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

Megan Cook’s The Poet and the Antiquaries fills a gap among other scholarship on Chaucer’s postmedieval readers and printers. While scholars such as Alexandra Gillespie, Stephanie Trigg, Seth Lerer, and Paul Ruggiers have studied various aspects of Chaucer’s reception in the transition period from manuscript to print, Cook’s focus is on the ways the antiquarian interests of Chaucer’s 16th- and early 17th-century readers and transmitters influenced readings and presentations of Chaucer’s works. She argues that Chaucer was important to these individuals not primarily because of his literary qualities but because of his antiquity and nationality. In roughly chronological order, Cook traces specific antiquarians, printers, and early scholars who valued, studied, and promoted Chaucer for social, cultural, and religious reasons.

In her introduction, Cook lays out the main argument of the book: that antiquarians were central to how “broad narratives” about the English past and Englishness were constructed and spread (p. 2). Chaucer was key to their project of tying the English language, literature, and history to ideologies of identity, Protestantism, and nationalism. In doing so, they shaped the ways a much broader readership received and perceived Chaucer. Cook defines “antiquarian” broadly–they are not mere coin-collectors!–as “chroniclers, religious polemicists, historians, and specialists in genealogy and heraldry” (p. 5). These antiquarian interests are notable for the relative unimportance of anything of literary or poetic merit; instead, the individuals she studies celebrate Chaucer for a wide variety of his perceived roles, from alchemist to religious reformer. Chaucer’s antiquity becomes a marker for the antiquity of not only the English language but English poetry, religion, nation, and culture.

Chapter one focuses on the early print editions of Chaucer’s Works, specifically the folio versions. The usual suspects, William Thynne, John Stow, and Thomas Speght, are explored in detail. Cook argues that these folio editions were “a bibliographic departure” (p. 18) from previous prints by the likes of Caxton and de Worde, and that in both content and form they emphasized a persistent connection between contemporary Early Modern nationalistic concepts and Chaucer’s status as a “privileged innovator” of the English language (p. 18). All of these folios make implicit or explicit claims to Chaucer’s antiquity, likening him to classical Greek and Latin authors and thus claiming an equal status and heritage for the English language. Chaucer’s historicity, however—as shown, for example, in the genealogical family tree engraving by John Speed, which Cook reproduces on p. 35—makes equal claims for the worth of the English heritage and nation.

Chapter two turns to the early modern biographers of Geoffrey Chaucer, focusing on John Leland and Thomas Speght. These biographers more explicitly positioned Chaucer as a “national poet whose cultural impact extended beyond the realm of literature and aesthetics into a wider historiographic and nationalistic context” (p. 45). As might be expected of biography, the focus shifts from the content of Chaucer’s works to the author’s life and history. Cook also explores a concomitant shift from the fifteenth-century valorization of a late medieval English triumvirate of writers–Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate–to a preeminence of Chaucer that lasts until today. According to these biographers, Gower becomes a sort of “John the Baptist” figure, paving the way for the more important figure of Chaucer.

The third chapter again expands on and reexplores work done by other scholars, in looking at Chaucer’s transformation into a proto-Protestant writer. Beginning with John Foxe’s revised Actes and Monuments, Cook examines the way that overtly Wycliffite and Lollard texts such as Jack Upland and The Plowman’s Tale became an accepted part of the Chaucer canon. She argues for a circular relationship between the Chaucer canon and Chaucer biography...