During the 1960s, work began in England and America on Michael Seymour's three-volume critical edition (1974–88) of Trevisa’s translation.^[12] Seymour's edition was a major achievement which made the work, with the addition of critical apparatus, accessible to scholars of Middle English. The research that was involved in achieving a ‘best reading’ of Trevisa’s lost copy-text, and in tracing the Latin exemplars possibly available to him, also cultivated a still-productive research area into the manuscript provenances and affiliations. In addition, the team of editors involved in the project went on to provide much of the English-language literature on Properties, in further critical editions of manuscript sections of the work.^[13]

In particular, it produced studies of John Trevisa and his work as a pioneer translator of serious prose works into the vernacular.^[14] In the context of Lollard dissent at this time and of the contentious issue of Bible translation, Trevisa’s work as a stage in the establishment of vernacular prose writing and his involvement in the translation of devotional prose works have been the subject of conjecture.^[15] Together the comprehensive work of David Fowler on the life and work of John Trevisa, the Seymour edition of Properties and modern studies of late-fourteenth-century literary patronage in England and in France provide a clearer picture of the culture and the conditions of production within which Properties appeared in an English vernacular dialect.^[16]

The quantity of research into the manuscript tradition of ‘Properties’ and Properties involved in the edition also led to studies of individuals and institutions that owned or bequeathed copies in France and England.^[17] Seymour brought together evidence for ownership of ‘Properties’ in England and France on the basis of wills and library catalogues. Anthony Edwards took the search further, looking at contemporary writings showing evidence of other writers’ direct knowledge of the work in the later Middle Ages. He concluded that ‘Properties’ and its translation came to be a resource freely mined by other writers, and he cites evidence from direct citations and borrowings found in late-medieval texts across a wide range of genres.^[18] The important studies of the translation, the ownership and the borrowings, help to contextualise the work within a widening English readership of the later Middle Ages.

The modern edition of Trevisa’s Properties, and the significant body of secondary literature surrounding it, open up the subject for research into the work’s function for English readers, writers and sermon audiences of that era. However, while it is an essential basis for further research, Seymour’s edition of Properties is haunted by the ghost of the lost exemplar towards which the editors aspire. The pursuit of a complete version of the text involves a particular approach and special skills, but it usefully draws attention to another possible approach: that of seeing the manuscript tradition as multi-stranded. In one strand, the work maintains basic integrity in its 19 Books, a repository of ancient wisdom maintained in ecclesiastical and academic libraries; in others, readers adapt it and abstract from it to meet new needs, and according to the methods of production available to them.