ABSTRACT
The Collected Works of Chaucer contain several “poems without endings” — poems, that is to say, which Chaucer began but appears never to have got to the end of. In this chapter, the author considers how scribes, editors, and readers have received these apparently incomplete texts. He discusses “apparently incomplete” because many Chaucer scholars have come to regard them as being in fact complete. All the scribes, printers, and poets so far considered share a common assumption: they take it for granted that the poems in question are incomplete—either because Chaucer never finished them or else because the conclusions have been lost. Looking for missing parts was only one response to the seemingly abrupt terminationes of the poems. An alternative was to supply an ending oneself and so convert a terminatio into a conctusio at a stroke.
