University of Virginia Library

Conclusion

McGann's definition of copy-text seems to be a reasonable extension of Greg's notion, and certainly is useful in practice:

The rejoinder to this argument is that it provides an excellent definition of a "base text" (implying an eclectic edition), not a "copy-text" (implying a recension edition or what was once meant by the phrase "critical edition"). Furthermore, the argument assumes that editors must choose a text as their highest authority. Yet recension editions still exist, and Kane has proved that even a base-text edition can exist without attributing undue authority to the basic text itself.

Chaucerians, however, seem to be moving toward single-text editions, and Greg's inadvertent defense of such editions can certainly be taken at face value: "what many editors have done is to produce, not editions of their authors' works at all, but only editions of particular authorities for those works, a course that may be perfectly legitimate in itself, but was not the one they were professedly pursuing" (p. 384). Editions of Hg and editions of Chaucer are two different things, and there are certainly reasons to prefer the former (economics, editorial consistency in a project involving many editors, etc.). And editors might do well to portray legitimate, economically based decisions for what they are, rather than to obscure them with textual-critical jargon. This is the approach successfully taken by the Toronto Medieval Latin Texts series. Furthermore, editorial projects are not necessarily doomed because they have multiple (and possibly conflicting) purposes. Poiron's cheap student edition of the Roman de la Rose follows a single manuscript (allowing the reader to reconstruct it) while adding in brackets the lines of the textus receptus not included in it. In so doing, Poiron can incorporate earlier editions rather than condemn them.[40]

An obvious conclusion here would be for Middle English editors to drop the notion of copy-text altogether unless they are willing to define it precisely (as, say, Greetham, "Normalisation") and to speak directly to the problem of what the accidentals provided by such a text are supposed to represent

or suggest: those of the author? or simply those of one of the author's near-contemporaries? Unless an editor is interested in grappling with such questions, I see little reason to invoke Greg's term. A statement such as "the base text for the edition is X (corrected), with forms normalized according to the edition of Robinson" makes perfect sense and can be easily justified. An edition will not (or should not) be condemned simply because it is selective in the issues it deals with. The use of the term "copy-text" for Middle English editions that are completely different from the type of edition on which Greg based his theory leads generally to confusion and to an obscuring of the often legitimate editorial procedures employed.