Computer-based Chaucer Studies ed. by Ian Lancashire (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Kindrick reminds us that, under the ars praedicandi, a four-part concept ofthe authorial role emerged in which writers assumed the roles ofscriptor, compiiator, commentator, or auctor. In this book he himselfhas played all four roles: as scriptor he has conveyed to us accurately parts of the rhetorical tradition that have been developed over centuries oflearning; as compiiator he has arranged and rearranged the materials so that we may meaningfully juxtapose the various and intertwining influences of rhetoric with the whole of Henryson's opus; as commentator he has carefully sifted the mate­ rials and presented them through his own authoritative voice; and as auctor he has shared with us a great many insights not previously a·.,ailable in the study of Henryson. In demonstrating that Henryson was a sterling practi­ tioner ofthe rhetorical arts, Kindrick has done an admirable job ofpractic­ ing them himself. GEORGE D. GoPEN Duke University IAN I.ANcASHIRE, ed. Computer-based Chaucer Studies. CCH Working Pa­ pers, vol. 3. Toronto: Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Univer­ sity of Toronto, 1993. Pp. vii, 205. $45.00 paper. From the "Editor's Noticeboard" of the European English Messenger comes the following query: "Surely the emperour of CD does have some clothes on?"1 The editor in a frustrating attempt to use the electronic text of Virginia Woolf's The Waves had found "water, water everywhere, but not a drop ofnew insight into the secrets ofthe text." Disappointed by his own efforts, the editor posted an appeal to "readers who have discovered what to do with or to a text on a computer, (to] advise us as to what pleasures those ofus miss who are puzzled by all these oysters that refuse to yield the pearls they had promised." Ian Lancashire's slender volume provides some answers to those ques­ tions. Collected from a two-day conference held in Toronto in November 1992, these essays produce a few genuine pearls and the promise ofmore to come from electronic texts. They demonstrate the usefulness of electronic technology in Chaucerian studies, and they offer models for literary and cultural analysis for other periods, other authors. The first two essays, those 1 "Editor's Noticeboard," European English Messenger 3, no. 2 (1944): 86-87. 226 REVIEWS of Murray McGillivray and Peter Robinson, describe work in progress for hypertextually linked critical and archival texts.McGillivray's report on his hypertextual edition of The Book of the Duchess begins with a visionary prospect of a time when "a scholar located ...in a remote part of the Canadian provinces, say, could enter into a cubicle in the library, strap on various sensory-input devices, and for an hour or two enjoy the experience of sitting in a virtual Bodleian library, flipping the virtual pages of Bodleian Fairfax 16, turning it over to examine the binding, feeling the texture of the parchment, looking closer to see whether the rough patch really was an erasure and so on" (p.2). Utopia once set aside, McGillivray discusses present and foreseeable technical realities that are only slightly less remarkable. He describes his current plans for presenting medieval manuscripts in color digital facsimiles and recounts the problems he has encountered and solved while producing manuscript transcriptions in elec­ tronic format. Peter M. W. Robinson's essay on the manuscripts of The Wife ofBath's Prologue reflects the experience ofseveral years' fruitful work with dozens of fifteenth-century manuscripts. Using the single graph's variation in WBP 46, "For sothe / sithe I wol nat kepe me chaast in all," he deftly calls attention to the fact that, until the appearance ofLarry D. Benson's River­ side Chaucer, the poet's text had scarcely benefited from the rigorous methods ofthis century's analytic bibliography.Poets offar less importance and interest than Chaucer have been far more professionally edited. Robin­ son continues in this essay to develop ideas more fully elaborated elsewhere about the desirability of graphemic rather than graphetic transcription in electronic texts and to describe the uses of cladistic analysis-a technique derived from phylogenetic biology-for determining stemmatic relations among the manuscripts.We must wait until the professional version of his COLLATE...