The Miller's Tale on CD-ROM
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Runs on any recent Windows or Macintosh computer with CD-ROM drive. See Millers Sales for further ordering information.
 
 
How to read 58 texts at once

The Miller's Tale on CD-ROM, edited by Peter Robinson, is the third in the series of 'single-tale' CD-ROMs prepared by the Canterbury Tales Project: that for the Wife of Bath's Prologue won the English Association's 1998 Beatrice White award for an outstanding contribution to medieval and renaissance studies. Like its fellows in the series, this CD-ROM contains a full set of materials for study of the text in all extant fifteenth-century witnesses: fifty-four manuscripts and four incunabula. The whole text of the tale and associated links in every witness is transcribed, with a digital image of every one of the 1200 pages also given. The images, now of enhanced quality, are mostly grey-scale, with some full-colour images. The transcripts are linked to full collations in both regularized and unregularized forms, and to thorough descriptions of each manuscript (provided by Dan Mosser). A stemmatic analysis and commentary offer an overview of the whole tradition, with discussion of individual readings. A spelling database, fully organized by manuscript and lexical categories, gives access to all 300,000 words in the witnesses.

This is the first 'single-tale' CD-ROM to use our new Anastasia publication interface, offering innovative access to all manuscript readings and images, and to all variant readings at each word. Clicking on any word or phrase in any witness opens up a window showing the variant readings in all witnesses at that point. At each point, a unique 'variant map' feature shows how the variants are distributed across the families of witnesses. Links in the transcripts and collations take the reader to the stemmatic commentary on individual readings. A specialized 'variant search' feature permits retrieval of all variants according to their distribution: thus, all readings found in the Hengwrt manuscript but not the Ellesmere manuscipt. Editorial articles describe how the CD-ROM was made, the transcription system used, the collation rationale, and analyze the relationships between the witnesses, drawing on evolutionary biology software methods.

This CD-ROM version is designed so that the reader can load it on the hard disc of the computer and always have the full text and images of the books available.



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