Editing Geoffrey Chaucer (section)

===Manuscripts and audience===
The large number of surviving manuscripts of Chaucer's works is testimony to the enduring interest in his poetry prior to the arrival of the printing press. There are 83 surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (in whole or part) alone, along with sixteen of ''Troilus and Criseyde'', including the personal copy of Henry IV.<ref>Benson, Larry, ''The Riverside Chaucer'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 1118.</ref> Given the ravages of time, it is likely that these surviving manuscripts represent hundreds since lost.

Chaucer's original audience was a courtly one and would have included women as well as men of the upper social classes. Yet even before his death in 1400, Chaucer's audience had begun to include members of the rising literate, middle and merchant classes. This included many [[Lollard]] sympathisers who may well have been inclined to read Chaucer as one of their own.

Lollards were particularly attracted to Chaucer's satirical writings about friars, priests, and other church officials. In 1464, John Baron, a tenant farmer in Agmondesham ([[Amersham]] in [[Buckinghamshire]]), was brought before [[John Chadworth]], the [[Bishop of Lincoln]], on charges of being a Lollard heretic; he confessed to owning a "boke of the Tales of Caunterburie" among other suspect volumes.<ref>Potter, Russell A., "Chaucer and the Authority of Language: The Politics and Poetics of the Vernacular in Late Medieval England", ''Assays'' VI (Carnegie-Mellon Press, 1991), p. 91.</ref>