The Canterbury Tales Project

What is it?

The Canterbury Tales Project is a pioneering initiative in Digital Humanities, dedicated to the study and preservation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This project aims to develop and publish the most complete scholarly edition of all surviving 84 pre-1501 manuscripts and four early printed editions of Chaucer’s work. It replaces less comprehensive print resources used for over half a century and represents the first complete critical edition of a major text created entirely through digital methods. It is currently co-directed by Barbara Bordalejo and Daniel P. O’Donnell.

Aims

As part of this endeavor, the project plans to publish 28 researcher-oriented editions, all encoded in XML-TEI, covering the entire Canterbury Tales along with 10 mobile apps presenting commonly read sections in a format suitable for general readers. Also, the project aims to train the next generation of textual critics through project work. The required skill set includes (but is not limited to) essential areas such as philology, Middle English, paleography, codicology, and Digital Humanities, including the use of the project’s Textual Communities platform.

Achievements

To date, the project has assembled a vast repository of digital images, including 29,000 pages from medieval manuscripts and early printed editions, produced transcripts for approximately 25,000 pages using the Textual Communities software, and developed an app for the edition of the General Prologue, as well as seven CD-ROMs published between 1996 and 2010. It has also confirmed the importance of variants introduced by Caxton’s second edition (1482) and clarified the roles of key manuscripts like Hengwrt, Ellesmere, and Christ Church Oxford, which represent independent lines of descent from the archetype.