A Revised Edition of the Manly-Rickert Text of the Canterbury Tales (review)

The title of A Revised Edition of the Manly-Rickert Text of the Canterbury Tales may be misleading: this is not a revision of Manly and Rickert's work, but a very slightly revised version of Ramsey's 1994 book (also published by Mellen), itself bearing the less-than-clear name The Manly-Rickert Text of the Canterbury Tales. The present revision is entirely editorial, and consists primarily of the addition of helpful running titles to the chapters and sections of the book. Henry Ansgar Kelly moved the re-issue of this book because the original 1994 publication, although a substantial work by an important scholar, was "never reviewed and rarely cited" (VIII). It does seem appropriate to take stock of Ramsey's ideas, both his more substantial arguments and the proposals he frankly labels "conjectural" (290, e.g.), but it would be odd to do so in the usual way, since scholarship has in the intervening eighteen years gone on providing evidence relevant to any evaluation of the issues. I will note those shifts in what we know today; but that is not the only concern. Where Kelly sees a problem in our failure to review Ramsey's book in 1994, Ramsey sees a scandal in the then-current standing of the Manly-Rickert edition (MANLY and RICKERT 1940, hereinafter M-R), which, he believes, "has been subjected to misguided attacks, badly misrepresented, heavily used without attribution, and, as a direct consequence of all these, neglected by most Chaucer scholars, critics and editors" (XIV). Kelly's call for a rehearing of Ramsey has already generated renewed statements of general skepticism about M-R in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (hereafter SAC); this review is perhaps a good place for vetting in some detail the issues Ramsey insists have not been adequately considered. Thus while my primary goal here is to summarize and evaluate Ramsey's argument, that argument itself requires attention to M-R and the theoretical questions it spawned.

The original neglect of Ramsey's book might be attributed partly to its surface characteristics. Although Kelly writes in his Foreword that "Errors in the original edition of Ramsey's work have been corrected" (VIII), many dozens of obvious typographical errors — as many as four on a single page (144) — remain in this revision. But Ramsey's argument is difficult to read for other reasons as well. The new running titles are helpful because Ramsey habitually refers to demonstrations that he will make later, a sure sign that the book could profitably be reorganized and shortened considerably. Thus we read on page 383 the same quotation from B. L. Ullman about Greg's Calculus of Variants that had been adduced to much the same point on page p. 83. Moreover, I cannot but share Jill Mann's sense that the demonstrations so frequently promised too often prove "disappointingly vague and general" (MANN 2010, 348). Nor can the animus that impels much of Ramsey's argument be anything but an obstacle to its appreciation. If M-R has indeed been "heavily used", surely it cannot also have been as "neglected" as his next phrase insists. Ramsey has a point, but here as too often elsewhere his disagreements with both "users" and "neglecters" leave the heads of his nails unhit. This is in many ways an unlovely book, and its unloveliness surely contributed to its lack of success.

Ramsey begins with a survey of most editions of the poem, emphasizing the small role that direct study of the manuscripts and their variants has played in that tradition; he contrasts Manly-Rickert's attention to that data with the reliance on the work of previous editors in all other editions generally available in 1994. He then details the chronology of the Chicago edition's progress, emphasizing how external pressure led to...