The Kelmscott Chaucer: The Book-Object, its Facsimiles, and Labor

Abstract

ABSTRACT William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer was an attempt to reproduce an “authentic” medieval artifact, albeit as a printed book rather than as a handwritten manuscript. The Kelmscott invites us to theorize about the medieval book; the medievalized book; the reproduction or facsimile of the medieval book; and the reproduction or facsimile of the medievalized book. The Kelmscott also urges us to consider practice; that is, the labor that went into all of the iterations of the Kelmscott, whether a copy was made on Morris’s press or later mass-produced as a facsimile. Moreover, Morris’s book can be approached as what I call a recalcitrant object. Its recalcitrance is mainly lodged in its aesthetic qualities — the extremes of ornamentation that are not additive, but inherent. One way to think about Morris’s project is as a metonymy for the non-cooperation, as it were, of the European Middle Ages itself. The apparent withdrawal of the Middle Ages from our understanding opens up a space for endless efforts to reproduce things medieval — cathedrals, feasts, gardens, music, poetry. As such, the Kelmscott interrogates the divide that we endeavor to maintain between the premodern and the modern: as a printed book masquerading as a medieval manuscript, it embraces both periods.