2 - Female Voices, French Frames: MS Gg.4.27

Summary

Sometime between 1410 and 1425, an East Anglian scribe copied the manuscript now known as Cambridge University Library Gg.4.27, in the earliest recorded attempt to create a “Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.” This scribe and his work have been the subject of considerable study and disagreement in the last hundred years. He has been variously described as a reasonably careful copyist, an eccentric speller, an aggressive editor, a frustrated scribe dealing with damaged or fragmentary exemplars, even a Dutchman copying English texts he only partially understood. Some of his exemplars seem to have been rather unusual: he preserved a unique version of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, and his is one of only two witnesses to what may be an early draft of Lydgate's Temple of Glass. In contrast, his exemplars for Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales seem fairly conventional, though oddly or poorly copied.

Despite this jumble of contradictions and uncertainties about the quality of the G scribe's exemplars and his work, and despite decades of argument about the questions of authorial intent and attribution raised by his texts, scholars do agree about the importance of Gg.4.27 as a window into the first attempts to construct Chaucer as an author. Matthew Wolfe, following the influential argument of John Fisher, has theorized that Gg.4.27 was the product of John Lydgate's patronage network, probably compiled at Bury St. Edmunds as part of the Lancastrian initiative to establish Chaucer as the champion of an English cultural heritage. However, given that French and English remained intertwined well into the fifteenth century, any aspirations to English cultural heritage would have drawn upon Latin and French models, such as anthologies featuring French authors known to early fifteenth-century English audiences: Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan each helped create the idea of themselves as authors by compiling their own works into manuscript collections. As he tries to give England its first literary foothold in competition with and imitation of France, the compiler of Gg.4.27 evokes connections between Chaucer's work and French lyric from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.