The History, Discoveries, and Aims of the Canterbury Tales Project

Every year countless people throughout the world encounter the Canterbury Tales in editions, translations, and adaptations. Ultimately, all these many different forms of Chaucer's work derive from a single source: the text he composed sometime between 1385 and his death in 1400. We have no direct knowledge of this text. We have no authorial manuscript of the Tales, nor indeed any single manuscript explicitly authorized by Chaucer, or whose copying was unambiguously supervised by Chaucer. Like Shakespeare, and unlike such contemporaries as Gower, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, we have no evidence of any systematic attempt by Chaucer to regulate the publication of his work. Notoriously, too, Chaucer left the Tales unfinished, adding another layer of uncertainty to our ignorance of the first states of the text.