This second volume of Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales completes the project, sponsored by the New Chaucer Society, to revise and expand the collection of Chaucer’s sources published by Bryan and Dempster in 1941. Appearing here for the first time in any such collection are investigations of the sources and analogues of The General Prologue and analogues to Chaucer’s Retraction. The other chapters cover the remaining tales not included in Volume 1 – those of the Knight, Miller, Man of Law, Wife of Bath, Summoner, Merchant, Physician, Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Canon’s Yeoman, and Manciple.

In addition to the new first-time chapters, readers will find several other significant differences between the source materials printed here and those in Bryan and Dempster. A new and greatly extended discussion of The Knight’s Tale includes not only a summary of the Teseida, but also all the relevant passages from it and from Chaucer’s other principal sources in Statius and Boethius. Other additions include one major and six “minor” sources of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the sources of the prologues to the tales of the Man of Law, Summoner, and Prioress, and a number of new analogues, especially to The Prioress’s Tale and The Canon Yeoman’s Tale. Three new stories from The Decameron have also been added, two identified as analogues to The Merchant’s Tale and one as an analogue to The Shipman’s Tale, providing further evidence of the belief among many contemporary scholars that Boccaccio’s work was an important influence on the development of The Canterbury Tales. At the same time, many analogues in Bryan and Dempster have been dropped by individual contributors because they are too distant in time or place from Chaucer’s work, or are lacking in word-for-word correspondences, or differ substantially in narrative structure or other plot motifs. One example of such pruning occurs in the chapter on The Miller’s Tale, where only one of the four analogues found in the earlier volume, the Flemish fabliau, is judged to be closest to Chaucer’s tale, close enough even to be considered its “near source.”

The format and purpose remain the same as in the first volume.