http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/Chaucer/ctpblurb.HTML (The Risc Disc Volume 2, 10/1995)
Canterbury Tales - the Project
Canterbury Tales - the Project
Illustrated capital from the beginning of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue appears here on the real Web site.
The Canterbury Tales Project from
Cambridge University Press will make available in
an electronic form, over a ten-year period, full transcriptions of the text of every
manuscript and pre-1500 printed edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, together with
digitized images of every page of every manuscript and early edition, collations of all
these texts, and analyses of the textual tradition based on the transcriptions.
Cambridge University Press is to publish these materials, initially on CD-ROM, as part
of a new Cambridge Electronic Editions series.
The Canterbury Tales Project will inaugurate a new kind of 'book': an electronic textual
edition of a major work containing a full record of all the original sources for the work,
and materials to help the reader find a way through all this material. CD-ROMs
produced by Cambridge University Press as part of the Project will use the most
advanced hypertext presentation system, so that the reader can find exactly what he
or she wants - the transcript of a particular line in a particular manuscript, the collation
of a particular word, the image of that line or word in a manuscript - with the greatest
of ease. Use of the CD-ROMs will require no special computer abilities whatever, and
the Project will be accessible - indeed essential - to all scholars and serious teachers
of medieval literature, textual criticism, bibliography, and manuscript traditions.
The first release in the series will be a CD-ROM published early in 1996 and
containing transcriptions, collations, and digitized images of all 58 pre-1500 witnesses
to Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue - an important section of the Canterbury Tales.
The full text of the Prologue in each witness (54 manuscripts, four printed editions) will
be transcribed, together with all glosses. The CD-ROM will also contain a description
of each witness, based on examination of the witness itself, and articles concerning
the development of the textual tradition. The collations will present the support for
every reading both in regularized and unregularized form. A lemmatized spelling
database will permit scholars to trace every spelling of every word across the
witnesses. The inclusion of some 1,200 digitized images will allow users to check
instantly the accuracy of any transcription, and the digitised images may be used for
teaching. The linking of all materials on the CD-ROM by hypertext will ensure that a
user can move from transcript to collation to image with just a few mouse clicks.
Included on this first CD-ROM will be descriptions prepared by Professor DAN
MOSSER of each witness containing the Wife of Bath's Prologue; and transcripts of all
of the glosses in every manuscript of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, prepared by
Professor STEPHEN PARTRIDGE. Both these are intended by Cambridge University
Press and the General Editors as first stages towards, respectively, a completely new
description of the early witnesses to the Canterbury Tales (so superseding Manly and
Rickert Volume I); and a complete edition of all the glosses in all the witnesses. The
Canterbury Tales Project is fortunate in being able to benefit from the years of work
done by Professors Mosser and Partridge.
Future CD-ROMs in The Canterbury Tales Project will include complete records of
single manuscripts representing the entire poem-sequence. It is technically possible
to include a digital image record of a whole manuscript of the Canterbury Tales on a
CD-ROM: our experiments have shown that colour digital photography direct from the
manuscripts, creating 24-bit colour images at 300 dpi resolution, gives quality
comparable to that of the best printed facsimiles. Using JPEG compression, 500 such
images may be accommodated on a single CD-ROM: enough for a full manuscript.
We expect that the next one or two CD- ROMs after the Wife of Bath's Prologue will
be single-manuscript CD-ROMs, containing our transcription and a full digital
photographic record of one whole manuscript.
The Project publishes a Newsletter and a series of Occasional Papers
volumes. Two numbers of the Newsletter and one volume of the Occasional
Papers have been published so far. The Newsletter reports on the progress
of the Project, and the Occasional Papers publishes articles on issues
related to the Project and the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.
Subscription to the Project entitles scholars to two numbers of the
newsletter and a volume of Occasional Papers, and costs 10 pounds UK,
including postage, for a single subscription (credit card payments except
American Express accepted).
Subscription enquiries should be directed to
Dr Robinson at Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Road,
Oxford OX2 6NN, fax +44 (0)865 273275, email peterr@vax.ox.ac.uk.
Subscriptions enquiries should not be sent to Cambridge University Press.
** The digitized images of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue illustrating this
announcement are the property of The Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (the colour image), and The Syndics of Cambridge University Library (the black and white image). The images must on no account be downloaded, printed out, transferred from the Internet to any other network, or copied in any other way.
Cambridge University Press
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www@cup.cam.ac.uk