Miscellaneity and Apocrypha in Chaucer's Works (1532)

Abstract

abstract: The miscellany has, historically, been treated as a category of remainder in catalogs of both manuscripts and printed books. Miscellanies are those volumes that, because of their inherently mixed character, do not fit neatly into other categories. However, this practice risks making miscellanies appear to be haphazard or accidental productions. Recent studies of such books have begun to excavate the strategies of assemblage, borrowing, and reorganization that mark their production. These strategies are not restricted to those books we now term miscellanies; frequently, they can also be discerned in books that fit more comfortably into other categories. How might our view of early books and the circumstances of their making shift if we centered the practices associated with miscellanies? As a case study, this essay will consider manuscripts and early printed editions of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, tracing the significant commonalities between early copies of Chaucer's writings, in what might be termed "miscellaneous contexts," and the large printed folios that proudly announce themselves as "Chaucer's works" while still containing significant material attributed to other authors. Ultimately, taking the variance within the corpus of early Chaucer books into account, Cook argues for the quality of the miscellaneous as a potentially more useful framework for literary history than the more static category of the miscellany.