On Losing Middle English

Abstract: Most premodern manuscripts containing Middle English have not survived. This vast loss usefully requires scholarship to restrain its claims on various topics, such as the significance of manuscript evidence when a work survives in just one witness, and the claiming of literary-historical firsts. Survivorship bias characterizes much of Middle-English studies. Lots of lost books therefore present a research problem, one that might be tackled through several different channels: codicological and textual-critical work on absent exemplars, attention to records of lost books, and the study of patterns of loss inferred from patterns of survival. The study of loss might have other benefits in a time when quantification presents humanistic studies with challenges and opportunities, demanding interdisciplinary leaps across wide gaps. Lost evidence offers us some ways to think cautiously but also fruitfully in this scholarly moment: it helps us think about differences in the amount of data available in separate disciplines, for instance. Remembering the vast scale of loss also might help ward off a credulous attitude towards data and statistics.