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Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Textual Criticism
and Modern
Editing
by
G. Thomas
Tanselle
Most scholarly editors, regardless of the nature or date of the material they work with, recognize that they are participating in a tradition extending back to antiquity; they realize that the activity of "textual criticism," whether called by that name or not, was for centuries concerned with the establishment of the texts of ancient Greek and Roman writings and of the Old and New Testaments and that the development of their discipline is therefore tied to the history of those works. Even if they are not familiar with the details of that history, they know that Aristarchus and other librarians at Alexandria in the third and second centuries B.C. attempted to determine what was authentic and what was spurious in the texts of the manuscripts they assembled; that the Renaissance humanists (among them Poggio, Politian, Aldus, and Erasmus) were particularly concerned with locating, establishing, and disseminating texts in the ancient languages; that Richard Bentley in the early eighteenth century made contributions to the textual study of several Latin authors and proposed a text of the New Testament based on the earliest manuscripts; and that Karl Lachmann, a century later, provided the fullest exposition up to that time of the genealogical approach and is therefore sometimes regarded as the father of modern textual criticism. They probably also know that A.E. Housman had some sharp things to say about the editorial practices of many of his predecessors, comments that emerged from important methodological considerations.
But unless their own work involves classical or biblical or medieval texts, they have in all likelihood not followed closely the nineteenth-and twentieth-century history of textual study in these areas. The explanation is not simply the growing specialization of scholarship but the feeling that the textual criticism of manuscript texts produced centuries after their authors' deaths has little, if any, relevance to textual work on printed texts published during their authors' lifetimes. The foolishness
As a contribution toward what I hope will become increased communication among scholars in all these fields, I should like to offer in what follows a few reflections on the relations between textual work on early or medieval manuscripts and that on later printed texts. Although I do not propose a systematic survey of the history of classical, biblical, and medieval textual criticism,[4] I believe that some purpose is served by bringing together, in this context, references to a number of the significant discussions. What I trust will become clear in the process is that editors of ancient and modern materials have much more to learn from one another than they have generally recognized. Equally revealing, if rather depressing, is the fact that many of their areas of confusion are the same: some of the questions that have been endlessly and inconclusively debated—and often, it must be said, illogically argued as well —are identical in both fields. In either case, the essential point is the relevance each field has for the other.
I
It should not be surprising that all textual scholarship is related, for the same activities are involved, regardless of the diversity of the materials. One must decide whether to produce a diplomatic—that is, unaltered—text of a single document or a critical text, which is a new text that incorporates the results of editorial judgment regarding variant readings and errors. One must assemble the relevant or potentially relevant documents (handwritten, typed, or printed), then find out in what ways their texts differ by collating them, then attempt to determine the relationships among the texts, and finally, if the edition is to be critical, construct a new text by choosing among variant readings and by making conjectures where errors seem to be present in all texts. These stages are interrelated: the kind of thinking one brings to the task of determining relationships among texts, for example, will obviously have a bearing on the decisions made at the next stage. Although these two
Methodological writings about the editing of post-medieval literature, on the other hand, have reversed this emphasis. Although relationships among the texts from this period are by no means always clear-cut, the dimensions of the problem are often significantly different: manuscripts in the author's hand, copies made directly from them, printed editions set from such documents (and perhaps proofread by the author), and later editions during the author's lifetime (perhaps set from copies of the earlier editions annotated by the author) are the characteristic materials. Editorial theorists concerned with this period
In classical textual criticism, these basic operations have generally been referred to as recensio and emendatio, and the distinction between the two points up another contrast with textual scholarship of later literature. Recensio refers to the process of establishing the archetype, or the latest common ancestor of all surviving manuscripts, insofar as it can be established from the evidence in those manuscripts, which are the only witnesses to the tradition. The particular decisions made about individual variant readings in the construction of this archetype depend, at least in part, on the relationships that have been postulated among the manuscripts; the practice of stemmatics—of constructing genealogical trees to show manuscript relationships—is therefore also sometimes called "recensionism." And whether or not one aspires to a system that eliminates judgment in the construction and use of the stemmata, the fact is that ultimately judgment will have been involved in the attempt to choose the wording of the archetype from among the variant readings. Swings in scholarly fashion toward, and away from, the use of critical judgment—along with the associated tendency to favor, or disapprove of, eclecticism—must be looked at later; but the point here is not whether a single text is principally adhered to in producing the new recension but the fact that the recension is defined as being limited to readings present in the witnesses (or obvious corrections of them). It is the next stage, emendatio, in which the editor can engage in conjecture to rectify what appear to be errors in all preserved texts.[7] Editorial discussion
It should further be evident that any approach or vocabulary suggesting that the latter are more conjectural than the former is delusory. Of course, a reading adopted from one of the documents may be a striking reading that the editor would not have thought of or dared introduce independently, but the decision to consider it as worthy of acceptance into the critical text is still an act of conjecture, always entailing the potential danger that the reading is accorded too much credence by the mere fact of its existence in one of the documents. To regard the choice among variants as "recension," defined as establishing "what must or may be regarded as transmitted" (Maas), and then to label further editorial alteration as "emendation" or "conjectural emendation," would seem to overemphasize the objectivity of the first and to imply a greater distance between the two than in fact exists. The recension, after all, is a conclusion resulting from scholarly judgment or conjecture—except, of course, when only one text survives or (theoretically) when all surviving texts are identical. Even when the archetype appears to be the text of one of the extant manuscripts, judgment regarding individual variants is still involved in reaching that decision. To think of
As the division of the editorial process into recensio and emendatio makes clear, editors of ancient texts are normally concerned with producing critical editions—editions, that is, containing texts that are different, as a result of the editors' intervention, from any of the documentary texts now existing. Editors of printed texts from the last five hundred years have also been engaged for the most part with this kind of edition: the extensive discussion in the wake of Greg's "Rationale," for instance, has concentrated on critical editions. Yet in the exchange of views that has increasingly been taking place in recent years between editors of modern literature and editors of statesmen's papers, some of the so-called "historical" editors have questioned the value of critical texts, or at least of texts that are "eclectic" in incorporating readings from two or more documents. It is easy to see why a historian editing letters and journals in the hand of a particular statesman would think primarily of a diplomatic edition, and similarly understandable that an editor of an ancient Greek text surviving in much later manuscripts would probably wish to construct a new text attempting to restore the author's words. But the difference between the two situations does not really rest on the different nature of the materials: there are different goals involved, the aim in the former instance being the reproduction of the content of a given document and in the latter being the reconstruction of what the author of a text intended to say. Both approaches are applicable to any material: documents containing ancient Greek texts, for instance, can obviously be treated as entities in their own right, with texts to be exactly reproduced, as manifestations of particular moments in the history of the pieces of writing involved; or they can be regarded as evidence to be used in reconstructing a text nearer its author's intentions than any of the surviving texts manages to come. Historians may more often find themselves producing diplomatic texts of particular documents (the contents of which were often not intended for publication), and scholars of literature (both ancient and modern)
This point would seem to be so elementary and obvious as not to need stating; but unfortunately some textual controversies have arisen through a failure to keep in mind the most basic distinctions and to appreciate the place each editorial undertaking occupies in the large framework that encompasses all textual work in all fields. One historical editor has gone so far recently as to make this statement: "To what uses literary critics may put bastard documents is for them to say, but the saying of the same will not likely change the historical discipline's rules of evidence and citation."[8] The narrowness and closed-mindedness of this position is astounding. In a more sophisticated form, however, this issue keeps turning up: the question of eclecticism has perennially been a point of controversy among editors of the classics as well as of modern works.[9] Some editors of modern literary works, who well understand the value of critical texts, have nevertheless argued against combining into a single text readings that reflect different stages of authorial revision. There is nothing wrong in principle, of course, with the position that authorially revised texts may at times be best handled by preparing separate critical editions of each version. But the mistake that sometimes follows is the belief that no variant from one version can be incorporated into another. That injunction would naturally be proper if one were producing a diplomatic edition of each version; but if a critical text of each version is the goal, then one must recognize that some of the variants among versions do not represent a particular stage of revision or rethinking but are precisely the kinds of corrections that the editor is already committed to inserting—without documentary authority. I make this point (which has been discussed more fully else-where)[10] in order to suggest, once again, that the distinction between
Further indication of these connections can be suggested by referring to three of the more recent manuals on textual criticism, published coincidentally at about the same time, James Willis's Latin Textual Criticism (1972), Martin L. West's Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts (1973), and Vinton A. Dearing's Principles and Practice of Textual Analysis (1974).[11] These books offer several contrasts. Willis and West, classicists and editors, address their work, as the titles indicate, to other editors of classical texts; Dearing, a professor of English who is establishing the text for the California edition of Dryden and is also working on an edition of the Greek New Testament, intends for his book to be applicable to all editorial scholarship, indeed "to the transmission in any form of any idea or complex of ideas" (p. ix). Willis, whose writing is marred by unsuccessful sarcasm, is principally occupied with restating "the many ways in which scribes were accustomed to make mistakes" (p. ix), though he prefaces that account with a brief section on "Fundamentals"; West, who writes lucidly and concisely, would claim originality largely (though not entirely) for his way of stating certain complex questions and their conventional answers and for choosing passages to illustrate his points; Dearing, who writes at greater length and with some obscurity, covers what a manual must cover but uses the occasion to set forth his own proposal for the analysis of relationships among texts. Willis's book is the narrowest and least significant of the three, focusing on scribal errors and devoting considerable space to "trial passages," on which readers are invited to exercise their ingenuity by proposing emendations
One vital matter commented on in all three books—and one that editors of modern literature have a particular interest in—is the role of the analysis of physical evidence in textual decisions. What has come to be known as "analytical bibliography" is crucial to the editing of texts in printed books: in order to be in a position to understand textual anomalies in a printed text, one must first have extracted as much information as possible about the printing of the work from the evidence preserved in the printed sheets themselves. As a result of the efforts of McKerrow, Pollard, Greg, Bowers, and Hinman,[13] and of those that followed their lead, editors of printed texts must now deal with such matters as the identification of compositors' habits and of the order of formes through the press. Knowing as much as one can about what happened to a particular text in the printing shop or the publisher's office puts one in a better position to recognize those features of the text that did not come from the author (or at least were not present in the copy furnished to the printer); analytical bibliography has shown time and
This whole question enters Dearing's book in the first sentence, where we are told that textual analysis "determines the genealogical relationships between different forms of the same message" but not "the relationships between the transmitters of the different forms"—or, as he puts it in the next paragraph, "the genealogy of the variant states of a text" but not "the genealogy of their records."[14] The distinction, indeed, Dearing regards as one of his central achievements: he believes that his book "carries out to the full" the differentiation set forth in the earlier version[15] between "the genealogy of manuscript and other books as physical objects and the genealogy of the ideas or complexes of ideas that these physical objects transmit" (p. ix). It is of course quite proper to begin with this basic point; editors of all materials from all periods must recognize that the chronology of texts does not necessarily match the chronology of their physical presentation. The point is perhaps not quite such a revelation as Dearing thinks. Nevertheless, it is always good to have fundamental distinctions set forth clearly at the outset of a discussion, and one would have no cause for complaint if Dearing had not carried the point to the opposite extreme, slighting the legitimate role of physical evidence in textual study. Writers in the past, he says, have "almost always" confused the physical document with the text it carries, and he admits that "it is extremely difficult to free oneself from the bibliographical spell"; but it is a "fundamental and important" matter, he insists, "to exclude bibliographical thinking from textual analysis"
The serious bibliographical problem raised by these statements becomes even more evident with Dearing's next sentence: "The many identical copies produced by printing from the same setting of type, however, provided they are uniformly bound and readied for sale as a single lot, are usually counted as one record." Analytical bibliographers have been demonstrating for three-quarters of a century that surviving copies from the same setting of type (i.e., from the same edition) are not necessarily "identical" in their text—indeed, that they are frequently (or, in some periods, usually) not identical. (Whether or not they are "uniformly bound" or "readied for sale as a single lot" has nothing to do with their text.) Differences can come about either intentionally or inadvertently, through stop-press corrections and alterations between printings or through accidents that damage the type (perhaps necessitating some resetting) and deterioration of type or plates through wear. The essential point is that different copies of an edition are different physical
We thus come back to Dearing's assertion that "bibliographical thinking" should be excluded from "textual analysis." It is no doubt true that some textual critics have been confused in their thinking and have not differentiated between a document and the text it contains; but it is an overstatement to say that "textual critics in the past almost always confused the two genealogies when they did not devote their attention exclusively to the genealogy of records" (p. 15). In any case,
Without losing sight of the idea that the genealogy of texts is a different concept from the genealogy of documents, there is a real sense in which one may still claim that a text does date from the time it is inscribed or set in type. The changes introduced by a scribe or compositor, whether out of habitual practice or out of inadvertence, produce a new text;[17] and understanding as much as possible about the production of that text—the habits of the individual scribe, the characteristics of the period, and so on—helps one to know how certain readings occurred. If one rules out this knowledge, one makes textual analysis a rather fruitless exercise, for one may postulate relationships that are shown by
In contrast, West's manual sets forth emphatically, if briefly, the role that the analysis of "external" evidence must play. He points out that the process of examining texts has refined "our understanding of the languages, metres, and styles of the Greeks and Romans," which in turn provides a background for examining further texts; we learn about "such matters as the proclivities of scribes" and "the processes governing the spread of texts at different periods" (p. 8) and need that knowledge (which, as he correctly says, is of interest in its own right) in evaluating particular texts. At other points he refers to the use of paleographical
West's inclusion of the results of paleographical analysis and watermark study among the types of "external" evidence points to the way in which terminology reflects point of view. To the analytical bibliographer such evidence would be thought of as internal, because it is part of the physical evidence of the document, as opposed to relevant information that comes from outside the document, such as that from publishers' archives or from one's knowledge of the book-making practices of the period (itself built up from internal evidence from other documents). West can place both watermark evidence and one's general knowledge of the period together as external evidence because they are both external to the text, even though one is not external to the document transmitting the text. Both usages—that of the analytical bibliographer and that of the textual critic—are proper: they simply result from different approaches to the material. Such differences in terminology should prove no obstacle to mutual comprehension so long as the operations being referred to are thoroughly understood and so long as the line between the approaches is not imagined to be firmer than it actually is. Some techniques of analytical bibliography—compositorial analysis, for instance—involve evidence drawn from the text itself; determining the habits of a compositor, or a scribe, depends on a close examination of practices within the text. One can say, and some have said, that this kind of examination takes the text only as additional physical evidence, regarding it simply as ink on paper. It is true that those inked shapes constituting the text are physical evidence; it is also true, however, that the analytical bibliographer must understand what the text says, in order to know which characteristics are worth studying as possibly attributable to compositorial or scribal practice. Determining whether this evidence is internal or external is not a very productive problem; what is important is to guard against equating "external" with "objective" and "internal" with "subjective." The terms unfortunately come to have these connotations in many discussions of the textual criticism of manuscripts. Sometimes "internal evidence" is used to refer to the kind of evidence adduced by an editor to support a conjectural emendation (largely evidence from context, which, in varying degrees, involves interpretation and is therefore subjective), and "external evidence" is taken to mean the relationship among manuscripts, which in turn leads (without the necessity of literary judgment) to the adoption of certain readings rather than others. West is too sensible to make this mistake: he describes "the more exact information derived from internal evidence" as "the interrelationships of the copies as inferred from comparison of their readings"
Nevertheless, his statement is not as clear as it might be. One assumes that "copies" refers to texts, for if it referred to the manuscripts themselves the statement would be guilty of the confusion, about which Dearing warns, between records and texts. Even so, there is a problem, for the sentence seems to make "the interrelationships of the copies" wholly dependent on a "comparison of their readings" and leaves one wondering how the "external" evidence previously described fits in. "The inquiry," West says, "proceeds on two fronts, from external and from internal evidence" (p. 30). The external evidence of provenance, paleography, "general historical conditions," and the like then becomes the "historical backcloth" (p. 31) against which to "project the more exact information derived from internal evidence." Stated in this way, it is hard to comprehend precisely what the function of the "backcloth" is in the whole process. West does understand that physical evidence plays a role in interpreting the readings present in a text, but his category of "external evidence" is here presented largely as having to do with the relationships of documents rather than of texts. What is lacking is explicit recognition that the comparison of readings, leading to inferences about the relationships of the texts, must involve analysis of physical evidence as well as literary analysis: examination of the physical features of a document is relevant not only to dating the document but also to evaluating the readings in the text contained in that document. Whether one is dealing with printed books or with manuscripts, understanding the physical evidence may set limits on the literary speculation that can be engaged in. I do not wish to dwell on what is only an infelicity in West's exposition, but it provides an occasion for underscoring a significant point. Distinguishing "external" and "internal" as they refer to evidence is finally not so important as recognizing the interrelatedness of all evidence. Neither kind of evidence has a monopoly on demonstrable conclusions; because generalizations based on inductive evidence are inevitably provisional, some historical "facts" may be more conjectural than emendations based on an editor's judgment. And if one wishes to think of the physical evidence of a document as external to the text, then one must think of degrees of externality, for such evidence is not in the same realm as the larger historical framework into which one hopes to place both the document and the text. If West, instead of asserting that "the interrelationships of the copies as inferred from comparison of their readings" should be projected onto a "historical backcloth," had said—turning his statement around—that the comparison
Some of the techniques of bibliographical analysis, such as some of those used to distinguish compositors, rely on characteristics of spelling and punctuation; and data about compositors' habits in these respects are important to the editor whose aim is to restore the author's spelling and punctuation as well as wording.[21] Most scholarly editors of postmedieval writing have such an aim: since spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and so on must be considered an integral part of texts, affecting their meaning, and since most of the extant documents containing these writings are relatively near to the authors' manuscripts (or include those manuscripts), editors dealing with these centuries have given a great deal of thought to the problem of authoritative spelling, punctuation, and capitalization (or "accidentals," as these features are sometimes called, in distinction to "substantives," or the words themselves). It is a common notion that the treatment of accidentals is one of the major respects in which the editing of ancient writing differs from the textual work on more recent material; because the spelling, punctuation, and system of abbreviations in the surviving texts of ancient works generally reflect the customs of scribes who lived long after the authors of the works, many people assume that even if these matters are of bibliographical significance they are not of textual importance and that editors of such texts would therefore find nothing relevant in the extensive discussion of recent decades concerning the accidentals in literature of the last five hundred years. At first glance there would seem to be good reason for this position, when one considers, among other points, that, although punctuation was in use from at least the fourth century B.C., the extent of its use is a matter of considerable debate; that in ancient times texts were normally written as a continuous series of letters, without spaces to separate words; and that in both Greek and Latin there was flexibility in spelling in certain periods.[22] Thus both the possibility of restoring to a classical text the spelling and punctuation of its author
The issue is not as simple, however, as these statements, taken out of context, would suggest, and West's own discussion raises some of the considerations that link so-called accidentals with meaning and with the author. West recognizes that "in theory an accent or a breathing in a medieval copy of a post-Hellenistic writer might go back to the author's autograph"; but he goes on to say that in most cases "all such features of the tradition will represent some later person's interpretation of a text consisting of virtually nothing but a continuous sequence of letters" (pp. 54-55) and that the textual critic is also "at liberty" to "reinterpret" the text in this respect. The question of how, or whether, to divide a continuous text into separated words is one that editors of modern works do not have to face, and it has therefore not been included in those editors' discussions of accidentals. In one sense word-division does fall into the group of features sometimes classed as "accidentals," for it is a matter of spacing and not of what letters are present. But obviously there may be ambiguous spots in an undivided text, where the letters can be formed into more than one set of words that make sense in the context, and matters of wording are usually called "substantive." The point is not what label ought to be used but the fact that the distinction between substantives and accidentals involves form, not meaning.[24] West further underlines the connection between marks and meaning when he says that, in the case of a nonsense word, "accents etc. may be valuable clues to what lies behind it, since they must have been supplied when the text was in a more intelligible state" (p. 55). Words that are not nonsense, however, may still be wrong (as West recognizes elsewhere), and accents or punctuation may provide clues anywhere in the text, not just where the text fails to make sense. Similarly, scribal
The attention one pays to accidentals, in other words, goes beyond the question of whether they reflect authorial or scribal practice. It is no doubt true that the accidentals in surviving manuscripts of classical texts exhibit more alterations by scribes than do the words, and equally true that editors have more basis for attempting to establish authors' wording than punctuation and spelling. Nevertheless, scribes do alter words as well as accidentals; the distinction is one of degree, and the texts one has to deal with contain both words and accidentals. If one decides in a given case that the accidentals of the manuscript tradition have no authority,
These considerations have direct implications for the apparatus. Since accidentals can affect meaning and scribal practices in accidentals can constitute important textual evidence, a complete recording of such details, as well as of substantive variants, would seem to be desirable. Selectivity, of one kind or another, has been the rule, however, in apparatuses for early texts, though disagreement has existed about the principles of selection. Willis approvingly claims that it is "a matter of common consent that purely orthographical variants should be excluded" (p. 35). His statement is disproved by West, who finds it "advisable to record orthographical variants fairly systematically, at least for portions of the text," and who further implies their significance by holding that, if one decides not to record "certain orthographical trivialities," "the fact should be stated" (p. 66).[27] Of course, printing costs
II
If discussion of the role of punctuation and spelling and of physical analysis in editing has been rather neglected in the theoretical writings devoted to early texts, the problem of how to determine the relationships among the surviving texts certainly has not been neglected. The great body of literature on the theory of the textual criticism of ancient and medieval writings has focused on what is after all at the heart of all critical editing: the question how to choose among variant readings, which in turn involves an assessment of the relationships among the witnesses and an evaluation of when a departure from all the variants would bring one closer to the author's intention. These matters have of course been debated at length by editors of modern works also, and the same central issues link all these discussions together. All of them in fact can be seen as variations on the theme of objectivity versus subjectivity. Some urge the desirability of as objective a system as possible,
Fredson Bowers, writing on "Textual Criticism" in the 1958 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, illustrates this point by suggesting how the editing of modern texts has benefited from earlier work on the classics: "The acceptance of Housman's attitude and its extension, about the middle of the 20th century, to editing from printed texts constitutes one of the most interesting of modern developments in editorial theory." Bowers here takes Housman as the exponent of a movement away from the Lachmannian tradition of relying whenever possible on the archetype as established through genealogical reasoning. Although many have pointed out the fallacy of believing that a "best" text has the correct readings at points where it is not obviously in need of emendation, Housman's famous remark in the preface to his 1903 edition of the first book of the Astronomicon of Manilius must be regarded as the classic statement of it:
The hope of having a single text to rely on dies hard, however, and
Some confusion on this point has been exhibited in the debate among editors of modern works over whether to choose an author's final manuscript as copy-text in preference to the first printed edition set from it. Of course, any attempt to fix a general rule on this matter is misguided, since situations vary greatly, and in some cases an author's revisions in proof may have been so thorough as to make the printed edition the proper choice. Some editors, however, prefer the first edition not for such reasons, but because it is the product of a historical moment; even though some aspects of its text may be the result of changes made in the publishing office or pressures brought to bear on the author by the publisher or others, the author accepted these conditions, they say, as part of the whole publishing process, and the text of the first edition is the one that emerged from a specific set of historical forces and the one that the public first read. This argument, however, leads only to the production of a facsimile edition; it has no relevance to a critical edition, although it is sometimes offered as if it did have, through a failure to think clearly about what the two approaches mean. Editors of earlier material do not encounter the problem in quite this form, since they do not deal with authorial manuscripts or authorially supervised printed texts, but the general issues are familiar to them. One manifestation of the exaggerated respect accorded to individual printed texts is the problem of the textus receptus of ancient writings. The text of the New Testament, or of other writings, that reached print was not, of course, necessarily more authoritative than other texts; but the controversy that sometimes surrounds editorial decisions to depart from the textus receptus suggests the irrationality with which a favored text can be defended. Clearly there are many differences between this situation and the question, faced by editors of modern works, whether to turn from printed book to manuscript for copy-text. But there is an essential similarity as well: in both cases the scholar's responsibility is to examine all the evidence in an effort to come as close as possible to the text intended by the author,[36] however many or few steps removed
Greg's rationale for selecting a copy-text was of course set forth in the first instance for editors of printed texts that are not far removed from authorial manuscripts; and near the beginning of his essay he distinguishes his approach (growing out of McKerrow's) from that appropriate for the classics. In the latter, he says, "it is the common practice, for fairly obvious reasons, to normalize the spelling," whereas in the editing of English texts "it is now usual to preserve the spelling of the earliest or it may be some other selected text":
For this purpose it is not necessary to go back beyond the approach usually associated with Karl Lachmann. Although scholars have shown that Lachmann's own contributions to the development of the "genealogical" approach have been greatly exaggerated,[40] his editions of the New Testament (1831) and of Lucretius (1850) stand as monuments linking his name with this method. Historically the importance of this movement is that it represented a reaction against the unprincipled eclecticism that had prevailed in the previous century (of which Richard Bentley was the most important, and most notorious, exemplar) and marked a recognition of what a scholarly approach must entail, at a time when ancient documents were beginning to be more accessible. There can be no question that the general drift of the genealogical approach is correct: that scholars must examine all the extant documents, learn as much about them as possible, and attempt to establish the relationships among the texts they contain. This much we would now take for granted as part of what it means to be scholarly. The difficulty comes in choosing a means for working out those relationships and in deciding what use to make of the data thus postulated; and when people refer to "the genealogical method" they normally mean the particular recommendations on these matters associated with Lachmann and his followers. Taken in this sense, the genealogical method can certainly be criticized, and its defects have by now been enumerated many times.[41] The essence of the method is to classify texts into families by
The force of these weaknesses is obvious, as is their relevance to the textual analysis of later material. Another of the often-discussed limitations of the method deserves to be underscored here: the fact that it does not make allowance for authorial revisions, for the possibility that variant readings result from the author's second thoughts as well as from scribes' errors and alterations. This oversight is not unique to the genealogical method but in fact exists, in greater or less degree, in all the approaches to textual criticism, regardless of the date of the works being considered. It springs from wishful thinking, for however difficult it is to choose among variants, it is easier to proceed on the basis that one is right and the others wrong than to recognize that several may be "right" or at least represent the author's preference at different times. Even among editors of modern works, where many authorial revisions can be documented, there is a reluctance to conceive of a text as containing multiple possibilities; and though an editor's goal is indeed to "establish" a text, editors—of works from all periods—should not forget that a "work" comprehends all the authorial readings within its several texts.
Another common criticism of the genealogical method—that one must revert to one's own judgment when the choice is, to quote Maas, "between different traditions of equal 'stemmatical' value" (p. 1)—calls attention to what may be a more serious problem: the tendency to think that the method generally minimizes the role of subjective judgment. The Lachmannian system is responsible for the standard division of editorial activity into recension and emendation and is therefore conducive to an attitude, as I suggested earlier, that takes the first of these procedures to be more objective than it is (or can be). There is superficially an appropriateness in distinguishing readings thought of by the
Some of the people who have criticized the "Lachmann method" have set forth alternative approaches that have themselves become the subject of considerable discussion. One such person is Joseph Bédier, whose work, particularly influential in the medieval field, can serve to represent another general approach to editing. The introduction to his second edition (1913) of Jean Renart's Le Lai de l'Ombre, which has become the point of departure for the twentieth-century criticism of Lachmann,[47] concentrates on the two-branched stemma as evidence of the weakness of the genealogical method. The fact that most stemmata turn out to be dichotomous is regarded suspiciously as indicating more about the operation of the system than about the actual relationships among the manuscripts. What Bédier recommends instead is to choose a single good manuscript and to reprint it exactly except for any alterations that the editor finds imperative. This approach has been called "a return to the method of the humanists of the Renaissance";[48] certainly it is a move in the opposite direction from Housman's criticism of Lachmann at nearly the same time. When Giorgio Pasquali, ridiculing this best-manuscript approach, linked the English Shakespeare scholars with the medievalists in following it,[49] he was essentially correct in regard to the period before Greg's "Rationale." There is no question that, in spite of Housman's incontrovertible logic, the best-text theory —whether or not directly influenced by Bédier in every case—held sway over a great deal of editing in the first half of the twentieth century. An instructive paradox of the commentary on Bédier is that his position has been regarded both as extremely conservative, restricting the role of editorial judgment, and as extremely subjective, emphasizing the editor's own critical decisions. The strict adherence to a single text does suggest an attempt to minimize subjectivity; but the leeway then allowed the editor in deciding what readings are not possible and must be replaced sets very few restrictions on subjectivity. The point in the editorial
Followers of Bédier and of Lachmann have been adept at suppressing recognition of the role of critical judgment at certain stages of the processes they favor, and they have failed to see that their apparently quite different approaches have much in common. The narrowness and confusion exhibited by such partisans can be illustrated in the work of a distinguished medievalist, Eugène Vinaver.[50] Admiring Bédier's criticism of Lachmann, he makes sweeping claims for the newer system:
It was inevitable that the desire for objectivity in textual analysis would lead to the use of quasi-mathematical or quasi-statistical approaches.
He recognized, however, that "we are bound to seek such an explanation if we can"; and the dream that "some day a law or a formula will be discovered which we can apply to the reconstruction of a text as easily and as safely as the chemists now apply laws of analysis or synthesis" (p. 141) continues to intrigue us, as evidenced by the scholars—such as Archibald Hill, Antonín Hrubý, and Vinton A. Dearing—who have followed in the tradition of Quentin and Greg.[59] Hill, Hrubý, and Dearing all attempt to work out problems left unsettled by Greg, and all recognize the importance, first seen clearly by Quentin, of examining distributional before genealogical evidence (i.e., studying the record of
Different as these various methods—from Lachmann to Dearing—are, they all have the same problem: the questions of conflation and the direction of descent prove to be the stumbling block for systems that attempt to achieve objectivity, and those systems either rely on subjective decisions, covertly or openly, or else set up conditions that limit their relevance to actual situations. This is not to say that one or another of the procedures developed in these systems will not be helpful to editors—of modern as well as earlier material—on certain occasions,[63] and editors can profit from the discussion of theoretical issues that the exposition of these systems has produced. But the impulse to minimize the role of human judgment (the view, in Dearing's words, that "textual analysis, having absolute rules, is not an art" [p. 83]) has not led to any satisfactory comprehensive system. In this context, it is useful to look again at the approach suggested by Greg in "The Rationale of Copy-Text," for it places no restrictions on individual judgment—that is, informed judgment, taking all relevant evidence into account and directed toward the scholarly goal of establishing the text as the author wished it. The idea that all alterations made by an editor in the selected copy-text are emendations—whether they come from other documentary texts or from the editor's (or some editor's) inspiration—gives rise to a fundamentally different outlook from that which often has prevailed in the
All available evidence should be considered by the editor in making these decisions—evidence from the physical analysis of the documents and from the textual analysis of their contents as well as from the editor's own judgment as to what, under the circumstances, the author is likely to have written. Although Greg's proposal is specific, dealing with the printed dramas of the English Renaissance, the spirit of his rationale can, I think, be legitimately extended in this way, providing a comprehensive approach that encompasses other more limited approaches. It allows one to go wherever one's judgment leads, armed with the knowledge of what evidence is available and what systems of analysis have been proposed; and it provides one with a mechanical means of deciding among variants only when all else fails, a means that is still rationally
Because Greg spoke specifically of copy-texts that were chosen for the relative authority of their accidentals, editors of earlier works—of which the preserved documents are not likely to contain authoritative accidentals—have concluded that his approach is relevant only for works preserved in authorial manuscripts or in printed editions based on them. Such a view does not take into account the natural extension of Greg's position that I have mentioned: the idea of copy-text as presumptive authority, which one accepts (for both accidentals and substantives)
This procedure, derived from Greg, would seem to be appropriate for all instances in which—if the choice of copy-text is not clear on other grounds—one can decide that a particular text is fewer steps removed from the original than any other known text. It is not helpful, however, in those instances in which two or more texts are an equal, or possibly equal, number of steps from the original. These situations are taken up by Fredson Bowers in an important essay on "Multiple Authority,"[65] which is the logical complement to Greg's "Rationale." What is particularly
My comments in the preceding pages aim to be nothing more than a series of reflections arising from an effort to think about what connections there are between the textual criticism of ancient writings and the editorial scholarship devoted to modern works. I do not claim to have proposed a new "method"; but I do hope that I have exhibited a coherent line of thinking applicable to all editorial scholarship. The issues will always be debated, and there will always be champions of various approaches. But no approach can survive in the long run that does not recognize the basic role of human judgment, accept it as something positive, and build on it. Welcoming critical judgment is not incompatible with insisting on the use of all possible means for establishing demonstrable facts. Scholarly editors are, after all, historians as well as literary critics, and they must understand the subjective element in the reconstruction of any event from the past. Establishing texts from specific times in the past, including the texts intended by their authors, is a crucial part of this large enterprise of historical reconstruction and cultural understanding. It seems obvious that textual scholars dealing with modern works can benefit from examining the ways in which editors of earlier materials have dealt with complicated problems of transmission and from studying the theories underlying those treatments; I think it equally clear that editors of earlier writings will find relevant what students of later texts have said about authors' revisions and the choice and treatment of a copy-text. One of the textual scholars who have emphasized the importance of cooperation among specialists in different areas is Bruce Metzger. He has urged New Testament scholars, through his own impressive example, to explore textual work in the Septuagint and the Homeric and Indian epics and to "break through the provincialism . . . of restricting one's attention only or chiefly to what has been published in German, French, and English." As he says, "An ever present danger besets the specialist in any field; it is the temptation to neglect taking into account trends of research in other fields. Confining one's attention to a limited area of investigation may result in the impoverishment rather than the enrichment of scholarship."[69] It is to be hoped that many more textual scholars will pursue their work with this same breadth of vision and will welcome the "cross-fertilization of ideas and
Notes
Robert R. Bolgar evocatively describes the situation in the last decades of the nineteenth century: "Textual criticism was the branch of Latin studies that enjoyed most esteem. . . . Successful editors, critics whose conjectures appeared in learned journals or in their adversaria critica were regarded as the leading scholars of their day. They had the stature of paladins in the eyes of their colleagues." See "Latin Literature: A Century of Interpretation," in Les Études classiques aux XIXe et XXe siècles: leur place dans l'historie des idèes, ed. Willem den Boer (1979), pp. 91-126 (quotation from p. 99).
W. W. Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950-51), 19-36; reprinted in his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), pp. 374-391.
I have attempted to provide a critical survey of these developments in "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text and the Editing of American Literature," SB, 28 (1975), 167-229 (reprinted in Selected Studies in Bibliography [1979], pp. 245-307), and in "Recent Editorial Discussion and the Central Questions of Editing," SB, 34 (1981), 23-65. Four publications of the Modern Language Association of America contain basic statements about editing that derive from Greg's rationale: The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (1963; rev. ed., 1970), which contains Fredson Bowers's "Textual Criticism" (pp. 29-54); Center for Editions of American Authors, Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures (1967; rev. ed., 1972); The Center for Scholarly Editions: An Introductory Statement (1977; also printed in PMLA, 92 [1977], 586-597); Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi (1981), which contains G. T. Tanselle's "Textual Scholarship" (pp. 29-52). (In the latter three I have suggested further related reading.) Two other general treatments in this tradition are Fredson Bowers, "Scholarship and Editing," PBSA, 70 (1976), 161-188, and G. T. Tanselle, "Literary Editing," in Literary & Historical Editing, ed. George L. Vogt and John Bush Jones (1981), pp. 35-56.
Excellent accounts of the history of classical and biblical textual criticism can be found in Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (1964; 2nd ed., 1968); L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1968; 2nd ed., 1974); and E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (1974). For the Renaissance humanists, see also M. D. Feld, "The Early Evolution of the Authoritative Text," Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), 81-111. Some further studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments are listed below in note 38.
When I speak of "ancient" (or "early") texts, I include medieval texts, which also normally depend on scribal copies a number of removes from the original (though generally not as many steps removed).
The term "textual analysis" has been used—particularly by Vinton A. Dearing (see note 11 below) and James Thorpe (note 39 below)—to refer specifically to the process of establishing the relationships among texts, which is only one of the operations that make up the larger undertaking of "textual criticism." Dearing's use of the term helps him to emphasize that what he is concerned with is the relationship of "messages," not their "transmitters"; but "textual criticism," in which one applies the abstractions of "textual analysis" to the specific instance of verbal texts, can also draw on "bibliographical analysis," the analysis of the physical documents transmitting the texts. I use these terms here with this distinction in mind, though I often employ the more general term where some might prefer the more specific. Whether "analysis" can be wholly objective and can be kept entirely distinct from the larger process of "criticism," in which subjective judgment plays a role, is a debatable question, and is taken up at several points later in this essay.
Paul Maas, in his celebrated essay "Textkritik" (note 44 below), as well as many other writers, specifies a step called examinatio between recensio and emendatio (or divinatio). But examining the recension to determine whether or not it can be regarded as furnishing what the author intended is a necessary first step in the process of deciding when to emend; it is simply a matter of definition whether or not one takes emendatio to comprehend the examination that leads to emendation, and in any case the two are intimately related. As E. J. Kenney concisely notes in his article on "Textual Criticism" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1974), the two activities are "in practice performed simultaneously." (He also recognizes that even recension "entails the application of criteria theoretically appropriate" to examination and emendation.) Maas in fact takes up divinatio in his section entitled "Examinatio." A similar point is implied by Robert Renehan, in Greek Textual Criticism (1969), which aims "to show the textual critic actually at work on a number of specific passages," when he says that his book deals with "examinatio, including both selectio between variants and divinatio" (p. 2).
Wayne Cutler, "The 'Authentic' Witness: The Editor Speaks for the Document," Newsletter of the Association for Documentary Editing, 4, no. 1 (February 1982), 8-9. A notorious example of this view, arguing that historical editions exhibit a "respect for historical fact" lacking in literary editions, is Peter Shaw's "The American Heritage and Its Guardians," American Scholar, 45 (1975-76), 733-751 [i.e., 37-55]; his position has been commented on by G. T. Tanselle in "The Editing of Historical Documents," SB, 31 (1978), 1-56 (Selected Studies, pp. 451-506)— cf. SB, 32 (1979), 31-34 (Selected Studies, pp. 385-388).
For an authoritative statement on eclecticism in the editing of modern works, see Fredson Bowers, "Remarks on Eclectic Texts," Proof, 4 (1975), 13-58 (reprinted in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing [1975], pp. 488-528).
See G. T. Tanselle, "Problems and Accomplishments in the Editing of the Novel," Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 323-360 (esp. 329-331); see also SB, 34 (1981), 30-31, 55 n.65.
An earlier, and much briefer, version of Dearing's book, entitled A Manual of Textual Analysis, appeared in 1959. Two manuals on medieval literature, which appeared later in the 1970s, are Charles Moorman's Editing the Middle English Manuscript (1975), a slight and very elementary book, and Alfred Foulet and Mary Blakely Speer's On Editing Old French Texts (1979), a much more useful and sophisticated treatment. A thorough and learned manual dealing with Italian literature of all periods is Franca Brambilla Ageno's L'edizione critica dei testi volgare (1975). A somewhat earlier manual that is full of common sense and wise observations is Ludwig Bieler's "The Grammarian's Craft: A Professional Talk," Folia, 2 (1947), 94-105; 3 (1948), 23-32, 47-58; 2nd ed., Folia, 10, no. 2 (1956), 3-42 (and as a separate).
He specifically mentions its use by "historians, cartographers, musicologists, iconographers, and so on," who will have to "translate from the more literary terminology and examples into their own" (pp. 1-2).
For an account of the development of analytical bibliography, see F. P. Wilson, "Shakespeare and the 'New Bibliography,'" in The Bibliographical Society 1892-1942: Studies in Retrospect (1945), pp. 76-135; it has been reprinted as a separate volume (1970), revised and edited by Helen Gardner. See also my "Physical Bibliography in the Twentieth Century," in Books, Manuscripts, and the History of Medicine: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Osler Library, ed. Philip M. Teigen (1982). The central statements of the field are R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927); Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963); and Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964).
He immediately proceeds to say that the goal of textual analysis is not "merely to provide a genealogy of the states of a text" but, if the state from which all the others descended is not known to be extant, "to reconstruct the latest state from which all the extant states have descended." This goal is proper, but one must remember that reconstructing a text is a very different activity from analyzing the relationships of those that exist.
In the 1959 Manual (note 11 above) he considers himself to be introducing this idea: "My method for the first time distinguishes the text conveyed by the manuscript— a mental phenomenon—from the manuscript conveying the text—a physical phenomenon" (p. ix).
He does later show his awareness of some of them, as when he cautions against using reproductions, which are "subject to all sorts of unexpected failures to perform their function" (p. 148). In his article on "Textual Criticism" in Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (1965), he properly points out that "early books preserved in only a few copies may differ in every copy."
Even if no changes are introduced (a theoretical possibility), the text is still new —though this possibility illustrates what Dearing means by bibliographical thinking, since there is no difference between the two "messages" but only between their "records." Nevertheless, the fact that separately produced texts may happen at times to be identical does not alter the general point that physical details are relevant to textual analysis.
Willis neglects the same fact, in his much less sophisticated way, when he claims that, whereas a paleographer is concerned with a manuscript as "a physical entity," to a textual critic "a manuscript is of interest only as a vehicle of readings" (p. 5).
Among the many other treatments of scribal error are Willis's (pp. 51-161) and Vinaver's (note 50 below); and Louis Havet, Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes latins (1911). Two classic psychological studies of scribal alterations are Jakob Stoll, "Zur Psychologie der Schreibfehler," Fortschritte der Psychologie und ihrer Anwendungen, 2 (1913-14), 1-133; and Sebastiano Timpanaro, Il lapsus freudiano: psicanalisi e critica testuale (1974; translated into English by Kate Soper, 1976). In the latter, textual study is the basis for a criticism of Freud's theory in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
James Douglas Farquhar, 'The Manuscript as a Book," in Sandra Hindman and J. D. Farquhar, Pen to Press: Illustrated Manuscripts and Printed Books in the First Century of Printing (1977), pp. 11-99; John Van Sickle, "The Book-Roll and Some Conventions of the Poetic Book," Arethusa, 13 (1980), 5-42, 115-127; Ernest C. Colwell, "Scribal Habits in Early Papyri: A Study in the Corruption of the Text," in The Bible in Modern Scholarship, ed. J. Philip Hyatt (1965), pp. 370-389 (reprinted as "Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits . . ." in Colwell's Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament [1969], pp. 106-124). See also C. H. Roberts, "The Codex," Proceedings of the British Academy, 40 (1954), 169-204; and G. S. Ivy, "The Bibliography of the Manuscript-Book," in The English Library before 1700: Studies in Its History, ed. Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (1958), pp. 32-65. (An example of an inept effort to base textual decisions on physical evidence is Albert C. Clark's argument, in The Descent of Manuscripts [1918] and other works, that many omissions result from scribes' skipping whole lines, since the lengths of omissions, he believed, often corresponded to multiples of the number of letters in a characteristic manuscript line.)
Of course, knowledge of each compositor's habits and reliability is useful in evaluating substantive readings in the part of the text he set, not just in dealing with the spelling and punctuation.
For information about ancient punctuation, see the interesting discussions cited in Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (note 4 above), pp. 214-215, 216.
"Paradosis" is "a rather imprecise but convenient term meaning 'the data furnished by the transmission, reduced to essentials'" (p. 53). Willis calls it "a pedantic synonym for 'transmitted reading' or for 'reading best attested'" (p. 228).
Greg, in his "Rationale" (note 2 above), says that the distinction is not "theoretical" or "philosophic" but "practical," separating two categories toward which scribes or compositors reacted differently; thus even if punctuation affects meaning, "still it remains properly a matter of presentation" (p. 376), for it would normally have been perceived so by scribes and compositors.
For further discussion of the accidentals of manuscript texts, see Bieler (note 11 above), who is sensible on this subject as on much else: his basic point is that "we should always try even in externals [i.e., accidentals] to keep to the original as nearly as evidence warrants and the reader may be reasonably expected to follow" (p. 28), for "the editor should prefer to make his readers think rather than to save them the trouble" (pp. 29-30); it is not proper for editors to insert "the standard punctuation of their mothertongue," and an editor must never "wish to be more consistent than his author" (p. 29). Similarly, S. Harrison Thompson on the classicizing of medieval Latin: "Medieval Latin writers had a right to spell as they wanted to, and we may not change their orthography and put it out under their names" ("Editing of Medieval Latin Texts in America," Progress of Medieval and Renaissance Studies in the United States and Canada Bulletin, 16 (1941), 37-49 (quotation from p. 47).
West's phrase "at least for portions of the text," however, indicates that the listing is being thought of more as a suggestive indication of the nature of the spelling variants than as a record of the evidence that was available to the editor and that may be relevant in understanding a particular passage or evaluating the editor's treatment of it. Years earlier MacEdward Leach had made a plea for constructing apparatus so that "the state of the manuscript in the smallest particular can be ascertained" (p. 150); regardless of the editorial alterations made in the text, these details should be available to the reader, because medieval capitalization may not have been haphazard and medieval punctuation "may be important and significant" (p. 147). See "Some Problems in Editing Middle English Manuscripts," English Institute Annual, 1939, pp. 130-151.
Most manuals on manuscript editing of course discuss the form of apparatus; the treatment in the Foulet-Speer manual (note 11 above) emerges from a long tradition of published rules for the medieval French field (and aims to supersede those set forth by Mario Roques in Romania, 52 [1926], 243-249). The Leiden system—Emploi des signes critiques: disposition de l'apparat dans les éditions savantes de textes grecs et latins (1932, 1938)—is an official publication of the Union Académique Internationale and is intended to apply to all kinds of editions, not only those of epigraphical and papyrological interest; O. Stahlin's Editionstechnik (2nd ed., 1914) has long been regarded as standard for classical texts. Two treatments concerned with later materials, but raising some general considerations, are G. T. Tanselle, "Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus," SB, 25 (1972), 41-88 (reprinted in Selected Studies, pp. 403-450); and Fredson Bowers, "Transcription of Manuscripts: The Record of Variants," SB, 29 (1976), 212-264.
Part of this preface is conveniently reprinted in Housman's Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (1961), pp. 23-44 (quotation from p. 36).
See Fredson Bowers, "McKerrow's Editorial Principles for Shakespeare Reconsidered," Shakespeare Quarterly, 6 (1955), 309-324.
Greg's own evolution from a position similar to McKerrow's can in part be seen in "McKerrow's Prolegomena Reconsidered," Review of English Studies, 17 (1941), 139-149, and in the prefaces to the first two printings of his The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942, 1951), as well as in what he sees as the relation of his own "Prolegomena" (pp. viilv) to McKerrow's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (1939).
He attributes the term to Paul Maas, who used it—somewhat differently—in a review of Greg's The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, in Review of English Studies, 19 (1943), 410-413; 20 (1944), 73-77. After praising the book as "a decisive step forward from McKerrow's orthodoxy towards the eclecticism which the character of the transmission requires" (p. 410) and congratulating Greg on his "courageous vindication of eclecticism" (p. 75), Maas objects to the idea of copy-text and expresses the hope that the "bibliographical school . . . will continue to move towards emancipation from the tyranny of the copy-text" (p. 76). Greg replied (20 [1944] 159-160) that a classicist would naturally object to copy-text, claiming that the concept "has no place in the editing of classical texts," where one is not concerned with preserving documentary accidentals. Cf. note 45 below.
Housman (in the Manilius) ridiculed the equation of conservatism with a thoughtless adherence to a single text: "assuredly there is no trade on earth, excepting textual criticism, in which the name of prudence would be given to that habit of mind which in ordinary human life is called credulity" (p. 43).
Of course, it is possible to set some other goal for a critical edition; e.g., one could attempt to reconstruct the text of any particular document presumed to have existed but no longer extant. More often, however, the goal of critical editing is the restoration of what the author wished. This goal is still historical, even though the resulting text is not that of any surviving document, and the evidence from all those documents can be reported in the apparatus.
One cannot simply say "written by the author," since the author's manuscript may have contained slips of the pen, and the critical editor is aiming for an ideal that may not ever have been realized in any document, even the author's own manuscript.
That they should in some cases be more concerned with it than they have been is a separate issue. Even when there is legitimately no question of retaining the accidentals of the manuscript tradition, documentary accidentals may be significant (as I suggested earlier) in assessing the presence of certain substantives and may play a role in the thinking that leads to the choice of a copy-text.
In addition to the splendid surveys in Metzger, Reynolds-Wilson, and Kenney (mentioned in note 4 above), other helpful discussions are by Bieler (note 11 above); Edward B. Ham, "Textual Criticism and Common Sense," Romance Philology, 12 (1958-59), 198-215; E. J. Kenney in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (note 7 above); Pasquali (note 45 below); and Robert Marichal, "La Critique des textes," in L'Histoire et ses méthodes, ed. Charles Samaran (Encyclopédie de la Pleiade 11, 1961), pp. 1247-1366. A convenient survey, making particular reference to the Old French field, appears in the Foulet-Speer manual (note 11 above); two useful collections emphasizing medieval texts are Christopher Kleinhenz (ed.), Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (1976), containing reprinted essays (some translated for the first time), and A. G. Rigg (ed.), Editing Medieval Texts, English, French, and Latin, Written in England (1977), bringing together the papers from the 1976 Toronto editorial conference. For the biblical field, see also Bruce M. Metzger, Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism (1963), and "Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament," in his Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (1968), pp. 145-162; Eldon Jay Epp, "The Twentieth Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism," Journal of Biblical Literature, 93 (1974), 386-414; Frederic G. Kenyon, The Text of the Greek Bible: A Students Handbook (1937; 3rd ed., rev. A. W. Adams, 1975); D. Winton Thomas, "The Textual Criticism of the Old Testament," in The Old Testament and Modern Study, ed. H. H. Rowley (1951), pp. 238-263; and Harry M. Orlinsky, "The Textual Criticism of the Old Testament," in The Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. G. Ernest Wright (1961), pp. 113-132.
One book that does look at the traditions of the textual criticism of early manuscript materials in the context of the study of post-medieval English and American literature is James Thorpe's Principles of Textual Criticism (1972; see "Textual Analysis," pp. 105-130). Thorpe says in his preface, "I believe that the same textual principles are true for all periods and for all literatures" (p. viii).
The fullest and most impressive treatment of this point is Sebastiano Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (1963)—revised from its earlier appearance in Studi italiani di filologia classica, 31 (1959), 182-228; 32 (1960), 38-63. Particularly important forerunners of Lachmann in developing a genealogical approach were the eighteenth-century scholars J. A. Bengel and J. J. Griesbach.
E.g., briefly in Reynolds-Wilson (note 4 above), pp. 192-194, and more thoroughly by Ernest C. Colwell, "Genealogical Method: Its Achievements and Limitations,' Journal of Biblical Literature, 66 (1947), 109-133 (reprinted in his Studies in Methodology [note 20 above], pp. 63-83). See also Vinton A. Dearing, "Some Notes on Genealogical Methods in Textual Criticism," Novum Testamentum, 9 (1967), 278-297. E. Talbot Donaldson makes a strong plea for abandoning the Lachmann approach in "The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts," in Speaking of Chaucer (1970), pp. 102-118 (see also his complaint about the amount of energy that has been devoted to trying to devise a "scientific system," p. 129). Most of the older standard introductions contain an exposition of Lachmann's method and some criticism of it; among them are Kirsopp Lake, The Text of the New Testament (1900; 6th ed., 1928); R. C. Jebb in A Companion to Greek Studies, ed. Leonard Whibley (1905); 4th ed., 1931); J. P. Postgate in A Companion to Latin Studies, ed. J. E. Sandys (1910, 1913, 1921), and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911); F. W. Hall, A Companion to Classical Texts (1913); and Hermann Kantorowicz, Einführung in die Textkritik (1921).
Colwell, after saying that Westcott and Hort did not actually apply the genealogical method to New Testament manuscripts, adds, "Moreover, sixty years of study since Westcott and Hort indicate that it is doubtful if it can be applied to New Testament manuscripts in such a way as to advance our knowledge of the original text of the New Testament" (Studies in Methodology [note 20 above], p. 63). Colwell believes that the method is useful only for closely related families of manuscripts "narrowly limited in time and space" (p. 82).
Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, 1 (3rd ed.), part 7 (1927), 18 pp.; separate editions appeared in 1950 and 1957. The 1958 English edition (Textual Criticism) includes a translation of Maas's "Leitfehler und stemmatische Typen," Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 37 (1937), 289-294. (For the Italian translation, Critica del testo, see note 49 below. Some comments on the influence of Maas in Italy and France appear in Luciano Canfora, "Critica textualis in caelum revocata," Belfagor, 23 [1968], 361-364.)
It is likely, of course, that a scribe would depart from his exemplar, but not that his departures would be such that no other scribe might hit on them independently. Maas, because his name is linked with the abstract and theoretical statement of stemmatics, is sometimes—but wrongly—thought to represent rigidity and an opposition to individual judgment. The truth is altogether different, as illustrated by his review of Greg (note 33 above), which includes the remark, "Misuse of conjecture is not more probable than misuse of conservatism, and is perhaps less dangerous" (p. 76). Giorgio Pasquali's long review of Maas in Gnomon, 5 (1929), 417-435, 498-521, was the predecessor of his great book, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1934; 2nd ed., with a new preface and appendixes, 1952). Pasquali's position (along with that of Michele Barbi, La Nuova Filologia e l'edizione dei nostri scrittori da Dante al Manzoni, 1938) in the Italian school of "new philology" is concisely described by Mary B. Speer in a review of two other books in Romance Philology, 32 (1978-79), 335-344; she notes their reaction against the rigidity of Maas's stemmatics and their emphasis on critical judgment as a scholarly and responsible procedure.
Sometimes it begins sooner, if one has difficulty determining some of the readings present in a particular document.
Bédier extended his discussion in "La Tradition manuscrite du Lai de l'Ombre: reflexions sur l'art d'editer les anciens textes," Romania, 54 (1928), 161-196, 321-356; and in "De l'Édition princeps de la Chanson de Roland aux éditions les plus récentes: nouvelles remarques sur l'art d'établir les anciens textes," Romania, 63 (1937), 433-469; 64 (1938), 145-244, 489-521. For an example of the voluminous later commentary on Bédier, see Frederick Whitehead and Cedric E. Pickford, "The Introduction to the Lai de l'Ombre: Sixty Years Later," Romania, 94 (1973), 145-156 (also published in Kleinhenz [note 38 above], pp. 103-116). Whitehead and Pickford find that textual criticism in the Old French field has "moved decisively away from the phase of extreme conservatism" (p. 156) associated with Bédier and has returned "to procedures familiar to textual critics in the classical field but completely lost to sight by editors of French medieval texts at the turn of the century" (p. 155).
"Principles of Textual Emendation," in Studies in French Language and Mediaeval Literature Presented to Professor Mildred K. Pope (1939), pp. 351-369 (reprinted in Kleinhenz [note 38 above], pp. 139-159).
Vinaver argues ineffectually with Housman later in the essay, twisting Housman's point in order to claim that it "is right to preserve a reading as long as it is possible that it comes from the original" (p. 368).
Vinaver is criticized by Henry John Chaytor, in "The Medieval Reader and Textual Criticism," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 26 (1941-42), 49-56, for assuming that scribes had "visual memory" rather than "auditory memory"—a difference that would affect the kinds of errors they made. Another effective criticism of Vinaver is provided by T. B. W. Reid, in "On the Text of the Tristran of Béroul," in Medieval Miscellany Presented to Eugène Vinaver by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, ed. Frederick Whitehead, A. H. Diverres, and F. E. Sutcliffe (1965), pp. 263-288 (esp. pp. 269-272); reprinted in Kleinhenz (note 38 above) pp. 245-271 (esp. pp. 252-254). (On scribal errors, see note 19 above.) See also George Kane's defense of emendation, in opposition to Vinaver and Bédier, in "Conjectural Emendation," in Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway, ed. D. A. Pearsall and R. A. Waldron (1969), pp. 155-169 (reprinted in Kleinhenz [note 38 above], pp. 211-225); and in his editions of the A and B versions of Piers Plowman (1960, 1975, the latter with E. Talbot Donaldson).
What it really does, however, is to provide the editor with information that may be of assistance in making a critical judgment. Knowing that a category of error exists may help the editor to recognize an instance of it, but one cannot assume that all possible instances of it are in fact errors. The editor must still decide whether a particular reading, in a particular context, is best explained as falling into one of those categories, or whether it need not be regarded as an error at all.
See Frederick Whitehead and Cedric E. Pickford, "The Two-Branch Stemma," Bulletin bibliographique de la Société internationale arthurienne, 3 (1951), 83-90. Cf. Jean Fourquet, "Le Paradoxe de Bédier," Mélanges 1945 (Strasbourg, 1946), 2:1-16; and "Fautes communes ou innovations communes," Romania, 70 (1948-49), 85-95.
For more detailed criticism of Quentin, see E. K. Rand, "Dom Quentin's Memoir on the Text of the Vulgate," Harvard Theological Review, 17 (1924), 197-264; and J. Burke Severs, "Quentin's Theory of Textual Criticism," English Institute Annual, 1941, pp. 65-93. Bédier's 1928 criticism is cited above (note 47). The Quentin-Bédier controversy is treated in a number of well-known books, such as Paul Collomp, La Critique des textes (1931) and Arrigo Castellani, Bédier avait-il raison? (1957).
The importance of the Calculus as a starting point for further thinking about objective methods of analysis, however, is recognized in the work of Dearing and Hrubý, commented on briefly below, and in F. M. Salter's critical but balanced review of Greg's edition (1935) of The Play of Antichrist in Review of English Studies, 13 (1937), 341-352 (to which Greg replied at 13 [1937], 352-354, and 14 [1938], 79-80).
"Recent Theories of Textual Criticism," Modern Philology, 28 (1930-31), 129-141. Greg replied to Shepard's criticisms (28 [1930-31], 401-404), emphasizing the distinction between the "mechanism of transmission," with which he was dealing, and the reconstruction of texts, which he acknowledges cannot be mechanical.
Hill, "Some Postulates for Distributional Study of Texts," SB, 3 (1950-51), 63-95; Hrubý, "Statistical Methods in Textual Criticism," General Linguistics, 5 (1961-62), 77-138; Hrubý, "A Quantitative Solution of the Ambiguity of Three Texts," SB, 18 (1965), 147-182 (the opening pages of which offer a good survey of the statistical tradition); Dearing, Principles and Practice of Textual Analysis (1974; see part I above and note 11). Other quantitative approaches involving the tabulation of agreements are represented by Ernest C. Colwell (e.g., several of the papers collected in his Studies in Methodology [see note 20 above]), Paul R. McReynolds (e.g., "The Value and Limitation of the Claremont Profile Method," in the 1972 volume of the Society of Biblical Literature seminar papers), and John G. Griffith (e.g., papers on "numerical taxonomy" in Museum Helveticum, 25 [1968], 101-138, and Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 20 [1969], 389-406); brief comments on Colwell appear in Metzger (see note 4 above), pp. 180-181, and Dearing, pp. 120-121, and on Griffith in West, pp. 46-47 (West's own approach, pp. 38-39, though simpler, is related). For comments on the use of computers in textual analysis, see Dearing, pp. 215-236; Jacques Froger, La Critique des textes et son automatisation (1968); and the works listed in the Center for Scholarly Editions statement (note 3 above), p. 9.
Sometimes "contamination" is distinguished from "conflation," the former resulting from the use of now one and now another manuscript, the latter from the combining of elements from two or more manuscripts. In a looser usage, they can be employed interchangeably to refer to the results of a scribe's use of two or more manuscripts.
The considerable amount of labor entailed by all these systems, often cited as a criticism, would not be a serious objection, of course, if the results were conclusive.
More detailed criticism of Dearing can be found in M. P. Weitzman's trenchant review in Vetus Testamentum, 27 (1977), 225-235. Dearing makes some comments on this review in "Textual Analysis: A Consideration of Some Questions Raised by M. P. Weitzman," Vetus Testamentum, 29 (1979), 355-359. His 1959 book is discussed by David M. Vieth in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 59 (1960), 553-559 (cf. Harvard Library Bulletin, 24 [1976], 210 n. 14).
Among the notable features of Bieler's essay (note 11 above) is his discussion suggesting situations in which various of these approaches might be appropriate.
Dearing says, "In fact, Greg's rule implies that scribes and compositors tend to follow copy in accidentals. If the evidence is clear that they did not, then any extant text may be the most like the author in the matter of accidentals, and the bibliographical tree does not limit the editor's choice of copy-text" (p. 155). It would be more accurate to say that Greg assumes deterioration as one text is copied from another and believes, when no other evidence is available, that more of the author's practices are likely to show through in the earliest copy. As Dearing implies, it would be possible for a later copyist, being unfaithful to the deteriorated text he is copying from, to happen to reintroduce a number of authorial practices. But they would carry no more authority than the editor's own decision to introduce them—unless, of course, there were reason to believe that the copyist had drawn on a more authoritative document, in which case the editor would have good cause to select the text containing them as copy-text. Greg would agree that "the bibliographical tree does not limit the editor's choice of copy-text," for he never argued for following a mechanical rule if the evidence, as one sees it, points another way.
"Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text," Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 81-115; reprinted in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (1975), pp. 447-487.
Bowers also speaks of carbon copies from typewriting—another modern phenomenon that can produce radiating texts.
I have explored this point, and its implications for the recording of variants, in "Editorial Apparatus for Radiating Texts," Library, 5th ser., 29 (1974), 330-337. Dearing —both in Principles and Practice of Textual Analysis (p. 154) and in "Concepts of Copy-Text Old and New," Library, 5th ser., 28 (1973), 281-293 (p. 291)—continues (as does Bowers) to use the term "copy-text" in these situations, but he confuses the concepts of "copy-text" and "printer's copy," as when he says (in the article) that "if we can completely reconstruct the archetype, any copy-text is as good as any other and we need only choose the one we must change the least to bring it into conformity with the archetype." What is being chosen in such a case is not a copy-text but a text that can conveniently serve as the basis for printer's copy; indeed, at the beginning of the article Dearing defines "copy-text" as "what a scholar-editor sends to the press." The necessity for maintaining a distinction between "copy-text" and "printer's copy" is shown, I hope, in my "The Meaning of Copy-Text: A Further Note," SB, 23 (1970), 191-196.
Another point that should perhaps be repeated to avoid misunderstanding: what I have said here does not purport to summarize Greg and Bowers but tries to extend their ideas in a direction suggested by their essays.
Chapters (see note 38 above), pp. ix and 142 respectively. This statement would in fact serve well as the motto for the Society for Textual Scholarship, founded by David Greetham in 1979; some remarks of mine along the same lines appear at the beginning of the first volume of Text (1981), the Society's publication. Forty years ago R. W. Chapman indicated some connections between the editing of ancient and of modern works, in "A Problem in Editorial Method," Essays and Studies, 27 (1941), 41-51.
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