Collecting Chaucer

Abstract: This essay stems from the biennial lecture of the New Chaucer Society Congress, given at the Huntington Library in Pasadena in July 2024. It explores two contrasting ways of approaching collecting: as something deadening and as something generative. The lecture is divided into four parts. Part I explores theories of collecting, drawing on thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Susan Stewart, and Geraldine Heng. Part II thinks about the Ellesmere Chaucer and its place in the Huntington, comparing the official story of its history and provenance with a shadow-history that foregrounds the women who have been connected with it, from Alice Chaucer to Arabella Huntington. Part III is text-based, and considers Chaucer himself as a collector, contrasting collections of sameness (e.g., The Monk’s Tale ) with collections of difference (such as the Canterbury Tales ). It explores an ecocritical reading of the collection of trees in The Knight’s Tale and close-reads a group of rhyme royal stanzas from Troilus and Criseyde . Finally, Part IV is a meditation on the author’s own experience of collecting and exhibiting Chaucer in 2024 in an exhibition held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Chaucer Here and Now . This exhibition was a celebration of Chaucer across time, showcasing medieval manuscripts and modern films, multilingual translations and newly commissioned cartoons, children’s Chaucers and the Hengwrt manuscript. Collecting Chaucer should not be sterile—it should be, above all, generative, celebrating the past and the present, and pointing forward to the future.