The Will to Witness in Chaucer and his Contemporaries R. Allen Shoaf History is not given. History is not data.
History is a version of what happened, a construction of the data.
These turns and twists are the traces of historiography. By now, all of the above is commonplace. The Testament of Love is a difficult case for several reasons, chief among them the enormously vexed Nachleben of the work. The central datum of Usk's Testament is that we have no manuscript of the work. I have been at work on this edition since the summer of 1990, when, upon joining the Advisory Board of METS, I agreed with Russell A. Peck, General Editor of METS, that a new edition of the work was needed and that METS afforded an ideal opportunity to pursue it.