Geoffrey Chaucer:
The Electronic Canterbury Tales

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

Web Resources by Tale 

Electronic Canterbury Tales Home 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

Additional Pages in The Electronic Canterbury Tales

About This Website

Chaucer Metapage

Chaucer Syllabi and Course Web Pages

Language Helps

Related Medieval Studies Course and Web Pages

Societies & Organizations 

Websites for Calls for Papers

Call for Papers database from the University of Pennsylvania CFP listserv

Major Medieval Conferences Websites

International Congress on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI)

International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds

Schools, Programs, and Local & Regional Organizations

  Journal & Newsletter Homepages

Chaucernet: 
An Academic Listserv (from Edwin Duncan, Towson U)

Other Academic Electronic Discussion Groups (from Edwin Duncan, Towson U)

When You Need Help Writing Essays, from Bartleby.com

The Scholar's Dozen
High Quality Web Resources

  1. The Online Chaucer Bibliography (Mark E. Allen, UT San Antonio) is from Studies in the Age of Chaucer and the New Chaucer Society. Another excellent project. Searchable by keyword and other Boolean terms.

  2. The Chaucer Review: An Indexed Bibliography, vols. 1-30  (Peter Beidler, Lehigh U. & Martha Kalnin, Baylor U). Originally published as the April 1997 issue of Chaucer Review and now put into html, this website provides a searchable list of all of the nearly 800 articles that have appeared in Chaucer Review, and, more important, a subject index to all of those articles. Excellent, and an invaluable resource.

  3. The Essential Chaucer (Mark E. Allen, UT San Antonio and John H. Fisher, UTennessee). This selective, annotated bibliography of Chaucer studies from 1900-1984 is divided into almost 90 topics, including themes, techniques, and individual works by Chaucer.  An invaluable starting point. See the Table of Contents
  4. The best single site devoted to the Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, The Harvard Chaucer Page, is a tutorial in itself, brought to the WWW by Larry D. Benson, gen. ed. of The Riverside Chaucer. Check the Index for easy access to the wealth of primary and secondary material there.
  5. Paul Halsall's consummate Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham U) offers a wealth of primary historical and cultural texts (from older print sources) and commentary on its numerous sub-pages. Comprehensive, and unsurpassed for medieval studies. See, for example, The 'Calamitous' Fourteenth Century.
  6. TEAMS Middle English Text Series (Russell Peck, URochester) houses a number of lesser known and hard to find medieval texts in helpful student editions. A generous and fascinating selection not to be missed! Each selection includes a scholarly introduction and full notes. 
  7. 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).
  8. The Middle English Collection of the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center includes searchable editions of a number of important ME texts (generally from older editions without the critical apparatus), including:
  9. The Middle English Dictionary is online at the UMichigan site. You have to access the individual password month by month.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. The ORB: Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies (Kathryn Talarico, gen. ed.) "is an academic site, written and maintained by medieval scholars for the benefit of their fellow instructors and serious students. All articles have been judged by at least two peer reviewers. Authors are held to high standards of accuracy, currency, and relevance to the field of medieval studies."
  13. For a peer-reviewed, academically sound evaluation of online Chaucer resources, see the links and annotations at the Chaucer Metapage project (gen. eds. Joe Wittig, UNC & Edwin Duncan, Towson State U).

Daniel T. Kline's
 Legacy Web Pages at the U of Alaska Anchorage

Please be advised that I no longer update these pages, so many of the links are likely to be bad

So many schools now use courseware such as WebCT and Blackboard that the early experiments in individual web-based courses now appear quaint and outdated.

I am no longer actively updating these web pages but will keep them alive in the ongoing battle against "link rot."

Use OpenOffice.org

  

 

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!

WHAT'S NEW?

About This Website

Though separated by six centuries' history, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the World Wide Web actually share much in common.

Many of Chaucer's tales are joined by brief snippets of dialogue and action traditionally called "links"; on the WWW one "clicks" on a "hyperlink" to go to another "page" on the Web.

Chaucer's great work was constantly in revision and seems never to have found a final, definitive form.  Many of the groups of Tales, called "fragments," seem to have been "free-floating" with several possible arrangements.  By the same token, the WWW is constantly in flux.  One need never follow the same path to a subject, and new links are being added while others disappear. 

And in the same way the WWW is faced with issues of censorship, so Chaucer himself was aware that some might look critically upon a few of his tales, and so the Pilgrim-Narrator of the Canterbury Tales advised that if readers found a Tale offensive, they should turn the page and choose another tale.  He even went so far as to rethink the value of the Canterbury Tales in the Retraction.

What You'll Find

  • At this website, part of the Chaucer Metapage project, I hope to imitate at least in form the spirit of the Canterbury Tales while assembling and annotating useful links by Tale.  Each page features the same set of headings and criteria for inclusion.  Use the navigation bar in the left frame to take you to a webpage dedicated to that Canterbury Tale or Additional Pages dedicated issues related to the Canterbury Tales.
  • On this page, you will find a number of excellent general WWW sources related to late-medieval England in general and the Canterbury Tales in particular.

May the teacher, student, and interested reader find their own paths through the Electronic Canterbury Tales, and then add a link of their own!

New - as of Fall 2006

See Julia Bolton Holloway's original research, for as she says, "Poor Second Nun! Who thus becomes a true saint! Chaucer and his wife were honoured by the city of Norwich. Norwich and Lincoln shared in the blood libel tale Chaucer has the Prioress tell. Benedictine Carrow Priory, just outside Norwich walls, had just such a Prioress, who in Julian's time even harboured a murderer. I did a study of it, visited the remains, just the terribly grand Tudor house left that a later Prioress had built for herself there, and this research is on the web. What could help too is the essay on Julian and Judaism, as well as the essay on the Prioress and the Second Nun."

Gerard NeCastro (UMaine - Machias) has put together a wonderfully useful Chaucer Concordance: "To check on the occurrence of a specific word in Chaucer,
simply click on the name of the text you wish to search.You can search via the full texts or smaller divisions of them." A very valuable and easy to use tool.

The University of Glasgow has put together a splendid exhibit, The World of Chaucer: Medieval Books and Manuscripts (Julie Gardham and David Weston). It is the "Web version of the catalogue of an exhibition of manuscripts and early printed books from Glasgow University Library held at the Hunterian Museum 15 May to 28 August 2004." Some of the texts featured include:

  • The Canterbury Tales (England, 1476), MS Hunter 197 (U.1.1)
  • Thomas Godfrey (London, 1532), The workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed, with dyuers workes whiche were never in print before (ed. Thynne), Hunterian Bs.2.17
  • Richard Pynson (London, 1492), The Canterbury Tales, Hunterian Bv.2.12
  • Richard Pynson (London, 1526), The Boke of Caunterbury Tales with The Boke of Fame and The Boke of Troylus and Creseyde, Hunterian Bv.2.6
  • An ABC (England, 15th Century), MS Hunter 239 (U.3.12)
  • The Romaunt of the Rose (England, c.1440), MS Hunter 409 (V.3.7)

Alison Stones (Pitt) Images of Medieval Art and Architecture has some lovely images, a terrific clickable map of pilgrimage sites in Engliand, and some especially nice maps:

"The Index of Medieval Medical Images project began in 1988 and aimed to describe and index the content of all medieval manuscript images (up to the year 1500) with medical components held in North American collections." Contains images and descriptions of each text. Search, or browse by subject, date, country of origin, and other factors. Includes a list of contributing collections. From the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi "is an international research project dedicated to the publication of medieval stained glass. Founded in 1949, the CVMA has committees in fourteen countries and over sixty-five volumes have been published so far." See their stunning (and free!) digital picture archive of over 13,000 images. You can search for images by County Index, County Map, Location Index, or a Search Form. Just as an example, Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, is represented by 972 images, each identified by a Description, Window, and Panel (within the window). A valuable and well produced site.

The English Heritage website is the best single online portal to the remaining material culture of medieval England. A recent general search under "medieval" yielded 371 hits, including:

"The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) supports research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources." The ADS site is a great portal to a variety of high quality, nationally supported web resources that often (though not exclusively) relate to medieval history and culture.The ADS houses a number of official reports, including digital images, of medieval archaeological sites around Great Britain, like

  • The Greater London Sites and Monuments Record (GLSMR), "a computerised record of information relating to historic buildings and archaeological sites in the Greater London area."
  • "The record of England's archaeological and architectural sites held by the National Monuments Record (NMR) contains over 400,000 records. It encompasses the historic environment in its widest sense and includes archaeological, architectural and historical sites from earliest times to the present day, covering England and its territorial waters."
  • "The York Archive Gazeteer contains records of nearly 1,000 excavations and watching briefs undertaken by the York Archaeological Trust since 1972. The gazeteer gives a brief description of the archaeology found at the sites and the type and period of the major archaeological features encountered."
  • Search the Archaeological Date Service by resource.

Recent Additions - Summer 2006

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

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.

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.

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.

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. See Manuscripts, Printed Editions, & e-Texts for deep linking to the CTProject site.

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:

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 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.

2.  The Canterbury Tales In Translation

The Electronic Library Foundation's edition of the Canterbury Tales is available in a variety of format: in Middle English, Modern English, and facing page versions. Very good for student reading.

  • Unsuitable for formal academic research, the ELF edition is the best online version for younger readers and those unfamiliar with Middle English. Easily navigable, and the Middle English glosses are very helpful.

Michael Murphy (CUNY-Brooklyn) has released an expanded version of his project to "modernize" the Canterbury Tales in his Reader Friendly Edition of the General Prologue and Sixteen Tales (up from the four tales of the so called "Marriage Group"), including the General Prologue and the tales by the 

The collection of translations begins with a handsome Introduction and concludes with Endnotes. Each tale also features an introduction.  Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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

The Wiretap Canterbury Tales (from an unknown base text digitized by Ted and Florence Daniels) is incomplete and unnumbered. Not recommended.

The Canterbury Tales and other Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer (Ed. D. Laing Purves from an unknown base-text) offers an odd assortment of unnumbered texts and is probably more useful for the introductory essay than for the text and thin critical apparatus. The one advantage to this text is that it is available as an e-book download for a modest $1.75 for you digi-kiddies out there!

3.  General Historical & Cultural Backgrounds

Paul Halsall's consummate Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham U) offers a wealth of primary historical and cultural texts and commentary on its numerous subpages. Comprehensive, and unsurpassed for medieval studies. See, for example, The 'Calamitous' Fourteenth Century.

Gallica, the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has made available online page images of an invaluable source, the Acta Sanctorum (Deeds of the Saints), from the Bollandist Society:

Click "Periodiques" at the main page, and scroll down to "Religions chretiennes"

Index to the Rolls Series (99 volumes), with annotations (Steven H. Silver).  The Rolls Series is a vital collection of primary documents from medieval England, including chronicles, lives of kings and saints, legal records, and texts from other medieval institutions.

L. Kip Wheeler offers a Heresy Handout: A Convenient Guide to Eternal Damnation (Carson-Newman College). A .pdf file.

Lynn H. Nelson, a respected University of Kansas historian, has generously provided a series of online lectures from his History 108 course at the ORB: Online Reference Book of Medieval Studies,. The Table of Contents includes:

  Steven Muhlberger (NipissingU) has crafted a very fine introduction to Medieval England at the ORB. The Table of Contents features: 

End of Europe's Middle Ages (UCalgary) provides in tutorial form "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." 

Yuri Koszarycz has put together a series of brief lectures at the ORB entitled Ecclesiology: A Short Course on the Medieval Church. The Table of Contents includes:

Medieval Britain (Brittania 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. See the Index and especially:

Exploring Ancient World Cultures (UEvansville) is an excellent, graphics rich website particularly useful to the younger student and undergraduates. Includes subpages on the ancient cultures of the Near East, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Islam, and Medieval Europe.

The New Advent Catholic Website hosts a number of important resources, especially the online Catholic Encyclopedia (1913 ed.) and its thousands of entries. Although the entries in the Catholic Encyclopedia are now dated in some areas and sometimes take a polemical or triumphalistic stance toward their subjects, they offer a helpful starting point, especially for matters of Catholic doctrine and practice.  See, for example:

From the Annenberg/CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] Multimedia Collection comes The Middle Ages, a beautifully done set of links, images, and brief narratives that attempt to answer the question: "What was it really like to live in the Middle Ages?" Somewhat simplistic and stereotypical descriptions, but good for younger students as an introduction are its subpages on Feudal Life, Religion, Homes, Clothing, Health, Arts and Entertainment, & Town Life.

There are a number of websites devoted to different aspects of the Black Death (or Bubonic Plague) that reached England in the winter of 1347-48 and profoundly affected all aspects of English culture during Chaucer's time:

Steve Mulberger's lecture notes to his course, History 2425 -- Medieval England (1998-9) are available via ORB.

Bartleby.com offers a number (and great variety) of standard reference works  (online and searchable). You'll have to tolerate a pop up advertisement or two when using the site, but it's only a minor distraction.

The Internet Archive Collection at the University of Toronto offers several older historical works that are still valuable as references sources (but whose findings would need to be supplemented by more recent scholarship):

From the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. II: The End of the Middle Ages (ed. A. W. Ward & and A. R. Walker), is an interesting chapter:

  • Ch. 15: Universities and Public Schools to the Time of Colet, by the Rev. T. A. Walker:
  1. Paris and Oxford
  2. Beginnings of Oxford and Cambridge
  3. Town and Gown
  4. University and Bishop
  5. The Coming of the Friars