Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts.

The K-D edition exemplifies the “gradual erosion of the concept of authorial revision” in the discussion of late-medieval texts in the past few decades. K-D’s claim that the processes of revision are represented in three mutually exclusive stages in the extant manuscripts is a perfectly likely explanation of the manuscript situation but not a priori a more likely reconstruction of WL’s revising practice than the alternatives that intermediate versions leaked into the manuscript tradition; or that A, B, and C are “merely arbitrary stages in a continuous process of evolution and revision,” as was once suggested by Donaldson (Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 39 [1955]: 177-212) regarding B text manuscripts R and F.