Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer

Summary

In July 2005 the Folger Shakespeare Library acquired a previously unnoticed copy of The workes of Geffray Chaucer (Folger STC 5074 Copy 2), edited by William Thynne, printed in 1550. The ‘flashpoint’ for the purchase was its provenance: in the seventeenth century this copy of Chaucer was in the private library of Frances Wolfreston and the Folger now holds thirteen of her books. The volume is of further value and interest because it is littered with manuscript marginalia by various earlier readers who, as will be shown, can be identified as Wolfreston’s female ancestors and their associates at Haslington Hall in Cheshire. It provides an example of how several successive generations of early modern female readers negotiated their engagement with a literary text within a domestic context. Moreover, Wolfreston and her ancestors are especially significant because they are, to use Paul Morgan’s term, ‘ordinary people’, members of the minor country gentry. The purpose of this essay is to provide an account and analysis of the annotations. It is a particularly fortuitous moment for this copy of Chaucer to have come to light as its contents correlate with a number of current critical themes and concerns. Chaucer’s post-medieval reception is a thriving area of interest, one which has gathered pace in response to the shift away from author- to reader-focused studies. Interest in marginalia as a historical source has also flourished in the context of the development of the history of reading as a field of study. At the same time, the lack of visibility in the historical record of women as readers and annotators, especially of ‘recreational’ texts, poems, plays and other kinds of literature before 1600, has troubled and challenged feminist historians. This copy of Chaucer offers new, welcome, material relating to each of these areas and represents an exciting new discovery, a genuine gem from the Folger collection.

The earliest traceable owner of Folger STC 5074 Copy 2 is Dorothy Egerton of Betley, in Cheshire. She became the wife of Sir Thomas Vernon (fl. 1580, 1613) of Haslington in Cheshire before c.1578, with whom she went on to have a son and nine daughters.