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This book draws on a lengthy experience of teaching graduates how to approach medieval books. It leads the reader through the stages of the editorial process, using part of Richard Rolle's "Commentary on the Song of Songs" as the working exemplar. In the humane sciences, the need for texts is ubiquitous; they provide the regular objects of study. But far less prevalent than editions is any discussion of the premises underlying these objects, or the mechanisms by which they have been constructed. This volume takes up both challenges. First, in a preliminary chapter, it discusses what is at stake in any edition one might read; the persistent argument is that these represent products of modern scholarly decision-making, the imposition of various kinds of unity on the extremely diverse evidence medieval books offer for any literary work. This chapter also explains broadly various options for the presentation of texts - and the difficulties inherent in them all. The remainder of the volume is given over to a step-by-step guide to the process of editing (and eventually to a finished presentation of) a heretofore unpublished medieval text. The discussion seeks to exemplify the decisions editors routinely face, and to suggest ways of addressing them.
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e x et e r m e di eva l t e xts a n d stu di es Series Editors: Vincent Gillespie and Richard Dance Founded by M.J. Swanton and later co-edited by Marion Glasscoe
Editing Medieval Texts An Introduction, Using Exemplary Materials Derived from Richard Rolle, ‘Super Canticum’ 4
Ralph Hanna
LIV ERPOOL UNIV ERSITY PR ESS
First published in 2015 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2015 Ralph Hanna The right of Ralph Hanna to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78138-272-1 epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-443-5 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound in Poland by BooksFactory.co.uk
Contents
Foreword Preliminary: On Editions
vii 1
1 Collecting the Witnesses
17
2 Finding a Copy-text and Transcribing it
29
3 Comparing the Witnesses, or Collation
39
4 The Examination of the Variants
45
5 Annotation
99
Richard Rolle, ‘Super Canticum’ 4: Edition, Collation, and Translation
107
Appendix: Additional Manuscript Descriptions; the Manuscripts and the Text
141
Notes
161
Index
179
Foreword
I wrote this book, designed for students new to the enterprise, because I recalled my early frustrations at trying to edit texts transmitted in medieval and early modern manuscripts. And although the practical experience of examining a number of such texts has given me a certain measure of confidence in my skills, one frustration still remains. This is the absence of any practical handbook for beginners, one that might show what is at stake in the process of editing a text and what steps one might take to address the attendant difficulties. Central to the whole argument here is ‘experience’. There is nothing ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ about the production of reading texts of medieval works, only an assessment of probabilities guided by one’s acquired knowledge. Of course, most of the knowledge that might be on display here has not been my own. I owe a very grea