The Poet and the Antiquaries
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Between 1532 and 1602, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer were published in no less than six folio editions. These were, in fact, the largest books of poetry produced in sixteenth-century England, and they significantly shaped the perceptions of Chaucer that would hold sway for centuries to come. But it is the stories behind these editions that are the focus of Megan L. Cook's interest in The Poet and the Antiquaries . She explores how antiquarians—historians, lexicographers, religious polemicists, and other readers with a professional, but not necessarily literary, interest in the English past—played an indispensable role in making Chaucer a figure of lasting literary and cultural importance. After establishing the antiquarian involvement in the publication of the folio editions, Cook offers a series of case studies that discuss Chaucer and his works in relation to specific sixteenth-century discourses about the past. She turns to early accounts of Chaucer's biography to show how important they were in constructing the poet as a figure whose life and works could be known, understood, and valued by later readers. She considers the claims made about Chaucer's religious views, especially the assertions that he was a proto-Protestant, and the effects they had on shaping his canon. Looking at early modern views on Chaucerian language, she illustrates how complicated the relations between past and present forms of English were thought to be. Finally, she demonstrates the ways in which antiquarian readers applied knowledge from other areas of scholarship to their reading of Middle English texts. Linking Chaucer's exceptional standing in the poetic canon with his role as a symbol of linguistic and national identity, The Poet and the Antiquaries demonstrates how and why Chaucer became not only the first English author to become a subject of historical inquiry but also a crucial figure for conceptualizing the medieval in early modern England.
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THE POET AND THE ANTIQUARIES
Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635
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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 national and literary concerns over a period of several decades. This phenomenon, of course, is not unique to Chaucer in the Renaissance: rather, it is exemplary of the manner in which the literature of the past and the politics of the present speak to one another in surprising and sometimes urgent ways.
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