The note with which my introduction has concluded offers a salient moral. It is certainly possible to discuss textual criticism and the production of edited texts abstractly, as a theoretical endeavour. But it is always more efficacious and more pointed to work with a concrete example. Thus, this book is predicated upon documenting the procedures involved in producing an edited text of an important medieval English work not heretofore printed. For this purpose, I have chosen a brief and relatively simple Latin text.

In the early 1330s, a major English literary figure, the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle, produced a commentary on the biblical Song of Songs. Like many commentators on this work, Bernard of Clairvaux among them, Rolle found the text intensely engaging, and, as a result, he never commented upon the entire biblical book (and did not intend to do so). Although the commentary is reasonably extensive (around eighty typewritten pages), Rolle did not get past the third verse of the first chapter of the Canticle.

Rolle's total output was prodigious, in both English and Latin. He, not Chaucer, was the first person writing in English to be recognised as an auctor (author, and thus authority). Yet, since the coming of print, his availability to readers has been limited. Only excerpts from the English texts appeared in early printings, and these works only achieved wide dispersal through EETS in the 1860s. Only recently have they been available in any critically edited form, while the full transmission of only one of the Latin works has ever been critically examined. In this situation, the state of the commentary on the Song is perhaps not surprising. If one wants to read this text in something like its original form, one's most available recourse is a manuscript version. There is an obscure unpublished dissertation, with transcription of a single manuscript copy, and the more available alternative, a sequence of printed editions, all dependent upon one produced in 1535(!), presents an excerpt only.