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Reviews 161 Cowan, Janet and George Kane, eds., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Legend of Good Women (Medieval Texts and Studies 16), East Lansing, Colleagues Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xi, 344; 1 plate; R.R.P. US$95.00. (Distributed outside North America by Boydell and Brewer) This handsome scholarly edition offers a reconstructed text based on Bodleian Library M S . Tanner 346 (T). The editors adopt the process of textual criticism employed in the editing of Piers Plowman by Kane (1960) and Kane and Donaldson (1975). The edition also includes the version of the Prologue to LGW found only in Cambridge University Library M S . Gg. 4. 27 (G), which since the work of Lowes (1904-5) has been widely held to represent Chaucer's revision. Parallel printing of the two versions, adopted by most editors of LGW, might better have served the reader's convenience. There is no glossary. Chronologically speaking, the Cowan and Kane edition is out of order. This, doubtless, is no fault of the editors. But as their edition isfirstand foremost a corrective to Robinson (1957), it is cause for regret that it did not appear before the Riverside revision of Robinson's edition. A preliminary study of G by Kane, however, appeared in 1983. Although the Riverside editors followed Robinson in editing the text of G, together with the variant version of the Prologue (preserved in twelve remaining manuscripts) from Bodleian Library M S . Fairfax 16 (F), they incorporated a number of Kane's suggested emendations to Robinson. Robinson considered that the G text had 'peculiar authority' because it alone represents Chaucer's revision of the Prologue to LGW. It was, he pointed out, difficult to determine whether variants between G and other manuscripts represented deliberate changes or scribal variants (p. 913). Some unique readings of G which were manifestly errors he corrected, but allowed others to stand as possible authorial revisions. Cowan and Kane establish that the G text of the body of the poem (the Legend) has no peculiar authority. Their classification of the manuscripts reveals that G, which cannot be confidently related to either of the two main families, was much corrupted in the latter stages of transmission. Their method of distinguishing scribal from authorial variations in G is to examine the unique Variants in its text of the Legend to form a 'profile' of the immediate scribe. Their systematic study of the G scribe's usus scribendi in the Legend makes it possible to identify scribal variation in the Prologue 'by editorial techniques rather than by arbitrary critical judgements' (p. 132). 1^2 Reviews They conclude that the G scribe was 'a careful, dull man, whose dullness actually increased his susceptibility to error' (p. 130), and that any substantial differences between the two texts of the Prologue would have been beyond his conception and execution and are therefore presumably authorial. 'Even in the Prologue G has in a strict sense no "peculiar authority". More correctly the manuscript is remarkable in respect of LGW only because of the paradoxical situation where it uniquely preserves an authorial version of the Prologue copied by an immediate scribe notably subject to error' (p. 139). In discussing their choice of T, the editors draw attention to Greg's distinction between the 'substantive' readings of a work (those which affect the author's meaning or the essence of his expression) and its 'accidentals' (particularly spelling). Cowan and Kane emphasize that final e, used metrically, is not an accidental, and include in their introduction an instructive study of 'The grammar of Chaucer's final e'. Their policy is to restore final e only where they judge it to be metrically necessary (except where it is a matter of sense, as for instance, in distinguishing subjunctive and indicative forms). Most editors, they point out, have not observed the distinction between the copy text (which is 'chosen for the appropriateness of its accidentals, that is, to provide a form of language for the text edited' (p. 143)), and the base text (which is 'presumed to incorporate the largest number of readings preferable on whatever grounds' (p. 144)). Editors of Chaucer thus stand accused, like the cooks in The Pardoner's Tale...

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