Constructing the Chaucer corpus: A study of Cambridge, University Library, MS. Gg.4.27.

Cambridge, University Library, MS. Gg.4.27, brings together more of Geoffrey Chaucer's work than any other extant manuscript. It contains Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales, Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Fowls, and other poems. MS. Gg.4.27 is also important for its unique spellings, its organization, and its value as a corpus. Based on my examination of the manuscript, I argue that MS. Gg.4.27 is the earliest surviving effort to create a corpus of Chaucer's poetry and that the manuscript and its production provide important information about the reception of Chaucer in the fifteenth century. As there are no manuscripts of Chaucer's works that have been dated to his lifetime, we are largely dependent upon the fifteenth-century reception of Chaucer for what we know and read. The basis for understanding the reception of Chaucer's work in the fifteenth century, therefore, must be the early manuscripts in which it is contained, and the most useful of these is MS. Gg.4.27 because of the complexity of its production and the scope of its contents. A codicological study of MS. Gg.4.27 illustrates how the early fifteenth century created a narrative of Chaucer. MS. Gg.4.27 is mutilated; portions of leaves and even entire leaves are missing. However, MS. Gg.4.27 was a lavish manuscript produced in East Anglia. Multiple hands and artists who exhibit East Anglian characteristics were involved in the project and indicate possible points of origin. Producing such a corpus would have involved significant time and money for the collecting of exemplars, for laying out the codex, and for editing the individual works. These features become singular evidence about how the early fifteenth century constructed Chaucer, the poet. Finally, the construction itself is contextualized to explore the possibility that this perspective of Chaucer was created in response to the growing interest in the English language during the early fifteenth century.