Tales of Canterbury

Geoffrey Chaucer composed the Tales of Canterbury and it got copied - early. Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson have a URL of that name.

These two believe that their predecessors had overcomplicated the manuscript tradition. Hengwrt and Ellesmere are good MSS, they agree. To these they'd add Christ Church 152 and Bodleian 686... to pretty-much ignore the others. Because they're all dependent on the four noted (or maybe on CC152's original, but CC152 itself is good-enough here).

The title "book of the tales of Canterbury" seems almost to roll off the tongue. Was it "Cantérbury" in Chaucer's time? A few centuries before him it was "Cantwareburh" or "Cair Ceint". I can't see the accent falling on the second syllable of the former... unless we allow for some lost Latinism. But in 13th-century Latin the Normans were using variations of "Dorobern" based off a tradition of Roman "Durovernum Cantiacorum". Chaucer was self-consciously English and no Norman. I think he'd rather say Cánterbury like we say; the "book of -" preface is tacked on, by scribes, because these Tales are poems which people declaimed from memory for sport.

As to the epigones: "Canterbury Tales" is a fair reduction in my opinion, but it remains a reduction. Also some Tales got memorised to the expense of others, which may explain how later editions might be wild compared to the originals. But - say Bordalejo and Robinson - we have good-enough originals. One might compare Homer, whose two main works seem deliberately-composed such that later copies don't deviate as far as, uh, sura 11 from sura 7.