The Broadview Canterbury Tales is an edition of the complete tales in a text based on the famous Ellesmere Manuscript. Here one may read a Middle English text that is closer to what Chaucer's scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, actually wrote than that in any other modern edition. Unlike most editions, which draw on a number of manuscripts to recapture Chaucer's original intention, this edition preserves the text as it was found in one influential manuscript. A sampling of facsimile pages from the original manuscript is also included, along with a selection of other works that give the reader a rich sense of the cultural, political, and literary worlds in which Chaucer lived.

The second edition includes a new Middle English glossary, a timeline of Chaucer's life and times, and detailed page headers showing the fragment and line numbers to assist readers in finding a specific section of the poem.

Praise for the first edition:

"I can already tell you that this text—unlike any other Chaucer text—makes it easy for students to read and understand Chaucer. It has certainly made my job easier!" – Mary Flowers Braswell, University of Alabama at Birmingham

"This attractive, readable edition features Chaucer's Middle English text, marginal glosses, explanatory footnotes, and illustrative facsimile pages. Especially helpful are the appended 'background documents,' historical and literary, which provide key contexts for the interpretation of Chaucer's work. A useful bibliography concludes the volume. Highly recommended." - Ann W. Astell, University of Notre Dame

"Britain's greatest medieval poem by its greatest non-dramatic poet: this new edition will be attractive to students, scholars, and general readers alike. Facsimiles of individual leaves from the Ellesmere Manuscript have been scattered throughout the volume to give us a real sense of what it would have been like to open The Canterbury Tales for the first time in the years immediately following Chaucer's death." - Larry Scanlon, Rutgers University

"With its meticulously edited text, generous glosses and notes, abundant selections from relevant medieval sources, and attractive reproductions of the sumptuous pages of the Ellesmere Manuscript, the Broadview Canterbury Tales will become the obvious choice for teachers, students, and general readers alike." - John T. Sebastian, Loyola University New Orleans

"This is the best edition of the Tales I've found to date." - John Marlin, College of Saint Elizabeth

Robert Boenig is Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Andrew Taylor is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa.

Table of Contents: [Back to Top]

Introduction

The Canterbury Tales

Appendices:

Saint Jerome, Against Jovinian (400)

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (524)

William Thorpe's Testimony on Pilgrimages (1407)

Benedict of Canterbury, The Miracles of St. Thomas Becket (1170s)  

The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards (1395)

Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (c. 1275)

     False Seeming

     The Old Woman

William Langland, Piers Plowman (1360s-80s)

     The Fair Field of Folk

     The Friar

Guillaume de Machaut, The Judgment of the King of Navarre (1351)    

The Plague

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1353)  

     The Black Death

     Patient Griselda

Jean Froissart, Chronicles (1400)

     The Black Death, Flagellants, and Jews (1349)

     The Campaign of 1359

     The Peasants' Revolt in England (1381)

     The Election of Henry IV

The Anonimalle Chronicle (1396-99)

     The Rising is Suppressed

A Model Indulgence (1300)  

Rudolph of Schlettstadt, The Host and Libels against the Jews (1303)   

The Remedy Against the Troubles of Temptation (late 14th century)  

     An Exemplum about Despair

The Tale of Beryn (1410-20)

     The Pilgrims Arrive at Canterbury and Visit the Shrine