4 - John Shirley and Chaucer’s Anelida: Additional 16165 and Trinity R.3.20

Summary

I turn now to two manuscript anthologies compiled between 1426 and 1432 by England's best-known early fifteenth-century scribe, John Shirley: British Library, Additional MS 16165 and Trinity College, Cambridge MS R.3.20. Shirley and his anthologies have long been acknowledged as invaluable to both Chaucer and Lydgate studies, both because he preserves unique or rare copies of texts, and because we know more about Shirley's life, his connections, his potential audiences, and the impact of his manuscripts’ circulation than about any other fifteenth-century scribe responsible for circulating Chaucer's works. He gives us a window into the literary interests of the nobility, the London bourgeoisie, and the minor gentry and bureaucratic employees who served both the nobility and the royal court. He carefully articulates (and thus shapes) the reputations of the authors whose work he spotlights, especially Chaucer and Lydgate. Moreover, his hortatory prologues and lengthy headings for individual texts construct a reading community with a personal investment in what they read. These characteristics make Shirley's manuscripts crucial for any study of Chaucer's fifteenth-century reputation. Thus, it is particularly significant that Shirley's choices resemble those of other compilers of Chaucer's shorter works. His selections and juxtapositions, like those of the compiler of Gg.4.27, affirm the continuing importance of French literature to early fifteenth-century readers of Chaucer's shorter poems. By placing Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite in contexts that justify female suspicion of fin’amor rhetoric, Shirley helps to perpetuate a fifteenth-century view of Chaucer as “womanis frend.”

Before discussing the manuscript contexts Shirley gives to Anelida, I will first examine the aspects of Shirley's life that put him in a position to collect and circulate the work of Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate and examine the way Shirley constructs (and instructs) the audiences he imagined for his compilation. I then turn to the two miscellanies. In Additional 16165, a collection of texts in English compiled around 1426, Shirley puts Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite in a context that reinforces female skepticism about male fin’amor rhetoric by demonstrating the spectrum of possible intentions that lie behind the rhetoric, from sincere admiration to lust to misogynist beliefs about female fickleness.