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’.

The introduction begins by establishing Chaucer’s place at the epicentre of intersections between the medieval past and an early modern present. It presents a new angle on the history of the Chaucerian book, suggesting that the poet’s prominence in early modern print facilitated continued interest in his medieval manuscript volumes. Next, it explores the cultural status of manuscripts in early modern England and considers how, why, and by whom medieval manuscripts were sold, collected, read, and even remade. It compares the relative authority and desirability of old manuscripts to print, and highlights the importance of both media within early modern antiquarian circles. Finally, the introduction re-evaluates the concept of the hybrid book and proposes that the historically attested idea of perfecting be added to the critical lexicon for the study of early modern reading. Through a series of contemporary examples which illustrate its usage in the context of bibliographical completeness, it contends that perfecting offers a nuanced means of characterising the updates that readers made to their old books in the spirit of improvement.