The Siege of Jerusalem. Edited by Ralph Hanna and David Lawton. Early English Text Society, Original Series, 320. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xcix + 224. $85.


The assumptions of this very learned and careful edition of a popular and somewhat distasteful narrative from later medieval England run counter to trends in editing. While the idea of presenting a transcript of a single manuscript has become fashionable in recent years, these editors, evoking the editorial tradition of Talbot Donaldson and George Kane, exercise editorial judgment very actively and emend with some frequency. The result is an edition that presents the achievement of the poem in its best light and that will probably cause dismay among those of a more conservative ideology.


George R. Keiser
Kansas State University