Although Chaucer's 'Boece' has been edited many times this is the first edition to offer not
only a critical text but also collations with all extant medieval and late-medieval authorities
and also with the modern critical editorial tradition. It thus presents both a reconstructed
text and the materials from which that reconstruction was made. Beyond that this edition
offers a complete survey of the traditions of interpretive scholarship literary as well as
textual. If Chaucer's 'Boece' does not offer an entirely new work to scholars of Middle English
it presents a familiar one in an entirely new fashion that is designed to enhance appreciation
of how much works like the 'Boece' can reveal about medieval translation and manuscript
transmission as well as about Chaucer as a writer.
