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CHAPTER 1

The First First Folios

Chaucer’s Works in Print

In 2016, academics and enthusiasts across the globe commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with conferences, exhibitions, and performances. Prominently featured in the celebrations were copies of the 1623 volume Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, or, as it is more commonly known today, the First Folio. In the United States, a “tour” of First Folios set up by the Folger Shakespeare Library that exhibited copies in all fifty states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico was heralded by promotional materials touting a chance to come “face to face” with “the book that gave us Shakespeare.”¹ Brought forth from the vault of the Folger to commemorate the death of their author rather than the anniversary of their own publication, the touring folios took on the status of relics, offering an opportunity for Shakespearean enthusiasts to bear witness to an object central to the poet’s lasting reputation.

The enduring impact of the Shakespeare First Folio depends on its form as well as its contents. When it was published by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount in 1623, it did more than gather together Shakespeare’s plays—previously circulating in manuscripts or single-text quartos—into a single, large volume. It also presented a particular version of the author and his works to the world. With its large size and engraved frontispiece depicting the deceased playwright, it staked a claim for the cultural and literary significance of its contents in the English literary marketplace. In its scale and scope, it functioned—and continues to function—as a particularly effective monument to Shakespeare and his literary accomplishments, the scholarly and financial value accorded to it today reflecting Shakespeare’s unique place in the English-language literary canon.

The Shakespeare First Folio was not, however, the first First Folio.² That distinction belongs to The workes of Geffray Chaucer, first printed in 1532 by Thomas Godfray and overseen by a courtier named William Thynne. The 1532 volume marked the first attempt to combine all the works of an English-language author into a single, impressively large printed book. Dedicated to Henry VIII, The workes of Geffray Chaucer brought together a wide range of Chaucerian texts that had previously only been available in manuscript or in smaller printed volumes. Like the Shakespeare First Folio, the Thynne edition of Chaucer’s Works set a precedent for later printers: for close to two and a half centuries, until Thomas Tyrwhitt’s edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775–1777), the folio collected works would be the dominant format for printing Chaucer.³

Chaucer was a mainstay of English printing well before the publication of the Works, but the books produced by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and other early printers works were different in both size and scope from the larger volumes that would follow.⁴ Pre-1532 editions of Chaucer were either quartos or small folios consisting of a single longer work or several shorter pieces.⁵ A transition to more comprehensive collections began in 1526, when Robert Pynson published a series of Chaucerian volumes, each with its own title page, designed to be bound together as a Sammelband, giving readers the ability to assemble their own grouping of Chaucerian works.⁶ For the first time, buyers had the opportunity to own a large portion of the Chaucerian canon in print in a common format. While these editions—along with manuscripts produced both before and after the arrival of print—continued to circulate in the sixteenth century and beyond, the large folio editions of Works produced after 1532 were a bibliographic departure from their predecessors and, in time, would come to outnumber these earlier publications.

Through their contents, their commentary, and their material form, these folio editions demonstrate the persistent link between Chaucer and emerging ideas of “Englishness,” as well as Chaucer’s role as a privileged innovator in the history of the English language. They also map a crucial phase in the development of English literary and linguistic history and the tools for pursuing it: the 1532 Thynne edition presumes Chaucer’s Middle English will be more or less accessible to its readers, but by the end of the century Thomas Speght will append a substantial glossary of Chaucer’s “hard words” to his 1598 version of the Works. Between these two poles lies a slow evolution of Chaucer’s status as a writer and as a historical figure. Chaucer in the Renaissance occupied a middle position between the literary and the scholarly, at once good to read and, increasingly, in need of specialized study.

Caroline Spurgeon’s foundational work of bibliography, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, provides ample evidence of wide-ranging and diverse engagement with Chaucer in early modern England.⁷ The sixteenth and early seventeenth century produced some of the most celebrated reworkings of Chaucer’s verse and stories, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. But Chaucer also figures in works that are not primarily concerned with poetry, such as John Foxe’s Protestant historiography, William Camden’s topographical history of the British Isles, John Stow’s Annales, or the Catholic Anglo-Dutch antiquarian Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. The diversity of these responses invites several broader questions: How did an increasingly robust body of extrapoetic commentary on Chaucer enable, on the one hand, specific stories about the English past and, on the other hand, new ways of conceptualizing English literary history? How did Chaucer’s dual role in poetic and extrapoetic discourses shape the way in which his writings were read and the forms in which they were transmitted?

This chapter addresses these questions, first, by tracing the development of Chaucer’s printed Works across successive printed editions, from 1532 to 1602. In the middle section of this chapter, I look more closely at several paratextual additions designed to shape the way readers thought about Chaucer and his place in English history: William Thynne’s preface to the 1532 Works, a woodblock frame depicting the genealogies of the houses of York and Lancaster used in the 1561 Works (but originally created for the 1550 edition of Edward Hall’s Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke), and an intricate full-page engraving, depicting Chaucer and his genealogy, prepared for the 1598 Works by the antiquarian and cartographer John Speed. A final section reflects on the special emphasis given to Chaucer’s language in antiquarian commentary and considers how this discourse evolves as Chaucer’s Middle English grows ever-more distant from contemporary forms of the English language.

Throughout the chapter, I argue that Chaucer’s exceptional status in early modern England was created and secured by a unique sense of his temporal doubleness. For antiquarians and for those who read their work, Chaucer and his language were a site at which they could simultaneously celebrate a connection with the past and measure distance from that past. In the Works and in antiquarian commentary alike, this doubleness combined with a sense of Chaucer’s special relationship to the English language to make Chaucer an ideal figure with which to think through early modern England’s relationship to its medieval past.

Printing Chaucer, 1532–1602

For all its topical and methodological diversity, early modern engagement with Chaucer remained centered on the half dozen folio editions of Chaucer’s collected works published between 1532 and 1602.⁸ From the early 1500s to the eighteenth century, these black-letter editions were the form in which most readers encountered Chaucer and his works.⁹ Each was produced under the supervision of an individual with ties to antiquarian communities: William Thynne (1532, reprinted 1542 and 1555), John Stow (1561), or Thomas Speght (1598, revised 1602, reprinted 1687).¹⁰ As these collections transmitted Chaucer’s writings to a new and wider audience, they mediated and shaped readers’ understanding of Chaucer and his text. Those responsible for the production of these volumes made decisions about which texts to include and which exemplars to use (if and when multiple sources were available), arranged the works within the volume (the Canterbury Tales has always been first), and in some cases bestowed on poems the titles by which they are still known today. At times, they selectively intervened in their text, emending and modernizing and choosing between variants in source material.¹¹ Their influence—along with that of the stationers with whom they worked—extended to the choice of typeface, the design of the title page, and the addition of introductory and explanatory materials like dedications and, later, glossaries. Regardless of the interests or investments that might lead early modern readers to Chaucer, in them they would find a representation of Chaucer already informed by an antiquarian perspective.

In content as well as in form, the 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed set the pattern for Chaucerian printing for the next two centuries. Drawing on previously printed editions of Chaucer as well as on manuscripts, it dramatically increased the size and scope of the Chaucer book in print, making a bold claim for Chaucer’s cultural import as it did so.¹² The book was very much a product of the Henrician court: William Thynne was chief clerk of the kitchen, his collaborator Brian Tuke was treasurer of the chamber, and Thomas Godfray, who printed it, was the recipient of the first royal patent for printing a book in England.¹³ Unsurprisingly, the book was dedicated to Henry VIII, and equipped with a fulsome preface addressed to the monarch.

A hefty folio of nearly four hundred pages, Thynne’s edition and its successors retained their status as the largest printed volume of English poetry throughout the sixteenth century. The 1532 edition includes the first printed editions of a number of Chaucerian texts, including the Legend of Good Women, the Treatise on the Astrolabe, and Chaucer’s translation of the Romaunt of the Rose. In addition, Thynne added—unwittingly or otherwise—a number of non-Chaucerian works; taken together, these apocryphal pieces constitute nearly a quarter of the book’s pages.¹⁴ Most of these pass without comment, but in later editions of the Works, some, such as Lydgate’s “A Balade of good conseile,” were identified as the work of their non-Chaucerian authors.

The 1532 Works were reprinted in 1542 and again in 1550, after Thynne’s death in 1548. The chief textual difference between these editions and the 1532 Works is the addition of the spurious Plowman’s Tale, an antifraternal satire, to the Canterbury Tales.¹⁵ (Godfray, printer of the 1532 Works, brought out a separate edition the Plowman’s Tale around 1534 [STC 5099.5], although it appears it was conceived of as a publication separate from the Works.)¹⁶ The Plowman’s Tale does not appear in any earlier printing of the Tales, and it is not found in any surviving Canterbury Tales manuscript.¹⁷ In the 1542 edition, it appears after the Parson’s Tale, making it the final element in the Tales, while in 1550, it was moved into the penultimate position between the Reeve and the Parson, disrupting the link between these two segments in what was perhaps an attempt to affirm its status as a full part of the Tales rather than a supplement. The Plowman’s Tale was carried forward in this place in subsequent editions of the Works.

In 1561 the Works were printed again, this time under the aegis of the antiquarian John Stow.¹⁸ The 1561 Works mark the first time a Chaucerian text had been printed during Elizabeth’s reign (Mary is the only Tudor monarch under whose reign no texts attributed to Chaucer were printed). Stow’s edition reproduced the text of the 1542 Works with only minor alterations, but it added a series of shorter poems at the end of the volume, most of which were drawn from two fifteenth-century miscellanies (now Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19 and R.3.20).¹⁹ R.3.20 was compiled by the scribe and bibliophile John Shirley (ca. 1366–1456), an important source for the attestation of many of Chaucer’s shorter poems.²⁰ Of the pieces added by Stow, only Adam Scriveyn, A Complaint Unto His Lady, and Against Women Unconstant and the Proverbs remain canonical today. Although Stow’s Works appeared when he was in his midthirties, he would return to Chaucer almost forty years later, contributing materials related to Chaucer’s biography to Thomas Speght’s edition of the Works.²¹

In 1598, more than sixty years after Thynne’s first edition, the Works were printed again, under the auspices of schoolteacher Thomas Speght. Speght’s edition was revised and reprinted in 1602, and reprinted a third time in 1687 for a consortium of booksellers. The 1598 edition reproduces Stow’s 1561 text and adds two previously unprinted apocryphal poems, The Assembly of Ladies and The Floure and the Leafe. These are included in the 1602 revision, which also adds two more works, both religious in nature: the A.B.C., Chaucer’s previously unprinted translation of a French poem in praise of the Virgin Mary, and Jack Upland. Jack Upland, a proto-Protestant prose polemic, had been previously printed at least twice, once in the 1530s and in the 1550s (in an edition by John Day described by John Bale but now lost). Jack Upland was also included—and attributed to Chaucer—in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, beginning with the second edition of 1570.

In addition to these new texts, the Speght editions expanded upon previous iterations of the Works by adding a significant amount of paratextual material designed to help readers better appreciate Chaucer and his work. This material places a focus on explanation, rather than simply praise, of Chaucer and his writings. The new front matter included dedication to Sir Robert Cecil and an address to the reader, as well as the prefatory material from the original 1532 Works, a substantial life of the poet, and summaries of each of the Canterbury Tales.²² At the back of the volume, Speght added translations for Chaucer’s Latin and French phrases, a list of authors cited in the text, and a hard word list—the first significant glossary of Chaucer’s Middle English.²³ All of these components, with the exception of the material taken over from the 1532 prefatory materials, were revised and expanded in the 1602 reprint. In some ways—its glossary, its explanation of Chaucer’s metrics, and working assumption that readers will find Chaucer’s poetry both difficult and distant—the 1598 Speght edition is the first to look forward to modern editions of Chaucer and other Middle English authors. In other ways, however, it is a culmination of the past century’s engagement with Chaucer: throughout the paratextual materials, Speght presents Chaucer as a medieval author who anticipates and enables the literary successes of later English poets, while also remaining exemplary of his own historical and literary moment.

The Cultural Work of the Works

Although they appeared over a span of seven decades, the Chaucer folios share a number of features that demonstrate the importance of both historical and literary concerns in the production, marketing, and use of the Chaucer book.²⁴ The sustained run of monumental folio editions from the 1530s onward is a unique feature of Chaucer’s early modern transmission: no other author’s works were collected, printed, and reprinted on such a scale. No effort was made to gather the writings of John Lydgate, the only other Middle English author with a similarly large and diverse vernacular canon.²⁵ Of the writings of John Gower, whom admiring fifteenth-century writers often invoked alongside Chaucer and Lydgate as the greatest of English poets, only the Confessio Amantis appeared in print (in 1483, 1532, and 1554). The collected editions of John Skelton and John Heywood’s writings published later in the century were both smaller in format (octavo and quarto, respectively), as were the works of the Scots poet Sir David Lindsay and the poems of George Gascoigne (both also quarto).²⁶ The folio edition of the English works of Sir Thomas More, published in 1557, was not reprinted.²⁷

While Chaucer’s contemporaries in the continental vernaculars—Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante, as well as the Frenchmen Chartier, Ronsard, and Marot—were printed more frequently than their English counterparts, they were most often published in small-format books that did not seek to encompass the author’s entire canon. In bibliographic terms, the folio Chaucers look less like other literary productions and more closely resemble the large-format legal, antiquarian, and religious productions that would have formed a substantial portion of the libraries of the lawyers and scholars in Chaucer’s early modern audience. The heft of these editions helped lend Chaucer an authoritative, scholarly air, but at a certain cost, since folios are less portable and less suited to private, individual reading than smaller formats.

Chaucer’s sixteenth-century print history is also remarkable for what it does not include: editions of individual works. Despite their large size and significant price tag, the collected Works appear to have satisfied market demand for new copies of Chaucer in print. While prior to 1532, editions of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and shorter poems issued with some regularity from English presses, after the appearance of the first edition of Thynne’s Works, there was no further effort to reproduce these texts in the more modest formats. The only works printed under Chaucer’s name between 1532 and 1687 were the apocryphal Plowman’s Tale and Jack Upland. Both of these were published as inexpensive pamphlets, clearly intended for readers more interested in the texts’ proto-Protestant views than in their poetic value or historical interest.²⁸

Although new texts were added and some line readings changed (whether by design or accident), the text of Chaucer remained largely stable across these folio editions. In 1532, Thynne drew from a mix of print and manuscript sources, reflecting the variety of textual witnesses in circulation; two manuscripts and a copy of Caxton’s Boece used in the preparation of his edition survive today.²⁹ Subsequent editions of the Works relied on the most recent previous edition, with the 1542 printers using a copy of the 1532 Works, the 1550 printers using the 1542 edition, and so on. Through this process of enchainment, Thynne’s text remained the basis for all printed editions of Chaucer until Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1775–1777 edition of the Canterbury Tales, published three hundred years after Thynne’s main source for the Tales, Caxton’s 1477 edition.³⁰ (Poems and other texts added to the Works in later editions generally came from manuscript sources, although Speght took Jack Upland directly from the text printed in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.)³¹ For good or for ill, this stability meant that decisions made in the preparation of one edition of the Works continued to shape Chaucer’s text as it was encountered by many future generations of readers.

The tendency of one edition to build on the previous through a process of textual accretion affected not just individual passages in Chaucer’s text, but the development of his canon as well. Once a text was printed in the Works, it was also reprinted in the Works (this was also true of paratextual elements like Thynne’s dedication to Henry VIII, which appeared in every edition of the Works until the eighteenth century). As noted above, while the folio editions contain most of the Chaucer canon as we regard it today, they also include a significant number of apocryphal texts, which early readers generally seem to have accepted as Chaucer’s own. Thynne’s 1532 edition, in particular, introduced several longer apocryphal works—among them Usk’s Testament of Love, Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, and The Floure of Curtesie, now attributed to John Lydgate—but new, non-Chaucerian texts were also added at later stages of transmission: the Plowman’s Tale (1542), most of the poems supplied by John Stow (1561), and three of the four pieces added in Speght’s editions (The Assembly of Ladies, The Floure and the Leafe, and Jack Upland are apocryphal; the A.B.C. is not).³²

These spurious works played a significant role in shaping readers’ understanding of Chaucer as an author. While the Plowman’s Tale supported Chaucer’s posthumous reputation as a religious reformer, many of the poems added by Stow (most of which do not carry attribution in manuscript) cast Chaucer as a courtly figure by the way they engage with topics of courtly love and fin amor.³³ While later sixteenth-century editions of the Works sometimes identify certain texts as the work of other writers, it is not always clear whether unmarked new additions—some of which are titled simply “a ballade”—were included on the basis of an amorphous notion of Chaucerian affinity and affiliation, or with the understanding that they were written by Chaucer himself.³⁴

As the size of Chaucer’s canon expanded, so too did the amount of paratextual material, often antiquarian in nature, that accompanied it. As in the case of the Works’ literary contents, an additive tendency prevails: once a new element is introduced, it generally appears in all subsequent editions. Thynne’s 1532 dedicatory preface to Henry VIII, which I discuss in greater detail below, was included in editions of Chaucer’s works long after the demise of its addressee.³⁵ Later publications carried over other elements from Thynne as well, including a table of contents (which is updated to reflect additions and changes in later editions) and three short non-Chaucerian poems that appear sandwiched between the table of contents and the interior title page for the Canterbury Tales. Greg Walker has argued that these three poems—“Eight goodly questyons, with their aunswers” (Digital Index of Medieval English Verse [hereafter DIMEV] 4978), “To the kynges most noble grace, and to the lordes and knyghtes of the garter” (written by Hoccleve, DIMEV 6045), and an untitled fourteen-line excerpt from prophetic verses sometimes attributed to Chaucer and sometimes to Merlin (DIMEV 6299)—were placed there deliberately, forming a kind of bridge between the concerns of the preface and the main body of the text, and that their didacticism offers a model for interpreting the Chaucerian pieces that follow.³⁶ Like the dedicatory preface, these were reprinted in later editions of the Works, even though the specific cultural and political moment they appear to address had passed. Along with the preface, their continued presence in later editions marked Chaucer as a poet who had become, in important ways, a Tudor author as well as a Ricardian one.

Chaucer’s Language and the Language of Chaucerian Praise

In the paratextual material associated with the Works as well as in other antiquarian contexts, extrapoetic discourse around Chaucer coalesced around a few major themes during the sixteenth century, most significantly the excellence of his language. For many commentators, Chaucer’s most noteworthy poetic accomplishments were not his robust characters, his sophisticated engagements with classical and continental sources, or his experiments in meter. They were, instead, his words, which were seen to have a salutary impact on the language as a whole, such that Chaucer could be credited with single-handedly elevating English to the same level of richness and sophistication as the continental vernaculars. (Chaucer, in this sense, occupied a role analogous to that of Shakespeare in the later Anglophone world, a proper name to which wide-ranging claims of linguistic innovation could be attached.) Chaucer’s language was important to his poetic admirers from Thomas Hoccleve and Thomas Usk onward, but the collected folio editions of the Works were especially attuned to the broader extraliterary significance of claims for Chaucer’s eloquence.

The dedicatory preface to William Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer’s collected Works offers what is perhaps the most fully articulated account of this view. Addressed to Henry VIII, the preface underscores Chaucer’s potential usefulness to early modern projects of nation building, while also emphasizing the importance of learning and wisdom to good government.³⁷ For Thynne, eloquence goes hand in hand with other forms of cultural excellence. Discussing the biblical, then the classical past, he writes that “Amonges other / the Grekes in all kyndes of sciences / semed so to prevayle and so to ornate their tonge / as yet by other of right noble langages can nat be perfitely ymitated or folowed.” Similarly, “the Latyns by example of the grekes, have gotten or wonne to them no small glorie / in the fourmynge / order / and uttrynge of that tonge.” Whatever eloquence these languages now possess is a tale of corruption followed by redemption, an important detail if one is to imagine the eventual perfection of the English tongue. Thynne explains that the Spanish language, “beinge also latyn was by Vandales / Gothes / Moores / Sarracenes / and other so many tymes blemysshed / as marveyle it is to se nowe unto what perfection these two [Italian and Spanish, the two languages that Thynne identifies as being closest to Latin] formed out of the latyn and barbare speches be reduced.” He continues, “Next unto them / in symilytude to the latyn is the Frenche tonge / whiche by dilygence of people of the same / is in fewe yeres passed so amended / as well in pronunciation as in writyng / that an Englyshman by a small tyme exercised in that tonge hath nat lacked grounde to make a gramer, or rule ordinary therof.”³⁸ For Thynne, as for most premodern writers on the topic, language and identity were deeply related. Here, “French” refers both to the language and to the “people of the same,” whose cohesion as a group stems from their shared language.

The preface suggests that Thynne valued regularity and systematic organization in language, qualities not particularly prominent in early modern English, but also that he saw linguistic improvement and standardization as the result of intentional effort—“dilygence”—on the part of a language’s speakers rather than as an organic process.³⁹ In his comments on German, Thynne praises the language for its similitude to Latin: “Though of trouthe (whiche some shall scarsely beleve) the Germayns have so fourmed the order of their langage / that in the same / is bothe as moche plentie and as nere concordaunce to the phrase of the latyn / as the Frenche tong hath.”⁴⁰ He concludes, “and veraiyly / lyke as al these and the rest have ben thus vigilant and studyous to meliorate or amende their langages: so hath there nat lacked amonges us Englishmen / whiche have right well and notably endevoyred and employed themselves / to the beautifying and bettryng of thenglyshe tonge.”⁴¹

Chief among those who have worked for the betterment of the language, of course, is Geoffrey Chaucer. Thynne’s comments on Chaucer address his style as well as his works, but coming after a lengthy and sweeping discussion of other languages, it is clear that for Thynne Chaucer’s significance lies not in his poetry itself but in what his verses prove about the excellence and capability of English, in both the linguistic and national sense of the term. The architect of this excellence must be suitably accomplished. Thus, Thynne praises Chaucer as someone “in whose workes is so manyfest comprobacion of his excellent lernyng in all kyndes of doctrynes and sciences, suche frutefulnesse in words / wel accordinge to the mater and purpose / so swete and pleasunt sentences / soche perfection in metre / the composycion so adapted / soche fresshnesse of invencion / compendyousnesse in narration / suche sensyble and open style / lackyng neither majestie ne mediocritie / covenable in disposycion / and suche sharpnesse or quycknesse in conclusyon.”⁴² Although he begins with Chaucer’s learning, Thynne devotes most of this passage to describing Chaucer’s writing. Presented as a master of the superlative expression of literary values that Thynne believes his sixteenth-century audience will share, Chaucer sounds very contemporary here. Chaucer’s works matter not only because of what their content reveals about their author, but also because they are the evidence of the “beautifying and bettryng of thenglyshe tonge.” In this way, according to Thynne, Chaucer was not just a good poet, but an extraordinary one. As Thynne puts it, “it is moche to be marvayled / howe in his time / whan doutlesse all good letters were layde a slepe throughout the worlde / as the thynge, whiche either by the disposycion and influence of the bodies above / or by other ordynaunce of god / semed lyke as was in daunger to have utterly perysshed / suche an excellent poete in our tonge / shulde as it were (nature repugnyng) spryng and arise.”⁴³ From a grammatical perspective, is not entirely clear what “thynge” is in danger of perishing without Chaucer’s aid, but what is certain is that in order to be the exceptional poet that Thynne presents him as, Chaucer’s poetic achievements must transcend their historical moment, making them temporally as well as literarily exceptional. And, indeed, Chaucer is presented here as a figure not just untimely but unnatural, springing forth despite “nature repugnyng.”

As the preface continues it becomes evident that, for Thynne, Chaucer’s significance lies not just in the unprecedented eloquence of his English poetry but, as the passage above suggests, more specifically in his ability to reach such heights at an unlikely historical moment. An air of untimeliness floats around Chaucer, whose works “semeth for the admiracion / noveltie / and strangenesse that it myght be reputed to be of in the tyme of the authour / in comparison / as a pure and fyne tryede precious or polyced jewell out of a rude or indigest masse or matere.”⁴⁴ Rather than emerging from the “indigest masse” of late medieval England, Thynne suggests Chaucer belongs more properly to either the Greek and Roman past or to the Henrician present, the parallels Thynne finds between Chaucer and Greek and Roman exemplars making him appear more like the writers of the sixteenth century than the fourteenth. Thynne continues,

For though it had been in Demosthenes or Homerus tymes / whan al lernyng and excellency of sciences florisshed amonges the Grekes / or in the season that Cicero prince of eloquence amonges latyns lyved / yet had it ben a thyng right rare and straunge / and worthy perpetuall laude / that any clerke by lernyng or wytte coulde than have framed a tonge before so rude and imperfite / to suche a swete ornature and composyicion / lykely if he had lyved in these dayes / being good letters so restored and revyved as they be / if he were nat empeched by the envy of suche as maye tollerate nothyng / whiche to understonde their capacite doth nat extende / to have brought it unto a full and fynall perfection.⁴⁵

In this passage, Thynne articulates a view of Chaucer that will be echoed in the works of later writers, including John Leland and Sir Philip Sidney. On the one hand, for Thynne, Chaucer is an extraordinary writer whose accomplishments are all the more remarkable because they occurred during a period when “all good letters were layde a slepe throughout the worlde.” Approached synchronically, in his own moment, Chaucer is exceptional. On the other hand, by setting Chaucer apart from his medieval antecedents and contemporaries, Thynne can also construct a diachronic narrative that not only links Chaucer to exemplars of classical eloquence but also imagines his reception (as if a living author) in the Henrician present in which “good letters” are “so restored and revyved” as to make “a full and fynall perfection” of the language possible. Although cut off from both the illustrious past and the glorious future by their medieval moment, Chaucer’s writings here are presented both as a continuation of classical learnedness and as something that might draw the “envy” of a lesser sort of contemporary reader. While Thomas Wilson might have had poetry in mind when he complained, in his 1553 Arte of Rhetorique, that “the fine Courtier wil talk nothyng but Chaucer,” Thynne’s preface suggests a variety of reasons why the English courtier—eager to demonstrate both loyalty and eloquence in the rapidly shifting environs of the Henrician court—might have found Chaucer, in particular, a useful focal point for courtly discourse.⁴⁶

(Re)framing Chaucer

While Thynne’s preface did much to link Chaucer with the development of the English language (and, through it, Englishness itself), the 1561 edition more vividly shows how bibliographic features like title pages could convey specific ideas about how and why Chaucer mattered in sixteenth-century England. The title pages to the three Thynne editions use relatively sedate architectural borders, but John Stow’s edition of the Works introduces a new title page, featuring the Chaucer family coat of arms (thereby emphasizing Chaucer’s social status; see Figure 1), and on several interior title pages makes use of the extraordinary “tree of Jesse” woodcut frame originally produced for Edward Hall’s Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, better known as Hall’s Chronicle (STC 12723), and used subsequently in Thomas Marshe’s 1555 edition of Lydgate’s Troy Book (STC 5580) (see Figure 2).⁴⁷ The bottom corners of the frame depict the slumbering figures of John of Gaunt and Edmund of York, from whose torsos emerge rose bushes, blooming with the visages of various fifteenth-century luminaries. At the top of the frame, the two bushes join as Henry VII extends a hand from his bloom to greet his queen Elizabeth in hers. Above, in a double Tudor rose, Henry VIII presides over the entire scene. In the 1561 Works, where the woodcut prefaces the Canterbury Tales and the Romaunt of the Rose, it quite literally provides a historical frame for Chaucer’s text. The juxtaposition is striking: while the image quite clearly reflects the contents of Hall’s Chronicle, there is no self-evident link between the Canterbury Tales and the War of the Roses. Instead, the woodcut invites the reader to make the link between Chaucer, the historical figure, and the luminaries depicted in the woodcut, most notably Chaucer’s patron John of Gaunt.

The Hall woodcut provides a visual analogue to what had by the middle of the sixteenth century become an increasingly historicized and politicized frame of reference for reading Chaucer. The woodcut’s biographical connection to Chaucer depends upon the figure of Chaucer’s patron and brother-in-law John of Gaunt at the bottom left; its appearance here must indicate that whoever was responsible for the its appearance in this book was aware of the connection between Chaucer and Gaunt and wished to emphasize this. Joseph Dane and Seth Lerer have argued that evidence of a stop-press correction of a typographical error in Adam Scriveyn indicates that Stow himself was involved in the production of the Works, perhaps even present in the printing house.⁴⁸ Stow certainly had the necessary historical background to recognize the connection between Gaunt and Chaucer, and he must have known Hall’s Chronicle as a source for his own historiography.⁴⁹ I think it very likely that Stow himself wanted this image placed in this book.

The use of the Hall woodcut in 1561 anticipates the more explicitly antiquarian orientation of the 1598 and 1602 Speght editions, which actively connect Chaucer’s writings to his historical circumstances. The frontispiece of the 1598 Works enumerates some of the features and aids for potential readers and buyers, beginning with the John Speed engraving I will discuss in detail below:

Figure 1. Title page, The woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed with divers addicions, whiche were never in printe before (1561); STC 5076. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 2. Interior title page for the Canterbury Tales from The woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed with divers addicions, whiche were never in printe before (1561), sig. A1; STC 5076. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

1. His Portraiture and Progenie shewed.

2. His Life collected.

3. Arguments to every Booke gathered.

4. Old and obscure words explaned.

5. Authors by him cited, declared.

6. Difficulties opened.

7. Two Bookes of his, never before Printed.

Notably, neither this list nor the text of the title page as a whole make mention of any of Chaucer’s works by title; Chaucer’s own name is the selling point here. The frontispiece for the revised edition, which appeared just four years later in 1602, has a similar appearance and emphasis. Readers are advised that they will find that “to that which was done in the former Impression,” “much is now added,” including:

1. In the life of Chaucer many things inserted.

2. The whole Worke by old Copies reformed.

3. Sentences and Proverbes noted.

4. The Signification of the old and obscure words proved: also Caracters shewing from what Tongue or Dialect they be derived.

5. The Latine and French, not Englished by Chaucer, translated.

6. The Treatise called Jacke Upland, against Friers: and Chaucers A.B.C. called La Priere de nostre Dame, at this Impression added.

Taken together, these two lists offer would-be buyers and readers a number of reasons that they might turn to this particular edition of Chaucer. Some of the aids listed here, such as the translation of Latin and French phrases and the glossary of “old and obscure” terms, could potentially help any reader. But taken together, these title pages present “our most learned and ancient English poet” as a figure of biographical and genealogical interest, a source of proverbial wisdom, and a multilingual and intertextual writer. These themes are already present in the Thynne preface, but here it is clear that, in assuming these roles, Chaucer has been made into an object of scholarly labor: arguments are “gathered,” words are “explaned,” and difficulties are “opened,” even if, on close examination, the assertion that the “whole worke [is] by old Copies reformed” proves to be somewhat (and somewhat predictably, given the tendency toward hyperbole on early modern title pages) overstated.

Speght’s editions make especially visible the hybrid status that Chaucer acquired over the course of the sixteenth century: on the one hand, as a poet whose works are witty and wise, and who can be read for pleasure or for edification; on the other, as a figure from the increasingly distant English past, someone whose life and works require explanation and interpretation so that later readers can fully understand the importance of his contributions. Chaucer’s Works remain a book to be read, but they are also, increasingly, presented as texts requiring study and careful explication.

Chaucerian Genealogies

A striking, full-page engraving prepared for the 1598 edition of the Works visually demonstrates this dual approach to Chaucer (Figure 3). The artist, historian, and cartographer John Speed was best known for his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine and for the genealogical tables he contributed to the Authorized Version of the Bible, and was well connected in antiquarian circles.⁵⁰ Speed’s engraving is significant in that it marks the first time a formal author portrait appeared in a printed edition of Chaucer’s writings (early editions of the Canterbury Tales depict the author/narrator on horseback), but it adds to that portrait a number of features that reflect Chaucer’s status as an object of antiquarian fascination. In form and in content, the engraving exemplifies the two distinct, though interrelated, ways of thinking about Chaucer that predominated at the close of the sixteenth century: one literary and laudatory, the other historical. Viewed through the literary lens, Chaucer is a great poet whose poetic achievements are said to transcend his historical moment in ways that allow Renaissance readers to feel particularly close to him. Viewed through the historical lens, Chaucer is of his moment, connected through family and marriage to a range of significant political figures. A tension between historical fixity and literary mobility lies at the heart of claims for Chaucer’s exceptional status, a point that the complex visual rhetoric of the engraving makes clear as it navigates between multiple schemata for periodizing Chaucer.

At the center of the image is a large, full-length portrait of Chaucer, modeled on that found in manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes.⁵¹ The caption underneath identifies it as “the true portraiture of GEFFREY CHAUCER / the famous English poet, as by THOMAS OCCLEVE is described who lived in his time, and was his Scholar,” touting the picture as an authoritative and authorized image of the poet grounded in firsthand experience.⁵² In it, a rotund and goateed Chaucer, looking serious in a smock and wide-sleeved garment, holds a penner in his right hand and a string of rosary beads in his left.

Figure 3. “The Progenie of Geffrey Chaucer,” from The Workes of our Ancient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly Printed (1602); STC 5080. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This portrait, which could have easily appeared in a fifteenth-century copy of Hoccleve’s poem, introduces familiar tropes of literary laureation, but it is the least elaborate aspect of Speed’s engraving. Directly below, Speed depicts the double tomb of Thomas and Maude (Matilda) Chaucer, Chaucer’s son and daughter-in-law, shown in situ at the Ewelme parish church. (Notably, Speed does not depict Chaucer’s own modest tomb in Westminster Abbey.)⁵³ The tomb chest features some two dozen shields, representing not only Thomas and Maude’s direct ancestry, but the impressive number of baronial families to which the couple—though not Geoffrey Chaucer himself—was related by blood or marriage (the connections are mostly through Maude’s family or Philippa Chaucer, née Swynford).⁵⁴ Speed has distorted perspective here to show three sides of the tomb and thus maximize the number of shields that can be illustrated; the arms appearing include those of John of Gaunt and Edward, 2nd Duke of York and the son of Edmund, 1st Duke of York. John of Gaunt and Edmund, Duke of York, are two of the key figures in the woodcut from Hall’s Chronicle used in the 1561 Works.

While the tomb occupies the space below the central portrait, an extensive genealogical diagram fills the space above and to the sides. Its circular medallions recall the medieval armorial roles that would have served as Speed’s sources and anticipate the genealogical tables that Speed would later produce for the Authorized Version of the Bible.⁵⁵ Like the other elements of the engraving, the genealogy bristles with information, presented in a format widely used in antiquarian contexts.⁵⁶ These elements not only speak to the new significance that Chaucer and his writings had taken on as objects of historic and antiquarian study by the turn of the seventeenth century but, considered along with the more conventional author portrait, also exemplify the dualism that is central to antiquarian responses to the medieval poet in this period.

This dualism also plays out in the ways the engraving depicts Chaucer’s relation to his “progeny”: at the center, the Hocclevian portrait recalls the poetic pedigrees and praise for “father Chaucer” familiar to literary scholars. It collapses historical distance and invites viewers to come face-to-face with the author, carrying forward the conventional hallmarks of Chaucerian tribute and memorialization. It cultivates a sense of personal connection to the poet, akin to the firsthand knowledge suggested by the Regiment of Princes portrait or the more metaphysical associations implied by Spenser’s claims for a spiritual connection to his predecessor.⁵⁷ In her discussion of Speght’s edition, Stephanie Trigg comments on the ways in which the prefatory materials encourage readers to imagine not only a synchronic “horizontal communion” of Chaucer lovers in the present, but a kind of diachronic “vertical communion” with previous admirers and finally the great man himself.⁵⁸ While Trigg imagines this community as centered on printed editions of Chaucer’s poetry, this engraving encourages devotion based not around a book but on the author himself. With this sense of connection, however, also comes an awareness of distance; Chaucer is, in fact, no longer present and the reader must make do with the book before him or her. As in religious devotional images, the viewer is visually cued to the fact the encounter is a mediated one, here by looking across the surface of the tomb that appears at the bottom of the engraving, which functions as a casement, arch, or doorway might frame an image of a saint in a Book of Hours.⁵⁹ Attending to these qualities of the engraving, Martha Driver aptly describes it as a “Protestant rereading of a medieval devotional image.”⁶⁰

The material that surrounds the portrait, by contrast, situates Chaucer in a specific historical moment and represents his historical existence as part of a genealogy that is not at all dependent upon his poetic accomplishments. Although the heading at the top of the frame reads “The Progenie of Geoffrey Chaucer,” it is Chaucer’s father-in-law, “Payne Roet Knight,” who sits atop the family tree. Paon de Roet (or Roelt, Ruet) was a knight from the Low Countries who came to England in the service of Edward III and who was father not only to Chaucer’s wife Philippa (identified here merely as “The Daughter of Payne Roet”) but also to Katherine Swynford, the mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt.⁶¹ As the left side of Speed’s engraving illustrates, through this family connection, Chaucer can be linked to several major figures in fifteenth-century history, including both Henry IV and Henry V. The right-hand margin shows Chaucer’s line of descent via his son Thomas, a successful politician in his own right. Thomas Chaucer’s only child, Alice, acquired prodigious amounts of wealth and power through a series of impressive marriages; the third and last, to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, resulted in a son, John. John was the father of Edmund de la Pole, the Yorkist pretender to the throne executed by Henry VIII in 1513. Speed thus links Chaucer with the houses of both York and Lancaster and, through them, to networks of power and institutions that continued to shape the world in which Speed’s audience lived and read. This is not so much a poetic tribute as a history lesson.

Taken as a whole, Speed’s engraving brings together praise of Chaucer as a posthumous but sacrosanct literary figure with a sense that he is, as Helen Cooper writes, “embedded in the great tradition of the nation in part by his close incorporation into the royal and aristocratic history of England.”⁶² Importantly, this connection is not limited to Chaucer’s own lifetime, nor does it only look backward to the classical inheritance (a move that ultimately contemporizes Chaucer for later readers who were themselves ardent students of the Greek and Roman past). Instead, as the genealogies remind us, Chaucer’s legacy extends directly to the sixteenth century, which will see “the comparison of him to the great classical authors in the Works, the patronage of Henry VIII, the tussle to claim him for each religion, the triumph of his misidentification as a forerunner of English Protestantism, and the erection of his tomb close to those of England’s monarchs.”⁶³ All these various claims for Chaucer’s lasting import find support in the genealogical framework that Speed provides.

Like the conventions of Chaucer’s literary reception, which venerate him as the author Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales while largely ignoring texts like the Legend of Good Women, both the portrait and the genealogy that surrounds it are selective, and this encodes a series of value judgments: the stemma depicts only those branches of the family tree that afford Chaucer the most impressive and politically significant connections, and while Speed emphasizes the authority of the portrait by associating it with a named author who lived in Chaucer’s time, he calls Hoccleve a “scholar” rather than identifying him as a poet in his own right. In both poetic and historical registers, Chaucer appears sui generis, without any representation of his own poetic influences or (relatively modest) parentage. At each of its many levels, the Speed engraving offers a visual example of the representational choices consistently made when presenting Chaucer to early modern audiences. These choices, in both the engraving and in the larger context of the Works and related commentary, maximize Chaucer’s status and importance not just to literary history but to English nationalism at large.

Antiquarian Readers and the Middle English Past

Although antiquarian readers like Thynne, Stow, and Speght made up only a small part of Chaucer’s early modern readership, they played a disproportionately significant role in defining the medieval poet’s reputation and constructing his canon. As a result of their work with medieval materials, antiquarians were probably among the best-equipped readers of Chaucer’s Middle English in early modern England. The average reader of the Works and other printed copies of Middle English verse must have lacked the linguistic facility of an aficionado like John Stow, but the assumption still seems to have been that she or he could read, admire, and appreciate the language of earlier poetry. Indeed, the increasingly palpable antiquity of Middle English could even be a selling point.

This attitude is not limited to Chaucer. Introducing his 1532 edition of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, the printer Thomas Berthelette praises the poem’s “olde englysshe wordes and vulgars [that] no wyse man / bycause of theyr antiquite / wyll throwe asyde.”⁶⁴ He juxtaposes Gower’s language with “newe termes” that “wryters of later dayes” borrow from foreign languages. Such unfamiliar terms, he writes, impede readers’ understanding since “they that understode not those langages / from whens these newe vulgars are sette / coude not perceyve theyr wrytynges.” The implication seems to be that Gower’s poetry can provide a suitable alternative to this unnecessary borrowing by offering a stock of novel, but still English, words.⁶⁵ Robert Braham, in his epistle to the reader in Thomas Marshe’s 1555 edition of Lydgate’s Troy Book, complains at length about the errors in the text introduced by earlier scribes and printers (of Pynson’s 1513 edition, he grumbles that “bothe the prynter and correctour, neyther of them as it shoulde seme [were] eyther learned or understandynge englishe”), but presumes that, once the text has been emended, readers will recognize Lydgate as one who “may worthyly be numbred amongest those that have chefelye deserved of our tynge,” the “verye perfect disciple and imitator of the great Chaucer.”⁶⁶ Robert Crowley, introducing his 1550 edition of Piers Plowman, faces a more difficult task, since the alliterative vocabulary of Langland’s poem differs much more starkly from sixteenth-century English than Chaucer’s or Lydgate’s language. Yet even he assures readers that “the Englishe is according to the time it was written in, and the sence somewhat darcke, but not so harde, but that it may be understande of suche as will not sticke to breake the shell of the nutte for the kernelles sake.”⁶⁷ In each case, the commentator acknowledges the difficulty or historical distance of the text he introduces but also articulates a confidence that the sixteenth-century reader will be able to navigate the intricacies of Middle English verse.

This combined sense of connection and distance is also on display in Speght’s 1598 Chaucer, the full title of which is The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, as well as in the revised 1602 edition that follows. Speght’s title marks Chaucer as a specifically English poet, but he is also, for the first time, “antient.” Taken together, “antient,” “learned,” and “English” suggest a native author as sophisticated and rich as Latin and Greek classics. This dynamic finds novel lexicographical expression in the form of the glossary. Glossaries, like genealogies of the sort offered in the Speed engraving, provide a path linking an archaic term (or ancestor) with its contemporary equivalent (or descendant). This connection is, importantly, never quite immediate, and access to the figure of Chaucer is never unmediated: in Speed’s engraving, readers must navigate five generations to move from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund de la Pole. In a glossary like Speght’s, readers must move back and forth between Middle English terms and their definitions, linguistic difference functioning here as a marker of historical distance.

The distancing effect produced by Speght’s title and glossaries might seem at first primarily negative. After all, at the end of the sixteenth century, as Speght compiled his list of “old and obscure words” in Chaucer, continental editions of Boccaccio and Dante came equipped not with glossaries but with indexes designed to aid the reader as he or she incorporated the language of the fourteenth-century poets into his or her own writing.⁶⁸ The linguistic and historical alienation that prompts Speght’s interventions is not necessarily undesirable, however, because it opens up new ways of situating the poet in relation to the more distant past. There might be no glossary in Dante, but similar lexicons can be found in school texts of Virgil, Seneca, and the like. With their language marked both as historically distant and foundationally English, Chaucer’s writings become the first English “classics.”

Far from bracketing off Chaucer as an antiquarian curiosity irrelevant to current experiments in form and diction, the increasing unfamiliarity of Chaucer’s language might well have helped to assure his relevance to the major conversations about language, influence, and national identity in early modern England.⁶⁹ On the printed page, Chaucer, viewed from the far side of religious reform and the “new” learning, could look surprisingly like certain influential Greek and Roman writers. Furthermore, as Lucy Munro demonstrates, the sixteenth century witnessed a sustained poetic engagement with the idea of archaism in ways that both drew upon and helped to shape antiquarian practice.⁷⁰ Archaism, which like antiquarianism was in its early modern form deeply concerned with questions of national identity and England’s relation to its own past, made Chaucer’s distant language newly available for poetic appropriation, perhaps most notably in the writings of Edmund Spenser.⁷¹ The perceived outdatedness of Chaucer’s language—the idea it was now, as Puttenham wrote, “no longer with us”—was precisely what allowed him to serve as Spenser’s “well of English undefiled” and to appear as a writer who was, in the words of Speght’s title page, both “antient” and “English.”⁷²

A few conclusions can be drawn from these examples. First, early modern readers and writers were alert to the changing nature of the English language. An awareness of language change in English was not new to post-Reformation England: in the thirteenth century the Tremulous Hand glossed Old English words with their Middle English equivalents, while around 1490, Caxton famously commented on the vagaries of the English tongue in his preface to his Eneydos (STC 24769). Throughout the premodern era, scribes and printers silently emended their sources to modernize their form and diction. But in sixteenth-century England, new kinds of changes made the difference between the language of the past and that of the present even more visible.⁷³ Modifications in pronunciation, orthography, and grammar all played a role, and caused particular challenges when scanning and pronouncing works in verse.⁷⁴ Errors proliferated as Middle English texts were copied and recopied by sixteenth-century scribes and compositors. Evolving attitudes toward the past itself—specifically, the notion that there was a “chiaroscuro” contrast between the present and the pre-Reformation past—also contributed to a sense that the language of the past was different and distant, and therefore more difficult to read and comprehend.⁷⁵

Second, despite this change, it is clear that readers retained a real connection to the language and stories of late medieval England. A number of things testify to their ongoing vitality: multiple editions not only of Chaucer’s Works but also of writings by Gower, Lydgate, and Langland; ongoing references to and adaptations of Chaucer and his contemporaries in poetry, drama, and prose; and the abundant presence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century annotations both in medieval books and in early printed volumes containing Middle English. Even if readers were increasingly aware of the historical and linguistic distance between themselves and their medieval predecessors, and even if Chaucer’s language was manifestly more difficult than it had been a hundred years earlier, the evidence suggests that a significant number of readers retained some ability to comprehend and appreciate London dialects of late Middle English. The ability to read as well as study these older texts, in other words, never disappeared completely.

Beginning in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, many antiquarians also devoted at least some of their energies to the study of Anglo-Saxon, and the degree to which Old English was necessarily treated as a separate language offers an illustrative contrast to late Middle English’s proximity to early modern English. For texts written in older forms of the English language, the distinction between historical and literary modes of reading was much more clear-cut than it was for Middle English. (This is not to say Anglo-Saxon could not be deployed for literary purposes: from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, poets have deliberately engaged with Old English language and poetry, whether translating it or, occasionally, composing new verse.)⁷⁶ Early modern readers could at least follow the sense of Chaucer’s stories without special training, even if individual words or references might be obscure or a corrupt or poorly edited text caused difficulty. Study of Old English grammar and language, however, was a necessary prelude to further investigation into Anglo-Saxon law, historiography, and religion.⁷⁷ Key figures in the development of Anglo-Saxon studies, such as Matthew Parker, understood this and supported the work of grammarians and lexicographers accordingly.⁷⁸ By and large, these early scholars turned to the surviving corpus of Old English writing as a source lexical and linguistic insight rather than poetic pleasure.⁷⁹ It would not be until the early twentieth century that Anglo-Saxon verse would be seriously studied from a literary, rather than philological, perspective.

Third and finally, as the sixteenth century progressed, Chaucer, in particular, became a site for the commingling of a tradition of readerly enjoyment and a new sense that the English past was worth studying in rigorous ways. This is true of other late medieval authors as well, of course, but the sustained attention given to Chaucer’s archaisms is unique and testifies to what I have argued throughout this chapter was Chaucer’s exceptional place as a figure primed to index both connection to and distance from the medieval past. Marked by language that was both recognizably English and increasingly historically distant, Chaucer was at once an object of antiquarian fascination and a familiar English writer whose works remained accessible to many readers.

While Chaucer’s early modern transmission and reception can and should be understood in a context that included the work of other Middle English writers, Chaucer’s especially vaunted position in poetic genealogies from the fifteenth century onward made both the author and his language a privileged site for contemplation of the past in early modern England. As a writer whose language was identifiably English and whose achievements could be favorably compared with both later writers and classical ones, Chaucer represented continuity and historical progression. At the same time, because his language was an earlier form of the vernacular, and because the historical and cultural moment in which he lived was increasingly thought of as “other” to the post-Reformation present, he also signaled the presence of chronological rupture within English history. This doubleness is key to Chaucer’s special status in early modern England and the basis for his ability to signify meaningfully in both literary and historical contexts—an ability that is increasingly foregrounded in successive editions of his Works.

In their shared concern for Chaucer’s poetic legacy and the English past, the work of early antiquarians constitutes the pre-philological beginnings of what we today recognize as English literary history. To adapt Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claims about the ceremonial importance of certain foods that are “good to think” if not necessarily “good to eat,” Renaissance antiquarians selected Chaucer for a special role because they found him exceptionally “good to think,” even if he and his contemporaries no longer remained unequivocally “good to read” as his language became more difficult for everyday readers.⁸⁰ The materials I consider in the following chapters show Chaucer’s works poised on a permeable boundary between “texts for reading” and “texts for studying”: what one reader considers a text for serious scholarly examination in one context may also be read for literary pleasure or moral insight in another.

In the decades since Alice S. Miskimin’s landmark 1975 study The Renaissance Chaucer, medievalists and early modernists have both done much to map the ways that Chaucer was read in the sixteenth century and beyond. Yet Tudor readers with connections to antiquarian communities have a special and largely untold role to play in this story, since not only do they comment on Chaucer, they play a key shepherding Chaucer’s works into print and keeping them there. In the following chapter, I turn to John Leland. Although Leland never edited Chaucer, his antiquarian writings influenced a century’s worth of English antiquarians, and any account that seeks to understand antiquarians’ influence on Chaucer’s transmission must account for the foundational role played by Leland and his commentary.