ABSTRACT
This essay first appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 71108.
T HE anonymous glosses or marginal annotations that appear in almost half of the Fifty-eight complete manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales provide a rich-but neglected-source of reader response to Chaucer’s poetry. Although Chaucerians have begun to explore how Chaucer's contemporaries reacted to his works, we have been slow to examine these glosses.1 Several obvious reasons for our relative disregard of them come to mind. Perhaps the most important is that access to these marginalia remains difficult.2 But even were this material ready to hand in facsimile or edited form, we would still have to struggle to interpret the kind of response to Chaucer's text that we find in most glosses. Only in rare cases do these marginalia make direct comment on Chaucer's text: “verum est” is one glossator's unequivocal assent to the Wife of Bath's claim that no man can swear as boldly as a woman can, and “nota bene” signals another glossator's obvious interest in, if not precise attitude toward, a proverb in The Knight's Tale.3 In equally unambiguous fashion, another glossator registers moral disapproval of the misplaced kiss in The Miller’s Tale by means of the marginal warning “nota malum quid.”4 And, citing Proverbs 21:19 (“Better to live alone in the desert than with a nagging and ill-tempered wife”), yet another glossator makes it quite clear that he prefers silent and agreeable women.5
