Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Nun's
Priest's Tale on CD-ROM.
Edited by Paul Thomas. The Canterbury Tales Project. Birmingham: Scholarly
Digital Editions, 2006. $85 (individual license) or $230 (institutional
license).
This CD-ROM edition of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's tale is the fourth in a
series of single-tale CDs produced by the Canterbury tales Project, the
others being the Wife of Bath's Tale (1996), General Prologue (2000), and
Miller's Tale (2004). The project has also produced CD-ROM editions of two
important witnesses to the complete Canterbury Tales, the Hengwrt
Manuscript in the National Library of Wales (2001) and the pair of editions
by William Caxton, from copies in the British Library (2003). the series
of single-tale editions is an interesting experiment in a computer-based
approach to presenting a text of which multiple versions exist. A commonplace
of late twentieth-century critiques of traditional editorial practice states
that, while a critical edition does represent all witnesses with its lists
of variants, nevertheless the editor's choice of a base manuscript governs
and mediates the presentation of all the other witnesses, and the eclectic
"correction" of the base text with preferred variants from other manuscripts
means that the critical edition offers a text that is new and idiosyncratic.
In the name of reconstructing the author's "final intentions," a new and
non-authorial version of the text is authored by the editor, and, because
the other versions are reduced to lists of variants (printed in small type
at the bottom of the page or at the back of the book) the user's access
to the versions that the editor does not prefer is limited. In many cases,
such as when there are a limited number of witnesses to a text, varying
only in a limited number of readings, such a critical edition may be adequate;
however, in cases of complex textual transmission the inadequacies of this
approach multiply exponentially with the increase in divergencies among
witnesses to the text. Such is the case, of course, with respect to the
Canterbury Tales, for which there are some 70 fifteenth-century
witnesses to all or parts of the text, with substantial variability.
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