Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon

Abstract

rT v he history of the Chaucer canon begins with fifteenth-century manuscripts and the variety of ways in which they have preserved information about Chaucer's authorship of particular texts. Most obviously, this information takes the form of scribal attribution, although it also includes testimony offered by other authors (Lydgate and Gower, for example), or internal evidence such as the eagle's identification of Chaucer in The House of Fame, or the revealing biographical details of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women.1 These categories of information are not wholly unproblematical: considerable skepticism has been expressed, for example, about the validity of the scribal notes that attach Chaucer's name to the short poems Womanly Noblesse and To Rosemounde2 and about the nature of Chaucer's connection with the various fragments of The Romaunt of the Rose;3 and recent studies have begun to demonstrate that a variety of powerful factors were at work on even the very early processes of canon formation.4 The influential roles of early Chaucer promoters such as the fifteenth-century scribe John Shirley or the sixteenth-century antiquary John Stow are also currently under investigation that seems likely to question or at least to expose for consideration the weight of their authority.5 The construction, over