Looking through the Eastern Frame: Evaluating the Influence of "The Arabian Nights" on "The Decameron" and "The Canterbury Tales"

Final Thoughts

Through reading the Nights in conjunction with the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, it becomes clear that the Nights were present in Europe long before the Galland Manuscript. Both the Decameron and the Tales were conceived in Italy, which was a major contact point between European and Arab merchants at the time. Similarly, both European works use a frame story, a method that seems to have been popularized by the Nights. Of course, both of these pieces of evidence could merely be coincidental. However, with the Decameron and the Tales drawing “on both literary and oral folk sources” to complete their texts, the similarity between their stories and those within the Nights seem to confirm the theory (Irwin 99).

It is not by accident that none of the stories in the Nights that reappear in the European texts are focused on the “other.” Many of the tales are nonreligious and speak very little about race or ethnicity. In this way, the stories appropriated from the Nights are used because they contain themes that are universally accepted. During the Middle Ages, most women were denied a formal education, meaning that the audiences of Chaucer and Boccaccio were mostly men. This primarily male audience can explain why the appropriated stories often had themes of masculinity and misogyny.

Ultimately, comparing these different versions of the same story helps contemporary scholars better understand medieval social attitudes. While the notion of the “other” was present in many medieval texts, the Decameron and the Tales worked more often than not to bridge the gaps between the different cultures, even if Boccaccio and Chaucer were not consciously aware of it. These similar morals give the writers of the Nights and the European authors common grounds, allowing us to see similarities in spite of other differences.  This is the greatest gift of reading these three works together, as they give us a better understanding of the common sentiments of those living in medieval times. 
 

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