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 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.
The Previous Edition of the General Prologue
In 2000, Cambridge University Press published an edition of The General Prologue, edited by Elizabeth Solopova and based on the work of the Canterbury Tales Project. The transcriptions used in that edition were taken over, with some exceptions, into the continuing work of the project, and then were absorbed into this publication. We are grateful to Elizabeth Solopova, Lorna Stevenson and transcribers in the Computers and Manuscripts project at Oxford before 1996, and to transcribers at De Montfort University after 1996. We acknowledge our debt to Elizabeth Solopova, whose early leadership of project created the first transcription guidelines and set the standard for all that has followed. These pre-2000 transcriptions were thoroughly revised after 2013 in accordance with the new transcription guidelines prepared by Barbara Bordalejo, after the project moved to Saskatchewan and the Textual Communities infrastructure became available. The exceptions referred to above relate to transcriptions of manuscripts to which the University of Sheffield claimed copyright (thus, Ch Dd El Gg Hg La Pw and others) and for which they refused the continuing project permission to publish. These transcriptions were replaced either by transcriptions derived by the University of Michigan from the Furnivall New Chaucer Society texts (thus notably Hg El) or by the making of new transcriptions (Ch Cx1 Cx2 and others).
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.
Besides the debts we owe to the many people and institutions mentioned above, we are conscious of how much we have gained from many others over the decades of this work. Without all we have learnt from Edvige Agostinelli, Mark Allen, Andrew Brown, Marina Buzzoni, Elizabeth Burr, Fabio Ciotti, William Coleman, Paul Eggert, Tuomas Heikkilä, (and our many other partners in the long-running Studia Stemmatalogica series), Franz Fischer, Hans-Walter Gabler, David Greetham, Chris Howe, Paola Italia, Lino Leonardi, Jerome McGann, Richard North, Wendy Phillips-Rodríguez, Francisco Rico, Roopika Risam, Geoffrey Rockwell, Teemu Roos, Prue Shaw, Peter Shillingsburg, Martha Nell Smith, G. Thomas Tanselle, Francesca Tommasi, Kevin Taylor, Joris Van Zundert, Dirk Van Hulle, Dick van Vliet, Aengus Ward, Heather Windram, and Marta Werner, this project would never have come to this point. Both editors feel a special debt to Terry Jones who led a treasure hunt that took us through Lambeth Palace and culminated at Penhurst House and a dinner of poached eggs from a hen called "Hen." Finally, we thank our families for their forbearance with our decades-long immersion in this work.
Barbara Bordalejo also wishes to thank Davide, Khalid, Jocelyn, Frank, Morgan, Nathan, and members of the Humanities Innovation Lab at the University of Lethbridge for their support and ideas; Medievalists of Color for offering a space in which she was welcome; Kyle Dase and Adam Vázquez, not just for their involvement in the project, but for offering intellectual challenges and friendship over the years. Of the people who didn’t get to see this edition, David Greetham, Terry Jones, David Hoover and Bill Coleman, contributed in ways that can barely be acknowledged here. To Dan, she owes a debt that can never be repaid. To Tessa, she says “Te hee quod she, and clapte the wyndow to” and hopes this is not too annoying.