Browse Items (16364 total)

An anonymous version of "Reynard the Fox" of 1706 contains a hitherto unnoticed allusion to Chaucer's KnT.

Almost all studies of Middle English language and style are flawed in method or lacking in comprehensiveness. The reaction of the medieval audience to dialectal differences is hard to gauge; e.g., sociolinguistic implications of the Northern dialect…

The textual tradition shows that the major and perhaps sole manuscript used by Thynne lacked lines 31-96. The borrowings from the French alleged by Helen Phillips for this passage are commonplaces. No reliable evidence proves that Chaucer composed…

By manuscript evidence Blake justifies his position that of CT only what appears in Hengwrt can be attributed to Chaucer. He attributes all the early manuscripts to a single copy text assembled from Chaucer's own copies after his death. For best…

The lack of a clearcut distinction between connotative and denotative associations of words, as well as the looseness of syntactical patterns in Middle English, forces us to focus on the rhetorical arrangement of ideas and words--repetition, balance,…

Refutes Benson's view (SAC 3 (1981), pp. 77-120) that Ellesmere represents Chaucer's final arrangement of CT. Like Manly and Rickert, Blake thinks there is no Chaucerian order and that after Chaucer's death scribes tried to achieve a satisfactory…

Endings may have been lost for HF and other works. The thesis that works were abandoned by Chaucer leads to untenable theories that Chaucer lost his patronage or became bored or dissatisfied.

On Manly-Rickert's faulty assumptions: prior circulation of individual tales among Chaucer's friends; two archetypes, O and O1; individual lines of textual transmission for separate tales; scribal use of several lost exemplars for some tales. It is…

Manuscript evidence suggests Chaucer's developing conception of the Wife in her GP portrait, the shorter prologue found in some MSS, the tale, and references made in ClT, MerT, and Buk. Some passage were added to WBT at a later date.

Studies based uncritically upon the Robinson text may have produced questionable readings in CT: KnT, ParsT and Prol, ClT, ShT, GP, RvT, MilT, NPT. The Hengwrt MS, currently being used for the "Variorum Chaucer" and by Blake, is the earliest…

Most if not all early scribes used Hg, which avoided editorial tampering--i. e., introduction of new tales and links, revision of order of tales, "corrections" of lines, words, spellings. "The best an editor can do is follow Hg closely."

Nothing in the textual tradition of the three MSS of BD supports a thesis of differing exemplars. The lines of BD that are found in Thynne's edition but not in the MSS--lines 31-96, 288,480, 886--should be considered spurious until convincingly…

None of the structural orders that critics have strained to produce are totally satisfactory for a poem in such an obviously fragmentary state as CT by an author whose plans and intentions are as enigmatic as Chaucer's.

Argues that Caxton's two editions of CT were prompted by patrons; that the revision of the text from the first to the second edition was a "haphazard affair"; and that Caxton's published remarks on Chaucer are conventional and economically motivated,…

El is based on Hg, the first published text. Hg arranged the thirteen apparently unrelated fragments of the one copytext left by Chaucer not by geographical and chronological features which exercise modern critics but by a sequence of…

Twice the carpenter in MilT uses "astromye": is it a malapropism, an acceptable variant, or a scribal error? Since according to Manly-Rickert all mss of CT record "astromye," the last of these is not tenable. And since the word thus misused does…

Despite Tolkien's praise of Chaucer's "accurate observation" of dialects in RvT, examination of the mss of CT reveals that Chaucer's knowledge of northern dialect was in no way exceptional and that many of the northern speech characteristics of the…

The lines (1.4087 and 4187) in RvT suggest the reading of "god" without the inflectional ending. Tolkien objects on grounds of meter, but we do not know enough about Chaucer's meter to emend on these grounds alone.

The "Roman de Renart" has been overemphasized as a source for NPT and for other Middle English works; English animal fables, perhaps influenced in part by the "Roman," are more likely sources and should be explored more thoroughly.

Surveys textual issues that confront editors of CT, presenting the issues as background to the "Canterbury Tales" Project. Considers problems of lineation, the incompleteness of the text, the role of the links, questions of early circulation,glosses,…

Since the text of the Ellesmere manuscript is highly edited, Hengwrt is superior to it and should be used as the basis for standard editions of CT.

Surveys interrelations between speech and writing in the history of English, drawing on KnT and RvT to illustrate features of late-medieval lexis and syntax. Features of KnT may reflect "oral residue," while dialect features of RvT are better seen…

A report on the history and the goals of the "Canterbury Tales" Project.

Describes a system of lineation for consistent citation of all materials relating to the textual history of CT, not only lines generally accepted as genuine but also all spurious and contested lines, including spurious tales. Explains the need for…

Fifteenth-century scribal additions and changes to manuscripts of CT indicate the "linguistic and stylistic prejudices and attitudes" of scribes and their audiences. Treats Hengwrt as a base text and explores how changes in Ellesmere, British…