David F. Hult TEXT EDITING

David F. Hult TEXT EDITING: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE s I’ve been thinking about Romanic Review’s 100th anniversary, I was Atempted, as I gather many participants on the program were, to dip into some of the frst issues of the journal in order to take a look at the sorts of articles being published in 1910 and the few years following. Among other observations, it is intriguing for us to discover the preponderance of studies devoted to either linguistics or philological topics as well as, historically speak- ing, to medieval and Renaissance literature. Only a handful of articles over the frst ten years extend into the seventeenth century and beyond. This of course refects the nature of graduate training at the time as well as the individuals who were forming graduate students and future professors at the most prominent institutions of higher education: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and a handful of others. Among the medieval contributions, I was struck by the slight number of studies devoted to editions of shorter texts—at the time, a more common type of contribution to the French journal Romania—or to editorial questions in general, which seem to have been relegated to the review section. My attention was thus drawn, for rather different reasons, to two items in volume 1, dated 1910. The frst was a review of an article that had been published the previous year, in July 1909, in the Transactions of the Con- necticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Written by an assistant professor of Spanish at Yale named Frederick Bliss Luquiens, the article under review had the straightforward yet provocative title “The Reconstruction of the Original Chanson de Roland.”1 The reviewer, J. A. Will, summarily dismissed the young professor’s argument, accusing him of subjectivity and specious reasoning. The second item in that frst volume of Romanic Review that attracted my attention appeared in the second fascicle for 1910, an article by the distin- guished French medievalist Joseph Bédier, innocuously entitled “Richard de Normandie dans les chansons de geste.”2 The author’s name is printed at the end, followed by the date, December 22, 1909, and the place, New York City. 1. J. A. Will, rev. of Frederick Bliss Luquiens, The Reconstruction of the Original Chan- son de Roland, Romanic Review 1 (1910): 333–6. The article in question appeared in Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 15 (July 1909): 110–36. 2. Romanic Review 1 (1910): 113–124. The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 37 8/31/11 3:43 PM 38 David F. Hult There would at frst blush seem to be little affnity between the Yale professor arguing somewhat loosely in favor of the “technical excellence” of the Oxford manuscript as a way of approaching a satisfactory “reconstruction” of the archetype of the Roland and Bédier’s own work at the time, which concentrated on analyses of the epic tradition that would lead to the publication of his four-volume Légendes épiques, the frst two volumes of which had appeared in 1908 and the fnal two of which would be published in 1912 and 1913. The Romanic Review article, which was later incorporated into the Légendes épiques, as were many of his articles devoted to epic at that time, studied the anachronistic presence of Richard the First, duke of Normandy, in a number of chansons de geste related to the cycle of Charlemagne in order to add one more piece of evidence in support of his thesis concerning the learned and clerical origins of French epic, which defed the prevailing orthodoxy of popular origins. Before coming back to a possible relation between these two items in the frst volume of Romanic Review, a few words should be said about the impor- tance of the period between 1907 and 1913 for editorial work in France and Germany, the status of the Chanson de Roland as an exemplary editorial challenge, and Joseph Bédier’s career-long contributions to the theory and practice of text editing. As is well known, Gaston Paris, through his courses and his landmark publication of the Vie de Saint Alexis in 1872, had intro- duced a method of text editing developed in Germany that was perceived as more scientifc than the less systematic approaches of his predecessors. The method, commonly associated with the German textual scholar Karl Lach- mann, attempts to establish the interrelationships between and among extant manuscripts of a given work in order to show how they relate to the now-lost common archetype, itself a descendant of the authorial original. Organizing these manuscripts in a family-tree arrangement, called a stemma, the method provided a quasi-mechanical method for determining the text of the archetype from all remaining manuscript witnesses. Post-Gaston Paris, the so-called stemmatic method dominated editorial circles. In 1890, in his very frst editorial project, Bédier produced, following the precepts of his master, an edition of a short narrative by the early thirteenth-century author Jean Renart, the Lai de l’ombre.3 As far as the Chanson de Roland is concerned, the situation in France was rather complicated, for it was the Germans who were at the cutting edge of textual scholarship.4 In 1872, the same landmark year that 3. Le Lai de l’ombre (Fribourg: Imprimerie et Librairie de l’Œuvre de Saint Paul, 1890). This edition was printed prior to Bédier’s defense of his doctoral theses in 1893; his complementary thesis, in Latin, was devoted to a study and edition of the poetry of Colin Muset. 4. For a superbly informed, yet compact, overview of the editorial history of the Chan- son de Roland, see Joseph J. Duggan’s general introduction to the three-volume collab- Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 38 8/31/11 3:43 PM Text Editing 39 saw the appearance of Gaston Paris’s Saint Alexis, Léon Gautier produced an edition of the great epic based upon the more eclectic approach of the previous generation and, with the intention of vulgarizing medieval French literature for a broad public, included a modern French translation of the text, which was somewhat unusual at that time. It was a runaway success, with numer- ous reprintings and revisions. It remained the primary edition of the Roland read and referred to in France up until the time that Bédier fnally produced his own edition in 1922. However, during the same period, German scholars were at work applying the stemmatic method to the various manuscript witnesses of the Roland, as well as producing editions of many other medieval French works that for some reason did not attract French scholars. Theodor Müller’s third, defnitive edition of the Roland, predicated upon one hypothetical genealogical tree, appeared in 1878. Instantly criticized by another German scholar, Edmund Stengel, in his review of the edition, it nonetheless became the scientifc edition of the work until Stengel produced his own edition, based upon a different hypothesis, in 1900. It would be fair to say that in the scholarly world, Stengel’s edition was thereafter widely recognized as the authoritative edition of the French epic poem and therefore the dominant model at the time Romanic Review was founded. As Joseph Bédier was undermining the orthodoxy concerning the genesis and authorship of the chansons de geste, gradually inching toward the case of the Roland, he had said little about any attendant editorial questions. How- ever, as Alain Corbellari has noted in his defnitive intellectual biography of Bédier, following observations made by Gilles Eckhard, Bédier showed signs as early as 1907, in his edition of the Folies Tristan, of distancing himself from the mechanistic Lachmannian method, destined to produce an edition more hypothetical than “real” in that it does not correspond exactly to any existing medieval document.5 In the Folies edition, he clearly adheres to the text as found in the manuscript instead of extensively emending it to correspond to an idea of what the author would himself have composed, as a later, German-leaning, editor, Ernest Hoepffner, would do. Another important moment in the edition of early French texts occurred in 1910: the foundation of the Classiques Français du Moyen Âge, which until the last ffteen years or so has been the most important conduit for Old French texts used by scholars and students of literature. The series founder was Mario Roques, a very close associate of Bédier who clearly idolized him, and the person upon whom Paul Meyer conferred the editorship of Romania that same year. orative edition he directed, La Chanson de Roland / The Song of Roland: The French Corpus (Turnhout (Belgium): Brepols, 2005) I: 5–38. 5. Alain Corbellari, Joseph Bédier: Écrivain et philologue (Geneva: Droz, 1997) 548–49. Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 39 8/31/11 3:43 PM 40 David F. Hult This is the setting in which the Spanish professor from Yale made his remarks concerning what he called the reconstruction of the Chanson de Roland: he fundamentally discounted the Stengel edition because it gave an aesthetically fawed account of the text as refected most notably in the Oxford manuscript and praised the Müller edition, which had been abandoned by scholars after Stengel’s achievement; he did so not because it was an impec- cable product, but because in its stemma, it placed the Oxford manuscript in a singular and prominent position. Luquiens’s concluding guidelines for the future editor of the Chanson de Roland stipulated that the latter should “never alter the Oxford manuscript to accord with the other redactions

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