George Kane and the Invention of Textual Thought: Retrospect and Prospect

The late George Kane revolutionized the editing of Middle English texts. He brought both a severely logical stance and an artist’s eye to the discipline. On the one hand, Kane demonstrated the inability of stemmatics to deal with complex traditions; on the other, he was inventive in imagining the modes of transmission by which errors might have emerged in copying. Yet these two powerful contributions sit uneasily together, and Kane is a hard (and not always consistent) master to learn from. Two examples of recent scholarly misunderstanding, predicated upon Kane’s prickly difficult explanations of his procedures, indicate some limitations of his contribution and imply the need for thoughtful reconsiderations not as yet undertaken.