An Ars Legendi for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A RE-Constructive Reading

In a daring, original study, Frese argues that the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales represents Chaucer’s own final plans for the order and number of the Tales, traditionally thought to be unfinished at the time of the poet’s death. Frese contends that Chaucer devised a final plan for the order and number of the Canterbury Tales, that he inscribed this plan into the poetic text, and that this order and number are integral to the poem’s meaning. The poet’s final intentions can be retrieved, reconstructed, and internally verified, she claims, by an intertextual reading of the work as a whole. Frese maintains that the instructions found in the text are retrievable only through the Ellesmere Manuscript, held at the Huntington Library in California. The author discusses number itself as an important textual trope and provides an analysis of the medieval poetic practices of intnegumentum and involucrum. Finally, she postulates how and why early exemplars of Chaucer’s poem became disordered in the arrangements represented in the early Hengwrt manuscript and suggests that Chaucer created the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale –included in Ellesmere but not in Hengwrt–to comment on this disaster. Chaucerians, literary theorists, and scholars of medieval French and Italian literature will welcome this modern reading of the Canterbury Tales.