The Legend of Good Women

This edition sets out to recover the original form of the poem Legend of Good Women by adopting the methods of textual criticism employed in the editing of Piers Plowman by Kane and Donaldson. The editors' introduction, forming roughly half of the book, covers a variety of allied interests, among them the general character of printed Chaucer texts and the practices of their editors; revision in The Legend of Good Womenand the `status' of the text of MS.

CUL Gg.4.27; scribal and editorial treatment of the finale as a constituent of Chaucer's metre; and the problem of copy text in the instance of 14th-century poetry preserved only in 15th-century manuscripts. JANET COWENis in the department of English at Kings' College, London University. GEORGE KANEwas Professor at Royal Holloway College, London, at King's College, London, and at the University of North Carolinaat Chapel Hill.