Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale and Nun’s Priest’s Tale: An Annotated Bibliography 1900 to 2000 (review)

This is the eighth volume in The Chaucer Bibliographies series (eighteen are projected at present) and occasion to take brief stock of the entire project as well as the individual volume. Begun under the general editorship of A. J. Colaianne and R. M. Piersol more than twenty-five years ago, and taken up by Thomas Hahn during the compilation of the second volume, the series is suffering from the extended gestation that plagues other massive Chaucer undertakings—the Canterbury Tales Project, the Variorum Chaucer, and the Chaucer Encyclopedia, for example. The series seeks to provide “a complete listing and assessment of scholarship and criticism” on Chaucer’s writings and his “life, times, and historical context” (p. vii). This aim is certainly admirable, but the prospects of successful completion seem to be fading.

To date, the published volumes in the series cover Chaucer’s lyrics and Anelida (Russell A. Peck, 1983); his Romaunt, Boece, scientific treatises, and Chaucerian apocrypha (Russell A. Peck, 1988); the General Prologue (Caroline Eckhardt, 1990); the Knight’s Tale (Monica E. McAlpine, 1991); the Miller’s, Reeve’s and Cook’s Tales (T. L. Burton, Rosemary Greentree, and a team of five other contributors, 1997); the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (Peter G. Beidler and Elizabeth M. Biebel, 1998); the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale (Marilyn Sutton, 2000); and the volume under review, edited by Peter Goodall along with two editorial assistants and eight additional contributors. Sixteen remaining tales await coverage, along with Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, and the three dream visions. There is clearly much yet to be done before completion.

The series received support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities between 1989 and 1995, evidently helping to explain the relatively rapid rate of production during that period and soon thereafter. Ominously, it has been nearly ten years between this newest volume and its immediate predecessor. The energetic promise reflected in Hahn’s General Editor’s Preface (which appears in modified forms in each of the volumes 3–8) has seemed more forced over time. Even early on, Derek Pearsall characterized the claims for the series as “a little over enthusiastic” (Modern Language Review, 87.4 [1992], 926), when he commented on Hahn’s Preface to Eckhardt’s volume on the General Prologue. Pearsall also notes (amidst much praise for Eckhardt’s volume) the “inexplicably vast” gap between the last entries in that volume (1982) and its date of publication (1990). That eight-year gap narrowed in ensuing volumes (Beidler and Biebel reduced it to three), but it has opened out again to nine. I do not think this inexplicable but attribute it instead to insufficient support for the series’ goal of comprehensive coverage and the fact that, as time goes on, it is less a goal than a rolling horizon. Goodall and his team attempt to cover eighteen more years than did Eckhardt, and this will apparently increase with the next volume in the series. It might be good to set a terminus ad quem for subsequent volumes to match the series’ terminus a quo of 1900 (which individual compilers have interpreted flexibly). Important works from before 1900 have certainly been overlooked in the series, presumably for the sake of practicality, and the impulse to be up-to-date might best be sacrificed on the same altar.

The version of Hahn’s Preface in Goodall’s volume strikes another ominous note for me. In Sutton’s volume on the Pardoner, Hahn says “plans are underway” for a compilation of all the volumes as an “updatable CD-ROM” (p. xiv). In the current volume, “online access” reasonably replaces the reference to CD-ROM, but there is no mention of plans, only that “Ultimately the complete series and its component parts may be accessible to a wide range of general users and scholars...