Title Background

Copy-Text and Its Variants in Some Recent Chaucer Editions.

Copy-Text and Its Variants in Some Recent Chaucer Editions.

MS. T, on which Kane based his edition of the A text, is as close to a copy-text as could be in a non-recension edition, since it is used to supply grammatical and orthographical forms and thus a system for regularization of accidentals. K-D chose W as the “basic manuscript” for the edition of the B text, but here the presumption of authority given to the base manuscript in substantive matters is secondary to its supplying the “closest dialectical and chronological approximation to the poet’s language.”