Chaucer and His Readers : : Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England / / Seth Lerer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Lerer, Seth,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©1993
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) :; 8 halftones

Challenging the view that the fifteenth century was the "Drab Age" of English literary history, Seth Lerer seeks to recover the late-medieval literary system that defined the canon of Chaucer's work and the canonical approaches to its understanding. Lerer shows how the poets, scribes, and printers of the period constructed Chaucer as the "poet laureate" and "father" of English verse. Chaucer appears throughout the fifteenth century as an adviser to kings and master of technique, and Lerer reveals the patterns of subjection, childishness, and inability that characterize the stance of Chaucer's imitators and his readers. In figures from the Canterbury Tales such as the abused Clerk, the boyish Squire, and the infantilized narrator of the "Tale of Sir Thopas," in the excuse-ridden narrator of Troilus and Criseyde, and in Chaucer's cursed Adam Scriveyn, the poet's inheritors found their oppressed personae. Through close readings of poetry from Lydgate to Skelton, detailed analysis of manuscript anthologies and early printed books, and inquiries into the political environments and the social contexts of bookmaking, Lerer charts the construction of a Chaucer unassailable in rhetorical prowess and political sanction, a Chaucer aureate and laureate.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- A NOTE ON EDITIONS -- LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS -- INTRODUCTION The Subject of Chaucerian Reception -- CHAPTER ONE Writing Like the Clerk: Laureate Poets and the Aureate World -- CHAPTER TWO Reading Like the Squire: Chaucer, Lydgate, Clanvowe, and the Fifteenth-Century Anthology -- CHAPTER THREE Reading Like a Child: Advisory Aesthetics and Scribal Revision in the Canterbury Tal -- CHAPTER FOUR The Complaints of Adam Scriveyn: John Shirley and the Canonicity of Chaucer's Short Poems -- CHAPTER FIVE At Chaucer's Tomb: Laureation and Paternity in Caxton's Criticism -- CHAPTER six Impressions of Identity: Print, Poetry, and Fame in Hawes and Skelton -- ENVOY "All pis ys said vnder correctyon" -- APPENDIX -- NOTES -- WORKS CITED -- INDEX