Caxton's Chaucer Digitised and Featured in Bodleian Exhibition

Merton’s copy of the first edition of the Canterbury Tales printed by William Caxton in 1476/77 is now fully digitised and available for viewing on Digital Bodleian.

The physical book will be on display at the Bodleian Library from 8 December 2023- 28 April 2024 as part of the Chaucer Here and Now exhibition.

The digitisation was made possible by a generous donation from the Mertonian Mr David Harvey.

Only around 21 copies of this edition survive, of which Merton College’s copy is one of the best-preserved. This copy contains unusually elaborate decoration added by hand, including gold illumination, floral borders and hand-drawn red and blue initials.

This decoration was probably commissioned by or for a member of the London Company of Haberdashers: the arms of the Haberdashers’ appear in the decoration on the first leaf, and devices associated with the Haberdashers (Catherine Wheels and brushes) are incorporated in the decorative borders on other folios.

The text of this edition, which Caxton subsequently condemned as containing errors, has been corrected throughout in a fifteenth- or early-sixteenth century hand, with missing words and lines supplied in the margins. There are also errors in the binding, with some pages appearing in the wrong order.

An attempt to correct this in the 19th century, when replacements for three missing leaves were inserted, corrected some of these errors but introduced others, so the text sometimes jumps around from tale to tale.

The book is believed to have been given to the College in 1620-1630 by Alderman William Wright (c.1561–1635), former Mayor of Oxford. It was previously owned by “Humfraye Cole”, whose name appears on fol. 197v.

Record Origin:

Description abbreviated from the main catalogue record in SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online), 2023. Additional description from an essay by James Misson, Merton’s copy of Caxton’s first edition of Canterbury Tales.

Photography by Colin Dunn (Scriptura Ltd)