The Poet and the Antiquaries. Megan L. Cook

      “Noster Galfridus”

      Chaucer’s Early Modern Biographies

      In 1532, when William Thynne assembled the first edition of Chaucer’s collected Works, there was no written biography of Chaucer.¹ Chaucer’s own writings are reticent about the facts of his life, and what they do say is often mediated through persona and allusion. A few fifteenth-century references mention Chaucer’s death, traditionally believed to have occurred on October 25, 1400: the scribe and bibliophile John Shirley calls Chaucer’s Truth a “Balade that Chaucier made on his deeth bedde.”² Thomas Gascoigne, in his Dictionarium Theologicum (ca. 1434–1458), appears to draw upon the Retraction to the Canterbury Tales as he describes a penitent Chaucer who dies bemoaning his inability to recall from circulation “those things that I wickedly wrote concerning the evil and truly disgraceful love of men for women.”³ No surviving account from the fifteenth century discusses Chaucer’s family, his education, or his travels abroad.

      In the sixteenth century, however, that would change, thanks to the rise of antiquarian scholarship and an increasingly robust body of commentary on Chaucer’s life and works. In antiquarian writings, especially those with an explicit interest in Chaucer’s life, focus shifted from Chaucer’s texts themselves to their cultural and historical significance. In these writings, history, language, and English nationalism became conflated in ways that would shape Chaucer’s transmission and reception for centuries to come.

      Antiquarian interest in Chaucer begins where early modern English antiquarianism itself arguably begins, in the writings of John Leland (ca. 1503–1552), the humanist poet and scholar. As a part of a larger work, De Viris Illustribus (On Famous Men), Leland’s Latin writings on Chaucer circulated in manuscript throughout the sixteenth century and beyond and were a continuous and foundational influence on antiquarian scholarship in England.⁴ They were known to both the Protestant polemicist John Bale and the martyrologist John Foxe, and eventually served as the primary source for the first English-language account of Chaucer’s life, printed in Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works.⁵ Reading Speght’s Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer in light of De Viris Illustribus, as I do in this chapter, underscores how Leland’s account shaped subsequent conversations about Chaucerian biography.⁶ Leland bequeathed to Speght not just details concerning Chaucer’s life, but an understanding of Chaucer as national poet whose cultural impact extended beyond the realm of literature and aesthetics into a wider historiographic and nationalistic context. Because Speght’s Life was written in English, not Latin, and because it circulated in print, not manuscript, it also made Leland’s humanistic view of Chaucer available to a new and wider audience.

      Before this, though, Leland’s biography and the texts it influenced restructured Chaucer’s reputation in early modern England, shifting attention away from the content of his works and toward the author himself. While earlier poetic tributes focused primarily on the Chaucerian text and its “rhetoric” or “eloquence,” Leland and Speght treated Chaucer as a historical individual whose writings could be better assessed in terms of their influence on a shared national vernacular and identity than on their ability to move individual readers or innovate in form or style. Even when praising Chaucer’s poems, Leland directs readers’ attention to Chaucer the author who stands outside his own works. As he does so, he reconstructs Chaucer as an author according to the discursive norms of early modern England, contributing to the ongoing evolution of what Alexandra Gillespie, following Michel Foucault, calls the “Chaucer ‘effect,’” defined as “the author who is a ‘function’ of the creation, circulation, and interpretation of his texts, paratext, and others’ texts about his work.”⁷

      Leland’s biography of Chaucer guided the development of this “Chaucer effect” in several overlapping and reinforcing ways. First, it created historical narrative that corroborated one of the key motifs of Chaucerian praise: the idea that the poet played a unique role in the improvement of the English language and through that, made a lasting contribution to English identity. In Leland’s text and those that follow from it, Chaucer becomes a synecdoche for national exceptionalism, someone who simultaneously stands for England’s worldliness and its uniqueness. Second, Leland’s use of Latin in his account inaugurated a split between praise of Chaucer and imitation of Chaucer, two strands of reception that had previously been closely linked. When, some sixty years later, Speght wrote his English version of Chaucer’s life, the language of Chaucerian commentary returned to the vernacular, but the sense of critical distance introduced by Leland remained. In Speght and in Leland both, praise of Chaucer’s works, which in poetic tributes can take on an intimate, deeply affective tone, now reads more like an objective recitation of facts. Third, these biographical writings situate Chaucer’s life story in relation to the present, emphasizing the continuities between his historical moment and that of his latter-day readers. Leland and his followers achieved this effect not only by celebrating Chaucer as a poet who both enabled and offered a glimpse of what English poetry would become, but by linking him to institutions and locations, such as the University of Oxford, that signified learning, power, and intellectual significance in the early modern present. These factors combined to reinforce an understanding of Chaucer as not only a source of readerly pleasure but a figure of national importance and a subject fit for scholarly inquiry.

      Leland’s remarks on Chaucer are best understood not in isolation (as they have been treated by some previous scholars) but as part of the larger scholarly enterprise from which they come. Accordingly, this chapter begins with a discussion of the overall scope, plan, and purpose of De Viris Illustribus. In the central sections, I take up Leland’s writings on Chaucer directly, including the three Latin poems in praise of Chaucer that appear in De Viris Illustribus, and discuss how they present Chaucer and his writings. I also consider his comments on Gower, the only other vernacular poet discussed in the collection. In the final section, I turn to Speght’s English Life of Chaucer and explore the ways it elaborates on Leland’s foundation. Whereas Leland works to situate Chaucer in the context of institutions familiar to his own readers, Speght makes copious use of genealogical material, articulating both continuity and change between the medieval poet and his latter-day readers and marking yet another phase in Chaucer’s continually changing postmedieval career.

      On Famous Men

      John Leland’s life and biography reflect the cultural complexity of his historical moment. Like many other Tudor readers with an interest in Chaucer, his relationship to the English past was a complicated one. Born in London and orphaned as a child, Leland studied at St. Paul’s School under William Lily before taking his AB from Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1522 and pursuing further studies in Oxford and Paris, possibly under the patronage of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.⁸ In Paris, he wrote Latin poetry and developed an interest in ancient texts and manuscripts that would remain with him throughout his career. Sometime before 1529, Leland returned to England, where he continued work as both a scholar and a poet, now cultivating the ascendant Thomas Cromwell as a patron.

      Starting in the 1530s, Leland made plans for a number of ambitious projects relating to English history, and in 1533 he apparently received a royal commission “to peruse and dylygentlye to searche all the lybraryes of Monasteryes and collegies of thys your noble realme.”⁹ Leland, then in his early thirties, spent the next three to four years traveling throughout