i. Nature of the Project

    Reader, take note, The Testament of Love by Thomas Usk does not exist. The Testament of Love by Thomas Usk as printed in 1532 (nearly 150 years after Usk's death) by William Thynne, who thought it was a work by Chaucer, exists. These two data, reader, must govern everything that follows in this book. Thus, for example, in the absence of any manuscript witness to TL, no editor can practice "traditional" editing techniques for the work in any systematic way (see Jellech [1970], p. 9). Expressed more theoretically, in contemporary terms of literary and editorial theory, the gap in the case of TL between the work and the text that conveys the work is extreme to the point of impasse. If every work is only imperfectly realized in the text(s) of its conveyance, then TL must stand in Middle English literature as the perfect paradigm of this imperfection (see Greetham [1994], pp. 326 and 352; Machan, pp. 181 and 193). And it is thus paradigmatic not only because of temporal lag but also because of the pervasive corruption in Thynne's edition, acknowledged and lamented by readers for centuries. Thus comparison, the "traditional" editor's most reliable tool, is literally impossible in the case of TL: there are no witnesses to compare. Hence reconstruction from texts imperfectly realizing the work is equally impossible. So Skeat, note well, openly admits that he re-writes Thynne's Renaissance English into his, Skeat's, idea of fourteenth-century English expressly and solely from his own experience and invention. The reader should note that the present editor does not presume to do likewise.
    Rather, I have decided upon the following, different expedient. In this edition, I print Thynne in a diplomatic transcription (see below, note 8) and, contrapuntally with it, a pointed version of the work representing my efforts at construing it. Thus, I offer the contemporary reader the constant choice, in the absence of any other choice, between the sixteenth-century editor's, Thynne's, construction of Usk and the twentieth-century editor's construction of Usk, mine. That this is a compromise we will all readily agree. However, it has one real virtue.
    And that is the reader's constant awareness of the track of Thynne's text which I am at pains to punctuate and redirect into my construction of its sense. I have transcribed Thynne as accurately as I could and then, on the same page, "edited" that transcription so that my reader can both experience Thynne's text and see, in the mise en page, my manipulation of that text. I mean by this expedient to provide readers with a device that will facilitate by comparison and contrast their own construction of Usk's sense even as it instructs them in my editorial theory and practice. . . .

pp. 1-3