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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - Repairing and Completing

  • Devani Singh, Université de Genève
  • Book:
    Chaucer's Early Modern Readers
    Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023, pp 84-126
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  • Summary

    This chapter studies the codicological and textual repairs readers made to perfect perceived lacunae in Chaucer manuscripts. Its argument is that readers privileged ideas of the complete Chaucerian text inherited from print and thus looked to print to supply text that was wanting. The chapter focusses on the modifications which early modern book owners made to repair and complete manuscripts in their torn or incomplete state – achieved by filling blank space and adding replacement leaves copied from print. Readers of Chaucer encountered in the chapter include John Stow (1524/25–1605), Joseph Holland (d. 1605), the clergyman John Barkham (1571/2–1642), and the Norfolk antiquary Thomas Martin (1696/7–1771). Their activities of mending older volumes and filling in blanks reveal them as active participants in the appraisal, remaking, and repair of Chaucer’s oldest books with the intention of preserving them intact. The chapter also considers the moral freight of the adjectives that have historically been used to describe bibliographical incompleteness: ‘mutilated’, ‘wanting’, ‘defective’, and ‘imperfect’.