On the latter of these missions Chaucer, who left England in the winter of
1372, visited Genoa and Florence. His object at the former city was to
negotiate concerning the settlement of a Genoese mercantile factory in one
of our ports, for in this century there already existed between Genoa and
England a commercial intercourse, which is illustrated by the obvious
etymology of the popular term "jane" occurring in Chaucer in the sense of
any small coin. ("A jane" is in the "Clerk's Tale" said to be a
sufficient value at which to estimate the "stormy people") It has been
supposed that on this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose residence
was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury
Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy
clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet,"
may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from
Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting
which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have
been accompanied by the most suitable conversation which the imagination
can supply; while, on the other hand, it is a conjecture unsupported by
any evidence whatever, that a previous meeting between the pair had
occurred at Milan in 1368, when Lionel Duke of Clarence was married to his
second wife with great pomp in the presence of Petrarch and of Froissart.
The really noteworthy point is this: that while neither (as a matter of
course) the translated "Romaunt of the Rose," nor the "Book of the
Duchess" exhibits any traces of Italian influence, the same assertion
cannot safely be made with regard to any important poem produced by
Chaucer after the date of this Italian journey. The literature of Italy
which was--and in the first instance through Chaucer himself--to exercise
so powerful an influence upon the progress of our own, was at last opened
to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain
undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he
would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio--both his