Dalla recensione di David Wallace in Medium Aevum, LXIII.i, 1994
(...) Buffoni devotes the first eight of his twenty-one chapters to Melibee; his reflections on Melibee form both the core of the book and its stimulating part. His thesis as to why Chaucer should identify himself with the Melibee is offered early on: “as a scholarly poet”, Buffoni argues, Chaucer “wishes to demonstrate that the moral treatise counts for more than any other form of artistic expression; that poetry may be a good divertissement, but that when called upon to express the best of himself, Chaucer can but resort to the moral treatise and to patristics, the “noble” form, the form of “truth”.
In choosing Melibee, Buffoni continues, Chaucer wished to suggest that beneath the mask of the poet we should perceive “the rhetor, the philosopher, the man of law”.
(...) Buffoni’s book is worth reading for the evident pleasure it takes in reading Chaucer (...). Buffoni performs a useful function in directing our attention away from the lesser-known Renaud de Louens towards the immensely popular Albertanus (...).
The impression that lingers from reading Buffoni is how very strange and retarded English mediaeval culture appears to Italian eyes. (...)