Over the course of his career Horace shows a variety of ways of referring to the way that readers are reacting to his work. In the Satires and Epistles he regularly makes references to his reception, but in the Epodes and Odes—following archaic and classical Greek precedent—he never does. The chapter argues that the main reason for these choices is that Horace was simultaneously keen to be famous and appalled at the idea of his poetry being vulgarised by a mass audience.

Chaucer’s works demonstrate that he was extremely well read. He engages intensively with major authors and texts of classical and medieval literature such as Boccaccio, Boethius, Dante, Ovid, Petrarch and the Romance of the Rose. He also frequently cites respected ‘authorities’, including the Bible and commentaries on it. For a layman, he appears to have had access to an unusually wide range of reading material. His love of books and reading is also represented in many of his works, where his fictional alter egos are often to be found poring over texts and sitting up reading late at night. Getting access to reading material would, however, not have been as easy as we might imagine from reading his works. Manuscripts were costly and probably hard to come by, especially well-copied and reliable ones. Chaucer may have borrowed books from wealthy patrons and well-connected friends, bought second-hand copies, or had access to the libraries of religious institutions.

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.