A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Volume II. The Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. Parts 5a and b ed. by Mark Allen and John H. Fisher (review)

These volumes are the latest installment in the Variorum series of editions of Chaucer’s works, whose aim is to provide a complete record of scholarship on individual Chaucerian texts. While a steady trickle of volumes appeared throughout the 1990s, this is the first addition since the publication of the Treatise on the Astrolabe in 2002. While such delays are understandable given the breadth and scope of this ambitious project, they do have the unfortunate effect of ensuring that these volumes are long out of date by the time of their publication. The present volume, published in 2012, aims to provide scholars with “convenient and ready access to the vast labyrinth, every nook and cranny, of commentary on The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale before 1996” (xiii).

The introduction consists of Critical and Textual Commentaries, followed by the text of the Prologue and Tale, accompanied by a critical apparatus and followed by the Bibliographical Index. The second volume comprises 291 pages of textual and explanatory notes and glosses. The first of these sections, the Critical Commentary, represents the volume’s most valuable contribution to scholarship. Here we are given the benefit of the editors’ exhaustive reading through centuries of scholarly assessment of the Wife of Bath, her Prologue and Tale. There are sections on the “Dramatic Approach,” “Psychology and Appropriateness of the Tale to the Teller,” and “Patristic Criticism,” which would make a very useful introduction for students keen to get an overview of critical approaches to The Canterbury Tales in general. While some sections need to be supplemented with reference to more recent scholarship (the updated editions of Sources and Analogues, edited by Robert Correale and Mary Hamer, for instance), other parts provide access to comparatively neglected fields. The sections dealing with allusions, adaptations, and the critical tradition before 1900 suggest a wealth of possible avenues for future research into Chaucerian reception.

The Textual Commentary offers an account of the textual tradition, and discusses additional lines and passages, the provision of marginal glosses, and the place of the tale within the Canterbury Tales as a whole. Descriptions of the manuscripts consist principally of discussion of textual affiliation; little notice is taken of codicological and paleographical details despite their obvious relevance to many of the issues debated here. Where reference is made to paleographical matters, the discussion suffers from the volume’s early cut-off point. Consideration of the copying of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts without any reference to Linne Mooney’s proposed identification of their common scribe as Adam Pinkhurst seems particularly unfortunate. A complete list of extant manuscripts is provided, although details are at times sparse and imprecise. The “Devonshire manuscript” is now in the Takamiya collection in Tokyo; “Northumberland” makes no reference to its location in the duke of Northumberland’s library at Alnwick Castle, or its shelfmark (455).

The Variorum editors’ decision to restrict their collations to a group of ten manuscripts further limits the value of their critical text and its apparatus. Recent scholarship has consistently demonstrated the importance of manuscripts not belonging to Manly and Rickert’s constant groups, as well as the value of later witnesses. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue on CD-ROM, edited by Peter Robinson in 1996, which offers complete transcriptions of all manuscripts and pre-1500 printed witnesses of the Prologue, along with sophisticated collation software, provides access to a far greater range of variant readings than is offered here. The Variorum series supplements this partial account of the manuscript record by providing a complete overview of the printed tradition, from Caxton’s first edition of 1476 to the text...