Abstract
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales survives in about 80 different manuscript versions1. We have used the techniques of evolutionary biology to produce what is, in effect, a phylogenetic tree showing the relationships between 58 extant fifteenth-century manuscripts of “The Wife of Bath's Prologue” from The Canterbury Tales. We found that many of the manuscripts fall into separate groups sharing distinct ancestors.
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References
Blake, N. F. The Textual Tradition of The Canterbury Tales (Edward Arnold, London, 1985).
Huson, D. H. Bioinformatics 14, 68–73 (1998).
Swofford, D. L. PAUP Version 3.1.1. (Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, 1993).
Robinson, P. M. W. in The Canterbury TalesProject: Occasional Papers Vol. II (eds Blake, N.F. & Robinson, P.M.W.) 69-132 (Office for Humanities Communication, London, 1997).
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Barbrook, A., Howe, C., Blake, N. et al. The phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales. Nature 394, 839 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/29667
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/29667
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