The Legend of Good Women

This edition sets out to recover the original form of the poem The Legend of Good Women from which the various surviving forms are likeliest to have survived. It seeks to do so by adopting the methods of textual criticism employed in the editing of Piers Plowman by Kane and Donaldson, thus testing those editorial principles by extension to another Middle English text of high literary quality. The editors’ introduction, forming roughly half of the book, covers a variety of allied interests, among them the general character of printed Chaucer texts and the practices of their editors; revision in The Legend of Good Women and the status of the text of MS CUL Gg 4.27; scribal and editorial treatment of the final e as a constituent of Chaucer’s metre; and the problem of copy text in the instance of 14th-century poetry preserved only in 15th-century manuscripts.