The following chapters trace specific ways in which this understanding of Chaucer unfolds over the course of the sixteenth century. Chapter 2 turns to early accounts of Chaucer’s biography and shows how important this genre was in constructing Chaucer as a writer whose life and works could be known, understood, and valued by later scholarly readers. It begins with the early Tudor antiquarian John Leland’s Latin writings on Chaucer, which remained the most important source for biographers until the eighteenth century. Written in the 1530s, Leland’s commentary bolsters Chaucer’s ability to move between periods by influentially (if spuriously) connecting him to institutions of ongoing importance like the Inns of Court and the universities. At the same time, in a series of Latin poems presented alongside this biographical material, Leland explicitly situates Chaucer in relation to his Greek, Roman, and Italian antecedents. As he draws on both past and present to produce “new” knowledge about the poet’s life and works, Leland articulates a humanistic understanding of what a national poet is, or should be. Leland’s work was, in turn, a major source for the first extended biography of Chaucer written in English. Prefixed to the 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works, the English Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer was prepared by the volume’s editor, Thomas Speght, with assistance from the indefatigable antiquarian John Stow. Written for a less scholarly audience than Leland’s Latin account, the Life of Chaucer nonetheless shows how influential Leland’s understanding of Chaucer as a figure of uncommon poetic and historical significance was for later readers and interpreters of the poet’s works.
In Chapter 3, I consider how claims about Chaucer’s religious views—specifically, assertions that he was a proto-Protestant—shaped his early modern canon. These claims, popularized in widely read works like John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, elevated Chaucer’s historical importance by making him integral to the development of English Protestantism. Modern scholars most often discuss these claims in conjunction with the Plowman’s Tale, an apocryphal anticlerical satire assigned to Chaucer’s Plowman and included in editions of the Canterbury Tales printed between 1532 and 1721. Here, however, I explore the ways that beliefs about Chaucer’s religion shaped the transmission of the genuinely Chaucerian A.B.C. (not printed before 1602) and the spurious Jack Upland, a Lollard tract that circulated widely under Chaucer’s name thanks to its inclusion in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
My fourth chapter looks in greater detail at sixteenth-century views of Chaucerian language as they relate to later forms of literary English. Early Chaucer lexicons, such as the one added by Speght to his edition of the Works, illustrate exactly how complex the interplay between Chaucerian language and early modern poetic language could be. I show that Speght’s hard word list took some of its strongest cues concerning the treatment of archaic language from the E.K. glosses in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579). E.K.’s commentary, written two decades before Speght’s edition, invokes Chaucer in order to justify the use of archaic words by the quasi-anonymous “new Poete.” This playful, literary engagement with scholarly discourse had surprisingly concrete ramifications for the representation of Chaucer’s own Works in print. Speght’s edition clearly follows the Calender’s approach to Chaucer’s language, making Chaucer’s Works, in important ways, a Spenserian text. In both Speght’s Works and the Shepheardes Calender, the introduction of lexicons makes newly visible and newly problematic the particularities of Chaucerian language, framing them as temporally distant even as it insists upon their relevance to contemporary poetic enterprise. The recursivity of this exchange, in which the later poet’s writing informs the way his own influences are subsequently presented to readers, emphasizes the degree to which the medieval past is always shaped by its postmedieval interpreters.
Chapter 5 moves beyond language to explore the ways in which scholarly writing situated Chaucer in a wide range of historical discourses, including British antiquities, legal history, alchemy, and heraldry. My focus here is on Francis Thynne (1545?–1608), an active member of the Society of Antiquaries and the son of William Thynne, the courtier who oversaw of the first edition of Chaucer’s collected works in 1532. The younger Thynne is best remembered today for his Animadversions (1599), an open letter criticizing Speght’s 1598 edition of the Works. While the Animadversions has typically been dismissed as the work of a pedant jealously guarding his father’s legacy, it is also a sustained commentary on Chaucer’s life and works written by a lifelong scholar deeply involved in London’s antiquarian community. This chapter sets the Animadversions in the context of Thynne’s copious output, including works on heraldry, alchemy, and local history, and even poetry.
In my sixth and final chapter, I consider what I call “coterie scholarship” and explore how antiquarian readers applied knowledge from other areas of study to their reading of Middle English works. I look closely at the annotations, citations, and marginal notations made by three seventeenth-century readers in their copies of the Canterbury Tales: the lawyer and antiquarian Joseph Holland (d. 1605), the collector, herald, and astrological enthusiast Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), and the Dutch scholar and philologist Franciscus Junius the Younger (1591–1677). Their notes are in many ways similar across date, professional occupation, national origin, and level of education, and all show relatively little interest in Chaucer’s work as poetry. By seeking instead to situate Chaucer’s work within the larger scope of historical knowledge, these scholarly annotators both confirm Chaucer’s transition from “old” author to historical subject and exemplify the remarkable variety of frameworks in which such a subject might be studied.
Through their broad and varied efforts, early modern scholars played an indispensable role in constructing Chaucer as a poet whose writing both embodies his historical moment and transcends it. As Chaucer’s life and works were redefined as subjects for scholarly as well as readerly attention in early modern England, they were inscribed as part of a shared English heritage. At the same time, through a new emphasis on the historical distance of the pre-Reformation past, they were increasingly marked as antecedent to contemporary literary culture. The Poet and the Antiquaries shows how antiquarian commentary not only reflected this dialectic but fueled it, transforming Chaucer into a synecdoche not just for earlier poetry but for wideranging linguistic, religious, and political dimensions of the English past. The significance granted to Chaucer by these materials extended that influence beyond the poetic realm, shaping the terms in which English nationhood found its cultural voice and making not just Chaucer but commentary upon him absolutely central to Renaissance ways of knowing the medieval.
Approached with this wider bibliographical and historical framework in mind, the Reader’s claim in the poem by H.B. with which I began may seem a bit disingenuous. Far from being “unknown” to early modern readers, Chaucer was a versatile figure who stood in for an intricate set of relations between past and present. Moreover, he was known not “only by [his] books,” but through a web of comment and commentary that, yes, included the impressive folio editions, but which also ranged from erudite national history to popular poetry and drama. In each of these contexts, Chaucer mattered both because of and in spite of his historical distance from the present. By reading Chaucer in an expanded archive, the following chapters show that Chaucer’s status in early modern England depended not just on ongoing enthusiasm for his poetry but on the intertwining and reintertwining of