Some key documents
Here are several key articles relating to the project:
"The History, Discoveries and Aims of the Canterbury Tales Project". Published in The Chaucer Review 38:2 (2003) pp. 126-139. A prepublication version of the article is also available here. Online subscribers to the journal may access it in HTML or PDF. (Convenient summary of the project to 2003).
"Guidelines for Transcription of the Manuscripts of the Wife of Bath's Prologue" (with Elizabeth Solopova). This version published on the Nun's Priest's Tale CD (2006) differs slightly from the version published in 1993 (see below). (Full explanation of the transcription principles upon which the whole project is based).
"New methods of editing, exploring, and reading The Canterbury Tales". Originally, conference epaper given at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, May 28 1998. (Brief outline of the transcription, collation and publication principles used by the Project).
"General Editors' Preface" (with Norman Blake): from The General Prologue on CD-ROM, 2000 (states a key change in project policy: not only 'to help editors edit' but also 'to help readers read').
"The phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales". Published in Nature 394 (1998) p. 839. Online subscribers to the journal may access it at Nature. You may also access the article here. (Brief account of the phylogenetic techniques used by the Project).
The "Open Transcription Policy". It is a vital principle of our work that the transcripts we make should be freely available to other scholars, for their use and modification. This document explains how we reconcile this with copyright considerations.
From the Occasional Papers volumes
We here reproduce all articles from the two volumes of the Project's Occasional Papers series, edited by Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, Office for Humanities Communication, Oxford. The following appeared in the first volume, published in 1993:
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson: "Preface" (pages 1-4)
Norman Blake: "Editing the Canterbury Tales: An Overview" (pages 5-18)
Peter Robinson and Elizabeth Solopova: "Guidelines for Transcription of the Manuscripts of the Wife of Bath's Prologue" (pages 19-52)
Robert O'Hara and Peter Robinson: "Computer-assisted Methods of Stemmatic Analysis" (pages 53-74)
Daniel Mosser: "A New Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales" (pages 75-84)
Stephen Partridge: "The Canterbury Tales Glosses and the Manuscript Groups" (pages 85-94)
From the second volume of the Occasional Papers, edited by Norman Blake and Peter Robinson, Office for Humanities Communication, Oxford, 1997:
Norman Blake and Peter Robinson: "Preface" (pages 1-4)
Norman Blake: "The Project's Lineation System" (pages 5-14)
Simon Horobin: "Editorial Assumptions and the Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales" (pages 15-21)
Beverly Kennedy: "Contradictory Responses to the Wife of Bath as evidenced by Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Variants" (pages 23-39)
Daniel W. Mosser: "The Language, Hands and Interaction of the Two Scribes of the Egerton 2726 Chaucer Manuscript (En1" (pages 41-53)
Michael Pidd and Estelle Stubbs: "From Medieval Manuscripts to Electronic Text: A Transcriber's Tale" (pages 55-59)
Michael Pidd, Estelle Stubbs and Claire E. Thomson: "The Hengwrt Canterbury Tales: Inadmissible Evidence?" (pages 61-68)
Peter Robinson: "A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century Witnesses to The Wife of Bath's Prologue" (pages 69-132)
Elizabeth Solopova: "The Problem of Authorial Variants in The Wife of Bath's Prologue" (pages 133-142)
Elizabeth Solopova: "Chaucer's Metre and Scribal Editing in the Early Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales" (pages 143-164)
Reviews: of the Variorum General Prologue; of The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions; of the Cowen/Kane edition of The Legend of Good Women (pages 165-179)
When reading these articles (or indeed any project publication) the list of witness sigils will be useful. Here are also brief notes on the contributors.
From our electronic publications
Our major publications are our CD-ROMs and other electronic publications: see Publications. Here we give access to portions of the editorial materials published on these:
From The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM, edited by Peter Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 1996): "Editor's Introduction" (Peter Robinson).
From The General Prologue on CD-ROM, edited by Elizabeth Solopova (Cambridge University Press, 2000): "General Editors' Preface" (Peter Robinson and Norman Blake); "Editor's Introduction" (Elizabeth Solopova); "Analysis Workshop" (Peter Robinson).
From The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile, edited by Estelle Stubbs (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2000): "Editor's Introduction" (Estelle Stubbs); "Manuscript Description" (Daniel W. Mosser); "The Language of the Hengwrt Chaucer" (Simon Horobin).
From Caxton's Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies, edited by Barbara Bordalejo (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2003): "Editor's Introduction" (Barbara Bordalejo); "Notes on the Caxton Canterbury Tales Editions and their Place in the Textual Tradition of the Tales" (Barbara Bordalejo).
From The Miller's Tale on CD-ROM, edited by Peter Robinson (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2004): "Editor's Introduction" (Peter Robinson); "Rationale and Implementation of the Collation System Used on this CD-ROM" (Peter Robinson).
Other publications
We list here a few other publications associated with the project.
Peter Robinson: "Current issues in making digital editions of medieval texts — or, do electronic scholarly editions have a future?" Digital Medievalist 1.1 (2005) at http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=6
Peter Robinson: "Where We Are with Electronic Scholarly Editions, and Where We Want to Be" Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie Online 1.1 (2005) at http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg03/robinson.html January 2004. In print in Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 2004, 123-143.
