Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
A New Edition by Steve Guthrie, Agnes Scott College
Based on Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Manuscript 61
Designed for Online Access
With Introductory Materials, Marginal Glosses, and Mouseover Explanatory and Textual Notes
Copyright Steven R. Guthrie, 2014
The image above is the well-known Corpus Christi manuscript frontispiece, showing perhaps Chaucer reading possibly this poem to a court audience.
My object is to provide an online edition of Troilus and Criseyde which is both editorially responsible and accessible to present-day readers, including students. It is not a translation or modernization, except insofar as every edition modernizes, for example, by adding phrase and sentence punctuation and quotation marks. Early in the poem, it normalizes the more obscure spellings of high-frequency words, not to the broad range of Middle English but to the more recognizable values of Corpus Christi and the other principal early manuscripts of the poem. As the poem continues, normalizing diminishes, so that by the end of the text the spelling closely resembles that of the base manuscript. This should give a beginning student a foothold, and it should also serve as a self-teaching device for Chaucer's Middle English.
The edition uses marginal glosses of archaic words and difficult or idiomatic phrases. Its explanatory and textual notes are linked electronically to the relevant passages in the text of the poem. The edition is based on the Parkes-Salter facsimile of the Corpus Christi manuscript, in consultation with the Chaucer Society six-text transcriptions, Thynne's edition, Root's collations, and the other modern editions of the poem. Editorial practice is described fully under that heading in the introductory materials.
My thanks to the Agnes Scott faculty and President Elizabeth Kiss for the sabbatical leave during which the edition took shape, and my thanks to Tammy Roundy, Web Developer in the college's IT department, who prepared the edition for publication online.