The Canterbury Tales Project: Occasional Papers. Volume I ed. by Norman Blake, Peter Robinson

Abstract

REVIEWS historical and political contingency that remains curiously disembodied from the evidence of history hinted at in its generous endnotes. And de­ spite its dazzle (no reader can miss the certain sense that Christ's Body is destined to become one of the most name-dropped books in Middle En­ glish studies), it is easy to complain that this compressed little book (only 117 pages of actual text) seems to end much too soon, as if caught some­ how in midstream between being a book about Margery Kempe and being a book about, as its tide promises, "late medieval writings." But what Christ's Body does aim most to do-make a compelling case for the new kinds ofquestions we should be asking of late-medieval religious texts--it does in these few pages both more fully and more urgently than any recent book I know. GAIL MCMURRAY GIBSON Davidson College NORMAN BLAKE and PETER ROBINSON, eds. The Canterbury Tales Proj­ ect: Occasional Papers. Volume I. Office for Humanities Communication Publications, no. 5. Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1993. Pp. 97. $20.00 paper. This slim volume of five essays is a byproduct of the Canterbury Tales Project, the aim of which, as Norman Blake and Peter Robinson describe it, is "to make available, in computer-readable form, transcripts, images, collations, and analyses of all eighry-four extant manuscripts and four pre-1500 printed editions of the Canterbury Tales" (p. 1). Analysis of this material, in turn, is meant to serve the larger goal of "a more exact recon­ struction of the history of the Canterbury Tales" than Manly and Rickert accomplished (p. 51), and, as the first newsletter of the project suggests, "The principal reason for exploration ofthe textual tradition of the Canter­ bury Tales is to try to discover what Chaucer actually wrote." The objectives ofthis project are thus as old as textual criticism itself, though its means-­ including hypertext technology, digital image reproduction, cladistics, and computer-aided database analysis--are very much of the late twentieth century. The first essay in this collection is Blake's overview of the condition of Canterbury Tales materials and his suggestions about the utiliry ofthe proj175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ect in analyzing them. There is a great deal of familiar information here about the fragmentary condition of Chaucer's longest work, the variant manuscript states, and the historical editorial attempt to present a unified, completed text. The very presence of this essay is thus a bit surprising, since any reader interested in something as specialized as the Canterbury Tales Project is likely to know all this. A reader unfamiliar with the subject will be confused by a number of contradictions, such as the assertion that modem editions leave undergraduates with the sense that the work is com­ plete (p. 6) but also that we "have in modern editions lost the sense of a continuous text provided with a running commentary of glosses and divi­ sions and subdivisions to direct our reading" (p. 11). Similarly, much is predicated on what is current in Chaucer editions, though, outside the ongoing Variorum Chaucer editions and The Riverside Chaucer (published in 1987), I do not know what the editions would be that represent "the current fashion" (p. 14). Blake sees the project as enabling users "to ap­ proach the text more objectively and to dispel" their "prejudices," even though he recognizes that the "Project cannot . . . decide for us what the textual development of the poem was" (pp. 15-16). His conclusion that the project "will alter our attitude to what we mean by a text" (p. 16) also would not seem to follow, since the equation of the authoritative Canter­ bury Tales text with what Chaucer wrote remains a traditional conception. Robinson and Elizabeth Solopova discuss the criteria they have devel­ oped for transcribing the manuscripts for the project. They begin with a theory of transcription in which they articulate the differences between a manuscript and an electronic forum as documents. The distinctions they draw between reference works and literary ones are problematic, however, since it is not true that the "electronic version" of the OED "and the printed version are simply...