Here are some useful posts from CHAUCER yesterday concerning
which texts to use (I've left out the original question, which was:
"Which text of Chaucer should I buy?").

Sincerely,

     Grover Furr

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Date:    Thu, 14 Jan 1999 14:30:19 -0600
From:    "Norman D. Hinton" 
Subject: Re: best editions

Really, the only edition of Chaucer any of us uses,  ,(which is complete
and hence includes the Canterbury tales) is _The Riverside Chaucer_, ed.
Larry Benson, Houghton Mifflin 1987, ISBN 0-395-29031-7.

Heavy and expensive, but that's it. Most other editions have gone out of
print for want of use.  There are various translations.

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Date:    Thu, 14 Jan 1999 16:13:10 -0500
From:    Gerard NeCastro 
Subject: Re: best editions

Marlene,

Though most people will tell you The Riverside Chaucer is the standard
edition, it is virtually unusable for the non-specialist.  If you want to
get an edition for the average intelligent person, I would suggest Fisher's
Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer.  It includes valuable
reading notes on the page, notes which actually help you construe difficult
lines.  The most The Riverside Chaucer ever does to help you understand the
reading is to gloss a word or phrase.  It is great for graduate students
and professionals, but the general reader will get more use and
understanding from Fisher.

Happy Reading.
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Date:    Thu, 14 Jan 1999 15:38:52 -0600
From:    "Mark E. Allen" 
Subject: Re: best editions

Marlene,

        Norman is right that most academics do use the Riverside,
although some of us still do use John Fisher's _The Complete Poetry and
Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer_.  The notes are not nearly as complete, but
the introductions are more lucid, and they have the advantage of having
all been written by one person (Fisher).  The Riverside is authoritative,
yes, but as a group effort, it is uneven.  I also think the format of
Fisher is more user-friendly, and the bibliography surely is (though the
bibliographies of both Fisher and the Riverside are now both outdated).
I suspect it depends upon what your users want.

        On translations:  nothing is good.  That having been said, let me
recommend that you look at a recent version of Nevill Coghill's venerable
translation, nicely done up by Barnes and Noble (1994) with lots of
illustrations, maps, art, and other good stuff. This is just the Canterbury
Tales, with the prose tales (Melibee and the Parson) in synopsis only.
There is no complete works in translation that I know of, but _Troilus_ and
the dream visions are "reliably" translated in trade paperbacks.  You
might also want to investigate Michael Murphy's edition of selected
Canterbury Tales (12 plus the General Prologue); it's in "normalized
spelling."

Hope this helps,

Mark Allen
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