ABSTRACT
THIS ESSAY IS FOR NON-MEDIEVALISTS. FOR THOSE TEXTUAL OR literary scholars already versed in the documentary and editorial circumstances of medieval texts I doubt that it will provide much in the way of provocation, and is certainly written at a much less sophisticated level than, say, Anne Hudson's essay on “Middle English” in the Toronto volume on editing medieval texts (Editing Medieval Texts [New York: Garland, 1977]), Derek Pearsall's essays on “Texts, Textual Criticism and Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Production” (Fifteenth-Century Studies, ed. Robert F. Yeager [Hamden, Conn., 1984]), “Theory and Practice in Middle English Editing,” (TEXT 7 [1994]: 107–126) and “Editing Medieval Texts: Some Developments and Some Problems”(Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985]), or any part of Tim William Machan's Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994). This opening demurral is not meant to sound apologetic (after all, some of my writing on medieval text and editing, even some of it included in this collection, has been criticised for being too technical, too detailed, and relatively inhospitable to the non-specialist). Rather than an apology, my caveat is a comment on the circumstances for which “Alterity” was written—an MLA conference session organised by the Committee on Scholarly Editions to cover “Editing in the Early Periods,” at which my paper was to be the token Middle English exhibit.
