“Un-English” Chaucer: Macaronic Verse and Codicological Form in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27

Abstract

This essay reconsiders the earliest extant manuscript to collect Chaucer’s works by attending to those of its poems that have heretofore been considered most marginal to its canonizing project: an anonymous pair of trilingual, tail-rhymed verse epistles. Reading these trilingual poems as integral to this Chaucerian anthology teases apart the often-twinned narratives of Chaucer’s canonization and the canonization of English as national literary language. The essay first explores the codex’s assembly and reception history to suggest that Englishness is not a prerequisite for Chaucerian canonicity within this fifteenth-century collection. The second section challenges the broader narrative of the emergence of English as “mother tongue” of a trilingual literary culture by looking to the macaronic poems themselves. I propose that the verse, rhetorical, and material forms of these poems—the very forms that make them most legible as Chaucerian—mobilize the permeability and fungibility of languages in contact such that no one language has an inevitable claim to authority within their multilingual milieu. It can therefore be argued that Gg.4.27 assembles an “un-English” Chaucer, whose forms are not only collected from French, Latin, and Italian models but continue to gather multilingual texts into the archive of English literature. The relationship between Gg.4.27 and its trilingual poems thus presents a limit case for the analogy between macaronic poem and multilingual codex more broadly, expanding our understanding of which literary objects count as witnesses to multilingualism and what stories they might tell.