Putting together the pieces : excerpts from Rolle, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate in fifteenth-century miscellanies

Excerpts copied in miscellanies occupy a significant place in the literary culture of late-medieval England. This dissertation surveys manuscripts excerpting Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Rolle’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and Gower’s Confessio amantis. These manuscripts display a fifteenth-century attitude to authorship that re-shapes modern assumptions about canon formation and the laureation of Chaucer, whose works were often attributed to Lydgate and re-framed to be read through the lens of his poetry. This fifteenth-century “culture of the excerpt” shaped both the composition and reception of canonical Middle English texts, many of which may have been read more often partially than as complete works, with a preference for morally or spiritually instructive excerpts.