The distancing effect produced by Speght’s title and glossaries might seem at first primarily negative. After all, at the end of the sixteenth century, as Speght compiled his list of “old and obscure words” in Chaucer, continental editions of Boccaccio and Dante came equipped not with glossaries but with indexes designed to aid the reader as he or she incorporated the language of the fourteenth-century poets into his or her own writing.68 The linguistic and historical alienation that prompts Speght’s interventions is not necessarily undesirable, however, because it opens up new ways of situating the poet in relation to the more distant past. There might be no glossary in Dante, but similar lexicons can be found in school texts of Virgil, Seneca, and the like. With their language marked both as historically distant and foundationally English, Chaucer’s writings become the first English “classics.”
Far from bracketing off Chaucer as an antiquarian curiosity irrelevant to current experiments in form and diction, the increasing unfamiliarity of Chaucer’s language might well have helped to assure his relevance to the major conversations about language, influence, and national identity in early modern England.69 On the printed page, Chaucer, viewed from the far side of religious reform and the “new” learning, could look surprisingly like certain influential Greek and Roman writers. Furthermore, as Lucy Munro demonstrates, the sixteenth century witnessed a sustained poetic engagement with the idea of archaism in ways that both drew upon and helped to shape antiquarian practice.70 Archaism, which like antiquarianism was in its early modern form deeply concerned with questions of national identity and England’s relation to its own past, made Chaucer’s distant language newly available for poetic appropriation, perhaps most notably in the writings of Edmund Spenser.71 The perceived outdatedness of Chaucer’s language—the idea it was now, as Puttenham wrote, “no longer with us”—was precisely what allowed him to serve as Spenser’s “well of English undefiled” and to appear as a writer who was, in the words of Speght’s title page, both “antient” and “English.”72
A few conclusions can be drawn from these examples. First, early modern readers and writers were alert to the changing nature of the English language. An awareness of language change in English was not new to post-Reformation England: in the thirteenth century the Tremulous Hand glossed Old English words with their Middle English equivalents, while around 1490, Caxton famously commented on the vagaries of the English tongue in his preface to his Eneydos (STC 24769). Throughout the premodern era, scribes and printers silently emended their sources to modernize their form and diction. But in sixteenth-century England, new kinds of changes made the difference between the language of the past and that of the present even more visible.73 Modifications in pronunciation, orthography, and grammar all played a role, and caused particular challenges when scanning and pronouncing works in verse.74 Errors proliferated as Middle English texts were copied and recopied by sixteenth-century scribes and compositors. Evolving attitudes toward the past itself—specifically, the notion that there was a “chiaroscuro” contrast between the present and the pre-Reformation past—also contributed to a sense that the language of the past was different and distant, and therefore more difficult to read and comprehend.75
Second, despite this change, it is clear that readers retained a real connection to the language and stories of late medieval England. A number of things testify to their ongoing vitality: multiple editions not only of Chaucer’s Works but also of writings by Gower, Lydgate, and Langland; ongoing references to and adaptations of Chaucer and his contemporaries in poetry, drama, and prose; and the abundant presence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century annotations both in medieval books and in early printed volumes containing Middle English. Even if readers were increasingly aware of the historical and linguistic distance between themselves and their medieval predecessors, and even if Chaucer’s language was manifestly more difficult than it had been a hundred years earlier, the evidence suggests that a significant number of readers retained some ability to comprehend and appreciate London dialects of late Middle English. The ability to read as well as study these older texts, in other words, never disappeared completely.
Beginning in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, many antiquarians also devoted at least some of their energies to the study of Anglo-Saxon, and the degree to which Old English was necessarily treated as a separate language offers an illustrative contrast to late Middle English’s proximity to early modern English. For texts written in older forms of the English language, the distinction between historical and literary modes of reading was much more clear-cut than it was for Middle English. (This is not to say Anglo-Saxon could not be deployed for literary purposes: from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, poets have deliberately engaged with Old English language and poetry, whether translating it or, occasionally, composing new verse.)76 Early modern readers could at least follow the sense of Chaucer’s stories without special training, even if individual words or references might be obscure or a corrupt or poorly edited text caused difficulty. Study of Old English grammar and language, however, was a necessary prelude to further investigation into Anglo-Saxon law, historiography, and religion.77 Key figures in the development of Anglo-Saxon studies, such as Matthew Parker, understood this and supported the work of grammarians and lexicographers accordingly.78 By and large, these early scholars turned to the surviving corpus of Old English writing as a source lexical and linguistic insight rather than poetic pleasure.79 It would not be until the early twentieth century that Anglo-Saxon verse would be seriously studied from a literary, rather than philological, perspective.
Third and finally, as the sixteenth century progressed, Chaucer, in particular, became a site for the commingling of a tradition of readerly enjoyment and a new sense that the English past was worth studying in rigorous ways. This is true of other late medieval authors as well, of course, but the sustained attention given to Chaucer’s archaisms is unique and testifies to what I have argued throughout this chapter was Chaucer’s exceptional place as a figure primed to index both connection to and distance from the medieval past. Marked by language that was both recognizably English and increasingly historically distant, Chaucer was at once an object of antiquarian fascination and a familiar English writer whose works remained accessible to many readers.
While Chaucer’s early modern transmission and reception can and should be understood in a context that included the work of other Middle English writers, Chaucer’s especially vaunted position in poetic genealogies from the fifteenth century onward made both the author and his language a privileged site for contemplation of the past in early modern England. As a writer whose language was identifiably English and whose achievements could be favorably compared with both later writers and classical ones, Chaucer represented continuity and historical progression. At the same time, because his language was an earlier form of the vernacular, and because the historical and cultural moment in which he lived was increasingly thought of as “other” to the post-Reformation present, he also signaled the presence of chronological rupture within English history. This doubleness is key to Chaucer’s special status in early modern England and the basis for his ability to signify meaningfully in both literary and historical contexts—an ability that is increasingly foregrounded in successive editions of his Works.
In their shared concern for Chaucer’s poetic legacy and the English past, the work of early antiquarians constitutes the pre-philological beginnings of what we today recognize as English literary history. To adapt Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claims about the ceremonial importance of certain foods that are “good to think” if not necessarily “good to eat,” Renaissance antiquarians selected Chaucer for a special role because they found him exceptionally “good to think,” even if he and his contemporaries no longer remained unequivocally “good to read” as his language became more difficult for everyday readers.80 The materials I consider in the following chapters show Chaucer’s works poised on a permeable boundary between “texts for reading” and “texts for studying”: what one reader considers a text for serious scholarly examination in one context may also be read for literary pleasure or moral insight