Word: chaucer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like hosts of other schoolboy scholars, Nevill Coghill tackled Chaucer in his teens, and found the venerable verses too quaint to be much fun. In time-when Coghill himself had become a relatively venerable (47) fellow of Exeter College, Oxford-he set out to de-quaint The Canterbury Tales...
...remain so until she learns to discipline herself. She has a smattering of many things, talks with skill, has read a scattered collection for counseling as well as for courses. But as a literature major in prospect, she had not, after four weeks of questioning, been able to get Chaucer within two centuries of his presumed time of activity on this earth...
...There still are a few. * Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Nicomachus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Newton, Huygens, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Kant, The Federalist (by Hamilton, Madison and Jay), J. S. Mill, Boswell, Lavoisier, Fourier, Faraday, Hegel, Goethe, Melville, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Most controversial omissions: Luther, Calvin, Moliere, Voltaire, Dickens, Balzac, Einstein...
...Canterbury? The next step was to compare MS. 75 with the longest and best authenticated sample of Chaucer's handwriting-a five-line note written while he was controller of customs at the wool quay. Price looked up the note in the London Public Record Office, photographed it, and showed it to Professor Roger Mynors, an expert on medieval handwriting. Yes, said the professor, the writing in the note and the writing in MS. 75 were very much alike...
Last week Cambridge was putting other experts on the case. Meanwhile, scholars were speculating about the Price find. If Chaucer really did turn out to be the "lewde compilator," scholars would have the first really long specimen of his handwriting. With that key, they could solve many of the mysteries that still exist in Chaucer's texts, might be able to identify other 14th century manuscripts as his. It was even possible that MS. 75 would uncover some more of the tales told more than five centuries ago by those famous old pilgrims to Canterbury...