Chaucer's Works

This volume is more than an edition of Chaucer: it is a scholarly companion to his complete works, designed to guide readers through the poems' language, sources, meter, and textual history. Its notes and commentary reveal how Chaucer's vivid range of voices, genres, and social observation still feels immediate, from comic domestic life to dream visions shaped by classical, biblical, and medieval learning. The result is a rich map of the Canterbury Tales and related poems, where humor, realism, superstition, and moral reflection constantly overlap. At the same time, the book is deeply concerned with textual fidelity. It challenges earlier editors, especially Tyrwhitt, for "correcting" away difficult manuscript readings and creating supposed Chaucerian idioms that may never have existed. Drawing on the Harleian and Ellesmere manuscripts, as well as early printed editions like Stowe's, it argues that medieval witnesses often preserve Chaucer's true rhythm better than later emendation, including the crucial final -e. Alongside this editorial debate, the notes illuminate The Nun's Priest's Tale, a widow's smoky cottage, Chanticleer, St. Kenelm, and a wealth of obscure allusions, proverbs, and learned references. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.