Things Lost and Things Found in Kynaston’s Chaucer

• In Event: Lost and Found I

Abstract

Famous lost things, or deperdita, once served as a coherent conceptual category, popularized by Guido Pancirolli in his popular Two Books of Things Lost and Things Found (1599 and 1602). Malleable glass, incombustible linen, specular stone, perpetual lamps and motion–these lost objects often promised, poignantly, to overcome fragility and defeat loss itself. These charismatic objects - and the tantalizing possibility of finding them again - lent material urgency to Renaissance recovery. Pancirolli’s catalogue of the non-existent plays a large role in several early seventeenth-century English projects of collective memory, including those of Robert Burton, George Hakewill, and Henry Peacham. Concentrating on Francis Kynaston’s use of Pancirolli in his commentary on Chaucer, I will argue that galleries of lost things allowed such writers to connect, in newly charismatic ways, commentaries on antiquity and meditations upon loss with manual attempts at recovery and invention.

Author

• Vera A. Keller, University of Oregon, Clark Honors College