Owen investigates what the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales reveal about the way they came into being. [see revs] This study of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Talescalls into question previous efforts to explain the complexities, the different orderings of the tales and the extraordinary shifts in textual affiliations within the manuscripts. Owen sees the manuscripts that survive, most of them collections of all or almost all the tales, as derived from the large number of single tales and small collections that circulated after Chaucer's death. This theory takes issue with all modern editions of the Canterbury Tales, which in Owen's view reflect the effort of medieval scribes and supervisors to make a satisfactory book of the collection of fragments Chaucer left behind. It is this collection of fragments, the authentic Tales of Canterbury by Geoffrey Chaucer, which reflects the different stages of the plan that was still evolving at his death. CHARLES A. OWEN Jr is former Professor of English and Chairman of Medieval Studies at the University of Conneticut.

This book is an ideal introduction to the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, covering its context, construction, and provenance, with two dozen full-page color illustrations showing the techniques of the scribes and illuminators.

Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age explores one major manuscript repository’s digital presence and poses timely questions about studying books from a temporal and spatial distance via the online environment. Through contributions from a large group of distinguished international scholars, the volume assesses the impact of being able to access and interpret these early manuscripts in new ways. The focus on Parker on the Web, a world-class digital repository of diverse medieval manuscripts, comes as that site made its contents Open Access. Exploring the uses of digital representations of medieval texts and their contexts, contributors consider manuscripts from multiple perspectives including production, materiality, and reception. In addition, the volume explicates new interdisciplinary frameworks of analysis for the study of the relationship between texts and their physical contexts, while centring on an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges effected by the digital representation of a tangible object. Approaches extend from the codicological, palaeographical, linguistic, and cultural to considerations of reader reception, image production, and the implications of new technologies for future discoveries. Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age advances the debate in manuscript studies about the role of digital and computational sources and tools. As such, the book will appeal to scholars and students working in the disciplines of Digital Humanities, Medieval Studies, Literary Studies, Library and Information Science, and Book History.

This second volume, which completes the first comprehensive catalogue of Chaucer's manuscripts, describes the 56 extant copies and the fragments of 8 otherwise lost copies of the Canterbury Tales. These manuscripts, last examined together over 50 years ago, are here described after a fresh appraisal and in the light of modern scholarship, and some revisions of date, decoration, dialect, location, provenance, and script are suggested. The Introduction defines some of the major textual problems posed by the manuscripts and presents some thoughts thereon, while suggesting solutions to some incidental cruces. The Indices and Appendices record the citation of lost and unidentified copies of the Canterbury Tales, the names of former owners and associates, and addenda et corrigenda for Volume I. The Catalogue is designed as a reference work for those teachers and students who wish to know what and where the extant material is without the labour of its collection and for those able in the various specialities of manuscript bibliography to advance present knowledge.

This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex—its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo—scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts—focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns’ libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book.

This volume of essays was produced in conjunction with a full-size facsimile of the Huntington's Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The introductory essays and appendices, prepared by Woodward (Huntington Library) and Stevens (Graduate School, City University of New York), explain the significance and construction of the facsimile and summarize the conservation work done on the manuscript as the facsimile was in the making. Essays by fourteen internationally known British, American, and Japanese scholars discuss the physical construction of the Ellesmere manuscript, its decoration and illumination, its text and language, the ways in which the arrangement and presentation of the manuscript affect the meaning of the text, the order of tales in the manuscript, the relationship of this work to contemporary literary efforts and practices, and the provenance of the manuscript before its acquisition by Henry E. Huntington in 1917. As a reflection of the significance of this manuscript in an increasingly English-reading world, the volume concludes with a survey of Chaucer studies in Japan. There are fifty-seven illustrations in the book, supplemented by a separate color foldout that reproduces all of the famous Ellesmere illustrations of the pilgrim-storytellers.