For Leland, the English tongue serves as an imperfect memorial of Roman greatness, even in an age of overall cultural decline. Earlier in De Viris Illustribus, he links Latin with the vernacular, writing that “before the arrival of Caesar, [the British language] was partly Hebrew and Greek and partly barbarian,” but under Roman rule it “was gradually transformed halfway to Latin in the same way that the Gallic island, by long habit, was reduced, albeit with difficulty, to a province.”52 In Leland’s view, this is improvement, not colonization. It is analogous to Chaucer’s comparison of his own work to classical sources, a juxtaposition that elevates English poetry by linking it with Latin and Greek models even as it also adopts a position of ostensible humility. Although he does not cite it, Leland would have likely known Chaucer’s instructions to his “litel book” in Troilus and Criseyde, wherein he implores it to “kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.”53 In Leland’s formulation, the English language itself performs a similar obeisance to the Latin model.
When it comes to Chaucer, Leland is very clear about the purpose of his English poetry. It is not a means of literary expression but rather a vehicle through which Chaucer can accomplish his nationalistic goal of improving the English language. Leland writes,
Now, indeed, the order of my discourse demands that I show clearly Geoffrey’s goal in his studies. Indeed, the single aim of his studies was to make the English language as polished as possible in all respects, for he had seen what good progress Gower had made in the same task, although much was left to be done. Therefore, he thought he should leave no stone unturned in order to reach the highest degree of success. And since he always admired poetry above all things, had loved and cultivated it religiously, it seemed most convenient to him to make his way towards the very heights of expression through poetry.54
In Leland’s view, poetry is a convenient and authoritative medium through which to improve the English language, an enterprise already authorized by Gower’s earlier work along similar lines. Ultimately, however, poetry is merely the setting; the words themselves, which can be appropriated and redeployed to any number of rhetorical ends, are where value truly lies.
This emphasis on words rather than entire works is, perhaps, why Leland never quotes from Chaucer’s poems directly. His most extended engagement with Chaucer’s poems comes in the form of a list of titles, translated into Latin from the 1532 printing of William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s Works.55 Leland lists twenty-two works, including two collective titles (“Fabulae Cantianae” and “Cantiones,” minor poems), one piece he identifies as spurious (The Floure of Courtesy, or “flos humanitatis, qui libellulus a multis, tanquam nothus, reiicitur,”—a small book that many reject as spurious), and something he calls the “Tale of Piers Plowman” (Petri Aratoris fabula), which he claims was suppressed because of its anticlerical tone (“quia malos sacerdotum mores vehementer increpavit, suppressa est”).56 This is apparently Langland’s Piers Plowman, which Leland has confused with the apocryphal Plowman’s Tale, which is absent both from Thynne’s edition and from earlier printed copies of the Canterbury Tales. Leland also describes an early collected edition of Chaucer produced by Caxton; no bibliographical evidence supports this claim, and Alexandra Gillespie surmises that Leland had encountered pre-1532 editions of the Tales and other poems bound together, which he mistook as a more deliberately unified production.57
When Leland lists the titles of Chaucer’s works, he is not simply quoting the titles or incipits from Latin works as in the case of most of his other subjects, but translating an English text (here, not Chaucer’s own words but rather titles assigned to his works in Thynne’s edition) into Latin. In this, Leland anticipates a tendency to classicize and Latinize Chaucer that will become increasingly prominent over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will take forms as varied as Robert Greene’s ventriloquizing of Chaucer and Gower in order to discuss Horatian poetics in Greenes Vision (ca. 1590; published 1592), Gabriel Harvey’s annotations identifying classical analogues in his copy of the Canterbury Tales (ca. 1600), and Sir Francis Kynaston’s translation of Troilus and Criseyde into Latin hexameters (1635).58 Leland explains that he has provided his list of Chaucerian titles “so that readers may be able, as the saying goes, at least to measure the lion by his claws.”59 The phrase, which has classical antecedents and is also found in Erasmus, is not entirely apt, since Leland never offers readers even a single claw’s worth of Chaucerian English. Chaucer’s poems are twice mediated here: once because they are referred to only by their titles (which are generally editorial rather than authorial), and a second time because these titles are Latinized. Paradoxically, Chaucer’s language becomes most occluded at the moment it becomes most central to Leland’s claims.
Nevertheless, Leland retains his focus on Chaucer’s language throughout the entry, a contrast to his comments on Gower, which mention his language only in passing. When Leland compares Chaucer with French and Italian writers, it is also in terms of the ways these poets shaped their respective vernaculars. Once again, he frames Chaucer’s achievements in linguistic but not necessarily literary terms. Discussing Chaucer’s models, he writes that “Petrarch was flourishing in Italy at the time [at which Chaucer wrote], by whose efforts the vernacular tongue of that land [lingua ibidem vernacula] had been brought to such a point of refinement that it was competing with Latin itself for the prize in eloquence. A certain Alain [Chartier] had likewise polished the French language in an infinite variety of ways.”60 In both cases, the works of Chaucer’s continental analogues are framed in national-linguistic terms. Leland takes a schematic approach in his celebration of Chaucer’s writing, and especially of his works as a translator, viewing the medieval poet’s work structurally and holistically rather than attending to the finer details of its contents. He describes the progress of Chaucer’s career in the following terms:
It was thus under favourable auspices that [Chaucer] applied himself to the work he had begun, now translating books written elegantly, ornately, and eloquently in the French language into his native speech; now rendering Latin verse into English, learnedly, aptly, and harmoniously; now committing to enduring parchment many of products of his own imagination, which equalled Latin authors in their aptness of expression; now striving with all his strength to be of use to the reader, and alternately taking sedulous care to delight him. He did not desist until he had raised our language to such purity, such eloquence, such concision and grace, that it could justly be ranked among the cultured languages of the nations.61
In Leland’s framing, the goal—linguistic improvement—remains the same in the case of both Chaucer’s translations and his original works, even as Leland’s choice of adverbs in this section (e.g., docte, apte, canore; sweetly, ornately, elegantly) recall the aureate diction of fifteenth-century Chaucerians.
A similar emphasis on language and national identity marks the three poems by Leland that