This book offers its readers a textual tradition, in the sense of identifying a coherent lineage of texts relating one to the other, re-addressing an idea that has not always found favour in scholarly circles. Late twentieth-century critics reacted against the textual closure and teleological assumptions of earlier accounts of tradition, which conventionally plotted an origin, heyday and moment of decay. Rather than returning to this narrative, I join with other new proponents of ‘tradition’ in identifying a set of relationships between texts which is neither progressive nor regressive, but simply ‘diachronically non-directed’. I also resist the idea of treating my texts as interlocutors within a closed and sealed textual system, placing them instead in an ongoing dialectic with historical events perceived at an institutional, regional and national register.