"Chaucer's Dreame": A Bibliographer's Nightmare

Abstract

he Chaucerian apocrypha consists of some fifty spurious pieces that were included in the early folio editions of Chaucer's works between 1532 and 1721 and in later editions based on them. These works present formidable bibliographical and material obstacles to anyone examining Chaucer's early canon formation. Several bibliographies have attempted to give histories of these apocryphal poems and to account for the attribution of individual works to Chaucer.' To make their discussions coherent, however, these bibliographies often oversimplify the transmission record, particularly the degree to which attributions are dependent on context. They assume (but never state directly) that an attribution in a manuscript is the equivalent of an attribution in a printed book; or that what might be called a post-print attribution added to a manuscript has the same authority as one contemporary with the production of the