TO BEGIN WITH THE OBVIOUS: Geoffrey Chaucer enjoys a foundational status as ‘the father of English poetry’ and the Canterbury Tales has been the most popular of his works. Over eighty manuscripts of it survive, complete, selected or fragmentary; and the earlier existence of a much larger number can be confidently inferred from a variety of evidence. No English poetic work occurs in more fifteenth-century copies. In addition, it was the earliest major such work in English to be printed and the only medieval English one to have been consistently republished over the centuries since Chaucer's death. In terms of English cultural and literary history it is a fundamental work.

The Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, Henry E. Huntington Library, California, EL 26 C 9 (henceforward ‘Ellesmere’), has become a crucial element in modern awareness of Chaucer. The general quality of its decoration and the number of its illustrations of the Canterbury pilgrims have made it the most frequently reproduced of all his manuscripts. And it has had a central role in modern understanding of the text and transmission of Chaucer's most famous work.

Consequently Ellesmere has come to enjoy a position of great importance in our contemporary perceptions of Chaucer's poem. In such circumstances it is appropriate to consider why Ellesmere matters to us as students of the medieval book. How does it contribute to our textual and cultural understanding of the Canterbury Tales?

Before examining such questions, a few facts: Ellesmere comprises two hundred and forty large (394 x 284 mm), good-quality parchment leaves. Its principal content is a version of the Canterbury Tales, although there are further additions to it ranging in date from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The text is illustrated by twenty-three marginal miniatures of each of the Canterbury pilgrims placed at the beginning of their respective tales. The manuscript has other elaborate decoration, including over seventy foliate borders, gilt and painted initials of varying size and frequent rubrication. Three artists were employed on the illustrations and possibly others on the borders. It seems certain that the manuscript was produced in London. The hands of some of these decorators have been identified in other London or Westminsterbased manuscripts of the early fifteenth century. The overall effect of its quality of production is the creation of a form of de luxe manuscript, the lavishness of which is consistently pleasing to the eye.