Authorising

Abstract

While framing devices in editions of the Workes have been recognised for their innovative elevation of a vernacular English poet, the extent of their cultural influence has not been fully documented. This chapter argues that the new presentation of Chaucer the man and his works in print gave rise to a broader attributional and biographical impulse on the part of his early modern readers. It notices readers’ embellishment of manuscripts and older printed books with authorising paratexts in the same period that parallel conventions commemorated Chaucer in contemporary prints. Inscriptions of the author’s name, lists of contents, standardised titles, comments on the canon, and imitations of his printed portrait were added to older books, manuscript and printed, by early modern and eighteenth-century readers who sought to improve those volumes according to the new aesthetic and scholarly standards codified in print. Chaucer’s printed works have long been implicated in the rise of the figure of the author, and this readerly desire for paratextual devices with which to frame his life and work provides new evidence for an emergent preoccupation with authorship in the Chaucerian book.