Chaucer: The General Prologue on CD-ROM

The General Prologue on CD-ROM presents full materials for detailed study of the text of The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, the most-read of all parts of the Tales. The CD-ROM contains transcripts, descriptions, and images of all 53 fifteenth-century manuscripts and early printed editions of The General Prologue. The exact text of every word of every text may be compared through full collations in both original-spelling and regularized form. Spelling databases permit the spelling of every different part of speech of every word to be examined in each manuscript, or across all manuscripts, for some 300,000 words in total. Sophisticated search tools allow retrieval of words and phrases, and permit searches constrained by the structure of the text. An 'analysis workshop' introduces specialized software to enable exploration of the history of the textual tradition, and a 'stemmatic commentary' assesses the evidence at particular crucial readings.