For Chaucer studies, the web is even still most useful for bibliographical research. You can find a lot out about current news and pop culture, but very little actual decent interpretive criticism of Chaucer (or indeed literature in general) is available on the Web. This is because copyright restricts the re-publication of authoritative studies: all of that information in all of those books and articles in the library is NOT on-line! With every site on the web, BE CAREFUL: there is a lot of garbage out there mixed in with the helpful stuff.
There are four sections on this page: Bibliographies; Sites devoted to Chaucer studies; sites devoted to medieval studies at at large; and on-line editions of Chaucerian (and many other medieval) texts.
Here is how to get to the Electronic Reserves page for this course.
Bibliographies for Chaucer Studies on-line: The web a very good tool to find studies which exist off line; here are some sites to help. NOTE that you can, of course, find much helpful work by using your Library's Index of Journal Articles and Databases; many of these subscription databases have links to full-text versions of articles. Here are your go-to places for help:
The Chaucer Bibliography On-line is the single best non-subscription bibliographical resource on Chaucer. You can use the "expert keyword" function to search for articles on a specific tale or issue. It is also annotated. Its references begin in about 1975.
The Geoffrey Chaucer Page at Harvard, your first go-to site, has a page with several bibliographies. "The Essential Chaucer" has helpful, brief annotations of its references, but it only covers work published between 1900 and 1984 (not so current any more). Derek Pearsall's bibliography contains an outstanding selection of 20th century work on Chaucer. There are no abstracts, however, and its references are heavily abbreviated (you'll need to use the list of abbrevations for help). The Chaucer Review is one of two publications devoted solely to Chaucer studies; here is an on-line and annotated index of articles, covering the first thirty years of publication (up to 1997). The SRU library has this journal, in print and as an on-line subscription, and many of its articles are very accessible to student researchers. (The other journal is Studies in the Age of Chaucer.) One slightly unusual place to search might be the archives for the Chaucerlist newsgroup; this is an index of discussions for subscribers, most of whom are professors and graduate students. Season all comments with much salt. For much more, there is helpfully annotated list of on-line bibliographies on the Chaucer Metapage.
Specific links for the study of Chaucer and his time: This is not a complete set of Chaucer links, but you can rely on these to be reputable and authoritative.
The Geoffrey Chaucer
Page at Harvard should be your first go-to site; it includes scads of information, tutorials, introductions, and links relevant to Chaucer studies which are aimed primarily for student researchers.
The Chaucer Pegagogy
Page is aimed primarily at teachers (nice if you're a K-12 teacher!) and students.
The Chaucer Metapage has a number of resources helpful for students.
Jane Zatta's Chaucer homepage contains a good set of helpful links, including a spoken version of the General Prologue, and introductory material for many tales.
The New Chaucer Society, which
includes information and a wonderful set of links on Chaucer studies
The Canon of John Lydgate Project,
about one of Chaucer's imitators
The Lollard Society Website, on not only the medieval heresy which developed
during Chaucer's life, but also later medieval popular religious studies in general.
The Records for Early
English Drama (REED) Homepage not only has information about itself,
but lots of links to medieval and renaissance drama, performance, texts,
and music
A Chaucerian Cookery:
everything you ever wanted to know about food in later medieval England, including recipes and a discussion of food in the Canterbury Tales
The Medieval and
Renaissance Embroidery Homepage -- there's some neat stuff here if you're interested, though I can't vouch for the authority of this one!
Metapages for the study of medieval literature and culture:
This on-line tutorial on The End of the Middle Ages is a wonderful introduction to Chaucer's time and place, though it reaches far beyond England. This is a great example of the web for teaching.
The Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
A collection of primary and secondary source texts on the web. Since
this is such as huge site, here are a couple of its pages you might find
useful: Historical
documents about later Medieval England has a great selection of primary texts about kings and wars; and The "Calamitous" Fourteenth Century contains a set of original texts concering events in Chaucer's lifetime, such as the Plague, the Hundred Years' War with France, and the papal schism.
A Brief Outline of
Middle English Literature by genre, with dates of major authors and
works, with some links as well.
The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies. If you are looking for some general and good information about a topic this is a good place to look. The "Orb" is an on-line encyclopedia of resources for learning and teaching about medieval Europe. It's not a metapage of links, though there is a selective and well-annotated page of them is included--which is a much better collection of links to use to than an undifferentiated metapage, though it is also a much smaller set.
NetSERF:
The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources, a large and searchable
metapage of popular and academic web resources; sites like this one, you should note, are fun to browse through, but don't do such a good job of helping you to sort through authoritative vs. non-authoritative material.
The Labyrinth Webpage for Medieval
Studies. Another metapage of web links for medieval literature
and culture.
The Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Resources
page from the Voice of the Shuttle metapage
of websites for research in the humanities.
Relevant Texts and Text search engines on line: The advantage to texts on line is that you can do word searches in them, to find specific passages in which you know a word was used, or to compare the various instances of a word. Note, however, that in Middle English spelling varied--one word might be spelled several different ways; if you just search for one spelling, therefore, you might not find all instances of a word. Complicating this, different editors may have transcribed the word differently (with or without a final -e, for instance), and different manuscripts of a text may have spelled the same word differently in the same passage (it might be illuminating, for instance, compare the Hengwrt manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, below, with the Ellesmere, on which Robinson largely based his edition).
The Glossarial Database
of Middle English will let you look up the occurences of specific words
in texts by Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower.
The Corpus of Middle English
Verse and Prose from Michigan allows similar searches for a much wider
range of texts.
The Middle English Collection
at the Electronic Text Center at
UVa has dozens of Middle English texts on line.
TEAMS Middle
English texts on-line--a huge variety of texts; in amongst the Breton
Lays and gests to Robin Hood, there are several apocryphal Fifteenth Century
Additions and Continuations to the Canterbury Tales.
The
Canterbury Tales, ed. F. N. Robinson, 1957, from the Electronic Text Center at UVa
The House
of Fame, ed. F. N. Robinson, 1957, from the Labyrinth Middle
English Text Library, at Georgetown
Troilus
and Criseyde, ed. B. A. Windeatt, 1984; kept at the Electronic Text Center at UVa
The Treatise
on the Astrolabe, ed. W. W. Skeat, 1872; kept at The Corpus for Middle English
Prose and Verse at Michigan
"Lak of Stedfastnesse", ed.
F. N. Robinson, 1957
"Mercilesse Beaute", ed.
F. N. Robinson, 1957
Boethius, the Consolation of
Philosophy, ed. James O'Donnell, from Penn, in English and Latin
Boethius, the Consolation
of Philosophy, also ed. James O'Donnell, from UVa, also in English
and Latin
Robert Henryson, the Testament of Cresseid, ed. Gregory G. Smith, from the Electronic Text Center at UVa