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"Maked na moore":Editing and Narrative Daniel Wakelin Seventy years on, the edition of the Canterbury Tales created by John M. Manly, Edith Rickert, and their collaborators stands as an impressive historical monument. It is historic in the sense of important—a historic occasion in Chaucerian scholarship. But it is also historic in the sense of being no longer current, for its text seems seldom to be cited (although its manuscript descriptions remain of great value for codicologists and palaeographers today studying manuscripts of the Tales); and it has become historic in the sense of being an object for historical study and storytelling, part of Chaucerian reception history, like Thynne's edition, or of the history of scholarship, like the Oxford English Dictionary. Earlier responses were, rightly, engaged, from the posthumous prize to Manly, through the expositions and corrections by Dempster and Rydland, to the muted dismissals of later editors.1 Passions often ran high—most notably the passionate blame and praise of Kane and Ramsey. But after seventy years, might passions now be spent?2 We would no longer scarify or defend the editorial practice of the Rolls Series, say; to do so would suggest a strange lack of perspective. Recent scholarship has found a new perspective from which to discuss [End Page 365] Manly and Rickert's work: the historian's mode, the recovery and interpretation of Manly and Rickert's work within the wider histories of university professionalization, evolutionary theory, gender in the academy, and so on.3 From the perspective of 2010, it seems time to treat this edition of 1940 as an object of historical curiosity and narrative. After all, one of the most striking features of Manly and Rickert's edition is the way in which it reports its own history from the outset, turning itself into an object of historical inquiry. The editors tell the story of their work in detail in several places in volumes 1 and 2. They describe searching for exemplars, making photostats, filling in cards, even taking two weeks' vacation or enjoying the respites of transatlantic travel (1:vii-xvii, 1:1-9, 2:1-10).4 The technology of photostats, ocean liners, and notices in Country Life and the cast of Misses and Sirs and earls off in colonial Kenya all mark this edition, seventy years on, as a quaint relic of "history," of a world we have lost.5 Much of this effect is an accident of hindsight and belatedness. But not all: Manly and Rickert chose to tell us more about their work than other editors of the time—who tellingly often used "I" only when they were uncertain, and wrote only terse prefaces of thanks for photostatting.6 And by narrating the process of editing so fully, Manly and Rickert make it look contingent, bound by circumstances, even subjective. Moreover, they make it sound—wittingly or not—like the travails of the manuscript transmission they narrate. Their search for exemplars oddly echoes the efforts of the scribes who "picked up" tales here and there (quoted below), their rue for sloppy collations by students (1:3), and their dream of photographic reproduction to avoid typesetting errors (1:xiv) recall Chaucer's worries for miswriting. In fact, the weird self-reflexiveness of the edition [End Page 366] goes even further than that, for in recounting the making of a text the edition does something like that famous text about texts, the Canterbury Tales itself.7 The oddest likeness between Chaucer's labor and his editors' comes in the death of one editor, Rickert, before the edition was complete, just as Chaucer died with the poem still undone. Manly reports that on May 30, 1938, Rickert "handed me a paper setting forth the views she had long held on the preservation of some traits of Chaucer's early drafts," and she was "full of confident hope that she would live to see the whole work completed," but "alas!"—a moment of pathos striking in an editorial paratext—within two days she died (1:viii). The edition has been described therefore as "a memorial for Edith Rickert."8 It is interesting that the manuscript which Manly and Rickert so...
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