NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AP) Yale University has received what it calls the largest and most comprehensive privately owned collection of Middle English texts, including three of the last privately held copies of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales."
Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya deposited his collection of manuscripts on long-term loan at Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale to allow researchers and students to study it. Yale says the collection has 51 medieval English vernacular texts of literary, historical, scientific and cultural significance.
Yale says the loan is a boon to medieval scholarship at Yale and the manuscripts could shed light on mysteries such as the order in which he wrote the tales.
Takamiya, professor emeritus at Japan's Keio University, says the loan will make the manuscripts easily accessible to international scholars.