In 1933 Alois Brandl, Professor of English at the University of Berlin, reviewed The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin (Boston) and earlier in the same year in Britain by Oxford University Press. In his review, Brandl expresses his astonishment at the publication of an edition of Chaucer by “the biggest publisher in English studies” compiled by someone he does not know:

Brandl’s astonished condescension was not based on inexperience. Even at the age of seventy-eight, he was the chair of his department and the Nestor of English studies in the German-speaking world. In the 1870s and 1880s, he studied in Berlin and Vienna with the founders of English and German philology, Wilhelm Scherer, Karl Müllenhoff, Julius Zupitza, Jakob Schipper, and Erich Schmidt, and he later held positions at the universities of Vienna, Prague, Göttingen, Strassburg, and Berlin. His list of achievements includes studies on some of the major authors from the Middle English through the Romantic periods (e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge), the essay on “English Philology” for the compendious tome Die deutschen Universitäten, through which the German universities proudly exhibited German academic accomplishments for the 1893 Chicago World Exposition, a hefty history of English literature, and the editorship of the prestigious Shakespeare Jahrbuch and Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen.