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The single most important aspect of the formation of Chaucer's canon is the record of critical judgement which adjudicated between the apocryphal and the authorial works. Despite this important inter-textual relationship, the judgement of R. H. Robbins, and most recently Russell Peck, that ‘the Chaucer apocrypha is at present the most neglected area of Chaucer and fifteenth-century studies’ is substantially correct. For the last half century, all the major editions of Chaucer, namely those of Robinson, Baugh, Fisher and the Riverside, have accepted the cumulative judgements of Tyrwhitt, Bradshaw, Skeat and Hammond concerning the canon. There is no explicit analysis in Howard's biography or in the general preface to the Variorum Chaucer of the apocrypha's relationship to the canon as a problematic nor of the heuristic process out of which the canon evolved. Baker, however, in addressing the rationale for a variorum in his preface to the facsimile of the Hengwrt Manuscript acknowledges that ‘Chaucer's text has never had the stable tradition that Milton's has had, and as a result each century has had its own Chaucer.’ Baker's remarks, if restricted to the idea of text as strictly authorial composition, are undoubtedly correct. However, the canons of most medieval authors share this lack of stability. The fixed canon had to await the development of print and more sophisticated editorial methods.
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