ABSTRACT
THIS ESSAY, WHICH PROVED TO BE A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN THE narrative of my scholarly life, was prompted by one of these detailed textual quibbles that scholarly editors are all-too-frequently known for. The Trevisa edition was reviewed by Anne Hudson in The Review of English Studies, an authoritative reviewer in a prestigious journal. It was a mixed review, for although Dr. Hudson found much to commend in the diligence and hard work of the editors, she admitted to being hampered in her review by the decision to publish only the text and an apparatus of rejected copy-text variants in the first two volumes, and to leave the full historical collation and textual notes to a third volume (which did not appear for another twenty years).
