At the Bodleian: ‘Chaucer Here and Now’
Philip Knox, 4 April 2024
One of the frustrating things about Chaucer is that the literary archive only begins at the time of his death in 1400. No earlier manuscripts containing his writings survive. This means that we don’t know how his works circulated in his lifetime, what he wanted them to look like, which of the competing versions he preferred, or even, in any detail, who his first readers were. There...