Educational Media Reviews Online

Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales, a multimedia CD produced by Films for the Humanities & Sciences (FFH hereafter), is intended for junior, middle, or high school level students.

It offers many of the same features and flaws as FFH's Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (reviewed previously in this journal by this same reviewer). Once again, I closely followed the directions for installation on the PC and was confronted with an error message and non-functioning videos every time I ran the software. The CD only functioned properly on the Mac.

The text of the Canterbury Tales provided is based on the Ellesmere manuscript and the tales are available in Middle English as well as modernized English. Synopses, character sketches, a biography of the author, a bibliography and filmography, scholarly criticism (both textual and via film clips), time lines, etc. are also available to aid the student. Links to web sites on Chaucer's Tales are provided, though two are non-functioning (one because the developers have simply typed in the wrong internet address!).

Surprisingly, the user is unable to display both Middle and modern English versions of the Tales side by side. More absurd is the fact there is no way to consult the glossary of Middle English terms while reading the text -- the user is forced to exit the text, return to the main menu, click open the glossary, then exit again to the main menu, re-select the text she was reading and relocate where she was within the tale. Glossed words and concepts could have been linked directly from the text itself, however no hypertextual links whatsoever are provided within the text of the tales.

Far more disturbing than these design flaws is the content itself. The textual support material is full of grammatical mistakes which make one shudder to think that this product is intended as a teaching tool. Editors at FFH seem not to be aware of the standard use of the comma in modern English. Phrases like "Modern editors, [sic] have altered the order of ..." and "The opinion of scholars is, [sic] that not a single piece of text..." abound and make the text perplexing and difficult to comprehend. The writing is generally sloppy (e.g. singular subject followed by plural verb) and muddled (e.g. the confusing and inexact presentation on the state of the English language during Chaucer's time). The lack of editorial standards for this material is appalling and educators will only do their students harm by giving them such poor models of English language usage and "scholarly" expression.

This title is not recommended.