Dan,
I think the short answer to your first question is that Chaucer
probably had more of what we would now call "market share" than did
Langland, though I admit I haven't done any research on numbers of
printings or numbers of copies printed. I suspect that then as now a
larger expected audience could justify a more elaborate apparatus.
Why Chaucer might have been more popular is a subject for further
investigation, but would involve the general reputations of both
poets at the time of the 16th-century editions, including -- but
certainly not limited to -- their relative markings on the
proto-Protestant scale. A few names that will turn up much relevant
work in a bibliography search on this more general question include
Judith Anderson, Kent Hieatt, Seth Lerer, Alice Miskimin, and Theresa
Krier. And see Paul Ruggiers, ed., _Editing Chaucer: The Great
Tradition_.
On the specific question of the relatively elaborate, scholarly look
of the Chaucer editions, my hunch is that the interest in Chaucer had
more to do with his potential to be cast as proto-Tudor and
proto-humanist than with any tendency toward proto-Protestantism.
The black letter type that was as often as not badly overinked might
well have contributed more to the authority of these editions than it
did to their readability. And a poet who served three kings and
modelled an enlightened and genial high culture seems more likely to
have appealed to Henry VIII than a poet such as Langland who shrilly
denounced authority, even if the particular authorities he was
denouncing were the "bad" ones in Protestant or Henrician terms.
Brian Tuke's preface to Thynne's 1532 edition of Chaucer is dedicated
to Henry and seems very much concerned with the construction of a
literary and linguistic authority that is distinctly English. There
are many other considerations, and I am less familiar with the
Langland situation than you are, but this is what initially comes to
mind for me.
On a rather different tack, Clare Kinney has a good essay on Speght's
scholarly apparatus in his 1598 edition of Chaucer; it's in Theresa
Krier, ed. _Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance_. There is an
essay by R.F. Yeager called "Literary Theory at the Close of the
Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne" that I think would
interest you; I'm afraid I don't remember where it appeared but it
should turn up in MLA.
Dan Knauss wrote:
> >Sender: "FICINO: FICINO Discussion - Renaissance and Reformation
>>Studies" <[log in to unmask]>
>>From: Dan Knauss <[log in to unmask]>
>>Subject: Renaissance editions of Middle English texts
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>>This fall I've been looking at the first 16th century printed editions of
>>Chaucer, Langland, and other medieval authors in an attempt to determine
>>why they might have been printed as they were. Can anyone recommend
>>sources that deal with the question of why Chaucer was always printed in
> >large, complete works editions with a scholarly apparatus?
--
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"Scholarship... It's where we're nearest to our humanness.
Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is
good too, but it's for the faint-hearted."
Housman, in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love
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