At a time of growing anxiety about the relationship between the analogue and digital worlds, there is cheering news from the British Library. The work of Geoffrey Chaucer has just been added to a digital archive that is free to view anywhere in the world. Cynics may wonder who will be cheered, apart from a scattering of medievalist scholars. But they would be missing the point not only about the intrinsic value of the democratisation of ancient and delicate cultural treasures, but also about the beauty of being able, anytime or anywhere, to peer back into the past.
Chaucer offers a particularly strong case for this. More than 600 years after his death, he remains one of the greatest writers in the English language. He is also a rarity as one of its most widely reproduced, yet who lived before the arrival of the printing press. The contemporary who described him as “firste fyndere of our fair language” spoke truer than he knew. To look through successive editions to the fragments of medieval manuscripts is the literary equivalent of seeing back to the big bang through a six-century swirl of accretions, from translations to illustrations and adaptations.
This is particularly true of The Canterbury Tales, the string of pilgrims’ yarns that have given us such memorable characters as the Wife of Bath, the subject of a recent scholarly biography by the Oxford professor Marion Turner. Turner traces her influence on, among others, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, James Joyce’s Molly Bloom and more recently on a generation of black poets and playwrights including Zadie Smith and Patience Agbabi.
Though the British Library is not the first to digitise Chaucer texts, it has the largest cache, with the earliest dating from just a few years after his death. Among 25,000 images from pre-1600 manuscripts alone is a tiny portrait of the poet in an illumination at the start of The Canterbury Tales.
Contrary to the more familiar portrayals of a bearded grandee, Chaucer here resembles a stylish young monk, studiously reading in a pair of bright red boots. To say he looks as if he is about to skip out to join his pilgrims in the April showers may be anachronistic, but one point of seeing works in historical iterations is to set up a conversation between the present and the past. A little over 60 years later, in 1476, The Tales made history, as the first significant text to be printed in England, by William Caxton.
One of the most beautiful editions dates from four centuries later. The product of a four-year collaboration between William Morris and the pre‑Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, it is named after Morris’s home, Kelmscott, and was completed just before his death. “If we live to finish it,” Burne-Jones rightly wrote, “it will be like a pocket cathedral – so full of design”.
The painstaking artistry of the Kelmscott edition captures the late 19th-century paradox of applying Arts and Crafts values to courtly imagery (a paradox re-emphasised by the £20 price of the 425 printed copies, rising to 120 guineas for those on vellum). Two illustrations of The Wife of Bath’s Tale also expose the dodgy sexual politics of the pre‑Raphaelite obsession with Arthurian romance.
If Caxton made books available to all, digitisation – generously and conscientiously applied – has added a new dimension, allowing us all to see those works in their true glory: as the sum of histories that have helped to shape us all.
