Preface (Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, volume 2)

In the preface to the second volume of Occasional Papers, Norman Blake and Peter Robinson chart the rapid evolution of the Canterbury Tales Project between 1993 and 1997, marking its transition from methodological exploration to large-scale scholarly production. Whereas the first volume outlined proposed aims and experimental methods, this second collection reflects completed work, tested procedures, and concrete results, most notably the full transcription and collation of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and its publication as the Project’s first major electronic edition.

The preface situates the volume’s essays within two complementary strands of activity. One strand focuses on exhaustive transcription of all witnesses to specific textual units, such as The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and, subsequently, the General Prologue and other fragments. The other strand concentrates on complete transcription of individual manuscripts, particularly through the Sheffield team’s work on whole codices. Together, these approaches enable both fine-grained stemmatic analysis and holistic manuscript study. The editors emphasize the importance of the Project’s lineation system, which assigns identifiers to every line and variant across all witnesses, allowing unprecedented precision in comparison and retrieval.

Blake and Robinson highlight major scholarly contributions in the volume, including cladistic analysis of manuscript relationships, reassessments of metre and authorial revision, and material discoveries such as the recovery of lost evidence from the Hengwrt manuscript via early photographic records. The preface underscores the Project’s collaborative and international character, involving teams in Sheffield, Oxford, Utah, and beyond.

The editors close by reaffirming a central premise of the Project: no single manuscript, facsimile, or edition can be equated with The Canterbury Tales itself. Instead, the poem must be understood as a distributed, historically layered tradition, accessible only through the comprehensive and transparent presentation of its surviving witnesses.