Conventional discussions of textual editing pay a great deal of attention to readings and stemmata, very little to explanation. However, the responsibility of an editor extends far beyond setting his or her text. Editions provide what are considered ‘first order research tools’, those books to which all students go first for solutions to basic questions about the text. On the whole, the disparity between versions of the same text edited by various hands is not great, but editions differ markedly in terms of their helpfulness to readers. Since you will have spent a very great deal of time examining variants and establishing a text, you should do everything possible to explain, both to open your text to the reader and to provide him or her with a basic range of information that will enable its intelligent consumption.

There are conventions governing the way in which editors present this basic information. On the whole, by tradition, these mandate a separable order of presentation, and there is a generally understood imperative to avoid interpretative statements. (No edition need include anything like a critical reading of the text; many are disparaged for having attempted to do so.) Most particularly, annotation answers a fixed rota of tasks and these are presented dispersed in different places in the published volume. This piecemeal provision of explanation, which re-enforces the absence of interpretative statements, has always seemed to me a hangover from a Lachmannian belief that the text presented is in some way ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’. Dispersed annotation stands as a signal that no whole consciousness has intruded between the reader and access to ‘medieval words’. As I have indicated above, this view is silly; the text only comes to us through a process that has required the intrusion of many consciousnesses, at whatever level of engagement. Moreover, deciding what deserves annotation is clearly an interpretative decision.

The most immediate level of annotation explains the constructed text itself. This material, disposed as notes to the specific lines and words of the edited text, has two forms.