The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635. Megan L. Cook. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. x + 278 pp. $59.95. - Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras . Nancy Bradley Warren. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xiv + 214 pp. $45

• Published in: Renaissance quarterly Vol. 74; no. 1; pp. 349 - 351
• Main Author: Parry, Joseph
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.04.2021
• Subjects: 16th century; Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340?-1400); Dutch language; English literature; Literary history; Nuns; Politeness; Religion; Renaissance period; Spenser, Edmund (1552?-1599); Spirituality
• DOI: 10.1017/rqx.2020.396
• ISSN: 0034-4338

The final three chapters take us to Edmund Spenser, both his manifestly Chaucer-inflected antique language and, more importantly, the way that E.K. as both editorial voice and textual apparatus influences Speght's own editorial furnishings; Francis Thynne, William's son, whose Animadversions written to Speght show how he “regarded Chaucer's writings as a subject of serious, historical inquiry” (130); and, finally, the continuation of scholarly work on Chaucer in the seventeenth century, courtesy of Joseph Holland (d. 1605) in repairing and extending Cambridge University Library MS .4.27; Elias Ashmole's annotations on his copy of Thynne's 1532 Works; and the “extensive glossary of Chaucerian language” produced by the Dutch philologist Franciscus Junius (186). [...]her story of a culture simultaneously connecting itself to and distancing itself from its past in order to authorize its own correctness and superiority gave me pause, as that very story is reified to a certain extent in the occasional passages in which she notes how her antiquaries are beginning to evolve into, well, us: scholars whose historiographic, textual, linguistic, and intellectual sophistication and methodology enables us to evaluate, as well as explicate, the practice of our forbearers in light of our own. Perhaps, and the Upland attribution is unforgiveable, but I just wonder what a similar book two centuries from now might say of us. Besides choosing the less traveled path through early modern Chaucer's Catholic reception history, Warren's text follows a narrower trajectory than Cook does, but she also travels further afield in time and space: we finish in early eighteenth-century Puritan New England.