University of Virginia Library

IV

The problem is much more difficult in the case of such works as Piers Plowman, The Prelude, and Murder in the Cathedral. These all challenge very strongly the concept of a single but lost text which the editor must seek to restore. This has implications of considerable importance for all textual critics and especially for those who can take their work no further back than an archetype which may be several removes from the author's original, which, of course, may not have ever existed in a single finalised form. Indeed, even if there is an absence of contamination, I am inclined to doubt how securely one can go back beyond the exclusive common ancestor (or hyparchetype). It seems to me increasingly doubtful to what extent one can relate one exclusive common ancestor to another in order to find their common ancestor (or archetype). The existence of more than one finalised text of so many works must make one wonder whether the various exclusive common ancestors do not descend from stages of these and that one is setting about doing what Dover Wilson has done with Culture and Anarchy — but at several removes and unaware that it is this kind of problem that one is tackling.

Even in what might at first sight seem to be the most certain cases of single-text sources — private letters written before the age of the typewriter and carbon paper — we can be deceived. Many examples spring to mind, but one will suffice. Thomas More's letter to Henry VIII of 5th March 1534 also exists, as George F. Warner notes, "in More's hand with a few verbal differences, in the Public Record Office" as well as in the British Museum, the version he reproduces.[24] And, of course, letters might be copied after the author's death. Drake's letter to John Foxe included in a recent collection[25] is dated about 1615 by the editors and is most certainly not in its author's hand. To what extent do, say, the letters of St Paul go back to versions made, even by their author (or authors) for communities other than those to which they were specifically addressed?

In no way is the paradigm accepted by textual critics more seriously in question than that of the modern theory of stemmatics. The nature of this acceptance is to be seen in the approval given to Paul Maas's

Textual Criticism.[26] Fredson Bowers begins his Bibliography and Textual Criticism by remarking: "The general procedures of textual criticism as it deals with manuscript study have been formulated for some years." There is then appended in a footnote: "The most convenient summary of the principles for dealing with manuscript texts is Paul Maas, Textual Criticism." Bowers goes on to suggest that the editor of a classical or medieval text "can attack the problem from a position of strength" and he concludes his paragraph by saying: These traditional methods do not, however, receive universal approval. H. J. Chaytor (who does not mention Maas) summarizing the work of Bedier, Dom Quentin, et al., in 1945 said: Earlier he had argued that a genealogy required that the approximate dates of the manuscripts must be established and went on: And L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson also point to the limitations of the stemmatic method:

The crucial weakness of the stemmatic method is, of course, its inability to deal with texts suffering from contamination. Maas certainly mentions contamination, stating quite clearly (paragraph 6) that his method is based on the assumption "that the copies made since the primary split in the tradition each reproduce one exemplar only, i.e. that no scribe has combined several exemplars (contaminatio)." And in paragraph 10 he states that if contamination has occurred, eliminatio "is greatly hindered, if not made impossible." And in the very last sentence (before the retrospect of 1956 which does not mention contamination) he states: "No specific has yet been discovered against contamination."

There seems little doubt that contamination was extensive in classical, Biblical, and medieval texts. Kane found that so much convergent variation had taken place in the A manuscripts of Piers Plowman that random groupings were extremely numerous and that it was difficult, if not impossible to show the whole genetic relationship of these manuscripts. Among the authorities he quotes, one is of particular interest in connexion with what I have to say about textual studies, science, and the rejection of paradigms.[29] According to E. Vinaver, writing in 1939:

As a gesture to Mr. Thorpe, perhaps I should not omit the last sentence Kane quotes from Vinaver: "Nothing has done more to raise textual criticism to the position of a science than the realisation of the inadequacy of the old methods of editing."[30]

In recent years some of those of us in the Departments of Greek, Theology, and English in the University of Birmingham who are interested in textual studies[31] have organised a joint seminar for our undergraduates to enable them to gain some insight into kinds of textual problems that they would not normally encounter in their main subjects. It is a modest enough scheme but it includes some account of problems presented by Aeschylus, the New Testament, the early Christian fathers, Piers Plowman, Elizabethan texts, The Prelude, and one or two modern authors such as Joyce and Eliot. What has proved most striking to those of us conducting the seminars has been the unanimity with which, quite independently, we have come to the conclusion that, because of contamination, the stemmatic approach is only of limited use — and then, as Kane suggests, often in a negative fashion:

In this area of textual studies it does seem that the old paradigm, represented by Maas's Textual Criticism, is no longer acceptable and one must evolve a new approach. For Thomson this has centred on the classification of errors.[33] This is closely related to "the identification of typical scribal substitutions" which, in Kane's view, "is, in default of recension, the main resource of the editor of these manuscripts." Kane's aim is "to establish presumption of originality among available readings, or, less often, to reconstruct the original reading from the variants."[34]

Kane's method may be illustrated from this example:

It will be apparent that such an approach is hardly likely to stand up to a Popperian falsification test; nor may it be verified, except subjectively. Its appeal can only be on the grounds of probability: that one hypothesis is, in the light of the knowledge of the text, language, literature, and ideas of the period, and of the scribes' involvement in what they were doing, less unacceptable than another hypothesis. The hypothetico-deductive method can play a part in discriminating between hypotheses, but ultimately, as Bowers puts it, one has to prefer the taste of a Kittredge, an Alexander, or, in this case, a Kane, to a quasi-systematic, quasi-objective approach.

The one element that Kane seems to take too little into account (in the light of what Honigmann has since written on the stability of texts) is the possibility of there being more than one authorial reading. This seems at least a possibility in the case of the example just quoted. Kane states that in Piers Plowman A he knows of no instance when it can be shown conclusively that because of authorial revision several variants are original (p. 147 fn 2). Of course, it cannot be shown conclusively: but then neither can Kane's editorial procedure prove it conclusively.