Chapter 49 - The Reception of Chaucer in the Renaissance

Summary

This chapter discusses Chaucer’s reputation in the English Renaissance. This was marked by a fundamental ambivalence: while humanist scholars may have sought to reject earlier writing in favour of a return to antique models of cultural production, Chaucer remained the most substantial example of literary achievement in the vernacular before the sixteenth century. Medieval Chaucer thus represented everything that the newest tendencies of the age aspired towards. The chapter discusses the principal motifs that channelled praise of the Renaissance Chaucer (a living Chaucer, fatherhood); early editions of Chaucer’s collected works; and literary adaptations of Chaucer by the likes of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.