Chaucer's Literary Influences
Like all great writers, Geoffrey Chaucer was a voracious and omnivorous reader, and he was well-versed in the classical Latin literary tradition from Livy and Virgil to Augustine. Ovid’s works – especially the Heroides – may have been particular favorites of Chaucer’s, and John Fyler has shown how much of Chaucer's antifoundationalist stance may have been inspired by Ovid.
Overall, the Roman tradition pops up in small details throughout his works. Two late Roman texts, however, stand out as more deeply influential upon Chaucer: Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (as one sees especially in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale), and – in a subtler way – a short text by the fifth-century writer Macrobius called the Commentarium super Somnium Scipionis, which discusses the nature of dream, a topic which enthralled Chaucer. Other earlier medieval Latin writers whom Chaucer absorbed include St. Augustine, Martianus Capella, Hugh of St. Victor, Alain de Lille, and Walter Map.
Chaucer’s more obvious medieval influences are largely French and Italian. Indeed, some scholars divide Chaucer’s early work (previous to 1385) into a “French period” and an “Italian period.” French writers of particular interest to Chaucer include Guillaume Machaut (who lived in England for many years in Chaucer’s youth and whom the poet may well have personally known), Jean Froissart, and the two authors of the famous allegory The Romance of the Rose (which Chaucer translated), Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The poet was also doubtless familiar with many Old French fabliaux and beast fables, though we cannot pinpoint any specific ones.
Overall, the Roman tradition pops up in small details throughout his works. Two late Roman texts, however, stand out as more deeply influential upon Chaucer: Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (as one sees especially in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale), and – in a subtler way – a short text by the fifth-century writer Macrobius called the Commentarium super Somnium Scipionis, which discusses the nature of dream, a topic which enthralled Chaucer. Other earlier medieval Latin writers whom Chaucer absorbed include St. Augustine, Martianus Capella, Hugh of St. Victor, Alain de Lille, and Walter Map.
Chaucer’s more obvious medieval influences are largely French and Italian. Indeed, some scholars divide Chaucer’s early work (previous to 1385) into a “French period” and an “Italian period.” French writers of particular interest to Chaucer include Guillaume Machaut (who lived in England for many years in Chaucer’s youth and whom the poet may well have personally known), Jean Froissart, and the two authors of the famous allegory The Romance of the Rose (which Chaucer translated), Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The poet was also doubtless familiar with many Old French fabliaux and beast fables, though we cannot pinpoint any specific ones.
Chaucer probably became familiar with Italian literature in the 1360s and 1370s during his diplomatic missions to Italy, and he seems quite conversant with the works of the great triumvirate of fourteenth-century Italian writers, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), whom he may well have met, and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). From Petrarch he derived the story that became The Clerk's Tale, as well as a host of other details that turn up . From Boccaccio he adapted the Italian poem Il Teseida, turning it into the basis for his Knight's Tale; another Boccaccio narrative poem, Il Filostrato, was the main source for Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. It is striking, however, that Chaucer seems not to have been familiar with Boccaccio's masterpiece, The Decameron, as the Italian work, with its narrative framework of having different characters tell stories, would have seemed an obvious inspiration for The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer's relationship to Dante is more complicated and far more interesting. Often Chaucer will translate lines more or less directly from The Divine Comedy (in The Prioress's Tale, for instance), or "borrow" similes or other imagery from the great Italian poet. At other times, Chaucer seems almost to mock Dante's work, as in The Hous of Fame, where a rather ridiculous eagle spirits the narrator Geffrei away to the heavens, a wry allusion to both Dante's dream in the Valley of the Kings in Purgatorio and to the celestial Eagle the pilgrim encounters in the Sphere of Jupiter in Paradiso.
Chaucer's relationship to Dante is more complicated and far more interesting. Often Chaucer will translate lines more or less directly from The Divine Comedy (in The Prioress's Tale, for instance), or "borrow" similes or other imagery from the great Italian poet. At other times, Chaucer seems almost to mock Dante's work, as in The Hous of Fame, where a rather ridiculous eagle spirits the narrator Geffrei away to the heavens, a wry allusion to both Dante's dream in the Valley of the Kings in Purgatorio and to the celestial Eagle the pilgrim encounters in the Sphere of Jupiter in Paradiso.
Chaucer seems (surprisingly?) less interested in native English literary traditions. He almost certainly never read such English “classics” as Beowulf, Layamon’s Brut, or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He certainly knew enough Middle English metrical romances to parody them in The Tale of Sir Thopas and in The Squire’s Tale, but his opinion of them may not have been very high (although he seems to have considered them "good fun"). He must also have been familiar with the popular English alliterative revival poetry, since he makes fun of it in passing a few times. He never makes direct reference, however, to England’s greatest contemporary alliterative poet, William Langland. This reticence is telling, and it may have been because Langland’s famous poem Piers Plowman was too politically incendiary in the wake of the Peasant Revolt of 1381, touching too close to social realities that Chaucer preferred to ironize or downplay.
We also know that Chaucer was a good friend of one of fourteenth-century England’s other great poets, John Gower (Shakespeare's "moral Gower" in Pericles). Gower’s Confessio Amantis is, like The Canterbury Tales, a frame-narrative that collects numerous other stories within it. Aside from Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale, however, it is difficult to detect any direct lines of influence from Gower.
[*] Note that the literature of ancient Greece was, in general, unknown to Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Chaucer would only have been familiar with Homer through Reader’s Digest-like abridgements in Latin. He had probably never even heard of Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sappho, Pindar, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, etc. Aristotle’s works, however, were known in the West through Latin translations, as were a few of Plato’s works, especially the Timaeus (though not The Republic).
Further Reading
Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Cornell University Press, 1996)
Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (University of California Press, 1957)
D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 1962)
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford University Press, 1999)