One of the major issues that faced humanities scholarship in the final decades of last century is the status of evidence, a topic explored in print in the January 1996 issue of PMLA, and one which has been variously taken up by a number of modern textual critics, including several medievalists who have recently been exploring the relative merits of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ philologies. As the quotation from David Greetham at the head of this essay suggests, such a topic has important, if also sometimes uncomfortable, implications for both modern editors and codicologists in the brave new postmodern world of epistemological uncertainty in which we find ourselves. The forensic mentality espoused by Greetham is one that recognizes the semantic flexibility of the key terms ‘text’ and ‘forensic’. On the one hand, ‘text’ is seen as a concept that can be fixed and authoritative, but, on the other, it is described as ‘textile’, something that is layered and woven, and therefore logically capable of being unwoven in different ways. And ‘forensic’, for Greetham, not only represents a scientific approach to current textual theory and its application, but also enjoys a more subjective rhetorical value.