AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE[1].
The history of the Renaissance ends in France and carries us away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun; and French writers, who are fond of connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old French fabliaux and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the art of miniature painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century,—a Renaissance within the limits of the middle age itself, a brilliant but in part
- ↑ Aucassin et Nicolette. See Nouvelles Françoises du 13e siècle, a Paris, chez P. Jannet, libraire; mdccclvi.
B
