I’d like to push you on your reading of the utility of the facsimile edition for pedagogic purposes. You write that McLeod advocates for their use in order to "empower the reader," but then suggest that because such editions necessarily require the "faith and optimism in the curiosity and doggedness of the reader" in order to be useful, they are therefore limited in application. Shouldn't academic readers (and here I include undergraduate students, who are by no means less academic for their inexperience) necessarily be assumed to be curious and dogged? Isn't that the default point of the literary pursuit?

It seems to me that one of McLeod's repeated rationales for the use of printed facsimile editions (which are practically necessary even in an age of EEBO, to literally keep a class on the same page) is to disabuse editors of the idea that they need to blunt historical documents' strangeness for naïve readers. When we speak of the "problems" of issues like non-standardized spelling, are we not begging the question of general readers' inability to udnertsnad difficulties and translate textual curiosities? What better illustrates to readers that a copy text was mediated through movable type, a sterilized modern edition, or a facsimile? Which better supports the conditions in which a spontaneous inquiry might be poised? In other words, do you think that the bibliographic disorientation that facsimiles have the potential to invite might be pedagogically useful?