Canterbury Tales Project

Electronic transcriptions of all the manuscript and early printed versions of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, thus providing clues as to the textual tradition of the poem.

Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1342-1400) established, through his works, the Southern English dialect as the literary language of England. The project put into electronic form all the manuscript and early printed versions of the Canterbury Tales, some 80 in total, located in research libraries around the world, thus providing clues as to the textual tradition of the poem as well as insights into how the English language was modified during a crucial period in its history. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue has been published by Cambridge University Press on CD-ROM.ctp

Strongly supported by the British Library and the National Library of Wales, the Project shared research links with the Universities of Oxford, De Montfort, Berkeley, Brigham Young, Kentucky, Virginia State Polytechnic University in the USA, Simon Fraser University in Canada, Santiago de Compostela in Spain and Keio University in Japan.

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Duration: February 1994 – December 2000

Project Team

  • Prof. Norman Blake (University of Sheffield)
  • Dr Peter Robinson (University of Oxford)
  • Dr Elizabeth Solopova (Transcriber – University of Oxford)
  • Dr Estelle Stubbs (Transcriber – University of Sheffield)
  • Michael Pidd (Transcriber – University of Sheffield)
  • Dr Claire Thomson, Dr Simon Horobin, Linda Cross, Dr Orietta Da Rold (PhD students, University of Sheffield)