Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Chaucer has the longest continuous reception history of any author writing in English, responses to Chaucer and his works constitute a larger body of written commentary than that associated with any other English author until the rise of Shakespeare studies in the eighteenth century. The copiousness of the written record related to Chaucer reflects his appeal to an unusually broad range of readers and commentators, from poets and rhetoricians to chroniclers and clerics. These readers sought out and made reference to Chaucer not only because of his reputation as an exemplary poet, but also because of his perceived status as an innovator in the field of Englishness itself, whose linguistic and lexical contributions to national excellence just happened to take the form of literary writings. While Chaucer had always held pride of place among English poets, in early modern England interest in his life and writing substantially outstripped interest in his contemporaries and immediate followers and no other Middle English writer is subject to the same degree of biographical speculation.25
The early modern encounter between antiquarians and Chaucer continues to reverberate in medieval studies today. In some cases, most notably Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love and the anonymous dream vision The Floure and the Leafe (both of which are printed in Chaucer’s Works), sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century editions serve as records of works for which no earlier manuscript survives.26 In the case of better-attested works, early editions may still provide variant readings drawn from otherwise-untraced manuscripts; for example, William Thynne’s 1532 edition provides the only complete text of the Book of the Duchess. More broadly, the version of Chaucer and his works found in these antiquarian editions has structured much subsequent literary and scholarly engagement with medieval English literature. In the linguistic realm, these editions kept not just Chaucer’s texts but the language of those texts in the hands of Tudor and Stuart readers, offering later writers a rich vocabulary for archaism and allusion and inaugurating a long-standing strain of medievalism in English writing.27 Later still, their very real textual faults would help to motivate the activities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors, who approached Chaucer armed with both philological methods and a stronger understanding of Middle English.28
Reading in an Expanded Archive
By taking up evidence of extraliterary readings of Chaucer in early modern England and by considering the scholarly and intellectual milieu that informed those readings, this book seeks to map the mutually constitutive relationship between a nascent discourse of vernacular English literary history and understandings of the English past more broadly. Within this discourse, Chaucer served as the native historical foundation for the work of later English poets in much the same way that Anglo-Saxon Christianity became proof of the English church’s historical independence from Rome, and, in common law, earlier cases acted as precedent for later legal decisions. In each case, the medieval example could be cited to place early modern practices—poetic, religious, or legal—on historical footing. Because it is deeply invested in questions of historical change and continuity, any study of Chaucer’s status in early modern England is also, in part, a study in periodization. Accordingly, my analysis draws on previous studies of Renaissance attitudes toward the postclassical, pre-Reformation past, especially those that foreground the ways that postmedieval ideologies shaped the fate of medieval texts and manuscripts. Such work is a reminder that periodization is never simply a chronological question and that, as Margreta de Grazia writes, the divide between the medieval and the Renaissance “works less as a historical marker than as a massive value judgment, determining what matters and what does not.”29
Chaucer’s early modern reception epitomizes the way that periodization plays with conventional, linear notions of temporality. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, Chaucer emerged as a figure capable of both exemplifying his historical moment and transcending it through the enduring literary value of his work, making him at once “proleptically modern” and representative of the past.30 As a result, Chaucer’s works were treated not only as sources of readerly pleasure and poetic exemplarity but also as documentary evidence of England’s linguistic, cultural, and political past. Even as Chaucer remained an important reference point for later poets, Renaissance scholars worked to situate his life and writings in an increasingly dense web of knowledge about the past, reading him at once as a historical source and as a literary historical source.
Chaucer’s presence in a wide range of extrapoetic discourses means that people in early modern England had available to them a figure who, in aggregate, might have looked very different from the poet that we know today, in terms of both what was believed about his life and writing and the significance that was accorded to it. The ability to occupy a position of national importance in both poetic and historical registers set Chaucer apart both from his co-medievals and from later authors, although Gower, Lydgate, and Langland would each at times play a Chaucer-like role in later commentary. The chapters that follow use Chaucer’s early modern bibliography to trace his function in overlapping discourses of nationhood, cultural identity, and literary tradition. I move from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, showing how subsequent generations of commentators built upon one another’s worth to refine and elaborate their understanding of Chaucer and his role in English national identity. By attending to the wider frame in which Chaucer’s works were read and reproduced, this book as a whole seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the early modern reception of Middle English writing, as well as a clearer view of the links between literary history, linguistic identity, and ideas about a shared, national past. Reading Chaucer’s reception in an expanded archive offers a new degree of context to a rich body of previous scholarship that prioritizes poetic and dramatic responses to medieval works and allows me to foreground questions of nationalism and history in new ways.31
This book seeks to answer the “why” of Chaucer’s early modern reception by exploring the “what” and “how” of that reception. Each chapter offers a Chaucerian lens through which to examine the intercalation of medieval literature and national identity in early modern England. Antiquarian commentary shows that, especially where Chaucer was concerned, in this period national history and literary history were not only intertwined but, often, one and the same. Although many of the figures I examine here advance claims about the medieval past that are at best pedantic and at worst historically inaccurate, the patterns of thought that structure their work reveal much about how antiquarians connected the past with the present and the significant role that Chaucer played in shaping their conceptions of those connections.
These chapters also offer a reappraisal of antiquarian writing itself. Our current disciplinary formations encourage us to treat literary commentary and historiography as wholly separate from the work that they comment upon and presume an easily identifiable division between creative work and scholarly writing. These distinctions are not so clear-cut in the Renaissance. Antiquarian scholarship was collaborative; and scholarly work was deeply concerned with the same questions and anxieties about fragmentation, incompleteness, and loss that shaped more recognizably literary engagement with the past.32 In Angus Vine’s words, antiquarianism was “a dynamic, recuperative, resurrective response to the past. And for this reason it was also an essentially imaginative response to the past,” rather than a dry assemblage of facts.33 This is to say: the writings of John Foxe, John Leland, and other Tudor commentators are a record of an affective engagement with Chaucer and his works, as much as are Spenser’s Chaucerian homages or the aureate praises of Lydgate and Hoccleve.
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Chapter 1 looks at the ways in which antiquarians shaped the large collected editions of Chaucer’s