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Canterbury

The document discusses Geoffrey Chaucer's famous work The Canterbury Tales. It summarizes that: 1) There is no single authoritative version of The Canterbury Tales, as Chaucer left the work unfinished at his death and the original manuscripts did not survive. 2) The text was copied and recopied after Chaucer's death, with each new copy introducing small changes and errors. 3) Scholars cannot say with certainty which words were exactly meant for each character, as the text was altered over multiple copies made after the author's death.

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67 views2 pages

Canterbury

The document discusses Geoffrey Chaucer's famous work The Canterbury Tales. It summarizes that: 1) There is no single authoritative version of The Canterbury Tales, as Chaucer left the work unfinished at his death and the original manuscripts did not survive. 2) The text was copied and recopied after Chaucer's death, with each new copy introducing small changes and errors. 3) Scholars cannot say with certainty which words were exactly meant for each character, as the text was altered over multiple copies made after the author's death.

Uploaded by

najibahmorshidi
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Experience, though no authority were in this world, were good enough for me. To speak
that is in all, marriage«

So begin the words of the wife of bath in geogffrey chaucher¶s the centerbury tales, that
medieval staple high school and college reading list.

Except scholars have never been able to say with authority exactly which words
chaucer meant for the wife of bath²or indeed any of the together characters in the
never finished tales. They still can¶t, but a couple of british evolutionary biologists have
now offered some insight into convoluted geneology of the work.



  
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Pick up a copy of canterbury tales, and it certainly looks like a polished, imposing tome
of classic literature. That¶s not what chaucer left behind.

³there is nothing like an authorized version that chaucer saw into


publication,´ says peter robinson, director of the center fir
technology in the arts at de montford university in england. ³we
have a real mess.´

The canterbury tales is a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims headed for
canterbury to visit the shrine of sir thomas backet. According to theprologue, each of
the 30 pilgrims were to tell four tales,120 in all. When chaucer died in 1400, he had
written, he was still revising many of them.

Worse, chaucer¶s original scribblings did not survive. After chaucer¶s death, several
scribes copied his writings.

What we now call the centerbury tales´derives from the pile of manuscriots left beside
him on his desk,´ robinson says.´We don¶t actually have the pile of papers. We don¶t
even have a complete manuscript that is a first-generation copy of that pile of papers.

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In other words, of the 58 surviving 15th century versions of the Canterbury Tales, the
best of the lost is likely a copy of a copy. And each time a scribe copies a copy, he
introduced new calligraphic ³types´ into the text.

³You can see how things got shuffled around, changed, and there¶s a problem




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