Critics’ Reviews

“This new Broadview edition by Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor offers students an ideal means to read, study, and appreciate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The scholarly introduction discusses Chaucer’s life, the formal features of his extraordinary tale collection, its historical reception, and modern critical approaches to the text. Based on the Ellesmere Manuscript, 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. The layout is inviting. Glosses in the margin and explanatory notes at the foot of the page insure easy access to all the necessary linguistic and historical expertise. Boenig and Taylor have done a wonderful job synthesizing the latest scholarship. The decision to concentrate on a single manuscript, the redoubtable Ellesmere, is a sound one. Facsimiles of individual leaves from that 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 Universit

Posted on November 2, 2015