Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida

The focus of Before the Knight’s Tale is the transformation of Statius’s Thebaid into Boccaccio’s Teseida and Chaucer’s subsequent reshaping of this rich literary tradition in the Knight’s Tale. David Anderson examines Boccaccio’s imitative art in its historical context, defining his model of classical epic and his imitative strategy in the Teseida. Two medieval prologues to the Thebaid, with a series of Boccaccio’s own glosses on a passage in Thebaid 7, are made available for the first time in the appendixes.