GG sent me a beautiful leather-bound book, The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), The William Caxton Facsimile Edition. Cambridge University Press published only 500 of these in 1973. She owns #248, signed by Cambridge University scholar Walter Hamilton of Magdelene College. On the last page of this huge volume I see a wonderful bookplate with the motto: “Mens Cujusque Is Est Quisque” (‘The mind is the man’). This personal motto belonged to Samuel Pepys, a scholar and writer of the 17th century. He owned the printed 1484 copy they based GG’s fascilie on.
The diarist and bon vivant Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) left his entire library to Cambridge University on his death. That magnificent library contained a handwritten diary Pepys began in 1660 and ended in 1669. Each day he described slices of his exploits. His visits to the theater, music halls, the various actresses he bedded, candid stories of the Court of Charles II and the immoralities there, as well as his career as an Officer in the British Navy. This diary of a privileged gentleman of Restoration England became, on its discovery, a document of immense importance. He wrote the diary in a cryptic code. Scholars broke the code in the 18th century and published this historical first-source record.
Pepys’s Pleasures
Pepys’s diary contains eyewitness accounts of the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of London in 1666. Pepys writes of his own Restoration England’s return to monarchy under Charles II after Oliver Cromwell. A Monarchist, he began his diary the night he accompanied Charles II back to England. A man of boundless energy, he lived a remarkable life with interests in all pleasurable things. As a voracious reader his pleasures included books. He acquired a particular love for Chaucer and amassed poetry volumes and rare manuscripts by Chaucer.
GG’s facsimile is a version of the second edition of Chaucer’s Tales (1484). Pepys purchased the book reproduced in GG’s volume in 1696. Only thirteen copies of the 1483 ORIGINAL printing extant exist. One of the world’s most influential books owned by one of the 17th century’s most famous men, and originally printed in the 15th century by England’s first publisher. Proof that provenance influences the importance of an object.
Who Published Chaucer 75 Years After the Poet’s Death?
William Caxton, a London merchant of the late 15th century, and one of the first men to operate a British printing press, foresaw the importance of The Canterbury Tales, the first book published in England. His first published version of the Tales came from one of 83 manuscripts in 1476. He sold a printed copy to a customer in 1477 who claimed he had a more complete manuscript. Caxton’s second edition (1484) was derived from that version. Caxton added an introduction as well as woodcuts depicting 27 of the 31 pilgrims making their way from Tabard Inn in Southwark, London, to Canterbury, Kent to the shrine of Thomas Becket.
California became home to one of those 83 handwritten illustrated manuscripts, the Ellesmere Manuscript of 1400-1403, located at the Huntington in San Marino. I’m amazed that as many as 83 manuscripts exist 624 years later. Perhaps this gives testimony to the interest in Chaucer’s poetry prior to the arrival of the printing press in England.
The Canterbury Tales Changed Literature
The audience for the Tales shortly after the book’s first publication in 1476 was courtly upper society. As educated upper middle classes of London became readers of Chaucer by the 16th and 17th century, the Tales became the most “printed” book by any English author. Chaucer became the first author to have his works collected in single volume editions as well.
Previous to The Canterbury Tales, the dominant languages for literature in the 14th and 15th century included Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer is credited as the source of the English vernacular tradition—ours to this day. This legitimized the use of Middle English as the dominant literary language, much like Dante did for the Italian vernacular at about the same time.
GG’s facsimile of the 1484 Canterbury Tales, owned by Samuel Pepys in 1696 and reprinted by the Cambridge University Press in an edition of only 500 books, is today sold in UK auctions (I do not find any sales here in the U.S.) for $250. It will become more valuable as time goes on.