Manly - Rickert Text of the Canterbury Tales

In addition to correcting errors in studies of or based in part upon Manly-Rickert's Text of the Canterbury Tales (explainable to an extent by the size and complexity of that edition), the present study offers an explanatory chronology of the project which lead to the constitution of the eight volumes; presents the evidence that Chaucer released copies of various links and tales during his lifetime; discusses what the manuscript evidence says was the state of the text when the earliest scribes copied it; presents evidence of the two basic modes of manuscript-production (by independent scribes and in scribal shops); and then concludes with an intensive study of the most important witness of the text, the Hengwrt Manuscript (MS Peniarth 392D) as it relates to such other important manuscripts as the Ellesmere (El) and also to the theory of the circulation of individual links and tales during Chaucer's lifetime.