ABSTRACT
THIS IS A CONFLATED TEXT. It BRINGS TOGETHER THE SUBSTANtive discussion of editing Hoccleve from two essays—one prepared for an audience of medievalists at a conference in York on the editing of late Middle English literature (“Challenges of Theory and Practice in the Editing of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes”), and the other a specifically textual essay written for Studies in Bibliography (“Normalisation of Accidentals in Middle English Texts: The Paradox of Thomas Hoccleve”). Since there is considerable overlap between the two (the published version of the York paper even takes some of its statistical analysis of morphological usage from the SB essay), it seemed to make sense to run the two together for this collection. I realise that, while such a conflation does avoid repetition of similar material originally prepared for different audiences, the resulting text no longer represents a single actual document but is an editorial (and in this case, authorial) reconfiguration for yet a third audience. I am not particularly embarrassed by this lack of documentary fidelity, however; after all, it is exactly this process of selection and omission that produces not only the medieval florilegia and compendia but, at a more technically sophisticated level, the eclectic, conflated, critical texts of much contemporary Anglo-American scholarly editing.
