The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 by Megan L. Cook (review)

We—and I use that "we" advisedly, to mean we readers of the reviews section of Studies in the Age of Chaucer—know that Chaucer was an important figure in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Writers of the period tell us so quite plainly. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, he is "Dan Chaucer, Well of English, undefiled." For John Foxe, he is likewise an inspiration, a "right Wiclevian, or else was never any" (Cook, 123, 73). Chaucer's works were a model for Wyatt and Surrey, and a source for Shakespeare and Milton. They were proof that, even in a distant and darker age, an English writer could foot it with the greats—"kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace" (TC, V.1791–92). Filled with the same yearning—hoping he might "their high steps adore"—Spenser could defend the vernacular of his Virgilian Shepheardes Calender by pointing to Chaucer himself. Caroline Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Allusions is still a useful survey of this and similar literary evidence of Chaucer's early modern reputation. E. P. Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliography is a thorough record of manuscripts and printed books, which, circulating widely in the 200 or so years after his death, earned Chaucer that reputation. In recent decades, many critics—Kathleen Forni, Helen Cooper, Thomas A. Prendergast, Seth Lerer, Joseph Dane, Stephanie Trigg, and James Simpson among them—have framed our assessment of the mark that Chaucer made on early modern England in many different ways—from study of bibliographical ghosts and a canon of apocrypha to myth of congeniality and the revolution—to "scramble" to claim Chaucer's authority for a host of different causes (Cook citing Cooper, 200).

Megan Cook's study is a welcome new landmark in this rather crowded landscape. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 picks up the story of the Chaucerian inheritance at the moment that that story becomes, as Cook's title suggests, an antiquarian and scholarly one. Her book describes the movement of the early moderns' Chaucer out of the hands of scribes such as John Shirley and early printers such as Caxton, De Worde, and Pynson (who was Richard, not Robert [18]) as he became not just a literary model, but a subject of antiquarian and scholarly interest. In the period 1532–1635 Chaucer's texts increasingly required explanation—full as they were of "hard words" (see Cook, Chapter 4)—but they also opened up all kinds of historical topics to contemporary view. These topics included the corruption of the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical establishment and the abuses rife among the regular orders (Chapter 3), and also the life, noble connections, family, and tomb of the poet himself (chapters 2 and 4). Chaucer became, in Cook's central argument, "an ideal figure with which to think through early modern England's relationship to its medieval past" (20), a past worth celebrating, but from a useful distance. The result of this historical negotiation was, argues Cook, a "'secret history' of Chaucerian reading," and it here forms the basis for Cook's new account of the influence of England's old poet.

Two words from Cook's title are particularly important to this account. One is the title "antiquary," which was first applied by Henry VIII to his subject John Leland, who was famous for laboriously journeying around England, taking stock of the libraries of religious houses on the eve of the Reformation. One result of these researches was Leland's De viris illustribus, a collection of biographies and bibliographies of England's great men: Chaucer was among them, his life story, as Cook shows, confected by Leland's bookish scraps, hearsay, and hopeful invention. As self-identifying English antiquaries increased...