Computer-Assisted Methods of Stemmatic Analysis

In this essay, we review the methods of computer-assisted stemmatic analysis available to the Canterbury Tales Project.1 Our belief that these techniques will permit us to arrive at a more exact reconstruction of the history of the Canterbury Tales than could Manly and Rickert (1940) is vital to our decision to undertake this work. There are two major strands to these techniques. The first, cladistic analysis, is used to gain a rapid overview of the broad relations among the manuscripts. The second, database analysis, is used to refine conclusions about the exact relationships of particular manuscripts and groups, on the basis of scrutiny of individual variants and their distribution. In addition to discussion of these techniques, we briefly report here the results of our testing of these tools on the Wife of Bath’s Prologue manuscripts, among other materials.