The "1689 Chaucer": A Reissue of the Last Black-Letter Chaucer Edition

A recently discovered copy of the Collected Works of contains a title page that claims it was printed in 1689, but it has not yet been recorded in the electronic English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). The 1689 Chaucer has been known to scholars at least since 1963, but it appears that until this year no descriptions were made based upon actual examination of a copy. (1) Now the 1689 can certainly be identified as a reissue of leaves from the 1687 printing with a new title page. (2) The only point that distinguishes its title page from copies of the 1687 edition is the booksellers' description. Based on the evidence in the booksellers' lozenges on the title pages, this edition may have been issued in four different states over the course of two years by a consortium of at least five booksellers and the printer, one J.H., generally believed to be Harefinch. (3) The 1689 title page represents the last campaign to sell copies of the 1687 resetting of Speght's 1602 edition with a hybrid typographic style that put contemporary commentary in Roman type and Chaucer's text in Gothic, with some modernized spelling. This is a compelling visual indicator of late-seventeenth-century readers' reverence for Chaucer's poetry and of their failing ability to construe his Middle English and to read black-letter text. Though the 1687 has little to tell scholars about Chaucer's text, the variant issues of the title page may reveal useful insights about readers' reception of Chaucer's works in the transition from the Renaissance to the modern era. Many of the booksellers named on the title page bearing the 1689 date also seem to have participated in an emerging English rare-book market for bibliophiles. Beginning just ten years before the 1687 printing, these same booksellers distributed numerous free auction sale catalogues describing book and art collections to promote book collecting, apparently a profitable side business to selling these same customers newly printed editions. (4) The auction catalogues' titles emphasized the learned disciplines of the books' subjects and the antique status of their editions. Simultaneously, older black-letter editions, especially the 1602 Speght, appear to have become both rare and sought-after. For instance, Samuel Pepys' 1684 diary entry records his visit to St. Paul's to direct the deliberately archaic binding of his 1602 Chaucer, a volume he may have sought for as much as a year: were not full neate enough for me, but pretty well it is; and thence to the clasp-maker's to have it clasped and bossed. (5) This emerging market for collectable copies of old editions may have been one factor motivating the printer and booksellers to produce this new, hybrid Speght edition in black letter with modernized apparatus which could be sold as a bargain to customers unable to acquire or to afford its rarer ancestors. Derek Pearsall described the 1687 resetting of Thomas Speght's 1602 edition of Chaucer's collected works as the last in what might be called a spate of Chaucerian beginning in 1532. (6) The title page of the only issue recorded in ESTC listed the place of publication as London and gave the date in Roman numerals as 1687. The only evidence of the printer's identity was a one-page Advertisement signed J.H. To identify J.H. as Harefinch, Pearsall referred to Charles Muscatine's Book of Geoffrey Chaucer, a 1963 monograph. Neither Pearsall nor Muscatine had seen a copy of the 1687 edition with the John title page, however. For this, they both depended upon William Alderson's research from the 1960s, though this identification also was based upon a secondhand description of a copy that was apparently never seen again. William Alderson wrote that P. L. Heyworth, the University of Toronto medievalist, had sent him the collation of a 1687 volume described in the 1956 catalogue of Folio Books, Oxford, whose title page listed no booksellers but specified that the books were Printed and are to be sold by Harefinch in Montague Court in Little Britain. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.