John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England

John Shirley was an important scribe of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century vernacular poetry and especially of the works of Chaucer and Lydgate. Some poems are known only through Shirley's copies. This monograph examines all the extant documents relating to Shirley's life and charts his career as secretary to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. It offers detailed analyses of Shirley's three main anthologies, and also surveys books that were owned or handled by him. Attention is also paid to Shirley's work as a translator, and to the impact of his work on a later generation of fifteenth-century scribes.