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Web Resources by Tale
Electronic
Canterbury Tales Home Page
Fragment I / Group A
The General Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Prologue &
Tale
The Reeve's Prologue & Tale
The Cook's Prologue & Tale
Fragment II / Group B1
The Man of Law's
Introduction, Prologue, Tale, & Epilogue
Fragment III /
Group D
The Wife of Bath's
Prologue & Tale
The Friar's Prologue & Tale
The Summoner's Prologue
& Tale
Fragment IV /
Group E
The
Clerk's Prologue & Tale
The Merchant's Prologue,
Tale, & Epilogue
Fragment V / Group F
The
Squire's Introduction & Tale
The Franklin's Prologue
& Tale
Fragment VI /
Group C
The Physician's Tale
The Pardoner's Introduction,
Prologue, & Tale
Fragment VII /
Group B2
The Shipman's Tale
The Prioress's Prologue
& Tale
The Prologue & Tale
of Sir Thopas
The Tale of Melibee
The Monk's Prologue & Tale
The Nun's Priest's Prologue,
Tale, & Epilogue
Fragment VIII /
Group G
The
Second Nun's Prologue & Tale
The Canon's Yeoman's
Prologue & Tale
Fragment IX /
Group H
The Manciple's
Prologue & Tale
Fragment X /
Group I
The Parson's Prologue
& Tale
The Retraction
The Electronic Canterbury Tales:
Troilus
and Criseyde
Additional
Pages in The Electronic Canterbury Tales
Chaucer the Narrator -
Pilgrim and Author
Chaucer's "Orphan" Pilgrims
The
Frame Tale, Later Continuations,& Apocrypha
Troilus
and Criseyde
Electronic
Chaucer Texts: What's Available Online?
Chaucer
in / and Popular Culture
Headings,
Organization,
& Criteria for Inclusion
ECT
Revision
History:
What's New?
The Chaucer Pedagogy Documentation Primer
The Chaucer Pedagogy Page
Need Teaching Ideas &
Resources?
The Chaucer Pedagogy Page
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
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The
General Prologue
Edwin Duncan (Towson U) has developed a sophisticated Electronic
Edition of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Mouse-overs supply definitions of difficult terms.
1. In Middle English
The General
Prologue at the University of Virginia's Electronic
Text Center (from Robinson 1957).
Read the General Prologue in the context of Fragment
I - Group A.
Read the General
Prologue according to the Hengwrt ms (Hg), one of the two most important early
manuscripts, at the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry On-line
site. The Ellesmere ms (El) is the other important early edition.
The General
Prologue at the University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose
(from Robinson 1957).
The General Prologue in Sinan
Kökbugur's hypertext edition at the Librarius
homepage. Helpful glosses of Middle English terms and phrases (frames; from unknown
base text).
- Although The Riverside Chaucer is the current
standard academic text, Robinson's 1957 edition is still serviceable for critical study.
2. In Modern English Translation
The General Prologue in
facing page translation (Paul Halsall, IMSB).
A
Reader-Friendly Edition of the General Prologue by Michael Murphy (CUNY-Brooklyn),
each tale featuring a handsome introduction. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The
Electronic Library Foundation's edition of the Canterbury Tales,
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.
From John Dahle's MA thesis (on
the possibilities for a hypertext Canterbury Tales), An Annotated Hypertext Version of
the General Prologue and An Example of Hypertext
Versioning and the General Prologue (Iowa State U.)
3. Historical & Cultural Backgrounds
The
Canterbury Pilgrims are on their way to Canterbury Cathedral, where the "holy
blissful martyr" Thomas Becket was murdered. Read the accounts of his life and
death and about his controversy with Henry II at the excellent Thomas Becket page (Scott
McLetchie, Loyola - New Orleans), especially the primary texts recounting
Becket and the murder (from McLetchie's page):
The Wife of Bath made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, quite an achievement
for the time. The University of Southern Colorado, Department of History
has put together a very fine Traveling
to Jerusalem website, detailing pilgrim accounts from the 3rd century
to the present day. See, for example, the accounts by
Jessica A. Browner's article, though a little after Chaucer's period,
catches some of the flavor of Southwerk, the Tabard, and the pilgrimage
party in "Wrong
Side of the River: London's Disreputable
South Bank in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century
Essays in History 36 (1994): 34-72.
See also McLetchie's excellent Pictorial
Tour of Canterbury Cathedral
The "Calamitous" Fourteenth
Century (Paul Hallsall, IMSB), a web page of primary sources on this pivotal century,
provides important background to Chaucer's era, including the Black Death, the Great
Schism, the Hundred Years War, and the "Peasant's Revolt" of 1381.
The Online Guide to Canterbury
History (Laurel Pearson) includes a nice narrative history of Canterbury and a variety
of images, including some of the Cathedral.
End of Europe's
Middle Ages (UCalgary) provides "a brief overview of the
conditions at the end of Europe's Middle Ages, the tutorial is presented in a series of
chapters that summarize the economic, political, religious and intellectual environment of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
Medieval Britain (Britannia
Online) boasts an impressive array of online vignettes for all aspects of medieval British
topics, including famous events, persons, places. Highly recommended, especially for
those who would like to review their British history.
Feudal Terms of England
(Michael Adams, NetSERF) provides a handy glossary of technical terms familiar in the
Middle Ages.
The New Advent Catholic Website hosts a number of
important resources, especially the online Catholic
Encyclopedia (1913 ed.) and its thousands of entries. Although
reflecting an earlier ero os scholarship, entries relevant
to the General Prologue include:
Although focused on a slightly later date than Chaucer's age, Jessica A.
Browner, Wrong
Side of the River: London's Disreputable South Bank in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Century. Essays
in History 36.2 (1994) is a helpful glance into the sociopolitical life
of the Southwark area in the 16th and 17th centuries. Essays in
History is an annual volume published by the graduate students at the
University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History.
4. Sources, Analogues, & Related Texts
In the late 12th
century, Marie de France composed a series of wonderful lais, short
narrative poems involving courtly figures, marvelous plots, and celtic
influences, and set them in a frame with a prologue. Judith P. Shoaf
(U of Florida) has generously provided verse translations of most of Marie's
Lais:
Marie's Lais and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
can profitably be read in tandem, to the mutual enhancement of both!
Compare
the opening of the General Prologue to the Prologue
of Langland's Piers Plowman (Harvard).
The Decameron
Web, dedicated to Boccaccio's frame tale series, which served as both source and
inspiration for the Canterbury Tales (Brown U.) The Decameron is set
during the onset of the Bubonic Plague.
John Lydgate, a
fifteenth century follower of Chaucer, imagined his Siege of Thebes to be an
extension of the Canterbury Tales, the first tale on the trip home from Canterbury.
In fact, Lydgate writes himself into the Prologue to the Siege of
Thebes, which is modeled upon the General Prologue.
The University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Prose
and Verse has digitized two important late-medieval tale collections:
For a different kind of travel narrative, an edition of The Travels of Sir
John Mandeville is available via ftp from Project
Gutenberg (tosjm.txt,
433 kb & tosjm.zip,
152 kb)
5. Online Notes & Commentary
L. Kip Wheeler offers a handout on Medieval
Numerology (Carson-Newman College)
Discussion and links concerning the General Prologue on Larry D.
Benson's superlative Harvard Chaucer Page
(Harvard U). Some of the items related to the General Prologue include:
Scott
McLetchie (Loyola - New Orleans) offers a splendid virtual tour of Canterbury Cathedral in
his A Pilgrimage to
Canterbury to the Shrine of St. Thomas.
Mary-Jo
Arn offers a number of thoughtful questions at Study Questions for Portions of the
General Prologue (Bloomsburg University).
Summaries and lecture notes concerning the genre, structure, and pilgrim portraits in the General Prologue (Daniel T.
Kline, U. of Alaska Anchorage).
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.
A selection of Chaucer-related and medieval
studies titles available to the general public include:
Katharine M. Wilson's "'What Man Artow?' The
Narrator as Writer and Pilgrim" is an e-print of her article from Chaucer's
Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Laura and R. T.
Lambdin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996).
Chaucer Sourcebook, from the
Harvard Chaucer Page, offers a number of classic and professional essays from noted
Chaucerians, including:
- E. Talbot Donaldson, "Chaucer the Pilgrim."
PMLA 69 (1954): 928-37. A classic article.
- All articles on the Harvard Chaucer Page reprinted by
permission.
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:
Anniina Jokinen's Luminarium features Essays and Articles on Chaucer.
From the Teaching
Chaucer in the 90s post-print from Exemplaria (ed. Christine Rose, Portland
State): Cathalin Folks's Of
Sondry Folk: The Canterbury Pilgrimage as Metaphor for Teaching Chaucer at the
Community College
The
Chronotope of Real-Time and Real-Space in Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrimage;
Sociological
Poetics and the Canterbury Tales; and Pilgrimage
in the Age of Schism (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.
Sam Schuman
(UMinnesota-Morris) offers
interesting fare in an essay entitled "On the Road to Canterbury, Liliput and Elphinstone - The
Rough Guide: Satiric Travel Narratives in Chaucer, Swift and Nabokov"
from the e-journal Zembla, an online journal devoted to Nabokov.
Compare Chaucer's self-presentation in the Canterbury Tales with his contemporary Thomas
Usk in Andrew Galloway's web article, "Private Selves
and the Intellectual Marketplace in Late 14th Century England: The Case of the Two Usks."
Cite as a web document.
- See R. A. Shoaf's e-text of Usk's Testament of Love and the
ample ancillary materials.
7. Student Projects & Essays
In a student essay, Jennifer Sou offers The
Host's Tale: Constructing Harry Bailly through a Marxist Lens (St.
Thomas U). from
Dene
Scoggins' English 316 site
(UT Austin) explores "culture, ideology, and issues of canonicity" in the
Canterbury Tales, including a student developed page devoted to the General
Prologue and each of the pilgrim portraits.
S.
Wheeler has put together a 26 slide Power Point presentation on Chaucer and the
Canterbury Pilgrims (Georgia Perimeter College).
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.
Mr. Davis's senior English
class at Troy High School has put together a fun web page comparing
Chaucer's pilgrims to contemporary personalities.
8. Online Bibliography
9. Syllabi & Course
Descriptions
10. Images & Multimedia
The Costume Page -
Medieval Era Costume (Julie Zetterberg) contains links that will give you some
sense of the clothing worn by the Canterbury pilgrims.
11. Language Helps & Audio Files
Sample
audio files (.wav, .au, .aiff) from the General
Prologue, recorded at Brigham Young University in 1990, are available from the Chaucer
Studio (Paul Thomas, Brigham Young).
Hear the General Prologue read by Jane
Zatta (SIU Edwardsville) and follow Middle English text as you listen.
12. Potpourri
Map of Medieval England, c.
1399 (Paul Halsall, IMSB), from Muir's Historical Atlas (1911).
Map of Medieval London (Paul
Halsall, IMSB), from Muir's Historical Atlas (1911).
13. The
Next Step
How to Document
Print & Electronic Sources:
The Chaucer Pedagogy
Documentation Primer
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