The conterbury tales

ACTUALITY OF THE RESEARCH: One of the most significant aspects of The Canterbury Tales is the language in which Chaucer chose to write. The text is in Middle English, a version of English spoken in what is present-day England from approximately 1100 to 1500. Modern readers may not even recognize Middle English as English, but it is an early stage from which our current English has evolved. [7;54] It may not seem unusual to modern readers that Chaucer wrote in the language that people in his area actually spoke, which is called vernacular, but it actually was a bold decision. Most poets during that time were writing in an earlier version of the language we know as French, or Latin. These were the languages of scholars, religious figures, and upper class people. As an upper-class, well-educated person himself, Chaucer would have been able to write in various languages, but he chose to write The Canterbury Tales in the vernacular of his country that more people would understand and connect to. For this reason, The Canterbury Tales is regarded as one of the first poems written in the English language, and Chaucer himself is one of the ''fathers'' of the written English language.
AIM OF THE WORK: The Canterbury Tales has many aims. One of these aims is as old as textual scholarship: we want to find out, as nearly as we can, what Chaucer actually wrote. To do this, we have to begin as all textual critics must when faced with a large and complex textual tradition: we have to establish, using all the means at our disposal, a narrative history of the textual tradition. Once we have a clear sense of the sequence of copying of the manuscripts, we can begin to discriminate which manuscripts appear closest to the head of the tradition, and in turn use that information to filter Chaucer's own text from the mass of scribal variation. Though this aim is old, some of the methods we use -- computer collation, techniques of computerised stemmatics borrowed from evolutionary biology, database analysis -- are very much of the late twentieth century.