I’m pleased to call your attention to a new digital resource for teaching and studying Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at manuscriptreader.org. This site offers an up-close, accessible encounter with the original text in its manuscript setting.
The site allows users to view simultaneously the Ellesmere manuscript’s pages (fetched via IIIF protocols from the Huntington Library) with transcriptions (from the Norman Blake Editions and Frederick Furnivall’s transcriptions of the marginal glosses). Larry Benson’s translations of the verse Tales are also included, although displayed in a way that prevents the Modern English from stealing attention from the Middle English.
Please feel free to share widely with students, colleagues, and anyone interested in Chaucer, manuscript studies, or digital approaches to medieval literature. The site has a User’s Guide that helps visitors navigate its pages.
Further details for DH enthusiasts:
My contribution to the foregoing mash-up consists in the TJ Reader software that drives the website and in the design that puts its components together to serve pedagogical purposes. Many of us first encountered Chaucer in modern editions that, for all their virtues, leave the material and visual dimensions of manuscript culture largely offstage. This project seeks to make those dimensions visible and intuitive, encouraging close looking and a historically grounded perspective. Its interface promotes direct engagement with the page: aligning transcription with the scribe’s hand and offering tools for exploring layout, decoration, and marginalia. The underlying TJ Reader platform also supports more advanced scholarly work—especially in studying scribal practice, mise‑en‑page, and lexical patterning across tales and folios. It features a particularly powerful search engine that displays its results in a variety of useful formats. Further scholarly enhancements to this software are planned.
Gene Lyman
eugene.lyman@gmail.com
