1. The Monk’s Tale is founded in its main features on
Bocccacio’s work, “De Casibus Virorum Illustrium;” (“Stories
of Illustrious Men”) but Chaucer has taken the separate stories
of which it is composed from different authors, and dealt with
them after his own fashion.
2. Boccaccio opens his book with Adam, whose story is told at
much greater length than here. Lydgate, in his translation from
Boccaccio, speaks of Adam and Eve as made “of slime of the
erth in Damascene the felde.”
3. Judges xiii. 3. Boccaccio also tells the story of Samson; but
Chaucer seems, by his quotation a few lines below, to have
taken his version direct from the sacred book.