This volume is a study of how the poetry of Chaucer continued to give pleasure in the eighteenth century despite the immense linguistic, literary, and cultural shifts that had occurred in the intervening centuries. It explores translations and imitations of Chaucer's work by Dryden, Pope, and other poets (including Samuel Cobb, John Dart, Christopher Smart, Jane Brereton, William Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt) from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, as well as investigating the beginnings of modern Chaucer editing and biography. It pays particular attention to critical responses to Chaucer by Dryden and the brothers Warton, and includes a chapter on the oblique presence of Chaucer in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. It explores the ways in which Chaucer's poetry (including several works now known not to be by him) was described, refashioned, reimagined, and understood several centuries after its initial appearance. It also documents the way that views of Chaucer's own character were inferred from his work. The book combines detailed discussion of particular critical and poetic texts, many of them unfamiliar to modern readers, with larger suggestions about the ways in which poetry of the past is received in the future.

"More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales." -- Publisher's description.

Provides a rich and varied reference resource, illuminating the different contexts for Chaucer and his work.

Joseph A. Dane examines the history of the books we now know as "Chaucer’s"—a history that includes printers and publishers, editors, antiquarians, librarians, and book collectors. The Chaucer at issue here is not a medieval poet, securely bound within his fourteenth-century context, but rather the product of the often chaotic history of the physical books that have been produced and marketed in his name. This history involves a series of myths about Chaucer—a reformist Chaucer, a realist Chaucer, a political and critical Chaucer who seems oddly like us. It also involves more self-reflective critical myths—the conveniently coherent editorial tradition that leads progressively to modern editions of Chaucer. Dane argues that the material background of these myths remains irreducibly and often amusingly recalcitrant. The great Chaucer monuments—his editions, his book, and even his tomb—defy our efforts to stabilize them with our critical descriptions and transcriptions. Part I concentrates on the production and reception of the Chaucerian book from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, a period dominated by the folio "Complete Works" and a period that culminates in what Chaucerians have consistently (if uncritically) defined as the worst Chaucer edition of 1721. Part II considers the increasing ambivalence of modern editors and critics in relation to the book of Chaucer, and the various attempts of modern scholars to provide alternative sources of authority.

This collection of 32 modernised versions of The Canterbury Tales which appeared in the 18th century offers basic material for studying the history of attitudes to Chaucer, and Chaucer scholarship, duringthe period. Reception data so precise and extensive is available only for Chaucer among English authors. At least seventeen known and anonymous writers produced thirty-two modernised Canterbury tales during the century, plus tale links and adaptations of each other's work. The present collection contains only modernisations that have not seen print since 1796, thus excluding those by Pope and Dryden. Although most works in this collection may be examined further in several British and American libraries, others cannot. Apparently only one copy has survived of an anonymous Miller's Tale (1791) with a thoughtful preface justifying the tale's overt sexuality published just as William Lipscomb was completing his 1795 edition that, in its preface, justifies exclusion from the pilgrimage of the notorious tales of Miller and Reeve. Such contrasting attitudes illustrate the dangers of generalisation about the usual reception or interpretation of Chaucer during this or any other socio-historic period; instead, the collection provides an untapped reservoir of material with which to investigate anew the rich complexity of his poetry and its enduring appeal. BETSY BOWDEN is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

The relationship between medievalism and reception explored via a rich variety of case studies. At the intersection of the twin fields of medievalism and reception studies is the timely and fascinating question of how a contested past is deployed in the context of a conflicted and contradictory present. Despite their shared roots and a fundamental orientation towards the entanglement of past and present, the term "reception" is rarely taken up in medievalist scholarship, and they have developed along parallel but divergent lines, evolving their own emphases, problematics, sensibilities, vocabularies, and critical tools. This book is the first to reunite these two fields. Its introduction and first chapter clearly set out their tangled intellectual and disciplinary histories. The ten essays that follow reflect upon the relationship between medievalism and reception in theory and in practice, through thematically, temporally, and geographically expansive case studies, engaging with theories of translation, postcolonialism, fan studies, persona studies, and Indigenous studies. Individual topics examined include the cultural impact of Robin Hood; the Tulsa rase massacre; the crusades in the nineteenth century; later representations of Chaucer's works; Victorian representations of Anne Boleyn; and media such as Star Wars and Game of Thrones. As a whole, this collection models and demonstrates the value of a new and self-aware approach to medievalism, enriched by a conscious and critical redeployment of reception theories and methodologies.

Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–6) occupied an important place in eighteenth-century culture. Spenser influenced almost every major writer of the century, from Alexander Pope to William Wordsworth. What was it like to read Spenser in the eighteenth century? Who made Spenserian books, and how did their owners use and interpret them? The first comprehensive study of all of the eighteenth-century editions of Edmund Spenser addresses these questions through bibliographical analysis, and through examination of the history of the book and of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Within these contexts, Hazel Wilkinson provides new information about the production, contents, texts, and reception of the eighteenth-century editions of Spenser, to illuminate how his cultural presence became so far-reaching. With each chapter structured around a major edition of Spenser's work, this volume provides a timely addition to arguments about the nature of literary history and the growing cult of great writers of the past.