The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile ed. by Diane Watt (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER concerning the broad effects in Piers of the problem of making a beginning in all the ways Smith shows obtained in the period. That the study leaves me wanting more and denser literary engagement, and more connected or discriminated historical contexts for the topic it takes up, is a sign that it succeeds in putting before us a major and novel task. Andrew Galloway Cornell University Estelle Stubbs, ed. The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile. Leicester, UK: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000. 1 CD-ROM. $110.00 for individual purchase, $240 for institution or library purchase. The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile is the third electronic publication undertaken by the Canterbury Tales Project. The previous publications —The Wife of Bath’s Prologue on CD-ROM (1996) and The General Prologue on CD-ROM (2000)—provide the reader with hypertexts of their respective narratives, and thus include all the manuscripts of those narratives. In contrast, this digital facsimile offers us the Canterbury Tales almost in its entirety, as it appears in one single but very important manuscript: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS. Peniarth 392D. It is generally agreed that the Hengwrt Chaucer dates to soon after Chaucer’s death in 1400, and that it therefore constitutes the earliest extant copy of the Tales, a poem never completed or fully revised by its author. The manuscript, however, was somewhat crudely made and is now in a bad condition: rats have chewed the parchment, and the removal of its boards in the 1930s and rebinding in the 1950s caused further damage. The CD provides color images of each folio of this battered codex, enabling readers to examine layout and quiring, positioning of headers and glosses, and changes in ink color and scribal hands. Links are provided alongside the images of the folios, which take the reader to notes on any distinctive codicological features. The high-resolution images are, arguably, easier to read than the manuscript itself (which is cumbersome as well as fragile), and some exciting new discoveries have been made in the process of the digital capture. The reader of The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile is effectively being presented with a highly sophisticated ‘‘best text’’ of the Canterbury Tales, 436 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:29 PS REVIEWS in that many of the assumptions underlying this type of editing manifest themselves in the surrounding apparatus. Of course, the choice of the Hengwrt Chaucer as best text (not to mention the decision to reproduce a best text in the first place) is controversial. The majority of editors and scholars continue to assert the superiority of the slightly later Ellesmere Chaucer (San Marino, California, Huntington Library, MS. EL 26 C9). And although Norman Blake, one of the co-general editors of the Canterbury Tales Project, produced an edition of the Canterbury Tales based exclusively on Hengwrt in 1980, he has until recently been pretty much a lone voice extolling Hengwrt’s virtues. The debate about the respective merits of Hengwrt and Ellesmere hardly needs rehearsing here, and, in her editor’s introduction, Estelle Stubbs provides a concise and upto -date overview of various critical opinions on the date, condition, and strengths of both manuscripts, although her prejudices against Ellesmere —the Prince to Hengwrt’s Pauper (to adapt Stubbs’s own description )—are fairly evident. For example, Stubbs draws our attention to Kathleen Scott’s work, which suggests the possibility of an earlier date for the Ellesmere Chaucer, and, by implication, also for Hengwrt, placing the latter within Chaucer’s own lifetime, and thus giving it even more authority. This conclusion is reinforced in the article on the language of the Hengwrt Chaucer by Simon Horobin, (published in the CD), which argues that the spelling in the Hengwrt manuscript comes closest to and retains elements of Chaucer’s own. I am perfectly happy to be persuaded by the findings of Scott and Horobin, although Stubbs could, I feel, have accorded more weight to the counter-arguments in favor of Ellesmere. The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile is an excellent research tool and a fine teaching resource and should prove invaluable, especially for postgraduate instruction in paleography and textual criticism. Indeed...