Book of Hours: Illuminations by Simon Marmion
with an introduction and commentary by James Thorpe

Preview Table of Contents and Introduction

Seventeen jewel-like miniature manuscript paintings are reproduced in this color facsimile from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours in the Huntington Library collections. The introduction discusses the history and meaning of Books of Hours, both as books of devotion and as works of art. Each plate is accompanied by commentary.

48 pages, 6 x 9, 17 color illus., cloth
ISBN: 978-0-87328-211-6, $14.95

Canterbury Pilgrims Poster

This color poster reproduces all twenty-three of the famous storytellers in full size as they appear in the Ellesmere Manuscript.

11 x 32, $6.95

Click here to order

The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation
edited by Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward

First published in conjunction with the color facsimile of the Ellesmere Chaucer, this book features essays by fourteen internationally known British, American, and Japanese scholars who examine various aspects of the manuscript from its physical construction to its relationship to contemporary literary practice. The essays treat the most current theories about the manuscript's text and language, ordering of the tales, decoration, illustration, and provenance, and report on the conservation work that was done on the manuscript while the 1995 color facsimile was in the making. Introductory essays and two appendices explain the significance and construction of the facsimile. Together, the volume of essays and the facsimiles establish a benchmark for the study of Chaucer.

"Chaucerians and historians of the book will find the essay volume a good buy."—Bibliographical Society of America

"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

378 pages, 8-1/2 x 11, illus., fold-out color poster, appendices, paper
ISBN: 978-0-87328-166-9, $25.00

The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
by Herbert Schulz

See our special page on this title

The Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, commonly referred to as the “Ellesmere Chaucer,” is one of the most valuable and cherished manuscripts in the Huntington Library. Compiled within five years of Chaucer?s death in 1400, it is considered by most experts to be the definitive manuscript of this cornerstone of English literature. This book is an ideal introduction to the Ellesmere Chaucer, covering its context, construction, and provenance, with more than two dozen full-page color illustrations showing the techniques of the scribes and illuminators.

48 pages, 6 x 9, 26 color illus., cloth
ISBN: 978-0-87328-152-2, $11.95

The Gutenberg Bible: Landmark in Learning
by James Thorpe

See our special page on this title

The Huntington holds one of the three vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible in the United States. Color reproductions of several pages and initial letters from this Bible accompany the text, which details the early history of printing and how the Gutenberg Bible was printed. Also discussed is the history of the Huntington copy and how it was acquired by Henry Huntington in 1911.

48 pages, 6 x 9, 20 color illus., cloth
ISBN: 978-0-87328-169-0, $11.95

The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile

The Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales is the most famous literary treasure in the Huntington Library's collections. The manuscript's 464 text pages are embellished with floriated borders, illuminated initials, and other decorations, as well as twenty-three portraits of the pilgrim-storytellers. In 1995, the Huntington Library and the Yushodo Co., Ltd., of Japan produced a full-scale, full-color facsimile of this manuscript still available in two formats. The second format, sewn and bound in an early fifteenth-century-type binding, oak boards and quarter brown leather, contained in a quarter-leather and Ellesmere blue-linen-covered box, is available for $16,000 per copy. Copies in unsewn quires and stored in an Ellesmere blue linen-covered box are $8,000 each.

The Ellesmere Chaucer Monochromatic Facsimile

See our special page on Chaucer for a more detailed description.

The transparencies that were the basis of the landmark color facsimile were used to make a full-sized, monochromatic facsimile. Elegantly printed by the Stinehour Press of Lunenberg, Vermont, the facsimile conveys the trim, texture, and decoration of the original manuscript pages. It features a color frontispiece, the page that begins the Knight's Tale. Both facsimiles were edited by Daniel Woodward and Martin Stevens.

484 pages, 12 x 17-1/2, illus., cloth
ISBN: 978-0-87328-162-1, $275.00

Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature
edited by Seth Lerer with essays by Ralph Hanna III, A. S. G. Edwards, Julia Boffey, Ardis Butterfield, David Lorenzo Boyd, David Greetham, and Anthony G. Cains

Six essays exploring new directions in the textual study of medieval manuscripts.

160 pages, 7 x 10, paper
ISBN: 978-0-87328-163-8, $12.00
(also published as Huntington Library Quarterly 58:1)

"One of the chief points held in common by these six essays is the authority of scribes and readers, which in previous generations of editors was often dismissed?emended away?or simply not taken into account. This volume reminds its readers that the stemma and the critical edition are modern inventions, and with them the idea of an originary author. In Chaucer's time, authorship was no guarantee of textual ownership. Medieval texts were often fluid, existing in various forms. How this state of affairs may shed light on Chaucerian manuscripts is the question underlying this volume."--Anglia

"The essays demonstrate the value of more than four decades of renewed interest in questions relating to the writing, transmission, and reception of late-medieval literary texts and manuscripts, particularly those associated with the name of Geoffrey Chaucer."--Modern Language Review

"Reading from the Margins articulates a number of issues that have concerned recent textual critics and applies them directly to Chaucer. . . . Ralph Hanna III and A. S. G. Edwards consider the specific literary circles that produced the famous Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales and in the process demonstrate the inter-relations between Chaucer's reputation, Lydgate, and prominent east Midlands families like the Pastons, De Veres, and Drurys. As this essay makes clear, it was provincial traditions that individually transmitted works and genres, and if collectively these traditions can be regarded as the history of Middle English, such collectivity implies (misleadingly) a coherence and national character that the evidence belies. There's much good information here, and an appendix provides an edition of Rotheley's poem on the De Veres that prefaces the Ellesmere manuscript. Julia Boffey's 'Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon' is characteristically insightful, informed, and rigorously argued. She focuses on a short verse stanza bound with some other fragments at the front of London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius E.xi, a copy of John of Fordun's Chronica gentis Scotorum. This stanza is actually an extract from John Walton's translation of the Consolation of Philosophy and in tracing its transmission history Boffey demonstrates the interconnections of material and interpretive history and the importance book communities had for both in the Middle Ages." -- Journal of English and Germanic Philology