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Electronic
Canterbury Tales - Kankedort.Net Index Page
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The Canterbury
Tales in Middle English
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The Canterbury
Tales in Translation
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General
Historical & Cultural Backgrounds
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Sources,
Analogues, & Related Texts
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Online Notes &
Commentary
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Online Articles
& Books
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Student Projects
& Essays
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Online
Bibliography
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Syllabi & Course
Descriptions
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Images &
Multimedia
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Audio Files &
Language Helps
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Potpourri
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Additional
Resources
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Scholar's
Dozen
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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
For you audiophiles!
George Dyson's
The Canterbury Pilgrims
Richard Hickox leads the London Symphony Orchestra &
Chorus (Chandos Recordings, 1997)
The General Prologue to
the Canterbury Tales
A Guide to the Criticism -
Takes a chronological approach to critical disputes over the General
Prologue from the 1880's to present
Two other excellent overviews of the General
Prologue
Medieval
Journal & Newsletter Homepages
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An Online Compendium and Companion
to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
WHAT'S NEW?
The
General Prologue
Edwin Duncan (Towson U) has developed a sophisticated Electronic
Edition of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Mouse-overs supply definitions of difficult terms.
1. In Middle English
The General
Prologue at the University of Virginia's Electronic
Text Center (from Robinson 1957).
Read the General Prologue in the context of Fragment
I - Group A.
Read the General
Prologue according to the Hengwrt ms (Hg), one of the two most important early
manuscripts, at the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry On-line
site. The Ellesmere ms (El) is the other important early edition.
The General
Prologue at the University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose
(from Robinson 1957). The General Prologue in Sinan
Kökbugur's hypertext edition at the Librarius
homepage. Helpful glosses of Middle English terms and phrases (frames; from unknown
base text).
- Although The Riverside Chaucer is the current
standard academic text, Robinson's 1957 edition is still serviceable for critical study.
2. In Modern English Translation
The General Prologue in
facing page translation (Paul Halsall, IMSB).
A
Reader-Friendly Edition of the General Prologue by Michael Murphy (CUNY-Brooklyn),
each tale featuring a handsome introduction. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The
Electronic Library Foundation's edition of the Canterbury Tales,
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.
From John Dahle's MA thesis (on
the possibilities for a hypertext Canterbury Tales), An Annotated Hypertext Version of
the General Prologue and An Example of Hypertext
Versioning and the General Prologue (Iowa State U.)
3. Historical & Cultural Backgrounds
Although a commercial site, billyandcharlie.com, specialists in pewter, has
affordable and lovely modern reproductions of pilgrim badges and ampullae
from medieval Canterbury, including:
I receive no royalties from
billyandcharlie.com sales, unfortunately.
The Canterbury Pilgrims would have encountered both these places as part
of their pilgrimage to Thomas a Becket's shrine at Canterbury:
The
Canterbury Pilgrims are on their way to Canterbury Cathedral, where the "holy
blissful martyr" Thomas Becket was murdered. Read the accounts of his life and
death and about his controversy with Henry II at the excellent Thomas Becket page (Scott
McLetchie, Loyola - New Orleans), especially the primary texts recounting
Becket and the murder (from McLetchie's page):
The Wife of Bath made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, quite an achievement
for the time. The University of Southern Colorado, Department of History
has put together a very fine Traveling
to Jerusalem website, detailing pilgrim accounts from the 3rd century
to the present day. See, for example, the accounts by
Jessica A. Browner's article, though a little after Chaucer's period,
catches some of the flavor of Southwerk, the Tabard, and the pilgrimage
party in "Wrong
Side of the River: London's Disreputable
South Bank in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century
Essays in History 36 (1994): 34-72.
See also McLetchie's excellent Pictorial
Tour of Canterbury Cathedral
The "Calamitous" Fourteenth
Century (Paul Hallsall, IMSB), a web page of primary sources on this pivotal century,
provides important background to Chaucer's era, including the Black Death, the Great
Schism, the Hundred Years War, and the "Peasant's Revolt" of 1381.
Here is a representative sample of Halsall's excellent work (lightly
edited):
The
"Calamitous" 14th Century
- A Malthusian Crisis?
- The Black Death
- Procopius: The
Plague, 542, History of the Wars (II.xxii-xxxiii): Description of the onset of the earlier "plague of
Justinian."
- [Tierney 84] Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron:
Introduction, on the Black Death, as is another
version. The entire Decameron
is also available (VaTech).
- The
Black Death and the Jews 1348-1349.
Contains: The Confession of Agimet of Geneva, , October 20,
1349; Jacob von Königshofen (1346-1420); Chonicle; The
Epitaph of Asher aben Turiel, Toledo, Spain, 1349
- Warfare
- Orders
for the English Fleet, 1326 (Hillsdale College).
- [Tierney 85, Geary 46.1. 46.2] Jean
Froissart: Battles
of Crecy 1346, of Poitiers 1356, from Chronicles.
- [Tierney 86, Geary 46.3] Jean
Froissart: The
Jacquerie, 1358, from Froissart's Chronicles.
- Jean Froissart: The
English Peasant Revolt, 1381, from Chronicles (Clinch Valley
College).
- [Tierney 87] Anonimalle Chronicle:
Peasant
Uprising of 1381.
- Tales
from Froissart (At Unipissing). Selection of short excerpts from
Froissart.
- Sir Jean Froissart: John
of Gaunt in Portugal, 1385
- Sir Jean Froissart: How
Philip van Artevelde was Made Governor of Ghent, 1386
- The
Hundred Years War In The High Court of Parlement(trans. Fred
Cheyette).
- Hundred Years War: Treaty
of Troyes, 1420 and Conditions in France in 1422.
Ecclesiastical
Disarray
- The Great Schism
- Conciliarism
- The Papal Response
Late
Medieval Governments
- See the specific Medieval
Sourcebook: Medieval Legal History page
- The Empire
- Italy
- Bartolus of Sassoferrato: On
the Tyrant, c.1330, trans. Steve Lane [slane@tezcat.com],
on tyranny in Italian city government.
- [Tierney 95] Machiavelli: Discourses
- on papacy, copyrighted
- France
- England
- [Tierney 93] Parliamentary Rolls:
Deposition of Richard II 1399, copyrighted.
End of Europe's
Middle Ages (UCalgary) provides "a brief overview of the
conditions at the end of Europe's Middle Ages, the tutorial is presented in a series of
chapters that summarize the economic, political, religious and intellectual environment of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
Medieval Britain (Britannia
Online) boasts an impressive array of online vignettes for all aspects of medieval British
topics, including famous events, persons, places. Highly recommended, especially for
those who would like to review their British history.
Feudal Terms of England
(Michael Adams, NetSERF) provides a handy glossary of technical terms familiar in the
Middle Ages.
The New Advent Catholic Website hosts a number of
important resources, especially the online Catholic
Encyclopedia (1913 ed.) and its thousands of entries. Although
reflecting an earlier ero os scholarship, entries relevant
to the General Prologue include:
Although focused on a slightly later date than Chaucer's age, Jessica A.
Browner, Wrong
Side of the River: London's Disreputable South Bank in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Century. Essays
in History 36.2 (1994) is a helpful glance into the sociopolitical life
of the Southwark area in the 16th and 17th centuries. Essays in
History is an annual volume published by the graduate students at the
University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History.
4. Sources, Analogues, & Related Texts
In the late 12th
century, Marie de France composed a series of wonderful lais, short
narrative poems involving courtly figures, marvelous plots, and celtic
influences, and set them in a frame with a prologue. Judith P. Shoaf
(U of Florida) has generously provided verse translations of most of Marie's
Lais:
Marie's Lais and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
can profitably be read in tandem, to the mutual enhancement of both!
Compare
the opening of the General Prologue to the Prologue
of Langland's Piers Plowman (Harvard).
The Decameron
Web, dedicated to Boccaccio's frame tale series, which served as both source and
inspiration for the Canterbury Tales (Brown U.) The Decameron is set
during the onset of the Bubonic Plague.
John Lydgate, a
fifteenth century follower of Chaucer, imagined his Siege of Thebes to be an
extension of the Canterbury Tales, the first tale on the trip home from Canterbury.
In fact, Lydgate writes himself into the Prologue to the Siege of
Thebes, which is modeled upon the General Prologue.
The University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Prose
and Verse has digitized two important late-medieval tale collections:
For a different kind of travel narrative, an edition of The Travels of Sir
John Mandeville is available via ftp from Project
Gutenberg (tosjm.txt,
433 kb & tosjm.zip,
152 kb)
5. Online Notes & Commentary
L. Kip Wheeler offers a handout on Medieval
Numerology (Carson-Newman College)
Discussion and links concerning the General Prologue on Larry D.
Benson's superlative Harvard Chaucer Page
(Harvard U). Some of the items related to the General Prologue include:
Scott
McLetchie (Loyola - New Orleans) offers a splendid virtual tour of Canterbury Cathedral in
his A Pilgrimage to
Canterbury to the Shrine of St. Thomas.
Summaries and lecture notes concerning the genre, structure, and pilgrim portraits in the General Prologue (Daniel T.
Kline, U. of Alaska Anchorage).
6. Online Books & Articles
A generous
new online publishing venture: The
University of California E-Scholarship Editions. "University of
California Press now offers electronic versions of almost all of its
journal titles and over 1400 books online, many of them out of print."
E-journals are available to subscriber institutions; 400 full texts, many
covering medieval topics, are available to the general public; the rest to
members of the UC community.
A selection of Chaucer-related and medieval
studies titles available to the general public include:
Chaucer Sourcebook, from the
Harvard Chaucer Page, offers a number of classic and professional essays from noted
Chaucerians, including:
- E. Talbot Donaldson, "Chaucer the Pilgrim."
PMLA 69 (1954): 928-37. A classic article.
- All articles on the Harvard Chaucer Page reprinted by
permission.
Essays in Medieval Studies
features full-text articles from the proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association,
online version edited by Allen J. Frantzen (Loyola - Chicago), including:
Anniina Jokinen's Luminarium features Essays and Articles on Chaucer.
From the Teaching
Chaucer in the 90s post-print from Exemplaria (ed. Christine Rose, Portland
State): Cathalin Folks's Of
Sondry Folk: The Canterbury Pilgrimage as Metaphor for Teaching Chaucer at the
Community College
The
Chronotope of Real-Time and Real-Space in Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrimage;
Sociological
Poetics and the Canterbury Tales; and Pilgrimage
in the Age of Schism (Frederick Martin, Tulane U), from an ongoing
e-project melding critical and cultural theory & medieval studies. See
Martin's e-dissertation in progress, Pilgrimage
in the Age of Schism: Chaucer, Sociological Poetics, and the Canterbury
Tales.
Sam Schuman (UMinnesota-Morris) offers
interesting fare in an essay entitled "On the Road to Canterbury, Liliput and Elphinstone - The
Rough Guide: Satiric Travel Narratives in Chaucer, Swift and Nabokov"
from the e-journal Zembla, an online journal devoted to Nabokov.
Compare Chaucer's self-presentation in the Canterbury Tales with his contemporary Thomas
Usk in Andrew Galloway's web article, "Private Selves
and the Intellectual Marketplace in Late 14th Century England: The Case of the Two Usks."
Cite as a web document.
- See R. A. Shoaf's e-text of Usk's Testament of Love and the
ample ancillary materials.
7. Student Projects & Essays
Dene
Scoggins' English 316 site
(UT Austin) explores "culture, ideology, and issues of canonicity" in the
Canterbury Tales, including a student developed page devoted to the General
Prologue and each of the pilgrim portraits.
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.
Mr. Davis's senior English
class at Troy High School has put together a fun web page comparing
Chaucer's pilgrims to contemporary personalities.
8. Online Bibliography
9. Syllabi & Course
Descriptions
10. Images & Multimedia
The Costume Page -
Medieval Era Costume (Julie Zetterberg) contains links that will give you some
sense of the clothing worn by the Canterbury pilgrims.
11. Language Helps & Audio Files
Sample
audio files (.wav, .au, .aiff) from the General
Prologue, recorded at Brigham Young University in 1990, are available from the Chaucer
Studio (Paul Thomas, Brigham Young).
12. Potpourri
Map of Medieval England, c.
1399 (Paul Halsall, IMSB), from Muir's Historical Atlas (1911).
Map of Medieval London (Paul
Halsall, IMSB), from Muir's Historical Atlas (1911).
13. The
Next Step
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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V.A. Kolve & Glending Olson's Norton Critical Edition of selected Canterbury
Tales
is an excellent teaching
text
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
Is there a greater
artistic pilgrim today
than Dylan?
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)
Netflix.com
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
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!
Medieval Pilgrimage is
a fascinating and growing field. Some notable recent titles
include:
Daniel T. Kline's
Legacy Web Page
(The Kankedort Page) at the U of Alaska Anchoragee
Please be advised that I no longer update most of these pages, so many of the links are likely to be bad,
but will keep them alive in the ongoing battle against "link rot."
Highly Recommended!
Challenge Your Vision of Chaucer with These Critically Acclaimed,
Contemporary
BBC Versions
of
The Miller's Tale, The Wife Of Bath, The Knight's
Tale, The Sea
Captain's (Shipman's) Tale, The Pardoner's Tale & The Man Of Law's Tale
Excellent for Classroom Use!
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