About this Edition

This edition is the result of more than 30 years of research on the textual tradition of Chaucer’s Tales. Its origins date to the beginning of the Canterbury Tales Project (CTP) in the 1990s collaboration between Norman Blake, Elizabeth Solopova, and Peter Robinson. While this edition could not have existed without the CTP project and might be identified with it, it is more than the profect.

The editors have very different backgrounds and perspectives, and their lived experiences afford them distinct vantage points from which to elucidate and interpret the text. This edition differs from the Wife of Bath’s Prologue on CD-ROM (1996), General Prologue (2000), Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile (2000), Caxton’s Canterbury Tales (2003), the Miller’s Tale (2004), and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (2004). Here we present a critical edition of The Book of the Tales of Canterbury. Like most critical editions, it has been a long time in the making. Conceptually, it goes back to our earliest forays into textual criticism, to the very different times and circumstances in which we both became acquainted with theories surrounding scholarly editing and textual transmission.

Our work on the textual tradition of the Tales, detailed as it is, is built on our transcription and collation of the text. Bordalejo’s Ph.D. research on Caxton's second edition of the Tales confirmed that the corrections included in that edition had their origin in a manuscript, now lost, that was likely independently descended from the archetype of the tradition. More recently, our article, “The Christ Church manuscript of the Book of the Tales of Canterbury” (forthcoming), documents one of the most consequential discoveries the Canterbury Tales Project has made: the identification of Christ Church Oxford as a manuscript containing not only a very early version of the text, but one that contributes meaningfully to the construction of our own critical edition (also Robinson and Tresoldi 2025).

When we talk about a constructed critical edition, we highlight the fact that, as stated in “The Editorial Principles of the Critical Edition of the Book of the Tales of Canterbury", (forthcoming) the aim of our critical text is not to conjure Chaucer’s intended text into existence, but rather to build a text that empowers readers to understand its textual history through the readings chosen for our editions. To achieve this, we highlight crucial places of variation so the reader can explore how the textual tradition reveals the social, cultural, and transmissional circumstances that drive textual change. An example of this can be found on the first line of the text, for which we retained the Hg reading, 'Aueryll'. Readers will find this reading in italics, with a link to the editors' textual explanation.

This approach to our conceptualization of the edition arose from our collaborations with biblical textual scholars, particularly with the Institute for Greek New Testament Textual Studies in Münster. In a conversation with Klaus Wachtel of the Institute around 2004, he remarked that one could see the Nestle-Aland text of the Greek New Testament as "the text that best explains all the extant documents." This conception is behind everything we have done.

We hope that our text of the Tales serves as a portal to access different worlds. Readers are invited to immerse themselves in the world of Chaucer’s work and to engage with the many facets of manuscript culture and textual transmission. By offering not only the critical edition but also the materials that made it possible, we give readers both a text to analyze and the tools to investigate the logic of its existence.

We believe that editions are arguments about a text (2013). This edition is an argument with a long and complex history. It is an argument informed by our knowledge of the textual tradition and by everything we have learned in the process of transcribing, collating, and editing the text, as well as in our classrooms, with our students, as when we debated the interpretation of specific lines or phrases or explored how the lack of punctuation caused scribal confusion regarding speakers and pronouns.

Here, we invite readers to take part in the long tradition of the Book of the Tales of Canterbury, from Chaucer’s first conception of the text to our critical edition, the latest in a long-standing endeavour to make sense of it.

Acknowledgements

Many individuals have contributed to the making of this edition. The General Editors thank Daniel Paul O'Donnell, Davide Pafumi, A. K. M. Iftekhar Khalid and Morgan Pearce at the University of Lethbridge; Yin Liu, Brent Nelson, Allison Muri, Kyle Dase, Nicole Atkings and the many transcribers at the University of Saskatchewan.

We are grateful to the Universities of Oxford, Sheffield, Birmingham, Saskatchewan and Lethbridge; De Montfort University; the University of Venice Ca' Foscari; the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada); the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the Huntington Library, Trinity College Library Cambridge for their support.