The First Riverside Chaucer

ABSTRACT This article highlights the accomplishments of a nineteenth-century American editor of Chaucer’s works, Arthur Gilman. It describes the nature of those accomplishments and situates them in respect to the Chaucer editorial activity of the time and to Gilman’s background. When Gilman’s Chaucer edition appeared in 1879, it was unprecedented in several ways, and for fifteen years it was the best mostly complete Chaucer ever produced. In particular, the edition, the first newly edited collection of Chaucer’s verse published by an American press, was also the first to make use of the outpouring of Chaucer Society materials that had appeared in the ten years leading up to it, resulting in an edition with a sounder text and more coherent, up-to-date introductory apparatus than any other available at the time. This achievement was all the more impressive given that the man who managed it was a largely self-taught student of medieval literature.