The texts of the sources and analogues should be accurately and faithfully transcribed from MSS or printed editions of base texts, except for the following:
a) capitalization and punctuation should be modernized.
b) i/j and u/v should be regularized, with i and u for vowels, and j and v for consonants.
c) abbreviations should be expandedwithout italicization.
All corrected readings and emendations should be enclosed in square brackets in the text, and the original readings recorded in the variants. Indicate the end of a manuscript page by a stroke (/), and note the folio the right-hand margin--f.64v. Use line numbers in all texts, including prose texts, and put them in the left-hand margins. Number lines consecutively within the text, and correlate them to the translations and variants.
All brief marginal summaries found in source texts in S&A1 should be deleted. All marginal references to line numbers in Chaucer's text should be deleted. Difficult words and phrases in Middle English texts should be glossed on the right hand side of the page, and further explained, where necessary, in footnotes. Difficult words and phrases in all other source texts will, of course, be translated into modern English, but may also be further explained in footnotes. All texts of sources and analogues in S&A2 will be printed on the rectos, with translations, variants, and footnotes on the opposite versos. (This is the method used in the Chaucer Library texts as shown in the attachments, and not the one used in Nicholson's draft of Friar's Tale.)Lines of poetry will be printed in single columns on the rectos of pages, and the number of lines will probably be the same as in S&A1, though we will not know for sure until we discuss matters of page format and layout with the publisher and designer. Some exceptions to this procedure may have to be made. For example, we may want to print the lines of the parallel texts of the two French analogues to the Reeve's Tale in double columns and translate only one of them instead of printing each analogue separately and then translating each one. These kinds of problems will need to be resolved in each individual case by the contributors, editors, and editorial board advisors.
Use the author's title, or one of your own devising, for all sources and analogues, and put it at the beginning of the text. Put "made-up" titles in square brackets. Under the title indicate briefly in parentheses the MS or printed edition from which you are editing or reprinting the text. For example:[LES CRONICLES]
(from MS Paris, Bibl. Nationale, franc. 9687, c. 1340-50)
or
THE TALE OF FLORENT
(from The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G.C. Macaulay,
II [Oxford, 1901], 74-86.)
Use footnotes for additional information of the kind given by Whiting (S&A1 p.242) about one of the analogues of the Wife of Bath's Tale. If several sources or analogues are used in a chapter, they should be numbered consecutively with Roman numerals.
Variants will be printed on the verso pages, after the translations and before the footnotes to the text. Each contributor should decide how many and which variants to use, but not as many will be needed, or should be used, as would appear in standard critical editions. As a general rule, we should print only those that reflect the basic purpose of editing texts in S&A2: to make accurate and reliable texts available for study of Chaucer's use of them in CT.
All manuscript readings that have been corrected or emended should be recorded in the corpus of variants. Others that might be included are readings that illuminate an obscure passage or shed light on the meaning, context, or transmission of a particular text down to the time it reaches Chaucer. The text of Chaucer that will be used in S&A2 will be The Riverside Chaucer.
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