Chaucer's works go online | Hacker News Reader

Chaucer's works go online

blogs.bl.uk

94 pointssklargh12 comments

I was in Prof. Marvin Mudrick's Troilus and Criseyde course at UCSB in the '70s. Things I learned: it is high literature (whereas one could argue the Cantebury Tales are in a more popular genre), and it is long. I'm sure I never finished it.

A good portion of the class time was spent listening to Mudrick's phenomenal reading of the text. I knew at the time he should have been recorded for posterity and I'm sure today no such recordings exist and he liked it that way. There are plenty of audio recordings of Mudrick from his writing seminars.

The really big thing Mudrick maintained about this work is it contains a chapter that is the single greatest description of love-making in all of world literature. (And Mudrick should know, he was a great scholar.) Every other work attempting this reduces to mere pornography in comparison. (My words, not his, so you know I agree.)

https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/mr-mudrick-is-100/

Weird UX critique. There's no 'Download Book' button. You can view a page, then click download, then click 'Select some or all pages for download', then click 'Select All' then click another 'Download' button, then you wait ... not for the download, but for them to prepare the download. As if they didn't even consider people wanting to get whole books. A 234 page PDF took about 8 minutes to prepare, and results in an 81MB file, which only takes a few seconds to download. Then you realize you're not getting full resolution images but some pre-selected resolution over which you have no control.

So somehow in the process of designing a fancy tile-based viewer for the web they completely forgot the most basic use case that all other ebook delivery systems start with.

Fun Fact: he created (or is the first documented user of) the word "Twitter"

https://twitter.com/OED/status/261451658784030720

This is really cool.

I wonder if there's any plans to actually OCR these. The handwriting is so hard to read without studying it ahead of time, so it'd be great for accessibility to have a searchable and "more modern" rendering of the texts.

If you have paid GPT you can throw them into GPT-V and it can read them perfectly and translate them.

Huzzah

is it the uncensored version?

It’s the expurgated version. The one without the gannet.

I love the OG callback.

Before I clicked the link, I was scared this was contextually something far scarier:

"After centuries of intellectual property legal disputes with the Catholic church and the Chaucer family estate, the British Library has finally been able to secure a win for public domain content freedom."

England’s suppression of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century was drastic. One could not expect any privileges of Rome from Chaucer’s era to have survived that period of English history.

In fact, reading the Canterbury Tales is a strange experience. On one hand, with perennially popular topics like bawdy humor and fart jokes, Chaucer’s era feels close to modern readers across the seven-century gap. On the other hand, he describes an England deeply imbued with Catholic clerical orders and worship, and that makes the setting alien indeed.

> with perennially popular topics like bawdy humor and fart jokes

The Miller's Tale is my go-to for both showing people the joy of medieval literature, but also as a counterpoint for people reminiscing about the "good old days" and concerned with how lewd modern society is. Well, the Miller's Tale and Pompeian graffiti.

But I love telling people about "kissing full sweetly" is.

> But I love telling people about "kissing full sweetly" is.

I'll bite. What does it mean? :D

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