Chaucer, Geoffrey | The first attempt to collect into a single volume the complete writings of an English author

Chaucer, Geoffrey

[The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed, with Dyers Works Whiche Were Neuer in Print Before: As in the Table More Playnly Dothe Appere. Edited by William Thynne. London: Printed.…..by Thomas Godfray, 1532]

Folio (297 x 205 mm). Black letter. Forty-eight lines plus headline, double columns. Several sets of decorated initials and lombards used as initials, a few capital spaces with guides. Fifteen woodcuts in the Canterbury Tales, three repeated, one three times, a total of twenty impressions. 383 (of 397) leaves, plus an additional leaf (Qq7) containing compartment for divisional title on recto (122), xili-CCxix, [4], CCxx-CCC, CCC-CCCIxxxili leaves); with fourteen leaves, including title, in facsimile [A1-A4, B1, I4, Qq4, Qq5, Qq7, and Vvv2-Vvv6], a few edge tears, stray stains, a few early ink annotations. Bound by Rivière & Son in full brown morocco, covers decoratively paneled in blind, spine in six compartments with five raised bands, gilt-lettered in two compartments and decoratively tooled in blind in the remaining four, board edges and turn-ins ruled in blind, all edges gilt. In a full brown morocco clamshell; one joint split.

First complete collected edition of Chaucer and the first attempt to collect into a single volume the complete writings of an English author. Putting aside Pynson's three separate publications of ca. 1526, Godfray's publication "was the first attempt at a critical edition and for over 200 years provided the standard text of The Canterbury Tales" (Hayward). It was edited by William Thynne, clerk of the kitchen and of the green cloth to Henry VIII, and recipient of numerous grants and appointments. His dedication to Henry VIII (actually written by Sir Brian Tuke) is noteworthy for its remarks on the development of language and on the editor's collection of printed and manuscript works of Chaucer.

As the Pforzheimer catalogue remarks, Thynne's enthusiasm may have outstripped his critical capacity, since more than half of the poems he included were spuriously attributed to Chaucer—giving this work a claim to the title of the earliest English poetical miscellany. Only The Canterbury Tales is illustrated: the cuts of the Knight and Squire are copies from Pynson's 1526 edition (Hodnett 2066, 2067), while the remaining thirteen were cut for Caxton's 1483 edition (Hodnett 214–236).

REFERENCE:

STC 5068; ESTC S106664; Grolier/Langland to Wither 28; Hayward 2; Pforzheimer 173