after Petrarch’s death in 1374, there was undeniably a boom in great literature, felt in realms across the west. Boccaccio, who died in 1375, had finished his Decameron twenty years earlier. In England the enthusiastic Italophile Geoffrey Chaucer began his Canterbury Tales around 1387 and worked on it until his own death in 1400. (Chaucer also translated Petrarch’s poetry into English and adapted one of his Latin stories, “Griselda,” as “The Clerk’s Tale.”)
