For us, readers of Chaucer living in an age when appeal to religious passions and sentiments as a means for the realization of worldly objectives by some charlatans has grown significantly, reviewing the theme of religious hypocrisy treated in The Canterbury Tales can be useful in a way that it proves a helpful means for recognizing and dealing with the hypocrites. The Pardoner of the Tales is ...

I am writing this despite a reluctance to add to the chorus of criticisms of the scientific publication process — an industry full of easy over-generalisations and proposals to discard babies with their bathwater. But a couple of recent publications do, I think, illustrate some recurring problems in the scientific “literature”. One of these is highlighted by the Graur et al. [1] paper in Genome...

In 2000, my wife Lynn and I were in Namibia researching the social organization of Elephantulus intufi (Rathbun and Rathbun 2006). During a meal at our study site which we shared with the landowner, his two sons and two archaeologists studying local rock art, the archaeologists showed us a newly published book (LewisWilliams 2000). When Justin Holloway, the youngest son of the landowner, saw th...

THIS book by a graduate of this medical school and a Fellow of this Society, who is now Professor of Histopathology at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, is a fascinating record of interesting clinical an,d pathological experiences. The conditions described are rare or presented in some unusual way, but the author has been able to indicate something of general value and interest in nearly a...

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, cla...