The poet and the antiquaries: Renaissance readers and Chaucerian scholarship

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the remarkable persistence of Chaucer's fame in early modern England owed as much to the historic, linguistic, and nationalistic narratives in which his life and work could be situated as to the poetic regard in which his writing was held. Though diverse in focus and less widely-studied than literary tributes and adaptations, these narratives constitute their own tradition of response to Chaucer in Tudor England, one which draws heavily on the interpretive practices associated with antiquarian scholarship. This commentary shapes the terms in which English nationhood finds its voice, making not just Chaucer, but also commentary upon him, absolutely central to Renaissance ways of knowing the medieval. ^ Chaucer's writing occupied a unique position in early modern England: while increasingly identified as historically distant, it was also celebrated as fundamentally and foundationally English, proof of the antiquity and excellence of a native literary tradition. Taking Thomas Speght's 1598/1602 edition of Chaucer's collected Works as a starting point, this dissertation examines how commentators addressed this dualism and its wider implications. My first chapter focuses on Chaucerian lexicons and glossaries, exploring how these reify a sense of linguistic difference between the past and the present and arguing, in particular, that the hard word list added in Speght's Works takes some of its strongest cues concerning the treatment of archaic language from the E.K. glosses in Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar. The second chapter turns to Speght's Life of Chaucer, comparing its investments in Chaucer's genealogy (literal as well as literary) with that of one of its most significant antecedents, John Leland's Latin account of Chaucer's life, written in the 1540s. The third chapter takes up the work of antiquarian Francis Thynne, situating his commentary on Chaucer within the larger context of his writings on heraldry, alchemy, and English history. My fourth and final chapter considers how the post-Reformation view that Chaucer was a proto-Protestant shaped his canon in sixteenth-century editions, encouraging the inclusion of spurious and anti-clerical works and occluding or delaying the inclusion of genuine works that display an affinity with more traditional religion. ^