The first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, this book focuses chiefly on fifteenth-century manuscripts and discusses how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed in an age of the poet's prominence in print. Each chapter argues that patterns in the material interventions made by readers in their manuscripts – correcting, completing, supplementing, and authorising – reflect conventions which circulated in print, and convey prevailing preoccupations about Chaucer in the period: the antiquity and accuracy of his words, the completeness of individual texts and of the canon, and the figure of the author himself. This unexpected and compelling evidence of the interactions between fifteenth-century manuscripts and their early modern analogues asserts print's role in sustaining manuscript culture and thus offers fresh scholarly perspectives to medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the book. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Winner, 2024 Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, The Medieval Academy of America

‘Devani Singh reveals how extensively early modern readers engaged with Chaucer's works. This is an important contribution to debates about periodisation. Singh's elegant study underlines the importance of the manuscript book in the age of print, and will increase awareness of the continuities in literary consumption across the period 1400–1600.'

Margaret Connolly - University of St Andrews

‘Scrupulously substantiated and cross-referenced, this book brings to life an intriguing cast of Chaucer readers and the volumes they owned.’

Julia Boffey - The Times Literary Supplement

‘… this is a valuable book, the product of an alert bibliographical intelligence linked to a keen sense of literary history. Dr. Singh demonstrates a firm grasp of the significance of the material forms and is able to convincingly interpret the evidence that they provide. All who are interested in the early reception of Chaucer will read this book to their profit.’

A. S. G. Edwards Source: SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature

‘Devani Singh’s erudite and clearly written study of the reception of Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval manuscripts in the centuries following his death is a welcome addition to scholarship on the complex, overlapping cultures of print and manuscript books that existed in early modern England. … A well written, cogently argued, and thought-provoking book, Chaucer’s Early Modern Readers will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the book, the reception history of Chaucer and of medieval manuscripts more broadly, early English canon formation, questions of periodization, and the intersection between manuscript and print culture in early modern England.’

Robert Stretter Source: The Spenser Review

‘Chaucer’s Early Modern Readers is a thorough and insightful addition to our understanding of how Chaucer was read and indeed created in both early print and in manuscript. By foregrounding the manuscripts that circulated alongside early modern printed books, Singh refocuses scholarly attention, emphasizing the interaction between two media still often considered separately. Though the book focuses on Chaucer, scholars interested in the reception of medieval texts more broadly-the reception of Gower, Lydgate, Hoccleve, and others-will find much of interest in Singh’s compelling book, as will scholars thinking about periodization and materiality as it pertains to the medieval/early modern divide.’

Mimi Ensley Source: Studies in the Age of Chaucer

‘This is a valuable book, the product of an alert bibliographical intelligence linked to a keen sense of literary history. Dr. Singh demonstrates a firm grasp of the significance of the material forms and is able to convincingly interpret the evidence that they provide. All who are interested in the early reception of Chaucer will read this book to their profit.’

A. S. G. Edwards Source: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature

‘[The book’s] novelty emerges from the painstaking attention that Singh has devoted to an astonishing range of often little-known primary sources. Weaving together a mass of often scattered manuscript evidence, Singh argues that print enabled and inspired the continued use, repair, and manipulation of fifteenth-century Chaucer manuscripts rather than caused their obsolescence.… Singh’s richly detailed book is at its most original when it analyzes the transmission of text, images, and ideas across media. It makes valuable contributions both to Chaucer studies and to book historical scholarship on the relationship between manuscript and print.’

John Colley Source: Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies