v. 29

The manuscript glosses to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales can tell us much about how early readers understood Chaucer's work; yet while particular glosses have long been cited in studies of reception and of Chaucer's own workingmethods, there has never been a printed edition to make the entire body of evidence easily accessible. This first published edition presents the glosses according to where in the text they appear, includes a full corpus of variants, and identifies the sources of the glosses, while headnotes to each tale provide an overview of the material. The extended introduction offers a taxonomy of these and other Middle English manuscript glosses, and discusses how the material can shed light on how fifteenth-century readers responded to the Tales, and on medieval reading in general.
Dr STEPHEN PARTRIDGE teaches at the University of British Columbia, Canada.