The entire collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works held by the British Library is being made available in digital format after the completion of a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts.
In a “major milestone” for the library, which holds the world’s largest surviving collection of Chaucer, it is hoped the digital platform will enable new research into the 14th-century poet, courtier, soldier, diplomat, and MP who is most famous for his Middle English epic, The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer, who died in 1400, was proclaimed by his contemporary poet Thomas Hoccleve as the “firste fyndere of our fair language” and is widely regarded as the father of English poetry. He was, in essence, the first poet laureate, being rewarded by Edward III with a gallon of wine daily for an unspecified task, thought to be for poetic work or works. He was also the first to be buried in what became Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The British Library holds more than 60 items related to his works and life, and has now digitised them all.
The 25,000 images of pre-1600 manuscripts have been carefully photographed and uploaded, including complete copies of Chaucer’s poems but also unique survivals, including fragmentary texts found in Middle English anthologies or inscribed in printed editions and incunabula (books printed before 1501).
They include 23 manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, the sometimes tragic, often funny and occasionally bawdy accounts of a storytelling contest among pilgrims on their way from London to Canterbury Cathedral. The earliest was written only a few years after Chaucer’s death in roughly 1400, and the collection includes rare copies of the 1476 and 1483 editions of the text made by William Caxton.
But there are other less known works, such as his Trojan epic Troilus and Criseyde, which inspired Shakespeare; the dream vision The Legend of Good Women and its often tragic stories of 10 female figures derived from classical history, legend and mythology; his translations of the Roman de la Rose and The Consolation of Philosophy; and his instructional manual on the astronomical instrument the astrolabe, as well as a host of minor poems.
Calum Cockburn, the British Library’s curator of medieval manuscripts, who is in charge of the project, said: “One manuscript of the Canterbury Tales has got this incredible portrait of Chaucer himself that appears at the very beginning of the General Prologue and the famous line, ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote’ [’When April with its sweet smelling showers’]. And in the W of Whan, Chaucer appears with a book open and a quill. That is a really wonderful detail because there aren’t that many surviving portraits of him.
“Another of my favourites is a collection of treatises in its own original medieval binding with a clasp on it. And its intact, it’s been the same for 600 years.”
The digital collection had “staggering potential”, he said, and the 25,000 images were of “incredibly high resolution … You can zoom into these images and see detail on the page you would not be able to with the human eye in person. They are really stunning.
“We are hoping it will provide this incredible foundation for future research. There are so many ongoing technological advances right now that means that with this digital platform we can share these manuscripts, look at them side by side and ask questions on how Chaucer’s works were being transmitted, how they were being copied, what kind of scribes were working on them, who was reading them, all of those sorts of questions that we might not have been able to answer as extensively in the past.”
During Chaucer’s life his poems were being painstakingly copied by scribes and would appear in bound collections and distributed among the wealthy, the upper merchant classes and the noble classes. His works remained equally popular after his death.
Cockburn said: “There is one incredible story of one of the royal manuscripts in the collection, which is a copy of the Canterbury Tales, where it is said that Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV, is crossing London Bridge on her way to her coronation and is presented with this copy of The Canterbury Tales, which is put in her hand, which is such an incredible detail.”
The collection can be accessed on the British Library website.
• This article was amended on 26 October 2023 to correctly describe incunabula as books printed before 1501, rather than “pamphlets”.
