The Digital facsimile of National Library of Wales Peniarth 392 D (Hengwrt Chaucer)

The Canterbury Tales project is glad to announce the publication of our third major electronic publication: the Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile, edited by Estelle Stubbs of the University of Sheffield. As the name suggests, this is a full-colour digital facsimile of National Library of Wales Peniarth 392 D, the 'Hengwrt Chaucer'. As Chaucer experts will need no reminding, the Hengwrt Chaucer is commonly regarded (together with the Ellesmere manuscript) as one of the most important sources for the text of the Tales.
The CD-ROM incorporates high-resolution (225 dpi) images of the entire Hengwrt manuscript together with binding fragments and the leaves of the Merthyr fragment. This CD-ROM joins these images to the transcriptions of the text, collations with the other crucial early manuscript of the Tales(the Ellesmere Chaucer, in the Huntington Library), complete descriptions and analytical discussions to give a full set of materials for studying this manuscript.
The report on CNN was somewhat distorted, but fundamentally accurate. In the process of preparation of this CD-ROM, Estelle Stubbs uncovered evidence that suggests that Chaucer himself may have supervised the preparation of part of Hengwrt (and, Ellesmere). Further, the title written on the first page (and just visible in the fraction of manuscript reproduced in the CNN report clearly labels this as 'Here begynneth the book of the tales of Canterbury' and the wording of the Ellesmere retraction confirms this. Elsewhere, we find the same wording used by John Shirley in his introduction to the Tales, copied into Harley 7333, and by William Caxton in the preface to his second edition.
You can find out more about this CD-ROM from the publisher's website: http://www.sd-editions.com
This reproduces many screens from the CD, and gives a fair sense of what this CD offers.

Peter Robinson
Director, The Canterbury Tales Project
De Montfort University, Leicester.

Centre for Technology and the Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences
De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 5XY, UK
Phone +44 (0)116 250 6495, fax 257 7250. http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/
The Canterbury Tales Project http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ctp/
The MASTER Project http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/master