Geoffrey Chaucer: 
The Electronic Canterbury Tales

Daniel T. Kline | U of Alaska Anchorage | Dept of English | CV | Pedagogy  

"But now to yow, ye loveres that ben here,  Was Troilus nought in a kankedort?"

Troilus and Criseyde 
2: 1751-52

Web Kankedort.net

Electronic Canterbury Tales - Kankedort.Net Index Page

1. The Canterbury Tales in Middle English

2. The Canterbury Tales in Translation

3. General Historical & Cultural Backgrounds

4. Sources, Analogues, & Related Texts

5. Online Notes & Commentary

6. Online Articles & Books

7. Student Projects & Essays

8. Online Bibliography

9. Syllabi & Course Descriptions

10. Images & Multimedia

11. Audio Files & Language Helps

12. Potpourri

13. Additional Resources

14. Scholar's Dozen

15. What's New? Recent Additions to the ECT

An Online Compendium and Companion
to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

WHAT'S NEW?

• See the ECT's Revision History for an overview

• Manuscripts, Printed Editions, and e-Texts - A new page in the Electronic Canterbury Tales!

• Last revision on 05 January 2007

Manuscripts, 
Printed Editions, & E-Texts

Although not Chaucer related, the Archimedes Palimpsest, detailing the efforts of scientists and scholars to recover the earliest Greek text of Archimedes' The Method, Stomachion, and On Floating Bodies beneath the text of a 10th century prayer book, is a fascinating website describing state-of-the art conservation and recovery technologies applied to a medieval manuscript. Well worth a look.

1.  In Middle English

 The University of Virginia e-text collection has a searchable version of the Canterbury Tales (based upon Robinson, 1957), at the UVa main page.

Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse has a large number of important primary texts, often older Early English Text Society volumes. The new editions also boast an upgraded search engine (Paul Schaffner & Perry Willett, UMichigan). Most important for Chaucer studies are the Chaucer Society editions of important early  manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (edited by the indefatigable Furnivall), including:

•  The Ellesmere Ms of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 2, 8, 16, 26, 32, 38, 50, 70 (1868-1879).
• The Hengwrt Ms of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 3, 9, 27, 39, 51, 71 (1869-1881).
• The Cambridge Ms (University library, Gg. 4.27) of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 4, 10, 17, 28, 33, 40, 52, 66 (1868-1884).
• The Corpus Ms (Corpus Christi coll., Oxford) of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 5, 11, 18, 34, 41, 53, 67 (1868-1884).
• The Lansdowne ms of Chaucer's Canterbury tales, ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 7, 13, 20, 36, 43, 55, 69 (1868-1884).
• The Harleian Ms. 7334 of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 73 (1885).
• The Petworth Ms. of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 6, 12, 19, 35, 42, 54, 68 (1868-1884).
• The Cambridge Ms. Dd. 4. 24. of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, completed by the Egerton ms. 2726 (the Haistwell ms), ed. F.J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society, 1st ser., 95, 96 (1902).

Arnie Sanders (Goucher College) has written a brief "explanation for how the manuscripts of CT were placed in "families," and how manuscripts get accidentally altered in production.  The errors actually turned out to help us discover the relationships among the MSS." See also his nice introduction to Canterbury Tale Orders. 

L. Kip Wheeler offers a very nice overview of manuscript issues in his Manuscript Talk (Carson-Newman College). Requires MS PowerPoint.

Read the General Prologue, Fragment I, Fragment III, and the Shipman and Pardoner's Tales in the famous Hengwrt manuscript (Hg, Nat. Lib. Wales Peniarth 392), one of the two most important early manuscripts, at the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry On-line site (e-text by Ian Lancashire). The Chaucer link will take you to the Hengwrt transcriptions. The Ellesmere ms (El) is the other important early manuscript.

• The Scrivener's Tale: How Chaucer's Sloppy Copyist was Unmasked after 600 Years (Guardian Unlimited, UK) details how Adam Pinkhurst has been "recognised as the scrivener of the two most authoritative copies of the Canterbury Tales: the Hengwrt manuscript, which is now in the National Library of Wales, and the Ellesmere manuscript, kept in San Marino, California."

2.  In Modern English Translation

Scott Gettman's edition of the Canterbury Tales (Electronic Literature Foundation) is accessible by individual tale & available in a variety of formats:  Middle English, Modern English, Facing Page, & Interpolated - Glossed (frames; from unknown base text).

• Although unsuitable for formal research or college work, the ELF is the best online version for younger readers and those unfamiliar with Middle English. Easily navigable, and the Middle English glosses are very helpful.

The Litrix Reading Room translation of the Canterbury Tales features rhyming couplets.

Sinan Kökbugur's helpfully glossed hypertext Middle English rendition of the complete Canterbury Tales is available at the Librarius page. Use the Table of Contents in the left frame to click on a specific Tale, and difficult terms and phrases are glossed in the lower frame. 

Skip Knox's selection of Canterbury Tales in Modern English (Boise State) includes the Prologue to the Second Nun's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale (from an unknown base text).

3.  Historical & Cultural Backgrounds

The Studio for Digital Projects and Research (NYU) has put together a helpful page detailing aspects of the Canterbury Tales Project (DeMontfort U), including the 88 known pre-1500 witnesses to the text of the Canterbury Tales.

See the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University, Budapest's Medieval Manuscript Manual for a detailed overview of medieval manuscript production techniques, examples, and cultural context. The Table of Contents follows:

• I.  Art Patronage and Function of Medieval Manuscripts 
  •     2. The Use of Books
• II. Materials and Techniques of Manuscript Production
  •     1. Parchment
  •     2. Papyrus
  •     3. Paper 
  •     4. Ruling
  •     5. Pen
  •     6. Ink
  •     7. Gilding
  •     8. Pigments
  •     9. Bookbinding
• III.   The Structure of Medieval Books
  •    2. Arrangement of the Text
• IV. Typology of Medieval Books
  •     1. The Bible
  •     2. Liturgical Books
  •     3. Diverse Types of Books
• V. Manuscript Illumination
  •     1-2. History, Artists, and Works
  •     3. Illumination in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
• VI. Glossary
• VII. Bibliography

4.  Sources, Analogues, & Related Texts

5.   Online Notes & Commentary

David Scott Wilson-Okamura (East Carolina U) has developed a fine classroom exercise, with bibliography, illustrating Examples of Chaucerian Revision and "describing examples of authorial revision in the Canterbury Tales. Probably best used in conjunction with a facsimile of the Hengwrt manuscript." In Wilson-Okamura's own words, "Note: author buys Ralph Hanna's booklet theory of Hengwrt MS without reservation, ignores N. F. Blake at his peril." Also available as a .pdf file. 

L. Kip Wheeler offers a very nice overview of manuscript issues in his Manuscript Talk (Carson-Newman College). Requires MS PowerPoint.

Arnie Saunders (Goucher College) has written a brief "explanation for how the manuscripts of CT were placed in "families," and how manuscripts get accidentally altered in production.  The errors actually turned out to help us discover the relationships among the MSS." See also his nice introduction to Canterbury Tale Orders. 

From Barbara Bordalejo (Canterbury Tales Project - DeMontfort U), a fully searchable online edition of Caxton's two printed editions of the Canterbury Tales: Caxton's Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies. Search the page by page comparison of Caxton's two editions.

• See also Peter Robinson's (DeMontfort U) "Electronic Textual Editing: The Canterbury Tales and Other Medieval Texts," as well as a series of important essays on digital textuality, at the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium website. 

The Canterbury Tales Project (Peter Robinson, U of Birmingham) has generously made available a series of articles and working papers describing the CTProject in detail, including the following:

• From The Canterbury Tales Project: Occasional Papers, Volume 1, ed. Norman Blake and Peter Robinson (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1993):

  • Norman Blake & Peter Robinson, "Preface" (pp. 1-4)

  • Norman Blake, "Editing the Canterbury Tales: An Overview" (pp. 5-18)

  • Peter Robinson & Elizabeth Solopova, "Guidelines for Transcription of the Manuscripts of the Wife of Bath's Prologue" (pp. 19-52)

  • Robert O'Hara & Peter Robinson, "Computer-assisted Methods of Stemmatic Analysis" (pp. 53-74)

  • Daniel Mosser, "A New Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales" (pp. 75-84)

  • Stephen Partridge, "The Canterbury Tales Glosses and the Manuscript Groups" (pp. 85-94)

• From The Canterbury Tales Project: Occasional Papers, Volume 2, ed. Norman Blake and Peter Robinson (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1997):

  • Norman Blake & Peter Robinson: "Preface" (pp. 1-4)

  • Norman Blake: "The Project's Lineation System" (pp. 5-14)

  • Simon Horobin: "Editorial Assumptions and the Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales" (pp. 15-21)

  • Beverly Kennedy: "Contradictory Responses to the Wife of Bath as evidenced by Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Variants" (pp. 23-39)

  • Daniel W. Mosser: "The Language, Hands and Interaction of the Two Scribes of the Egerton 2726 Chaucer Manuscript (En¹" (pp. 41-53)

  • Michael Pidd & Estelle Stubbs: "From Medieval Manuscripts to Electronic Text: A Transcriber's Tale" (pp. 55-59)

  • Michael Pidd, Estelle Stubbs & Claire E. Thomson: "The Hengwrt Canterbury Tales: Inadmissible Evidence?" (pp. 61-68)

  • Peter Robinson: "A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century Witnesses to The Wife of Bath's Prologue" (pp. 69-132)

  • Elizabeth Solopova: "The Problem of Authorial Variants in The Wife of Bath's Prologue" (pp. 133-142)

  • Elizabeth Solopova: "Chaucer's Metre and Scribal Editing in the Early Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales" (pp. 143-164)

  • Reviews: of the Variorum General Prologue; of The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions; of the Cowen/Kane edition of The Legend of Good Women (pp. 165-179)

• From the Canterbury Tales Project CDs:

  • Peter Robinson, "Editor's Introduction, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM, ed. Peter Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).

  • Peter Robinson and Norman Blake, "General Editors' Preface;" Elizabeth Solopova, Editor's Introduction;" Peter Robinson, "Analysis Workshop," The General Prologue on CD-ROM, ed. Elizabeth Solopova (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).

  • Estelle Stubbs, "Editor's Introduction;" Daniel W. Mosser, "Manuscript Description;" Simon Horobin, "The Language of the Hengwrt Chaucer," From The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile, ed. Estelle Stubbs (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000).

  • Peter Robinson, "Editor's Introduction" and "Rationale and Implementation of the Collation System Used on this CD-ROM," The Miller's Tale on CD-ROM, ed. Peter Robinson (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2004).

Barbara Bordalejo, current director of the Canterbury Tales Project, has also generously made her two dissertations available online (unrevised):

• The Phylogeny of the Tale-Order in the Canterbury Tales (NYU):
• Title
• Front matter
• Introduction
• Chapter I: A Historical Survey of the Scholarship Concerning the Tale-Order Problem
• Chapter II: A History of the Stemmatic Approach to the Criticism of Texts
• Chapter III: Stemmatic Analysis and Tale Order
• Chapter IV: Analysis of the Trees Produced Using Phylogenetic Software
• Chapter V: Relationship between the Tale-Order and the Word-Variant Stemmata
• Chapter VI: Codicological Analysis and Its Implications for the Tale-Order Problem
• Conclusions
• Works Cited
• The Manuscript Source of Caxton's Second Edition of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in the Textual Tradition of the Tales (DeMonfort U):
• Introduction
• Chapter I: A Historical Survey of Scholarship of Cx2, Especially Focused on the Problem of its Source
• Chapter II: Bibliographical Description: The St. John's College, Oxford Copy
• Chapter III: The Order of the Tales
• Chapter IV: Theoretical Aspects of Textual Variation
• Chapter V: Variants Single Lower Case Signatures (a to v)
• Chapter VI: Variants Double Lower Case Signatures (aa to ii)
• Chapter VII: Variants Single Upper Case Signatures (A to L)
• Conclusions
• Works Cited

Bordalejo also states, "Although these versions are thought to be the same as those publically available through University of Michigan, as a textual critic I am aware that 'textual control' is never as strict as one thinks. I would appreciate if you could contact me if you intend to quote from these works."

6.  Online Articles & Books

  Timothy A. Shonk explicates the creation of an important early manuscript in B.L. Harley MS 7333: The "Publication" of Chaucer in the Rural Areas Essays in Medieval Studies 15 (1998): 81-90.  

  Paul G. Remley's An Electronic Reading-Text of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a fine (early) accounting of new forms of e-textuality and their application to the Tales.

7.  Student Projects & Essays

Anniina Jokkinen's Essays and Articles on Chaucer includes a number of sample student essays, of varying quality.  Like any other source, student essays must be evaluated rigorously, cited correctly, and  used responsibly.

8.  Online Bibliography

9.  Syllabi & Course Descriptions

See Steven Reimer's excellent online course, Manuscript Studies: Medieval and Early Modern (U of Alberta), for an excellent introduction and overview to the composition and development of medieval texts. The Table of Contents is as follows: 

• I. Towards a definition of "manuscript studies"
  • I.ii. The four branches of bibliographical study
    I.iii. Topics in the social history of texts
    
• II. Diplomatics
  
• III. Codicology
  • III.ii. Decoration and Illumination
    
• IV. Paleography
  • IV.ii. Historical Notes
  • IV.iii. Writing Implements
  • IV.iv. Letter Formation
  • IV.v. Special Characters in English Manuscripts
  • IV.vi. Scribal Abbreviations
  • IV.vii. Punctuation
    • IV.viii. Paleographical sample: William Herebert, OFM (early fourteenth-century England)
    • Herebert sample, with transcription
    • Herebert sample: enlargement of full page reproduced at high resolution
      
• V. Textual analysis (James E. Thorpe)
  • V.ii. Scribal error
  • V.iii. Kinds of edition
  • V.iv. Examples of over emendation on insufficient grounds

• VI. Linguistic competence (an example): An Outline History of the English Language
  
• VII. Libraries and archives
  • VII.ii. British Library Manuscript Collections
  • VII.iii. Bodleian Library Manuscript Collections

10.  Images & Multimedia

The B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library at Long Island University has made available a number of images of the stunningly beautiful Ellesmere ms:

• The wordes of the hooste to the compaignye
• A leaf from the Parson's Tale
• A leaf from the Knight's Tale
• Another leaf from the Knight's Tale
• The prologe to the Clerkes Tale of Oxenford
• A leaf from the Wife of Bath's Prologue
• A leaf from the Frankelyn's Tale
• Another leaf from the Parson's Tale

You can easily see difference in quality of the El ms as compared to most other pre-1500 Chaucer ms. 

The British Library has generously made available a stunning online resource, Treasures in Full: Caxton's Chaucer. You can examine the two Caxton editions of The Canterbury Tales (1476 and 1483) individually or compare them tale by tale. Transcriptions of these images can then be examined folio by folio in Barbara Bordalejo's online edition (Canterbury Tales Project, De Montfort University). See also at this site:

• Caxton's Life
• Caxton's Texts
• Caxton in the British Library
• Caxton's England
• Caxton's Technologies

The University of Wisc - Milwaukee has put together a beautiful collection of important Canterbury Tales manuscripts and printed editions in the series Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales, The Classic Text: Traditions and Interpretations.   This guided tour through the history of Canterbury Tales editions includes images from the Ellesmere Chaucer (1400-05), Cambridge MS Gg.4.27 (1410-15), Caxton (1478), Wight (1561), Lintot (1721), Tyrwhitt (1786), Pickering (1852), Kelmscott (1896), through a number of rare modern editions.  A very handsome exhibit and case study in the history of the book.

Images of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 198, an important 15th century Canterbury Tales manuscript, is now available online (Oxford U). 

See images of the Hengwrt ms at the National Library of Wales website.

See the detailed images at Kevin Kiernan's webpage (UKentucky) of 

• (Hg) National Library of Wales MS. Peniarth 392 D

• (El) Henry E. Huntington Library MS. El.26C.9

• (La) British Library MS. Lansdowne 851

The Huntington Library Press has released several images online in conjunction with their publication, The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, by Herbert C. Schulz.

The University of Chicago has issued a centennial celebration that includes profiles of noted faculty, like J.M. Manley and Edith Rickert:

• "In 1924, John Matthews Manly proposed a systematic study of the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer, anticipating that the work "would necessarily require several years." Although the "several years" were to become sixteen, Manly and his collaborator, Edith Rickert, produced the eight-volume edition of The Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940) that was immediately hailed as the defining work in the field of Chaucerian studies."
• Their discoveries included University of Chicago Ms. 564, a "mid-fifteenth-century codex is one of fifty-seven relatively complete manuscript copies of the Tales and one of only two containing a passage from the 'Tale of Melibeus'."

11.  Language Helps & Audio Files

12. Potpourri

13.  The Next Step

Google Academic Resources

Google Scholar

The Poor Medieval Scholar's Electronic Bookshelf

(no cost, older academic books, in .pdf form from the 
Google Library Project)

The Electronic Canterbury Tales Bookshop

(recommended books for the study of Chaucer and Late-Medieval England, hosted by Amazon.com)

The Kankedort
Gift Shoppe

(with many serious and some silly offerings for the medievalist in your life)

About This Website

ECT Revision History:
What's New?

Headings, Organization, &
Criteria for Inclusion

Additional Chaucer Pages in The Electronic Canterbury Tales

Chaucer the Pilgrim-Narrator & Author

Chaucer's "Orphan" Pilgrims - Those without a Tale

The Frame Tale, Later Continuations,
& Chaucerian Apocrypha

Manuscripts, Printed Editions, & Electronic Texts

Electronic Chaucer Texts:
What's Available Online?

Chaucer in / and Popular Culture

Troilus and Criseyde

Documentation Primer

Chaucer Pedagogy Page

The Electronic Canterbury Tales 

  © 1998-2007 Daniel T. Kline & www.kankedort.net All rights reserved

This page was last revised on 01.05.07.