Online Editions of Chaucer's Works

        Note that the Riverside Chaucer is the current scholarly edition of Chaucer's works, and unless you have a very good reason for not using it, you should not quote from these oh-so-convenient but no longer accurate enough texts.  They are a quick and dirty solution to searching for passages in texts we know, or a way to quickly familiarize ourselves with new texts relevant to the text we're working on.  If you are my student, do not hesitate to ask me whether the occasion of your use is such that you can afford to risk quoting from them.  Usually, if you are not doing New Critical close reading of precise usage, but rather you are talking about plot or generalizing about dialogue, you are probably safe to use them for an undergraduate paper.  The one exception might be the Windeatt Troilus, which I ordinarily would accept in place of the RC.  His edition was actually only a subordinate project to support his doubly-annotated parallel text edition of Chaucer's poem alongside an edition of Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Chaucer's primary source.  You can find it in Goucher's library, and it should be considered a basic resource for students writing about the Troilus.  Until you know whether what you are talking about was Chaucer's translation of Boccaccio's material or Chaucer's independent invention, you cannot write sensibly about the poem.

Chaucer's Major Works--

• Troilus and Cressida, (Editor: Barry Windeatt [London: Longman, 1984, public domain]) at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.  You must scroll down this menu to "Chaucer" and click on the hyperlink for the Windeatt edition of Troilus.
• The Canterbury Tales, (Editor: F.N. Robinson, 2nd Edition [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957, public domain]) at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.  Yes, this is the same URL as that indicated by the hyperlink above.  You must scroll down this menu to "Chaucer" and click on the hyperlink for the Robinson Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's Dream Visions--

• The Book of the Duchess, (Editor Douglas B. Killings, based on the edition of W.W. Skeat [Oxford UP, 1899, public domain]) at the Online Medieval & Classical Library.
• The House of Fame, (Editor Douglas B. Killings, based on the edition of W.W. Skeat [Oxford UP, 1899, public domain]) at the Online Medieval & Classical Library.
• Legend of Good Women (Editor Douglas B. Killings, based on the edition of W.W. Skeat [Oxford UP, 1899, public domain]) at the Online Medieval & Classical Library.
• The Parliament of Fowles, (Editor Douglas B. Killings, based on the edition of  W.W. Skeat, [Oxford UP, 1899, public domain]) at the Online Medieval & Classical Library.

Two "Non-Literary" Works by Chaucer--

• Chaucer's Boethius (Editor: Richard Morris [E.E.T.S., 1868, public domain]) at the U. Michigan site.  The Roman philosopher, Boethius, wrote "The Consolation of Philosophy" in prison while awaiting execution by his prince, the barbarian Roman emperor, Theodoric.  Boethius structures it as a dream vision in which Lady Philosophy comes to him and helps him reconcile the apparent paradox of Christian "free will" and the foreordaining power of God's Providence.  Chaucer apparently set himself the task of translating it in the course of writing the Troilus, which draws heavily on it in places, and it also may influence Chaucer's thinking in other poems.
• Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (Editor: W. W. Skeat [E.E.T.S., 1872, public domain]) at the U. Michigan site.  Chaucer addresses this operational manual to "LItell Lowys my sone," based on the boy's ability in "sciencez touchinge noumbres & proporciouns," perhaps the first English usage of "science" in its modern sense of a systematic, observationally based knowledge of the universe.  Chaucer's use of the astrolabe, an ancestor of the modern sextant used by navigators, may have been linked to his work as a construction supervisor when he built a tournament stadium and lists for Richard II.  Orientation of building sites to the sun and to other celestial light sources, even today, requires architects to know the site's location relative to the movements of the cosmos.  He also used astronomical observations to tell time in Canterbury Tales, and elsewhere, suggesting how easily medieval thinkers could move from daily trivialities to the motions of planets and stars.  The work also is the only surviving piece of technical writing from any major English poet.  Imagine if Shakespeare had left us a manual for the operation of a Galilean telescope!  But he didn't, so there, Jeff.