For Elizabethans, modern English literary history began with Chaucer. Looking back, they say him as a noble primitive, a genius in spite of the barbarity of his age and language. In this book, Alice Miskimin attempts a new kind of comparative literary history, combining both historical perspective and critical close reading to reexamine "England's Homer" in the light of the two-hundred year period of transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

A survey of the emergence of the Chaucer canon from manuscript to print shows how progressive corruption changed the texts and how the...