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An Online Compendium and Companion
to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
10. Images & Multimedia
This heading contains the following sections:
- Chaucer Images
- Images from the Canterbury Tales
- Images from Other Medieval Texts
- Images of
Historical, Architectural, & Cultural Artifacts & Places
- Collections of Medieval Images
Chaucer Images
Images from the Canterbury Tales
The B. Davis Schwartz
Memorial Library at Long Island University has made available a
number of images of the stunningly beautiful Ellesmere ms:
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:
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 from Other Medieval Texts
Images of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 198,
an important 15th century Canterbury Tales manuscript, is now available
online (Oxford U).
The Digital Scriptorium
(Berkeley SUNSITE), still in its test stage, promises to be a significant
project.
Early Manuscripts at Oxford University
houses digital facsimiles of a number of beautiful ancient and medieval
texts.
Images of
Historical, Architectural, and Cultural Artifacts and Places
The Canterbury Pilgrims would have encountered both these places as part
of their pilgrimage to Thomas a Becket's shrine at Canterbury:
Joshua Merrill's From Gatehouse to Cathedral: A
Photographic Pilgrimage to Chaucerian Landmarks is a lovely photo essay (with
annotations) of the Canterbury route and the places and things the medieval pilgrims might
have encountered. An excellent resource for visualizing
the sites and sounds of medieval England.
Hanley's
Image Archive (Michael Hanley, UWashington). Photos of Canterbury
Cathedral, including a very fine image
of the cathedral floor plan.
Monarchs
and Monasteries: Knowledge and Power in
Medieval France (late 8th -- late
15th centuries), from the Treasures from the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, displays a number of wonderful images from the BNF's extensive
holdings. Part of the exhibition, Creating
French Culture: Treasuries from the Treasures from the Bibliothèque
nationale de France
Epact
is a beautiful electronic catalogue of 520 medieval
and renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums: the Museum
of the History of Science, Oxford, the Istituto
e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence ,
the British
Museum, London, and the Museum
Boerhaave, Leiden. With full cataloguing
information and supporting scholarly apparatus. Beautiful images of
"astrolabes, armillary spheres, sundials, quadrants, nocturnals,
compendia, surveying instruments, and so on."
Collections of Medieval Images
A
Hundred Highlights from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Dutch Royal
Library) houses a number of glorious medieval (and post medieval) images:
Choix
de miniatures des manuscrits de
l'Université de Liège offers a number of high quality scans.
Bodleian
Library (Images from Western European manuscripts from the 11th-17th
centuries.) Really beautiful images.
Les
Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (U of Chicago), one of the most
beautiful of medieval books, is "a medieval book of hours. This was a
collection of the text for each liturgical hour of the day - hence the
name - which often included other, supplementary, texts. Calendars,
prayers, psalms and masses for certain holy days were commonly
included." Accessible by month of the year.
The Hill
Monastic Manuscript Library is one of the largest medieval and
Renaissance archives in the world whose aim is to microfilm all the
premodern libraries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
Literary texts were only one aspect of
medieval culture and piety; literary texts can be profitably read
alongside of visual texts. Medieval
Wall Painting in the Medieval Parish Church (Anne Marshall, Open
University, UK) is an absolutely stunning collection of religious images
from across England. From Prof. Marshall's page: "This site
represents the continuing development of what may one day become a
comprehensive catalogue. Vast quantities of Medieval Wall Painting have
been lost forever, of course, but there is nevertheless more left on
English church walls than is generally realised; paintings continue to be
uncovered and more still are known to exist under layers of plaster. Some
of these will come to light one day; in fact some are already doing so, .
. . "
Google & Microsoft Academic Resources
See the
The
Poor Medieval Scholar's
Electronic Bookshelf
for recommended
texts
from Google Book Search& Microsoft Live Search.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar indexes
academic material but doesn't yet make all of that material
available. In most cases, you'll have to access your own
institution's electronic databases and library materials to get
the full text versions.
Because it
does not make full texts available,
at this point
Google Scholar is best used as a bibliographical
resource.
Google Book Search & Microsoft
Live Search
These projects
are also showing their growing pains, but they
make a number of (primarily) older studies related to
Chaucer and medieval literature and culture in full
text. You can
contribute to the success of this effort by informing Google
or Microsoft of any incorrect scans, missing pages, or other errors.
Only out-of-copyright books are
available in full and some of the scans are
messy. I will cross list the relevant titles
at the Electronic Canterbury Tales -
Online Books and Essays main page and at the appropriate
web page for each Canterbury Tale.
Google Custom
Search
You can search for handpicked websites related to
Chaucer and medieval culture as recommended by ECT users.
I welcome your
suggestions for suitable websites. Please be patient as
I tune the search terms.
How to Document
Print & Electronic Sources:
The Chaucer Pedagogy
Documentation Primer
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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
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)
Calls for Papers
Call
for Papers database from the University of Pennsylvania CFP listserv
Build Your Chaucer & Medieval
Studies Library!
Save 50-80%
at The Electronic Canterbury Tales
Bookshop (a new page with affiliated online booksellers)
Visit
The
Electronic Canterbury Tales
Bookshop, hosted by Amazon.com
For those in
the UK?
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