Lineages
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Bring any book to the centre: what it draws on is to its left, what draws on it to its right.
Of its time
It draws on
The Manciple's Tale is Ovid's story of Phoebus and the crow, from Book 2 of the Metamorphoses: the white bird that tells Apollo of his wife's infidelity and is turned black for it.
Chaucer read Dante closely and borrows from him in several tales. Harold Bloom sees the pilgrims of the Comedy behind Chaucer's frame: another journey of souls, but a whole worldly company on the road, with the Host in Virgil's place.
Like Boccaccio, Chaucer sets his stories inside a frame of people telling tales to pass the time: ten young Florentines escaping the plague, a company of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. About a quarter of the tales have a parallel in the Decameron, patient Griselda's among them.
No later work in the atlas draws on it yet.
Of its places
The whole web
Every line in the atlas, by place or by time. Tap a work to bring it to the centre.