The Poet and the Antiquaries. Megan L. Cook
and the consequent improvement of the text bring forth Chaucer to his proper place, where he can express his thanks to the “man who hath no labor spar’d / To helpe what time and writers had defaced.” In this poem, as Stephanie Trigg writes, “author, editor, and reader are apparently bound together in ties of love and mutual obligation, of mutually flattering recognition and knowledge,” but without Speght’s antiquarian interventions, the connection between the reader and the author would dissolve.2
By foregrounding Speght’s involvement, H.B.’s poem emphasizes an aspect of Renaissance encounters with Chaucer—and with Middle English writing more generally—which often passes unmarked in discussions of early modern uses of the medieval, and which this book seeks to illuminate. This is the vital role that early modern scholarly intermediaries played in shaping later readers’ understanding of Chaucer and his contemporaries, whether through their involvement in printed editions of Middle English texts, their role in forming collections of medieval books and documents, or in their generically varied writings about the English past, which range from handbooks of rhetoric to discourses on religious history. Through these activities, antiquarians played a key role not only in the construction and dissemination of broad narratives about the English past, but also in some of the earliest articulations of what we might term literary history, especially as it concerns Chaucer. In this, they respond to claims found in Chaucer’s own works: Chaucer, in A. C. Spearing’s terms, “was the father of English literary history—the first English poet to conceive of his work as an addition, however humble, to the great monuments of the classical past and as continuing to exist in a future over which he would have no control.”3 At the same time, however, they—like many of Chaucer’s readers, from the fifteenth-century to the present—respond to the remarkably malleable authorial self-presentation found in Chaucer’s writings, a flexibility that makes not only his writings but the authorial figure behind them available for an especially wide array of interpretations and appropriations.4
The story of how Chaucer’s work came to occupy an exceptional place in English literary history offers revealing insight into the ways texts and authors acquire political, historical, and social meaning far beyond that which might have adhered to them at the moment of composition.5 Much of this story can be told through the six folio editions of Chaucer’s Works that were printed between 1532 and 1602.6 Though large and necessarily costly, the collected works seem to have become the preferred or at least expected vehicle for Chaucer in print, judging by the fact that no shorter or smaller printed volumes of Chaucer appeared in this period. Both in their length (eventually more than four hundred pages) and their impressive folio size, these are the largest collections of poetry printed in England during this period. All were produced with substantial involvement of individuals connected with antiquarian communities, and all bear evidence of the scholarly habits and intellectual investments characteristic of those communities.
Antiquarians, in other words, were largely responsible for the kind of work that enables the reader and Chaucer to reunite in H.B.’s poem. By reading the archive of Chaucer’s reception in a way that foregrounds this work, this book seeks a fuller understanding of the ways that Chaucer and his writings were read and transmitted in early modern England. Antiquarian material makes profoundly visible the fact that Chaucer—already widely known to English readers—functioned in a wide range of historical discourses in this period, some concerned with his literary merits but many more simply eager to leverage his preexisting fame.7 This fame, and Chaucer’s ability to signify venerability and Englishness in so many different contexts, made him a prime site at which to link a nascent concept of vernacular literary history with ideas about national and linguistic identity both past and present.
Of Chaucer’s early modern readers, perhaps no group had as outsize an impact as those courtiers, chroniclers, heralds, and scholars whose attention to the English past might earn them the label “antiquarian.” Antiquarians sought, in William Camden’s famous words, “to restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britain to his antiquity” (ut Britanniae antiquitatem et suae antiquitati Britanniam restituerem).8 While antiquarian scholars constituted a relatively small number of Chaucer’s readers in late Tudor England, they were a uniquely influential minority. In the printed folio editions, the antiquarian view of Chaucer announces itself in dedications, explanatory notes, and even in the selection and arrangement of texts, including many that are now recognized as apocryphal.9 As antiquarians prepared editions of his Works and circulated copies of his poems and lists of his titles, they became arbiters of what constituted “Chaucer” and how it should be situated in relation to other literary, linguistic, and historical material. References to Chaucer and other medieval writers are woven through major works of antiquarian scholarship like John Leland’s De Viris Illustribus (1530s) and Camden’s Britannia (1586), and a number of antiquarians, like Francis Thynne (1545?–1608) and Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), annotated their own copies of Middle English texts in manuscript or in print. Taken together, these materials show that antiquarian and other scholarly readers constitute a significant and frequently overlooked site for the reception of Middle English literature in early modern England.
More important, in reading and reproducing Chaucer, antiquarians shaped the experiences of a much larger swath of readers. When nonantiquarians read Chaucer, it was typically in the printed folio editions, shaped by the antiquarian interests of the scholars who produced them. From 1532 until the middle of the eighteenth century, the typical reader encountered Chaucer in books whose contents and supplementary materials were determined not by poets or literary critics but by antiquarians for whom interest in Chaucer was just one facet of a much broader engagement in the English past. In this sense, Tudor antiquarians acted as a kind of filter through which nearly all post-1532 readers encountered Chaucer and his texts. Readers who relied upon the editions produced by William Thynne (1532, revised 1542 and 1550), John Stow (1561) and Thomas Speght (1598 and 1602) include George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Pepys, John Milton, and John Dryden, as well as the authors of lesser-known adaptations of Chaucer’s poems like the ribald Cobler of Canterburie (1590, likely written by Robert Greene), Francis Kynaston’s Latin translation of Troilus and Criseyde (pub. 1635), and Chaucer New Painted by William Painter (1623). In the decades around the turn of the seventeenth century, Anne Bowyer, mother of the antiquary and collector Elias Ashmole, copied out extracts from Chaucer into her commonplace book (now Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 51) while the noblewoman Elizabeth Danvers (1545/50–1630) was said by John Aubrey to have “Chaucer at her fingers’ ends.”10
Antiquarian Readers?
In this book, I define the idea of the antiquarian capaciously, as someone with a professional or abiding personal interest in the details of the English past. The writings and textual work of the readers I study here draw upon the same rhetorical and literary-historical discourses that made Chaucer an indispensable symbol for cultural and linguistic excellence in the English past, but their authors interweave these discourses with wide-ranging narratives about nationhood, language, and history. With a few notable exceptions, these writers did not consider themselves poets or poetic commentators; instead, they wrote first and foremost as chroniclers, religious polemicists, historians, and specialists in genealogy and heraldry.
Renaissance antiquarianism had its roots in humanism, and, like other forms of humanistic inquiry, it sought the recovery of the past through an improved understanding of ancient records and texts.11 Humanistic readers, as described by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton in their influential account of the scholar and author Gabriel Harvey, often studied their texts “for action,” focusing primarily on those aspects of the past—including philosophy, style, and aesthetics—perceived as informing the present in a positive way. This is a method of reading that, in Jardine and Grafton’s words, is “intended to give rise to something else.”12 Antiquarian readers, by contrast, often dwelled on the past for its own sake. While they shared a humanistic tendency to valorize Greek and Roman texts, the work of English antiquarians also addressed itself to the more recent, post-Roman past. One particularly notable outcome of this approach was the rise of Anglo-Saxon studies at Cambridge, but an appetite for research into place-names, family trees, and the history of certain institutions—such as that required for the