The text is based on Caxton’s printed edition of 1485. The syntax of the original has been left unchanged, but the spelling has been modernized. Archaic forms have usually been kept, although some minor alterations have been made, as, e.g., in rendering hem (3rd person plural pronoun) as them, and in the past tenses of a few verbs. Obsolete words are explained in the Glossary and incorporate the same minor spelling changes as are made regularly elsewhere. Caxton’s spellings of proper names have been harmonized. Modern punctuation and paragraphing have been used.
In commenting in the Notes on difficult points, I have occasionally referred to the readings of the Winchester Manuscript, which has been edited by Professor E. Vinaver as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, Oxford, 1967 (second edition). My thanks are due to the Clarendon Press for permission to quote from this edition, to which I am greatly indebted. My thanks are also due to the Pierpont Morgan Library and the John Rylands Library for supplying microfilms of the two extant copies of Caxton’s edition.
JANET COWEN