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John Matthews Manly
1865–1940
A pioneering American scholar of Shakespeare and Chaucer, remembered for the huge editorial project that produced The Text of the Canterbury Tales. He spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, where his teaching and research helped shape early modern English studies.
1 Audiobook
Contemporary American Literature Bibliographies and Study Outlines
by John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert
About the author
Born in 1865 and died in 1940, John Matthews Manly was an American professor of English literature and philology who became closely associated with the University of Chicago. His scholarship centered on two major figures of English literature, William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer.
Manly is especially remembered for his work on medieval texts and for the eight-volume The Text of the Canterbury Tales, published in 1940 with his former student Edith Rickert. The project drew on a very large body of manuscript evidence and became one of the landmark scholarly efforts in Chaucer studies.
Available sources also point to Manly's wider influence as a teacher, editor, and department leader. He wrote and edited books on English poetry, prose, drama, and writing, helping bring rigorous textual scholarship to a broad range of students and readers.