ABSTRACT
The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women exists in two versions: one (commonly called G) is contained only in Cambridge MS Gg 4.27; the other (commonly called F, after the Fairfax manuscript) is represented by all other manuscripts. Chaucerians are well aware of these two versions, but often refer to the issue involving them as more settled than it in fact is. Arguments over the precedence of each version were in the early twentieth century a staple of Chaucerian scholarship; by mid-century, most Chaucerians were content to view the matter as resolved, or simply (and rightly) as not relevant to their purposes. The growing interest among medievalists in Langland and the evidence for authorial revision led to a renewed interest in textual problems. And in 1983, the controversy over the two Legend of Good Women prologues was reopened by George Kane in a brief article defining the usus scribendi of the Gg scribe and an analysis of the heavily corrupted lines Gg 126-38 (= F 138-52).1 Kane argued that many of the differences between the two versions of these lines in the two prologues, differences once thought to constitute evidence of authorial revision or to be the actual products of that revision, were the product of ordinary scribal practices. By implication, the notion of a revising Chaucer, at least here, was illusory. Although Kane reprinted this article in 1990, it was not included in his edition of Legend of Good Women in 1995, nor does that edition follow through with the implications of the article in any systematic way. Kane obviously assumed that textual-critical analysis was crucial in determining the difference between authorial and scribal. But the very analysis he provides may suggest the reverse: that textual-critical analysis is just as useful in providing support for pre-existent conclusions.
