The Ellesmere Chaucer, or Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, is an early 15th-century illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , owned by the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California (EL 26 C 9). It is considered one of the most significant copies of the Tales.
Chaucer scholarship has long assumed that no manuscripts of the Tales existed before Chaucer's death in 1400. The Ellesmere manuscript, conventionally dated to the first decades of the fifteenth century, would therefore be one of the first extant manuscripts of the Tales. More recently, the manuscript has been dated to c. 1405 or earlier, leading to speculation that it "was conceived as an immediate response to Chaucer's death by those eager to commemorate his memory through the appropriate preservation of his work." [1] : 60 It has even been suggested that, while the final sentence of the manuscript ("Here is ended the Book of the Tales of Canterbury, compiled by Geffrey Chaucer, of whos soule Iesu Crist have mercy. Amen.") makes it clear that Chaucer had died by the time the manuscript was finished, Ellesmere could have been begun while the poet was still alive. [2] : 208
The early history of the manuscript is uncertain, but it seems to have been owned by John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford (1408–1462). The manuscript takes its popular name from the fact that it later belonged to Sir Thomas Egerton (1540–1617), Baron Ellesmere and Viscount Brackley, who apparently obtained it from Roger North, 2nd Baron North (1530/31-1600). [3] The library of manuscripts, known as the Bridgewater Library, remained at the Egerton house, Ashridge, Hertfordshire, until 1802 when it was removed to London. Francis Egerton, created Earl of Ellesmere in 1846, inherited the library, and it remained in the family until its sale to Henry Huntington by John Francis Granville Scrope Egerton (1872–1944), 4th Earl of Ellesmere. Huntington purchased the Bridgewater library privately in 1917 through Sotheby's. The manuscript is now in the collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California (EL 26 C 9). It was published in facsimile in 1911, [4] then reproduced again in colour in 1995. [5]
Because the manuscript was in the Bridgewater Library for centuries, early scholars working on Chaucer's works were unaware of its existence and it was not consulted for any early editions of the Tales. It first came to public notice following its description in 1810; the text was not available until 1868, when it was edited by F. J. Furnivall. [1] : 62–63 W. W. Skeat's 1894 edition of the Tales was the first to use Ellesmere as the basis for its text. [1] : 63
The Ellesmere manuscript is a highly polished example of scribal workmanship, with a great deal of elaborate illumination and, notably, a series of illustrations of the various narrators of the Tales (including a famous one of Chaucer himself, mounted on a horse).
The manuscript is written on 240 high-quality parchment leaves of approximately 394mm (13¾") by 284mm (11¼") in size. [1] : 59
Owing to the quality of its decoration and illustrations, Ellesmere is the most frequently reproduced Chaucer manuscript. [1] : 59
In order of appearance in the Ellesmere Chaucer (note that not all storytellers have an illumination): [6]
The Ellesmere manuscript is thought to be very early in date, being written shortly after Chaucer's death. It is seen as an important source for efforts to reconstruct Chaucer's original text and intentions, though John M. Manly and Edith Rickert in their Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940) noted that whoever edited the manuscript probably made substantial revisions, tried to regularise spelling, and put the individual Tales into a smoothly running order. Up until this point the Ellesmere manuscript had been used as the 'base text' by several editions, such as that of W. W. Skeat, with variants checked against British Library, Harley MS 7334.
The manuscript is believed to have been written by a single scribe, the same scribe who wrote the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Tales. The scribe has been identified as Adam Pinkhurst, a man employed by Chaucer himself; however, the attribution is controversial, with many palaeographers remaining undecided for or against. [7] If the scribe was employed by Chaucer directly, this would imply that the reconstructions hypothesized by Manly and Rickert were carried out by someone who had worked with Chaucer, knew his intentions for the Tales, and had access to draft materials.
The Ellesmere manuscript is conventionally referred to as El in studies of the Tales and their textual history. A facsimile edition is available.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
The Parlement of Foules, also called the Parlement of Briddes or the Assemble of Foules, is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer made up of approximately 700 lines. The poem, which is in the form of a dream vision in rhyme royal stanza, contains one of the earliest references to the idea that St. Valentine's Day is a special day for lovers.
"The Cook's Tale" is one of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It breaks off after 58 lines and was presumably never finished, although some scholars argue that Chaucer deliberately left the tale unfinished.
The Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early-15th-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, held in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth. It is an important source for Chaucer's text, and was possibly written by someone with access to an original authorial holograph, now lost.
Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (1368/69–1426) was a key figure in 15th-century Middle English literature, significant for promoting Chaucer as "the father of English literature", and as a poet in his own right. His poetry, especially his longest work, the didactic work Regement of Princes, was extremely popular in the fifteenth century, but went largely ignored until the late twentieth century, when it was re-examined by scholars, particularly John Burrow. Today he is most well known for his Series, which includes the earliest autobiographical description of mental illness in English, and for his extensive scribal activity. Three holographs of his poetry have survived, and he also copied literary manuscripts by other writers. As a clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal, he wrote hundreds of documents in French and Latin.
Adam Pinkhurst is best known as a fourteenth-century English scribe whom Linne Mooney identified as the 'personal scribe' of Geoffrey Chaucer, although much recent scholarship has cast doubt on this connection.
Thomas Chestre was the author of a 14th-century Middle English romance Sir Launfal, a verse romance of 1045 lines based ultimately on Marie de France's Breton lay Lanval. He was possibly also the author of the 2200-line Libeaus Desconus, a story of Sir Gawain's son Gingalain based upon similar traditions to those that inspired Renaut de Beaujeu's late-12th-century or early-13th-century Old French romance Le Bel Inconnu, and also possibly of a Middle English retelling of the mid-13th-century Old French romance Octavian. Geoffrey Chaucer parodied Libeaus Desconus, among other Middle English romances, in his Canterbury Tale of Sir Thopas.
A Treatise on the Astrolabe is a medieval instruction manual on the astrolabe by Geoffrey Chaucer. It was completed in 1391. It describes both the form and the proper use of the instrument, and stands out as a prose technical work from a writer better known for poetry, written in English rather than the more typical Latin.
The Pilgrimage of the Soul or The Pylgremage of the Sowle was a late medieval work in English, combining prose and lyric verse, translated from Guillaume de Deguileville's Old French Le Pèlerinage de l'Âme. It circulated in manuscript in fifteenth-century England, and was among the works printed by William Caxton. One manuscript forms part of the Egerton Collection in the British Library.
Contact between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian humanists Petrarch or Boccaccio has been proposed by scholars for centuries. More recent scholarship tends to discount these earlier speculations because of lack of evidence. As Leonard Koff remarks, the story of their meeting is "a 'tydying' worthy of Chaucer himself".
The Bridgewater Library was a family library, "the oldest large family collection in England to survive intact into modern times".
Harley MS 7334, sometimes known as the Harley Manuscript, is a mediaeval manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales held in the Harleian Collection of the British Library.
The Trinity Gower D Scribe, often referred to simply as Scribe D, was a professional scribe and copyist of literary manuscripts active during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century in London, England. Although his real name long remained unknown, Scribe D has been described as "so well known to students of late Middle English manuscripts that he hardly needs any introduction".
Edith Rickert (1871–1938) was a medieval scholar at the University of Chicago. Her work includes the Chaucer Life-Records and the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940).
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories, mostly in verse, written by Geoffrey Chaucer chiefly from 1387 to 1400. They are held together in a frame story of a pilgrimage on which each member of the group is to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back. Fewer than a quarter of the projected tales were completed before Chaucer's death. It is uncertain in what order Chaucer intended the tales to appear; moreover it is very possible that, as a work-in-progress, no final authorial order of tales ever existed.
Hatton Gospels is the name now given to a manuscript produced in the late 12th century or early 13th century. It contains a translation of the four gospels into the West Saxon dialect of Old English. It is a nearly complete gospel book, missing only a small part of the Gospel of Luke. It is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as MS Hatton 38. The fullest description of the manuscript is by Takako Kato, in Treharne, et al., eds., Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1020-1220.
John Matthews Manly was an American professor of English literature and philology at the University of Chicago. Manly specialized in the study of the works of William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. His eight-volume work, The Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940), written in collaboration with his former student Edith Rickert, has been cited as a definitive study of Chaucer's works.
Norman Francis Blake was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.
John Shirley was an author, translator, and scribe. As a scribe of later Middle English literature, he is particularly known for transcribing works by John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer.
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