Editing Chaucer’s Early Poems:

Abstract

The particular conception of copy-text proposed by W.W. Greg in his “A Rationale of Copy-Text,”especially his “distinction between the [. . .] ‘substantive’ [. . .] readings of the text, those namely that affect the author’s meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which [. . .] I shall call [. . .] ‘accidentals’,” has not really achieved much purchase in the field of editing medieval vernacular manuscript texts, perhaps because punctuation is often entirely or largely missing in them, word division purely scribal, and spelling subject to dialect translation from manuscript to manuscript. Nevertheless, the general procedure that Greg recommended — briefly, that “copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals” — is the one that holds sway in the editing of medieval text though under different terminology: the usual procedure is to select one manuscript, if there are several, as the ‘base text’ for an edition and to emend its text (if at all) only in cases of substantive disagreement with other manuscripts (if a better reading exposes an error in the base manuscript) or when there is obvious error shared by all manuscripts.