Inside the front cover of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 346, a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britannie, an eighteenth- century owner notes that he has seen the translation of the work by Aaron Thompson, ‘with a large preface wherein he endeavours to prove the author to be a more faithfull Historian, than he is generally esteemd to be’. The reference is to the first English translation of the Historia, which appeared in 1718 with, as the note says, an extensive preface championing Geoffrey's veracity, in particular with reference to the Brutus foundation story. This was, as I have written elsewhere, quite an extraordinary claim to make by this point in Geoffrey's reception history. Thompson was fighting a battle that had been largely settled, and not in Geoffrey's favour, some centuries earlier. There is nothing in the Fitzwilliam annotator's comment to indicate whether he endorsed Thompson's view or not, though the manuscript itself has added chapter divisions based on the divisions in Thompson's translation, suggesting at least some communication between the two books. What is clear is that a reader of the Historia who had also read Thompson would have a very particular sense of what Geoffrey's text is about. Thompson's preface takes Geoffrey's claim to be translating an ancient British book at face value and sees that book as important because of what it has to say about Britain's origins. Thompson goes to great lengths to take issue with early modern antiquarians who queried the Historia's foundation story, remarking, for example, that William Camden was wrong to argue in his Britannia (1586) that Geoffrey was the first to tell the story of Brutus, saying instead, ‘That there had been frequent Mention made of Brutus the Founder of the British Race, by Authors extant long before Jeffrey's Time; and that there had been a constant Tradition either oral or written concerning him, especially among the Britains, even from the first Beginning of the British Nation’. Thompson does concede that ‘it is very well known that … fabulous and legendary Stories, were very well receiv’d in those credulous Times, and that the gravest Writers are not exempt from them’, specifically mentioning ‘several of the most Romantick and incredible Exploits of King Arthur’, and suggesting that the currency of such tales among the Welsh might explain their appearance in Geoffrey's text.

How institutional manuscript collections and archives emerged, and how some of the idiosyncratic systems in place within these establishments were created, helping to anchor the new manuscript scholar.

In the preface to his 1532 printing of the Confessio Amantis, Thomas Berthelette alerts his audience to the textual discrepancies he has found between the written books – the manuscript copies – and the printed ones, by which he means William Caxton’s edition of 1483. He is referring specifically to the differences in the Prologue that distinguish the Ricardian version from the Henrician text presented by Caxton, and he prints lines 24* to 92* in his Preface, to illustrate that difference. Accustomed as we are to Macaulay’s below-the-line, asterisked representation of the Ricardian commission story, Berthelette’s choice may seem at first to align with Macaulay’s editorial preference for the Henrician version. Examining Berthelette’s language, however, gives us rather a different story. Macaulay’s choice was based on an assessment of the manuscript record and on the critical assumptions of his day about how to represent an author’s final intentions, when dealing with a revised work. Berthelette’s decision, on the other hand, is based on attitudes towards the material witnesses and their status.

Berthelette presents his decision as a pragmatic one, saying that he has chosen to follow print for his own edition, rather than the manuscript record, as there are more printed books than there are manuscripts. By Berthelette’s day it doubtless was easier for Gower’s would-be readers to access print rather than manuscript copies.

It is a commonplace of modern criticism that a fruitful way of understanding medieval literary texts is to consider the ways in which they engage with the social hierarchies, institutions, conventions, behaviours and ideologies of their day. As Janet Coleman put it, relatively few works of fourteenth-century literature ‘were meant merely to entertain but were intended to instruct, exhort and, ultimately, to inspire readers to criticize and eventually to reform social practice, by which was meant the behaviour of church officials and the politically and economically powerful’. As Helen Barr argues, literary language is neither independent of reality nor a passive reflection of it, but is itself a form of social practice or behaviour. Both old and new historicist approaches have been extremely influential amongst scholars of medieval literature, particularly those working on Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet, in many ways, the works of John Gower are even more readily open to historicist readings than are those of Chaucer, against which Gower's verse is so often compared or judged. After all, whilst Chaucer tended to engage with the social, political and religious controversies of the day obliquely or in an allegorical form, Gower explicitly addressed the conflicts which divided his contemporaries. If Chaucer's ‘Knight's Tale’ provides us with a mirror for princes in the guise of a roman antique about Duke Theseus of Athens, then Book VII of Gower's Confessio Amantis directly sets out the virtues needed in a king. Whilst Chaucer's ‘Miller's Tale’ is often read as a peasants’ revolt in literary form, with the Miller's bawdy fabliau being pitted against the hierarchical world-view of the ‘Knight's Tale’ which precedes it, Book I of Gower's Vox Clamantis offers us a detailed response to the events of the actual Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Thus, although it would be a mistake to take Gower's works as merely straightforward reportage, it remains crucial to acknowledge how Gower addressed the issues of his day. Because Gower's work includes such overt political and social commentary, an understanding of the period in which his work was rooted is particularly important. The aim of this volume is to enable a group of historians to bring their specialist expertise to bear on Gower's poetry and to show what a detailed knowledge of England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries can add to our understanding of his work.