The following sentences began the first six paragraphs of a research article I
published:
“Writing Fame: Epitaph Transcriptions in Renaissance Chaucer Editions and the
Construction of Chaucer’s Poetic Reputation,”
Journal of the Early Book Society 14
(2011), 105-130.
The complete text of the article is available on GoucherLearn if you want to see
how the paragraphs following each sentence fulfill the promise of the first
sentence’s transition. Note that
number 6 is a biggie, pointing to three major chunks of what the article is
doing for its best readers, scholars interested in Chaucer, Chaucer’s fame, the
history of English printing, and the history of Poet’s Corner in Westminster
Abbey (more or less from center to
outside ring of my target audience).
1) While
examining two copies of Stow’s 1561 Chaucer edition
at the Garrett Library Collection of the Sheridan
Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, I discovered that each of them contained
a manuscript transcription of the verses on Chaucer’s tomb, the marble structure
Nicholas Brigham paid to erect at Westminster in 1556.
2)
The occurrence of the same kind of annotation in two different
hands in two copies of the same Chaucer edition seemed astonishing and
suggestive.
3)
Nor are these four the only annotations of their type in early
Chaucer editions.
4) If the manuscript epitaphs have been found in an eighth of these
fifty-six Renaissance Chaucers, it seems likely that we would find more now that
we know what we are looking for.
5)
In brief, I believe these annotations may represent early-modern
English readers’ participation in the construction of Chaucer’s poetic fame by
means of behaviors that resemble the social practices of cult worship of the
saints.
6)
The transmission of the tomb-verse-annotation custom to later
owners of early Chaucer editions appears to have passed through an important
stage in which Chaucer’s “Englishness” and his status as an originator of high
English literature were consolidated, finding expression in three important
print events: the front matter of Thomas Speght’s late-seventeenth-century
Chaucer editions (1598, 1602, 1687), the engraving of the tomb in Elias
Ashmole’s 1650-to-1651 alchemical anthology, and the reproduction of a similar
tomb engraving on the frontispiece of Edmund Spenser’s Collected Works
(1679).
[etc.]