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This book explores both the value and the potential pitfalls of reading the literature and drama of the period from the 1380s to the Reformation ‘historically’, that is, in dialogue with historical events and the political cultures of the communities which produced and received it. It examines a wide range of dramatic and literary texts, some of which, like Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Sir David Lyndsay’s monumental drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis are relatively well known. Others, like the early Tudor Interlude of Godly Queen Hester, are perhaps less so. What drives the book is a belief that studying the literature of a period provides a far richer experience of its culture and politics than consideration of ‘historical’ documents alone. To read literature historically allows us to see how contemporary men and women deployed the ideas, concepts and symbols that mattered to them and how they represented their own relationships to such ideas and symbols. It allows us to hear them discussing questions of morality, identity, belief, private and public probity and responsibility openly and at length, and suggests how those men and women might respond, emotionally and aesthetically (as well as intellectually or pragmatically) to moral, social, and political issues. To read literature historically is, then, to attend to history imaginatively and aesthetically, with a fuller regard to the concerns, at once both intimately personal and broadly cultural, that underpinned political action, and the beliefs that gave meaning to individual behaviour.

What happens when Chaucer turns up where we don’t expect him to be? Transporting Chaucer draws on the work of the British sculptor Antony Gormley alongside more traditional literary scholarship to show that Chaucer’s play with textual history and chronological time prefigures how his poetry becomes incorporate with later (and earlier) texts. The shuttling of bodies, names, and sounds in and amongst works that Chaucer did write anticipates Chaucerian presences in later (and earlier) works that he did not. Chaucer’s characters, including ‘himself’ refuse to stay put in one place and time. This book bypasses the chronological borders of literary succession to read The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s Dream Vision poetry in present company with Chaucerian ‘apocrypha’, and works by Shakespeare, Davenant and Dryden. Conventional models of source and analogue study are re-energised to reveal unexpected (and sometimes unsettling) literary cohabitations and re-placements. Transporting Chaucer presents innovative readings of relationships between medieval texts and early modern drama, and between literary texts and material culture. Associations between medieval architecture, pilgrim practice, manuscript illustration, and the soundscapes of dramatic performance reposition how we read Chaucer’s oeuvre and what gets made of it. Written for scholars and students (undergraduate and graduate) who work in medieval English literary studies and early modern drama, Transporting Chaucer offers a new approach to how we encounter texts through time.