Marcus Boxhorn's Misattribution of Verses from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' to John Gower.
- Author/Editor
- Levelt, Sjoerd.
- Title
- Marcus Boxhorn's Misattribution of Verses from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' to John Gower.
- Published
- Levelt, Sjoerd. "Marcus Boxhorn's Misattribution of Verses from Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' to John Gower." Notes and Queries 67 [265], no.1 (2020): 14-16.
- Review
- Levelt begins his note by correcting the misattribution to Gower in Marcus Boxhorn's "Chronijck van Zeelandt" (1644) of Chaucer's lines from the description of the Merchant (General Prologue 1.273-77) and, tracking variants in Boxhorn's quotation of the lines, identifies the second-hand source of the quotation as an octavo edition of John Selden's "Mare clausum" (STC 22176) owned by Boxhorn. Levelt then goes on to explain that details of Boxhorn's brief biography of Gower which accompanies his misattribution apparently derives from John Bale's "Scriptorum illustrium majoris Britanniae . . . Catalogus," indicating, Levelt shows, that Boxhorn "somehow skipped to the wrong page" and followed Bale's mistaken claim that Gower died in 1402. Despite their interest in English history and literature, Boxhorn and others of his "learned circle" (16) in the seventeenth-century Dutch Low Countries, Levelt concludes, had only limited, secondhand acquaintance with Gower and Chaucer. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Biography of Gower