Abstract
Chaucer's CanterburyTales consists of loosely-connected stories,appearing in many different orders in extantmanuscripts. Differences in order result fromrearrangements by scribes during copying, andmay reveal relationships among manuscripts. Identifying these relationships is analogous todetermining evolutionary relationships amongorganisms from the order of genes on a genome. We use gene order analysis to construct astemma for the Canterbury Tales. Thisstemma shows relationships predicted by earlierscholars, reveals new relationships, and sharesfeatures with a word variation stemma. Ourresults support the idea that there was noestablished order when the first manuscriptswere written.
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Spencer, M., Bordalejo, B., Wang, LS. et al. Analyzing the Order of Items in Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales . Computers and the Humanities 37, 97–109 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021818600001
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021818600001