Acknowledgements

This book is informed by questions raised during my doctoral work on early modern readers of Chaucer in print, and has now been reconceived to take account of manuscript evidence. For supporting my early investigations into Chaucer’s reception, profound thanks are due to Helen Cooper, Jason Scott-Warren, Daniel Wakelin, and Richard Beadle, to the Gates Cambridge Trust, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). I am indebted, too, to those in Toronto who first put me on the path to becoming a Chaucerian, particularly Alexandra Gillespie, Chester Scoville, Kimberly Yates, and the Jackman Humanities Institute. At Oxford, my training as a medievalist was generously supported by the Cecil Lubbock Memorial Scholarship at Trinity College. More recently, when I returned to Oxford as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, I was welcomed by Jane Griffiths and Daniel Wakelin, by Kantik Ghosh and Valerie Worth at Trinity, and by Carolyne Larrington, Maggie Snowling, William Whyte, and the Fellowship of St John’s.

My colleagues in Geneva’s English department have been a source of inspiration and encouragement, and in this regard I wish to single out Guillemette Bolens, Sarah Brazil, Lily Dessau, Erzsi Kukorelly, and especially Lukas Erne. For granting access to the collections of the Fondation Bodmer, I am grateful to Jacques Berchtold and Nicolas Ducimetière and, for their longstanding collaborations, to Jérôme David, Radu Suciu, the late Michel Jeanneret, and the Bodmer Lab. Philippe Coet, Susan Mesa, Angela Simondetto, Clare Tierque, and Hélène Vincent have provided vital support. For advice and assistance of countless sorts, I thank Pascale Aebischer, Marianne Bauer, Julia Boffey, Amy Brown, Alison Bumke, Benjamin Cartlidge, Charles Chadwyck-Healey, Margaret Connolly, Jacqueline Cowan, Orietta Da Rold, Sonja Drimmer, Martha Driver, A. S. G. Edwards, Barry Everitt, Mary Flannery, Alexandra Gillespie and the OBNS Lab, Jane Griffiths, Ralph Hanna, Ben Higgins, Petra Hoffman, Holly James-Maddocks, Hope Johnston, David Matthews, Jean-Christophe Mayer, M. J. Kidnie, J. R. Mattison, Marc Mierowsky, James Misson, Alan Nelson, Scott Newstok, Winfried Rudolf, Emily Rutherford, Hannah Ryley, J. D. Sargan, Daniel Sawyer, Jeremy Smith, Paul Strohm, Michael Suarez, S.J., Simon Swift, Juliette Vuille, Daniel Wakelin, and Alison Wiggins.

Work towards this book was facilitated by grants from the New Chaucer Society, SAUTE and SAGW in Switzerland, and the Barry Bloomfield Award of the Bibliographical Society. Librarians at the Bodleian, the British Library, the Huntington, John Rylands, Lichfield Cathedral, Glasgow University, Trinity College Dublin, and colleges across Oxford and Cambridge all lent their expertise, and are cited individually in the pages that follow. Material from the book has been presented to medievalists and early modernists in Switzerland (SAMEMES; the Geneva Doctoral Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern English), in England (the Geneva-Exeter Research Exchange; the Oxford Medieval English Research Seminar), in Scotland (the Glasgow English Language and Linguistics Seminar; the St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies), and at various international meetings of the Early Book Society and New Chaucer Society. I wish to thank the audiences and organisers of these meetings, and in particular Pascale Aebischer, James Balfour, Guillemette Bolens, Margaret Connolly, Martha Driver, Lukas Erne, Tim Greenwood, Daniel Wakelin, and Alison Wiggins for the invitations to share my work and for the rich discussions that ensued.

At Cambridge University Press, Emily Hockley shepherded the book along its way, providing encouragement and expert advice at every turn. I am grateful to her and to the two anonymous external readers for the Press, whose suggestions and insights were most valuable. Sarah Lambert, George Laver, Anika Parsons, and Bharathan Sankar were valued collaborators during production. Special thanks are due to Hannah Ryley and Paula Clarke Bain for creating the bibliography and indexes respectively. A subsidy awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) supported the pre-press stage of this book’s publication. Another version of the discussion of Chaucer’s portraits in Chapter 4 has previously appeared in Digital Philology 9.2, 177–98.

For so many things, my husband Jasmeer deserves more acknowledgement than I have space to express in the preface of any book. Finally, for their many years of unremitting love and support, I wish to thank the Virdees, Ravina, Narvin, Nirvana, and most of all, my mother Fazia.