Geoffrey Chaucer Online:
The Electronic Canterbury Tales

Daniel T. Kline | U of Alaska Anchorage | Chaucer Pedagogy | CV

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

Troilus and Criseyde 
2: 1751-52

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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

Web Resources by Tale 

Electronic Canterbury Tales - Kankedort.Net Index Page

Fragment I / Group A
The General Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Prologue & Tale
The Reeve's Prologue & Tale
The Cook's Prologue & Tale

Fragment II / Group B1
The Man of Law's Introduction, Prologue, Tale, & Epilogue

Fragment III / Group D
The Wife of Bath's Prologue & Tale
The Friar's Prologue & Tale
The Summoner's Prologue & Tale

Fragment IV / Group E
The Clerk's Prologue & Tale
The Merchant's Prologue, Tale, & Epilogue
 
Fragment V / Group F
The Squire's Introduction & Tale
The Franklin's Prologue & Tale

Fragment VI / Group C
The Physician's Tale
The Pardoner's Introduction, Prologue, & Tale

Fragment VII / Group B2
The Shipman's Tale
The Prioress's Prologue & Tale
The Prologue & Tale of Sir Thopas
The Tale of Melibee
The Monk's Prologue & Tale
The Nun's Priest's Prologue,
Tale, & Epilogue
 
Fragment VIII / Group G
The Second Nun's Prologue & Tale
The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue & Tale

Fragment IX / Group H 
The Manciple's Prologue & Tale

Fragment X / Group I
The Parson's Prologue & Tale
The Retraction

The Electronic Canterbury Tales:

Troilus and Criseyde

Two Academic Quality, Complete Editions of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English

Each with Full Glossary, Notes, Commentary & Critical Apparatus

The Riverside Chaucer is generally recognized as the academic standard and is cited by scholars in the academic literature

Amazon.co.uk has a less expensive paperback edition of the Riverside available

An Online Compendium and Companion
to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

1.  The Canterbury Tales
In Middle English

The Complete Tales in Middle English at UVa (1510 kb) or access the Tales individually by the Table of Contents.

• Search the UVa Middle English Text Archive.

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).

The Google Library Project has made a number of venerable older (and out of copyright) works available as fully downloadable (and quite large) .pdf files. These include:

• Skeat, W.W., ed. The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1894).

• ---, ed. The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1866). 

• ---, ed. The Student's Chaucer: Being a Complete Edition of His Works. (Oxford, 1897).

While these older works are vitally important for their historical value and their place in the development of the history of Chaucerian criticism, they should be supplemented with current textual and critical studies.

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."

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. 

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. 

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

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.

A number of images related to the Tales and CTales manuscripts:

• The "pilgrim steps" leading to Thomas Becket's tomb at Caterbury Cathedral (Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Loyola, Maryland).
• Stained glass image of St. Thomas Becket (Canterbury Cathedral, 13th century) (Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Loyola, Maryland).
• London's Inner Temple, the 'law school' where the Manciple is said to have served (A.567) and the Sergeant of Law would have been trained (A.309-30), has put online a concise account of its history and development.
• 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'."

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. 

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 (U of Birmingham) "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. 

A real boon for scholars, 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).

• Other essays ("key documents") at the Canterbury Tales Project site:

  • Peter Robinson, "The History, Discoveries and Aims of the Canterbury Tales Project," The Chaucer Review 38:2 (2003) pp. 126-139. This is the prepublication version. The article summarizes project activities to 2003.

  • Peter Robinson and Elizabeth Solopova, "Guidelines for Transcription of the Manuscripts of the Wife of Bath's Prologue," from the Nun's Priest's Tale on CD-ROM (2006), fully explains "the transcription principles upon which the Canterbury Tales Project is based." 

  • Peter Robinson's "New methods of Editing, Exploring, and Reading The Canterbury Tales," was originally fashioned as a conference paper given at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome (28 May 1998).

  • Peter Robinson and Norman Blake, "General Editor's Preface," from The General Prologue on CD-ROM (2000), describes "a key change in project policy: not only 'to help editors edit' but also 'to help readers read'."

  • Peter Robinson, "Open Transcription Policy," takes an ethically important stance toward academic collaboration and peer review: "It is a vital principle of our work that the transcripts we make should be freely available to other scholars, for their use and modification. This document explains how we reconcile this with copyright considerations."

  • Peter Robinson, "Current Issues in Making Digital Editions of Medieval Texts — or, Do Electronic Scholarly Editions Have a Future?" Digital Medievalist 1.1 (2005). 

  • Peter Robinson, "Where We Are with Electronic Scholarly Editions, and Where We Want to Be?" Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie Online 1.1 (2005).  In print in Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 2004, 123-143.

• See also the excerpts from the editorial materials to the  Canterbury Tales Project's already-completed CD-ROMs:

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

  • Peter Robinson and Norman Blake, "General Editors' Preface;" Elizabeth Solopova, "Editor's Introduction;  & Peter Robinson, "Analysis Workshop," from The General Prologue on CD-ROM, ed. Elizabeth Solopova (Cambridge University Press, 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. by Estelle Stubbs (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000). 

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

  • Barbara Bordalejo, "Editor's Introduction" & "Notes on the Caxton Canterbury Tales Editions and their Place in the Textual Tradition of the Tales," from Caxton's Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies, ed.  Barbara Bordalejo (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2003).

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

Something Extra?

Free Books!
The Poor Medieval Scholar's Electronic Bookshelf

(no cost, older academic books,
in .pdf form from the 
Google Library Project &
Microsoft Book Search Live)

Cheap Books!
The Electronic Canterbury Tales Bookshop

(recommended books for the study of Chaucer and Late-Medieval England)

The Kankedort
Gift Shoppe

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

Check out Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, well, just because. And, no, it ain't me. And, no, I don't get a piece of this either, but I like it!

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