Before Chaucer, Inc.: Thomas Pope Blount’s Literary History

ABSTRACT This article examines Chaucer’s reception in a fallow period prior to the eighteenth century, when his work decisively rejoined a refurbished English literary canon. In Thomas Pope Blount’s Latin Censura celebriorum authorum (1690) and English De Re Poetica (1694), Chaucer—and medieval England with him—barely registers amid scores of learned writers from the ancient Mediterranean world and seventeenth-century Europe. Blount’s bibliographical compilations express a non-English concept of literature hard to recapture today, after the nationalization and monolingualization of literary studies via the study of Chaucer and other early poets, but ubiquitous in Blount’s lifetime (1649–1697). The article asks what minimal value Chaucer offered to that concept of literature, such that he could be named and honored, yet in no way centralized, in Blount’s literary world.