The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

Abstract

Megan Cook's The Poet and the Antiquaries fills a gap among other scholarship on Chaucer's postmedieval readers and printers. While scholars such as Alexandra Gillespie, Stephanie Trigg, Seth Lerer, and Paul Ruggiers have studied various aspects of Chaucer's reception in the transition period from manuscript to print, Cook's focus is on the ways the antiquarian interests of Chaucer's 16th- and early 17th-century readers and transmitters influenced readings and presentations of Chaucer's works. She argues that Chaucer was important to these individuals not primarily because of his literary qualities but because of his antiquity and nationality. In roughly chronological order, Cook traces specific antiquarians, printers, and early scholars who valued, studied, and promoted Chaucer for social, cultural, and religious reasons.In her introduction, Cook lays out the main argument of the book: that antiquarians were central to how “broad narratives” about the English past and Englishness were constructed and spread (p. 2). Chaucer was key to their project of tying the English language, literature, and history to ideologies of identity, Protestantism, and nationalism. In doing so, they shaped the ways a much broader readership received and perceived Chaucer. Cook defines “antiquarian” broadly–they are not mere coin-collectors!–as “chroniclers, religious polemicists, historians, and specialists in genealogy and heraldry” (p. 5). These antiquarian interests are notable for the relative unimportance of anything of literary or poetic merit; instead, the individuals she studies celebrate Chaucer for a wide variety of his perceived roles, from alchemist to religious reformer. Chaucer's antiquity becomes a marker for the antiquity of not only the English language but English poetry, religion, nation, and culture.Chapter one focuses on the early print editions of Chaucer's Works, specifically the folio versions. The usual suspects, William Thynne, John Stow, and Thomas Speght, are explored in detail. Cook argues that these folio editions were “a bibliographic departure” (p. 18) from previous prints by the likes of Caxton and de Worde, and that in both content and form they emphasized a persistent connection between contemporary Early Modern nationalistic concepts and Chaucer's status as a “privileged innovator” of the English language (p. 18). All of these folios make implicit or explicit claims to Chaucer's antiquity, likening him to classical Greek and Latin authors and thus claiming an equal status and heritage for the English language. Chaucer's historicity, however—as shown, for example, in the genealogical family tree engraving by John Speed, which Cook reproduces on p. 35—makes equal claims for the worth of the English heritage and nation.Chapter two turns to the early modern biographers of Geoffrey Chaucer, focusing on John Leland and Thomas Speght. These biographers more explicitly positioned Chaucer as a “national poet whose cultural impact extended beyond the realm of literature and aesthetics into a wider historiographic and nationalistic context” (p. 45). As might be expected of biography, the focus shifts from the content of Chaucer's works to the author's life and history. Cook also explores a concomitant shift from the fifteenth-century valorization of a late medieval English triumvirate of writers–Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate–to a preeminence of Chaucer that lasts until today. According to these biographers, Gower becomes a sort of “John the Baptist” figure, paving the way for the more important figure of Chaucer.The third chapter again expands on and reexplores work done by other scholars, in looking at Chaucer's transformation into a proto-Protestant writer. Beginning with John Foxe's revised Actes and Monuments, Cook examines the way that overtly Wycliffite and Lollard texts such as Jack Upland and The Plowman's Tale became an accepted part of the Chaucer canon. She argues for a circular relationship between the Chaucer canon and Chaucer biography: as Chaucer increasingly became adopted as an early Protestant figure, obviously Lollard-leaning texts started being attributed to Chaucer, which then reaffirmed his status as a Lollard writer. Chaucer was thus appropriated not only for national and linguistic ideological purposes, but religious as well.I found the fourth chapter the most innovative and original of the book. In a move that brings to mind David Lodge's character in Small World who (accidentally) claims his Ph.D. thesis studies the influence of T. S. Eliot on William Shakespeare, Cook argues in this chapter for Edmund Spenser's influence on Geoffrey Chaucer (or at least on the way Chaucer was received and read). She argues that Spenser's implicit gestures to antiquity in his Shepheardes Calender, in its accompanying textual apparatus including glosses and annotations, both signaled the archaic nature of the words and provided Thomas Speght with a model to follow in his next edition of Chaucer's Works. Spenser, in the Shepheardes Calender, deliberately used words from Chaucer's time as a tacit argument for the age and literariness of the English language: “Newly identified as archaic, Chaucerian and Lydgatian words equip the poet with the language needed for his vernacular application of classical literary precepts to English verse” (p. 105). Again, Chaucer is linked with the Greek and Latin classical writers, a “hybrid of ancient and native traditions” (p. 111). Cook argues that Speght's “hard words” list and textual apparatus were inspired by the similar extratextual framework of the Shepheardes Calender. As such they functioned not only as (possibly unnecessary) tools to understanding, but more importantly as a signal of their antiquity: “the glosses and annotations introduced by Speght also have a role to play in constructing the very sense of historical difference that they purport to resolve” (p. 124). Chaucer is thus positioned as ancient, and moved from being accessible to ordinary readers into the province of the scholar. Ordinary people, the apparatus implicitly argued, can only appreciate Chaucer through a scholarly textual apparatus.In chapter five, Cook turns to William Thynne's son, Francis Thynne. She argues that Francis Thynne, in his 1598 response to Thomas Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer Animadversions uppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucers workes, is the first person to take a “scholarly approach” to Chaucer and his contemporaries in our understanding of the term (p. 131). In doing so, he does the inverse of what Edmund Spenser did in writing the Shepehardes Calender: instead of adapting the tropes and forms of antiquarian scholarship to a literary conceit, “Thynne took what was commonly seen as a literary text and excavated its antiquarian concerns” (p. 133). So, for example, Thynne explores the French roots of the surname Chaucer and the Chaucer coat of arms, details which fall into the category of “history” rather than “literary study.” Throughout the Animadversions as well as other works and poems, Francis Thynne positions Chaucer as comparable both with Latin classical authors and with contemporary English poets.Chapter six brings us into the seventeenth century, with an examination of three early-seventeenth-century readers of Chaucer: Joseph Holland, Elias Ashmole, and Franciscus Junius the Younger. Cook selects these three readers because, continuing a move started by Speght, they demonstrate how “increasingly, Chaucer was the province of the scholar rather than the general reader, and how an antiquarian approach to the Chaucerian book created new scenes of reading and interpretation” (p. 165). As in chapter four, she makes an argument that on the surface seems anachronistic, as she examines the ways print editions shaped Holland's thinking about what is now Cambridge University Library manuscript Gg.4.27. As a result, paradoxically, “the fifteenth-century object was remade in the image of its sixteenth-century descendant” (p. 177). Elias Ashmole, by contrast, gave primacy to manuscript evidence, including works such as Gamelyn in the Chaucer canon, which shows his belief in the possibility that other Chaucerian works exist outside of the printed collections of Works. The transition of the typical reader of Chaucer from an ordinary Englishman at the beginning of the 16th century to the exclusive antiquarian and scholar is completed with Dutch philologist Franciscus Junius, notable not only because he considers Chaucer primarily from a philological and linguistic standpoint, but because he is the only non-English reader Cook studies.Megan Cook's study is a fine addition to scholarship on postmedieval readership of Chaucer. At times I felt it veered too far from the antiquarians’ image of Chaucer's works into a study of the antiquarians themselves. For example, in chapter five there is a lengthy section on Francis Thynne's own personal life and interests that is only tangentially related to his interest in Chaucer. This book is not useful to anyone seeking insight into Chaucer's works themselves, nor for people looking for evidence of Chaucer's literary, as opposed to historical, influence. However, it is an important study of the ways that an author's creations can be used by later readers for nationalistic purposes.