The History, Discoveries, and Aims of the Canterbury Tales Project

Abstract

Every year countless people throughout the world encounter the Canterbury Tales in editions, translations, and adaptations. Ultimately, all these many different forms of Chaucer's work derive from a single source: the text he composed sometime between 1385 and his death in 1400. We have no direct knowledge of this text. We have no authorial manuscript of the Tales, nor indeed any single manuscript explicitly authorized by Chaucer, or whose copying was unambiguously supervised by Chaucer. Like Shakespeare, and unlike such contemporaries as Gower, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, we have no evidence of any systematic attempt by Chaucer to regulate the publication of his work. Notoriously, too, Chaucer left the Tales unfinished, adding another layer of uncertainty to our ignorance of the first states of the text. What we actually have are some eighty-four manuscripts of the Tales and four early printed editions dating before 1500.1 This evidence, then, sets two classic scholarly problems. First, what can we deduce from this mass of manuscripts? Second, how should we present what we find to the reader? Since Tyrwhitt, the history of Tales textual scholarship is a record of the attempts by various scholars to grapple with these problems.2 The most ambitious of these attempts was that by John Manly and Edith Rickert at the University of Chicago from 1920 on and resulting in their massive eight volumes The Text of the Canterbury Tales Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts? Before Manly and Rickert, there had been several careful but necessarily limited explorations of the manuscripts of the Tales.4 It is their distinction that they saw that a full account of the whole tradition of the Tales must rest on analysis of all the available evidence in all the manuscripts. Logically, this meant discovery of all the manuscripts (itself a massive task), exploration of all that could be learned from the manuscripts as to their origins and later provenance which might cast light on the text they contain, word-by-word collation of the whole text of every manuscript, and analysis of this collation. This is a breathtaking