STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER I.70-71" (p. 419), "340." A more notewonhy omission is failure to include the AMS reprint (1972) of Tyrwhitt's landmark edition of The Canterbury Tales (originally published 1775-78). McAlpine does cite (item 640) the Folcroft reprint (1973) of Tyrwhitt's "Introductory Discourse" to that edi tion. But this item provides insufficient information, and a cross reference to it in item 345 is misleading since the "Discourse" does not itself address the issue raised in item 345. Errors that are certainly typographical include the date of Morell's edi tion (p. xxviii), which is 1737, not 1727; in item 345, "I.601" should read "I.60"; in item 1122, something has gone awry with the sentence fragment that begins "Given the weight of the astrological machinery." These short comings do not, however, undermine McAlpine's achievement. Her anno tated bibliography of The Knight's Tale is a monument of scholarship and will be an indispensable tool in the study of one of Chaucer's most important tales. DANIEL]. RANSOM University of Oklahoma TIM WILLIAM MACHAN, ed. MedievalLiterature: Texts andInterpretation. Medieval andRenaissanceTexts and Studies, vol. 79. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval andRenaissanceTexts and Studies, 1991. Pp. vii, 198. $20.00. Tim Machan's useful anthology of essays is devoted to theoretical and practical issues in editing and interpreting Middle English texts. The issues are, to a degree, the old ones, those that scholars have debated for the past century and more. First, and perhaps most important, is the often-ignored truism that both editors and literary critics ought to work in full knowledge of all the available evidence, codicological, metrical, and historical, what Richard Beadle felicitously calls "the careful cultivation of acquaintance with the primary materials on which a text may be based and its apparatus assembled." Only slightly less central is the discussion of the extent to which editorial intervention can be justified and whether modern editors, like modern museum restoration curators, can or ought to restore ancient works. The analogy between manuscript texts and old paintings is im precise, primarily because each painting is a work, while each manuscript 232 REVIEWS only attests, with greater and lesser fidelity, to a work. The poemPearlis not to be confused with the graphies in British Library manuscript Cotton Nero A.x. in which it survives, though if the manuscript had not survived into the print era, we would not have the poem. What are responsible editors to do when they are certain that witnesses only imperfectly representwhat the author wrote and aware that an indeterminate number of scribes have intervened in the process ofcopying, each introducing new readings, both inadvertent and intentional? A. S. G. Edwards argues persuasively in "Editing English Romance: The Limits of Editing, the Limits of Criticism" that no single theory or meth odology is adequate to address the multitude of textual traditions we encounter in Middle English texts. Addressing the large and extremely diverse corpus of fictional narratives we have lumped together under the term "verse romance," Edwards describes the material conditions of the production and dissemination of both the poems themselves and the manuscripts in which they survive. Though noting that a mindless editorial conservatism has made many a modern editor "the preserver ofthe aberra tions of transmission," Edwards delineates the historical elements that make genuinely critical editing virtually impossible-the effects of oral transmission, our ignorance of audience and milieu, and (not least) "the untranscendable banality of such texts." Charlotte Brewer, Ralph Hanna III, and Derek Pearsall address very different literary corpora in the works of Chaucer and Langland. Pearsall addresses emendation metri causa in modern editions of Chaucer in an elegant essay full of wit, charity, and good sense, avoiding the odium phzlologicum that tends to mar the work ofmetrists, whose passions often appear to flare ininverseproportionto theavailableevidence. However, not everyone will grant the "special claim" for textual authority claimed for the Hengwrt manuscript of The rsion (1960) is fundamentally flawed by (1) an unrealized circularity owing to Kane's willingness to generalize to difficult cases from the nature ofscribal variants when originality is not in doubt and (2) Kane's conviction that none of the A text...