Author Description

This is the third in the series of 'single-tale' CD-ROMs prepared by the Canterbury Tales Project: that for the Wife of Bath's Prologue won the English Association's 1998 Beatrice White award for an outstanding contribution to medieval and renaissance studies. Like its fellows in the series, this CD-ROM contains a full set of materials for study of the text in all extant fifteenth-century witnesses: fifty-five manuscripts and four incunabula. The whole text of the tale and associated links in every witness is transcribed, with a digital image of every one of the 1200 pages also given. The images, now of enhanced quality, are mostly grey-scale, with some full-colour images. The transcripts are linked to full collations in both regularized and unregularized forms, and to thorough descriptions of each manuscript (provided by Dan Mosser). A stemmatic analysis and commentary offer an overview of the whole tradition, with discussion of individual readings. A spelling database, fully organized by manuscript and lexical cateories, gives access to all 300,000 words in the witnesses; the new interface offers advanced searches over the whole text and spelling database and easy navigation throughout all the data included on the CD.