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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

manuscript variation, Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, textual variation

College

Humanities

Department

English

Abstract

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales before his death in 1400, producing his tales over the space of approximately 14 years. But even with over twenty thousand lines of poetry and prose, his work was still unfinished, for the plan was that each pilgrim would share two tales on the outward journey and two more on the homeward journey. When Chaucer died, he left only 23 tales (plus a prologue and retraction), with little direction as to their order and placement within the larger framework of the action, It was up to his literary executors and later editors to decide how the tales should be compiled. Some editors and copyists even took it upon themselves to fill in the gaps Chaucer left by composing their own links between tales when they had not already been provided. Today, 83 pre-1500 manuscripts exist containing anywhere from one to 911 of the tales, most hand crafted by monastic or secular scribes. As the tales were copied and recopied throughout the century, deviations from Chaucer’s original text only increased as the inevitable copying errors were passed on. Words were changed, lines transposed or omitted, words and lines were added, and even whole blocks of text were changed, deleted, or moved. The numerous different readings of the tales created a challenge in establishing a definitive text for the tales, but also provided an intriguing puzzle for tracing the sources of variation from manuscript to manuscript.

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