The Ellesmere Chaucer: The Once and Future Canterbury Tales

abstract:This essay about the Huntington Library’s Ellesmere manuscript of Canterbury Tales was originally written to be a research lecture, one of a series of talks on treasures of the Huntington’s collections given in celebration of the Huntington’s centennial in 2019–20. Here, James Simpson uses the manuscript, and particularly its visual depiction of Chaucer as a storytelling pilgrim, as a lens for understanding the role of Chaucer in producing the Tales. He outlines the various ways in which scholarship has divagated from the evidence of this manuscript, yet returned to it. Simpson argues that we should return even more closely to it, admitting the likelihood that Chaucer himself oversaw its production.