I wrote this book, designed for students new to the enterprise, because I recalled my early frustrations at trying to edit texts transmitted in medieval and early modern manuscripts. And although the practical experience of examining a number of such texts has given me a certain measure of confidence in my skills, one frustration still remains. This is the absence of any practical handbook for beginners, one that might show what is at stake in the process of editing a text and what steps one might take to address the attendant difficulties.

Central to the whole argument here is ‘experience’. There is nothing ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ about the production of reading texts of medieval works, only an assessment of probabilities guided by one's acquired knowledge. Of course, most of the knowledge that might be on display here has not been my own. I owe a very great deal to two teachers who directed my work early on, E. Talbot Donaldson and Richard S. Sylvester. I owe much more to a sequence of collaborators, people with whom I have joint-edited texts over the years and from whom, as we argued variant by variant, I have derived vastly more instruction than I could possibly have given in return: M. C. Seymour, Robert A. Pratt, Hoyt N. Duggan (and Robert M. Adams, and the rest of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive team), David A. Lawton, and Traugott Lawler. Traug, in particular, will probably find this volume intensely amusing in its various flailings; an expert Latinist and an extraordinarily organised thinker, he would have done the whole with greater authority, clarity, and acumen.

I have also profited from intensely critical readings the script has received. In addition to the customary incisiveness of the series editors, Vincent Gillespie and Richard Dance, I am particularly grateful for three readings, all producing extensive suggestions about both content and presentation, from Nicholas Perkins, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and Sarah Wood. Of course, given my intellectual stubbornness, many of their fine suggestions have gone unheeded, and I am solely responsible for what remains.