The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale : A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Volume 2, Parts 5A and 5B

The Wife of Bath is the most vibrant character in The Canterbury Tales - and arguably the most famous.

In creating his brilliant portrayal of the talkative wife, Chaucer weaves a dazzling array of allusions to biblical, classical, patristic, and vernacular sources.

These two volumes - the most recent contribution to the Variorum Chaucer series - integrate six hundred years of scholarship on The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. Editors Mark Allen and John H. Fisher present a comprehensive record of the textual traditions of the tale and of the critical commentary from the earliest manuscripts to the mid-1990s.

Part A (the first volume) includes the text of Chaucer's poem, accompanied by exhaustive collation of the ten most valuable manuscript witnesses to the text and all twenty-two of the major editions.

Also included in Part A are an introduction to the text, and extensive discussions of sources and analogues, genres, theoretical approaches, and major themes.

A bibliographical index concludes the scholarly apparatus in Part A.

In Part B (the second volume), the editors present a line-by-line, often word-by-word, record of the legacy of Chaucer's text, including variants, glosses, editors' notes, and observations by scholars through the ages.