The Progeny of Print: Manuscript Adaptations of John Speed’s Chaucer Engraving

John Speed’s engraved portrait of Chaucer, made for the 1598 edition of the Workes, relies rhetorically upon a manuscript tradition of Chaucerian portraiture to establish its authenticity. During the seventeenth century and onward, Speed’s printed plate exhibited a high degree of mobility, being removed from the editions and reappearing in other Chaucerian books and in later manuscript replicas. This essay tracks the movement of the portrait across the permeable boundaries of print and manuscript, arguing for the role of print culture in its dissemination and as the cause of its eventual reappropriation into hand-drawn and painted forms.