Canterbury Tales

This article considers the significance of the ‘blered’ eye as a figure for covetousness in Piers Plowman and ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’. Piers Plowman refers to the ‘blered’ eye in its account of the false pardoner, the confession of Covetise, and the Samaritan’s image of the three things that drive a man from his house, while the Canon’s Yeoman describes his own ‘blered’ eyes as a consequence of his master’s alchemical experiments. ‘Blereynesse’ named a condition where the eye became watery or rheumatic, which was understood to be contagious and often moralised in terms of spiritual confusion. To ‘blere’ a person’s eye was also an idiom for trickery and deception. The ‘blered’ eye was further associated with Leah from the book of Genesis, whose own ‘blereynesse’ was read to represent the spiritual confusion of the Old Law in relation to the New, and of the active life in relation to the contemplative. The article argues that Langland and Chaucer drew on the symptoms of the ‘blered’ eye, and on its interrelated moralised, idiomatic and allegorical meanings, to describe covetousness as a characteristically ‘unkynde’ sin, which alienates people from ‘kynde’ relationships and obscures the significance of ‘kynde’ knowledge. As a condition that makes it hard to see, ‘blereynesse’ figures the confusion that arises from ‘unkynde’ covetousness in these tales, while, as a contagious condition, and as an idiom for trickery, it speaks to the complex forms of deception and self-deception by which one person’s covetousness might extend to other people. Through its association with Leah and the active life, the imagery of the ‘blered’ eye reinforces the connections between ‘unkynde’ covetousness and economic work in these poems. Through its association with Leah and the Old Law, meanwhile, ‘blereynesse’ becomes part of the way the poems relate contemporary covetousness to larger historical narratives, moving from a golden age to a corrupt present in ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, and from a sinful present to a redemptive future in Piers Plowman.

This chapter focuses on the problem of tale-order in the witnesses of the Canterbury Tales and pays special attention to the differences in the order of the tales in Cx1 and Cx2. A brief history of the problem of tale-order is offered first, since it is likely that that was what prompted Caxton to change the order of Cx1 was that ω presented a different tale-order. Although the tale-order in Cx2 is unique and probably conflated, this new order should partly reflect the order of the lost manuscript, and might offer new information about it.

In this three-paragraph essay, I focus on two tales which are taken from the medieval collection of tales The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. " The Miller's Tale " and " The Knight's Tale " are stories that are held as a contrast to each other. The Knight's Tale is a story of chivalric romance with two knights competing each other to attain the love of the lady. In the story, the one who is the most worthy of the love of the lady will get it. However, in " The Miller's Tale " we have a mock-heroic tale. We move on from a world of courtly love to a world of lust. We have middle class characters. Later, they will be punished for this because they break the order of The Chain of Being by being pretentious and acting out of their class. In short, " The Knight's Tale " is a tale embodying the conventions of medieval romance tradition, whereas " The Miller's Tale " is a story of coarse humour in which there is no love but lust.

Stories that concern refugees make considerable claims regarding the need for representational forms contained in literary discourse to carry societal weight; in other words, stories about refugees address themselves to the ongoing political and social crisis of migration. This paper considers two recent examples of “refugee literature”, the multiply-authored Refugee Tales (2016), a collection that adopts the Chaucerian pilgrimage format, and Kate Evans’ Threads from the Refugee Crisis (2017), a graphic novel in the vein of Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996) that narrates its author’s experiences in the Calais Jungle. While both texts hybridize their literary form, they do so for with different political and aesthetic effects. Ultimately, this paper seeks to ascertain the relevance of these literary narratives to their seemingly direct objects of reference: communities of refugees, asylum seekers, and the reading public.

"I’ve argued in Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia UP, 2003, 2004, 2012) that England’s coalescence as an imagined national polity—a medieval nation—required the historic manipulation of English Jews, a manipulation visible in England’s cultural artifacts, including its literature. 

In 1290, England became the first European country to expel its Jews, but the literary and cultural manipulation of its now-absent Jews continued into the early modern period, when Shakespeare’s famed Merchant of Venice set the activities of Shylock, arguably the most famous Jewish character in literature, in Venice, not England. 

My current book, the Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, includes a chapter that considers medieval England to be Europe's first racial state.  The chapter ends with "England's Dead Boys," an analysis of differences in the literary treatment of England’s Jews before and after the Expulsion of 1290, to gain a finer-grained perspective of what changes in the cultural manipulation of Jews. 

“England’s Dead Boys” compares three pre- and post-expulsion literary exemplars that narrate, invoke, or mime the plot of young Hugh of Lincoln’s putative murder by Jews in 1255.  The coda to this cluster of pre- and post-expulsion retellings is a literary tale that turns the boy-slaughter plot inside out, showing us what can be gained when the story is changed, and the boy does not die. 

Texts in this case study are: the Anglo-Norman ballad Hughes de Lincoln, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, The Christian Child Slain by Jews, and The Jewish Boy.  "

Here, the attempt to empty the Flood of its religious meaning ignites a war of epistemologies. “Deerne love” and “Goddes pryvetee” are two universes set on a collision course. Human secrets will scale the wall to unseat God’s. The dust settles and the corroded theology of this New Flood opens on to a barren landscape. It is religious metapoetry, “the mighty, and the terrible God” cut loose from its mission and witness. Theology splinters into a chilly science of art rather than doctrine and “the rock of my strength, and my refuge” gives way to Fame’s “roche of yse.” It is one matter for religion to hover as medieval tropology, place Nicholas’s pagan spree in the crosshairs, and stump from our shores that “pride goeth before the destruction.” It is another for religion to become the world-weary irony that exploits his shortcomings as a poet and mythographer.

Resumo: Os Contos da Cantuária de Geoffrey Chaucer foram um marco para a Língua Inglesa, pois têm o objetivo de ser um extrato da vida dessa sociedade do final do século XIV. A partir deste, serão verificadas as transformações sociais ocorridas no período e como os ideais cristãos foram articulados pelo autor da obra. Deste modo, será analisado o discurso dos narradores em O Conto do Frade, O Conto do Beleguim, O prólogo do Vendedor de Indulgências e O Conto do Criado do Cônego, no que diz respeito à atuação do clero e seu espaço na sociedade medieval e em como a historiografia aborda os valores de conduta presentes nesses Contos, comparando-os com a crítica social presente em Chaucer.
Abstract: The Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer are considered a milestone for the English Language; they have the goal of being an extract of this society's life in the late fourteenth century. We will verify the social changes and how the Christian ideals were articulated by the author. We will analyze the speech of the narrators in The Friar's Tale, The Summoner's Tale, The Pardoner's Prologue and The Canon's Yeoman regarding to the role of clergy and their place in medieval society and how the values of conduct are discusses in these tales comparing them with the social critique presented in Chaucer's work.

This article aims at revealing the social, cultural, and political lives of the English people in the Medieval England in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Prologue to Canterbury Tales". Chaucer who is also known as the father of English poetry describes in detail various aspects of social, cultural and political lives of his time. The description of people's lives at that time was well mixed by Chaucer through the presentation of the characters featured in his work so that by reading this article the reader will get a good and clear picture of life and the actual situation at that time. It becomes the very cause why "Prologue to Canterbury Tales" is well known as the mirror of the society of the contemporary lives of English people in the Medieval Age.

This paper sets out three modern critical approaches to Chaucer's work (Chaucer as a conservative voice, Chaucer as in some sense radical or subversive, and Chaucer as open-ended) as an introduction to the studies of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims in the rest of this edited collection.

Chaucer is arguably one of medieval England’s greatest travel writers. Voyages and pilgrimages pervade his surviving oeuvre; they guide and organize a number of his works, culminating in the pilgrimage framework that structures the Canterbury Tales. Travel in all its real and fictional forms and with all its implications punctuates Chaucer’s texts.

Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims in his monumental work The Canterbury Tales have been widely treated by the scholars who produced copious articles and books on the countless matters focusing on each pilgrim. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to Harry Bailly, the striking innkeeper of the text. Bailly guides a group of medieval people of different ranks to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury which introduces the reader to the greatest panorama of the medieval period. As the main framework of the text, Bailly asks pilgrims to tell stories on their way to Canterbury. Bailly does not tell a story himself; yet, he becomes so successful in handling of the disputes among the pilgrims and putting all of them in order; and every time he has a say for the stories as well as the story tellers. He is also very cautious about the traditional three estates order which constitutes the backbone of the medieval society. The Canterbury Tales can be envisaged without any of its pilgrims, but not without a Harry Bailly. He is the authoritative figure, and a know-it-all. Throughout the text, he performs divergent roles as a host, a leader, a judge, a critic and a governor. Although his commanding position is impeded by his domineering wife, taken as another Wife of Bath in the paper, Bailly occupies a unique position as the maestro of the pilgrims. Accordingly, this paper aims to dwell on Harry Bailly in the Canterbury Tales to present him as the inalienable yet neglected character of the masterpiece of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer's Knight has been interpreted by modern critics in very different ways with some seeing him as a model of the estate of 'those who fight' knight whilst others judge his portrait to be a satirical critique of contemporary chivalry and crusading. This chapter argues that, when read in the context of the popularity of crusading in fourteenth-century England, Chaucer's praise of the Knight need not be read ironically and that the Knight,, should be seen as one of the estate ideals amongst the Canterbury pilgrims.

Middle English Literature

The second part of the anthology including examples of Middle English Literature starting with Sir Gawain and Canterbury Tales. The anthology is intended as a source of texts for students.

English Literature – An Anthology for Students. Volume 1 - From the Old English Period to the Eighteenth Century. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2010, pp. 512.

Studies in the Orthography of Some Early Manuscripts of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”
―
Jacob Thaisen
Volume I: Analysis and discussion

A thesis submitted for the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Ph.D.
―
De Montfort University
October 2005
―

Abstract

The systems of spelling found in the extant manuscripts of a late Middle English text are rarely considered in discussions of the transmission of that text. If they are, scholars have typically used the occurrence of dialectal spellings to allocate manuscripts to geographical areas or the occurrence of identical spellings, often unusual spellings, in corresponding locations across the manuscripts to recover the usage of the presumed archetype. The basis for much of this scholarship has been profiles which rely upon text samples or which list what spellings are found in a manuscript but do not reveal the internal distribution of these spellings in that manuscript.

This study considers the spelling and codicology of nine complete, textually-important manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, each of which was copied by a different scribe. The author semi-automatically indexes the electronic transcripts prepared by the Canterbury Tales Project from the spellings registered in the Project spelling databases for one of the tales. He extracts a comprehensive spelling profile for each manuscript from this index. The profiles correspond to the questionnaire used for Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, et al., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Aberdeen, 1986).

The author next evaluates the distribution of the variant spellings of each lemma relative to one another in the individual manuscripts. This evaluation leads to the findings that these manuscripts typically contain relatively few co-ordinate sets of spelling and that the boundary between two such sets usually coincides with a change in the codicology of the individual manuscript. This congruence can be related to the number of exemplars used by the scribes of these manuscripts in preparing them, implying that, with outside support, late Middle English manuscript spelling can be useful for textual purposes.

Much Canterbury Tales scholarship has been dominated by a view developed by some textual scholars in the interwar years. According to this view the first manuscripts were compiled from multiple exemplars due to individually circulating tales or, at best, from material received piecemeal, for Chaucer left the poem unfinished. This study concludes in opposition that large tranches of the text were physically together in a fixed order already when it reached the early scribes.

This thesis attempts to offer a reconceptualization of translation analysis. It argues that there is a growing interest in examining translations produced outside the discipline‟s historical field of focus. However, the tools of analysis employed may not have sufficient flexibility to examine translation if it is conceived more broadly. Advocating the use of abductive logic, the thesis infers translators‟ probable understandings of their own actions, and compares these with the reasoning provided by contemporary theories. It finds that it may not be possible to rely on common theories to analyse the work of translators who conceptualize their actions in radically different ways from that traditionally found in translation literature. The thesis exemplifies this issue through the dual examination of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s use of translation in the Canterbury Tales and that of Japanese storytellers in classical Kamigata rakugo. It compares the findings of the discipline‟s most pervasive theories with those gained through an abductive analysis of the same texts, finding that the results produced by the theories are invariably problematic.
The thesis demonstrates that understandings of translation practice have been given to change over time, and vary substantially across cultures. Therefore, an individual theory is unlikely to be able to rationalize particular practices or features of translations irrespective of the cultural context in which they are found. Abductive logic aims to describe translations in particular, rather than translation in general. It can be used to infer factors that may have influenced translators‟ understandings of the roles their texts will take, and hence, their aims in translating. Many theories tend to be underpinned by inductive logic, which essentially restricts textual analysis to the application of pre-defined labels of translation phenomena. Abductive logic forms hypotheses based on the context in question, going far beyond this kind of textual categorization.

Study of the Islamicate background of two tales which appear in Boccaccio and Chaucer, specifically the Enchanted Pear Tree in the Decameron the Chaste Empress / Persecuted Queen in the Man of Law's Tale.  The former has earlier analogues in Ibn al-Jawzi in Arabic and and Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi in Persian.  The latter has analogues in `Attar's Persian telling in the Elahi-nama and in al-Kulayni's Arabic legal compendium, al-Furu` min al-Kafi.  It traces the "enchanted" tree tale in the symbolic trees of paradise and hell in Islamic tradition, and in the apochryphal Book of Daniel and Susanna.  It also traces the Persecuted Empress tale in English, French and Latin tradition, as well as in Arabic and Persian.
Publisher's webpage:  https://brill.com/view/title/15440

By means of some veiled hints related to the figure of the Pardoner, Chaucer introduces his readers to a peculiar character whose ambiguous moral and sexual identity might be discovered in a far-flung Germanic past once prevailing in Anglo-Saxon England. The description given in the General Prologue recalls Old Norse Gylfaginning where Snorri Sturluson tells the story of Loki: a god who once turned into a mare. It is plausible to think that Chaucer might have drawn from a faded mythologema still known and accessible to his readers’ understanding. This Pardoner–Loki correlation stands as another testimony of the Pardoner’s homosexual nature.

"As one progresses from The Clerk's Tale through Fragments IV and V of the Ellesmere manuscript, it becomes clear that there are some interesting parallels between The Clerk's Tale and The Franklin's Tale which cause them to mirror each other quite oddly at times. (For instance, the Clerk's prologue begins with a reference to sophistry and the Franklin's with a reference to rhetoric.) Chaucer criticism often involves the comparison of two or more tales and/or Chaucer's use of certain techniques in multiple tales, but, while these two tales seem ripe for such considerations, there is a relative lack of scholarship examining each of them in relation to the other.
Therefore, this paper will consider the contrasting ways in which allusion is utilized in each of the tales (specifically the relative sentence and solas of said allusions), the divergent and extreme ways in which the Clerk and Franklin end their tales, and the possible conclusions that can or should be drawn from these considerations. Namely, I propose to compare, first, the numerous and artfully-placed allusions of The Clerk's Tale to the singular and exhaustive collection of allusions found in The Franklin's Tale known as Dorigen's complaint and, second, the glosses which end The Clerk's Tale to the question which ends The Franklin's Tale. Finally, I propose to relate these comparisons to the questions raised by The Canterbury Tales as a whole: those of sentence and solas as well as substaunce and auctorite."

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales presents pilgrims whose status in the medieval three estates is not clearly defined. The Prioress is one of those pilgrims who experiences in-betweenness as she lives in what Bhabha terms the " territories " (1994, p. 28) of her former and present estates, the nobility and the clergy respectively. In fact, the members of medieval monasteries were mostly of the noble origin. Generally, it was not the choice of the members of the nobility to enter monasteries; yet, it was the wish of their families. Thereby, most of the noble men and women had to leave their previously secular and worldly life behind and live in full compliance with the monastic rules which required an entirely ascetic life. Accordingly, in most cases, the noble members of monasteries had difficulty in adjusting to monastic life which put them in between the territories of their former and present estates, in what Bhabha terms " a third space " (1994, p. 28). As they neither completely belonged to the nobility nor to the clergy, those nobles of monasteries lived in a third space contesting the territories of both estates. Thus, they became medieval hybrids. Similar to her historical counterparts, Chaucer's Prioress of noble birth can find a fixed status or identity neither in the nobility nor in the clergy, and she has to live in between them. That is, the Prioress develops a hybrid identity at the interface between her former and present estates. Within this context, this paper aims to discuss Chaucer's Prioress in The Canterbury Tales as a medieval hybrid who occupies a medieval third space on the borders between the nobility and the clergy.
Öz Geoffrey Chaucer'ın Canterbury Hikayeleri Ortaçağ'ın üç sınıfında yeri tam olarak belli olmayan hacıları resmeder. Eski (soylular) ve yeni (ruhban) sınıfları arasındaki Bhabha'nın deyişiyle " alanlarda " yaşam sürdüğü için arada kalan Başrahibe bu hacılardan biridir. Ortaçağ'da manastır mensupları genellikle soylulardan oluşurdu. Soylular manastırlara çoğunlukla kendi tercihlerinden değil, ailelerinin istekleri doğrultusunda girerlerdi. Bu yüzden, bu asil erkek ve kadınların çoğu laik ve dünyevi hayatlarını arkalarında bırakıp, bütünüyle dünyaya kapalı bir hayat gerektiren manastır kuralları doğrultusunda yaşamak zorunda kalırlardı. Dolayısıyla, manastırın asil mensupları çoğunlukla manastır hayatına ayak uydurmakta zorluk çekerler ve Bhabha'nın " üçüncü alan " olarak tanımladığı eski ve yeni sınıflarının arasında yaşamak zorunda bırakılırlardı. Tam anlamıyla ne soylu nede ruhban sınıfına ait olmayan manastırın bu soylu mensupları iki sınıfında alanlarını kapsayan üçüncü bir alanda yaşayarak Ortaçağın melez bireylerine dönüştüler. Tarihteki emsallerine benzer bir şekilde, kendine ne soylular nede ruhban sınıfında

The medieval universe was captivated by composite monsters like manticores and centaurs which adorned the margins of manuscripts and tales of medieval man. Medieval monsters were at the same time the Others of the society. Medieval Others are largely treated under the monster studies which begin with the dichotomy of "Us" (human beings) and "Them" (monsters). The Others of the Middle Ages were not limited to beasts, but embraced Saracens and Jews as the monstrous Others alongside heretics, pagans, homosexuals, lepers and witches. With their atypical social positions, millers were among those monstrous Others or "Them" of the Middle Ages as they could not be fitted into any of the three estates; namely the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. They were the unwanted upstarts and leading rebels of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In accordance with their monstrous presence, the chronicles depicted the millers of the revolt with animal-like qualities. Similar to their historical counterparts, the most notable feature of Chaucer's Miller in The Canterbury Tales is his animal-like appearance with a hairy face and a gigantic mouth. Aggressive and disruptive, rather than a human, the Miller looks like a wild animal bringing down doors-literally social boundaries-with his head. Parallel to the Miller in The General Prologue, the miller in The Reeve's Tale possesses an animal-like appearance and a disobedient nature that grows into a threat to the social order. In this respect, this paper discusses Chaucer's Miller in The General Prologue and his miller in The Reeve's Tale as medieval monsters who are man-animal composites and defiant Others.

Contemporary BDSM practice looks longingly back at the Middle Ages in its enjoyment of shackles and dungeons, floggings, and St Andrew's crosses. 1 This is the essence of medievalism: to take up some aspect of medieval life (correctly or erroneously understood) and turn it into fodder for fantasy. It seems safe to say that contemporary BDSM practitioners understand the difference between modern and medieval instances of induced physical suffering to be the difference between consent and its lack. Consent is not a relevant category to someone being tortured in the medieval public square. 2 Things were more complex where the re-enactment of biblical history was concerned, as in representations of Christ's buffeting, scourging, and crucifixion in the Corpus Christi Day pageants. 3 However strongly an audience might be titillated or aroused by the performance of public violence, whether juridical or religious in nature, however strongly such scenes might be available to contemporary imaginations as instances of sexual perversity, they were not necessarily ever understood by medieval subjects who took willing or unwilling part in them in the same way that contemporary sexual communities understand BDSM. The difference lies, over and over again, in the nature of consent as the basis of contemporary BDSM practice. 4 And yet, much as one might want to draw border lines and acknowledge anachronisms and to bear in mind the differences between desired, eroticised, and punitive, non-eroticised physical suffering, those lines also turn out to blur in ways that might be understood as queer and through queer theory's theorisation of desire. To ground a given sexual minority group's difference in history is to insist that its manifestation of desire is not merely contemporary

As taught in 2014-15. In this course, students become acquainted with a selection of representative vernacular medieval and Tudor texts written in England. Particular attention is paid to external political and cultural influences, such as the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to Britain, the Christianisation of the island, the Norman Conquest, language politics, and cultural translation.

Past exams are given below.

In his Retraction, Geoffrey Chaucer describes himself as a translator. However, while his texts clearly draw directly from antecedents, they do not easily align to the source-target parallels that are so familiar in translation studies. Using abductive reasoning, this article asks whether the evidence supplied by the constituent stories of the Canterbury Tales suggests that Chaucer’s understanding of translation was fundamentally based on the notion of excogitatio. It observes features of Chaucer’s translation practices that may appear surprising or idiosyncratic to a contemporary observer, and asks, whether an underlying conceptualisation of translation that actively avoids reflecting the source text would make these features a matter of course. The
article demonstrates that abductive reasoning is a useful tool for the first stages of analysing a text as a translation, allowing a researcher to ask how the translator may have perceived the act of translation.

Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ at Canterbury is the Mother Church of the worldwide
Anglican Communion and seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the Trinity chapel of cathedral is
located a marble pavement with complex symbolism. Experts often argue when was created this
pavement and circumstances. Researchers agree only that the Italian or French craftsmen were
authors of this pavement. The author of this article proves that the Italian marble craftsmen Cosmati
were creators of a mosaic pavement. Craftsmen are known for creation of pavement in a presbytery
of the Westminster Abbey in London. The author of this article deciphers symbolism of marble
pavement. The author of this article assumes this Cosmati floor mosaics symbolize the opening way
of man to Heavenly Jerusalem.

Собор и Митрополитская Церковь Христа в Кентербери известен как главный англиканский
храм и место кафедры архиепископа Кентерберийского. Один из центров распространения
христианства и свидетель драматичных событий английской истории. В Троицкой капелле
собора расположены мраморные полы, состоящие из геометрической мозаичной фигуры и
группы камней с символами – предмет спора историков и искусствоведов. Не известно
точное время и обстоятельства их создания. Исследователи согласны только с тем, что
авторами их были итальянские либо французские мастера. Автор статьи, опираясь на
исторические сведения и исследования кентерберийских полов, доказывает, что творцами
мозаичной фигуры были итальянские мастера Космати, ранее построившие знаменитые
полы в пресвитерии и усыпальнице Вестминстерского аббатства в Лондоне. Он приходит к
выводу, что камни с символами и мозаика созданы разными мастерами и в разное время, но
представляют собой единый комплекс, символизирующий путь человека к Небесному
Иерусалиму.

Considering the tale’s placement between two narratives of violence—the Prioress’s Tale and the Tale of Melibee—it is surprising that the Tale of Sir Thopas has not merited more discussion of the potential for violence against feminine bodies. I argue that Chaucer the author introduces significant changes to the typical medieval romance, with the result that Thopas’s actions in the name of “love” conceal a rape narrative that engages late fourteenth-century debates as to what exactly constituted rape. As the transfer of property was a significant portion of such discussions, the 1382 Statutes of Rape prompted concerns about the ability of men and women to manipulate rape and abduction laws to select their marriage partners, and I argue that the Tale of Sir Thopas reflects these concerns. Sir Olifaunt is a protective warden rather than a destructive rapist, and Thopas, despite his seemingly non-threatening demeanor, is the true threat.

This article describes computer-assisted methods for the analysis of textual variation within large textual traditions. It focuses on the conversion of the XML apparatus into NEXUS, a file type commonly used in bioinformatics.
Phylogenetics methods are described with particular emphasis on maximum parsimony, the preferred approach for our research. The article provides details on the reasons for favouring maximum parsimony, as well as explaining our choice of settings for PAUP. It gives examples of how to use VBase, our variant database, to query the data and gain a better understanding of the phylogenetic trees. The relationship between the apparatus and the stemma explained.
After demonstrating the vast number of decisions taken during the analysis, the article concludes that as much as computers facilitate our work and help us expand our understanding, the role of the editor continues to be fundamental in the making of editions.

Unit I -- Academia:
Chapter 1: Beowulf: A View of Civilization ............... 1:5
Chapter 2: A Timeless Classic: Canturbury Tales ....... 2:6
Chapter 3: Macbeth ................ 3:8
Chapter 4: Machiavelli: A view of leadership ........... 4:10
Footnotes to Machiavelli: A View of Leadership ...... 4:12
Chapter 5: The New Land .............. 5:12
Chapter 6: A Point of Agreement ...... 6:13
Chapter 7: Puritanism in Literature.............. 7:14
Chapter 8: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Trust in Others ..... 8:17
Chapter 9: A Melting Pot or Salad Bowl? ....... 9:18
Chapter 10: A biographical sketch of Edgar Allan Poe ....... 10:19
Chapter 11: New Romanticism ........ 11:20
Chapter 12: Two Views of Death .............. 12:22
Chapter 13: Stephen Crane: An analysis ....... 13:23
Chapter 14: Leggatt: An Unusual Secret ....... 14:27
Chapter 15: A biographical sketch of Abraham Stoker ...... 15:27
Chapter 16: Allan Sillitoe: A View of an Individual ............. 16:28
Chapter 17: Barbara Tuchman: Revolutions ............ 17:32


Unit II -- Fiction:
Chapter 18: The Briefcase ........... 18:33
Chapter 19: The Chaser ............... 19:35
Chapter 20: IQ Day: The Story ........ 20:36
Chapter 21: The Haunted House ...... 21:37
Chapter 22: The Ditcher............... 22:39
Chapter 23: The Problem ............. 23:40
Chapter 24: The Empty Room ......... 24:41
Chapter 25: The Greatest Singer in the World......... 25:41
Chapter 26: Graduation ...... 26:42
Chapter 27: Risk ................ 27:43
Chapter 28: Boy King Get Coroneted ........ 28:44
Chapter 29: Releasing It............... 29:44

In Boccaccio's Decameron, Novella 7.9, the final trick Lidia plays on her husband Nicostrato with her lover Pirro involves making love in full view of Nicostrato, but convincing him that what he sees is an illusion produced from the height of a pear tree.  Jalal al-Din Rumi tells a similar tale in his Masnavi, and an earlier analogue in Arabic in a collection of tales by Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201) dates from about the same time as the Latin poem, Comoedia Lydiae, which is the proximate source upon which Boccaccio bases his retelling. The tree itself (the "enchanted pear tree" or the tree of deception) has roots in the Tree of Existence, the Tree of Knowledge, Rabbinic material, and in Roman depictions of Venus genetrix.  It turns up again in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale.  This article shows how there were various versions of this tale circulating in the Mediterranean in the 12th to 14th century, based on misperception and employed especially in varieties of the fabliau genre to depict women's wiles and the gender wars.  The article also suggests that scholars attempting to explain Boccaccio's views on women would do well to consider earlier analogues and sources of his tales, to analyze what changes Boccaccio introduces, and what the import of those changes may be.