The Poet and the Antiquaries. Megan L. Cook
a class of readers with the practical skills needed for detailed research using later medieval texts and documents.
Interest in Chaucer enters antiquarian discourse at, or close to, its inception. For many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, the paradigmatic English antiquarian was John Leland (ca. 1503–1552), who, in addition to producing a significant body of Latin and Greek poetry, undertook an extensive program of research and writing about the English past. Leland is remembered today for his conflict with the Italian historiographer Polydore Vergil, with whom he quarreled over the historical existence of King Arthur, and for his “laborious journey”—actually a series of as many as five journeys—to monastic libraries in the years leading up to the dissolution of the monastic houses under Henry VIII.13 While Leland was no champion of vernacular literature, his De Viris Illustribus, a posthumously circulated collection of bibliographic and biographical notes on learned Englishmen, features an extended entry on Chaucer, as well as one on John Gower. Although his claims about Chaucer’s life largely appear to be based on hearsay and tradition rather than archival evidence, as I discuss in my second chapter, Leland’s writings on Chaucer’s life would form the core of Chaucer’s biography until the eighteenth century.
While Leland was closely associated with the court of Henry VIII, over the course of the century, antiquarian studies came to flourish in the universities and in the city of London as well.14 With this, came new, large-scale projects that sought to interpret the material and textual remains of the medieval past. At Cambridge, Matthew Parker (1504–1575), archbishop of Canterbury and vice-chancellor of the university, assembled a team of Anglo-Saxon scholars whose research into medieval English texts was intended, in part, to provide evidence for the historical independence of the English church.15 In 1586, William Camden published the first edition of the extraordinarily popular Britannia, with a special emphasis on the physical and cultural legacy of the Roman occupation of Britain.16 While Camden began and ended his career at the University of Oxford, he spent much of his professional life living and working in London, and the social and scholarly networks that he helped to foster were important conduits for medieval studies at the end of the sixteenth century.
The most significant of these networks was the Society of Antiquaries. Around 1586, Camden and his pupil, the lawyer and manuscript collector Sir Robert Cotton, established the group to share and discuss research on topics related to the English past.17 Attendance was by invitation only, and members were expected to present papers upon two preset topics; the best responses were preserved in the society’s records.18 The papers collected in Thomas Hearne’s Curious Discourses (1720, revised and expanded 1771) reveal a kind of intellectual piecework system in which individual members focused on highly specific and technical aspects of the set topic, with the understanding that their work would be complemented or perhaps challenged by the contributions of other members. The Society of Antiquaries met consistently for about twenty years.19 Members were heralds, lawyers, and schoolteachers; topics discussed at meetings reflected the interests of participants and ranged from the history of coinage in Britain to the origins of units of land measurement to the historical duties of officers of the royal household.
Aside from Camden and Cotton, the best-known member of the Society of Antiquaries was John Stow, who bears a special relationship to the history of Chaucer in print. Stow’s crabbed handwriting can be found in a large number of surviving manuscripts and documents, including several fifteenth-century collections containing works by Chaucer.20 From this primary-source research, Stow produced two highly influential works whose titles evoke the temporal sweep and geographical specificity characteristic of antiquarian scholarship in the later sixteenth century: The Annales of England, faithfully collected out of the most authenticall Authors, Records, and other Monuments of Antiquitie, from the first inhabitation untill this present yeere 1592 and A Survay of London: Contayning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne estate, and description of that Citie, written in the yeare 1598. Chaucer is mentioned in these works—as he is other notable works of Tudor scholarship like John Bale’s Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, and William Camden’s Britannia—but his life and writings are in no way their major focus. These references do not encompass the full scope of Stow’s engagement with Chaucer, however: earlier in his career, he had been the motivating force behind the 1561 edition of Chaucer’s Works, expanding it to include more than a dozen new poems (many apocryphal) largely drawn from two fifteenth-century literary manuscripts now at Trinity College, Cambridge.21 He also contributed material to a new account of Chaucer’s life that was published in the 1598 edition of the Works and appears to have taken an abiding interest in Chaucer’s contemporary John Lydgate as well.
Viewed on its own, Stow’s edition of Chaucer is interesting, but when we approach it in the context of an entire career, it becomes legible as something connected to larger currents of scholarly practice and historiographic thought. When the antiquarian commentary is foregrounded as a significant strand of Chaucerian reception in its own right—a strand that quite often precedes and enables more recognizably literary forms of response—an alternative “secret history” of Chaucerian reading begins to emerge. For many antiquarians, Chaucer was more than an exemplary poet. He was a figure whose outsize prominence in emerging literary histories made him essential to broader accounts of English cultural and political development. As a result, while the early modern period witnessed some of the most celebrated reworkings of Chaucer’s verse and stories, it also saw continued efforts to articulate Chaucer’s significance in other forms of writing: histories, biographies, and lexicographical works, as well as prefatory materials designed to introduce readers to a poet who seemed, in the decades after the English Reformation and amid a rapidly evolving vernacular tongue, newly distant from the present. These other writings—and the ways that they shaped the publication, preservation, transmission, and reception of works attributed to Chaucer, and the corpus of Middle English writing more broadly—are the principal subject of this book.
Why Chaucer?
Rather than being fixed in a single cultural role as “the father of English poetry,” in paraliterary materials Chaucer emerges as a surprisingly mobile figure, whose writings can be appropriated for a variety of historical, religious, and scholarly purposes, and who comes equipped with an increasingly robust biographical narrative.22 While Chaucer is of undisputed poetic importance, for many readers and writers in the early modern period, he matters as much or more for other reasons, some of which might seem startling from the vantage point of the twenty-first century: Chaucer is celebrated as an alchemist, an intellectual, a courtier, a religious reformer, and above all an Englishman, whose writing serves to endow the English nation with a vernacular suited to its status as an emerging power. At times, commentary invested in these aspects of Chaucer’s persona can seem quite divorced from the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of his texts, but I will argue throughout this book that these quasi-historical and biographical readings do much to dictate conventional understandings of specific texts, to shape Chaucer’s canon, and to determine the presentation of his works in print.
Chaucer’s works were far from the only Middle English texts circulating in Tudor England, however. Printers put forth new editions of works by Lydgate, Gower, and Langland, not to mention anonymous devotional works and popular romance. Prefatory epistles attached to printed editions of Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1532), Langland’s Piers Plowman (1555), and Lydgate’s Troy Book (1555) all praise the lasting virtues of the “olde English” used in these poems. Writings from the past were neither culturally nor intellectually inert: in the hands of printer Robert Crowley, Langland’s fourteenth-century alliterative poem Piers Plowman found a new audience among readers concerned with religious prophecy, and alchemic adepts took interest in passages from Gower, Lydgate, and Chaucer that seemed to speak to their art.23 Medieval texts and records, in both print and manuscript, remained an important source for historiographers and chroniclers. When public theater was established in London in the early 1560s, writers for the stage drew both on earlier forms of performance and on earlier written texts for inspiration.24
Despite the diversity of these encounters with the medieval past, my focus remains