The asymmetry of Leland’s interest in Chaucer and Gower—rooted in a sense that it is Chaucer who makes the transformative contribution to the English language—presages the divergence of the writers’ reputations in the decades to come and shows the impact of Chaucer’s already exceptional status.40 In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Chaucer frequently shared the spotlight with both Gower and John Lydgate as part of a triumvirate of Middle English poets. Over the course of the sixteenth century, however, as judged by the relative number of contemporary references and the frequency of printed editions of their works, their reputations began to differ and as Chaucer’s stock rose, that of the other two did not. The reasons for this are varied: the Confessio Amantis may have been superseded by the availability of other Ovidian works better suited to contemporary tastes and more readily available to readers, while Alexandra Gillespie argues that the majority of the works of “Dan John [Lydgate], monk” were an unappealing business prospect for printers in an age of Protestant polemic.41 Yet, judged on the content of his writings alone, Chaucer should not be immune to similar charges. His work contains religious content (especially if the non-Chaucerian religious poems included in the 1532 Works are taken into account), and his classical themes, from Statius’s Thebiad to Ovid’s Heroides, are later taken up by Tudor writers using style and language more amenable to sixteenth-century readers. But precisely because they are celebrated for their linguistic qualities as well as their poetic acumen, Chaucer’s works are never really consigned to the past on the grounds of form or of content. Looking closely at Leland’s writings on Chaucer reveals a poet uniquely situated at the intersection of literary history and a sweeping, at times propagandistic, account of the formation of Englishness itself.
“Noster Galfridus”
Leland’s entry on Chaucer consists of three principal parts: an account of his life, a list of his works, and four poems in praise of Chaucer. Three of these poems are Leland’s own work, while the third is the epitaph for Chaucer commissioned by William Caxton and written by the Italian poet Stephanus Surigonus. Leland’s writings on Chaucer have a clear influence on the poet’s reception in the sixteenth century and beyond: later scholars accept Leland’s conclusions, often unquestioningly, and the De Viris Illustribus account is the basis for all subsequent biographies of Chaucer until the 1800s. Less apparent—but no less important—are the ways Leland’s use of Latin shaped Chaucer’s trajectory in the years and decades ahead. Like the rest of the work, the entry for Chaucer is written entirely in Latin, save for the title of the Romaunt of the Rose, which Leland renders in French as the Roman de la Rose. This marked an important shift away from earlier English encomiums to the poet, which self-consciously deployed the same poetic vernacular that they charge Chaucer with creating. Leland’s Latin text provides a model for writing about Chaucer without writing like Chaucer.
In his account of Chaucer’s life, Leland presents his readers with a mixture of tradition, extrapolation, and hearsay that adds up to something quite different from the London-born son of a vintner known to modern biographers. In the process, he crafts an image of the poet that might have looked reassuringly familiar to his sixteenth-century readers. This is not because Chaucer’s life story was already widely known, but because Leland’s version of Chaucer’s life sets the poet amid educational, social, and cultural institutions that would have held meaning and resonance for many Latinate English readers. In some ways, this does echo earlier praise of Chaucer. Leland followed in the footsteps of those earlier admirers who, as David Lawton has argued, tended to project onto Chaucer an idealized relation between poet and sovereign.42 Thus, we find Leland asserting that Chaucer “was known to Richard of Bordeaux, king of England, and was dear to him on account of his virtues, so too he was held in high regard for the same reasons by Henry IV and his son, who triumphed over the French.”43 Leland spent most of his career under the patronage of Henry VIII or highly placed figures in his court; the idea of a poet in close proximity to the sovereign would certainly have been meaningful to him and to other literary and scholarly courtiers in his audience.
Leland also writes that Chaucer, whom he calls “a young man of noble birth and the highest promise,” was a student at the University of Oxford and that he emerged from that institution “an acute logician, a sweet-toned orator, a sparkling poet, a weighty philosopher, an ingenious mathematician … as well as a devout theologian.”44 This claim that Chaucer attended the University of Oxford would stand unchallenged until the eighteenth century and was rooted in Chaucer’s references in the Treatise on the Astrolabe to the Oxford-based mathematicians John Somer and Nicholas of Lynn, whom Leland identifies in De Viris Illustribus as Chaucer’s teachers.45 For Leland, Chaucer’s alleged time at Oxford provides the needed explanation of how a noncleric came by his Latinate learning. A university education provides a new context for claims like Hoccleve’s that Chaucer was a “Universel fadir in science,” second only to Aristotle in “philosophie,” and bolsters assertions like William Thynne’s that Chaucer’s writing displays “manyfest comprobacion of his excellent lernyng in all kyndes of doctrynes and sciences.”46 To have attended Oxford (Leland says only that he studied there, not that he received a degree) signals a familiarity with Latin culture that Chaucer’s English poetry alone cannot demonstrate, even if readers might infer it through his translation of Boethius, his glib use of scholarly sources in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, or his claims to have translated Troilus and Criseyde from his “auctor” “Lollius.”47
A claim about Chaucer’s education is a claim about language as well as learning: the litany of scholarly accomplishments that Leland ticks off here strongly implies that Chaucer had the ability to write in Latin, but merely chose not to. Latinity is at the heart of Leland’s understanding of poetic production, even as he celebrates Chaucer’s work as an English poet. Chaucer here is not an untutored, native genius, as some later commentators might suggest. Rather, he is a sophisticated scholar whose command of learned disciplines places him on a par with those other much-admired elevators of vernacular literature, Dante and Petrarch, to whom Leland compares Chaucer later in the entry.
James Simpson has argued that, in the early modern period, historical research into the lives of medieval notables could serve an overtly periodizing purpose by fixing them in a past that is defined in opposition to the present.48 As a figure perceived as at once both medieval and modern, Chaucer is an important exception to this tendency. While Leland’s account clearly locates Chaucer in a pre-Reformation, pre-humanist, pre-Tudor past, it also takes pains to emphasize his participation in institutions and traditions of importance to an early modern audience, including the Inns of Court (where Leland claims both Chaucer and Gower studied), the universities, and the court itself. In this framework, Chaucer’s antiquity signifies not because his life and works appear on the “wrong” side of a historical gap, but because it places him at an early stage of literary and historical genealogies still vital in the early modern present.
The same sort of reasoning informs Leland’s treatment of Chaucer’s language. At first, it might seem that Leland’s preference for Latin leaves both Chaucer and Gower outside