It has long been recognized that Chaucer came to occupy his peculiar place in English literature only as a result of deliberate and posthumous elevation. When we strip back the various layers of myth that have accumulated around him, it is clear how much work they do, turning a minor official on the fringes of the Ricardian court, whose fortunes waxed and waned with the king, writing in his free time for a limited network of associates, into a poet not merely of national importance but “father” of an entire tradition. Indeed, unpeeling the various layers of this myth has become something of a cottage industry in recent Chaucer criticism. With the persuasively written and argued The Poet and the Antiquaries, Megan Cook makes a thoughtful intervention into this busy field. She focuses on an important formative period for Chaucer, examining the ways in which early modern antiquarians shaped the man and his work. This small but influential circle of readers and collectors was unified by its common set of designs: situated between the scholarly and courtly worlds, it studied the medieval past not only as an object of knowledge, but to advance a self-conscious cultural program, creating a new sense of Englishness attuned to the political structures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Cook demonstrates throughout her six main chapters, Chaucer proved a centerpiece of its efforts from the very first.
The first chapter addresses the impact of the group head-on. It considers the six Tudor imprints of Chaucer's collected works, from William Thynne's Workes Newly Printed (1532) to Thomas Speght's Works of our Ancient and Learned Poet (1602). This is of course not new ground: the sixteenth-century editions are an obvious point of reference for judging Chaucer's early modern reception, and they have been analyzed by Alice Miskimin and Tim Machan, among others. Nonetheless, the specificity of Cook's focus allows her to draw new insights from the material. As her discussion shows, these volumes are self-consciously designed to install Chaucer at the heart of an emerging sense of national identity. Their paratexts often emphasize his persistence into the present, such as the genealogy that appears on Thynne's frontispiece. They are also more interested in how Chaucer wrote than in what he wrote, setting him up as a model by which English itself might be safeguarded against continental loanwords. Even the formatting of these early editions turns out to be a significant choice: the fact that Chaucer was the first English poet to be printed in folio (a century before Shakespeare) turns out to be highly loaded, placing his work on the same level as the legal texts that were routinely bound in this way. Aside from Cook's eye for detail, this chapter also demonstrates her fair-mindedness; while the willingness of these early editors to accept spurious works might strike us as naively uncritical, or cynically exploitative, she points out that it did preserve several Middle English texts that are otherwise unrecorded, such as Thomas Usk's Testament of Love and the Lollard Plowman's Tale.
After this general survey, remaining chapters examine individual figures and texts. First is John Leland, the itinerant scholar commissioned to undertake a search of monastic libraries in the 1530s. Particularly important is his De Viris Illustribus (c.1535–36), which contains the earliest biography of Chaucer; although filled with confusion and inaccuracy, its view of the writer was remarkably tenacious, informing the later English lives by Speght and even William Godwin. As Cook observes, it is in Leland's work that many key ideas about Chaucer begin to coalesce: his very inclusion in this catalogue of Latin writers marks him out as exceptional, one of the few writers to achieve authority in the vernacular, and his supposed connections to Oxford and the Inns of Court align him with the ruling cultural institutions of Henrician England. Leland is followed by a chapter on John Fox, and the role of the 1570 Actes and Monuments in shoring up the image of Protestant Chaucer. While Fox was not the first to deem Chaucer a card-carrying Wycliffite, he certainly cemented the idea, and in so doing gave extra legitimacy to the antipapal texts circulating under his name. For the next two sections, Cook turns again to the treatment of Chaucer in early editions. In Speght's 1598 Works, she finds surprising parallels between the editorial apparatus and the glosses E. K. provided for Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar; these similarities, she argues, direct readers to view Chaucer much as Spenser did, as a kind of English Virgil. Next, she turns to Francis Thynne. As a herald, founding member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, and son of the printer William Thynne, Thynne is the archetypal antiquarian, poised between the political and academic worlds. Cook offers a close reading of his Animadversions, a lengthy response to Speght that, despite its pedantry and inaccuracy, shows Chaucer becoming the subject of scholarly debate, fixing a framework around him that in large part still remains. Finally, Cook concludes with the seventeenth-century collectors Joseph Holland, Elias Ashmole, and Franciscus Junius the Younger, a group whose activities show Chaucer edging away from Leland's “our Chaucer” into the hands of scholarly specialists.
As the foregoing should make clear, this is a suggestive and sensitive book. It is also intensely readable in a way that does not compromise its rigor, as each chapter is written with a rare level of intellectual and stylistic fluency. There are, perhaps inevitably given its tight focus, occasional issues with the larger generalizations. Cook's claim in the conclusion, for example, that the House of Fame attracted little notice in the sixteenth century might surprise readers of William Baldwin's weird, learned fantasy Beware the Cat. But such slips are few and far between, and the handful that do occur only serve to corroborate Cook's central point that “Chaucer” is largely a product of specific audiences and their needs. As she demonstrates ably throughout this volume, the lingering idea of “Chaucerian exceptionalism” (204), and the “untimeliness or temporal slipperiness” with which he is often credited (114), are conceptions that have their own histories, being leftover traces of his Tudor and Stuart readerships.
