The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
by Herbert C. Schulz

BEGINNING OF THE GENERAL PROLOGUE, fol. 1r

From the Introduction

The Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, commonly referred to as the "Ellesmere Chuacer," is one of the most valuable and cherished mansucripts in the Huntington Library. A similarly high opinion of it would doubtless be held by its owners were it, instead, in any other library of the English-speaking world. The reasons for this distinction readily reveal themselves and invite the attention of both the general reader with a fondness for books and literature and the student with a serious interest in the text.

Chaucer's position as the most prominent author in the history of English literature before Shakespeare has long been a well-established fact. No other text in the entire Chaucer canon can equal the Canterbury Tales, and indeed it would be difficult to name a single literary work of the whole medieval period, by any author, that surpasses these tales in their direct appeal to the reader. They can, with considerable assurance, be placed among the world's greatest literary achievements. Their continued vitality almost six centuries after they were written is well attested by the several "modernizations" of the Middle English text, from Dryden to present generations, and by repeated appearances in paperback editions.

THE SQUIRE, fol. 115v, and THE FRANKLIN, fol. 123v