The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer

The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is a finished work has not been answered to date. There are 84 manuscripts and four incunabula (printed before 1500) editions[4] of the work, which is more than for any other vernacular English literary text with the exception of Prick of Conscience. This comparison should not be taken as evidence of the Tales' popularity in the century after Chaucer's death, because, according to Derek Pearsall, it is unfair considering that Prick of Conscience had all the benefit of the "preservation of a dogmatic religious subject-matter".[5] Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have been originally complete, while 28 are so fragmentary that it is difficult to ascertain whether they were copied individually or as part of a set.[6] The Tales vary in both minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript; many of the minor variations are due to copyists' errors, while it is suggested that in other cases Chaucer both added to his work and revised it as it was being copied and possibly as it was being distributed.

Even the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Tales are not Chaucer's originals. The very oldest is probably MS Peniarth 392 D (called "Hengwrt"), written by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death. Another famous example is the Ellesmere Manuscript, a manuscript handwritten by one person with illustrations by several illustrators; the tales are put in an order that many later editors have followed for centuries.[7][8] The first version of The Canterbury Tales to be published in print was William Caxton's 1476 edition. It was one of the first books to be printed by Caxton, the first person in England to print books using a printing press. Only 10 copies of this edition are known to exist, including one held by the British Library and one held by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In 2004, Linne Mooney claimed that she was able to identify the scrivener who worked for Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney, then a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, said she could match Pinkhurst's oath in the Scriveners' Common Paper to the handwriting in the Hengwrt manuscript, which she theorized might have been transcribed from Chaucer's working copy.[9][10] Although this identification has been generally accepted, some scholars have expressed doubts.[11]

Order

There is no consensus as to whether a complete version of the Tales exists, and also no consensus regarding Chaucer's intended order of the stories.[12][13]

Textual and manuscript clues have been adduced to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales. Some scholarly editions divide the Tales into ten "Fragments". The tales that make up a Fragment are closely related and contain internal indications of their order of presentation, usually with one character speaking to and then stepping aside for another character. However, between Fragments, the connection is less obvious. Consequently, there are several possible orders; the one most frequently seen in modern editions follows the numbering of the Fragments (ultimately based on the Ellesmere order).[12] Victorians frequently used the nine "Groups", which was the order used by Walter William Skeat whose edition Chaucer: Complete Works was used by Oxford University Press for most of the twentieth century, but this order is currently seldom followed.[12]

An alternative ordering (seen in the early 15th-century manuscript Harley MS. 7334) places Fragment VIII before VI. Fragments I and II almost always follow each other, just as VI and VII, IX and X do in the oldest manuscripts. Fragments IV and V, by contrast, vary in location from manuscript to manuscript.