About this Edition

Part Editors' Introduction

My interest in the Canterbury Tales Project began long before my participation in it. I was intrigued by its first publication, The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM, for its inclusion and—for 1996—remarkably accessible display of the full range of variants in that work. I slowly became more engaged with The Project's innovative and evolving theory of witness relations, as detailed in Peter Robinson's groundbreaking "A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth Century Witnesses to the Wife of Bath's Prologue," his "Analysis Workshop" on the General Prologue on CD-ROM, and many conversations over many years with Peter and Barbara Bordalejo. I used its evidence in several articles, and the generally unthinking resistance to that use by some readers ultimately encouraged me to address "The Value of the Canterbury Tales Project and Textual Evidence in the Emendation of Canterbury Tales III 117," in a 2017 article in JEGP. By the time that article appeared I had agreed to start transcribing the witnesses to the Reeve's Tale and Prologue, setting in motion the process whose product is before you. As a footnote to my article noted, "I affiliated myself with the CTP after being persuaded of its value, not vice versa.

The process of making this edition followed the protocols of earlier CTP editions. All 58 fifteenth-century witnesses to the Reeve's Prologue (Link 2). the Reeve's Tale, the Cook's Prologue (Link 3), and the unfinished Cook's Tale were transcribed and then collated; phylogenetic Variant Maps were generated using PAUP* software, and the Stemmatic Commentaries generated out of those data using the Project's standard procedures. I either made or reviewed the transcripts and the collation; Peter Robinson generated the Variant Maps, and Peter, Barbara Bordalejo, and I all contributed to the Commentary.

Part of the interest of the Reeve's Tale has always been its deployment of various dialect forms, especially in the speech of Aleyn and John. The existence of those variants also proved to be interesting in editorial terms. As I collated, it was relatively easy to distinguish dialect forms incorporating a distinct word—"I is" rather than "I am," for example—but words in which only a vowel changes present a more formidable challenge, especially given the number of vowels that might occur in the textual record at any point. An early attempt to collate distinctly all the dialect forms that might reasonably be attributed to Chaucer failed because 1) it was insurmountably difficult to establish a consistent protocol determining which forms should and should not be distinguished and 2) phylogenetic analysis of such efforts suggested results incommensurate with what we already knew: the pair of group a witnesses Cn Ma, for instance, were in such maps placed far apart from their group mates Dd En1 Ds1. In the end, standard collation practices, regularizing dialect variants, were employed for most dialect forms.

But there is no perfect solution to this dilemma. When the dialect program in the tale generates different words, those forms are distinguished in the collation. When only a morpheme changes, the two forms are usually regularized. But when the changed morpheme is placed in rhyme position, they must again be distinguished, especially because any given manuscript may well use one morpheme in the a-rhyme and another in the b-rhyme.

In short, the Reeve's Tale, perhaps more than most of the Tales, ought to provide its readers with what the General Editors describe as "not only the critical edition but also the materials that made it possible, because only that complete record will "give readers both a text to analyze and the tools to investigate the logic of its existence

General Editors' Introduction

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 project.

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.