In a recent article on Berthelette's 1532 edition of Gower's Confessio Amantis, Tim William Machan suggests that the presentation of the text in Macaulay's 1900 edition is misleading: noting that the majority of Confessio MSS place the poem's Latin glosses in the text column, Machan argues that, like Berthelette, modern printers ought to include the glosses in the text column rather than marginalizing them, both literally and figuratively, as Macaulay's edition has done.
Macaulay's (or Oxford's) decision to place Gower's glosses in the margins is defensible; the earliest MSS use this sort of layout, and the practical problems of text-column placement reveal themselves in the many medieval Confessio MSS which are difficult to read precisely because of it. But I take Machan as the point of departure for this paper because his observation makes an important point; that is, that type and layout are no more neutral in a modern edition than are the effects of decisions made by medieval scribes. Ordinatio in either case is, as Parkes and Doyle have said, a guide to interpretation of the text by a reader. In Gower's case, the marginal position of the glosses, the smaller italic type, and their displacement from the lines which they usually accompany by Macaulay's editorial English running heads, combine to suggest that the glosses are less important than is the English text. Modern Chaucer editions, for their part, omit or banish to an appendix the glosses to some of the Canterbury Tales: while these are not authorial, they are nevertheless to be found in major witnesses, and would have formed part of the reading experience for certain audiences. In their place one finds modern linguistic and explanatory glosses which reposition Chaucer's work, for introductory students at least, as the subject of (often painful) academic scrutiny, a work in a foreign language to be translated.
The scholarly arena is not the only one in which the reception of Middle English texts is predetermined through design decisions. In the nineteenth century in particular, pre-packaged "series" presentation of the icons of the (newly-defined) British literary tradition offered the more general public one way of looking at these authors, while the fine editions produced by small presses, often for literary societies, offered another. Here again there are telling differences between the presentation of Chaucer and Gower.
In this paper, then, I propose to compare the printed presentation of Gower and Chaucer in nineteenth-century printings and modern critical editions with MS and early modern printed witnesses. I want to restore to the discussion the ordinatio of the modern critical and student edition, so that we may recognize how much these modern presentations of medieval texts affect our reception of them.