This chapter discusses Chaucer’s reputation in the English Renaissance. This was marked by a fundamental ambivalence: while humanist scholars may have sought to reject earlier writing in favour of a return to antique models of cultural production, Chaucer remained the most substantial example of literary achievement in the vernacular before the sixteenth century. Medieval Chaucer thus represented everything that the newest tendencies of the age aspired towards. The chapter discusses the principal motifs that channelled praise of the Renaissance Chaucer (a living Chaucer, fatherhood); early editions of Chaucer’s collected works; and literary adaptations of Chaucer by the likes of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.