| This edition was originally undertaken as an experiment, to subject a Chaucer text of manageable length, attested in a substantial number of manuscripts, to the processes of textual criticism employed in the editing of Piers Plowman by Kane, 1960, and Kane and Donaldson, 1975, and thus to test the validity of generalisations pragmatically formed during one single, albeit large, instance, about the possibilities of recovering original readings in a Middle English text of high literary quality. It offered a variety of other interests. It would draw attention to the general character of printed Chaucer texts and the practices of their editors.1 It would necessarily bear on the question of revision in LGW, and along with that, on the 'status' of the text of ms. CUL Gg. 4. 27, there and in other works of Chaucer. It would direct attention to both scribal and editorial treatment of the syllabic value of final e as a constituent of Chaucer's metre. And it would illustrate the problem of copy text in the instance of fourteenth-century poetry preserved only in fifteenth-century or late fifteenth-century manuscripts. |
| This edition differs from earlier ones in a number of particulars. It is, first, open, in presenting the manuscript evidence fully. Second, it attempts to identify originality from the quality of variant readings rather than by the number of manuscripts that instance them, that is, it interprets manuscript support and gives primary authority to readings, not 'witnesses'. It gives the grounds, in the analysis of variants, for the identification of the likelier derivative variant, or, if originality is otherwise indicated, it offers an explanation of variation to the reading presumed scribal. The choice of copy text has not been easy, but T has |
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