Sometimes half a loaf is worse than none.

The idea here is intriguing. Take nine of the best and most important Canterbury Tales and surround them with enough commentary to truly make them understandable. And certainly the editors did a good job of choosing the nine tales. There is the Franklin's Tale, the best metrical romance ever written in English. There is the Wife of Bath's Tale, another beautiful romance, which of course also has a fascinating prologue. There is the Knight's Tale, Chaucer's "philosophical romance." There are the two best-known dirty tales, the Miller's and the Reeve's. There is the beautiful exemplum of the Pardoner's Tale, and its awful enclosing account. There is the light-hearted bird fable of the Nun's Priest's Tale. And, to show just a sample of the darker tales, there is the murderous Prioress's tale and the brutal Clerk's Tale.

The text is good although it is not the very best -- it is basically that of Skeat's edition rather than the newer Riverside Chaucer. The glossing is very thorough; there should be no great problem understanding the meaning. So far, so good.

It's the additional essays that don't seem quite sufficient to me. The book includes roughly 300 pages of commentary (on 200 pages of text), but 200 of those commentary pages are examples of sources -- and, too often, the sources are either not all that useful or too easily found elsewhere. Better to refer readers to something like Robert P. Miller's Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds than to leave such chopped down source material and be left with so little room for commentary.

For commentary, when reading Chaucer, is vital. We need to understand romances, and fabliau, and beast tales. We need to know the attitudes that would allow something like The Clerk's Tale to seem pathetic rather than horrid. We need to understand Chaucer's sense of irony. We need to understand the forgotten virtues of gentilesse and trouthe. Chaucer was a genius who foresaw many of the changes since his time (especially regarding the relations between men and women) -- but he was a medieval man, with a medieval set of attitudes (trouthe, the noblest of all virtues, seems now to be considered a vice!). The Tales need more context than they are given. To me, it seems as if it would be better to give the full tales (which are, after all, their own context!) or to go with the reduced set and supply at least twice as much commentary. As a classroom text for a medieval literature class, this would probably do well. But as a true commentary on the Canterbury tales, I can only saw -- whole loaf or none. ( )

Text based largely on Skeat. ( )