ABSTRACT
A LTHOUGH Chaucer died in the last year of the fourteenth century, virtually all the surviving manuscripts of his works date from the fifteenth.1 The manuscripts therefore provide evidence not only for what he wrote during his lifetime, but also for how his work was read in the century after his death; thus they are among our chief means of understanding Chaucer’s relationship to the fifteenth century. It is in this light that I will consider the manuscripts here. Space does not permit me to offer an introduction to the bibliography of the manuscript book, or a systematic survey of the manuscripts’ dates, materials, and textual affiliations, or a comprehensive review of recent scholarship.2 Instead, by referring to selected examples, I will highlight several aspects of pre-print culture that a student of literature might keep in mind when beginning to work with manuscript evidence. Treated with sensitivity, this evidence has the potential, often still untapped, to give us access to the history in which Chaucer’s works are situated. Whatever their other reasons may be, most scholars who work with manuscripts do so in part because handling a physical artifact from the Middle Ages gives them a sense of contact with the people who lived, read, and wrote in that period that can be achieved in no other way. I hope that my readers will go on to examine Chaucerian and other medieval manuscripts for themselves in order to discover the many aspects of the medieval experience of literature which are difficult to recover from modem printed editions.
