CHAPTER 2

“Noster Galfridus”

Chaucer’s Early Modern Biographies

In 1532, when William Thynne assembled the first edition of Chaucer’s collected Works, there was no written biography of Chaucer.1 Chaucer’s own writings are reticent about the facts of his life, and what they do say is often mediated through persona and allusion. A few fifteenth-century references mention Chaucer’s death, traditionally believed to have occurred on October 25, 1400: the scribe and bibliophile John Shirley calls Chaucer’s Truth a “Balade that Chaucier made on his deeth bedde.”² Thomas Gascoigne, in his Dictionarium Theologicum (ca. 1434–1458), appears to draw upon the Retraction to the Canterbury Tales as he describes a penitent Chaucer who dies bemoaning his inability to recall from circulation “those things that I wickedly wrote concerning the evil and truly disgraceful love of men for women.”³ No surviving account from the fifteenth century discusses Chaucer’s family, his education, or his travels abroad.

In the sixteenth century, however, that would change, thanks to the rise of antiquarian scholarship and an increasingly robust body of commentary on Chaucer’s life and works. In antiquarian writings, especially those with an explicit interest in Chaucer’s life, focus shifted from Chaucer’s texts themselves to their cultural and historical significance. In these writings, history, language, and English nationalism became conflated in ways that would shape Chaucer’s transmission and reception for centuries to come.

Antiquarian interest in Chaucer begins where early modern English antiquarianism itself arguably begins, in the writings of John Leland (ca. 1503–1552), the humanist poet and scholar. As a part of a larger work, De Viris Illustribus (On Famous Men), Leland’s Latin writings on Chaucer circulated in manuscript throughout the sixteenth century and beyond and were a continuous and foundational influence on antiquarian scholarship in England.4 They were known to both the Protestant polemicist John Bale and the martyrologist John Foxe, and eventually served as the primary source for the first English-language account of Chaucer’s life, printed in Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works.⁵ Reading Speght’s Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer in light of De Viris Illustribus, as I do in this chapter, underscores how Leland’s account shaped subsequent conversations about Chaucerian biography.⁶ Leland bequeathed to Speght not just details concerning Chaucer’s life, but an understanding of Chaucer as national poet whose cultural impact extended beyond the realm of literature and aesthetics into a wider historiographic and nationalistic context. Because Speght’s Life was written in English, not Latin, and because it circulated in print, not manuscript, it also made Leland’s humanistic view of Chaucer available to a new and wider audience.

Before this, though, Leland’s biography and the texts it influenced restructured Chaucer’s reputation in early modern England, shifting attention away from the content of his works and toward the author himself. While earlier poetic tributes focused primarily on the Chaucerian text and its “rhetoric” or “eloquence,” Leland and Speght treated Chaucer as a historical individual whose writings could be better assessed in terms of their influence on a shared national vernacular and identity than on their ability to move individual readers or innovate in form or style. Even when praising Chaucer’s poems, Leland directs readers’ attention to Chaucer the author who stands outside his own works. As he does so, he reconstructs Chaucer as an author according to the discursive norms of early modern England, contributing to the ongoing evolution of what Alexandra Gillespie, following Michel Foucault, calls the “Chaucer ‘effect,’” defined as “the author who is a ‘function’ of the creation, circulation, and interpretation of his texts, paratext, and others’ texts about his work.”⁷

Leland’s biography of Chaucer guided the development of this “Chaucer effect” in several overlapping and reinforcing ways. First, it created historical narrative that corroborated one of the key motifs of Chaucerian praise: the idea that the poet played a unique role in the improvement of the English language and through that, made a lasting contribution to English identity. In Leland’s text and those that follow from it, Chaucer becomes a synecdoche for national exceptionalism, someone who simultaneously stands for England’s worldliness and its uniqueness. Second, Leland’s use of Latin in his account inaugurated a split between praise of Chaucer and imitation of Chaucer, two strands of reception that had previously been closely linked. When, some sixty years later, Speght wrote his English version of Chaucer’s life, the language of Chaucerian commentary returned to the vernacular, but the sense of critical distance introduced by Leland remained. In Speght and in Leland both, praise of Chaucer’s works, which in poetic tributes can take on an intimate, deeply affective tone, now reads more like an objective recitation of facts. Third, these biographical writings situate Chaucer’s life story in relation to the present, emphasizing the continuities between his historical moment and that of his latter-day readers. Leland and his followers achieved this effect not only by celebrating Chaucer as a poet who both enabled and offered a glimpse of what English poetry would become, but by linking him to institutions and locations, such as the University of Oxford, that signified learning, power, and intellectual significance in the early modern present. These factors combined to reinforce an understanding of Chaucer as not only a source of readerly pleasure but a figure of national importance and a subject fit for scholarly inquiry.

Leland’s remarks on Chaucer are best understood not in isolation (as they have been treated by some previous scholars) but as part of the larger scholarly enterprise from which they come. Accordingly, this chapter begins with a discussion of the overall scope, plan, and purpose of De Viris Illustribus. In the central sections, I take up Leland’s writings on Chaucer directly, including the three Latin poems in praise of Chaucer that appear in De Viris Illustribus, and discuss how they present Chaucer and his writings. I also consider his comments on Gower, the only other vernacular poet discussed in the collection. In the final section, I turn to Speght’s English Life of Chaucer and explore the ways it elaborates on Leland’s foundation. Whereas Leland works to situate Chaucer in the context of institutions familiar to his own readers, Speght makes copious use of genealogical material, articulating both continuity and change between the medieval poet and his latter-day readers and marking yet another phase in Chaucer’s continually changing postmedieval career.

On Famous Men

John Leland’s life and biography reflect the cultural complexity of his historical moment. Like many other Tudor readers with an interest in Chaucer, his relationship to the English past was a complicated one. Born in London and orphaned as a child, Leland studied at St. Paul’s School under William Lily before taking his AB from Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1522 and pursuing further studies in Oxford and Paris, possibly under the patronage of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.8 In Paris, he wrote Latin poetry and developed an interest in ancient texts and manuscripts that would remain with him throughout his career. Sometime before 1529, Leland returned to England, where he continued work as both a scholar and a poet, now cultivating the ascendant Thomas Cromwell as a patron.

Starting in the 1530s, Leland made plans for a number of ambitious projects relating to English history, and in 1533 he apparently received a royal commission “to peruse and dylygentlye to searche all the lybraryes of Monasteryes and collegies of thys your noble realme.”⁹ Leland, then in his early thirties, spent the next three to four years traveling throughout England, researching and cataloging the holdings of monastic houses, in some cases just months before their official suppression.¹⁰ The commission was, of course, given by Henry VIII, who was himself the major animating force behind the dissolution of the monasteries. Thus, as James Simpson writes, “Leland’s raison d’être for constructing a British past is in part, then, the fact that the past is undergoing destruction by Leland’s own patron. Leland is himself, accordingly, an agent of destruction, and the very object of his attention as antiquary—the past seen as something distant and sharply different—is itself a product of Leland’s moment.”¹¹ The complex set of motivations behind the visitations notwithstanding, Leland’s travels gave him an unparalleled knowledge of the breadth and depth of England’s medieval textual and intellectual heritage.

Upon his return, Leland used the materials collected during these journeys to begin working on the massive compendium of the life and works of learned Britons now known as De Viris Illustribus.¹² Like Leland’s other writings, De Viris Illustribus expresses a deep appreciation for the English past alongside loyalty to a Tudor regime that increasingly defined itself against that past.¹³ While Leland’s antiquarian writings bemoan the destruction of the monastic libraries during the dissolution, his position within the court of Henry VIII meant his critiques were enabled by the patronage of those largely responsible for it.¹⁴ The result is, in Simpson’s phrase, “a deeply divided consciousness.”¹⁵

Leland explains the origins and scope of the De Viribus project in a kind of prospectus, written in the mid-1540s and published some years later (with interpolations by John Bale) as The laboryouse Journey and serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees (1549; STC 15445). Addressed to Henry VIII, De Viris Illustribus’s prospective patron, Leland explains how the project would bring together records of a “great a numbre of excellent godlye wyttes and wryters, learned wyth the best, as the tymes served, hath bene in thys your regyon,” who without such a monument were “lyke to have bene perpetually obscured, or to have bene lyghtelye remembred, as uncerteyne shaddowes.”16 The ensuing book would cover the accomplishments of English writers from pre-Roman times to the present, with the final volume (of four) dedicated solely to the reign of Henry VIII.¹⁷ Leland completed substantial work on De Viris Illustribus by the early 1540s, but around the time of Henry’s death in 1547 he experienced what Bale calls a “soden fall”—apparently some kind of mental breakdown—that brought an end to his scholarly activities. He died in 1552, having been declared insane two years prior.¹⁸

In its final yet incomplete form, De Viris Illustribus covers nearly a millennium of British intellectual history and presents information on the work of nearly six hundred individuals, from Roman antiquity to the early sixteenth century.¹⁹ That said, De Viris Illustribus includes some entries for figures who not only did not write the works Leland attributes to them, but did not exist at all. As James Carley notes, “Leland does tend to be credulous in his enthusiasm for the British past, most notoriously in his accounts of the ancient prophets Aquila (the eagle in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae who prophesied when Shaftesbury was built) and Perdix (a prophetic partridge at the time of King Rivallo) and in the account of Pope Joan.”²⁰

A typical entry in De Viris Illustribus describes its subject’s life and education, offers a list of his works—sometimes supplemented by comments about Leland’s research in monastic libraries—and concludes with a few words about the subject’s death, burial place, and legacy. There is room for significant variation and digression within this format, however: Leland’s entry on the fourteenth-century chronicler Ranulf Higden (no. 354), for example, devotes more than half its space to criticisms of Leland’s contemporary and nemesis, the Anglo-Italian antiquarian and historiographer Polydore Vergil.²¹ The entries are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with the Druids and ending with the poet and musician Robert Widow, who died in 1503.²²

While each entry is discrete and Leland does not provide the kind of contextual historical narrative that John Bale does in his later appropriations and expansions of Leland’s work, the various political, religious, and pedagogical links among his subjects form a web of historical connections. Read as a whole, the work constitutes a grand narrative about the transmission of knowledge that stretches back, ultimately, to the Roman occupation of the British Isles and, through that, to the glories of classical civilization. In this way, Leland anticipates the interest in antiquity that marks the work of later antiquaries like William Camden and Sir Robert Cotton, but he also reflects admiration of the Greek and Roman past that characterizes the humanistic beginnings of Renaissance antiquarianism.

As a collection of biobibliographic writings, De Viris Illustribus continues a long-standing and wide-ranging scholarly genre that includes works by Jerome, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The immediate catalyst for Leland’s work was the Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, written by the German polymath, abbot, and early humanist Johannes Trithemius and printed in Basel in 1494.23 Trithemius’s work includes entries for nearly a thousand writers, including numerous English authors. Leland felt that Trithemius had failed to acknowledge the significance of English writers and their accomplishments, and had unjustly set them apart from their rightful place in a distinctively English intellectual tradition.²⁴ By researching and writing De Viris Illustribus, Leland sought to claim these writers, and many more, for England.

In its awareness of the asymmetry between the reputation of continental writers in England and the reputation of English writers abroad, De Viris Illustribus reflects something of the anxiety around English as a cultural and national identity in the sixteenth century.²⁵ Leland’s desire to equip English readers with an intellectual genealogy of their own makes him a historiographical analogue to writers seeking a native alternative to “inkhorn terms” brought over into English from other vernaculars.²⁶ In the dedication to his English version of Jacopo di Porcia’s De Rei Militari (1554), for example, the translator Peter Betham makes the case directly: “I take them beste englyshe men, which folowe Chaucer, and other olde wryters, in whyche studye the nobles and gentle men of England, are worthye to be praysed, whan they endevoure to brynge agayne to his owne clennes oure englysshe tounge, & playnelye to speake wyth our owne termes, as others dyd before us.”²⁷ For Betham and other advocates of nativist diction, Englishness and use of the English language tended to go hand in hand. Leland, by contrast, remained a consummately Latinate thinker. Not only is De Viris Illustribus written in Latin, the majority of its subjects are learned clerics who—while celebrated here for their English origins—also write in Latin.

In this context, the entries on John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer stand out as vernacular exceptions to the Latinate rule. While John Bale’s later Catalogus (which takes Leland as its main source) adds entries for English-language writers like John Lydgate, Walter Hilton, and even the elusive “Robert” Langland, Gower and Chaucer are the only English-language poets included in Leland’s collection.28 Leland’s decision to include Chaucer and Gower in De Viris Illustribus—a work that, as The laboryouse Journey makes clear, is dedicated to the glories of England—is a bold claim for the importance of their poetry, not just in the field of literary endeavors but in intellectual and learned culture more generally. Their very presence in the project places the two poets at the intersection of English poetics and a largely Latinate intellectual tradition and suggests that their vernacular poetry is an important part of the shared national culture in England, worthy of commemoration at the highest levels. Writing about Middle English poetry in Latin is, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, an act of consecration that elevates Gower and Chaucer to an elite position within their field of cultural production. It is also a means of spreading their fame as English writers to an audience that extends, at least in theory, far beyond England toward a wider community defined by latinitas.²⁹

While a tradition of vernacular tribute to Chaucer and his contemporaries continued to flourish among early Tudor poets, Latin praise of English poets was something relatively novel in the 1530s. By the time that Leland set to work on De Viris Illustribus, poets like John Skelton and Stephen Hawes had begun to blend an appreciation for Chaucer’s achievements rooted in fifteenth-century Chaucerianism with a new sense of the possibilities of English verse. Gower, too, remained a familiar name among the literary cognoscenti, his reputation bolstered, perhaps, by his consummate Ovidianism and Thomas Berthelette’s 1532 edition of his Confessio Amantis (Leland will misidentify Berthelette as the printer of the 1532 Chaucer).³⁰ Importantly, however, these tributes almost exclusively take the form of English verse or, in the case of John Shirley’s headnotes and the comments of marginal annotators, prose that accompanies Middle English writing attributed to one of the poets.³¹ Leland’s Latin commentary not only put the work of Chaucer and Gower on the same level as that of Latinate scholars, but in its linguistic shift away from the vernacular it split apart two strains of response—imitation and appreciation—that had previously been closely entwined.

Leland’s turn to Latin set a precedent for later scholarly discussions of Chaucer’s English eloquence, which—in English or in Latin—were undertaken separately from attempts on the part of the commentator to express eloquence in English himself. In the long run, this split creates a place for vernacular work on Chaucer written in forms of English very different from Chaucer’s own. In De Viris Illustribus, Leland carries on a long tradition of English writers praising Chaucer, but—writing in Latin—he does not imitate him. His Latin verses and the accompanying prose present themselves as a sufficient memorial to the author, but there is not one line of English in the entirety of De Viris Illustribus. Freed from the near obligation to imitate the master, Leland’s account must tell, rather than show, what it is that makes Chaucer special. When this new kind of description, coupled with an interest in Chaucer’s biography, filters back into the vernacular later in the century, it begins to look something very like literary criticism.

John Gower, “studiosius quam felicius”

As the earliest attempt to provide a comprehensive biography for both Chaucer and Gower, Leland’s accounts lay the groundwork upon which subsequent commentators would build throughout the early modern period. Given Chaucer’s close association with the English language, it is unsurprising to find him singled out for special attention in De Viris Illustribus. Gower, however, may strike some modern readers as a less obvious subject, especially given the absence of other vernacular writers in Leland’s project. Leland does not mention John Lydgate, for example, whose plentiful works he would have almost certainly encountered in the course of his research, nor does he mention William Langland, whose Piers Plowman may in fact be the Petri Aratoris fabula that Leland lists among Chaucer’s writings.

Leland wrote shortly after publication of Thomas Berthelette’s first edition of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which appeared in 1532, the same year as the first edition of Thynne’s Works. Like the Works, the Confessio is a handsome folio volume (albeit not quite as large).32 Like the Works, Berthelette’s Confessio is dedicated to Henry VIII and furnished with a laudatory preface. The preface is in some ways similar to that found in the 1532 Works, which suggests that the figures of Gower and Chaucer could perform similar authorizing cultural work in the 1530s (hence their appearance in Leland), and that, in both cases, their reputations hinged upon their achievements as vernacular authors. Like the preface to the Works, Berthelette begins with a classical anecdote (this time drawn from Plutarch) and flattering praise of the sovereign before offering an account of the difficulties and labor involved in bringing the work to press. This work, however, is worth the trouble since readers of the Confessio will find it “plentifully stuffed and fournysshed with manyfolde eloquent reasons / sharpe and quicke argumentes / and examples of great auctorite / perswadynge unto vertue / not onely taken out of the poetes / oratours / history wryters / and philosophers / but also out of the holy scripture.”33 Berthelette does not credit Gower with the kind of untimely linguistic excellence that Thynne attributes to Chaucer, but he does emphasize that the Confessio contains “olde englysshe wordes and vulgars no wyse man / bycause of theyr antiquite / wyll throwe asyde,” words that offer an alternative to those writers who feel themselves “constrayned to brynge in / in their writynges / newe termes (as some calle them) whiche they borowed out of latyne / frenche / and other langages”³⁴ Berthelette concludes with a ringing endorsement of Gower’s language, especially its utility in the present: “if any man wante / let hym resorte to this worthy olde wryter John Gower / that shall as a lanterne gyve hym lyghte to wryte counnyngly / and to garnysshe his sentencis in our vulgar tonge.” The Latin verses included in the Confessio, and Gower’s other major works in Latin (Vox Clamantis) and French (Mirour de l’Omme) are not discussed.

Given this framework, and the fact that Berthelette, like Leland, was closely associated with the Henrician court, it is less surprising to find Leland acknowledging the work of the poet in De Viris Illustribus and emphasizing his contributions to the English vernacular. Although he acknowledges that Gower wrote in Latin as well as in English, Leland makes a strong claim for Gower’s contributions to the vernacular, asserting that he was “the first to polish our native language” (primum patriae linguae expolitorem) and that, “before his time the English tongue was cultivated and almost completely unformed. Nor was there anybody who could write any work in the vernacular [vernaculo idiomate] fit for a cultured reader…. He wrote a great deal in his mother tongue, both in verse and prose, which is carefully read by scholars even in this our blossoming age.”³⁵

Apart from this singular fact, Leland’s knowledge of Gower’s work appears to be limited. His comments on the poet’s three major works later in the entry have the vague air of a learned person discussing books he has not read, even though he asserts that Gower’s works are “carefully read by scholars even in this our blossoming age.” He writes that, “among his longer works the most important is his Speculum Meditantis, the second his Vox Clamantis, and the third his Confessio Amantis. A fastidious reader may not perhaps consider that it is elegance that determines these titles. Yet there is something mysterious in them and a certain concord, as if one depended on the other.”³⁶ If Leland ever read the French Mirour de l’Omme (Speculum Meditantis) or Latin Vox Clamantis, it is not at all apparent here. In addition to these major works, Leland also mentions Gower’s English poem “In Praise of Peace,” but he misidentifies its dedicatee as Richard II, when in fact the first lines of the poem reveal the addressee to be Richard’s successor Henry IV (this despite the fact that Leland also quotes verbatim a Latin couplet from the end of the poem, another indication of his linguistic preferences).

In general, Leland has little to say about French in England (although he mentions French translations of the Latin works of English writers on several occasions and asserts that Chaucer wrote excellently in French), and he is consistently dismissive of the literary qualities of medieval Latin throughout De Viris Illustribus. Leland’s attitude toward most medieval writing—a mark of his high humanist moment—sets him apart from later antiquaries like William Camden, whose work demonstrates a robust knowledge of Anglo-Latin writing, or even John Foxe, who includes a more detailed account of Gower’s tomb (including its incorporation of three books representing the poet’s major works, in each of the three languages of late medieval England) than that offered by Leland.

In many ways, including his praise of innovation and poetry in the vernacular, Leland’s entry on Gower is a preview of the much longer entry on Chaucer that follows. In the remaining portion of his entry on Gower, he emphasizes the poet’s use of the same classical sources admired by later scholars, his association with the legal profession, and—what is clearly of greatest interest to Leland—his purported mentorship of Chaucer. In De Viris Illustribus, Gower functions as a sort of John the Baptist, crying out in a literary desert to prepare the way for a poetic messiah.

While Berthelette’s preface places Gower on similar footing to his contemporary Chaucer, it is clear from the length, specificity, and enthusiasm of Leland’s entry on Chaucer (the only place in De Viris Illustribus where Leland incorporates his own Latin verses), that Leland feels the eloquent Englishmen of the sixteenth century owe their greater debt to Chaucer. Framed as part of a long tradition of learnedness and scholarship, rather than vernacular poetry, Chaucer’s presence in De Viris Illustribus testifies to the way his particular brand of cultural significance could be transposed from the discourse of vernacular literature to that of English cultural accomplishments writ large.

Leland’s admiration for Chaucer can be thought of as an extension of two closely related strands of fifteenth-century praise for the poet. First, there is a tradition of special appreciation for Chaucer’s language, in which literary admiration frequently bleeds over into a sense of pride grounded in Chaucer’s status as a specifically English author, as in Henry Scogan’s praise of Chaucer as “this noble poete of Brettayne.”37 This gives Chaucer a special place in the English intellectual tradition, broadly construed, that is Leland’s focus in De Viris Illustribus. Second, there is the frequently voiced appreciation for Chaucer’s “eloquence” and “rhetoric.” Christopher Cannon argues that the standard vocabulary for Chaucerian praise privileges terms abstract enough to adapt to the aesthetic needs of the moment, even as literary tastes and the English language itself continue to evolve.³⁸ As Cannon observes, “such early definitional terms matter very much because they actually sketch out a typology into which almost every subsequent definition of Chaucer’s achievement fits,” and this flexibility encourages the repetition of earlier praise, keeping Chaucer’s close association with the English language intact.³⁹ This flexibility also creates a space for Leland—who does not seem to have been particularly fond of vernacular writing—to discover in Chaucer’s English poetry an eloquence that is consistent with his own Latinate taste.

The asymmetry of Leland’s interest in Chaucer and Gower—rooted in a sense that it is Chaucer who makes the transformative contribution to the English language—presages the divergence of the writers’ reputations in the decades to come and shows the impact of Chaucer’s already exceptional status.⁴⁰ In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Chaucer frequently shared the spotlight with both Gower and John Lydgate as part of a triumvirate of Middle English poets. Over the course of the sixteenth century, however, as judged by the relative number of contemporary references and the frequency of printed editions of their works, their reputations began to differ and as Chaucer’s stock rose, that of the other two did not. The reasons for this are varied: the Confessio Amantis may have been superseded by the availability of other Ovidian works better suited to contemporary tastes and more readily available to readers, while Alexandra Gillespie argues that the majority of the works of “Dan John [Lydgate], monk” were an unappealing business prospect for printers in an age of Protestant polemic.⁴¹ Yet, judged on the content of his writings alone, Chaucer should not be immune to similar charges. His work contains religious content (especially if the non-Chaucerian religious poems included in the 1532 Works are taken into account), and his classical themes, from Statius’s Thebiad to Ovid’s Heroides, are later taken up by Tudor writers using style and language more amenable to sixteenth-century readers. But precisely because they are celebrated for their linguistic qualities as well as their poetic acumen, Chaucer’s works are never really consigned to the past on the grounds of form or of content. Looking closely at Leland’s writings on Chaucer reveals a poet uniquely situated at the intersection of literary history and a sweeping, at times propagandistic, account of the formation of Englishness itself.

“Noster Galfridus”

Leland’s entry on Chaucer consists of three principal parts: an account of his life, a list of his works, and four poems in praise of Chaucer. Three of these poems are Leland’s own work, while the third is the epitaph for Chaucer commissioned by William Caxton and written by the Italian poet Stephanus Surigonus. Leland’s writings on Chaucer have a clear influence on the poet’s reception in the sixteenth century and beyond: later scholars accept Leland’s conclusions, often unquestioningly, and the De Viris Illustribus account is the basis for all subsequent biographies of Chaucer until the 1800s. Less apparent—but no less important—are the ways Leland’s use of Latin shaped Chaucer’s trajectory in the years and decades ahead. Like the rest of the work, the entry for Chaucer is written entirely in Latin, save for the title of the Romaunt of the Rose, which Leland renders in French as the Roman de la Rose. This marked an important shift away from earlier English encomiums to the poet, which self-consciously deployed the same poetic vernacular that they charge Chaucer with creating. Leland’s Latin text provides a model for writing about Chaucer without writing like Chaucer.

In his account of Chaucer’s life, Leland presents his readers with a mixture of tradition, extrapolation, and hearsay that adds up to something quite different from the London-born son of a vintner known to modern biographers. In the process, he crafts an image of the poet that might have looked reassuringly familiar to his sixteenth-century readers. This is not because Chaucer’s life story was already widely known, but because Leland’s version of Chaucer’s life sets the poet amid educational, social, and cultural institutions that would have held meaning and resonance for many Latinate English readers. In some ways, this does echo earlier praise of Chaucer. Leland followed in the footsteps of those earlier admirers who, as David Lawton has argued, tended to project onto Chaucer an idealized relation between poet and sovereign.42 Thus, we find Leland asserting that Chaucer “was known to Richard of Bordeaux, king of England, and was dear to him on account of his virtues, so too he was held in high regard for the same reasons by Henry IV and his son, who triumphed over the French.”⁴³ Leland spent most of his career under the patronage of Henry VIII or highly placed figures in his court; the idea of a poet in close proximity to the sovereign would certainly have been meaningful to him and to other literary and scholarly courtiers in his audience.

Leland also writes that Chaucer, whom he calls “a young man of noble birth and the highest promise,” was a student at the University of Oxford and that he emerged from that institution “an acute logician, a sweet-toned orator, a sparkling poet, a weighty philosopher, an ingenious mathematician … as well as a devout theologian.”44 This claim that Chaucer attended the University of Oxford would stand unchallenged until the eighteenth century and was rooted in Chaucer’s references in the Treatise on the Astrolabe to the Oxford-based mathematicians John Somer and Nicholas of Lynn, whom Leland identifies in De Viris Illustribus as Chaucer’s teachers.⁴⁵ For Leland, Chaucer’s alleged time at Oxford provides the needed explanation of how a noncleric came by his Latinate learning. A university education provides a new context for claims like Hoccleve’s that Chaucer was a “Universel fadir in science,” second only to Aristotle in “philosophie,” and bolsters assertions like William Thynne’s that Chaucer’s writing displays “manyfest comprobacion of his excellent lernyng in all kyndes of doctrynes and sciences.”⁴⁶ To have attended Oxford (Leland says only that he studied there, not that he received a degree) signals a familiarity with Latin culture that Chaucer’s English poetry alone cannot demonstrate, even if readers might infer it through his translation of Boethius, his glib use of scholarly sources in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, or his claims to have translated Troilus and Criseyde from his “auctor” “Lollius.”⁴⁷

A claim about Chaucer’s education is a claim about language as well as learning: the litany of scholarly accomplishments that Leland ticks off here strongly implies that Chaucer had the ability to write in Latin, but merely chose not to. Latinity is at the heart of Leland’s understanding of poetic production, even as he celebrates Chaucer’s work as an English poet. Chaucer here is not an untutored, native genius, as some later commentators might suggest. Rather, he is a sophisticated scholar whose command of learned disciplines places him on a par with those other much-admired elevators of vernacular literature, Dante and Petrarch, to whom Leland compares Chaucer later in the entry.

James Simpson has argued that, in the early modern period, historical research into the lives of medieval notables could serve an overtly periodizing purpose by fixing them in a past that is defined in opposition to the present.⁴⁸ As a figure perceived as at once both medieval and modern, Chaucer is an important exception to this tendency. While Leland’s account clearly locates Chaucer in a pre-Reformation, pre-humanist, pre-Tudor past, it also takes pains to emphasize his participation in institutions and traditions of importance to an early modern audience, including the Inns of Court (where Leland claims both Chaucer and Gower studied), the universities, and the court itself. In this framework, Chaucer’s antiquity signifies not because his life and works appear on the “wrong” side of a historical gap, but because it places him at an early stage of literary and historical genealogies still vital in the early modern present.

The same sort of reasoning informs Leland’s treatment of Chaucer’s language. At first, it might seem that Leland’s preference for Latin leaves both Chaucer and Gower outside the scope of De Viris Illustribus. But what are the Latin alternatives to vernacular poetry in the Middle Ages? For Leland, there were none. Despite what James P. Carley calls Leland’s “clear admiration for the glories of the monastic world,” Leland almost always characterizes its literary output as an artistic failure, lacking both the eloquence of the past and the rhetorical sophistication of the present.49 When it comes to Gower and Chaucer, Leland explains these stylistic failures not as a lack of talent but as an inevitability of the historical and cultural contexts in which those writers lived. In his entry on Gower, Leland writes that Chaucer’s friend “wrote many [poems] in Latin, imitating Ovid rather more studiously than felicitously [studiosius quam felicius]. This must not be thought surprising, especially in a semi-barbarous age, since even in our own flourishing times there are few who can fittingly express Naso’s [i.e., Ovid’s] abounding fruitfulness in verse.”⁵⁰ If Latin was not a viable means for poetic expression in the hands of medieval monks and schoolmen, it nevertheless served as an important link between past and present. In De Viris Illustribus, the Roman occupation of Britain is a benign or even beneficial force, insofar as it provides the vehicle through which Latin learning arrives in Britain. In its wake, according to De Viris Illustribus, “a high standard of learning prevailed in Britain, the great contribution of the Romans who had made it a province; and the nobles were notable for their practice of eloquence and the other usual arts.”⁵¹

For Leland, the English tongue serves as an imperfect memorial of Roman greatness, even in an age of overall cultural decline. Earlier in De Viris Illustribus, he links Latin with the vernacular, writing that “before the arrival of Caesar, [the British language] was partly Hebrew and Greek and partly barbarian,” but under Roman rule it “was gradually transformed halfway to Latin in the same way that the Gallic island, by long habit, was reduced, albeit with difficulty, to a province.”⁵² In Leland’s view, this is improvement, not colonization. It is analogous to Chaucer’s comparison of his own work to classical sources, a juxtaposition that elevates English poetry by linking it with Latin and Greek models even as it also adopts a position of ostensible humility. Although he does not cite it, Leland would have likely known Chaucer’s instructions to his “litel book” in Troilus and Criseyde, wherein he implores it to “kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.”53 In Leland’s formulation, the English language itself performs a similar obeisance to the Latin model.

When it comes to Chaucer, Leland is very clear about the purpose of his English poetry. It is not a means of literary expression but rather a vehicle through which Chaucer can accomplish his nationalistic goal of improving the English language. Leland writes,

Now, indeed, the order of my discourse demands that I show clearly Geoffrey’s goal in his studies. Indeed, the single aim of his studies was to make the English language as polished as possible in all respects, for he had seen what good progress Gower had made in the same task, although much was left to be done. Therefore, he thought he should leave no stone unturned in order to reach the highest degree of success. And since he always admired poetry above all things, had loved and cultivated it religiously, it seemed most convenient to him to make his way towards the very heights of expression through poetry.⁵⁴

In Leland’s view, poetry is a convenient and authoritative medium through which to improve the English language, an enterprise already authorized by Gower’s earlier work along similar lines. Ultimately, however, poetry is merely the setting; the words themselves, which can be appropriated and redeployed to any number of rhetorical ends, are where value truly lies.

This emphasis on words rather than entire works is, perhaps, why Leland never quotes from Chaucer’s poems directly. His most extended engagement with Chaucer’s poems comes in the form of a list of titles, translated into Latin from the 1532 printing of William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s Works.⁵⁵ Leland lists twenty-two works, including two collective titles (“Fabulae Cantianae” and “Cantiones,” minor poems), one piece he identifies as spurious (The Floure of Courtesy, or “flos humanitatis, qui libellulus a multis, tanquam nothus, reiicitur,”—a small book that many reject as spurious), and something he calls the “Tale of Piers Plowman” (Petri Aratoris fabula), which he claims was suppressed because of its anticlerical tone (“quia malos sacerdotum mores vehementer increpavit, suppressa est”).56 This is apparently Langland’s Piers Plowman, which Leland has confused with the apocryphal Plowman’s Tale, which is absent both from Thynne’s edition and from earlier printed copies of the Canterbury Tales. Leland also describes an early collected edition of Chaucer produced by Caxton; no bibliographical evidence supports this claim, and Alexandra Gillespie surmises that Leland had encountered pre-1532 editions of the Tales and other poems bound together, which he mistook as a more deliberately unified production.⁵⁷

When Leland lists the titles of Chaucer’s works, he is not simply quoting the titles or incipits from Latin works as in the case of most of his other subjects, but translating an English text (here, not Chaucer’s own words but rather titles assigned to his works in Thynne’s edition) into Latin. In this, Leland anticipates a tendency to classicize and Latinize Chaucer that will become increasingly prominent over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will take forms as varied as Robert Greene’s ventriloquizing of Chaucer and Gower in order to discuss Horatian poetics in Greenes Vision (ca. 1590; published 1592), Gabriel Harvey’s annotations identifying classical analogues in his copy of the Canterbury Tales (ca. 1600), and Sir Francis Kynaston’s translation of Troilus and Criseyde into Latin hexameters (1635).⁵⁸ Leland explains that he has provided his list of Chaucerian titles “so that readers may be able, as the saying goes, at least to measure the lion by his claws.”⁵⁹ The phrase, which has classical antecedents and is also found in Erasmus, is not entirely apt, since Leland never offers readers even a single claw’s worth of Chaucerian English. Chaucer’s poems are twice mediated here: once because they are referred to only by their titles (which are generally editorial rather than authorial), and a second time because these titles are Latinized. Paradoxically, Chaucer’s language becomes most occluded at the moment it becomes most central to Leland’s claims.

Nevertheless, Leland retains his focus on Chaucer’s language throughout the entry, a contrast to his comments on Gower, which mention his language only in passing. When Leland compares Chaucer with French and Italian writers, it is also in terms of the ways these poets shaped their respective vernaculars. Once again, he frames Chaucer’s achievements in linguistic but not necessarily literary terms. Discussing Chaucer’s models, he writes that “Petrarch was flourishing in Italy at the time [at which Chaucer wrote], by whose efforts the vernacular tongue of that land [lingua ibidem vernacula] had been brought to such a point of refinement that it was competing with Latin itself for the prize in eloquence. A certain Alain [Chartier] had likewise polished the French language in an infinite variety of ways.”60 In both cases, the works of Chaucer’s continental analogues are framed in national-linguistic terms. Leland takes a schematic approach in his celebration of Chaucer’s writing, and especially of his works as a translator, viewing the medieval poet’s work structurally and holistically rather than attending to the finer details of its contents. He describes the progress of Chaucer’s career in the following terms:

It was thus under favourable auspices that [Chaucer] applied himself to the work he had begun, now translating books written elegantly, ornately, and eloquently in the French language into his native speech; now rendering Latin verse into English, learnedly, aptly, and harmoniously; now committing to enduring parchment many of products of his own imagination, which equalled Latin authors in their aptness of expression; now striving with all his strength to be of use to the reader, and alternately taking sedulous care to delight him. He did not desist until he had raised our language to such purity, such eloquence, such concision and grace, that it could justly be ranked among the cultured languages of the nations.⁶¹

In Leland’s framing, the goal—linguistic improvement—remains the same in the case of both Chaucer’s translations and his original works, even as Leland’s choice of adverbs in this section (e.g., docte, apte, canore; sweetly, ornately, elegantly) recall the aureate diction of fifteenth-century Chaucerians.

A similar emphasis on language and national identity marks the three poems by Leland that appear in the second half of the entry. While Leland was a prolific poet, these are the only examples of his own verse that appear in De Viris Illustribus.⁶² Their appearance here both situates Leland’s work in a long history of poetic tributes to Chaucer and reemphasizes his commitment to Latin as the language of serious intellectual labor, including poetry. Accordingly, these verses—like the entry as a whole—leverage the prestige and cultural connotations of Latin even as they argue for the cultural importance of Chaucer’s vernacular poetry. Like the list of titles, these poems can only provide indirect proof of Chaucer’s poetic excellence: as Latin verses about a vernacular poet, they can describe, but not demonstrate, the linguistic and poetic achievements that are their raison d’être.

Leland himself recognizes the mediated nature of these tributes. He writes that he wishes “our language [that is, English] were known to the Latin poets; then they would easily—I say easily—accede to my opinion [of Chaucer]. But since what I want is scarcely possible, I wish at least that having been prevailed upon they would have some faith in me as a lover of Latin literature in this matter.”63 While it is difficult to say whether the Latin poets that Leland has in mind are ancient or his sixteenth-century contemporaries, his comment suggests that both a linguistic gap and a historical gap separate the medieval poet from those best able to appreciate his works.

The first poem presented by Leland, a short epigram, sets three pairs of poet and place in relation to one another:

Praedicat Aligerum merito Florentia Dantem,

Italia et numeros tota Petrarche tuos;

Anglia Chaucerum veneratur nostra poetam,

Cui veneres debet patria lingua suas.

(Florence rightly trumpets Dante Alighieri

And all Italy your verses [numeros], Petrarch;

Our England reveres the poet Chaucer,

To whom our native tongue owes its beauties.)

Here, Leland transposes Chaucer’s achievements in language from the individual to the collective realm. (Chaucer never claims to be a national poet, so later writers must make this connection posthumously, beginning with Lydgate’s interpellation of his predecessor as the “chiefe Poet of Britaine.”) The verb (veneratur) indicates that “our England” (anglia … nostra) the subject, is in the present, but it and Chaucer share a “native tongue” (patria lingua) as do Dante and Florence and Petrarch and Italy. Although Leland’s aim here is to increase Chaucer’s poetic reputation among Latinate readers, he also articulates a significant connection in the form of a language shared between English-speaking collectivities in the present and Chaucer himself, making the poet a focal point not only for England’s literary reputation among readers of Latin, regardless of nationality, but also establishing him as the founding figure of an English-language tradition that carries on into the present.

The second poem opens with an allusion to Virgil’s Eclogues, comparing poetic fame to the natural affinity of animals to their native habitats:

As long as the boar love the mountain ridges, the merry bird the branches,

And the scaly fish the limpid waters,

Homer, the most renowned author of the Greek tongue,

Will always be first in Aonian song.

So, too, will Virgil always be the greatest glory of the Roman muse,

If Apollo himself is the judge.

No less will our Geoffrey Chaucer always be

The fairest ornament of the British lyre.

The former, of course, were born in fortunate times,

Yet the latter, great as he was, was born at a barbarous hour.

If he had lived when the muses flourished,

He would have equaled or surpassed his famous predecessors.64

Like the epigram that proceeds it, this poem links Chaucer with a larger, transhistorical collectivity: comparing the enduring fame of Homer (whom Leland refers to here as Maeonides) and Virgil to these natural affinities, Leland writes that “Nec minus et noster Galfridus summa Britannae / Chaucerus citharae gratia semper erit” (No less will our Geoffrey Chaucer always be / The fairest ornament of the British lyre). Whereas the first poem compares Chaucer with his contemporaries, this poem uses classical writers. This second juxtaposition suggests a kind of translatio imperii that links England with ancient Greece and Rome through the shared greatness of their principal poets, but also reminds readers of Chaucer’s belated historical moment. In a passage that resonates strongly with the preface to the 1532 Works, Leland concedes that Homer and Virgil were, “of course, were born in fortunate times,” yet Chaucer, “great as he was, was born at a barbarous hour.” Had he “lived when the muses flourished,” Leland writes, Chaucer “would have equaled or surpassed his famous predecessors.” As elsewhere in De Viris Illustribus, the temporal infelicity of medieval writing is used to explain away any unfavorable comparisons between Chaucer and his classical antecedents. Chaucer might be a vernacular poet living in Leland’s Latinate world, but, according to the poem, his significance, like Homer’s and Virgil’s, will always endure. Emphasizing this point, each of the three couplets describing the individual poet’s fame ends with the same phrase—semper erit, always will be.

In his third and final poem, Leland articulates more directly the notion of translatio linguae implied in the previous piece.65 Just as translatio studii, the transmission of learning, is linked to translatio imperii, the movement of imperial power from East to West, so too Leland suggests that excellence in learning is naturally accompanied by excellence in language itself. The poem, the longest of the three, describes the development of the Greek language, then that of Latin, before turning to the role of “eloquent Chaucer” who was

The first in proper conciseness

Who cast our native language into such a form,

That it might shine with much beauty and charm,

With much wit and grace,

Like Hesperus among the lesser stars;

And yet did not arrogantly reproach

Any other language for barbarity.⁶⁶

In the lines before this passage, Leland attributes the improvement of the Greek language to “Atticus” and the Latin tongue to “Quirinius” (another name for Romulus).⁶⁷ Although both figures are allegorical rather than historical, Leland fits Chaucer into their company as naturally as he does that of Dante and Petrarch. The invocation of Chaucer in their presence puts forth a different view of the poet than that offered by either of the two preceding pieces. In their company, Chaucer assumes a mythic status closer to that of the Druids and Arthurian figures found in the early entries in De Viris Illustribus than to the Italian poets mentioned in the first poem, or even Homer and Virgil in the second. Here, Chaucer’s role is as a founder of language in the most abstract sense. While this contrasts with Leland’s interest in the particulars of Chaucer’s life (his education at Oxford, his burial in Westminster), it is also a logical extension of his claims for Chaucer’s significance as a poet whose work both elevates literature within English and raises the status of the English language in a transhistorical and interlinguistic framework.

All three poems celebrate Chaucer’s poetic and aesthetic value, but that value is always understood in relation to a shared intellectual tradition and national identity. Rather than echo earlier poets who present Chaucer’s writings as the apex of English poetry, Leland’s poems transform him into a foundational figure whose importance is best understood not in terms of individual poetic genius but in terms of his linguistic (and therefore national and even imperial) significance. As a result of this emphasis on Chaucer’s foundational status rather than his ongoing influence, there is a new sense of distance here. In this last poem, in particular, we see a burgeoning sense of Chaucer as a revered ancestor rather than the recently deceased kinsman lamented by Hoccleve and Lydgate.

Thomas Speght’s Life of Chaucer

Leland’s account circulated widely in antiquarian circles throughout the Tudor and Stuart eras, and at the end of the sixteenth century, it served as the basis for the first full-fledged English-language biography of Chaucer. First published in the 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works, the Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer includes sections on Chaucer’s origins, education, marriage and children, and professional activities, as well as a discussion of his poetic accomplishments and influence.68 Written by Thomas Speght, who was also responsible for most of the other explanatory materials added to this edition, the treatise supplements material that originated with Leland with references to popular scholarly works like William Camden’s Britannia and archival materials provided by the antiquarian John Stow who, Speght writes, “helped me in many things.”⁶⁹ Though De Viris Illustribus was not Speght’s only source, it was his main one, and he agrees with his predecessor on all major points.

Speght appears to have known Leland’s writings through the work of the antiquary’s friend and literary executor John Bale. Although Bale is perhaps best remembered today for his dramatic writings, his activities as a radical Protestant polemicist extended from the stage to the more sedate world of scholarly publishing. His Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum (1549, revised 1557) is a massive compendium of biobibliographical data intercalated with accounts of papal and European history. Leland’s De Viris Illustribus forms the nucleus of this Latin work, which Bale initially compiled while in exile during the 1540s and extensively revised and expanded for its second publication in 1557. Bale’s presentation of literary history as salvation history played a crucial role in the reimagination of the medieval past in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction and dispersal of medieval textual culture.70 These printed books provided a vehicle through which Leland’s writings on Chaucer might reach a broader audience than that of De Viris Illustribus, although Leland’s manuscripts continued to circulate in antiquarian networks. Bale readily acknowledges his reliance on Leland, and when Speght cites material taken from Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum, he names Leland, not Bale, as his ultimate source.⁷¹

In tone, form, and content, Speght’s Life of Chaucer is a celebration of the medieval poet. It demonstrates how, by the end of the sixteenth century, Chaucer was “established as an important father for English history: a suitable object of veneration and recuperation for a nationalist humanism seeking to rival the Italian discovery of the Latinate past as an antecedent for its contemporary poetics.”⁷² Indeed, it shows that Chaucer had become a father for English history in a general sense, a figure whose importance was not limited to literary discourse but who signified meaningfully in nationalist narratives about the development of English cultural identity on multiple fronts.

At first glance, Speght’s account, with its use of multiple outside sources, seems markedly more scholarly than Leland’s. Whereas Leland’s assertions about Chaucer’s biography are not backed with any evidential claims, Speght cites a variety of secondary archival and historiographical sources. In the 1598 version of the Life, for example, Speght’s discussion of the source and antiquity of the Chaucer family coat of arms includes references to “the opinion of some Heralds,” historical facts that “as by Chronicles appeareth,” “the Records of the Tower,” “the Records of the Exchequer,” and “the Roll at Battle Abbey.”⁷³ At times throughout the Life, Speght cites specific locations within the patent rolls and quotes from them at length; these are the same sources cited by the modern Chaucer Life-Records.⁷⁴ Bolstered by references like these, Chaucer’s life appears as a matter of historical fact, whose details have been recovered through assiduous archival research.

In other ways, however, Speght’s biography is much like Leland’s, especially in its willingness to treat Chaucer’s words themselves as a historical source. Like Leland in De Viris Illustribus, Speght takes a dominant idea from the Chaucerian tradition—specifically, the notion that there is something fundamentally English about Chaucer’s language—and expounds on it in a scholarly way. The result is a body of commentary, separate from Chaucer’s writing, that models a specific way of reading and judging the Chaucerian text. In the Life, for example, Speght uses Chaucer’s language to rebut historical sources that (correctly) indicate that Chaucer’s progenitors were comparatively recent arrivals in England. Speght invokes the purity of Chaucer’s language to argue for both the antiquity and status of Chaucer’s family:

But wheras some are of opinion, that the first coming of the Chaucers in England was, when Queene Isabell wife to Edward the second, and her sonne Prince Edward with Philip his new married wife, returned out of Henault into England, at which time also almost three thousand Straunger came over with them (as by Chronicles appeareth) I can by no meanes consent with them; but rather must thinke, that their name and familie was of farre more auncient antiquitie, although by time decayed, as many more have been of much greater estate: and that the parents of Geffrey Chaucer were meere English, and he himselfe an Englishman borne. For els how could he have come to that perfection in our language, as to be called, The first illuminer of the English tongue, had not both he, and his parents before him, been born & bred among us.75

In this passage, beliefs about Chaucer’s contribution to the English language trump the testimony of the chronicles. If the chronicles place his ancestors on English soil later than Speght feels is appropriate for the progenitors of the “first illuminer of the English tongue,” then the chronicles, not Chaucer’s reputation, must be inaccurate. Chaucer’s words do more than simply ensure his reputation: they become the evidence upon which the Life justifies its claims for Chaucer’s biography. Even though Speght has already noted that Chaucer’s family were vintners, he cannot divorce his assessment of their social standing from his perception of Chaucer as a national poet with a special relationship to the English language.

For Speght, language can also function as a guarantor of authenticity in Chaucer’s writings. In the “His Bookes” section of the Life, Speght lists the titles of books he believes were written by Chaucer but that are “besides those books of his which he have in print.”⁷⁶ In this same section, Speght writes of poems that “I have seene without any Authours name, which for the invention I would verily judge to be Chaucers, were it not that wordes and phrases carry not every where Chaucers antiquitie.” Here, Speght makes a judgment based not on the apparent age of the manuscript or the contents of the verse, but on “wordes and phrases” that carry (or fail to carry, in this instance) evidence of “Chaucers antiquitie.” As Leland’s emphasis on Chaucer’s lexis reminds us, “wordes and phrases” are exactly what Chaucer’s early modern reputation is based upon. In Speght, as in Leland’s earlier work, the same criteria used in aesthetic valuations of Chaucer are applied to the ostensibly more objective task of assembling an accurate canon.

Like Leland before him, Speght drew heavily on Chaucer’s own writings when constructing his biography of the poet. Because the Chaucer canon that Speght knew included numerous apocryphal works, this strategy can sometimes backfire. For example, Speght correctly asserts that Chaucer was born in London. He does so, however, based on statements made in the Testament of Love, a Boethian allegory in prose written by Londoner Thomas Usk in the 1380s. The Testament of Love was first printed in the 1532 edition of the Works, and generally accepted as Chaucer’s own until the eighteenth century. The Testament may also be behind Speght’s claim that Chaucer fell into “some daunger & trouble” during the earlier years of the reign of Richard II, “by favoring some rashe attempte of the common people” and that, because “as he was learned, so was he wise,” he “kept himself much out of the way in Holland, Zeland [sic] and France, where he wrote most of his books.”77 While the Chaucer Life-Records contains no support for such a claim, the speaker in the Testament of Love writes from prison, in a position of great personal and political distress, such as might necessitate a self-imposed exile (in fact, Usk was executed on March 4, 1388, for his role as an informant in conspiracies concerning the election of the Lord Mayor of London). In the absence of other biographical material, this may have been enough to lead Speght to conjecture that Chaucer left England for a time. In the case of both Chaucer’s London origins and his putative exile, Speght reports traces of what might be construed as biographical disclosure in Chaucer’s canon as though they were straightforward historical fact.

Like De Viris Illustribus, and unlike modern biographies of Chaucer, the Life concerns itself primarily with the professional details of Chaucer’s life and does not attempt to integrate biographical events with the composition and reception of the literary works for which its subject is chiefly remembered.⁷⁸ Although the Life’s title page, like the title page of the Works as a whole, identifies its subject as a poet (see Figure 4), only two sections (“His Friends” and “His Books”) explicitly address the production of poetry. When specific works are invoked, it is often as sources for certain biographical details, as is the case with Chaucer’s connection with John of Gaunt, for which the Book of the Duchess is cited as evidence.

Like Leland, Speght emphasizes Chaucer’s relation to institutions, individuals, and locations recognizable to latter-day readers, especially those with legal, antiquarian, or scholarly backgrounds. While Speght gives more attention than Leland to the linguistic and cultural differences between Chaucer’s day and his own historical moment, he also elaborates on the institutional framework in which Leland situated Chaucer. Now, instead of merely attending Oxford, in Speght’s account Chaucer studied “by all likelihood in Canterburie or in Merton Colledge with John Wyckelife, whose opinions in religion he much affected” a supposition that both derives from and reinforces previous claims for Chaucer’s proto-Protestantism.⁷⁹ (The reasons for and implications of this claim are explored in Chapter 3.) Now, instead of studying and working alongside Gower at the Inns of Court, Chaucer is installed in the Inner Temple where, Speght writes, he was arrested and fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street.⁸⁰ This anecdote, conveniently, ascribes to Chaucer both a social and religious disposition in line with that of many of his early modern admirers.

Figure 4. Interior title page for The Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer from The Workes of our Antient and Learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly Printed (1598), sig. C1; STC 5079. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

While both Leland and Speght are eager to connect past and present, Speght, in particular, also takes pains to show that relation as mediated. The Works as a whole makes prominent use of interpretive devices that convey a genealogical relationship between present and past. These include John Speed’s genealogical engraving and a full-page woodcut of Chaucer’s coat of arms, used as a title page in Stow’s 1561 edition and repurposed here as an interior title page.81 In the Life, Speght’s interest in Chaucer’s “progeny” leads him to take up the successful political career of Chaucer’s son Thomas (apparently unknown to Leland, Bale, and Foxe) and the rather spectacular trio of marriages undertaken by Thomas’s daughter Alice. Chaucer’s descendants are described narratively in the section of the Life entitled “His Progenie and Their Advancement” and in a full-page Latin stemma, accompanying this section, prepared by the herald Robert Glover (Figure 5). Like the John Speed engraving also prepared for this edition, Glover’s stemma is not centered on Chaucer, but rather on Thomas Chaucer and his wife Maude (Matilda), the couple whose tomb, decked with baronial arms, Speed also depicts. The point of the Glover stemma is to illustrate Chaucer’s familial connections to historically significant individuals, and not to celebrate his poetry, but it also provides essential context for a historical reading of that poetry.

These Chaucerian genealogies, which unfold over time and culminate in figures whose historical import easily overpowers Chaucer’s own, run parallel to the accounts of Chaucer’s influence on later writers found in the section on “His Death.” Despite the finality of Speght’s subtitle, both the genealogy and the poetic tributes are oriented toward a future that is, for readers, already past: in Speght’s formulation, which evokes Leland’s, Chaucer’s true literary import and historical significance are revealed not in his own day but rather by the individuals who carry on his lineage after his death. In Speght, this shows up in two distinct ways that reflect Chaucer’s dual significance for antiquarian readers: through family connections (in the Speed engraving, this can be traced by following the presence of Chaucer’s arms in the heraldry of later generations) or through later writers’ use of Chaucerian language. It is in order to trace this second kind of lineage that Leland and Speght need to focus on the lexical rather than rhetorical dimensions of Chaucer’s poetry: like arms, which can be bisected and quartered, and quartered again, incorporating traces of new alliances and allegiances while containing within the identifying mark of the original grantee, Chaucer’s lexicon is available for recombination and reappropriation with new words and in new contexts, while still retaining its identity as “Chaucer’s English.” Chaucer’s literary achievements of narrative, genre, and characterization lack this mobility and adaptability; they are objects of study, while, at least potentially, Chaucer’s words remain objects of both study and use.

Figure 5. “Stemma peculiare Gaufredi Chauceri Poetæ celeberrimi” from The Workes of our Antient and Learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly Printed (1598), sig. B4; STC 5079. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Like Leland, Speght clearly believed his vernacular subject to be worthy of both scholarly consideration and literary appreciation. Echoing and amplifying the sentiments expressed in the 1532 editions of Chaucer’s Works and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Leland’s entries on Chaucer and Gower in De Viris Illustribus assert, by their mere presence, that vernacular literature is part of what makes English culture great. Speght’s attention to Chaucer’s biography carries on this tradition, elaborating Leland’s account and, by transposing it into English, making it available to a wider variety of readers. Crucially, this movement back into the vernacular does not preclude a reading of Chaucer that, like Leland’s, privileges historical and biographical concerns rather than poetic details. Rather, it reinforces it.

Leland, writing in the 1530s, and Speght, working circa 1598, bookend an important phase in Chaucer’s early modern reception. During this period, interest in Chaucer’s late medieval contemporaries faded, while Chaucer was widely and repeatedly identified as the individual founder of English poetry, the only poet of his era capable of authorizing and legitimizing an ongoing tradition of English verse. The biographical narratives of Leland and Speght both bolster and affirm this view, stressing Chaucer’s outsize eloquence and exceptional contributions to the English language.

It would be a mistake, however, to overlook the fact that their writings shifted emphasis away from the content of Chaucer’s poems and onto their cultural and linguistic impact. With Chaucer’s work framed in lexical terms and explicitly linked to the development of English as a national identity, his influence was no longer limited to the realm of poetry; he became a cultural force on the broadest possible scale. In their biographical writings, Leland and Speght produce new knowledge about Chaucer’s life and works that supports their claims for the poet’s widespread significance. The historical narratives they provide offer a foundation for the sense of temporal doubleness, of simultaneous connection and distance, that I argued in the previous chapter was an essential part of Chaucer’s exceptional status in early modern England. Their work offers us a view of Chaucer that is in some ways quite different from the one known to modern scholars, but at the same time crafts a figure uniquely well suited to the needs and desires of sixteenth-century Chaucerians.