GUIDE FOR CONTRIBUTORS TO THE SOURCES AND ANALOGUES PROJECT

Purpose and Scope

The purpose of the project is to produce a revised and updated edition (S&A2) of Bryan and Dempster's Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (S&A1). This new edition will include texts of all the known sources of the Canterbury Tales (CT) and, where the direct sources are unknown, the closest known analogues in the forms in which Chaucer may have known them. In addition to the texts retained from S&A1, the new edition will bring together for the first time in one place all sources and analogues discovered during the past 50 years. It will also include introductory essays to each chapter that will represent at the time of publication the best current information about these source texts.

All 27 chapters in S&A1 will be revised and updated, and chapters on the General Prologue and the Retraction added. The chapters in S&A2 will follow the order of the tales in The Riverside Chaucer. S&A2 will also contain a general introduction, an annotated table of contents and several appendices: a general bibliography with coded abbreviations for frequently cited books, a list of additional abbreviations used throughout S&A2, and a general index.

Editions of Source Texts

Because our goal is to make available accurate and reliable texts of the sources and analogues of CT, those we print should be edited as carefully as possible according to the accepted norms and methods used by modern editors of medieval texts. However, for our purposes it will not be always necessary to produce critical editions, or even completely new editions, of all of Chaucer's source texts, and so in actual practice not every text will require the same kind or amount of editorial work. Several sources and analogues (Reeve's Tale, Franklin's Tale) have already been very competently, even skillfully edited, in S&A1, and, more recently, in other places. These texts, which in most cases will require only minimal rechecking or re-editing of MSS, should whenever possible, be reprinted in S&A2 with the proper permissions and acknowledgements. However, in cases where new MSS or printed texts of sources have been discovered, or where it has been determined that MSS closer to Chaucer's copy of the source might have been used in some of these editions (CIT), some greater amount of re-editing may be required.

Some contributors have already published, or are now preparing, new critical editions of several other sources (Man of Law's Tale, Wife of Bath's Prologue, Parson's Tale) for the Chaucer Library, and relevant parts of these texts may also be used in S&A2.

Other contributors will be working on sources and analogues that have not been satisfactorily edited in the past, or were unknown to contributors of S&A1. Ideally, editions of these texts should be based on MSS closest to Chaucer's source texts, or on MSS that might have circulated in fourteenth-century England. But realistically such MSS may not exist or be easy to identify, and so contributors should select MSS which they believe best represent Chaucer's sources and give reasons for their choices--e.g. date, accuracy, and/or completeness of the text, readings that appear to have influenced Chaucer, etc.

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