Chaucer Editions

1 month ago 17

I want to read The Canterbury Tales. I understand that the Riverside Chaucer is the best critically, but I am more interested in a relatively compact edition that has just enough notes to help me take in the meaning. I want to immerse myself in the language and after doing that for a while, I'll consider some more critical stuff.

Harold Bloom's big book The Best Poems of the English Language had a good set up for the his selections of Chaucer. It had the poem, and on the same line as the poem's lines there would be definition's for words that were not easy to guess, with a little dot above the word.

Like it was something like this:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote* (sweet)

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich* licóur (such)

[etc or whatever in a similar pattern, reddit is hard to format]

I like this feature. The Everman's Library editions seems similar to this, but it doesn't note with a star/dot which word the margin term is defining. I could put up with that, but I'd rather something more like the Bloom book. The Penguin Jill Mann edition looks to have good notes, but they're long and at the bottom of the page, and make the book 1,500 pages. The Everyman is 600 or so, which is desirable.

Any tips? What's your favorite edition and why? Thanks!

submitted by /u/dannymckaveney
[link] [comments]
Read Entire Article