Over the past twenty years, in fact, the complex relations between Boccaccio and Chaucer have been receiving ever expanding and dynamic treatment, without critics compelling themselves to determine whether Chaucer actually read the Decameron and employed it as a source.1 I want to further these inquiries by engag-