Monumental Chaucer: Print Culture, and Conflict, and Canonical Resilience.
- Author/Editor
- Ascari, Maurizio.
- Title
- Monumental Chaucer: Print Culture, and Conflict, and Canonical Resilience.
- Published
- Ascari, Maurizio. "Monumental Chaucer: Print Culture, and Conflict, and Canonical Resilience." Chaucer Review 53 (2018): 402-27.
- Review
- Ascari intends "monumental" to be taken in two ways: both as the placement of Chaucer at the head of an incipient vernacular literary canon, and as the subject of "his" (since Chaucer's body was never in it) tomb, placed in Westminster Abbey by the Catholic Nicholas Brigham in 1556. The first of these, Ascari argues, results from the development of printing, and the second--motivated and facilitated by the first--from the erection of the "tomb" itself. Gower figures briefly but importantly in Ascari's narrative, which focuses on Thomas Berthelette's two editions of the Confessio Amantis (1532 and 1554) and Gower's tomb (which did contain his body) in what is now Southwark Cathedral. (Rather strangely, Ascari neglects Caxton's prior printing of the CA in 1483, and whatever contribution it might have made to his argument.) Ascari quotes at length Berthelette's introductory "To the Reder" in which the printer connects Gower's tomb with Chaucer's original, humbler burial-site in the floor of Westminster Abbey, in order to argue that Brigham was motivated to provide the monumental "tomb" for Chaucer by Berthelette's editions and by the clearly Catholic tomb of Gower, in the hope that Chaucer could thus be claimed as a Catholic poet (416-20). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2018
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Biography of Gower