The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile: Research Edition (review)

Reviews 279 Stubbs, Estelle, ed., TheHengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile: Research Edition. Leicester, Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000; 1 C D - R O M ; R R P £70.00/US$130 (individual buyers), £150/US$240 (institutional and library buyers); ISBN 0953961001. The Canterbury Tales Project, under the general editorship of Norman Blake a Peter Robinson, has been revolutionising Chaucer studies since the appearance of an electronic edition ofthe Wife ofBath's Prologue in 1996. The aim ofthe project hasbeen to present every one ofthe surviving pre-1500 witnesses to the Canterbury Tales, whether manuscript orprinted, in a form suitable for advanced textual research. This has meant going beyond the obvious advantages ofthe electronic form - full transcriptions and digital images of each witness - to provide more analytical materials, particularly databases of word forms and occurrences in each witness, bothregularised and un-regularised. All these materials have been extensively interlinked to enable browsing and searching. Software normally employed in genetics has also been used to analyse the textual tradition and to produce stemmata. All these features were well demonstrated in the recent edition ofthe General Prologue, edited by Elizabeth Solopova (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The latest addition to this corpus of material takes a rather different approach. It contains the whole of a single manuscript - Hengwrt - rather than many witnesses to a single section ofthe Canterbury Tales, and uses new software called Anastasia to present the text. At the heart of this edition are colour images of each page of the manuscript, accompanied by diplomatic transcriptions of Hengwrt and of the Ellesmere manuscript for comparison. A range of supplementary materials is also provided, including a detailed description of the manuscript (by Daniel Mosser), an essay on the language of the scribe (by Simon Horobin) and a study of Hengwrt (by Estelle Stubbs). The power ofthis edition comes from the sophisticated ways in which the corpus ofinterlinked materials can be displayed and navigated. A n y given section ofthe text can be viewed in various forms: as image, as image with transcription, or as parallel Hengwrt and Ellesmere transcriptions. Even the underlying S G M L based text encoding (using T E D can be seen ifrequired. Images can be displayed as a single page, or as an opening (facing pages), or as conjugates (two pages on the same side of a sheet). They can be viewed at sizes from 2 5 % to 200%, with 50% as the default, and a magnifying glass can be used to enlarge sections of a page. The user can browse, eitherby going sequentially page by page, or by picking from a list of sections and tales or from a list of quires, or by going directly to a 280 Reviews specific page number. The Hengwrt transcription can be searched for words or phrases, and searches can be limited to specific areas ofthe text. The presentation and navigation of this edition have managed to outstrip even the high standards set by the previous Canterbury Tales Project publications. Not only are the images marvellously clear and the transcription very accurate, but there are also numerous unobtrusive ways in which the materials are made easier to use. I particularly liked the visual assistance provided: the diagram for each page showing its place in a quire, the colour-coded analysis ofthe different inks used, the highlighting of variants in red in the parallel transcriptions, the 'keyword in context' display of search results, and the colour-coded listing ofthe different orders ofthe tales in the two manuscripts. The different navigation panels for the whole edition and for each page are clear and concise and easy to follow. The ability to search and analyse the text is satisfactory, but less sophisticated than in the previous publications. Though this is mainly the result of the different aims of this edition, there are a few significant limitations: only the Hengwrt transcription can be searched (not the Ellesmere), while the restriction of wildcards torighttruncation makes it difficult to allow for spelling variants (such as Tycour' versus iicour'). Limiting a search to a specific area of the text requires an understanding of the S G M L encoding. The Hengwrt Chaucer comes in two versions, the Research Edition...