How, and in what forms, did Chaucer’s poems reach medieval readers in the manuscript age? How was Chaucer’s writing (both process and actual content) affected by the manuscript culture within which he wrote? And for the modern reader of Chaucer, what insights are to be gained from a heightened awareness of the manuscript context from which his poetry emerged? The sheer difficulty of obtaining texts in the age of manuscript is difficult to imagine from a world with print, never mind one with instant internet access. A medieval reader keen to acquire a copy of Chaucer needed money, connections, and above all patience. A modern reader in search of Chaucer, meanwhile, needs to understand something of the vast, shifting manuscript matrix from which all modern editors have, like so many hopeful Dr Frankensteins, tried to re-create his texts. A better understanding of this manuscript culture, which robbed authors of control over their texts and could even remove their name, can also illuminate aspects of Chaucer’s process of composition, and may even help to explain his infamous use of an alter-ego narrator-figure, often explicitly named ‘Geffrey’, into his major poems.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.