Dr Simone Celine Marshall, a University of Otago English
scholar, reflects on her discovery of a 19th-century
edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's collected works. Photo by
Peter McIntosh.
A previously unknown early 19th-century edition of
collected works of Geoffrey Chaucer has been identified by
University of Otago academic Dr Simone Celine Marshall, with
important implications internationally for the study of
medieval literature.
Chaucer (c1320-1400) is often regarded as the father of
English literature, having written an extensive amount of
English poetry, most famously The Canterbury Tales.
He lived before the invention of the printing press, and it
has been hard to establish exactly which poems are his.
For centuries, many works were wrongly attributed to him.
Dr Marshall, who is a senior lecturer in English, said that
when her find was confirmed she felt "amazement that
something could still be discovered about Chaucer".
While visiting the Bodleian Library at Oxford University,
England, in January this year and waiting for the edition to
be brought to her for the first time, she had confirmed that
the book - titled The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and
published in 1807 - was not listed in main bibliographies of
the period.
"I'm about to see an edition that officially doesn't exist,"
she recalled.
When it arrived, she saw the edition was in seven volumes, of
pocket-book size, able to be easily carried by readers.
"The discovery of this edition changes the way we had thought
people in the 19th century understood Chaucer's poetry.
Until now we've assumed that in this period Chaucer was of
limited interest."
This edition showed that people in the 19th century were
"interested in Chaucer, and made intellectual decisions about
what was or was not important about his poetry, nearly 100
years before we previously thought this occurred".
"They were quite discriminating."
Previously, the earliest-known Complete Works of Chaucer that
noted that some poems previously attributed to him were
spurious, and some were authentic, had been published in
1897.
The 1807 edition identified the wrongly-attributed poems much
earlier than had been thought, she said.
She discovered the book, referred to in a resource text on
multi-volume poetry books, while researching a poem
attributed to Chaucer, for her recently published book The
Anonymous Text.
The Chaucer edition's existence had been noted by scholars as
early as 1908, but its significance had not been identified,
and the edition had not been previously studied.
john.gibb@odt.co.nz
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