While the subject matter of this article is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the content focuses on issues related to critical editions in general. Among these are the relationship between multiple editions of a text and, based on these, conclusions that can drawn about the original text. Thus, the article presents a discussion of critical editions, structured around the following topics: Conclusions about Relations among All the Texts in the Tradition; Conclusions about the Earliest State of the Text; and Conclusions about the Value of Individual Manuscripts.

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