The Southern Recension of the Pricke of Conscience, also known as the East Midland Recension, has not hitherto been edited except for a few passages and its manuscripts have been very little examined. Earlier attempts at a classification of the texts of all versions have resulted in the erroneous assignment of four manuscripts listed in Brown and Robbins Index of Middle English Verse to the wrong categories. The present textual study is based on the eighteen known manuscripts of the recension. It provides a history of Pricke of Conscience scholarship together with a bibliography of books, theses, articles and papers treating the poem, its versions and manuscripts. There is a description of each of the eighteen manuscripts for Book V, a textual study of all of the manuscripts using the variants in Book V and an edition of Book V based on Huntington Museum Manuscript HH 125. There follows a critical edition of a selected passage, lines 4737i-4802, of' the Signs Before Doomsday, with a listing of' the substantive manuscript variants; in the appendices are given the variants of' the manuscripts for Book V and a listing of the Latin works used as the sources of the Pricke of' Conscience.