A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts and Editions of the Canterbury Tales

Provides a description of every extant manuscript and pre-1500 edition of Chaucer's best-known, yet unfinished work. Nearly a century has passed since the first detailed descriptions of all the known manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales were published. Our better understanding of the processes of fifteenth-century book production, along with the development of new tools and methodologies, today allows for much more precise and accurate descriptions. This Catalogue provides accounts of the manuscripts and pre-1500 editions of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales based on examinations of all the manuscripts (often multiple examinations) and almost all the known copies of the incunable editions. This includes 54 complete or once complete manuscripts; 29 manuscripts containing extracts or that are incomplete for other reasons; and four pre-1500 printed editions surviving in multiple copies. Each description is self-contained, and includes sections on contents, tale-order, progress of copying, materials, collation, format, hands (or printer's type for the incunables), decoration, date, dialect/spellings, and provenance. The front-matter provides details of tale-order types, textual relationships, sigla, abbreviations, and notational conventions referred to and employed in the individual descriptions. These manuscripts were produced for a wide variety of consumers, which is reflected in the varying qualities of parchment, or paper, or combinations of paper and parchment on which they are copied. Some are sumptuously illuminated, while many are remarkably plain for a text whose stature we today regard so highly. Some contain only the Canterbury Tales; in others, it can be difficult to find any Chaucer at all. In a few, the portions of the Canterbury Tales they contain were copied from an early printed edition. While these incunable editions came off the press as more-or-less identical copies, some were elaborately decorated for purchasers, others received minimal "finishing," and many none at all. This Catalogue presents the stories - to the extent we have been able to reconstruct them - of these surviving witnesses to the fifteenth-century dissemination of Chaucer's best-known yet unfinished work.