A Computer-assisted Quantitative Companion of the Editions of Chaucer's The Legend of Good Woman

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What follows is an interim report of a comprehensive textual comparison of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. We have undertaken a comparison of the following editions: Benson's The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), F. N. Robinson's The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), and J. Cowen and G. Kane's The Legend of Good Women.We compared the editions line by line, and then word by word within pairs of "the same" lines.In this study, we have made use of the same method as we did in our Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Dream Poetry projects. It has been first necessary for us to make the corresponding lines, taking one from each of the editions, after we have made Benson's edition the basis for comparison. We have left all punctuation marks intact as they appear in the original editions, because they may indicate the editor's different interpretations of Chaucer's syntax.In the present document, we have listed all the lines, which contain one or more different words and spellings including upper / lower case differences. The first line shows Benson's edition, the second line Robinson's, and the third line Cowen and Kane's. We have printed the complete line in Benson's edition, but only the words, which show differences in Robinson's and Cowen and Kane's. We are now preparing for "Word Form Correspondence Index," where we will make an alphabetically ordered word index to the sets of corresponding words. This index makes it possible to check every word set quickly and comprehensively. The present list comprises the basic material for a further quantitative and qualitative study of the differences in spelling and vocabulary among the four editions. We have tried to make a contribution to Chaucerian textual criticism by clarifying the textual similarities and differences among the editions.