The Electronic Canterbury Tales: The Clerk's Tale

Complete Online Versions of the Canterbury Tales

The Complete Tales in Middle English at UVa (1510 kb)

Search the UVa Middle English Text Archive

Sinan Kökbugur's hypertext, helpfully glossed Middle English edition at the Librarius Homepage

The Electronic Library Foundation's edition of the Canterbury Tales is available in a variety of formats

The Litrix Reading Room Translation of the Canterbury Tales

Top 15
Medieval & Chaucer-Related Sites

The Aberdeen On-line Bestiary

Argos: Limited Area Search of the Ancient & Medieval Internet

The Camelot Project

Exploring Ancient World Cultures

Geoffrey Chaucer: Annotated Guide to Online Resources

Gothic Dreams

The Harvard Chaucer Page

Internet Medieval Sourcebook

The Labyrinth

The Luminarium

The Online Medieval and Classical Library

Project Seafarer / Anglo-Saxon.net

TEAMS Middle English Text Series

Univ. of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative

Voice of the Shuttle

The Clerk's Tale

1. In Middle English

The Clerk's Prologue and the Clerk's Tale at the UVa Electronic Text Center.

Read the Clerk's Prologue and Tale in the context of Fragment IV - Group E

Sinan Kökbugur's helpfully glossed hypertext Middle English rendition of the complete Canterbury Tales is available at the Librarius page. Use the Table of Contents in the left frame to click on a specific Tale, and difficult terms and phrases are glossed in the lower frame.

2. In Modern English Translation

Scott Gettman's edition of the Canterbury Tales (Electronic Literature Foundation) is accessible by individual tale & available in a variety of formats: Middle English, Modern English, Facing Page, & Interpolated - Glossed (frames; from unknown base text).

Although unsuitable for formal research or college work, the ELF is the best online version for younger readers and those unfamiliar with Middle English. Easily navigable, and the Middle English glosses are very helpful.

The General Prologue and the Marriage Group has been modernized by Michael Murphy (CUNY-Brooklyn), each tale featuring a handsome introduction. Read the Clerk's Prologue and Tale. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The Litrix Reading Room translation of the Canterbury Tales features rhyming couplets.

3. Historical & Cultural Backgrounds

The Clerk's Tale has sometimes been read against the backdrop of Nominalism, a philosophical outlook associated with William of Ockham. See the entries in James Fieser's (Tennessee - Martin) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which contains brief but authoritative entries on medieval thinkers and topics.

See also the online Catholic Encyclopedia entry on William of Ockham.

4. Sources, Analogues, & Related Texts

5. Online Notes & Commentary

Discussion and links concerning the Clerk's Prologue and Tale on Larry D. Benson's superlative Geoffrey Chaucer Page (Harvard). Includes e-texts of scholarly essays, sources and ancillary texts, and capsule discussions of key issues. Some of the items related to the Clerk's Tale include:

General Note on the Clerk's Tale
Apuleius's The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche (distant analogue).
Bocaccio's Decameron, Day 10, Tale 10 (analogue)
Petrarch's Tale of Griselda (analogue)

A brief sample of The Clerk's Tale in the proposed new Chaucer Commentary Edition format gives some insight into the possibilities for an online variorum & commentary edition.

6. Online Books & Articles

A generous new online publishing venture: The University of California E-Scholarship Editions. "University of California Press now offers electronic versions of almost all of its journal titles and over 1400 books online, many of them out of print." E-journals are available to subscriber institutions; 400 full texts, many covering medieval topics, are available to the general public; the rest to members of the UC community.

Academic studies from the University of California Press related to the Clerk's Tale include:

Bloch, R. Howard, and Frances Ferguson, eds. Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.)
Sheila Delaney's The Naked Text: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994).
Elaine Tuttle Hanson's Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992).
Laura Kendrick's Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988).
H. Marshall Leicester's The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990).
Richard Neuse's Chaucer's Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991).

Chaucer Sourcebook, from the Harvard Chaucer Page, offers a number of classic and professional essays from noted Chaucerians, including:

George Lyman Kittredge, "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage," Modern Philology 9 (1911-1912): 435-67. Perhaps one of the most important articles in all of Chaucer studies. Set the debate concerning "the marriage group."
David Aers, ""Chaucer: Love, Sex and Marriage," from Chaucer,
Langland, and the Creative Imagination, 1980 pp. 143-70.

Essays in Medieval Studies features full-text articles from the proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association, online version edited by Allen J. Frantzen (Loyola - Chicago), including:

Anne Clark Bartlett's "Delicious Martyr": Feminine Courtesy in Middle English Devotional Literature for Women. Essays in Medieval Studies 9 (1992): 9-15. Though not directly about the Clerk's Tale, the issue of courtesy is central to the story.

See Susan K. Hagen's e-text, What's Really Being Tested in "The Clerk's Tale"? (Birmingham Southern College).

Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford and Other Rime Royal Interludes (Frederick Martin, Tulane U), from an ongoing e-project melding critical and cultural theory & medieval studies. See Martin's e-dissertation in progress, Pilgrimage in the Age of Schism: Chaucer, Sociological Poetics, and the Canterbury Tales.

M. L. Warren has written Griselda's "Unnatural Restraint" as a Technology of the Self (Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies).

7. Student Projects & Essays

Anniina Jokkinen's Essays and Articles on Chaucer includes a number of sample student essays, of varying quality. Like any other source, student essays must be evaluated rigorously, cited correctly, and used responsibly.

8. Online Bibliography

9. Syllabi & Course Descriptions

10. Images & Multimedia

11. Language Helps & Audio Files

Sample audio files (.wav, .au, .aiff) from the Clerk's Tale, recorded at the University of Adelaide, 1994, and read by Tom Burton, are available from the Chaucer Studio (Paul Thomas, Brigham Young).

13. The Next Step

How to Document
Print & Electronic Sources:
The Chaucer Pedagogy
Documentation Primer

Daniel T. Kline & The Kankedort Page