This volume of essays was produced in conjunction with a full-size facsimile of the Huntington's Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The introductory essays and appendices, prepared by Woodward (Huntington Library) and Stevens (Graduate School, City University of New York), explain the significance and construction of the facsimile and summarize the conservation work done on the manuscript as the facsimile was in the making.

Essays by fourteen internationally known British, American, and Japanese scholars discuss the physical construction of the Ellesmere manuscript, its decoration and illumination, its text and language, the ways in which the arrangement and presentation of the manuscript affect the meaning of the text, the order of tales in the manuscript, the relationship of this work to contemporary literary efforts and practices, and the provenance of the manuscript before its acquisition by Henry E. Huntington in 1917. As a reflection of the significance of this manuscript in an increasingly English-reading world, the volume concludes with a survey of Chaucer studies in Japan.

There are fifty-seven illustrations in the book, supplemented by a separate color foldout that reproduces all of the famous Ellesmere illustrations of the pilgrim-storytellers.

Martin Stevens is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Daniel Woodward is a senior research associate at the Huntington Library.

"This book will tell the reader all that he ever wanted to know about the Ellesmere Manuscript but was afraid to ask. . . . Stevens and Woodward are to be congratulated on having assembled such a collection of authoritative pronouncements on the Ellesmere MS—and especially on allowing conflicting authorities to stand alongside each other. . . . This book will set a benchmark in Chaucer studies.—English Studies

"The introduction should be required reading for anyone who still believes that the making of a facsimile, of any kind, is a purely objective and 'scientific' activity, removed from any editorial judgment."—Studies in the Age of Chaucer