This chapter discusses Chaucer’s language, the difficulties it posed for early modern readers, and the competing claims of superior accuracy and comprehensibility made by contemporary prints. Representing various texts in the Chaucer canon, the manuscripts discussed in this chapter have in common a unique aspect of their provenance – their words have all been corrected, glossed, or emended by different early modern annotators. Through analysis of hundreds of annotations in their manuscript context, the chapter argues that early modern readers sought to perfect the outmoded, error-prone, and sometimes illegible Chaucerian manuscript text, often on the basis of printed editions. These readerly interventions reveal contemporary anxieties about linguistic archaism and textual corruption, and strive to resolve them by recourse to glosses and readings contained in new books.

This chapter considers how the theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana, attributed to John Milton, portrays the Bible’s textual history in such a way as to underwrite the political agency of the Holy Spirit-filled Christian. In this work, which directly confronts the putatively corrosive findings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical scholarship on the biblical text, Milton argues in strikingly unequivocal terms that the biblical text is utterly defenseless to corruption and loss in its passage through history. Paradoxically, however, he argues that this condition of total vulnerability to contingency is providentially ordained, and that it has the effect of emphasizing the preeminence of the Holy Spirit within the individual Christian over the external text. I contend that the challenges for the Christian presented by the corruption and loss of the sacred texts in Milton’s account correspond with his theological politics centered on the struggles and ultimate authority of the Spirit-guided, individual believer encountering the fallen world. This politics is given voice in his tracts Areopagitica and Of Civil Power, and most famously in his epic poem Paradise Lost.

Writing in Ezra Pound and Referentiality, the poet Bob Perelman notes that ‘we have been living in … the Golden Age of Pound Studies’ in which ‘Pound’s already-published writing was read assiduously; much of the huge bulk of his other public and private writing was published; the ramifications of his references were exfoliated, his ellipses were spelled out, the ideograms were translated’. So why, he (provocatively) asks, has it not ‘become increasingly possible and even easy to read Pound’? Perelman’s question, as Pound’s papers continue to surface, becomes ever more pertinent. What in particular has been the value of Pound’s manuscript materials for reading his poems? I wish to suggest that it has been considerable, but also that it does not and can never absolve readers of their critical obligations or resolve certain fundamental ambiguities in Pound’s work.