A poem. Canterbury Tales. King Edward VI. Intriguing!
From a piece in WVU Today...
She and the students headed to the Rare Book Room on the sixth floor of the Downtown Library where Treharne happened to open a 1561 edition of works by Geoffrey Chaucer that includes The Canterbury Tales.
She opened it, and saw the Latin poem pasted in the back of the book.
From that moment, time works backward.
The investigation
To discover the origins of this poem, all Treharne has is the Latin, her own research experience and a name. As a medievalist, Treharne rarely studies anything more recent than 1200 C.E., but she’s interested in what the elegantly handwritten words signify.
She did what many folks in the 21st Century do as the first step of research, even if it involves the 16th Century. She Googled it.
She assumed what was tucked in the book was only a copy of a known poem. But it wasn’t on the Internet. None of the scholars she spoke with had heard of it.
The name in the front pages of the book and at the base of the poem is Elizabeth Dacre. And Treharne’s translation of the poem revealed another name – the person for whom the poem was written: Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI, son of King Henry VIII.
So Treharne searched for Elizabeth, from the U.S. and in England.
And the story she found is as unconventional as its heroine.
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