At a time of growing anxiety about the relationship between the analogue and digital worlds, there is cheering news from the British Library. The work of Geoffrey Chaucer has just been added to a digital archive that is free to view anywhere in the world. Cynics may wonder who will be cheered, apart from a scattering of medievalist scholars. But they would be missing the point not only about the intrinsic value of the democratisation of ancient and delicate cultural treasures, but also about the beauty of being able, anytime or anywhere, to peer back into the past.
Chaucer offers a particularly strong case for this. More than 600 years after his death, he remains one of the greatest writers in the English language. He is also a rarity as one of its most widely reproduced, yet who lived before the arrival of the printing press. The contemporary who described him as “firste fyndere of our fair language” spoke truer than he knew. To look through successive editions to the fragments of medieval manuscripts is the literary equivalent of seeing back to the big bang through a six-century swirl of accretions, from translations to illustrations and adaptations.
