Chaucer resources
The primary purpose of this page is to support the Chaucer element of the Medieval English Literature (ENGL 2012/ENGL3012) courses which are offered by the English Department here at the University of Adelaide, and convened by Associate Professor Tom Burton.
I have provided links to the best Chaucer resources on the web as well as to print resources in our own Library.
My Medieval English literature resources page is the place to go for general information on this period.
Major websites
- The Harvard University Chaucer Site
- One of the most comprehensive Chaucer site I have found and an excellent place to start. It provides a wide range of glossed Middle English texts and translations of analogues relevant to Chaucer's works, as well as selections from relevant works by earlier and later writers, critical articles from a variety of perspectives, graphics, and general information on life in the Middle Ages.
- geoffreychaucer.org
- An annotated guide to online resources. The site is searchable and lists, evaluates and describes many Chaucer-related sites under headings such as: background; bibliography; biography; commentary; images; language and so on.
geoffreychaucer.org is maintained by David Wilson-Okamura.
- Chaucer MetaPage
- This project was initiated at the 33rd International Congress of Medieval Studies by a group of medievalists interested in promoting Chaucer studies on the WWW. Its aims are: to organize and provide navigation aides for Chaucer resources on the WWW; to work towards enhancing and extending those resources; and to encourage Chaucer studies.
- Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English literature
- Links to Chaucer studies including his life and works and a selection of excellent essays on Chaucer topics. This is part of Anniina Jokinen's most useful Luminarium website on Medieval literature.
Texts
- Caxton's Chaucer
- On this site you will find William Caxton's two editions of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, probably printed in 1476 and 1483, the originals of which are both in the British Library. The impact of the digitised texts on your computer screen will blow you away - I could not believe what I was seeing when I first visited this site, which is part of the British Library's impressive Treasures in Full series.
In the Texts section you can view the first or the second editions separately, or you can compare them. If you chose to see one edition at a time, you will get two pages on the screen, the way you would if you had the book open in front of you. But to read them you may have to enlarge the image by clicking on it or using the enlarge icon.
- Geoffrey Chaucer Online: The Electronic Canterbury Tales
- An online compendium and companion to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, indexed by tale.
- The Canterbury Tales presented by the Electronic Literature Foundation
- If you are wondering what to do next when the screen opens, try clicking on the word 'Begin' on the line 'Begin your Pilgrimage...'
The ELF edition of the Canterbury Tales features two full editions of the Canterbury Tales online: the original Middle English text, and a Modern English translation in rhyming couplets. The texts can be viewed en face ('Middle English and Modern English side by side'), as well as in interpolated formats (mixed line by line).
The text is illustrated with portraits from the Ellesmere Manuscript and the Kelmscott reprinting.
- The Canterbury tales
- From the The Middle English Collection, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. You can download Chaucer's The Canterbury tales (F.N. Robinson edition), either the whole work or individual sections.
- Rare Book Room
- Here's a wonderful resource; the Rare Book Room site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world. Over the last ten years, a company called Octavo has digitally photographed some of the world's great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).
You simply must have a look at the Chaucer text: no less than Edward Burne-Jones' own copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer, pinnacle of Arts and Crafts book design.
Bibliographis details: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works Now Newly Imprinted. London: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 17 1/8 inches x 12 inches (435 x 305 mm), 564 pages, illustrated throughout.
To feast your eyes, simply scroll down to Chaucer under Find by Authors.
And if you want to see the real thing (well, almost), you can see a facsimile edition in our Special collections.
Dictionaries, glossaries, concordances
- A Glossarial DataBase of Middle English: Canterbury Tales
- A searchable glossary prepared by Professor Larry Benson. Marked up according to TEI (P3) guidelines. There is a caveat: 'considerable work on this version of the DataBase is still necessary...'.
- WordHoard
- An application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged texts. The WordHoard project is named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure 'unlocked' by a wise speaker. It applies to highly canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech. In the WordHoard environment, such texts are annotated or tagged by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria. They are mediated through a 'digital page' or user interface that lets scholarly but non-technical users explore the greatly increased query potential of textual data kept in such a form.
It is a basic assumption of WordHoard that new kinds of historical, literary, or broadly cultural analysis will be supported through the forms of data access that are made possible when literary texts are treated in the manner of linguistic corpora. Deeply tagged corpora of course support more finely grained inquiries at a verbal or stylistic level. But more importantly, access to the words of a text at such microscopic levels also lets you look in new ways at the imaginative worlds created by those words.
In its current release WordHoard contains the entire canon of Early Greek epic in the original and in translation, as well as all of Chaucer and Shakespeare, as well as Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and Faerie Queene.
You'll find more Middle English dictionaries on my Medieval English resources page.
Encyclopedias
- The Oxford companion to Chaucer
- Edited by Douglas Gray. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003. Barr Smith Reference collection Call Number: 821.17 ZGRA.
The perfect companion to Chaucer studies.
- The Palgrave literary dictionary of Chaucer
- By Malcolm Andrew. Houndmills, Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Barr Smith Main collection Call Number: 821.17 ZAN.
Background information on Chaucer and his times.
- Who's who in Chaucer
- By Arthur Finley Scott. London : Elm Tree Books, 1974. Barr Smith Main collection Call Number: 821.17 Z.SCO.
Bibliographies
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer (SAC) [online] Bibliography
- Maintained by the University of Texas at San Antonio Library. An excellent annotated bibliography of books and articles.
Content: This is the New Chaucer Society bibliography, published annually in SAC (Studies in the Age of Chaucer), covering Chaucer scholarship since 1975. Each entry is annotated and the bibliography is searchable by author, title, subject, or keyword.
The bibliography is part of the University of Texas catalogue and opens in a separate Telnet window: if you are not sure about the mechanics of using this form of catalogue, they have very kindly provided a help page.
- The essential Chaucer: an annotated bibliography of major modern studies
- By Mark Allen and John H. Fisher. London: Mansell Pub, 1987. Barr Smith Main collection. Call Number: 821.17 ZALL.
A selective, annotated bibliography of Chaucer studies from 1900-1984. Divided into almost 90 topics, including themes, techniques, and individual works by Chaucer.
- The Chaucer Review: An Indexed Bibliography
- Provides an index, with abstracts, of the 800 or so articles that have appeared in Chaucer Review between 1967 and 1996.
- Online Chaucer Bibliographies
- The Chaucer MetaPage has a listing of additional Chaucer bibliographies.
Multimedia resources
We have several multimedia items in our Reserve and Multimedia collection of interest to Chaucer students and researchers. Not sure where to find Reserve and Multimedia? Here's a map.
- Chaucer, life and times
- Complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer as in the Riverside Chaucer with translations of major works as published by Penguin and critical essays by leading academics. Also includes images from various libraries, museums and art galleries, a map of pilgrim routes, a tutorial on reading a medieval manuscript, a glossary of Middle English words and audio clips of The General Prologue and some tales in Middle English.
- The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM
- The Chaucer Studio
- The Chaucer Studio is a nonprofit-making organization assisted by the English departments of the University of Adelaide and Brigham Young University. It was founded in 1986 by members of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, with the aim of producing cassette recordings of medieval English texts at very low prices.
All the recordings are listed in the Library Catalogue under Chaucer Studio
The Studio's General Director is our own Tom Burton, Discipline of English, University of Adelaide.
Critical works
The Library has an excellent collection of books on Chaucer, acquired over many years. To see what is available search the Library Catalogue under the Subject Heading Chaucer Geoffrey and then explore the entries under the main Chaucer heading and also the myriad sub-headings.
Discussion groups and organisations
- The New Chaucer Society
- The purpose of The New Chaucer Society is to provide a forum for teachers and scholars of Geoffrey Chaucer and his age. To advance such study, the Society organises biennial international congresses of Chaucerians, publishes the annual Studies in the Age of Chaucer and a semiannual newsletter, and supports such important projects as the Variorum Chaucer, the Annual Annotated Chaucer Bibliography, and the Middle English Dictionary Project.
We have Studies in the Age of Chaucer from volume 1 (1979) onwards in the Barr Smith Library Main collection at call number 821.1705 S933.
- Chaucernet
- Chaucernet is an electronic forum, or academic discussion group, devoted to Chaucer studies. Its membership consists of professors, graduate students, undergraduates, and others from all over the world who either specialise in -- or are merely interested in -- Chaucer, his works, and related topics.
This page is maintained by Jennifer Osborn
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