from Medieval Academy News

The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile
by Linne R. Mooney

The latest CD-ROM released by the Canterbury Tales Project, The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile, provides all of us who teach Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with a wonderful new tool for introducing students to the textual problems unique to medieval literature. Its clear, color images of the manuscript, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392, universally accepted as the earliest copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to survive, allow us to show students what the written medieval text looked like. The option to view side-by-side transcriptions with the images of the manuscript pages enables us to offer the text in readable form to our students, allowing them the opportunity to work through a few lines of text on the image using the transcription as a crib and thus to experience the pleasure of reading Chaucer in its original form. This level of use might be all we would need to enliven the class period in which we introduce The Canterbury Tales in a survey of British literature course.

For upper-level courses on medieval literature, the CD is even more useful. Estelle Stubbs’s introduction to the textual problems associated with the Hengwrt manuscript, outlining the evidence for its being a work in progress supervised by a knowledgeable editor who was perhaps the poet himself, allows us to walk students through the scholarly arguments about tale order and fragments of unfinished text as, with them, we examine the material evidence on which the arguments are based. Stubbs’s charts of quires, ink colors, and running titles enable us to visualize the manuscript in the process of construction, which she argues was not linear from beginning to end as one might expect from a completed text, but rather tentative and make-shift, as the scribe awaited text to fill in gaps between what he already had to hand, from either the author himself in the process of creating the Tales or from other manuscripts left behind when Chaucer died. Links built into the CD allow us to move easily from prose argument to charted explanation to visual examination of the pages of the manuscript themselves. The small icon in the upper left-hand corner as one examines the pages of the manuscript, showing at which opening in which quire one is on screen, helps to create the illusion of turning the pages of the manuscript. For visualizing the way the scribe constructed the manuscript, the CD also allows us a facility not possible with the actual bound volume in the National Library of Wales: that is, we can “disbind” the manuscript to see contiguous sides of each bifolium, the two-folio units of parchment the scribe would have written on before they were gathered into quires and then bound into a volume. Such facility helps to show students how the scribe inserted the text of the Nun’s Tale into the middle of a quire and adjusted the text on either side of it to smooth over the transitions, how he included a copy of the Parson’s Tale that had previously been copied into a separate booklet, etc., in this earliest attempt to bring together all of the Tales in some logical order, perhaps for the first time.

For textual studies of The Canterbury Tales, the CD provides the possibility of side-by-side comparison with the text of the Ellesmere copy of the Tales, Huntington Library MS. 26.C.9, written by the same scribe sometime after the copying of the Hengwrt manuscript (though Stubbs makes a good case for overlap in the copying of these two manuscripts) and the usual base text for editions of the Tales students will be reading, like The Riverside Chaucer. Differences between the Hengwrt and Ellesmere readings of each word, even each punctuation mark, are highlighted in red for easy comparison. Students can thus begin to comprehend the difficulties editors face in preparing a modern edition of Chaucer’s Tales, or of any other medieval text that does not survive in an authorial copy.

For those who teach palaeography in manuscript-sparse North America, the CD will be invaluable for demonstrating to students the importance of examining quire make-up, ink color, script changes, etc., in examining a manuscript. Stubbs discusses in detail such features as catchwords, punctuation of running titles, and changes of hand, all of which influence her interpretation of the manuscript as a work in progress. The clear, color images can be magnified to show students these minute details on the screen as one initiates class discussion of them. With an entire manuscript available on this CD, one can show students variations in the scribe’s handwriting from one portion of the manuscript to another, or assign students transcription and study of individual tales, quires, or booklets of the whole. The images are so clear that one can even show students the alteration of hair and flesh sides of parchment in the make-up of a medieval manuscript.

The CD-ROM of The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile is available from Scholarly Digital Editions, 31 Guilford Road, Leicester LE2 2RD, England, for $110 plus $10 postage (individuals), or $240 plus $10 postage (institutions, incl. network license). A demonstration of some of its features is available on the Website, http://www.sd-editions.com.