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After its appearance in 1933, F. N. Robinson's text of the Canterbury Tales steadily took the place of W. W. Skeat's as the one scholars taught from and cited in their professional articles.[1] This continued to be true despite the appearance in 1940 of The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert (Manly-Rickert), with full collations and analyses of and a text based upon all of the manuscripts (Robinson had avowedly based his text upon ten), and despite data and analyses in Manly-Rickert which proved the faultiness of earlier analyses of manuscript relations to which Robinson had subscribed in his textual introduction. Not only have that first Robinson text and the little-changed second one of 1957 been cited as standard for well over fifty years, but the appearance in 1987 of a very lightly emended "Third Edition," under the general editorship of Larry D. Benson, makes the continued scholarly use of it as the standard text of the Canterbury Tales a possible, if not a likely, prospect. Such past, present and possible future uses of this text make particularly urgent a better and more general understanding of the methods by which Robinson edited because, as the present study will seek to indicate, careful analysis fails to support the belief of others and of Robinson himself in his textual methods and in his text of the Canterbury Tales.
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