Life in the Margins or, or, What’s an Annotator to Do?

In presupposing that a work came into the world as an achieved unity, without gaps or lacunae, and was totally legible in its own time, explanatory notes to vernacular medieval texts tend to suppress, even misrepresent larger consideration of the relations of author to his production. Especially for the Athlone edition, which emphasizes the “intensely local process rather than the general achievement of meaning,” a different kind of annotation is required for PPl—one that respects the work as an act of reception rather than a sustained act of citation.