Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete

265 Pages·2019·8.209 MB·English

by  Rachel Stenner (editor), Tamsin Badcoe (editor), Gareth Griffith (editor)

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Rereading Chaucer
and Spenser
Dan Geffrey with
the New Poete

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EDITED BY RACHEL STENNER,
TAMSIN BADCOE AND GARETH GRIFFITH

Manchester University Press
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright
in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced
wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 5261 3691 6 hardback
First published 2019
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external
or third- party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any
content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
List of figures page vii

List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe and Gareth Griffith
1 Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Spenser’s Amoretti and
The Faerie Queene: reading historically and intertextually 19
Judith H. Anderson
2 ‘Litle herd gromes piping in the wind’: The Shepheardes Calender,
The House of Fame and ‘La Compleynt’ 37
Helen Barr

3 Diverse pageants: normative arrays of sexuality 60
Helen Cooper
4 The source of poetry: Pernaso, Paradise and Spenser’s Chaucerian craft 75
Claire J.C. Eager

5 Chaucer in Ireland: archaism, etymology and the idea of development 98
William Rhodes
6 Wise wights in privy places: rhyme and stanza form in Spenser
and Chaucer 113
Richard Danson Brown
7 Romancing Geoffrey: Chaucer and romance in the manuscript
tradition 137
Gareth Griffith
8 Cultivating Chaucerian antiquity in The Shepheardes Calender 150
Megan L. Cook
9 Worthy friends: Speght’s Chaucer and Speght’s Spenser 168
Elisabeth Chaghafi
vi Contents
10 Chaucer’s ‘beast group’ and ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’ 189
Brendan O’Connell
11 Propagating authority: poetic tradition in The Parliament of Fowls
and the Mutabilitie Cantos 212
Craig A. Berry
12 ‘New matter framed upon the old’: Chaucer, Spenser and Luke
Shepherd’s ‘New Poet’ 224
Harriet Archer
Select bibliography of books and essays on Chaucer and Spenser 243
Index 249
Figures

4.1 The woodcut at the opening of ‘June’ in the 1579 edition of

The Shepheardes Calender (F2v) (by permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library) page 78
6.1 Page spread from 1590 Faerie Queene showing Proem to
Book II (Huntingdon Library copy from EEBO) 118
6.2 Troilus and Criseyde IV.1604– 31 in Thynne’s edition,

showing minimal punctuation between stanzas 122
9.1 Title page of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer’s works
(by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library) 172
9.2 ‘The progenie of Geffrey Chaucer’ (1602) (by permission
of the Folger Shakespeare Library) 176
Contributors

Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus at Indiana University

and author of six single-a uthor books: most recently, Translating Investments:
Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor- Stuart England, Reading
the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Light and Death:
Figuration in Spenser, Kepler, Donne, Milton. She is also co- editor of five volumes,
including Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman, Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography

and Go Figure: Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World.

Harriet Archer is a lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University
of St Andrews. She previously taught at the University of Oxford, the University of

Colorado, Boulder, and Newcastle University, where she also held a Leverhulme
Early Career Fellowship. Her first monograph, Unperfect Histories: The Mirror for
Magistrates, 1559– 1610, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. She is
currently co- editing Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc with Paul
Frazer for the Manchester Revels Plays Series, and the Tudor English translations
of Erasmus’s Colloquies for Erasmus in English 1523–1 584 (MHRA), with Alex

Davis, Gordon Kendal and Neil Rhodes.
Tamsin Badcoe is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Her first book

project, Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space (Manchester University Press,

forthcoming), is interested in the relationship between literary genre and geog-
raphy, and the role that subjectivity and the imagination play in spatial practices.
She also has research interests in the early modern book trade, the work of Thomas

Nashe, and the literature of travel and navigation.

Helen Barr is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and
Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall. She is the author of Socioliterary
Practice in Late Medieval England, and has edited The Poems in The Piers Plowman
Tradition and The Digby Lyrics. Her most recent monograph is Transporting
Chaucer, a study of finding Chaucer where we might not expect him to be between
the late medieval and early modern periods.
Craig A. Berry is an independent scholar who makes his living as a software pro-
ject manager. He holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University and is
Contributors ix
the author of essays on Chaucer, Spenser and the Roman de Silence. He currently
serves as Digital Projects Editor at The Spenser Review.
Richard Danson Brown is Professor of English Literature at The Open University.
He is the author of several books including The New Poet: Novelty and Tradition
in Spenser’s ‘Complaints’ (1999) and A Concordance to the Rhymes of the Faerie
Queene (with J.B. Lethbridge, 2013). Since 2014, he has been the book reviews
editor for The Spenser Review. His latest book – on the poetic forms of Spenser’s
epic – is The art of The Faerie Queene (2019).

Elisabeth Chaghafi’s research focuses on book history and the works of Edmund
Spenser and Gabriel Harvey. She has written on Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’, the quarto
reprints of The Shepheardes Calender, the so- called Spenser– Harvey letters, and
imagined friendships between early modern poets in the biographical works of
Izaak Walton and John Aubrey. Articles on Harvey’s sonnets, and the structure of
John Derricke’s Image of Irelande, are forthcoming. She is currently working on

papers about the function of anecdotes in seventeenth- century lives of Spenser, and
Harvey’s stylistic revisions in his ‘letter- book’. She teaches at Tübingen University.
Megan Cook teaches medieval literature and book history at Colby College in

Waterville, Maine. She is the author of The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian
Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532– 1635 (Penn, 2019). With Elizaveta
Strakhov, she is also the co- editor of John Lydgate's Dance of Death and Related
Works (Medieval Institute Publications, 2019). Her work on the fate of Middle
English texts and books in the early modern period has appeared in Spenser
Studies, Chaucer Review, Manuscript Studies, Studies in Philology and elsewhere.
Helen Cooper is Professor Emerita of Medieval and Renaissance English at the
University of Cambridge, and a Life Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. She
has written extensively both on Chaucer and on topics that cross the medieval–

early modern divide, including Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance, Oxford
Guides to Chaucer: ‘The Canterbury Tales’, The English Romance in Time and
Shakespeare and the Medieval World.

Claire J.C. Eager is Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and
Shakespeare at Colorado College. Her research and teaching focus on Renaissance
literature, visual and material culture, poetic forms, book history to 1800, and

the ecology of space and place. In her book project, Vertuall Paradise: Vaulting
Ambitions Brought to Earth in Tudor and Stuart England, she analyses how poets
from Spenser to Milton construct paradisal spaces, and how they put them to use
as poetic, political or ethical statements, alongside material practices of printing
and horticulture. Her work on John Donne and the garden at Twickenham
belonging to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, will appear in Studies in Philology.
Her next project will investigate the aesthetics and ethics of war landscapes in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.
Gareth Griffith is Senior Teaching Associate and Director of Part- Time
Programmes in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. His research