Should We Reedit the Canterbury Tales?

Eight volumes, clad in pale blue cloth with gilded frame and letters on the spine, constitute a bibliographical point of reference for textual scholars who have worked on the Canterbury Tales. The importance of The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts lies precisely in the task the title describes. Manly and Rickert aimed to prepare a new edition with a text: "based throughout upon the evidence afforded by all the extant MSS and such early editions as represented MSS no longer in existence."¹

Manly and Rickert's decision to work from the textual evidence of all the known surviving manuscripts was revolutionary, because no other earlier editorial projects of the Canterbury Tales had fully undertaken such an impressive survey of the surviving witnesses.² By dedicating two volumes to the description of the manuscripts and incunabula (vol. 1) and detailed analysis of the textual affiliation of the witnesses with special attention to the relationship between manuscripts (vol. 2), they gave these matters more attention than had ever been given. Their edition of the poem appears in volumes 3 and 4, which also contain a brief apparatus criticus and notes. The remaining four volumes give the textual variants, grouped according to tales and links; this too was novel, and is a practice seldom adopted even by recent editors.³ The edition was then a major contribution to the textual criticism of the Canterbury Tales, even though it did not have an immediate impact on the scholarly community.⁴ In particular, the difficulty of interpreting the data and sifting through the complex apparatus criticus and variants have not given editors, scholars, and students easy access to the critical mass of information that Manly and Rickert collected.⁵

Manly and Rickert attempted a new approach to the editing of Chaucer's work, and if the text they established did not find favor among editors, nevertheless their work on the affiliation of the manuscripts,⁶ their argument for the textual importance of Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 392 D (Hengwrt),⁷ and their research on the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales have influenced textual and literary scholars, palaeographers, and book historians.⁸ Manly and Rickert's contribution to the textual criticism as well as our understanding of the material production of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales is worth considering in more detail. But even more challenging would be to consider afresh new editorial projects in which the textual and material dimension of the Canterbury Tales do not sit in separate volumes, but work together to ask new and ambitious research questions of the poem. This interaction can only be achieved in an electronic environment, which allows the integration of text and manuscripts in imaginative ways. The reconciliation of these two aspects is pivotal in exploring further issues of authorship and canonicity in the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer's other works alike.

Existing electronic projects, such as the Canterbury Tales Project, have aimed to refine Manly and Rickert's understanding of how the texts of the surviving manuscripts relate to one another.⁹ The General Prologue, the Wife of Bath's Prologue, The Miller's Tale, and The Nun's Priest's Tale have been transcribed in order to provide an electronic collation of multiple textual variants to complement Manly and Rickert's manual collation.¹⁰ These electronic editions are certainly valuable, and one of the most important achievements is to provide complete textual evidence of the transcribed tales to aid future editors.¹¹ As Manly and Rickert's classification was essential to explain the eclectic editorial approach they had chosen, it would seem that a refinement of their textual affiliation would offer new evidence to establish a new text, provided that all the tales and links are transcribed and available to scholars. However, can we go beyond this text-based approach? Can we start again with fresh questions: Do we need a new edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, especially after the excellent and affordable edition by Jill Mann?¹² Do we need a new...