Middle English Literature

Historical Documents volumes in particular; these I have listed also in the
bibliography at the back of the book. Edith Rickert’s Chaucer’s World is an
early precedent to this volume, a remarkable work (in a career of remarkable
achievements) that demonstrates great foresight in providing what Rickert’s
posthumous editors called “a mosaic of fourteenth-century life.”
7
My focus
has been perhaps to pick only certain colors in a mosaic that speak most
directly to current critical interests, a perspective that has benefited from
Rickert’s and others’ painstaking identification of prominent themes that
are common to historical and literary texts.
Editorial Practice
The original documents exist in Latin, French, and a variety of Middle
English dialects. Where a Middle English text or translation from the period
exists, I have chosen it. Some of the remaining documents are newly trans-
lated, some are twentieth-century translations, and some older translations,
depending on the quality of available texts. Manuscript variants are not
noted. Previous editors’ and my alterations to editions are indicated in

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xxxviii
Introduction
square brackets. Readers should refer to the original editions for variants
and other apparatus. Abbreviations and contractions are silently expanded.
The thorn character is transcribed as th, the yogh character as g, gh, w, y, or
z as appropriate. The consonantal i is transcribed as j, but the i/y variation
remains; u/v are normalized according to modern practices; initial ff appears
as f or F. Capitalization, word division, punctuation, paragraphing, numerals,
dates, and currencies are modernized as appropriate.
Notes
1 Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-century Texts
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–9.
2 Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media
Studies,” in Culture, Society, and the Media, ed. M. Gurevitch et al. (New York:
Routledge, 1982), 67–8.
3 Further discussion of what Early Modern scholar Louis Montrose calls “the
textuality of history” may be found in New Historicist writings such as those
contained in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge,
1989).
4 This distinction and other ideas in this section are primarily based on observations
made in Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, vol. 2: c. 1307 to the
Early Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1982) and John Taylor, English
Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
5 Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
6 Lucy Sandler, Introduction, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385, A Survey of Manu-
scripts Illuminated in the British Isles 5 (London: Harvey Miller, 1986); Kathleen
Scott, Introduction, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, A Survey of Manuscripts
Illuminated in the British Isles 6 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996).
7 Chaucer’s World, compiled by Edith Rickert, ed. C. C. Olson and M. M. Crow
(1948; New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), xi.

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