Chaucer's Sources and Analogues Revisited

Jill Mann, University of Notre Dame

Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, Volume I. Edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002. Pp. xii, 623. $99; £55.

Bryan and Dempster's Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (hereafter SA) has been one of the indispensable tools of Chaucer scholarship for more than half a century. Gathering together earlier research in this area, particularly that produced under the aegis of the Chaucer Society, SA presented it in an orderly and easily accessible form. The new volume of sources and analogues edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, which covers roughly half of the Canterbury Tales, will not so much lay SA to rest as give it a new lease of life, by updating its scholarship, by correcting the few errors that it contains, and above all by providing modern English translations for the benefit of students and scholars less linguistically proficient than they were formerly expected to be. The intentions motivating the production of this volume are admirable; unfortunately their execution is not uniformly successful, and there are a couple of outright disaster areas, as will appear below.