By JOANNA KASPE
Editor’s Note: This is the third article in a series about medieval literature, particularly the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and its influence on students and the campus community.
With the help of BYU working on the Chaucer Project, Chaucer’s works will soon be on CD-ROM and many of the age-old questions about his works will be closer to being answered.
When Chaucer died in 1400, he did not leave a nicely finished copy of his various writings, including the Canterbury Tales.
People copied his work because it was so popular and scribes filled in the gaps of unfinished work with what they felt Chaucer would have filled in himself, said Paul R. Thomas, a professor in the English Department.
One of the main questions lies in determining which fragments of the remaining manuscripts are actually Chaucer’s and which are the work of the scribes, he said
“Scholars can then decide, based on studies such as paleography (the dating of hand-writing), which manuscripts present the text closest to Chaucer’s original.”
“The problem in the past was that if you wanted to study the Morgan and the Hengwrt manuscripts, or any other manuscript, you would have to cross England to look at them and you could never have them in the same room because they are at different museums and universities,” said Darin Merrill, a graduate student working on the transcription for BYU.
“These manuscripts are worth thousands of dollars and no library will ever let you check one out,” he said. “This project will hopefully open up Chaucer’s works in a way that really has never been available before and the accuracy of the computer compared to the human eye is obvious.”
The project is centered, for the most part, in England. But thanks to Dr. Thomas’ extensive international contacts, he was able to get BYU into the thick of it.
When Dr. Peter Robinson, a professor from Oxford University, came to BYU last year, he said he was pleased the transcription work would go on here rather than someplace like Harvard because we have much more flexibility to do research and be innovative, Thomas said.
“Though Oxford has been important in supporting text with variance in them and in the creation of software, the innovations often occur at BYU and Sheffield,” Thomas said.
“If someone says we have made a mistake, then we can go back and change it in the next version of the CD-ROM,” he said. “It can be more quickly corrected on CD-ROM than in a book. So what will happen with Chaucer’s works is that they will keep getting better and better.”
“The beauty of the CD-ROM is that you have access to things you’ve never dreamed of before,” Merrill said.
