ABSTRACT
Scholars, teachers, and students of medieval literature rely heavily on printed editions of the texts they study. Access to the manuscripts of those texts is often difficult, and even when they or facsimile editions of them are available, they can be used efficiently only by the few who have been trained in paleography. Diplomatic editions of manuscripts obviate that problem, but one suspects that they are not consulted often because most scholars are interested in individual texts, not in the manuscripts in which those texts appear. Therefore, the process by which the individual, handwritten text is turned into a printed edition of that text is crucial: the printed edition will, for all practical purposes, take the place of the manuscript text. One question governing the process is, will the edition attempt to reproduce a single manuscript version of the text? Or will the edition use several manuscript versions in an attempt to reconstruct a supposed original text of which the individual manuscript versions are the flawed remains?
