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This article highlights the accomplishments of a nineteenth-century American editor of Chaucer’s works, Arthur Gilman. It describes the nature of those accomplishments and situates them in respect to the Chaucer editorial activity of the time and to Gilman’s background. When Gilman’s Chaucer edition appeared in 1879, it was unprecedented in several ways, and for fifteen years it was the best mostly complete Chaucer ever produced. In particular, the edition, the first newly edited collection of Chaucer’s verse published by an American press, was also the first to make use of the outpouring of Chaucer Society materials that had appeared in the ten years leading up to it, resulting in an edition with a sounder text and more coherent, up-to-date introductory apparatus than any other available at the time. This achievement was all the more impressive given that the man who managed it was a largely self-taught student of medieval literature.

This chapter considers a particular conception of authorship emergent in the fifteenth century in relation to its significance for English literary history. By way of recalling the late twentieth-century critique of person-centered literary histories that led to an alternative emphasis on institutions, and the alignment of that emphasis with broad medieval conceptions of authorship, the chapter casts into relief what was unprecedented in many instances of fifteenth-century authorial representations: an idea of the author as the specific living human agent from whom a work proceeds. With this idea, fifteenth-century poets bring to English literature the very person-centered notion of literary history that would predominate until recent times. As an initial example, the chapter considers the passage in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes accompanying the famous Chaucer portrait and, for purposes of contrast, some of the poems in BodL MS Digby 102. It surveys possible sources for this innovation and then describes some of the more typical or striking forms that this idea of authorship takes, pointing out their distinguishing features, reviewing their institutional circumstances, and noting their means of transmission. In particular, it provides examples of laureate author (e.g., John Lydgate, George Ashby), sacerdotal author (e.g., John Audelay, Henry Bradshaw), and author as narrative protagonist (e.g., Hoccleve, King James I, Stephen Hawes, John Skelton). These illustrations confirm that an author’s textualization as flesh-and-blood person is not inevitable but rather a strategic discursive construct that organizes the meaning of a text toward some end, however lofty or pragmatic.

This essay argues that both sides of the continuing debate about whether Lydgate’s Troy Book is more interested in political legitimation or admonition have not understood the form of the poem. It ...

After characterizing the two general approaches to literary value most often taken in Anglo-American treatments of the topic as either ontological (which emphasize what literary value is ) or genealogical (which emphasize how literary value is made ), this article defines and elucidates an alternative, complementary, pragmatic approach. This approach—taking as its basis the evident, pervasive valuing of literature that occurs both inside and outside the academy and drawing on the actor-network-theory of Bruno Latour—argues that acts of ascribing value are necessary for any social recognition of the literary, and that these acts occur distributed across a network of human and nonhuman valuing agents that extends indefinitely in time and space. It contends that literary value, in pragmatic practice, emerges through activities of mediation among these agents and explains how this view does not preclude ontological or genealogical accounts of value but is not reducible to them. The article next explores the implications of the characteristic looseness in an agent’s ascription of literary value, a characteristic that results in literary value often both manifestly pendant on, and in competition with, value of other kinds. In its conclusion, the article suggests how its approach to literary value may function as a shared conceptual platform for the diverse range of projects that today occur under the umbrella term of literary study, thereby helping to restore some conceptual coherence to the field.

This article explores the relation between Chaucer's socioeconomic location as lay controller of customs and the dazzling metapoetics of the House of Fame. It emphasizes the social ambiguity of Chaucer's movement out of court to the customs house and hence what he would have to gain, in an intertwined socioeconomic and aesthetic sense, from the dissemination of this poem. It argues that the latter—in addition to its skeptical and comic engagement with poetic tradition—represents Chaucer's experimental attempt to shift the parameters of the literary field of late medieval English court poetry to better advantage someone in his then rather peculiar, liminal position.

The poetry that modern editorial practice assigns to Chaucer may be charming, astute, and, simply, beautiful, but the stable Chaucer whose agency determines this achievement—the Chaucer who serves as a canonical center against whom the marginal voices of vernacular culture have been defined—is more the creation of a Shakespearian-focused textual criticism than a historical medieval reality. —Tim William Machan1

In the early fifteenth century, English poets responded to a changed climate of patronage, instituted by Henry IV and successor monarchs, by inventing a new tradition of public and elite poetry. Following Chaucer and others, Hoccleve and Lydgate brought to English verse a style and subject matter writing about their King, nation, and themselves, and their innovations influenced a continuous line of poets running through and beyond Wyatt. A crucial aspect of this tradition is its development of ideas and practices associated with the role of poet laureate. Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the nature and significance of this tradition as it developed from the fourteenth century to Tudor times, tracing its evolution from one author to the next. This study illuminates the relationships between poets and political power and makes plain the tremendous impact this verse has had on the shape of English literary culture.