Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 638

ISBN-13: 1605205176

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It is impossible to overstate the importance of English poet GEOFFREY CHAUCER (c. 1343 c. 1400) to the development of literature in the English language. His writings which were popular during his own lifetime with the nobility as well as with the increasingly literate merchant class marked the first celebration of the English vernacular as a tongue worthy of literary endeavor, most notably in his unfinished narrative poem The Canterbury Tales, the format and structure of which continues to be imitated by writers today. But the impact of Chaucer s work was felt even into the 16th and 17th centuries, when the first major collections of his writings set a high standard for how authors should be presented to the reading public. This widely esteemed seven-volume set first published in the 1890s by British academic WALTER WILLIAM SKEAT (1835 1912), Erlington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University is based solely on Chaucer s original manuscripts and the earliest available published works (with any significant variations or deviations between versions highlighted in the extensive notes), and comes complete with Skeat s informative commentary on many passages. Volume I features a detailed life of Chaucer; a complete list of Chaucer s works; The Romaunt of the Rose, a translation of a popular and controversial French poem of courtly love typically attributed to Chaucer; and minor poems including: The Book of the Duchesse The Compleynt of Mars The Parlement of Foules A Compleint to His Lady Merciles Beaut proverbs of Chaucer and others.

A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts
A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts

Author: M.C. Seymour

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1351962833

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This second volume, which completes the first comprehensive catalogue of Chaucer's manuscripts, describes the 56 extant copies and the fragments of 8 otherwise lost copies of the Canterbury Tales. These manuscripts, last examined together over 50 years ago, are here described after a fresh appraisal and in the light of modern scholarship, and some revisions of date, decoration, dialect, location, provenance, and script are suggested. The Introduction defines some of the major textual problems posed by the manuscripts and presents some thoughts thereon, while suggesting solutions to some incidental cruces. The Indices and Appendices record the citation of lost and unidentified copies of the Canterbury Tales, the names of former owners and associates, and addenda et corrigenda for Volume I. The Catalogue is designed as a reference work for those teachers and students who wish to know what and where the extant material is without the labour of its collection and for those able in the various specialities of manuscript bibliography to advance present knowledge.

The Poet and the Antiquaries
The Poet and the Antiquaries

Author: Megan L. Cook

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-04-12

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0812250826

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Between 1532 and 1602, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer were published in no less than six folio editions. These were, in fact, the largest books of poetry produced in sixteenth-century England, and they significantly shaped the perceptions of Chaucer that would hold sway for centuries to come. But it is the stories behind these editions that are the focus of Megan L. Cook's interest in The Poet and the Antiquaries. She explores how antiquarians—historians, lexicographers, religious polemicists, and other readers with a professional, but not necessarily literary, interest in the English past—played an indispensable role in making Chaucer a figure of lasting literary and cultural importance. After establishing the antiquarian involvement in the publication of the folio editions, Cook offers a series of case studies that discuss Chaucer and his works in relation to specific sixteenth-century discourses about the past. She turns to early accounts of Chaucer's biography to show how important they were in constructing the poet as a figure whose life and works could be known, understood, and valued by later readers. She considers the claims made about Chaucer's religious views, especially the assertions that he was a proto-Protestant, and the effects they had on shaping his canon. Looking at early modern views on Chaucerian language, she illustrates how complicated the relations between past and present forms of English were thought to be. Finally, she demonstrates the ways in which antiquarian readers applied knowledge from other areas of scholarship to their reading of Middle English texts. Linking Chaucer's exceptional standing in the poetic canon with his role as a symbol of linguistic and national identity, The Poet and the Antiquaries demonstrates how and why Chaucer became not only the first English author to become a subject of historical inquiry but also a crucial figure for conceptualizing the medieval in early modern England.