Chaucer's Early Modern Readers
Reception in Print and Manuscript

This is the first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period.

Devani Singh (Author)

9781009231114, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 June 2023

288 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.56 kg

'[The book's] novelty emerges from the painstaking attention that Singh has devoted to an astonishing range of often little-known primary sources. Weaving together a mass of often scattered manuscript evidence, Singh argues that print enabled and inspired the continued use, repair, and manipulation of fifteenth-century Chaucer manuscripts rather than caused their obsolescence.… Singh's richly detailed book is at its most original when it analyzes the transmission of text, images, and ideas across media. It makes valuable contributions both to Chaucer studies and to book historical scholarship on the relationship between manuscript and print.' John Colley, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

The first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, this book focuses chiefly on fifteenth-century manuscripts and discusses how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed in an age of the poet's prominence in print. Each chapter argues that patterns in the material interventions made by readers in their manuscripts – correcting, completing, supplementing, and authorising – reflect conventions which circulated in print, and convey prevailing preoccupations about Chaucer in the period: the antiquity and accuracy of his words, the completeness of individual texts and of the canon, and the figure of the author himself. This unexpected and compelling evidence of the interactions between fifteenth-century manuscripts and their early modern analogues asserts print's role in sustaining manuscript culture and thus offers fresh scholarly perspectives to medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the book. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

1. Glossing, correcting, and emending
2. Repairing and completing
3. Supplementing
4. Authorising.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]