Margaret Connolly's
Textual Criticism
Editing prose texts
The Idea of Vernacular contains lots of prose texts (at least 50%).
Traditionally undergraduate courses = preodminantly verse (- only exceptions = Malory and women mystics particularly since late 1980s). This imbalance has been a big issue, as very much more prose than verse survives in ME.
Prose has not been taught because it doesn't fit with essentially "lit crit" view of English; also because editions of prose texts are not readily available. It is not well-catalogued or indexed (nb IMEP); not sufficiently edited & harder to edit. Prose is therefore not a natural choice for graduates & researchers. This is a circular process.
Why are prose texts harder to edit?---less stable than verse texts.
- no rhyme scheme to preserve lines intact
- scribes more likely to make errors & felt more free to adapt text
- prose texts tend to be extracted & anthologised, without acknowledgment
- transcripts do not have fixed lineation (as a verse text would)
- lineation can change right up until type-setting of text
- thus changes/corrections introduced at late stage can cause catastrophic knock-on effects
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