John Foxe’s Chaucer: Affecting Form in Post-Historicist Criticism

Abstract

This essay considers John Foxe’s treatment of Geoffrey Chaucer in his Actes and Monuments as it might shed light on ‘post-historicist’ criticism. Instead of a chronology, Foxe uses a combination of form and affect to unite the threads of his reformist history. Chaucer is not connected to events of the fourteenth century, but finds formal and affective affinities with other reformist writers across three centuries. By emphasizing Chaucer’s mobile poetic forms, Foxe combines irregular temporal trajectories to figure a reformist aesthetic that exceeds traditional historicist analysis.