The Poet and the Antiquaries by Cook Megan L.;

Author:Cook, Megan L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Chaucer’s Scholarly Readers in Seventeenth-Century England

The revised Speght edition of Chaucer’s Works published in 1602 marked the beginning of an eighty-five-year hiatus in Chaucerian printing, the longest gap in the poet’s history. It did not, however, signal an equivalent pause in antiquarian engagement with Chaucer’s works. This final chapter considers a trio of seventeenth-century scholarly readers of Chaucer. Each reworked his book to suit his own particular interest and needs, relying in part on the paratextual apparatus of Speght’s 1598 and 1602 editions. These readers—the lawyer and manuscript collector Joseph Holland (d. 1605), the antiquarian, astrologer, and collector Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), and the Dutch philologist Franciscus Junius the Younger (1591–1677)—each worked, to a greater or lesser extent, within the antiquarian traditions responsible for transmitting Chaucer’s text in the sixteenth century. Although no edition of the collected Works was published between 1602 and 1687, when a booksellers’ reprint of Speght’s edition appeared, the commentary left by Holland, Ashmole, and Junius shows how the considerations that informed responses to Chaucer in the sixteenth century continued to guide antiquarian engagement with the poet well into the seventeenth.1

More than just readers, each annotator left evidence of a distinctive material engagement with the Chaucerian text. Holland used Speght’s Works to repair and expand an important fifteenth-century manuscript. Ashmole added the apocryphal Tale of Gamelyn to the Canterbury Tales and recorded both classical allusions and astrological observations in his copy of the 1532 edition of the Works. Junius, the most accomplished scholar of the trio, applied his formidable philological and lexicographical skills to the production of a substantial glossary of Chaucerian language.

Just as their approaches differed, so too did the materials they used. Holland worked with a medieval manuscript, the Chaucerian miscellany that is now Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27. Ashmole owned a copy of the 1532 Thynne edition, but added to it using the 1598 Speght edition and at least two additional manuscripts. Junius, living in Leiden during the final years of his life, read his copy of the 1598 Speght Works alongside a 1553 printed edition of the Eneados, Gavin Douglas’s early sixteenth-century Scots translation of the Aeneid. In addition, the similarities between Ashmole’s and Junius’s notes suggest that—despite working three decades apart and on opposite sides of the North Sea—the two may have made use of a common set of notes on Chaucer that contained material not found in Speght’s commentary. Working with individual copies rather than preparing material for a larger public, these readers produced personalized books that met their specific needs.

Like previous Chaucerians, the readers I consider here were committed to commemorating Chaucer and improving his text. In the address to the reader in his 1598 edition, Thomas Speght asserts that his purpose is to make Chaucer more accessible to a present-day audience of gentlemen and friends. He writes that, “some few years past, I was requested by certaine Gentlemen my neere friends, who loved Chaucer, as he well deserveth; to take a little pains in reviving the memorie of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.