The phylogeny of the order in the 'Canterbury Tales' (Geoffrey Chaucer)

Since Furnivall's Six-Text Edition, the order of the Canterbury Tales has become a theoretical issue for many scholars interested in the textual history of Chaucer's work. Moreover, this issue is faced by all editors of the text, since the tales need to be arranged in a specific sequence or in a series of sequences, as suggested by Pearsall when he proposed an edition in booklets.; This work is an interdisciplinary approach that uses computer technologies in combination with traditional codicological analysis to study the relationships between the different tale orders in the 58 more or less complete manuscripts and fifteenth century editions of the Tales. This work is organized in seven chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on scholarly work relating to the order of the Canterbury Tales; chapter 2 presents a brief history of the stemmatic approach to the criticism of texts; chapter 3 explores the possibility of studying the order of the Tales from a stemmatic perspective; chapter 4 presents the results of the use of phylogenetic software applied to the study of the order of the tales and analyses these results; chapter 5 analyses the relationships between the tale-order and the word-variant stemmata; chapter 6 presents codicological analyses of Ad3 Ch Cp Dd Ha4 and Hg. The findings of this work are presented in the conclusion (chapter 7), where the implications of the different orders are considered.; It is a known fact that some scribes accidentally altered the order of the Tales (as the Hg scribe did), but this work shows that some scribes altered the order intentionally. Codicological evidence suggests that both Ch and Ha4 added the Tale of Gamelyn to their texts when this tale was not part of their copy-texts. The conclusion of this work also suggests that further codicological analyses of the witnesses of the Canterbury Tales could still cast some light on the developments of manuscripts with b, c or d tale-orders as well as elucidate or suggest the places in the textual tradition in which these orders might have originated.