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Tracing the Ancestry of The Canterbury Tales
The Scientists’ Tale
“[There are] quite close parallels in which way the manuscripts and DNA evolve. There is a mutation process when the manuscript is copied just as you get with DNA.”
— Adrian Barbrook
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“You can see how things got shuffled around, changed … we have to reconstruct what we thought Chaucer might have left behind.”
— Peter Robinson,
Canterbury Tales Project
| Web Links |
Wife of Bath prologue (modern translation) Full text of The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales Project |
 Was the Wife of Bath promiscuous or just sexy? Depends on which version of The Canterbury Tales you read. (Syndics of Cambridge University) |
ABCNEWS.com
Aug. 31 — Experience, though no authority
Were in this world, were good enough for me,
To speak of woe that is in all marriage…
So begin the words of the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, that medieval staple of high school and college English reading lists.
Except scholars have never been able to say with authority exactly which words Chaucer meant for the Wife of Bath—or indeed any of the other characters in the never finished Tales. They still can’t, but a couple of British evolutionary biologists have now offered some insight into the convoluted genealogy of the work.
Unpublished Rough Draft
Pick up a copy of Canterbury Tales, and it certainly looks like a polished, imposing tome of classic literature. That’s not what Chaucer left behind.
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| Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer. (Syndics of Cambridge University) |
Robinson is co-editor of the Canterbury Tales Project, which is trying to untangle the different versions.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims headed for Canterbury to visit the shrine of Sir Thomas Becket. According to the prologue, each of the 30 pilgrims were to tell four tales, 120 in all. When Chaucer died in 1400, he had written only about 25. Of those he had written, he was still revising many of them.
Worse, Chaucer’s original scribblings did not survive. After Chaucer’s death, several scribes copied his writings.
What we now call The Canterbury Tales “derives from the pile of manuscripts left beside him on his desk,” Robinson says. “We don’t actually have that pile of papers. We don’t even have a complete manuscript that is a first-generation copy of that pile of papers.”
The Evolution of Errors
In other words, of the 58 surviving 15th-century versions of The Canterbury Tales, the best of the lot is likely a copy of a copy. And each time a scribe copied a copy, he introduced new calligraphic “typos” into the text.
“You can see how things got shuffled around, changed, and there’s a problem among the existing manuscripts,” Robinson says. “Somehow out of all that, we have to reconstruct what we thought Chaucer might have left behind.”
Yet those errors also offer clues as to which of the 58 manuscripts are closest to the original.
As each copy added new errors, it presumably preserved the errors of earlier transcribers. Thus, as different scribes copied from different manuscripts, The Canterbury Tales mutated into several versions. The evolution of the Tales was similar to biological evolution where one species diversifies over time into several species.
So about a year ago, Robinson and his colleagues at the Canterbury Tales Project enlisted Christopher Howe and Adrian Barbrook, two evolutionary biologists at Cambridge University.
“[There are] quite close parallels in which way the manuscripts and DNA evolve,” Barbrook says. “There is a mutation process when the manuscript is copied just as you get with DNA.”
Lots of Mistakes
Looking at just the 850 lines of the prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, in which the Wife of Bath tells of her five husbands, the researchers noted 2,500 variations between the 58 manuscripts, which they fed into software that usually analyzes the DNA sequences of different species to figure out their evolutionary relationships.
The researchers reported their findings in last week’s issue of the journal Nature.
“The computer analysis should make it as possible as it’s going to be,”comments Daniel Mosser, professor of English at Virginia Technical University, “to determine which is the ancestor of most of the manuscripts, if there is one.”
Among the findings is that several little-studied manuscripts are actually quite close descendants of the original.
“It’s not we’re proposing any radically new readings,” Robinson says, but the analysis provides a “much better understanding of the language of the manuscripts and the spelling of the manuscripts. It is offering a clearer sense of where the text is coming from.”
With some manuscripts, it appears the scribes copied from two or more different earlier versions.
The analysis also suggests that Chaucer had left behind only a working draft with alternative passages and notes of what was to be added and deleted.
Two Sides of the Wife of Bath
In particular, the evolution of the Wife of Bath’s prologue has split into two major groups, one containing an extra 16 lines that paint the Wife of Bath as sexually promiscuous and aggressive. “But ever followed my own appetite,” she says in the of the passages in question. “Though he were short or tall, or black or white; I took no heed, so that he cared for me.”
According to the researchers, Chaucer meant to eliminate these lines from an earlier version, but some scribes reinserted them as they copied the draft. “The difference between the two is really quite dramatic,” Robinson says.
While the short version still portrays her as sexy and fun-loving, it eliminates the gold-digging and sex-obsessed intimations.
Robinson and colleagues are performing similar analysis on the Tales’ general prologue. Robinson is also working on a project to analyze the 5,000 earliest manuscripts of the New Testament dating from about 200 A.D.
And meanwhile, scholars can now say with more authority what the Wife of Bath did and did not say.
| Three Lines, Four Versions | |
| Here’s how a short snippet from the Wife of Bath prologue of The Canterbury Tales appears in four 15th-century editions plus the modern English translations. | |
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Hengwrt Manuscript, (c. 1405, National Library of Wales) |
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For sith I wol nat kepe me chaast in al Whan myn housbonde is fro the world agon Som cristen man shal wedde me anon |
For since I will not keep myself chaste in every way When my husband is from the world gone Some Christian man shall wed me soon |
| This is one of the versions that is likely among the closest to the original. The word “me” in the first line is actually inserted in the manuscript. | |
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Corpus Christi College manuscript (c. 1405, Oxford University) |
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For sithe I wille nought kepe chaste in al Whan myn housebonde is fro the world y gon Som crystne man schal wedde me anon |
For since I will not keep chaste in every way When my husband is from the world gone Some Christian man shall wed me soon |
| The absence of “me” in the first line, and the addition of this word in the Hengwrt manuscript is one of the pieces of evidence suggesting a link between these two versions. | |
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Cardigan manuscript
(c. 1440, University of Texas at Austin) |
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I wil hym not forsake nothyng at al When my husbonde is fro the worlde gon Som Cristen man shal wedde me anon |
I will not abandon him in any way When my husband is from the world gone Some Christian man shall wed me soon |
| The first line is nonsense. It seems the scribe could not read the line and made one up to fit. It’s an example of the weird “mutations” the text could undergo. | |
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Ellesmere manuscript (c. 1410, Huntington Library, San Marino) |
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For sothe I wol nat kepe me chaast in al Whan myn housbonde is fro the world ygon Som cristen man shal wedde me anon |
For in truth I will not keep myself chaste in every way. When my husband is from the world gone (ie dead) Some Christian man shall wed me soon |
| Ellesmere is the manuscript most modern editions are based on, and in many sections, it appears to be a very good version. However, the text of the first half of the Wife of Bath prologue appears to have been copied from a less authoritative manuscript. In the first line, “sothe” (truth) appears to be a misspelling of “sithe,” (since), as it appears in the other three manuscripts. | |
