The Project's Lineation System

N. F. Blake outlines the rationale and design of the Canterbury Tales Project’s new lineation system, developed to support the comprehensive computerization and comparison of all fifteenth-century witnesses of The Canterbury Tales. Blake argues that existing lineation systems—based on fragments, sections, or assumed authorial structures—are inadequate because they embed editorial assumptions about the poem’s original form and development. Such systems cannot accommodate the full range of textual variation across manuscripts without implicitly privileging particular hypotheses about Chaucer’s compositional intentions.

To address this problem, Blake proposes a neutral, modular lineation system that reflects the practical units of medieval copying rather than modern editorial reconstructions. The poem is divided into “tale units,” each consisting of a tale and any consistently attached prologues or epilogues, alongside separately numbered links. This structure allows changes in ordering, attachment, and expansion to be recorded without presupposing an archetypal arrangement. Each unit is lineated independently, usually using an early manuscript—most often Hengwrt—as a pragmatic base, while clearly marking additions, omissions, and variant lines through a transparent numbering scheme.

The system is designed to record every line found in fifteenth-century witnesses, including spurious or non-Chaucerian material, on the principle that the textual history of the poem cannot be understood selectively. By distinguishing base text, additions, variants, omissions, glosses, and marginalia through consistent notation, the lineation facilitates precise comparison across manuscripts in a digital environment.

Blake emphasizes that this approach does not claim to reconstruct The Canterbury Tales as Chaucer wrote it, but rather to provide an evidentiary framework within which competing theories of textual development can be tested. The lineation system thus embodies the Project’s broader commitment to methodological openness and resistance to premature editorial closure.