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Variants The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship
14 | 2019 Varia
Elli Bleeker, Wout Dillen, Wim Van Mierlo and Stefano Rosignoli (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/497 DOI: 10.4000/variants.497 ISSN: 1879-6095
Publisher European Society for Textual Scholarship
Electronic reference Elli Bleeker, Wout Dillen, Wim Van Mierlo and Stefano Rosignoli (dir.), Variants, 14 | 2019 [Online], Online since 20 March 2019, connection on 25 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ variants/497 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/variants.497
This text was automatically generated on 25 September 2020.
The authors 1
From production to transmission, from genesis to reception, text is an infinitely complex object of study that we can approach and represent from a wide range of perspectives. Influenced by technological inventions and transnational trends, the field of textual scholarship continues to evolve: we refine or alter our methodologies and we broaden our research focus. Technological developments have become a research topic in and by themselves, as we study how digitality affects modes of presentation, or influences how we conceptualize "texts", "documents" and "works". At the same time, the core business of textual scholarship – to investigate text in all its manifestations – remains unchanged. The diverse nature of contemporary textual scholarship is reflected in the contents of the fourteenth issue of Variants. In the opening essay, Paul Eggert sets the tone by epitomising the fluidity between the concepts "archive" and "edition" brought about by digital devices. How to relate oneself to the seemingly contradicting impulses to archive or to edit is a familiar issue for textual scholars, but the growth of both digital archives and digital editions has intensified this dichotomy. To help us imagine the wide range of possibilities to (re)present textual material digitally, Eggert proposes a horizontal slider or scroll bar, with the archive and the edition at opposite ends. He concludes that the expansion of editorial activities may come to include literary criticism as well. Our writing practices become increasingly digital too: scholarly editors of contemporary materials are confronted with an overflow of digital documents that may require an entirely different definition of a version. Christopher A. Plaisance looks at Aristotelian philosophy and establishes an ontology of fundamental concepts like "work", "text", "document" and "version" suitable for a textual scholarship framework. The transformative effects of technology on scholarly editing are also central to the contribution by Merisa Martinez, Wout Dillen, Elli Bleeker, Anna-Maria Sichani and Aodhán Kelly. Together, they carried out a large-scale survey among the international editorial community in which participants were asked about their position on access and accessibility of digital editions. The survey results show us that for many important issues, such as Open Access and web accessibility, no agreed-on, clear-cut solutions as yet exist. Should digital editions provide access to the underlying code? How can scholars exploit the full potential of the digital medium to disseminate their findings? Although the most suitable approach to these and related questions will differ per editing team, the scholarly community will undeniably benefit from guidelines and the sharing of best practices. Building upon the methodological value of giving users insight into the workings of a software program used for text analysis, Elisa Nury examines the visualization of collation results using the tool PyCoviz. Nury aptly illustrates how to implement and refine an open source tool to examine the manuscript tradition of Calpurnicus Flaccus in greater detail. In doing so, she also demonstrates how visualization can function both as a research instrument and as a means of communication. Claudia Tardelli presents a fascinating report of the challenges that arise when editing Francesco da Buti's commentary on Dante's Commedia. Da Buti's manuscript has a complex tradition that includes authorial revisions on some – but not all – documents as well as numerous contaminations. Tardelli therefore makes the case for a critical edition that is based on a single, most authoritative manuscript with an apparatus fontium. This paves the way for a proper contextualisation of Da Buti's work and see how it relates to other Dante commentaries and additional historical sources. Peter Groves, then, identifies an increasing neglect of the metre in scholarly editions of early modern texts like Shakespeare's plays. This subtle yet significant change in editorial policy has important consequences for the way contemporary readers experience those texts. Groves calls for action and proposes a new standard for representing metrical information in texts that would uncover and illuminate an essential feature of Shakespeare's verse. We move from Britain's bard to the national poet of Lithuania, Kristijan Donelaitis, whose poem Metai is the topic of Mikas Vaicekauskas' contribution. Vaicekauskas gives an insightful overview of the various editions of the poem and beautifully illustrates how editorial strategies are shaped by sociocultural and political circumstances.
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Much along the same lines, the review essay of André Goddu offers an in-depth study of the various editions of Copernicus's most famous work De revolutionibus orbum celestum, first published in 1543. Since then, a number of editions have appeared based on (a combination of) the first publication or the surviving autograph. Goddu thoroughly reviews the latest edition (2015) and at the same time synthesizes the extant scholarship on this historical text that forever changed the way we think about our planet and the solar system. The final section of Variants 14 comprises of seven reviews of innovative and remarkable scholarly editions, research volumes, and monographs that have appeared in recent years.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Essays
The Archival Impulse and the Editorial Impulse Paul Eggert
Textual Realities: An Aristotelian Realist Ontology of Textual Entities Christopher A. Plaisance
Refining our conceptions of ‘access’ in digital scholarly editing: Reflections on a qualitative survey on inclusive design and dissemination. Merisa Martinez, Wout Dillen, Elli Bleeker, Anna-Maria Sichani and Aodhán Kelly
Visualizing Collation Results Elisa Nury
Prolegomena to the New Edition of Francesco da Buti’s Commentary on Dante’s Commedia. Purgatorio Claudia Tardelli
Textual Editing, Shakespeare’s Metre and the Reader on the Clapham Omnibus Peter Groves
To Edit a National Poem. The Editing of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Poem Metai and its Sociocultural Context Mikas Vaicekauskas
Review Essay
The (likely) Last Edition of Copernicus’s Libri revolutionum André Goddu
Book Reviews
Gaspar Aguilar, La comedia segunda de los agravios perdonados. Santa Barbara: Publications of eHumanista, 2016. Bélen Almeida
Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ann-Marie Einhaus
Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses. Becoming the Blooms Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015 Hans Walter Gabler
Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014 Simon Mahony
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Ramon Llull, Vida i Obres. Volum I Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2015 Marco Matteoli
Dirk Van Hulle, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière Bande Antwerp: University Press Antwerp and London: Bloomsbury. 2015 Anna McMullan
Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes Paris: STFM, 2015. François Rouget
James Joyce, Brouillons d’un baiser : premiers pas vers Finnegans Wake Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Sam Slote
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Essays
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The Archival Impulse and the Editorial Impulse
Paul Eggert
1 In text-critical circles the term “archive” is increasingly used to mean a special- purpose collection of analog or digital surrogates of original text-bearing materials that centre on a particular subject, author, work or group of works.1 This meaning of “archive” departs from the professional archivist’s stricter and principles-based definition.2 But that departure need not detain us long in view of the wide currency our looser metaphorical definition has clearly attained – attained, that is, on account of its usefulness. One thinks of the Rossetti Archive, the Walt Whitman Archive, the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project whose worldwide web address is, revealingly, beckettarchive.org. A 1990s habit of naming has become normalized. The ensuing neglect of the distinction between “archive” and “edition”, which various people have raised recently, is my subject here.3
I
2 Some scholars in the textual studies community have seen the need for the distinction between archive and edition as they design their projects. It seems, for instance, to map nicely onto the dual Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schemas for documentary features on the one hand and textual on the other being used for some projects now.4 But equally, it is clear that some people bristle at the very proposal of a distinction between archive and edition since it implies to them that transcription is mere grunt work whereas text-establishment and commentary are the preserve of an editorial elite. They rightly point out that transcription of manuscripts involves judgement, often expert judgement, not just in the act of reading the manuscript text and its sometimes nearly indecipherable layers of correction and revision but also in the considered choice of TEI codes in which to capture the information (TEI 2007).
3 However, in an article written in 2012 and published the following year Peter Robinson observed that the predominant effort amongst digital textual scholars was going into
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document transcription and coding, with the transcription often being assumed to be, or being portrayed as the same thing as, an edition (Robinson 2013a). By 2013 he was concerned that the tendency of the digital medium to privilege the document as the object of attention over the work, and the devotion of so many scholars and programmers to that documentary goal, presaged the effective end of scholarly editing as we have known it (Robinson 2013b).
4 The appearance of Elena Pierazzo’s book Digital Scholarly Editing two years later doubtless substantiated his fears. She details the recent flowering of digital editions of individual modern manuscripts treated as documents and she questions the special standing of critical editing of multi-witness works as such. All involve interpretative judgement, she observes, and goes on: “if it is enough to add a [collation] tool to one’s archive to transform a documentary edition into a critical edition [. . .] then the distinction between the two forms of scholarship seems rather unsubstantial.” But having entertained that idea she backtracks. The very next sentence says: “It is not the tool that makes the difference, obviously, but this example underlines how the two endeavours are based on very similar scholarship” (Pierazzo 2015, 197).5
5 The recent flourishing of digital documentary editions is probably, as Pierazzo implies, a reflection of the development of a technology: TEI. But surely we need to resist a theory of digital editions that is determined and limited by a specific technology. A keener understanding of what, at the moment, is frustrating the development of the traditionally more ambitious editions of multi-witness works is needed. In addition, we need to be able to differentiate between digital forms of the documentary-diplomatic edition and the critical edition in a way that does justice to both.
6 There was another dimension to Peter Robinson’s lament in 2013. In an introductory paper to the editorial conference called Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing that he convened at the University of Saskatchewan in July 2013 he explained the stalling of multi-witness digital editions as a problem of editors having become dependent on digital-humanist programmers (Robinson 2013c). The dependency arose from the need of editors for tools to process the customized set of TEI codes that projects had found it convenient to use in their transcriptions. The case was similar to the building of customized interfaces that, inevitably, cannot be sustained long into the future. “It is time to assert the value of editions in the digital age”, Robinson resonantly declared, adding provocatively: “Digital humanists should get out of textual scholarship: and if they will not, textual scholars should throw them out” (Robinson 2013c, 2). Put less provocatively, what he meant was that a standard set of tools and a workflow environment need to be created so that editors can get on with what they know best: edition-making. When Robinson’s paper appeared almost immediately in a blog post it got emotions running high at the international 2013 Digital Humanities conference at Lincoln, Nebraska only a week later.
7 I have answered the Robinson of 2012, and elsewhere I have tried to demonstrate the unkillable robustness of the work concept both for editors and for literary studies.6 In the present essay I address the question of nomenclature that keeps bubbling to the surface in the recent debate without being satisfactorily resolved. The question is: What, in the digital arena, is an archive and what is an edition? And, how should this affect our characterization of the types of editorial project that we may otherwise be tempted to run together.
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8 I was at the same Saskatchewan conference in July 2013. My paper (Eggert 2016) was about understanding the scholarly edition as embodied argument about the work instead of, as is traditional, seeing the edition only as a presentation or representation of the work.7 Mine, granted, is a counter-intuitive proposition. I have been putting it forward for some years now, as have others, with different emphases, including Erick Keleman (2009, 73) and, most notably and thoughtfully, Hans Walter Gabler (2010).8 Robinson and Peter Shillingsburg also took it up in their conference papers at Saskatchewan.9
9 In characterizing the edition as argument I had merely articulated what every editor of multi-witness works learns the hard way: that the editing involves a complex series of linked judgements, each of which tests the others so far reached. But the implications of the proposition only grew clearer to me as my involvement with digital scholarly editing in the early 2000s forced me to think about the landscape of actions, responsibilities and meanings that the changed medium brought with it. One principal implication emerged. If the edition is to be seen as an argument then it is necessarily one that is addressed to an audience in respect of the documents gathered and analysed for the editorial project, usually documents deemed to witness the textual transmission. If the edition is an argument addressed to an audience then it must anticipate the needs of its readership. This view of things places the editor in a medial or Janus-faced position, looking in one direction towards the relevant documents and looking towards the audience in the other.
10 So to edit is to mediate, to come between.10 Documents are not self-declaring and may contain all kinds of impediments to their consumption. But since the need for making sense of the documentary condition of texts will never disappear, especially when multiple witnesses are competing for our attention, I suspect that Robinson’s anxiety about what is happening to editorial activity in the digital medium is premature and that deficiencies of current tools that currently stand in the way will eventually be overcome. Robinson is right that we lack a standardized set of tools that an editor can simply pick up and use. The digital scholarly edition has not yet settled into a widely subscribed format. But when it does, when we understand the logic of its digital environment better, the range of responsibilities of the editor will likely be different than they were in print. Even so, the fundamental necessity of mediation will remain.
11 This defining editorial act will typically be embodied in a reading text and in the ancillary matter that surrounds and justifies it. The editorial mode and its display will be limited only by the editor’s ingenuity and the available tools. The result will be judged by readers able to assess the explicit or implicit argument that the edition embodies. Thus editions will be identifiable as such by the cogency and rigour of their analysis of the archival data, which, in the force-field of the edition, is converted into evidence in the service of the editorial argument.
II
12 These introductory remarks set the stage for a discussion of the disputed distinction between archive and edition. Some people believe the distinction ought to be a firm one. Brüning, Henzel and Pravida (2013), for instance, three scholars associated with the FaustEdition, understand the distinction between archive and edition in terms of Hans Zeller’s famous distinction of 1971 between Befund and Deutung (record and
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meaning, see Zeller 1995). Although I too have been attracted to the parallel I now feel that applying Zeller’s theory in this way is a mistake. Unfortunately the two categories – record and interpretation – cannot gain the firmly differentiated objective footing for which philologists have traditionally yearned. This is because humanly-agented reading is intrinsic to both of them. There is no firm, outside vantage-point from which to survey and thus to define archive and edition as securely differentiated categories. As readers we inhabit the same textual field as the approaches to documents and texts that we seek to define.11 To record is first to read and analyse sufficiently for the archival purpose; to interpret is first to read and to analyse sufficiently for the editorial purpose. In practice, the archival impulse anticipates the editorial, and the editorial rests on the archival. They are not separate categories and certainly not objective or transcendental ones. As co-dependents they are perhaps best understood as being in a negative dialectical relationship with one another, that is, each requiring the other to exist at all, yet each requiring the other’s different identity to secure its own.
13 So, how better may we envisage the relationship of archive and edition? I propose that we think of a horizontal slider or scroll bar running from archive at the left to edition at the right. In this model every position on the slider involves interpretative judgement appropriate to its purpose. All stakeholders will want to position themselves at one place rather than another along that slider, or at one place rather than another depending on what responsibilities they are discharging at any one time. To see things like this is to want to recast the archive idea as archival impulse and its complementary opposite as the editorial impulse. Based on impulse or tendency, the distinction that I am proposing is pragmatic rather than ideal. To the extent that the archive–edition distinction is deployed it has to be understood, then, as a shorthand standing in for what is in fact a more nuanced reality. I wish now to consider where this approach leads us.12
14 Every position along the slider involves a report on the documents, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Yet each activity, if it be a truly scholarly one, depends upon or anticipates the need for its complementary or co-dependent Other. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it, with the aim of orienting it towards known or envisaged audiences and by taking their anticipated needs into account. Another way of putting this is to say that every expression of the archival impulse is to some extent editorial, and that every expression of the editorial impulse is to some extent archival. Their difference lies in the fact that they situate themselves at different positions on the slider.
15 The question may be asked: Why is it necessary to make this distinction, now, after centuries of editorial effort have got by without it? In print, after all, we just prepared editions: critical, historical-critical, documentary–diplomatic or, more recently, genetic editions. To the extent that there was a distinction between archive and edition it was subsumed within other, louder disputes over the valuation of types of edition. Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle used to insist on the difference between critical and non-critical scholarly editions. According to them, parallel-text editions, type-facsimile editions, documentary editions presenting transcriptions of facsimiles, and variorum editions were not critical editions since no reading text was editorially established or preferred.13 German-style historical-critical editions were similarly, at least in
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Charlottesville where Bowers held court, only on the cusp of acceptance as being critical since the editorial effort was centred narrowly on decisions about the authorization of historical texts, with emendations limited to failures of the semiotic system that was said to constitute the particular historical text-version. It was plain to Anglo-American editors that their German counterparts’ recording of the documentary history of textual transmission was more systematic and thorough than their own. Yet, in the establishment of reading texts, they were more conservative, less adventurous. But whichever perspective editors adopted when preparing a historical-critical apparatus, or an Anglo-American one in support of an editorially emended reading text, they assumed that their role necessarily included a compilation and presentation of the evidence of textual transmission in a well-designed apparatus. Every entry acted as a check on the editor’s discursive account of the transmission elsewhere in the volume: garrulous apparatus entries indicated the account was probably wrong, economic ones that it was probably right.
16 The systematic recording was a shaped report that, for practical reasons, stood in for what we have since come to expect of the digital archive (minimally, facsimiles and transcriptions). If facsimiles were to be reproduced in the print environment, whether with or without transcriptions, they would require a volume or series of volumes of their own, in effect a separate project.14 What print scholarly editors like me failed to fully appreciate – because the digital medium had not yet prompted us to do so as we established our reading texts, wrote commentary on them and painstakingly prepared the textual apparatus – was that we were serving dual functions as editors and archive reporters combined. Our textual apparatuses substituted for the archive we could not reproduce.
17 We called the result an edition. It was an integral conceptual unit. The book format, its material logic as a book, silently but potently confirmed this. The ancillary material (including the archive report) was oriented around, complexly linked to, and intellectually supportive of, the reading text. The book was a single whole. Every part of it was completed to the same time-schedule. Every part of it was brought up to a standard of accuracy that pertained across the whole edition equally. In other words, the very form of the edition tended to shield us from the now-obvious fact that our responsibilities were both editorial and, in the special sense I have given it, archival as well. We had two roles but we conceived of them as one. The book form had naturalized this assumption for us in advance.
18 But then gradually, during the 1990s, the possibilities of the digital domain dawned on us. The first so-called electronic editions were mostly yearned-for figments of our imagination, projections rather than actually achieved things. Nevertheless it was clear from early on that these new textual beasts, in whatever form they would turn out to take, would not need to be brought to a uniform standard of completion and accuracy at publication. This was because, in the digital domain, they would always be open to correction, revision and extension. In prospect at least, electronic editions were soon growing monstrously large as we envisaged loading them with more and more, mainly archival responsibilities than the printed book could contain. We print editors yearned especially to see much more of the primary evidence on which we customarily reported shown in facsimile in the electronic edition. We had naturalized the book form, yes; but we were also foremost amongst humanities scholars in fretting under its constraints. We envisaged a better future. But I am not sure that we asked: for whom?
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19 That future took longer to arrive than we thought it would. It also brought unexpected problems with it. Solutions to questions of preservation were proposed and the idea of collaborative interpretation of reusable resources was given a basis in text encoding. A great deal of effort went and continues to go into tuning, adjusting and extending the definitions of elements and attributes by what deserves to be called the TEI movement, now with its own Board, funding, special-interest working groups and journal. The TEI Guidelines are now up to Version 5; each version has been bigger and more complex than its predecessor. Regular workshops spread the word and induct novices into the mysteries of TEI encoding.
20 An almost equal amount of effort has had to go, editorial project by project, into creating bespoke tools and ad hoc solutions to process the encoded data. This is because the original hope that the creation of TEI standards would allow for interoperability of encoded data among projects, and thus lead to a widespread take-up by software manufacturers, has proved to be deeply problematic, even illusory.15 Little wonder that the sheer quantum of effort devoted to mainly technical matters has fed the anxiety about the end of editing of multi-witness works with which I began.
21 One thing is for sure: the situation has given the old understanding of our duties as editors a shake-up. What we need now, I am urging, is not so much a new taxonomy of editing and archiving, as a sliding scale of document and audience orientations of the kind I have suggested, one that can self-adjust as new approaches in the digital arena are projected and put into operation.
III
22 Entertaining the edition-as-argument idea on the one hand and the slider model on the other permits various clarifications to emerge about archival–editorial projects in the digital domain.
23 If one accepts the model for the purposes of argument then, on the very left of the slider where the archival impulse is dominant, there is, to be strict, no robust or settled work attribution yet available, nor for that matter a version concept, since, once again strictly speaking, all the archivist-transcriber has at first are documents. Several, tens, perhaps hundreds, even thousands will be in need of transcription for the project. For practical reasons transcribers may be asked to record what they see on the page. Manuscripts showing multiple levels of verbal alteration may then be captured and encoded as documentary texts. Determination of whether such a text captures a version at all (since it may be only a fragment), or whether the alterations indicate the presence of two or more versions within the same documentary text, the result of the author returning to the document at different points in time to revise, is a matter for editorial postulation and argument once the provisional record has been more or less settled.16 The decision may be affected by visible or inferrable evidence: allied patterns of revision, say, on other manuscripts in the same manuscript book. Conversely, two or more documentary texts may be editorially deemed to be the same version: for example, successive newspaper reprintings of a poem, each printed without variation from the first.
24 In practice of course, work-and-version concepts are typically drawn down in advance, whether from tradition, from the fact of preceding publication or following
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bibliographical or codicological analysis. But sometimes these supports are lacking and often they are incomplete. Nevertheless, the terms “work” and “version” are useful categories by which to organize the archival effort, to keep it within achievable bounds. Their use is a silent indication that the archival impulse already bends towards the later editorial one. Thus the two are linked, because they are in need of one another, even at this early stage. Nevertheless, the drawing-down has to be understood as always provisional because always open to editorial reinterpretation or challenge. In a complete poetry project, for instance, the status of transcribed documentary texts, especially in manuscript, will become clearer as a second-stage editorial attention is brought to bear. Variant titles and heavy revision may initially mask work–version relationships, and version status can remain arguable.
25 As the project subsequently proceeds, the document-facing transcription, now tentatively completed, begins to come into a dawning editionhood of its own as the scholar-transcriber draws the documentary details into a shaping editorial argument about their history and significance. Even if originally prepared for private uses, the transcription now bends that document’s textual witness towards an envisaged readership. Any and every emendation that makes the text more legible or usable is done on behalf of a readership, and that fact shifts the project a few points along the slider to the right without having quite reached the midpoint. Nevertheless, the archival pull of the document, of fidelity to the document, remains strong. This is the first clarification.
26 Once the relevant transcriptions for a multi-witness work have been prepared and checked, once the archival impulse has been satisfied, a second clarification emerges from the slider model: automatic collation of those witnesses is the pivot between the archival impulse and the editorial impulse.17 It is the midpoint on the slider. The editor considers the meanings of the data produced by the collation and confirms, corrects or discards the provisional assignation of versionhood and workhood that had helped organize the archival effort.
27 I use these unfamiliar terms (“editionhood” too) to unsettle the apparently objective status that we habitually accord works and versions. The preceding scenario has just shown that they are not givens, not objective. Rather, these categorizations emerge. A well-mounted argument, reinforced by the results of collation, may convince that their designation as such provides a strongly pragmatic hypothesis that explains the available evidence and forms a basis upon which it is safe to proceed editorially. As this occurs the position on the slider begins to move to the right.
28 The editor finds it harder and harder to resist the pull of work or version concepts as containers for shaping the data into a legible form for readers. As the editorial impulse gains ascendancy – as archival data is converted into evidence in support of the editorial argument – a more fully reader-facing edition comes into focus. Documentary fidelity is by no means lost sight of – the slider model insists on it – but is now consigned to the archival expression of the project.
29 Although the slider links all interpretative archival–editorial decisions on the same continuous scale it is obvious that a transcriber’s decision to record as unobjectionably as possible the tags and attributes for, say, italic rendering involves a different level of judgement than the system-wide decisions that an editor must make. The project workflow will wisely respect that reality. It will normally make sense to do the reader- oriented editing after the archival effort is provisionally finished. The archival phase
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will have generated all kinds of clues that will benefit the editorial effort, and the latter phase may lead to corrections and adjustments of the archive.
30 But what form should the digital edition take and how should it be stored, joined at the hip as it is to the archive from which it now seeks separation? Or, put another way, as it reaches towards the right-hand end of the slider – for a reader-facing editionhood? So far we know that such a digital edition will typically take the form of a reading text of the unit being edited (work or version) or the genetic development of the version or draft, supported by a commentary analysing the documentary evidence. The edition will be potentially only one considered application of that data, potentially only one of many, since there will usually be more than one possible argument about textual authority or authorization or, occasionally, about work-version divisions. Indeed, there will potentially be as many editions as there are organizing arguments. Each one, offered as an interpretation of the data in the archive, must then take its chances in the intellectual marketplace. It must persuade its readers or, in the case of a genetic edition, prove useful to those who study the genesis or emergence of text on the page under the hand of the writer.18
31 I find support for my case in an article of 2016 by Patrick Sahle. For some years he has been compiling a catalogue of scholarly digital editions (Sahle 2008– ), so his thinking about his definitions (especially, for present purposes, the relationship of archive and edition) has been continuously refined as each contender for the catalogue was assessed.
32 He stresses the continuity of editorial traditions from the print medium to the digital and, by implication, the need for less special pleading about the changes in conception and execution (as opposed, say, to storage) that the digital medium has brought with it for scholarly editors: “Others may emphasise that our whole concept of editing is changing so completely that it may dissolve and be replaced by other labels. In my work, however, I see the continuity in the basic goals of providing reliable, trustworthy and useful representations of our textual and documentary heritage as the basis for further research in the humanities” (Sahle 2016, 37). One of his criteria for whether a digital-textual project constitutes a scholarly digital edition is: “Does the edition suffice as a substitute for the previous editions or primary documents making it unnecessary to go back to them in most cases? Does it enable further scholarly research on a reliable and trustworthy basis?” (Sahle 2016, 38).
33 Such recognition of the functioning of editions as serving readers’ needs – as reader- oriented – allows us to insert a lever of differentiation between archival and editorial efforts. It also wisely acknowledges that digitized facsimile images may, once equipped with suitable description, commentary and transcriptions, lead to the production of facsimile editions. But it also grants that the further establishment of reading texts of single- or multi-witness works, based on copy-texts emended on argued grounds, was and remains another matter. On the slider, they would appear further to the right.
34 The sliding scroll-bar model dispenses with anxiety about archives replacing editions. Editions will continue to be prepared for as long as readers need them. Readers need reader-facing editions.19 The special-purpose collections that we call archives can be substantial achievements in themselves, and certainly they are indispensible to digital editing. But only a tiny number of readers will want or feel that they need face-to-face engagement with the original sources or will be able to make effective use of them. Expanding the constituency of such curious readers to help them engage with the
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primary documents is desirable, for a range of pedagogic reasons. But we have to be realistic about our chances of success. Accordingly, I believe we will continue to prepare editions in the digital domain if only because, on the slider, archival contributions are by definition document-facing. They have a responsibility to leave the textual difficulties encountered in situ for the next specialist user. Ordinary readers, on the other hand, will need those impediments to comprehension to have been editorially digested by commentary or emendation.20 As Horace put it in the Ars Poetica, “He takes the prize who mixes the useful with the pleasurable, giving the reader enjoyment and advice in equal measure”.21
35 Because of the way in which it will likely be stored the digital edition will be better described as the editorial layer of the complete project.22 It will be the normal point of entry for the reader. It will be up to the editor to link the archival evidence to the editorial layer again and again, thus tempting the reader to go deeper. Provided that the project can be given a collaborative interface some readers may become enduring contributors to the project. This is the third clarification: apprehensions that single- document transcription projects are replacing work editions needlessly telescope the slider into a single disputed point. The slider model helps us to survey the full range of archival and editorial possibilities.
36 The fourth clarification is one of nomenclature: “representation” versus “presentation” as applied to the archival and editorial impulses. To establish the distinction I return to Sahle’s essay. His definition of the scholarly digital edition is based on his prior definition of the scholarly edition per se: “A scholarly edition is the critical representation of historic documents” (Sahle 2016, 23). The term “critical representation” warrants inspection.23
37 Its benefit lies in the fact that it allows him to envisage archival and editorial endeavours as more or less continuous but without sacrificing any of the rigour associated with scholarly editing: Criticism as a practice and a process may take different forms. Think of the rules that are applied in the transcription of a document. While the transcription itself is a representation, the specification of rules and their application make this a critical process. [. . .] [W]e may take the word critical as a container for all those activities that apply scholarly knowledge and reasoning to the process of reproducing documents and transforming a document or text into an edition. The critical handling of the material is a second necessary condition for an edition. A representation without such treatment or the addition of information is not an edition but a facsimile, a reproduction or – nowadays – a digital archive or library. Critical representation as a compound notion of editing aims at the reconstruction and reproduction of texts and as such addresses their material and visual dimension as well as their abstract and intentional dimension. (Sahle 2016, 24–5)
38 The omnibus, inclusive term “critical” in relation to documentary texts seems at first a welcome one since it allows for a range of applications along the slider. But it does not afford a way of differentiating expressions of archival from editorial impulses such as I have been arguing is useful and clarifying.
39 More importantly, the term “representation” seems to apply rather better to the archival aim than it does to the editorial. “Representation” became a ubiquitous term during the period of high theory of the 1980s and after. The so-called thing itself was felt to be inaccessible except via representations of it, usually discursive representations, and workings of power typically hung off that discursive condition.
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However, used more precisely in the present setting as Sahle does, “representation” does seem to apply aptly to the aim of transcribers of documents, especially in projects involving the encoding of the transcribed text. So the term embraces the archival impulse nicely.
40 But it does not satisfactorily describe the editorial impulse. The editor’s aim is less to represent something that is pre-existing than to present something (the text of a version, the text of work, a process of writing) that typically has not existed in precisely this form before, together with the critically analysed materials necessary to defend the presentation. My distinction invokes the ordinary meaning of “a publication” as something that is presented (gifted, handed over) to a readership.
41 While an archival transcription is an attempt to capture the text of a historical document (representation), an edition claims to make present the text of the thing that has been subject to the editorial analysis (presentation). This distinction seems cleaner – there is less muddying of the waters – than trying to bridge, as Sahle does, the archival and editorial activities as both being forms of representation.24
42 Of course as Sahle points out, any one project, by virtue of its deep encoding, may be capable of algorithmically generating both representation and presentation.25 But that is only a technical matter – and, as already observed, our definitions should not be dependent on those technologies that happen to enjoy current popularity. The slider idea, on the other hand, captures the relationship of the archival and editorial impulses, linked at the hip yet forever pulling apart. And now we can place the representational and presentational goals on the slider too, in parallel with the archival and editorial. This placement will help us as we seek to name and thereby to understand our project outcomes. Nomenclature turns out to be no trivial matter.
43 There is yet a final clarification to report. Once the slider model is seen as accommodating expressions of both the archival and the editorial impulses, another constellation of interpretative activity looms into view even further to the right on the slider – or, it may be judged, so far to the right as to be off it entirely. Given the orientation of the edition towards reader-facing activity and away from the duties of transcription and collation now understood as archival, where should we locate literary criticism? Does it have a position on the slider? Traditionally, it has been excluded from printed scholarly editions on the grounds of its lack of objectivity and its relatively short shelf-life compared to the editing itself.
44 I cannot see why, in the digital domain, this exclusion should be mandatory. To be sure, textual commentary will remain a central part of the edition’s argument. But need it, together with the factual explanatory notes, glossaries and maps be the only acceptable forms of commentary? Would not literary criticism, collaboratively contributed – date- stamped, signed, formally published and archived by the project – only benefit by its keeping company with the archival evidence and editorial interpretation? Could the old, familiar, disheartening, turf-protecting divide of scholarship and criticism be thus bridged? The Alexandrians had no trouble mixing textual commentary with exegesis. Why should not we, in our digital environment, now follow suit?
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Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon. 2015. “Editorial Principles and Practice”. In Van Hulle et al., eds., Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.
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Yale, Elizabeth. 2015. “The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline”. Book History, 18, pp. 332–59.
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NOTES
1. This is a revised version of a paper given at the 2016 annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship in Antwerp. 2. Three principles underlie the professional archival pursuit: archives are organized according to provenance not, say, by author; materials are “managed as aggregates, not as collections of individual items”; and “the original order imposed by the source” of the materials (“records”) is “preserved or recreated if it is known” (Theimer 2012). For a brief account of the looser definition (which Theimer terms “digital collections”), see the “keyword” Archive defined by Coats and Dean (n.d.). See also Bode and Osborne 2014; and Manoff 2005. Note that the “archival divide” that is said now to separate archivists and historians shows that the looser definition depends on an out-of-date assumption among historians about the nature of archives and the “scientific evidence” offered by their records: see further, Blouin and Rosenberg 2011. The new self-consciousness amongst archivists and historians sparked by the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (especially the latter’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression) asks, among other things, “Who actually should determine what the archives retain, and by what criteria?” (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 9). This kind of question reflects Derrida’s intervention and the consequent creation of a new humanities consensus, outside the world of professional archivists, that (1) no archive is complete; that (2) every document is partial so that the reason for its collection needs to be understood and, equally, its contents need to respond to an organizing narrative if it is to be made to yield its testimony (so that part of its meaning always resides in the interests brought to the investigation); and finally (3) that digital literary archives have a bias towards the canon. See further, Yale 2015, especially 332–3. This line of questioning remains applicable for special-purpose collections. In due course, the pragmatic agreement amongst textual scholars on what to include and, more generally, what special-purpose literary archives are will be sceptically inspected. Nevertheless the slow process of moving towards agreement over the last decade or two gives reason to assume that it will remain robust for some time to come. 3. E.g. Shillingsburg 2014; Van Hulle and Nixon, 2015: “The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project functions both as a digital archive and as a genetic edition”. 4. E.g. the digital FaustEdition (Bohnenkamp, Henke and Jannidis 2016) and the Canterbury Tales project (Robinson and Bordalejo n.d.) use dual TEI schemas, even though the resulting displays are very different (genetic on the one hand, stemmatic on the other). 5. The claim about the collation tool is sourced to Van Hulle and Nixon 2013; the 2015 revision contains the same wording: “Usually, digital ‘archives’ are distinguished from ‘editions’ because the latter offer a critical apparatus. An interoperable tool such as CollateX can enable any user — not necessarily an editor — to transform a digital archive into an electronic edition”. This may be true of genetic archival projects, which exist principally to facilitate study of the compositional process rather than to provide emended reading texts of works or of versions. But it is not true of critical editions nor of those documentary editions that employ emendation for the reader’s
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convenience. A line is crossed at that point. See further, below; Sahle 2007, 2008; and Pierazzo 2011. 6. Eggert 2013; and, for the viability of the work concept, Eggert 2012b. Robinson writes: “a scholarly edition must, so far as it can, illuminate both aspects of the text, text-as-work and text- as-document. Traditional print editions have focussed more on the first”. Whereas it was hoped that digital editions “might redress this balance”, he argues that the currently dominant view of digital editions, being document-centred, dissolves the work concept altogether (2013a, 123). 7. To which presentation or representation might be added “scholarly introductions, annotations, and textual histories”: this is how Kenneth M. Price describes the value-adding contents of a scholarly edition that, together with the reading text, provide “editorial supervision and intervention in the reader’s experience of the text” (Price 2009, § 27 and see § 4). The additive principle adduced by Price is the inverse of the edition-as-integrated-argument principle that I was proposing. 8. The development of the edition-as-argument idea from the late 1980s is detailed in Eggert 2016, 809. The quotation from Kane and Donaldson on which Keleman relies (scientific hypotheses are liable to “replacement” upon “the emergence of new data”) ignores, however, the role of a readership in reception. For a reply to Gabler’s idea of the edition as a set of discourses in dynamic argument with one another, see Eggert 2013. 9. Though not always in the nuanced way that I believe is necessary. See Robinson: “An edition is an argument about a text. We need arguments; without arguments, our archives are inert bags of words and images” (2013c, 1). 10. I have been drawing attention to this obvious, if nevertheless often overlooked, fact since the mid-1990s: see Eggert with McCauley 1995. 11. I am grateful to Jerome McGann who has influenced me here (see, e.g. McGann 2014, 197–8). 12. I first proposed the qualified terms “archival impulse” vs “editorial impulse” (rather than the starker “archive” vs “edition”) in Eggert 2012a. The distinction made its way into my presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship in March 2013 (Eggert 2012b, issued August 2013), and made a cameo appearance in a paper of 2013 published as Eggert 2016. Via oral transmission and warmly acknowledged, the “impulse” idea first made its way into these pages in an article by Peter Shillingsburg, the generosity of whose thinking has benefitted mine in ways too numerous to specify for over three decades now, including over issues where we have disagreed (2014, 20). The slider metaphor is a natural extension of the terms spectrum or continuum, both of which I use in Eggert 2009 and which Elena Pierazzo picks up (2015); see also her Figure 2.5, which portrays different kinds of edition on a line between works and documents (p. 52). Drawing on Patrick Sahle’s characterization of types of digital edition (Sahle 2008), she comments: The shift between archives, libraries and editions is subtle and happens along a continuous line where minimum and maximum scholarly engagements are distributed. The difference between these resources is therefore quantitative: the more scholarly argument [there is] the more likely there is to be an edition. However, the quantitative definition becomes also qualitative in the moment that scholarly engagement corresponds to an increased level of reliability, accuracy and, generally, quality of the editorial product. While the distinctions are blurred, they still hold from a scholarly point of view. Nevertheless, no reliable criteria, but the judgement of the scholar-user, are offered as a means for classifying digital scholarly editions as distinguished from other text vessels. (Pierazzo 2015, 201) The lack of “reliable criteria” is a problem for the modelling of editions that Pierazzo advocates. It is less so for the scholar–editors themselves. Dirk Van Hulle comes close to my use: “the strict boundary between digital archives and electronic editions is becoming increasingly permeable, resulting in a continuum rather than a dichotomy” (Van Hulle and Nixon, 2013), as does Peter Robinson:
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There should be an unbroken continuum, between the multiple resources created by libraries as they produce and put online more and more images of the manuscripts and books [. . .] through to the scholarly editions we might build within and on top of all these materials, where every word is scrutinized, every decision weighed, and where our aim is not just to record, not just to present, but to understand (Robinson 2013c, 4). Perhaps Claus Huitfeldt has the most felicitous formulation: “As a first step, let us imagine representation and interpretation as points located at opposite ends of a continuum. Our task is to find somewhere along this continuum clear demarcation lines that allow us to decide, in particular cases and classes of cases, what is interpretation and what is representation” (2006, 195). See also Sahle 2007, 2008– , and 2016. 13. Each form was nevertheless seen as a scholarly edition. See Bowers 1966 and 1978 and Tanselle 1978. See also Eggert with McCauley 1995, which, on the basis of a survey of scholarly editions of literary works, and historical and other documents, as well as a wide range of other editorial endeavours (e.g. the collection of children’s chants from the playground), came to the conclusion that the distinction between scholarly and critical editions was a fragile one, and that all editions that took a conscious attitude towards the text being presented as a problem in itself deserved the label “critical”. That left the secondary but, for some scholarly purposes, more important distinction of whether or not they were full-scale editions based on an identification and collation of the relevant textual witnesses. 14. E.g. the James Joyce Archive, the Shelley–Godwin Archive, the Cornell Yeats. 15. The original claim of interoperability may be found in Ide and Sperberg-McQueen 1998, 1.4: “If both the creators of textual scholarly materials and software developers utilize a common encoding format, the texts may be used with any software package”. Sperberg-McQueen’s influential claim that SGML encodings were “software independent” is often sourced to his paper at the Modern Language Association conference in San Diego in 1994: “For scholarly editions, such longevity is essential. And that is why I say that the development and use of software- independent markup schemes like SGML and the TEI Guidelines will prove more important, in the long run, to the success of electronic scholarly editions [. . .] than any single piece of software can”. The goal of interoperability grew out of this belief, a persuasive one in the early–mid 1990s when the problems of dependency on proprietary software had become acute. Time and experience have undermined it: see Schmidt 2014. He cites the opinions of prominent TEI-associated scholars who concur, including Martin Mueller (2011), written in his capacity as chair of its board; and Syd Bauman (2011), originally co-editor with Lou Burnard of the TEI: P5 Guidelines 2007. Bauman concludes that “interoperability is the wrong goal for scholarly humanities text encoding”. Schmidt’s argument is that, while there can be interoperability (and thus generalized tools) at the XML level, it is much harder to achieve at the semantic level. Programs that only check syntax or allow XML editing regard every XML file as “interoperable” because they do not care what is inside individual tags, but only that they are well-formed and syntactically correct. However, such programs are rather limited, such as a searching tool (e.g. XQuery) or an XML parser (e.g. Xerces) or an XML editor (e.g. oXygen). By contrast, the value- added semantic information of TEI is one level above that, and uses XML as its medium of expression. The flexibility of TEI allows humanistic interpretations to be expressed through a customizable computer-language syntax, but in practice this freedom leads to strong variations in the resulting encodings: through the choice of which features to encode, which tags to use and how to encode them. Software built on such shifting foundations must be customized for each project and cannot therefore be generally reusable. Thus in practice the TEI encoding scheme is unable to achieve true and practical interoperability. For recent statements sceptical of the prospects of interoperability as a goal, see: (1) Jannidis (2010), in particular: “Interoperability of Programs” (551–56); (2) Cummings (2013): “Being able to seamlessly integrate highly complex textual structures in interoperable methods without
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significant conditions or intermediary agents is a fantasy”; (3) Holmes (2015; Holmes is co-editor of Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative); and (4) the abstract for Tara Andrews’s keynote address at the TEI 2016 conference (Andrews 2016). I thank Desmond Schmidt for advice in compiling this note. 16. Work and version attributions being editorial is a logical extension of the argument in Shillingsburg that the material forms that texts take need to be distinguished from texts themselves: “Drafts have the same ontological status as versions; they have no material existence. [. . .] A version is a coherent whole form of the work as conceived and executed by the author within a limited time in pursuit of a reasonably coherent or constant overall intention” (1996, 46). 17. Technical advances mean there is no longer any need to think of the collation as a strictly editorial responsibility as print editors used to do. Automatic collation tools and the algorithmic creation of stemmata are rapidly rendering that assumption outmoded. 18. Hans Walter Gabler argues that the genetisch-kritische edition goes beyond the traditional formation of the genetic dossier (manuscript image plus transcription), traditionally prepared by the scholar to support genetic criticism (Gabler 2016). The edition brings topographic and time- based material considerations into the project, realized by markup correlated to the image. An argument about the genetic development is offered, embodied in markup aimed at text- fragments and perhaps additionally in external commentary pointing to the whole text. This strikes me as a sound defence of the claim that genetic “editions” are indeed editions. However, Gabler claims an ontological foundation for genetic editions in arguing that the condition of the draft manuscript is, using Nelson Goodman’s famous distinction, autographic (and therefore special to the materiality of the document) as opposed to the allographic condition of texts in transmission (e.g. printed texts). This claim ignores the fact that all texts share the same basic predicament (as D. F. McKenzie, amongst others, has shown). Reading materially embedded text is unavoidable whether it be in manuscript or printed form, even if the task of deciphering the evolution of text on a draft manuscript page can be very much more difficult than a printed counterpart of the final layer of that text. The examples Gabler offers to witness his ontology are not fully convincing. One is the double markup of the FaustEdition (Bohnenkamp, Henke and Jannidis 2016); but it is readily explicable as a function of TEI’s intractable problem of overlapping hierarchies rather than a reflection of the ontology offered. 19. See Kenneth Price’s observation: “the whole question of what is in keeping with the wishes of a writer is beside the point. We do not edit for writers themselves but for our own purposes as scholars and readers” (Price 2009, § 23). To serve readers by anticipating what they understand a work to be, editors draw down from the witness documents what they call textual authority. Often it is the authority of the author that is invoked. Confused commentators sometimes conflate this with textual ownership, which is entirely author-directed. 20. See Tim McLoughlin who argues that the language of electronic editions implies a user rather than the reader anticipated by print scholarly editions. “The text is now an ‘archive’, a ‘resource’” (2008, 4). As the needs of worldwide users cannot be predicted he argues that annotation needs to become encyclopaedia-like, revealing the culture of which the text is an “archive”. I prefer the term “index” and can foresee the advent of semi-automatic annotation through the compilation of shared N-grams from contemporaneous writings and via harvesting of proper nouns. More ambitious is the proposal of Scheirer, Forstall and Coffee 2016. Nevertheless, as McLoughlin also argues, a bridging of the gap between users and readers is desirable via the design and architecture of the edition and constant reminders of and invitations to read the texts central to it. The user’s needs will be addressed by what I am calling the archival impulse in the project and the reader’s by the editorial. The user will treat the project as a digital work-site suitable for pursuing other endeavours; editions would be one of those endeavours. Finally, McLoughlin underestimates the extent to which printed scholarly editions have always
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had a reference-book function, with readers able to read with the grain in the traditional way he describes but also against the grain by consulting and finding versional multiplicity in the textual apparatus and using the annotation and commentary as arcs of further discovery. 21. Quoted by McLoughlin 2008, p. 3 n. 3. See Connor’s extensive review-article of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (Connor 2015). Although he does not use the terms, the desirable balance between archival and editorial obligations is his considered theme. 22. Contrast this position with Hans Walter Gabler’s description of the digital scholarly edition as “centripetal. It stores the comprehensive record of the material evidence of its research object at its own digital centre” (Gabler 2015). 23. “Document” is also more problematic than Sahle assumes. The main, traditional Anglo- American approach to critical editing did not see capturing the text of the document as the central aim but only as a subsidiary one. The text of the work (or, less often, a version of the work) was the typical goal. Documents were understood to be witnesses of texts that were always liable to contain unauthorized or accidental changes. The textual authority of documents was understood, therefore, to be mixed. The challenge was to rise above them in defensible ways. Sahle’s definition bends towards the German historical-critical editorial tradition where the aim was to capture the text, whether in the reading text or apparatus, of all the authorized versions (usually the text of the authorized documents). Laudably, however, Sahle wishes his aim to be understood not as tendentious but as inclusive when he uses the term “document” (Sahle 2016, 23). 24. The neo-platonic idealist might argue that the text of the version or the work once existed in the author’s mind and so, to that extent, any edition of it is a representation. I have repeatedly shown that this idealist argument is flawed. See e.g. Eggert 2009, chap. 10. 25. According to Sahle, “deeply marked up textual code of the digital edition theoretically covers several views of the text and may lead to various presentations generated by specific algorithms” (2016, 27). Near the start of his essay he promises to come back to the difference between representation and presentation but in fact this statement is the only thing he has to say on the matter in this article. Elsewhere he distinguishes between data as representation and algorithmically generated media as presentation: see Sahle 2010.
ABSTRACTS
There is no firm, outside vantage-point from which to survey and thus to define archive and edition as securely differentiated categories. As readers we inhabit the same textual field as the approaches to documents and texts that we seek to define. To record is first to read and analyse sufficiently for the archival purpose; to interpret is first to read and to analyse sufficiently for the editorial purpose. In practice, the archival impulse anticipates the editorial, and the editorial rests on the archival. We may envisage the relationship of archive and edition as a horizontal slider or scroll bar running from archive on the left to edition on the right. In this model every position on the slider involves interpretative judgement appropriate to its purpose. Every position along the slider involves a report on the documents, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Yet each activity, if it be a scholarly one, depends upon or anticipates the need for its complementary or co-dependent Other. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it, with the aim of orienting
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it towards known or envisaged audiences and by taking their anticipated needs into account. The sliding scroll-bar model dispenses with recently expressed anxiety about digital literary archives (special-purpose collections) replacing editions. The latter will continue to be prepared as long as there are readers whose requirements need to be served. The slider model helps us to survey the full range of archival and editorial possibilities. The term “representation” embraces the archival impulse. The editor’s aim, on the other hand, is less to represent something that is pre-existing than to present something (the text of a version, the text of a work, a process of writing) that typically has not existed in precisely this form before, together with the critically analysed materials necessary to defend the presentation.
INDEX
Keywords: archival impulse vs editorial impulse, archive vs scholarly edition, representation vs presentation, document, text, work, version
AUTHOR
PAUL EGGERT
Paul Eggert is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago where he previously held the Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies. He is also an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He has edited critical editions of works by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Kingsley, Rolf Boldrewood, Henry Lawson and Joseph Conrad. His principal ideas are brought together in The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Biography of a Book (Pennsylvania State University Press and Sydney University Press, 2013). His Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2009) won the Society for Textual Scholarship’s Finneran Award as the best book of editorial theory for 2009–10.
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Textual Realities: An Aristotelian Realist Ontology of Textual Entities
Christopher A. Plaisance
Ontological Questions
1 Within the domain of textual scholarship, there is a category of theoretical questions which have received comparatively less attention than other questions of theory (e.g. those of intentionality) — this category of questioning is that of the ontological status of the entities which constitute the domain’s primary subjects.1 To query an entity’s ontological status is to inquire into the nature of its being, to ask what it means to say that such an entity exists (Loux 2006b, 13–15). In terms of textual scholarship, these ontological questions tend to revolve around the relationship of the literary work to the material documents which witness it. Solutions to this problem can be broadly categorized as either being derived from realist or nominalist poles of the ontological spectrum (Kelemen 2009, 15; Van Hulle 2004, 37).2 Textual scholars whose ontologies are realist in nature will treat the work as an entity, whose being is, in some way, separate from the beings of the material documents reproducing the work’s text. However, those scholars who tend more towards the nominalist pole of the spectrum will deny the existence of a work which is ontologically distinct from such material documents (Chartier and Stallybrass 2013, 201–02). In this way, while a realist position enables the scholar to speak of a given work as an entity in and of itself, which further allows him to identify a plurality of documentary witnesses — which both exist in a multitude of different forms materially and often disagree with on another textually — as instances of that single work; it necessarily commits the scholar to an ontology which admits the existence of non-physical beings, as the work itself is seen as something apart from the material documents. On the other hand, while a nominalist ontology which denies the existence of such non-physical beings more closely comports to the materialism which has come to dominate twentieth century academic discourse, it does not easily permit the scholar to identify any unity either between different material objects or between the slightly varied texts of two different editions of a work. It is for
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reasons such as this, Kelemen argues, that “most textual critics are Realists, believing that a change in the physical appearance of the work […] does not change its substance, [and] does not make it into a new work” (Kelemen 2009, 15).3 The strong commitment to the materialism that nominalism with respect to textual entities necessitates makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for the textual scholar to find theoretical justification for doing critical work itself. For if the work is not something apart from a material document, then any text resulting from a critic’s labour would be an entirely new work, rather than new edition of existing work.
2 Following the lead of the authorial branch of the intentionalist oriented critics, particularly Tanselle, my ontological approach to this question is rooted in realism rather than nominalism. Tanselle argues that any historical approach to a literary work as something more than a mere physical artifact “must be able to distinguish the work itself from attempts to reproduce it” and that “equating a reproduction with the work it aims to copy is incoherent” (Tanselle 1989, 13–14). The incoherence of the nominalist ontology is, from Tanselle’s perspective, due to the fact that it conflates the communicative statements of the work with the means of communication. For even though he agrees that such communication always requires a physical vehicle (e.g. sound waves, combinations of paper and ink, magnetic hard drives, etc.), the work’s existence as a work — the work qua work — does not depend on any single vehicle existing. He notes that “a literary work is not lost through the destruction of every handwritten, printed, and recorded copy of it, so long as a text remains in someone’s memory” (Tanselle 1989, 17).4 This is to say that for the critic whose orientation is at all concerned with the historical transmission of a work, his ontology must allow for the work itself to transcend discrete physical instances of the work through existing as an idea. If a nominalist ontology is adhered to, and the work treated as identical to the document, then there can be no historical continuity. If each document reproducing the work is viewed as a new work in and of itself, then it is nonsensical for the critic to speak of the two documents as having any unity or identity between them; they are inextricably different and disconnected. It is only through some species of ontological realism that it becomes sensible to speak of a work appearing in various forms through the centuries, or to speak of works being transmitted from one medium to another. To speak of such things is to accept the “recognition that literary works do not exist on paper or in sounds”, but rather that their existence — in some way — transcends these media (Tanselle 1989, 17–18).
3 However, this acceptance of a realist orientation towards the question of the work’s ontology immediately begets another question which must be addressed: if a work has some type of nonphysical existence, as the realist supposes, what is the precise nature of this existence? Among textual scholars, realists and nominalist alike, there is a near universal agreement that the answer to this question is not to be found in Platonic realism (Sutherland 2013, 54; Niles 2013, 205; Chartier and Stallybrass 2013, 201–02; Shillingsburg 1996, 43–45). The clearest articulation of this opposition to Platonic realism with respect to the question of a work’s ontology is found in Shillingsburg. In his Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, there is a detailed section on ontology, which is currently the most formally developed such treatment within the field of textual scholarship (Shillingsburg 1996, 41–52). Therein, Shillingsburg argues that although a work is ontologically ideal, “it is dangerous to think of the work as a Platonic ideal that the author strove to represent in some final or best version of the work” (Shillingsburg
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1996, 43). This danger with respect to Platonic realism comes from the fact that the Platonic ideal is wholly transcendent with respect to change and instantiation (Loux 2006b, 41), which is to say that a work conceived of as real in the Platonic sense would necessarily be an immutable ideal existing indefinitely with no need for physical instantiation, and that all such attempts to instantiate the work physically would necessarily be flawed reflections of the transcendent ideal work (Shillingsburg 1996, 43). In this way, while the manifold problems with a Platonic realist ontology for dealing with literary works have largely kept Platonism out of the ontologies of textual critics, the question lingers as to what type of a realist ontology is acceptable for dealing with the specific problems presented by artifactual entities such as literary works.
4 In considering the previously quoted passage from Tanselle regarding the existence of literary works depending on their continued persistence either as material objects or in the minds of mankind (Tanselle 1989, 17), it becomes clear that a solution to the problem of the work’s ontological status can be found through examining historical solutions to the problematic status of certain genera of ideas within Platonic realism. Since the Middle Ages, one of the most common expressions within the discourse of Platonic realism — specifically the traditions derived from Augustine’s adaption of Plotinus’s metaphysics — has been to describe these transcendental ideas as thoughts in the mind of God (Boland1996, 66; Cary 2000, 56). In his clearest statement on the topic, Augustine tells us that “the ideas are certain original and principal forms of things, i.e. reasons, fixed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed and, being thus eternal and existing in the same state, are contained in the Divine Intelligence” (Augustine 2010, 79–80).5 These ideas which spring forth from and are contained within God’s mind are, within Platonic realism, conceived of as both necessary and eternal, insofar as their non-existence is strictly inconceivable. The necessity and eternality which characterize the being of such objects is, Augustine tells us, due to the fact that the horizon of their being is strictly determined by ontological situation within God’s mind (Augustine 2010, 80–81). Classic examples of these genera of ideas are generally given by Platonic realists as mathematical objects. However, while it may be the case that some genera of ideas are real in the Platonic sense and that literary works are ideal, it is clear that such works do not at all comport to Augustine’s description. Where Platonic ideas are necessary, literary works are unnecessary — it being possible to imagine a world in which a currently existing ideal literary work does not exist. And, where Platonic ideas are eternal, literary works are temporal — it being the case that such works invariably come into being at some discrete point in time, and can potentially pass into nonexistence.
Aristotelian Realism
5 If it is the case, then, that literary works are ideal rather than material, but that they are not ideal in the Platonic sense, in what sense are they real? At this juncture, Tanselle and Shillingsburg’s guidance becomes less reliable. As we have seen, both theorists are clear that literary works are ideal objects, which are not identical with material vehicles of instantiation; however, both are also clear that the reality of such works cannot be explained by Platonic realism. So far, so good. But when it comes to specifically delineating what metaphysical alternative to Platonism does accurately
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reflect the ontological status of literary works, both are strangely silent. It is my contention that the theoretical understandings of the work’s status in Tanselle and Shillingsburg can best be explained by appealing to Aristotelian realism, and that this also provides the most accurate understanding of the truth of these entities’ ontology.6 The implicit Aristotelian ontology present in Tanselle can be traced to Greg’s textual distinction between substantives and accidentals, which is itself implicitly Aristotelian but also presented in a manner devoid of the broader context necessary to describe the work’s ontological status. This thesis, of an explicitly Aristotelian ontology of the literary work has, to date, been advanced by only two scholars (Bruin 1999, 95): first, by Jorge J. E. Gracia (1996, 1–90); and second, by John Bruin (1999, 94–101) in his response to Gracia. However, though both Gracia and Bruin were writing after Tanselle and Shillingsburg, their ontologies were independently developed, and thus do not share the same vocabulary. What follows, then, is an attempt to: (1) demonstrate the implicit Aristotelian ontology present in Greg, Tanselle, and Shillingsburg; (2) demonstrate the compatibility of their implicitly Aristotelian ontologies with the explicit theories of Gracia and Bruin; and (3) to provide working definitions of the types of entities encountered by the textual critic as informed by this Aristotelian ontology of the work.
6 The implicit use of Aristotelian ontology within modern textual scholarship finds its earliest exemplar in Greg, whose distinction between substantives and accidentals is, both in essence and form, a “borrowing […] from medieval scholastic philosophy” (Kelemen 2009, 15). Specifically, the metaphysical dichotomy between a thing’s substantia and its accidens has its genesis in the Medieval Latin translations and interpretations of Aristotle which form the core of Thomism’s philosophical canon (Feser 2014, 164–71; Wippel 1987, 13). In Greg’s formulation, the primary task of the textual critic is to recover whatever text represents “most nearly what the author wrote” (Greg 1950/1951, 21). The method, by which this goal is best reached, he tells us, is as follows: We need to draw a distinction between the significant, or as I shall call them “substantive,” readings of the text, those namely that affect the author’s meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in generally spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I shall call them “accidentals” of the text. (Greg 1950/1951, 21–22)
7 This textual ontology which Greg presents is clearly drawn from the ontology which Aristotle delineates throughout his Categories and Metaphysics (Aristotle 1984a, 2a11– 4b20; Aristotle 1984b, 990b27–991a8), whereby an entity’s being is described as an essential substance which is expressed through a variety of accidental categories (Annas 1977, 146). Substance and accidence operate, in Aristotle’s ontology, in an identical fashion with the subject and predicate of a sentence in classical grammar (Aristotle 1984a, 1a16–1b25).7 As such, given the phrase, “Aristotle is happy,” we identify “Aristotle” as the being’s substance and “happiness” as its accident. A being’s substance is that attribute without which it would not be itself, whereas an accident is an attribute which may or may not characterize the being at a given point in time. In this case, while the being in question is necessarily Aristotle (e.g. Aristotle cannot become Plato), but Aristotle is not necessarily happy (e.g. he might be sad, but that accidental sadness would not affect his being Aristotle).
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8 In terms of the literary work’s text, Greg applies Aristotle’s ontology by construing the text’s words and their order as the text’s substance and such things as punctuation and spelling as the text’s accidents — proposing that it is, essentially, the words and not the punctuation which define the text’s being. It is, however, important to note that Greg’s formulation here is an ontology of the text of a literary work, rather than an ontology of the work itself.8 Having been developed out of the particular issues involved with editing early modern texts (Tanselle 1995, 22), Greg’s distinction between a text’s words as substantives and punctuation as accidentals is not necessarily an appropriate theoretical framework within which to consider textual corpora developed outside of this narrow timeframe. This is because during the time period with which Greg was primarily concerned, authorial manuscripts generally omitted punctuation — which was added later by a publisher who may or may not have been relaying the specific intentions of the author. That being the case for early modern works, Greg’s specific distinction makes a great deal of sense for those works. However, when considering modern — particularly 21st century — corpora, the textual landscape is vastly different, with many witnesses being typescripts or electronic objects keyed by the author himself. What this means is that, in terms of such works, both the words and punctuation marks will tend to be indicative of the author’s intention. Therefore, in such cases, it makes more sense to treat all textual characters as substantial. Within such corpora, then, textual accidentals would largely be such things as the metadata and document source code, as well as any other formal elements — such as word division, fonts, typeface, etc. — which either the document’s creator did not have authorial control over, or do not serve to impact the text significantly.
9 While Greg’s formulation serves as an introduction into the application of Aristotelian realism into the field of textual scholarship, it does not address the fundamental theoretical issue of the ontological status of the work itself. It is the case that the Aristotelian categories can be used to resolve this question, but for the answer to be sensible we must first examine the substance and accident distinction in terms of the issue of instantiation. Broadly speaking, this issue is the dividing line between Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of realism, with the Platonists supporting the position that uninstantiated properties are real and the Aristotelians rejecting the position in favor of the necessity of exemplification (Loux 2006a, 208; Loux 2006b, 41–43, Franklin 2008, 105; Tweedale 1988, 502–08). This to say that while a Platonic ontology would admit the reality of an ideal entity which is not at a given time materially instantiated (e.g. the ideal form of the square would necessarily exist even if it were the case that there were no materially exemplified squares at a particular point in time), the Aristotelian position demands instantiation as a necessary requirement for the ideal’s existence (e.g. ideal squares are necessarily contingent on the concurrent existence of square material objects). As James Franklin says, “the Aristotelian slogan is that the universals are in re: in the things themselves (as opposed to a Platonic heaven)” (Franklin 2008, 104). What this means is that while both Aristotelian and Platonic realist ontologies admit the existence of ideal forms, they differ both in terms of the dependent relationships between the form and its instantiation as well as in the posited location of the ideals themselves. For the Platonic realist, the ultimate dependence of material particulars upon ideal universals necessitates the ontological location of ideals in some hyper-cosmic level of reality. However, for the Aristotelian realist, the codependence of form and instantiation necessitate the ontological location of ideal forms within their material instantiations.
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Working Ontology
10 It is not my intent to argue here that Aristotelian realism as described above accurately describes the ontological statuses of all beings, but rather to argue that it provides the best answer to the ontological question of the literary work’s status.9 In developing an Aristotelian realist ontology suitable for informing the theoretical foundations of textual critical work, there are four entities which must be defined: (1) the text, (2) the document, (3) the version, (4) and the work. Of these three entities, the text is the natural place to begin, as the three remaining entities are all textual in nature. According to Shillingsburg, “a text is the actual order of words and punctuation marks as contained in any one physical form, such as a manuscript, proof, or book” which itself “has no […] material existence, since it is not restricted by time or space” (Shillingsburg 1996, 46). This delimitation is sound and provides a firm foundation for building the necessary subsequent ontology. The key point to note with this definition of text is that it is ontologically ideal in nature. As previously discussed, although texts do depend on material documents (i.e. the document is the text’s causa materialis), text itself is not a material object which can be seen or touched; it is a pattern which can manifest in a wide variety of physical objects, but is not defined or exhausted by an of them. Shillingsburg, here, is in agreement with Gracia, who identifies a text as “a group of entities, used as signs, that are selected, arranged, and intended by an author to convey a specific meaning to an audience in a certain context,” which “entails that texts are artifacts, products of conventionally established relation between certain entities and meanings in a context” (Gracia 1996, 6). This poststructuralist understanding of an author’s relationship with his written work is essentially grounded in Michel Foucault’s argument that the author of a literary work is not a person, but is rather a discursive function which emerged (in the historical sense) during the early modern period (Foucault 1998, 211; Nehamas 1986, 685; How 2007, 9; Chartier and Stallybrass 2013, 200). Under this theory, the writer is an “actual individual, firmly located in history” and is the efficient cause of his written works, but has no “interpretative authority over them” (Nehamas 1986, 686). The author-function, on the other hand, is seen as being the formal cause of a literary work — emerging from an interactive relationship between the work and its readership — whose nature is to guide the interpretation of the work, and whose nature is in turn determined by the work’s interpretation (Nehamas 1986, 686). In this way, Foucault sees the meaning of a work as being generated alongside the author-function — being neither objectively rooted to the work itself nor authoritatively determined by the writer himself, but rather emerging as a socially constructed value from the interrelation between the author-function and the discursive community within which the work is being read (Olsson 2007, 224). Within this poststructuralist understanding of the question of authorial intention, what Gracia adds to Shillingsburg’s ontology is the definition of text as an essentially artifactual entity, whose existence is wholly contingent on both the author as the creative agency (i.e. the text’s causa efficiens) as well as the preexisting contextual relationship between the author and his intended audience (i.e. the text’s causa formalis).10 The final component to be addressed is the question of the text’s final causation (causa finalis), which in terms of the text proves to be the author’s intention for the text. This understanding of the term “intention” is quite distinct and must be understood wholly apart from any questions of meaning which have been discussed
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above in terms of the text’s formal and efficient causes. Here, following Shillingsburg, the term ‘intention’ strictly and solely refers to the author’s intent to arrange a specific pattern of letters, punctuation marks, and spaces so as to constitute a text which will convey an intended meaning (Shillingsburg 1996, 35–36). Both Shillingsburg and Gracia are approaching text from an Aristotelian perspective — Shillingsburg implicitly, Gracia explicitly — with their formulations being complementary to one another. In synthesizing the two, we can develop a working Aristotelian ontological definition of text as being: an artifactual pattern of letters, punctuation marks, and spaces, which is materially caused by the physical document(s) instantiating it, formally caused by the contextual author function, efficiently caused by its author, and finally caused by the author’s intention.
11 As the remaining three entities to be discussed — the document, version, and work — are all textual beings, they are all necessarily shaped by this ontological definition of the text. Given that the document is the being from the remaining category of textual entities which is perceptually closest to us, we will do well to examine it first. Shillingsburg rightly states that “a document consists of the physical material, paper and ink, bearing the configuration of signs that represents a text” (Shillingsburg 1996, 47). Such documents “have material existence”, with each new copy of a text, whether accurate or inaccurate” coming into being as “a new document” (Shillingsburg 1996, 47). This is to say that as objects whose ontological horizons are material rather than ideal, the document’s ontology is defined by particularity and specificity, insofar as each particular document (e.g. each specific copy of a book pressing) is itself a distinct material being. However, as a textual entity, the document’s ontological horizon is not strictly material, but has an ideal dimension as well. For, even as the document exists “as the material substratum” of a textual ontology, it is itself a transmissive medium which, by bearing its text, becomes more than a dumb object (Gabler 2007, 197–198). If we are to treat a document’s text as a universal immaterial substance, then it is necessarily the case that the document itself is that text’s particular material accident. In this way, even though the text itself does ontologically depend on instantiation in principle, as a universal it does not depend on the individual preexistence of any particular material document. The textual substance is the universal category which gives a sense of unity to the diverse textual accidents that are the different document copies of a single text. As Gracia illustrates, within the University of Buffalo’s library, there are multiple material books bearing the title Don Quixote. While these documents differ in many ways — “they occupy different spatio-temporal locations; they are printed on different typescripts; the papers of the books have different consistencies; pages vary on the number of words they have; and so on” — the factor which ties these diverse beings together as a unity is that they are the specific material instantiations of an ideal textual pattern (Gracia 1996, 45). The document can certainly be treated as a substantial being in and of itself, but as a textual being, it is bound to be the ideal text’s material accident.
12 The document’s causation is quite different from that of the text. As a material rather than ideal entity, the document’s causa materialis is nothing less than the specific material components used to construct the document. For a book, this would be such things as paper, ink, glue, cardstock, etc. — all of which are used to physically assemble the document itself as a material being. The document’s causa formalis, which informs the pattern and form of the document as a textual object would then be the document’s
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text. For while it would be possible for two books with identical bindings, page counts, materials, etc. to be nearly identical materially, what distinguishes one from the other as a specific book is the text printed therein — making the text the formative element of the document qua textual being.11 The document’s causa efficiens would be the creator of the specific document. For manuscripts, this would be the author who obtained the paper and inscribed the words; whereas for books, this would be the network of individuals and processes which comprise the publisher and printer. And finally, the document’s causa finalis would be the intrinsic ontological requirement of the text itself to be instantiated by a material vehicle; for the text’s very existence is directly predicated on some such instantiation. As such, we find a working Aristotelian definition of the document to be simply: a particular material textual accident of a universal immaterial textual substance, which is materially caused by the material components used to assemble the document, formally caused by the document’s text, efficiently caused by the document’s manufacturer, and finally caused by text’s ontological need for material instantiation.
13 When we speak of the text of a work — say, Don Quixote, to use Gracia’s favorite example — as being instantiated by a document, the question which must be asked is which text is being instantiated. For, although there is a certain type of unity between all document copies of Don Quixote, the specific texts of various editions can differ greatly from one another due to a plethora of issues such as shifting authorial intentions between the publication of versions, editorial emendations, printing mishaps, etc. Therefore, it is the version whose ontological structure must next be investigated to contextualize and bring finality to the previous discussion of the document. Following Shillingsburg, a version can be identified as “one specific form of the work — the one the author intended at some particular moment in time” (Shillingsburg 1996, 44). The version is not a material being like the instantiating document, “but it is represented more or less well or completely by a single text as found in a manuscript, proof, book, or some other written or printed form” (Shillingsburg 1996, 44). This is to say that Shillingsburg uses the term version to specifically “refer to the nonmaterial authorial intentions” which take the ideal shape of a specific text and the material shape of either a specific handcrafted document or a specific class of manufactured documents which are, more or less, textually identical (Shillingsburg 1996, 48).12 While the document is necessarily a single individual material being, the version is a more elastic category and can refer either to unique material beings (e.g. manuscripts, typescripts) or to textually identical classes of beings (e.g. editions of a book). In each case, what distinguishes the entity as a version rather than a document is that the version is ontologically ideal (Shillingsburg 1996, 45). This means that even in the cases of manuscripts, where the version is instantiated in only a single document, the term version will refer to the document’s textual substance rather than its material accident.
14 In terms of causation, as a textual being, we find that the version bears more similarity to the general case of the text than to the material document. As an ideal entity, the version’s causa materialis is the text embodied in the specific class of documents (in this case editions of books, etc.) or the individual document (in the case of manuscripts, typescripts, etc.) which serve as the specific accidents of the version’s ideal textual substance. Again, as is the case with the general case of the text, the textual version’s causa formalis is the Foucauldian author function, which creates meaning through the contextual interplay between the author and his intended audience. The version’s causa efficiens is the creative being who intended this text’s creation. In the case of works
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where there was a sole author responsible for the composition of the version’s text as well as the publication of the version as a class of documents, the causa efficiens is the singular author. However, as McGann argues, for more complex situations where the specific pattern of words, punctuation marks, and spaces which define the text were jointly ordered by an author working in conjunction with a publishing house, the causa efficiens would be the social network of individuals responsible. Regardless of whether or not the author engaged the assistance of a publisher in translating his version’s text into a printed edition, the causa finalis of the version is the author’s intention to express himself by means of a materially actualized text. As such, we may ontologically define the version as: a particular immaterial textual accident of a universal immaterial textual substance, which is materially caused by the text of its instantiating class of documents, formally caused by the contextual author function, efficiently caused by its author or authorial network, and finally caused by the author’s intention.
15 The text, document, and version now having been defined in terms of Aristotelian ontology, the central question of the ontological status of the literary work may now be answered fully in terms of these prior descriptions. In terms of the two polarities we have been using to examine these terms — (1) the universal and particular polarity, and (2) the ideal and material polarity — the work is the polar opposite of the document in terms of extremity. Where the document is wholly particular and material, the literary work is wholly universal and ideal; where the document sits at the bottom of the ontological chain as its final link, the work sits at the top as the fountainhead which informs and shapes the beings of those contingent types of entities. In Shillingsburg’s words, the work is wholly “a product of the imagination”, which is “shaped variously, grows, is revised, changes, develops in the author’s mind”, and as it “achieves completeness of form in the imagination (aided by notes and drafts), the written representation of it achieves not only a fullness but also a stasis or rigidity” (Shillingsburg 1996, 42). This is to say that while both the version and the work are ideal, they differ insofar as the version is defined by temporal particularity — being a version of the work as formulated by the author at a particular point in time. Just as the document is a non-exhaustive accident of the version’s textual substance which it exemplifies, so is the version a non-exhaustive accident of the work’s textual substance which it exemplifies. In this way we can see something akin to a chain of emanation where the work is seen as the primary textual substance whose accidents are the various versions intended by the author at various points in time; the versions as textual substances are then exemplified through accidental documents which complete the descent of the wholly ideal and universal work into the wholly particular and material document.
16 Where the factor which characterized the version as universal was the fact that the documents which exemplified it were textually identical, the same is not true for works, as the very factor which differentiates one version from another is that they differ textually. Therefore, if it is not textual identity which universalizes the work, what is it? According to Gracia and Bruin, it is a semantic rather than textual universality which unites the various versions of a work and makes them identifiable as versions of the same single work. As Gracia tells us, “if the texts in question [i.e. versions] did not have the same meaning, syntactical arrangement, or type signs, then they would have to be considered different” (Gracia 1996, 88). This position is clarified by Bruin, who explicitly states that “the universality of the text is semantic”, which is what allows different readers to approach textually distinct versions of a single work
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and still know that they are reading the same work (Bruin 1999, 100). In causative terms, as an ideal textual substance, the work is very similar to the version. We are able to identify the work’s causa materialis as the specific versions intended by the author at different times, which is the sole real causative difference between versions and works. Identical to the version, the work’s causa formalis is the Foucauldian author function which contextualizes the author’s intentions within the meaning-creating relationship between readers and authors; its causa efficiens is the author or authorial complex responsible for creating the specific text which defines the work; and its causa finalis is the author’s intention to textually impart meaning. As such, the Aristotelian definition of the work can be stated as: a universal immaterial textual substance accidentally exemplified through particular immaterial textual versions, which is materially caused by these same specific versions, formally caused by the author function, efficiently caused by its author or authorial complex, and finally caused by the author’s intention.
Relational Symmetries
17 Within this ontological framework, three primary relational symmetries between the four textual entities suggest themselves: (1) a unitary vector of material causation linking the document, text, version, and work; (2) a nested relationship of substance/ accidence dependencies between the work, version, and document; and (3) a recursive relationship between the material and formal causation of the text and document. That such relational symmetries are a necessary implicit consequence of the ontological formulation calls to mind Proclus’ requirement that all manifold formulations which are reflective of the Good necessarily be constituted by the triad of beauty, truth, and symmetry (Proclus 1995, 3.6.1–5). And, although neither I nor Proclus would argue that symmetrical arguments are necessarily true, it is fitting that a true formulation would yield such implicit structural symmetries in the relationships between the key entity types.
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Figure 2.1: Vectors of Material Causation
18 The first set of relational symmetries implied by the above ontology is that of the unitary vector of material causation connecting the four key entity types within the ontological framework: the document, text, version, and work. This symmetrical relationship is easily displayed graphically (see Figure 2.1), insofar as the relations are simple and direct. We begin with the material constituents of a document (e.g. paper, ink, etc.), which serves as the causa materialis of the document; the document then serves as the material cause of the text; the text as the material cause of the version; and, finally, the version as the material cause of the work. There is, here, a strict line of succession, with one entity type functioning as the causa materialis of the next entity in the series — with a single vector thus connecting the document to the work in this manner.
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Figure 2.2: Substance/Accidence Dependencies
19 The second set of implied relational symmetries is the system of substance/accidence dependencies connecting the work, version, and document entity types within the ontological schema presented here. Graphically displayed through a Euler diagram demonstrating the nested relationships between the terms (see Figure 2.2), what we see here is a way in which all three terms are necessarily related to one another by virtue of being one another’s substance and/or accident. It is the case that while a version is the accident of the work’s substance, the document is the accident of the version’s substance — thus revealing a smooth dependent symmetry linking all three terms, with the version serving as the pivot key.
Figure 2.3: Principle of Textual Recursion
20 The third, and final, relational symmetry set which emerges from this ontological schema is that of the recursive relationship which exists between the text and document entity types by virtue of their respective material and formal causes. Graphically displayed as a cyclical process, what is necessarily implied by the ontologies of these two terms is that while the document is the causa materialis of the text, the text is itself the causa formalis of the document — the result of which is an endless recursive cycle connecting the two terms in a loop of ontological dependence (Figure 2.3).
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Conclusion
21 In conclusion, in response to the question of the ontological status of the four entities with which the textual scholar is concerned — (1) the text, (2) the document, (3) the version, (4) and the work — this paper has advanced an Aristotelian realist ontology. The ontology developed here both serves to harmonize prior Aristotelian theoretical work (both implicit and explicit) within the field of textual scholarship, and to develop a novel formulation which presents an internally and externally consistent ontological mapping of these four primary entity types, by defining them within the Aristotelian frameworks of (a) the fourfold model of causation and (b) the theory of substance and accidence. The consequences of this new ontology can be grouped into three general categories: (1) broader theoretical ramifications for the study of textual entities, (2) practical methodological considerations for the practice of textual scholarship, and (3) special concerns related to both textual sources and editions witnessed as digital media.
22 First, the ontological schema advanced by this paper has ramifications for the theoretical study of textual entities both within the field of textual scholarship and the broader philosophical field of ontology itself. In both cases, the key feature is that of the model’s accuracy concerning the truth of the entities and relationships under discussion. In terms of the larger philosophical ramifications, while the paper does not propose any modifications to the core Aristotelian theories involved, it does present a novel real-world application of these theories which serves to further demonstrate their veracity. Additionally, within this specific context of textual scholarship, the paper’s model advances what is perhaps the most rigorous ontology — Aristotelian or otherwise — to date. The external validity and internal consistency yielded by the model’s rigor results in a standardized vocabulary which has the potential to both increase the theoretical coherence of ontologies used within the field of textual scholarship, but also to better facilitate communication between theorists, by providing a common lexicon which distinguishes key concepts at a fine grain level of detail.
23 Second, the schema has additional practical considerations which translate the theory into methodological practice. In general, this is to say that the more accurate the theoretical underpinning is formulated, then the more effective practical methodology that rests on top of the theory. For example, a theoretical apparatus which more clearly delineates the distinctions between the version and document (and distinguishes both from the work) would be useful in developing a genealogical methodology which charts the emergence of distinct versions of a work through the evidence provided by clusters of related documents which witness the work’s text. In developing such a methodology, the precision of the underlying ontology around which the theory rests would have a corresponding effect on the precision of the methodology itself — which is, in and of itself, reason for the textual scholar to strive for ontological precision and veracity.
24 Third, both the theoretical and methodological considerations of this paper’s ontology take on a new importance in light of the fact that the field of textual scholarship is currently facing transformative challenges from new media. These challenges faced manifest both as digital critical editions and as critical editions (digital or otherwise) which analyse digital witnesses (Gabler 2010; Pierazzo 2016). Indeed, this present
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ontological study emerged out of a larger textual critical project analysing a literary corpus composed almost entirely of digital documents.13 This project required several methodological innovations in order to treat these documents with the same rigor as an analytical bibliographic study would for traditional media (Plaisance 2016). And, while researching these new methods and techniques of analysis, it quickly became apparent that an ill-defined ontology would serve this new methodology poorly. It is my hope that this paper’s ontological schema will provide a firm theoretical foundation for a new generation of textual scholars blazing trails amidst virtual stacks of the seemingly endless variety of digital documents.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Aristotle. 1984a. Categories. Trans. J. L. Ackrill. In Vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen Series 71:2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 2–24.
Aristotle. 1984b. Metaphysics. Trans. W.D. Ross. In Vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen Series 71:2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 1552–28.
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Augustine. 2010. “On the Ideas”. In Eighty-Three Different Questions. Trans. David L. Mosher, pp. 79– 81. The Fathers of the Church 70. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America.
Boland, Vivian. 1996. Ideas in God According to Saint Thomas Aquinas: Sources and Synthesis. Studies in the History of Christian Thought 69. Leiden: Brill.
Bruin, John. 1999. “An Aristotelian Ontology of the Text: In Response to Jorge J. E. Gracia”. Symposium, 3(1), pp. 93–117.
Cary, Phillip. 2000. Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chartier, Rober and Peter Stallybrass. 2013. “What is a Book?” In Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 188–204.
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Franklin, James. 2008. “Aristotelian Realism”. In Dov M. Gabbay et al. (eds.), Philosophy of Mathematics. Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. London: Elsevier, pp. 101–53.
Gabler, Hans Walter. 2007. “The Primacy of the Document in Editing”. Ecdotica, 4, pp. 197–207.
Gabler, Hans Walter. 2010. “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition”. Literature Compass, 7(2), pp. 43–56.
Gracia, Jorge J. E. 1996. Texts: Ontological Status, Identity, Author, Audience. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Greg, W.W. 1950/1951. “The Rationale of the Copy-Text”. Studies in Bibliography, 3, pp. 19–36.
Holdrege, Barbara A. 1996. Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
How, Alan R. 2007. “The Author, the Text and the Canon: Gadamer and the Persistence of Classic Texts in Sociology”. Journal of Classical Sociology, 7(1), pp. 5–22.
Kelemen, Erick. 2009. Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction. New York: W.W. Norton.
Loux, Michael J. 2006a. “Aristotle’s Constituent Ontology.” In vol. 2 of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Ed. Dean W. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press pp. 207–51.
Loux, Michael J. 2006b. Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. 3rd ed. New York and London: Routledge.
Margolis, Joseph. 1968. “On Disputes about the Ontological Status of a Work of Art”. British Journal of Aesthetics, 8(2), pp. 147–54.
Margolis, Joseph. 1974. “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities”. British Journal of Aesthetics, 14(3), pp. 187–96.
Nehamas, Alexander. 1986. “What an Author Is”. The Journal of Philosophy, 83(11), pp. 685–91.
Niles, John D. 2013. “Orality.” In Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 205–23.
Olsson, Michael. 2007. “Power/Knowledge: The Discursive Construction of an Author”. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 77(2), pp. 219–40.
Panza, Marco and Andrea Sereni. 2013. Plato’s Problem: An Introduction to Mathematical Platonism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pierazzo, Elena. 2016. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods. New York and London: Routledge.
Plaisance, Christopher A. 2016. “Methods of Web Philology: Computer Metadata and Web Archiving in the Primary Source Documents of Contemporary Esotericism”. International Journal for the Study of New Religions, 17(1), pp. 43–68.
Proclus. The Theology of Plato. 1995. Trans. Thomas Taylor. The Thomas Taylor Series 8. Wiltshire: The Prometheus Trust.
Shillingsburg, Peter L. 1996. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sutherland, Kathryn. 2013. “Anglo-American Editorial Theory”. In Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 42–60.
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Tanselle, G. Thomas. 1989. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. 1995. “The Varieties of Scholarly Editing.” In D. C. Greetham (ed.) Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research. New York: Modern Language Association of America, pp. 9–32.
Tweedale, Martin. 1988. “Aristotle’s Realism”. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18(3), pp. 501–26.
Van Hulle, Dirk. 2004. Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Wippel, John F. 1987. “Thomas Aquinas’s Derivation of the Aristotelian Categories (Predicaments)”. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25(1), pp. 13–34.
Zeller, Hans. 1975. “A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts”. Studies in Bibliography, 28, pp. 231–264.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank Casen Keller for his assistance in reading an earlier version of this paper, and for providing valuable comments regarding the ontological schema and the relational symmetries presented therein — in particular, for his identification of the third symmetry, the principle of textual recursion. I would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of Variants, for their helpful suggestions, which have served (I hope) to clarify and focus several key areas. 2. For a cogent discussion of the varieties of realist and nominalist ontologies within Western metaphysics, see Loux 2006b, 17–19. 3. It is interesting to note here that Kelemen, in referring to the physical appearance of a work is himself engaging in precisely the kind of terminological confusion that this paper’s schema is intended to clarify. As we shall see in Section 3’s definitions, as a work is properly immaterial, it would be more proper to speak of changes in the physical appearance of documents instantiating a version of a work. 4. This calls to mind the ars memorativa practices surrounding the oral transmission of the Vedas and Torah, where there are demonstrated traditions of these respective texts being transmitted orally through rigorous processes of rote memorization and recitation such that the text’s precise pattern of characters remains constant over a period of centuries (Holdrege 1996, 386– 88). 5. In the same work, Augustine further emphasizes that the Platonic ideas “exist nowhere but in the very mind of the Creator” (Augustine 2010, 81). 6. It is of interest to note that this seemingly implicit Aristotelian realism can also be found in the more general discussions of the ontological status of the work of art by Joseph Margolis. See especially Margolis 1968, 148–49; Margolis 1974, 187–90. 7. For a fuller examination of the subject/predicate argument, see Loux 2006b, 21–26. 8. It is worth noting here that this line of argumentation necessitates a terminological as well as an ontological distinction between the text and work, as distinct entity types. While the ontological case for this distinction is laid out plainly in the subsequent pages, the fact that a great many textual scholars have conflated these two terms does present something of a practical difficulty in terms of the near identity of these terms both in everyday speech and in a great deal of scholarly literature. I contend that while this difficulty is an obstacle to the easy acceptance of such an ontology, both the fact that the ontology demands such a distinction, and that there are no better terms in the common lexicon, present a need to overcome such obstacles.
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9. Indeed, in considering certain categories of beings (e.g. mathematical objects), I would argue in favour of a strong Platonic realist ontology. For mathematical Platonism generally, see Panza and Serini 2013, 1–15. 10. For a full exposition of Aristotle’s theory of causation, see Aristotle (1984b, 1013a24–1014a25; 1984c, 194a16–195b30). In Aristotle’s model of causation, the causa efficiens is that which explains a process’s cause in terms of the external body initiating the process (e.g. the efficient cause of a boy is his father); whereas a causa formalis explains the process’s cause in terms of its inherent structure (e.g. the formal cause of the octave is the 2:1 ratio). 11. It is worth noting here that some scholars, particularly archivists, would perhaps argue that a document is not strictly speaking a “textual being”, but is an essentially unique and singular artifact, which is neither dependent on nor secondary to any text contained by it. This is, I think, less an ontological objection and more a question of focus. If the document is treated here as a quintessentially textual object, it is because this is a textual ontology designed to accurately map the entity types dealt with by textual scholars. Whereas the material focus of the archivist would, no doubt, demand a differently focused ontology, which cares less for textual content (and all of the subsequent textually ideal being like the version and work) and more for material grain and nuance. 12. For a structuralist critique of the author-centric theory of the version which dominates Anglo- American theory, see Zeller 1975, 231–63. 13. This corpus in question is that of the American occultist, Benjamin Rowe (1951–2002).
ABSTRACTS
This paper is a study conducted within the domain of textual scholarship, which develops a cartographic ontology of the four primary entity types dealt with by scholars working within this domain: (1) the text, (2) the document, (3) the version, (4) and the work. The specific ontology advanced is an Aristotelian realist treatment of the four entity types, which synthesizes (a) implicit Aristotelian ontologies present in the theoretical textual scholarly works of Greg, Tanselle, and Shillingsburg, with (b) explicit Aristotelian ontologies of textual entities put forward by Gracia and Bruin, to (c) develop a novel position that best describes the realities of these four entity types within two specific Aristotelian ontological frameworks: (1) the fourfold model of causation, and (2) the substance/accidence theory.
INDEX
Keywords: Textual theory, Ontology, Aristotelian realism
AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER A. PLAISANCE
Christopher A. Plaisance is presently a doctoral candidate with the University of Groningen's department of the Comparative Study of Religion. His research focuses on the corpus of the 20th
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century occultist, Benjamin Rowe, applying principally the methods of web philology, data science, and discursive archaeology. He holds an MA in Western Esotericism from the University of Exeter's Centre for the Study of Esotericism (EXESESO), and is currently indexing and editing philological monograph based on his MA thesis titled, Evocating the Gods: Divine Evocation in the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri. Professionally, he works in the field of information security, as a cyber threat hunter, combining data scientific and digital forensic methodologies to develop technologies which facilitate the detection and investigation of cyber threats.
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Refining our conceptions of ‘access’ in digital scholarly editing: Reflections on a qualitative survey on inclusive design and dissemination.
Merisa Martinez, Wout Dillen, Elli Bleeker, Anna-Maria Sichani and Aodhán Kelly
Introduction
1 Access, in all its iterations, continues to shape the discourse of textual scholarship as the field grapples with new methods and models of the digital scholarly edition (DSE).1 Using an amalgamation and paraphrasing of two definitions posed by Patrick Sahle (2008; 2016), we define a digital scholarly edition as an information resource which offers a critical representation of (normally) historical documents or texts and which is guided by a digital paradigm in its theory, method and practice. Discourse around digital scholarly editions and conceptions of access has been ongoing among textual scholars for the past twenty years. In 2009, John Lavagnino reflected on editorial practice in 1997, citing the tension – present even then – between creating digital editions for a scholarly audience and a broader readership. He notes that at the time, there were few digital editions with elements that acted as “an invitation to look at the texts along with the editor” (Lavagnino 2009, 67). Summarizing an argument made by Jerome McGann in 2001, Susan Schreibman writes in 2013 that “it was only when textual scholars had the opportunity of editing in a medium other than the the book that they were able to realize the constraints of the medium imposed on them.” The perceived openness of the web, however, also brought a new set of challenges for editors. The understanding of who exactly is involved in the creation of editions expanded to include not just editors and publishers, but students, software and web
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developers, computer scientists, librarians, archivists, project managers, and digitization specialists. Indeed, as Martha Nell Smith (2004) asserts, “we have entered a different editorial time, one that demands the conscious cultivation of many hands, eyes, ears, and voices.” Perhaps the most notable change from the analog to the digital has been the extended focus on users. Nell Smith goes on to state that “[w]hen editors make as much about a text visible to as wide an audience as possible, rather than silencing opposing views or establishing one definitive text over all others, intellectual connections are more likely to be found than lost.” Such discussions illustrate the history of accessibility issues for editors who have moved from the well-established norms of the print paradigm to the ever-changing digital publishing environment.
2 While ‘accessibility’ is a highly-cited term in digital scholarly editing, its use generally refers to making data (Sahle 2014) and source materials (Martens 1995, 222) available to users rather than to making data more accessible to different types of users – which is the predominant definition of the term in the context of software and web development (W3C 2018). This basic distinction indicates that access is a multilayered concept in the digital humanities, and that to avoid discussing the topic at cross- purposes, further refinement of the term is needed. This paper frames a discussion around a broader definition of access in relation to digital textual scholarship, by examining pertinent questions in the field: What type(s) of materials do we make accessible in our digital scholarly editions? How? And to whom? Answering these questions will help us to pinpoint digital scholarly editing praxis as it stands at the present moment, and to aid in the continued development of praxis for a new generation of textual scholars who will work primarily, if not solely, on digital scholarly editions.
3 We address these issues by building on our panel discussion at the Digital Humanities 2017 conference in Montréal, Canada (Sichani et al. 2017). At this event, we explored the concept of access in the field of digital scholarly editing in terms of (web) accessibility, usability, pedagogy, collaboration, community and diversity. To gain some preliminary insights about community perspectives before our panel, we released a qualitative survey on inclusive design and dissemination in early July 2017. In return, we received rich, nuanced data from the community, and decided to leave the survey open until November to attract more responses. Collecting and interpreting this data allowed us to engage in much needed cultural criticism of the discipline (Fiormonte 2012; Liu 2012; Posner 2016), by encouraging practitioners within the digital scholarly editing community to critically reflect on what the term ‘access’ means in both the literal and the more abstract senses of the word.
4 During the process of aggregating and analyzing survey responses from the community, it was apparent that our dataset contained an interesting array of approaches to access taken by a broad cross-section of practitioners with different backgrounds in the field (albeit a sample with a clear bias towards European and Northern American experiences, see Figure 3.1). We aim to communicate a broad overview of these data, and consider their implications for the five thematic layers of access that were covered in the survey: 1) dissemination; 2) Open Access and licensing issues; 3) access to the code of the edition; 4) web accessibility and usability; and 5) inclusivity and diversity.
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Inclusive design and dissemination in Digital Scholarly Editions: A survey
5 Our survey, “Inclusive Design and Dissemination in Digital Scholarly Editions,” was designed and hosted using SurveyMonkey.2 It remained open from July to November 2017, and we distributed it through a series of relevant mailing lists,3 social media portals, and via personal emails to practitioners in the field in our own networks. In total we received 219 responses, 109 of which completed every required question in the survey – resulting in a completion rate of 49.7%. Given the length of the survey (with 42 questions distributed over 14 pages, which most respondents took over 40 minutes4 to complete), this was a healthy completion rate. Taking into account that 65 of these 109 respondents (or almost 60%) expressed their willingness to participate in a follow-up interview, it is clear that the issues raised in the survey are of considerable interest to the community – or, at least, to that portion of the community that we were able to reach with our survey.
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Figure 3.1. Demographic distribution of survey respondents (left); zooming in on distribution in Europe (right).
6 As we were purposefully targeting respondents who had experience using and/or creating digital scholarly editions in the email and social media messages we distributed, our sample contained a marked professional bias. Within that group, the demographic data showed a clear majority of respondents who self-identified as digital scholarly editors and librarians, and less participation from those who referred to themselves as technical support (e.g. software development or interface design), or from users of digital scholarly editions.5 As mentioned above, our respondent pool also contains a clear bias towards Northern American (82 respondents, or almost 37.5%) and European participants (106 respondents, or almost 48.5%), with only 3 respondents (or just over 1%) from the rest of the world (see Figure 3.1).6 We expected this bias, as the field is already largely skewed toward these locations, and because of the dissemination channels we used (Twitter, Facebook, Western mailing lists, etc.), our personal network
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(which we used to send reminders about the survey), and the fact that the survey itself, as well as all our follow-up communication about the survey, was written in English. Although this bias should be taken into account with regard to the survey’s analysis, it does not pose an intrinsic problem for our results. As a primarily qualitative survey, this is in essence an exploration of how the concepts of access and accessibility are perceived in a sizable subset of users and practitioners, and we were more interested in individual positions and motivations than in exposing trends and making generalizing claims about the field itself. Thus, we included responses from participants who did not complete the survey: their opinions on the specific questions or subsections in which they were interested still provided us with equally valuable feedback, especially in a reflective study like this one.
7 The survey was structured around a series of themes relating to aspects of access and/ or accessibility. After a demographic section (Q1-3) and a section designed to gauge the respondent’s involvement or role in the development or publication of digital scholarly editions (Q4-6), the survey first focused on Open Access and licensing issues (Q7-11); access to the underlying code and software of the edition (Q12-18); cataloging and dissemination of digital scholarly editions (Q19-21); web accessibility (Q22-30); and inclusivity (Q31-37); before ending with a general question about digital scholarly editions, and an inquiry whether the respondent had any additional comments, or was open to the possibility of a follow-up interview (Q38-42).
8 In the welcome page of the survey, we established a baseline vocabulary for our respondents by providing short definitions of some of the most important concepts that we used throughout the survey. These were: Access: […] the ease or difficulty of users finding and interacting with digital scholarly editions. Inclusivity: […] the focus on representing and including people/groups who would otherwise be marginalized. Web Accessibility: […] the design of digital interfaces for use by people with (in)visible disabilities. Digital Scholarly Edition: Our definition includes (but is not limited to) an amalgamation and paraphrasing of two definitions offered by Patrick Sahle (2008; 2016): A digital scholarly edition is an information resource which offers a critical representation of (normally) historical documents or texts and which is guided by a digital paradigm in its theory, method and practice. Since we were primarily interested in the respondents’ individual perspectives we encouraged them to provide their own definitions for these concepts at distinct points in the survey (Q7, Q31, Q22, and Q38, respectively). The fact that many of these personal definitions deviated strongly from our own (and from one another) confirmed our premise that access is a layered concept that is used to mean different things in different contexts. As will be elaborated below, these differentiations proved to be fundamental points of discussion, particularly in relation to web accessibility, and must be taken into consideration for the analysis of the survey’s results.
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Challenging the concepts of access in Digital Scholarly Editing
Dissemination
9 We begin this discussion by approaching access from the broadest possible sense, which corresponds to the definition we gave at the start of our survey. Access to a digital scholarly edition in the sense of interacting with the edition is inherently linked to its discoverability. The challenge of discoverability extends far beyond the realm of digital scholarly editions alone; it is an issue affecting digital scholarly outputs throughout the academic world. As the Ithaka S+R research team observed: “Digital projects on campuses live everywhere! This extreme decentralisation adversely affects their discoverability. [...] There is often no single place for users to find digital projects and some projects can too easily slip from view” (Pickle and Maron 2013, 4). The digital ecosystem of scholarship continues to increase in size and complexity, while patterns of information retrieval also morph and mutate, which makes the effective dissemination of digital scholarly editions extremely challenging, particularly for those editors who are making the transition from print to digital editing, and for new students in the discipline.
10 The purpose of the dissemination section of the survey was to gain insight into the means through which respondents make their digital scholarly editions known to users. This also highlights the extent to which the respondents are aware of the various ways that users discover and use their resources. We opened this section by asking how the DSE(s) with which respondents were involved were disseminated and marketed (Q19). We provided a list of options and asked respondents to choose any or all that applied in their case, and to specify if they used another method not in the list. Interestingly, despite the digital nature of their projects, it was evident from the results that ‘traditional’ methods of promoting editions remain the most prevalent approaches. By ‘traditional’ we mean methods that existed in the analogue pre-digital turn. The top four results from the list were all in this category: word of mouth (67%); conference presentations (67%); citations in articles written by the team (64%); and citations by others (58%). The two most utilized digital methods of promoting DSEs were social media (57%) and Listservs (42%).
11 A more interesting, and perhaps slightly concerning, observation from the results was the relatively less commonplace usage of existing digital catalogues to make digital scholarly editions discoverable. Only 29% of those who responded chose the option of “through catalogues in one or more memory institutions.” Essentially, if students and researchers were to rely on institutional or aggregated catalogues (e.g. NINES or Europeana) as principal finding aids, they may struggle to find digital scholarly editions that even originated at their own institutions. While some digital scholarly editions are created in collaboration with librarians or archivists, there are many created by scholars working independently from such institutions that may benefit greatly from the expertise of LIS professionals in order to make the editions more findable through effective cataloguing. One of the biggest challenges faced in that domain of digital scholarly editions is classification, a concern which, in the words of Elena Pierazzo “pervades digital scholarship” (2015, 6). The difficulty for digital textual scholars to find common ground about whether a digital project should be deemed a digital
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edition, library, or archive7 is not merely a semantic squabble, but a practical bibliographic issue with substantial impact on discoverability, and thereby dissemination in general.
12 The two most prevalent catalogues of digital scholarly editions, one created by Patrick Sahle (2016) and the other by Greta Franzini (2016) were among the lowest scoring results on the list provided at 16% and 12% respectively (a further 12% of respondents had their editions entered in other catalogues). Some respondents commented that they had never heard of the two resources, while others replied that they now intended to ensure their digital scholarly editions will be cataloged there in future. In Q20 we asked respondents if they were satisfied with the dissemination and marketing of their edition(s). Of the 91 responses we received, 41 responded in the affirmative, while 26 said they were not satisfied (the remaining 24 gave more ambiguous answers). Opinions on who should be responsible for the dissemination of a digital scholarly edition are often varied and this is clear from the respondents’ comments. In a print paradigm this is much clearer, as publishers have a well-established role in the marketing and distribution of printed editions in much the same way that libraries have a clear remit to catalogue them. The digital avenues of distribution have blurred those lines, as the distinct role of publisher has all but disappeared in a digital context. It remains unclear whose responsibility it is to take on this marketing and distribution role. One respondent put it quite succinctly when they said “no one knows whose task it is to market digital scholarly editions” (R116).8
13 The responses we received indicate that there remains a need for further reflection and discussion in the field about how digital scholarly editions are disseminated to and made findable by users. Aside from the ambiguity surrounding how roles and responsibilities in this area should be assigned, there is also a general need for increased awareness among the creators of digital scholarly editions regarding the variety of dissemination channels at their disposal as well as for information about retrieval habits of users. This is not surprising, given that many of these issues are new to editors who previously relied on print-based publishers to tackle distribution, and for whom papers and presentations were the primary avenues of knowledge-sharing. While classification and cataloguing challenges will not be solved by the digital scholarly editing community alone, they cannot be neglected, and are only likely to improve through deeper and more critical collaboration with academics in other disciplines, with archivists, and with librarians.
Open Access and licensing issues
14 Moving from a broader conception of discoverability, we now explore the definition of access most often used in the field: that of Open Access (OA) and its inextricable link to licensing issues. Coined in 2002 by the Budapest Open Access Initiative to mean “the free and unrestricted online availability” of published and pre-published research (Chan et al. 2002), OA builds on a longstanding tradition of Open Source (OS) software development on the one hand, and ad hoc practices of academic self-archiving on the other. Although the term is now commonly used in relation to scholarly communication and digital scholarship (Suber 2012; Eve 2014), there are still diverging interpretations of OA in the field of digital scholarly editing, as well as a confusing number of coexisting standards and strategies for licensing scholarly content (Sichani 2017, 440). Given that practitioners of digital textual scholarship and digital scholarly
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editing are working particularly with historical and archival-based textual material, and are therefore likely to be confronted with licensing restrictions, this section is intended to provide an overview of the developments of Open Access in these communities of practice.
15 Rather than documenting what kind of licensing restrictions or copyright status digital scholarly editions typically have,9 the licensing section maps our respondents’ awareness regarding issues and levels of Open Access. Because we wanted to assess the community’s engagement with the topic, we designed this section with two tracks of questions to the subjects of OA and licensing that actively avoided guided replies. To assess the importance of licensing issues with regard to digital scholarly editions within our sample, we kept all questions in this section optional.10 The fact that just over two-thirds of all respondents (149 out of 219) answered these optional questions and provided useful comments was a clear indication that these are indeed issues important to the digital scholarly editing community.
Figure 3.2: Response breakdown of Q8.
16 We began by asking participants whether the content of the digital scholarly edition(s) on which they work(ed) (as creators), or with (as users), is openly licensed (Q8). The purpose of this question was twofold: a) to indicate awareness of the licensing and OA landscape in general; and b) to provide crucial data of the specific licensing status of their DSEs. As Figure 3.2 shows, while a majority of respondents (105, or 70%) answered that the content is openly licensed at various levels, a substantial amount of people indicated that they are not aware of the licensing status of their work at all. Useful insights from the comments mentioned various barriers to OA such as rights clearance (for mainly 20th century source materials), or partner agreements’ provisions. Others indicated that they distinguish between different licenses or reuse statuses for different data types (e.g. texts vs. images) within the same edition. The issue of open documentation alongside CC licensing was also raised several times: We’re using Creative Commons licences, which seems sufficient. Of course, explicit documentation about re/use conditions wouldn’t harm. (R112) To deepen our understanding of the community’s awareness of licensing issues further, we asked respondents to provide the name of the license under which their digital
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scholarly edition is published (Q9). This question asked for open-text responses, to allow people to be as specific or general as they wished, while allowing us to assess their understanding of licensing standards and protocols. To frame the question, we gave respondents a concrete example (“e.g. CC-BY-SA-4.0 or similar”). The Creative Cοmmons licensing scheme was the most popular, with respondents offering a number of variations on the CC license, as well as references to other licensing schemes that were better suited to different types of scholarly outputs (e.g. content versus code).
17 After mapping respondents’ awareness of licensing for digital scholarly editions, we asked about current institutional policies on Open Access. While setting up and adopting OA institutional policies for various scholarly outputs such as digital scholarly editions may help enforce licensing considerations, making OA a requirement could impede a more active engagement and understanding of OA, based on a conscious scholarly choice: we don’t always understand or support a regulation we’re forced to follow. Furthermore, it is important to note that OA regulations tend to create tensions between institutional policies and funders’ agendas, when we want to assess the socio- economic and scholarly questions that are currently at stake. By asking two distinct questions on institutional and funders’ provision towards OA (Q10 and Q11), we wanted to imply a clear distinction between the two, and, more importantly, see if any gaps or grey areas exist regarding OA implementation, especially in the case of complex digital scholarly outputs. This last aspect is especially relevant in relation to digital scholarly editions, as stakeholders’ guidelines vary widely in terms of openness, comprehensiveness, and style, as well as in how they conceptualize the multitude of research outputs and their related licensing status. To leave room for this issue, we provided our respondents with a comment box where they were encouraged to list specific licensing regulations pertaining to “the edition itself, the underlying code, metadata, scholarly outputs or manuals resulting from the digital scholarly edition.” An interesting response also describes Open Source tools and services as part of the institutional compliance of the digital scholarly editing project to Open Access: I have licensed my two first digital projects with Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0. Most of my work is funded by public bodies so it has to be freely available for reuse. [...] The data (XML) is all available on Github. I have used EVT2 to publish my digital edition of the [redacted] which is a free open source tool. In regard of [redacted], we are using Kiln with publication purposes – this is again all free and available online. In addition to open access, I have documented my editorial criteria on Github and also written extensively about the whole process in a number of articles and papers. (R13)
18 The majority of our respondents’ institutions do not require open licensing for research outputs (57 responses, or 38%), in contrast to a relatively small number of institutions where open licensing is mandatory (27 responses, or 18%). It should be noted that a substantial amount of respondents indicated they were simply not aware of their institution’s Open Access policy for digital scholarly editing projects (40 out of 149 respondents, or almost 27%). As for the funders’ OA requirements (Q11), the results were quite evenly distributed among respondents that indicated their funders do require open licensing (30, or 20%), those that do not (32, or 21.5%), and respondents who indicated that their project did not fall under a funding scheme at all, allowing them to make a more conscious decision when it comes to licensing their digital scholarly edition (also 32 respondents).
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19 To conclude, the answers we gathered in this section underlined the importance of Open Access for digital scholarly editions, the growing awareness of the community about licensing and reuse issues, and the diverse stakeholders’ takes on establishing OA policies. As issues of licencing are usually linked to copyright regulations, e.g. for historical documents, it is often difficult to balance the scholarly will and/or commitment to an OA ethos with compliance to external legal and financial regulations. On the other hand, OA as a scholarly movement is about inventing financial, legal, intellectual and administrative models, in order to redistribute the power of knowledge; what we are observing from this section is that the digital editing community is actively exploring ways to make this happen, by balancing the restricted access or reuse of copyrighted material with open documentation, or by adopting Open Source tools and development frameworks.
Access to the code
20 With Open Access being an emerging topic in digital textual scholarship, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at what we understand by the content of digital scholarly editions. In general, content usually means the source material in some digital form (e.g., digital facsimiles and transcriptions of the source text). To be sure, the capacity of digital editions to provide access to primary sources has always been a major selling point of the digital medium. And, as Lavagnino noted, a digital edition differs from a digital library because it contains a fair amount of scholarship in addition to digital reproductions of existing texts (2009[1997], 63).11 It has been generally acknowledged and accepted that transcriptions, for instance, convey a scholarly interpretation rather than objective findings. Incidentally, this holds true for both print and digital transcriptions.12 Arguably, though, another key component of the edition's content is its code base. Code, in the broadest sense of the word, provides users with various tools to access and examine the source materials. It seems evident, therefore, that an edition's code base should be made available for critical evaluation too (Bodard and Garcés 2009). All the more so if we consider that a digital scholarly edition makes use of tools that transform and manipulate its source materials for the benefit of the user. How to critically assess an edition's code base, however, has only become a point of concern in recent years.
21 As with every topic in the article, a code base is an intricate issue that needs more context. We will therefore start by asking what the code of a digital edition is exactly, before we go on to discuss the current approaches to providing access to it. So what do we mean when we talk about the code of an edition? In and of itself, ‘code’ appears to be a term as broad as the term ‘access’ – and as diversely defined. In the context of a digital scholarly edition, we can distinguish source code from other underlying material. Source code is understood to be "a blueprint for a [computer] program that can be executed,” meaning something written in a formal language that is interpreted by a computer and results in executable software (Van Zundert and Haentjens Dekker 2017, 121). "Other underlying material" constitutes a more ephemeral category and includes (but is not limited to) digital transcriptions, a database or content management system, associated style sheets and schemas, a graphical user interface, and a search engine. In addition to the source code and the underlying material, an edition can make use of integrated existing software like a collation engine or a data visualization tool to process the text files. This could be software that is specifically
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developed for the edition, software developed by external, independent parties, but tweaked to match the research purposes of the edition, or Open Source software that is integrated unaltered. To date, there has been little agreement on what, of this amalgam of databases, software, stylesheets, query functions, and transcriptions, makes up the code of the edition. Everything together, or just a selection, and if so, on what grounds is this selection made?
22 In this respect, another interesting perspective is that of the archivists and librarians who take charge of preserving digital editions. What aspects do they consider as essential parts of a digital scholarly edition? The Dutch digital archiving institute Data Archiving and Networking Services (DANS)13 takes a universal approach and aims to store as much data as possible. The group recognize the risk of digital files becoming obsolete as hardware changes, and while they lament their lack of means to preserve hardware, they intend to store at least information about the digital environment and the hardware required to access the data set (DANS Preservation Policy version 1.0, 2018). Another important aspect that certainly influences how digital editors feel about the code of a digital scholarly edition is whether or not they consider code to have a scholarly quality. The editing community may agree that a digital transcription represents an interpretation, but less attention has been paid to the question of whether the edition's code also constitutes a form of scholarship. Users often attribute a neutral or objective quality to software, but software that is used to query, process, or analyze the edition's data is often constructed based on certain scholarly assumptions and decisions. An Open Source collation engine like CollateX,14 for example, reflects the prevalent scholarly understanding of text collation and makes, inter alia, certain assumptions about what constitutes a token, and when two tokens form a match. The same applies to graphical interfaces that inevitably steer a user’s gaze and influence how the edition's data is accessed and perceived.15
23 Still, the variety of digital editions, representative of a field that continues to develop, makes it difficult to come to any conclusive definition of a code base. For that reason we have refrained from a narrow definition of ‘code’" in the survey to leave room for idiosyncratic, project-specific interpretations. One disadvantage of such a broad definition is that not all respondents understood what was meant by ‘code’ which was for some an incentive to skip the questions (e.g. Q15, R185; Q16, R120; Q17, R176). Others, on the contrary, decided to leave a lengthy and detailed response, listing every program their project uses. These wide-ranging and diverse responses are difficult to summarize and do not exactly help with narrowing down and refining the definition of code. An important benefit, however, is that this survey provides us with perhaps the most comprehensive overview of current digital editorial practices. Indeed, when taking a closer look at the commentary in response to Q12 and Q13 ("what type of software does your edition use?") we see a highly diverse understanding of software. Respondents list specific editorial tools like eXist DB and CollateX, but also more general tools like git version control, Google Sheets, and MS Office suite. In addition to tools, standards like TEI (P5) (Text Encoding Initiative Proposal 5), HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) appear to be considered part of software as well.
24 As mentioned above, editorial strategies geared towards providing suitable and sufficient access to code are affected by how the concept of code is defined. In other words, if software isn't considered to be part of the scholarly content of an edition,
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editors are less inclined to put any effort into making its source code accessible. In the context of the survey, we've understood access to code as the possibility for end-users to see which software is used and how the scripts and tools together manipulate the content of a digital scholarly edition.16 This definition adheres to the idea that knowledge is inseparable from the way it is made.17 A similar sentiment was expressed by survey respondents who overwhelmingly responded positively when asked if they considered it important to share information about the technical aspects of the edition and the underlying data (Q18). The responses underline that the question isn't so much "should the code be made accessible", but rather " how should the code be made accessible?" This question is strongly related to the issue of education and training. In her talk at the 2016 ESTS (European Society for Textual Scholarship) conference, Elena Pierazzo rightly noted that it's infeasible to expect scholarly editors to be experts in textual scholarship, information modeling, data structures, APIs, and interface design.18 Training in digital scholarly editing is a key concern, and over the past decade the amount of institutional programs and online training material is increasing. Still, those new to the field of digital editing (whether they are early career scholars or senior scholars making the transition from print to digital) may not necessarily know where to look for training material, or even where to start.19 Based on our experiences within DiXiT, we confirm that expecting digital editors to be "super editors" is not only unrealistic but also unnecessary (Pierazzo 2016). A more realistic approach would be for editors to have a conceptual understanding of text modelling and, importantly, to be able to collaborate and communicate effectively with specialists in information science.
25 Respondents also confirmed the observation made in the introduction to this article: most editors consider access to code important, but editorial stands vis-à-vis ways to share code remain disparate. For instance, digital scholarly editors could provide extensive technical documentation or content themselves by providing a link to an online GitHub repository that contains all scripts of their editions. Without some commentary or annotation, however, these scripts would be difficult if not impossible to read for the uninitiated. We can break this issue down in at least three key aspects, the first one naturally having to do with what is defined as the edition's code. Is it the complete set of scripts, the interface(s), and software packages taken together, or a selection thereof? Second, there are different degrees of access to the code. Someone who has a broad and inclusive understanding of ‘code’ may still consider it unnecessary to make the entire set available to the end-user. For example, the technical criteria for RIDE, the review journal for digital scholarly editions, only asks about availability of what they call "basic data" – XML transcriptions of the source texts – and not so much the operations on those source texts.20 Third, if an edition makes use of tools developed by external parties, it may be challenging for the team to provide detailed insight into how these tools operate. This point is particularly relevant, as over 70% of our respondents indicated that they make use of existing open source software (Q12). One could argue that, in this case, the responsibility lies not with the editorial team, but with the tool developers. Is it not reasonable to assume that creators of digital scholarly editions have made an informed choice regarding these tools? That they are aware of how the edition's data is manipulated, and that they are able to justify their choices? In reality, again, editorial practices vary. Several respondents indicate that providing access to the code was a goal at the outset of their projects, but was never (fully) realized: one respondent commented that "associated XML files, as well as
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documentation concerning their markup and associated technical systems was supposed to be made public but was never done" (Q16, R196). Others admit that they have no idea whether or not any of the underlying code (transcriptions or scripts) are available. Still, with the majority of answers being favorable21 towards open repositories like GitHub for storing datasets, it seems that the real challenge lies not in the general mentality but rather in the methodology. We therefore strongly recommend any future work to focus on establishing standards for a technical rationale of digital scholarly editions. In particular we see value in (1) the development of guidelines for communicating the data transformations produced by tools and software used; and (2) providing clear instructions about the possibilities to (re)use the scholarly data set. Such recommendations are tightly intertwined with the pedagogical issues outlined above..
Web accessibility and usability
26 Having broached the subject of code and accessibility to the entire digital scholarly edition environment itself rather than its contents alone, we wanted to examine the concept through the lens of web and software development. In this context, the term accessibility has a very specific meaning, where it refers to the adoption of strategies that make the application accessible to all users – including those with (in)visible disabilities. George H. Williams lamented the fact that although “[o]ver the last decades, scholars have developed standards for how best to create, organize, present, and preserve digital information” for future generations, “the needs of people with disabilities” have largely been neglected in this pursuit (2012, 202). Indeed, especially in the field of digital scholarly editing, discussions regarding different user needs typically refer to those with non-academic backgrounds (Apollon et al. 2014, 93; Pierazzo 2015, 151) rather than to users with (in)visible disabilities. In addition, as two major points of reference in the field, neither Sahle’s (2016) nor Franzini’s (2016) catalogues mention accessibility in their respective lists of criteria for digital scholarly editions. This suggests that otherwise widely adopted standards such as @alt texts for links and images, consistent use of header tags, legibility of fonts, attentive use of colors and contrast, etc. are not sufficiently acknowledged or adopted in the field.22 In the web accessibility section of our survey, we wanted to test this hypothesis, while also gauging the community’s perspective about making accessibility a prevailing concern for digital scholarly editions.
27 The first goal of the web accessibility section was to map respondents’ awareness of relevant accessibility guidelines by practitioners in the field. To this end, we asked our respondents whether the digital scholarly editions on which they worked adhered to any established web accessibility guidelines (Q23).23 In total, 75 respondents (64.5%) indicated that they were at least aware of the efforts their development team were making in this respect (with 31 indicating compliance, 9 indicating partial compliance, and 35 indicating non-compliance to web accessibility standards), with 37 (31%) indicating they were not aware. These results suggest that awareness of web accessibility practices is still an issue in digital scholarly editing, and that most editions do not actively (or only partially) comply to relevant standards. Cross-referencing these results with respondents’ demographic data, however, revealed an interesting geographical divide (see Figure 3.3).24 When we just look at ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, we see that for Europe, ‘no’ responses outrank ‘yes’ almost two to one; while in Northern
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America the roles are reversed, with ‘yes’ responses outranking ‘no’ almost three to one. This suggests that web accessibility practices in digital scholarly editions are much more common in Northern America than in Europe. This divide makes sense when we take into account that both the USA and Canada have laws or policies in place requiring web accessibility for digital output of publicly funded projects, and this is not the case for many European countries (Williams 2012, 205).
Figure 3.3: Responses of Q23 "Do(es) your digital edition(s) adhere to any established web accessibility guideline(s)?", contrasting answers from European respondents (left) with those of
Northern American (right) respondents..
28 For editing projects that did provide web accessibility options, we wanted to know what kind of options these were (Q25). This was an optional open-ended question to encourage respondents to share any web accessible option that sprang to mind. Sadly, the response rate to this question was low (with only 23 usable answers).25 We grouped
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answers into different categories, to determine what kind of measures digital scholarly editing teams were focusing on – or, failing that, at least those of which our respondents were aware. These categories were based on the four ‘principles of accessibility’ that the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)26 are organized around: for web content to be accessible, it needs to be “perceivable” (presented in a way users with different abilities can perceive); “operable” (presented in a way user with different abilities can work with); “understandable” (presented in a way users with different abilities can understand); and “robust” (presented in a well- formed environment so that it can be interpreted and used by different agents such as assistive technologies) (W3C “Introduction”).27 As respondents were free to list as many options as they liked, it was possible for individual responses to be tagged with more than one of these categories.
Figure 3.4: Classification of the accessibility options offered in Q25 in relation to the different WCAG principles.
29 As Figure 3.4 indicates, most responses focused on perceivability, including ‘text alternatives’ (e.g. careful description of images so that they can be perceived by the visually impaired), careful use of color, contrast, and visual presentation (e.g. using more legible fonts), providing options for resizing the text, and making the content adaptable to the display (responsivity). The second largest category, robustness, focused on the structural integrity of HTML output, and/or explicit screen reader testing. In the operability category, then, all four responses mentioned keyboard accessibility (making content accessible through the keyboard rather than with a mouse pointer). Finally, the one respondent that discussed understandability referred to catering to different reading levels. It should be noted that out of the 23 usable responses, only four were given more than one tag, and no response was given more than two.28 This is important because for a web environment to be considered conformant to the WCAG, it needs to meet at least all Level A Success Criteria (or conforming alternate versions) across all four organizing principles.29
30 Finally, we wanted to gauge the community’s position toward adapting web accessibility guidelines in the first place, by asking them how important they found the issue of web accessibility when developing a DSE (Q26). The answer format was left open to allow the participants to be as nuanced in their answers as needed. While the responses were evaluated and tagged according to a set of categories (very positive; positive; qualified positive; negative; unsure; not answered),30 this question was primarily designed to support a qualitative rather than a quantitative analysis, and we were mostly interested in reading our respondents’ reasons for (and caveats to) assigning a degree of importance to the aspect for web accessibility. Still, as Figure 3.5
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shows, responses to this question were overwhelmingly positive, as most answers could be tagged as either ‘Positive’ or ‘Very positive’ (respectively 19 and 63 responses; totalling just over 70%). Almost 20% of respondents could be considered as critical of the importance of web accessibility for digital scholarly editing (merging the categories ‘Qualified positive’ and ‘Unsure’), while less than 4% provided a clearly negative response to the question.
Figure 3.5: Distribution of importance assigned to web accessibility in the design of DSE as analysed through Q26.
31 Positive responses referred to the importance of catering to a broad interpretation of the edition’s target audience; an insufficient awareness of the problem; a structural lack of resources and training; the importance of considering accessible design at an early stage in the project; and the fact that universal design improves user experience in general – not just that of people with disabilities. Most of the critical responses referred to the difficulty and high cost of realizing fully web accessible editions, and to the need for editors to prioritize their efforts and expend their resources accordingly.31 In some cases these arguments were justified by referring to the digital scholarly editions’ highly specialized target audience.
32 Most of the four negative responses we received were rather short, but all indicated in some way or other that web accessibility is not (or should not be) a priority in digital scholarly editing. One respondent was more elaborate, and expressed sentiments that recall some of the statements made by the ‘critical’ respondents, so it is quoted it here in full: Not very. Ease of use and consideration of different access devices (tablets, phones as well as traditional laptops, etc) is part of the design of all Web software. I don't think we need to supply specific tools for say blind people to read our edition. First of all we're not made of money and all this costs money. Someone who has an interest in that sort of thing can do it instead. (R18)
33 Again, the price of developing digital scholarly editions that are accessible to people with disabilities is mentioned. The response implies that editors should prioritize the
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development of their digital scholarly editions to their target audience, and suggests that people with disabilities (here: “say blind people”) are not part of that target group. Instead, the burden of developing digital scholarly editions that are web accessible (or reengineering editions to make them more accessible) is pushed to an external party. We should note that as a single response of a clear minority of the survey’s respondents, this is an outlier – but the sentiment it expresses should be taken into consideration, especially since it echoes several concerns voiced in the category of critical responses. To conclude, we can say that while our survey suggests an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards making digital scholarly editions web accessible, the community also conversely indicates some marked resistance towards its implementation. This implies that seven years after Williams’ essay, there is still a lack of awareness of these issues among some members of the field.
Diversity and inclusivity
34 After exploring how digital scholarly editions can be made more accessible to a wider group of people, we further extend the discussion by examining what access can mean in terms of diversity and inclusivity. As opportunities for the institutional support and development of digital scholarship have proliferated, so too have calls for more diverse and inclusive research groups and materials.32 Correspondingly, digital humanities scholars are continually confronted with the difficulty of creating Internet-based research that is simultaneously global and ethical, and are beginning to negotiate this tension by engaging with scholars and materials not just from the Global North, but also the Global South.33 However, this tension and its related discourse seems to progress without notable input from the (mainly European) digital scholarly editing community. This is remarkable, because the symbiotic relationship between digital humanities and digital scholarly editing, as well as editors’ collaboration with colleagues from disciplines that actively work toward social justice,34 suggest that a critical reflection on digital scholarly editing should address questions of inclusion and diversity head-on. We therefore designed the inclusivity section of the survey to gauge our respondents’ familiarity with and opinions about these issues, and to add our community’s voices to this discourse.
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Figure 3.6: Response breakdown of Q32.
35 As our own definition of inclusivity was focused on marginalized people and groups, Q32 asked whether our respondents’ editions covered such material. A vast majority of our respondents (48.2%, or 54 out of 112) replied that theirs did not (see Figure 3.6). Further context for this result was provided when respondents were asked whether or not inclusive design (Q33) and subject matter (Q34) are prevailing concerns in the development of digital scholarly editions. As the breakdown of these questions in Figure 3.7 illustrates, in both cases the majority of respondents answered that they are not prevailing concerns (49.1% for Q33; 42.2% for Q34). Similarly, a minority of respondents argued that it was not a concern, but that it should be (respectively seven and nine respondents). We then asked respondents in Q35 and Q36 if they had any opinions about what could be done to promote inclusive design and inclusive subject matter, and received responses which generally addressed three specific issues: collaboration, funding, and the literary canon. Using responses from the survey, we explore these three issues below.
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Figure 3.7: Response breakdown of Q33 and Q34.
36 In a recent paper Peter Robinson (2016, 875) called for a reconsideration of the role of editors to become “key participants in, and enablers of, communities,” rather than leaders of more exclusive collaborations. Our respondents reinforced this claim, recommending that in order to address issues of inclusion, more could be done to promote and include diverse scholars and users, both in terms of traditionally marginalized groups and in terms of diverse disciplinary backgrounds. As R38 mentioned, digital scholarly editions need to “have as diverse a design, production, and dissemination team as possible. Diversity is good in and of itself, especially if the team is demographically simple.” R191 agreed, writing “[a]s we gain diversity of the people of the scholarly community the projects become more diverse, too.” Another (R59) noted that “marginalised people should be involved in the process! Whether as editors or testing the DSEs before they go live.” This sentiment was echoed by R14, who wrote
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that collaborative editing projects should “collect ideas/suggestions from a variety of people (racial and ethnic groups, disabled and abled-bod[ied]).” It is important to note, however, that the work of acknowledging and confronting our implicit biases cannot be left solely to the user community. While asking for user input is valuable and necessary, it also shifts the burden of correcting issues of exclusion to those who are being excluded, which can be exploitative. This needs planning tempered with care and concern by editorial teams that choose to call for user participation on these issues.
37 Over 50% of our respondents commented that funding opportunities for projects promoting diverse teams, exploring non-canonical authors and materials, or for the inclusion of accessibility options in interface design, are few and far between. As R131 observed, changing funding policies is key to raising awareness around the issue of inclusion among colleagues who may be resistant: Raise awareness of the importance of the topic with funding and policy setting bodies. I think researchers are plenty aware, but feel that accessibility and inclusiveness is not a goal of research output. Also aim awareness under 'techies'. The attitude of many technologists I know is often quite rude and awareness is rudimentary. Like with the misogynistic attitude inbred as sadly as it currently is in IT work, also the topic of inclusiveness meets with knee jerk denial. R89 was one of many respondents who further reasoned that if funding calls had requirements for inclusive design and subject matter, these would become heightened areas of focus in digital scholarly editing: I think it is a topic that is simply going to become unavoidable as time goes on. I've been on grant panels where a failure to observe the problem has led to grants being rejected out of hand by the committee. That only has to happen a few times and people will pay more attention! Such responses underscore a key frustration in digital scholarship: the expectation of researchers and users is that scholarly resources will be available online, but, in comparison to the vast funding opportunities for STEM,35 humanities researchers are given, as one respondent called it, “peanuts” (R131). There is then no doubt that actively designing editions with questions of inclusivity and accessibility in mind can be regarded as taking time away from content-building, particularly when digital scholarly editors view themselves as creating digital resources on a (relatively) shoestring budget within a tight time frame – as was corroborated in our section on web accessibility. The goal of digital scholarly editing may then need a realignment of perspective, where inclusive research is seen not as an afterthought or a box to be ticked, but as a prime opportunity to explore new, untapped sources in discipline- shaping ways.
38 Expanding funding for digital scholarly editing projects is linked to a longer and equally critical process of expanding the (digital) literary canon to include marginalized voices and themes. As R201 replied, The funding bodies that support scholarly editions are still often strongly motivated by theories of literary quality or cultural significance in their funding decisions. While the wording of guidelines may now provide fairly broad definitions of "value", nonetheless in making funding decisions, canonical works are more likely to be supported. These policies need explicit change. Literary quality is a subjective characteristic that can be ascribed to texts by scholarly editors. As Hans Walter Gabler argues, “editors can, for sure, put works and texts, or indeed authors (of the past and present), on the literary map, and within the ken of a general cultural awareness;” and “canonisation is intimately- is, indeed, functionally
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bound up with transmission” (2018, 366). Actively seeking out new texts and authors can contribute new understandings to our editorial orientations – or it can serve as the process by which we discover new orientations.36 This in turn deepens and broadens our approach to the material we select and explore, and potentially extends the possible applications of our work. According to R190, broadening our scope of material could also be a step toward “acknowledging and addressing our dominant colonial and imperialist culture.” It is important to clarify that marginalized subject matter does not mean the same thing to every person in our field. That is part of the tension around the topic. Respondents working in medieval literature commented that they viewed the whole of their subject as being marginalized, underused, and under researched. A respondent working in American literature replied, “C19 American Literature is all about marginalized voices” (R129). Recognizing that we have personal notions about what counts as ‘marginalized’ is also a recognition that there are multiple ways to approach this issue within our respective time periods and subjects of study.
Moving forward
39 In their introduction to Advances in Digital Scholarly Editing, Peter Boot, Franz Fischer, and Dirk Van Hulle argue that: Scholarly editing has a long-standing tradition in the humanities. It is of crucial importance within such disciplines as literary studies, philology, history, philosophy, library and information science and bibliography. Scholarly editors were among the first within the humanities to realize the potential of digital media for performing research, for disseminating their results, and for bringing research communities together. (Boot et al. 2017, 15-16) With such an illustrious history and a broad reach into other disciplines, the field can be at the forefront of transforming the digital edition into an environment that is as open, reproducible, and inclusive as possible. Starting from a conviction that a reflexive, collaborative, and inclusive praxis is the cornerstone of good digital scholarship, we designed this survey to determine to what extent practitioners thought these issues were (or, indeed should be) general concerns in the field.37 But what the survey especially showed across all sections is that often practitioners are not sufficiently aware of these issues to address them in the first place.38 Perhaps even more telling is that the survey confirmed our hypothesis that the field is still grappling with competing conceptions of access and accessibility.
40 When asked to define the concept of access with regard to the dissemination and design of digital content (Q7), responses are largely uniform, as a majority of respondents (127 out of 158, or just over 80%) define it more or less in terms of ‘Open Access’ – i.e. its freely accessible open availability in a digital medium. Several respondents emphasize the monetary aspect of this ‘free’ availability, and protest the practice of putting up paywalls around scholarly content;39 others stress how important it is for this content to not only be available, but also discoverable. Some respondents also specifically mention inclusivity issues and catering to users with disabilities – though we may have guided these responses to some extent by highlighting these issues in the survey’s title and introduction. The issue becomes much more complex, however, when we take a look at the definitions respondents wrote to describe the concept of web accessibility (Q22). Although the term was defined at the start of the
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survey, a considerable number of respondents are still unfamiliar with it, and take the compound word literally instead – as is evident from responses such as: “Accessible on the web? (R189), or “[t]he way to be able to access DSE on the web?” (R120).40 And in many cases, this concept too is defined in terms of discoverability or Open Access41 – nine respondents even indicated that they made no distinction between the terms ‘access’ and ‘accessibility’ by explicitly referring to their definition in Q22.42 A similar confusion of terms occurs with the code of a digital scholarly edition: although respondents are largely positive about the idea of accessible code, the survey responses also showed considerable variation in the definition of ‘code,’ ranging from software to XML/TEI transcriptions. Accordingly, there is little consensus in editorial strategies towards providing sustainable access to the code of a digital scholarly edition. Finally, it is striking that only just under half of the respondents (57 out of 123) explicitly refer to efforts that make editions more accessible to people with disabilities. This again points to a great lack of awareness in the field, and implies that the term accessibility is used at cross purposes. These are important factors to take into account when we try to grasp the field’s perspective on these issues.
41 As was suggested by the survey’s respondents in its inclusivity section, a key approach to raising awareness is through teaching. An extensive and deep knowledge of editorial theory and practice is acquired with time and experience, but how can we attract new talent? Introductions to scholarly editing for a new generation of students often occurs in summer schools and workshops. Such spaces can make inroads into addressing ‘marginalization,’ by providing students with example editions that meet the agreed definition of inclusion for that context (though the cost of these schools in time and money can itself marginalize interested parties). Often students develop further interest in a field when they have a personal connection to the material and are encouraged to question and analyze it from their own perspectives. This can be accomplished by providing students with materials in which they can see themselves. We don’t need to make assumptions about a potential student’s background, but the mere act of our choosing more diverse texts by women, people of color, people with (in)visible disabilities, people from the LGBTQIA+ community, and people who have been marginalized for other political, religious, and social reasons, is a way of implicitly signifying that digital scholarly editing is a discipline whose practitioners normalize such work – and agree that it is worthy of editorial attention. Making critical choices to include teaching materials that showcase diverse content and inclusive design can also provide new students with a baseline to develop skills in cultural, web, and software criticism, and to take up further calls to expand the canon based on what sparks their own interests, in ways that are both interesting and inclusive.
42 Given the conflicting understandings of terminology and the general need for greater awareness of access issues, how do we move forward? We would like this article to stand as a call to action, for the community to come together to generate, and more importantly to implement, a set of guidelines that address access in all its messy multiplicity, from dissemination, to Open Access, code, web accessibility, and finally to diversity. Such a call is neither unexpected nor unprecedented: respondents mentioned several times that best practices are needed in order to delineate clearly what is and should be expected of editors with regard to access. There are well-considered guidelines for other areas of our research, such as the TEI guidelines for XML, and the RIDE and MLA criteria for reviewing editions. These give us a reference to return to
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when we want to evaluate our work against a community standard. But establishing community standards for project building around access, perhaps particularly where web accessibility and inclusivity are concerned, will take careful, measured consideration, as the survey responses indicate that these are murky waters. After conducting this survey, it is clear that more specific research needs to be done to investigate whether or not there is a demonstrable difference in attitudes toward the digital (a 'digital divide,' so to speak), between editors who have made the considerable theoretical and practical move from the print paradigm, and those who have only ever worked in the digital. This could help explain the complexity of the approach to concepts of access and accessibility in the editing community. Indeed, much more could be done with our own dataset generated by this survey. We don’t profess to be statisticians, and we recognize that others may see connections where we did not. Therefore we gladly offer a GDPR compliant version of our questions and responses on Humanities Commons for further review, reuse, or remixing.
43 As fellows in a well-funded network on digital scholarly editing, we (as authors) have enjoyed a great amount of privilege to explore the theory and praxis of digital scholarly editing in the past four years. However, such privilege needs to be considered when we (as a community) attempt to design desiderata. What is actually feasible to achieve? This is up to each editing team to decide for itself. We will never have uniformity with regard to budgets, team size, project goals, computing power, or editorial approaches in our community. Such diversity is intellectually stimulating. But having a set of guidelines and best practices specifically about access and accessibility, which are generated by and consider the needs of the marginalized as well as the privileged, the precariously employed as well as the tenured, the ‘digital migrants’ as well as the ‘digital natives,’ may provide an advantageous starting point for any project, and, in turn, may help us become as diligent about the design and dissemination of our digital scholarly editions as we are about the transcription of our source materials.
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NOTES
1. The authors wish to acknowledge that the work performed on this article was funded in part by the Digital Scholarly Editions Innovative Training Network (DiXiT ITN), a Marie Sklodowska- Curie Action, underwritten by the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), REA grant no. 317436. 2. We have deposited a CSV file of the survey's raw data (uncorrected, but scrubbed of respondents' personal information, following GDPR compliance requirements) in the Open Access Humanities Commons repository, alongside an accompanying PDF file with graphical representations of the survey's statistics. The redacted datasets can be found here: http:// dx.doi.org/10.17613/c3m9-kq76 (csv) and here: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/x4mx-x394 (pdf). 3. The following mailing lists were used: Humanist Discussion Group; Digital Library Forum/ Council on Library and Information Resources (DLF/CLIR); Text Encoding Initiative (TEI-L); CODE4LIB; Scholarly Editing Forum (SEDIT-L); Textual Scholarship; Association for Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO); Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP-L); Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS); Digital Humanities Benelux; Digital Humanities in Flanders (DHu.F); Digital Research Infrastructure in the Arts and Humanities-Belgium (DARIAH-BE); Nordic Network of Editions (NNE); Digital Humanities Summer
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Institute (DHSI); Global Outlook: Digital Humanities (GO:DH); the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)’s “Make Your Edition” workshop mailing list; and the Digital Scholarly Editing Innovative Training Network (DiXiT ITN). 4. This number was constructed by comparing SurveyMonkey’s “Time Spent” values for all respondents who had completed the survey, which we rounded off to the closest half minute mark. This time does not necessarily reflect ‘active’ time spent on completing survey answers, but measures the distance between the moment when respondents start and complete the survey. Values for completed surveys ranged between six minutes and over a week, and had median of 41.25 minutes. 5. Although DSE creators are often also users - and perhaps arguably even the primary target readership - of other DSEs, so the roles can be fluid. 6. Twenty-eight out of 219 respondents did not supply sufficient information to determine their nationality. 7. See Kenneth Price 2009 for a detailed discussion of this topic. 8. R+number is used to anonymize respondents, and refers to respondent number to the overall survey. 9. For more information on these issues, see Dillen and Neyt 2016 and Sichani 2017. 10. We also tried to keep the phrasing of the questions as neutral as possible, and strategically combined a series of closed and open-ended questions, offering respondents the option to elaborate on their perspective in a comment box as well. 11. We can even make the argument that digital reproductions are a product of scholarship as well. At the very least they are equally subject to interpretations of the specialist that makes them. This ranges from technological factors like lighting and camera settings to a choice about what elements to capture and what not. In short, digital facsimiles are always an approximation of the source document. 12. In 1971 German scholar Hans Zeller argued that scholarly editing is "ineluctably" subjective, which isn't a bad thing by itself; in fact, the scholar's insights and knowledgeable interpretation can help others understand the text (Zeller 1971, 22). It's more important, therefore, that editors clearly communicate about their decisions and methodology than strive towards an unattainable standard of objectivity (see also Bleeker 2017: 41). 13. https://dans.knaw.nl/en/about/organisation-and-policy/policy-and-strategy/preservation- plan-data-archiving-and-networked-services-dans-1, accessed 30 June 2019. 14. CollateX (https://collatex.net/) is developed within the framework of the Interedition project (2007-2011) and maintained at the Digital Infrastructure department of the Humanities Cluster at the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam. 15. This topic was the theme of a symposium on scholarly editions and interface design, "Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces," at the Centre for Information Modelling in Graz, Austria (23-24 September 2016). The contributions to this symposium are bundled in a special volume of Schriften der Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik (SIDE, band 12; preprint). 16. This definition was inspired by the Modern Language Association’s 2016 publication on digital scholarly editions, which states the importance of documenting how the edition was created, including processes that otherwise remain invisible like algorithms, data structures and constraints (MLA 2016, 7). 17. A statement recently repeated by Willard McCarty in his keynote lecture at the international conference on Computational Methods for Literary Historical Textual Scholarship (Leicester, July 3-5, 2018; http://cts.dmu.ac.uk/events/CMLHTS, accessed 30 June 2019). 18. In a joint talk with Susan Schreibman and Franz Fischer entitled "DiXiT: Research, Training, and Networking in the Field of Digital Editing" (October 6, 2016).
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19. Good starting points are the website of the DiXiT project, which contains all materials of the training camps and workshops (http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/, maintained by the University of Cologne), the NEH Institute "Make Your Edition" (https://pittsburgh-neh-institute.github.io/ Institute-Materials-2017/) and the personal website of David J. Birnbaum of the University of Pittsburgh (http://obdurodon.org). All links accessed on 30 June 2019. 20. The RIDE questionnaire focuses on another key issue: the reusability of the edition's data. 21. As a final point, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at reasons for not providing access to the code of a DSE. Answers range from straightforward (the editors do not know how the code works) to complex (part of the code is licensed), from principled (the code is considered as subservient to or less important than the source material) to aesthetic (the code is considered too ugly to publish). 22. This shortcoming becomes particularly poignant when we take into account that the digital medium gives the DSE the capacity to be more accessible than its print predecessor – and perhaps especially so when the DSE is published on the Web, a medium that “is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability,” as it “removes barriers to communication and interaction that many people face in the physical world” (W3C 2018). 23. By answering either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to this question, respondents indicated that they were at least aware of the efforts their development team were making in this respect, while answering ‘don’t know’ indicated that they were not. An ‘other’ option with comment box was also provided for people to whom the question did not apply (e.g. because they were not involved in the development of a DSE) or for those who wanted to provide a more nuanced answer. Delving deeper into the ‘other’ category allowed us to attribute a few more answers to the other three categories, and suggested that there was a substantial part of digital scholarly editions that provide partial compliance to web accessibility standards. 24. The nine respondents that are not included in these two graphs either did not enter usable demographic information in the survey, or were situated on a continent that was underrepresented in our survey. 25. We received a total of 48 answers, 19 of which (i.e. almost 40%) were disqualified because respondents did not mention measures that were taken to make the edition more accessible. In addition, six more respondents referred to standards, platforms, tools, and/or validators they had used, rather than mentioning specific accessibility options – leaving the total at 23. 26. Specifically, we used version 2.1 of the guidelines: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/, accessed 30 June 2019. 27. For more elaborate definitions of these terms, please refer to: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ WCAG21/Understanding/intro#understanding-the-four-principles-of-accessibility, accessed 30 June 2019. 28. Two respondents mentioned measures that improved both the edition’s operability and robustness; one respondent’s measures improved its perceivability and robustness; and one respondent’s measures improved its perceivability and understandability. 29. With the exception of one respondent that focused on understandability, most of the web accessibility options listed in responses to Q25 focus on aiding people with visual impairments, while the WCAG tries to cater (to some extent) to an audience with a wider range of disabilities – including “auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities” (WCAG 2.1). Part of this bias towards visual impairments in the survey’s responses could be explained by recalling that respondents were never asked to provide an exhaustive account of the accessibility options their editions provided, and were possibly only entering those that came to mind first. In a predominantly visual environment like the World Wide Web, arguably the most obviously disadvantaged group of people is the visually impaired. We should also keep in mind that (much like its print predecessor) the modality of today’s DSE is mostly
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limited to digital facsimiles and texts transcriptions. As time-based media such as audio, video, and complex animations are much less common in this environment, there is also less of a focus on catering specifically to users who have more difficulties navigating, perceiving, or processing such materials. 30. Answers that described web accessibility as ‘important’ (or an equivalent term) were tagged as ‘Positive’, except when they were accompanied by a reinforcing adverb (such as ‘very’), in which case the response was tagged as ‘Very positive’. This latter category was also assigned responses that describe web accessibility as an indispensable step in web design (e.g. ‘crucial’, ‘essential’, etc.). When web accessibility was regarded as important, but the statement contained a caveat to qualify this importance, it was tagged as a ‘Qualified positive’. When it was not regarded as an important aspect of digital scholarly editing at all, the response was tagged as negative. The category ‘Unsure’ was reserved for responses that indicated the respondent’s indecisiveness, and responses that avoided the issue were tagged as ‘Not Answered’. 31. One critical respondent called web accessibility a “luxury” (R100). 32. See for example Nell Smith 2007; Earhart 2012; Fiormonte 2012; Liu 2012; McPherson 2012; Risam and Koh 2013a; Risam and Koh 2013b; Terras 2013; Galina Russell 2014; Bordalejo 2016; Fiormonte 2016; Posner 2016; EADH 2017; Brown and Leigh 2018; Eichmann-Kalawara et al 2018; Liu 2018; Losh and Wernimont 2018; Mahony 2018; Risam 2018, to name a few. 33. The Global South includes Australia, Canada, Israel, Hong Kong, Macau, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States and all of Europe, including Russia. The Global South consists of Mexico, developing countries in Asia, Central America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. See Wikimedia 2018. 34. E.g. librarians and archivists. On social justice as a core value of librarians, see Rubin 2016, 533-79; Gustina and Guinnee 2017. On social justice performed by archivists, see Jimerson 2007; Belmonte and Opotow 2017. 35. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. 36. On editorial orientations, see for example Van Hulle and Shillingsburg 2015. 37. As the survey’s responses indicated, listening is a key factor in understanding where improvements can be made in academia: while conversations about how to refine aspects of praxis can be fraught with tension and disagreement, they are a necessary step in moving any discipline forward. 38. Especially in the web accessibility and inclusivity sections many respondents either lamented a lack of awareness in the field, or openly called for more awareness raising activities – at times acknowledging that the survey itself had alerted them to new concerns that they hoped to take with them in the development of their editions. 39. R129, for example, wrote: “Not behind a paywall. Free as in beer” – a sly reference to Richard Stallman’s well-known assertion that “‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’” (2002, 3). 40. The question marks at the end of these replies further indicate that the respondents are not confident in their definitions, and are essentially uncertain about how to define this term. 41. R100 defined the concept as “A big fight with copyright and estates.” 42. See R19, R29, R35, R58, R59, R79, R104, R127, and R201.
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ABSTRACTS
In this paper we explore layered conceptions of access and accessibility as they relate to the theory and praxis of digital scholarly editing. To do this, we designed and disseminated a qualitative survey on five key themes: dissemination; Open Access and licensing; access to code; web accessibility; and diversity. Throughout the article we engage in cultural criticism of the discipline by sharing results from the survey, identifying how the community talks about and performs access, and pinpointing where improvements in praxis could be made. In the final section of this paper we reflect on different ways to utilize the survey results when critically designing and disseminating digital scholarly editions, propose a call to action, and identify avenues of future research.
INDEX
Keywords: digital scholarly editing, access, accessibility, code, Open Access, dissemination, inclusive design, diversity, survey, cultural criticism, digital humanities
AUTHORS
MERISA MARTINEZ
Merisa Martinez is a PhD Candidate in the Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University of Borås, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Cambridge Digital Library, and a member of the Program Committee for the 2019 Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage (DaTech) Conference. From 2014 to 2017, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Research Fellowship in the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT ITN), where she also served for three years as an elected Student Representative to the Project Advisory Board. Merisa is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on the intersection of digital textual scholarship and the digitization process in libraries, which she will defend in 2019.
WOUT DILLEN
Wout Dillen holds a PhD in Literature with a focus on text encoding and digital scholarly editing from the University of Antwerp. From 2016 to 2017, Wout held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Research Fellowship in the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT ITN) at the University of Borås. Since 2016 he has been the Coordinator of platform{DH} and the Coordinator of the University of Antwerp’s contribution to DARIAH-Flanders. Wout currently serves as the Secretary of the European Society of Textual Scholarship (ESTS), as a member of the Steering Committee of the DH Benelux. For the current issue, Wout is an Associate editor of Variants, and will be General Editor from issue 15 onwards. Besides these, he is also on the editorial boards of the Review Journal for Digital Editions and Resources (RIDE) and the upcoming DH Benelux journal.
ELLI BLEEKER
Elli Bleeker is a postdoctoral researcher in the Research and Development Team at the Humanities Cluster, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She specializes in digital scholarly editing and computational philology, with a focus on modern manuscripts
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and genetic criticism. Elli completed her PhD in 2017 at the University of Antwerp on the role of the scholarly editor in the digital environment. During her Early Stage Research Fellowship in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie funded DiXiT network (2014–2017), she received advanced training in manuscript studies, text modeling, and XML technologies. Elli has participated in the organization and teaching of workshops on scholarly editing with a focus on knowledge transfer and the application of computational methods in a humanities environment. She is also the Associate Editor of Variants from this issue onwards.
ANNA-MARIA SICHANI
Anna-Maria Sichani is a Research Fellow in Media History and Historical Data Modelling on the AHRC-funded ‘Connected Histories of the BBC’ project at the Department of Media, Film and Music at University of Sussex and Sussex Humanities Lab. In 2018, she completed her PhD in Modern Greek Philology and Cultural Studies at University of Ioannina in Greece. From 2017 to 2018, Anna-Maria was the Communications Fellow for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). Previously, Anna-Maria held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Research Fellowship in the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT ITN) at Huygens ING and a PhD Research Fellowship at King’s College Digital Lab in London. She has collaborated on a number of Digital Humanities projects including the COST Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History," Transcribe Bentham, and DARIAH. Currently, Anna- Maria serves on the Editorial Board of The Review Journal for Digital Editions and Resources (RIDE) and at The Programming Historian.
AODHÁN KELLY
Aodhán Kelly is an affiliated researcher in the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Research Fellow within the DiXiT network. Aodhán researches methods and models for the dissemination of digital scholarly editions to wider audiences and he defended a PhD thesis on this topic at the University of Antwerp in July 2017 with the title "Disseminating digital scholarly editions of textual cultural heritage".
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Visualizing Collation Results
Elisa Nury
1 In recent years, the use of computers in the collation workflow has increased, and so has the need to display results of collation in meaningful ways.1 Collation results are recorded in various digital formats, whether performed by hand or with the help of a tool such as Juxta or CollateX.2 As more and more texts are available in a digital format, however, and as the efficiency of collation tools improves, computer-supported collation is likely to become the solution of choice in order to collate texts (Prebor 2013, 64).
2 In this article, I would like to address the issue of visualizing collation results, focusing in particular on results produced by CollateX. What is a good visualization? How can it help the editor to assess the witnesses, their relationship, and to prepare a critical text? What information should be included in the visualization? Collation is admittedly more than just a record of variant readings (Macé et al. 2015, 331). It frequently incorporates additional notes and comments, assessing the certainty of a reading for instance, as well as “paratextual” elements such as changes of pages or folia, gaps, lacunae, and so on. This combination of variants, annotations and paratextual material produces a large amount of complex collation data which is difficult to read and interpret. Therefore, the editor needs to visualize and analyse the collation results as a whole, and not only variant by variant. A good visualization should offer a way to check collation against the actual witnesses, whether they are manuscripts or printed editions. In addition, the editor should be able to interact with the collation to analyse readings and variants in order to evaluate the stemmatic weight of a witness. Collation could be filtered, so as to find patterns of agreements or disagreements between those witnesses, which can indicate how they are related to each other. Visualization and manipulation of collation results are thus essential in order to use collation for further research, such as studying the manuscript tradition and creating a stemma codicum.
Automated Collation
3 The role of computers in supporting the collation process goes back to the 1960s, when Dom Jacques Froger (1968) discussed one of the first programs performing collation.
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Froger was soon followed by other scholars (Gilbert 1973; see also Hockey 1980), but often their software was intended for a limited audience. Collate, an automated collation tool published by Peter Robinson (1994), and the Tübingen System of Text Processing (TUSTEP) developed by Wilhelm Ott (1991), were among the first programs to be used more widely across a range of projects. In 2009, the Gothenburg model was designed in order to improve the complex collation process by dividing it into a series of simpler tasks. Following this model, new collation programs were created, such as CollateX (the successor of Collate) and Juxta. One of the benefits of automated collation is to obtain a collation result in a digital format that can be readily processed for further research.
4 The creation of a stemma with digital methods is one possible application of the results obtained through automated collation, since the collation data is already in a convenient format for processing with a computer. The parallel between manuscript variation and DNA mutation prompted researchers to apply algorithms from evolutionary biology to textual traditions. The phylogenetic approach was adopted with success by Peter Robinson to the Wife of Bath’s prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Barbrook et al. 1998). More recently, the STAM research project carried out by the University of Helsinki has adapted phylogenetic algorithms especially for the purpose of studying textual traditions (Roos and Zou 2011).3 Their algorithms are available through the Stemmaweb interface of Andrews (2012). The Canterbury Tales project has spurred criticism (Cartlidge 2001) and the debate on the application of phylogenetic methods to textual traditions is still ongoing (Howe et al. 2012; see also Heikkilä 2014, Roelli 2014, and Andrews 2016). The importance for scholars to be able to interact with the collation results was underlined by Andrews and van Zundert (2013). They argue that a static visualization is a barrier to research and that interactivity encourages scholars to be more critical of the results produced by the algorithms of automated collation programs such as CollateX. An interactive visualization of the collation results is therefore an important issue related to automated collation. The variant graph data model behind collation tools (see Schmidt and Colomb 2009; see also Dekker et al. 2015) serves as visualization in Stemmaweb, Jänicke et al. (2015) proposed a new tool, Traviz, meant to improve the variant graph visalization. The features of Traviz include for instance the use of colours to distinguish witnesses, font-sizes that reveal the frequency of a reading, and a division of the text in lines for better readability. The most advanced tool to correct a collation alignment is the Collation Editor, prepared for the collation of the complex Greek New Testament tradition.4 The Collation Editor allows numerous interactions, including regularization of orthographic variation, and correction of the alignment.
5 Beside the variant graph, collation tables are another visualization format. This is the visualization adopted for instance by the Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project or the Digital Mishnah project.5 While CollateX focuses rather on improving the witnesses’ alignment, Juxta places a much stronger emphasis on visualization (Dekker et al. 2015). Juxta offers several visualizations, the Heat Map and a Side-by-Side view, where colours are used to show the places of variation in the text. A histogram is available to show to which degree the witnesses vary across the text. In addition, Juxta also integrates the Versioning Machine among the visualization options, another tool that displays parallel versions of texts encoded in XML TEI with the P5 guidelines and highlights corresponding segments in the different versions.6 Finally, the TEI Critical Apparatus
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Toolbox is also designed to display parallel versions when variants are encoded manually by a scholar.7 Compared to the Versioning Machine, the TEI toolbox provides different features. In particular, the use of colours shows when witnesses agree or not with the readings of a critical text. This can be an important feature for the collation’s analysis: the variants marked in orange within the toolbox are considered errors according to a critical text, and errors are essential in the neo-Lachmmann method for text editing.
Lachmann’s Common Errors
6 To detect relationships between witnesses, many scholars follow the (neo-)Lachmannian method of text editing (Trovato 2014). Here neo-Lachmannism refers to the improvements to Lachmann’s method brought by Giorgio Pasquali and other Italian scholars, who took Bédier’s criticism into account and incorporated the study of the textual tradition and material documents (the manuscripts themselves) to the creation of stemmata (Pasquali 1952). Lachmann’s method focuses on common errors shared by a group of witnesses in order to postulate relationships between those witnesses: witnesses are likely to be related if they (1) agree on readings that (2) they do not share with the other witnesses, and especially (3) those that agree in errors (i.e. they share readings that have no manuscript authority). A reading with manuscript authority is “a reading that may have reached us through a continuous sequence of accurate copies of what the author wrote back in antiquity and may therefore be authentic and (by definition) right” (Damon 2016, 202–3). In sum, witnesses may be related when they share readings that do not represent the original text and that are absent from other witnesses. Other readings of interest in Lachmann’s method are “unique errors”, which are errors found only in one witness. Between two related witnesses that share common errors, if one has in addition unique errors that could not have been easily corrected, it can be concluded that this witness is a direct descendant of the other (West 1973, 33). Being able to find common errors or unique errors in the collation results would therefore be especially useful for a scholar preparing a critical edition.
7 The visualizations described above are mostly linear: the reader must follow the text word by word and it is difficult to select only variants of interest, such as common readings or unique readings. A new perspective may be required in order to fulfill the need of editors: the ability to filter the collation and select agreements between witnesses or unique readings. In addition, the collation tables will usually show only plain text from the witnesses and omit the paratextual elements that could be useful to an editor. Enhancements have been proposed to improve the basic table output of CollateX, for instance with colours to indicate the places where a variation occurs: in the Digital Mishnah demo, variant locations are highlighted in grey. Another example is the Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project, where deletions are represented with strikethrough and additions with superscript letters.8 However, other elements are still missing from those helpful visualizations, such as, for instance, the changes of folia mentioned earlier, or other types of paratextual and editorial annotations. The reason for recording folia changes is mainly for checking purposes. If the editor or a reader wants to check the accuracy of the transcription for a particular reading, it will be much easier to find the reading back in the manuscript knowing the folio where it appears.
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8 In the context of the Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus, the need for visualizing groups of witnesses with shared readings, or unique readings, has become necessary to analyse the manuscript tradition and the relationship of the editio princeps with other manuscripts. Therefore, I have developed a tool to respond to this need: a user interface which makes it possible to filter the collation results in order to find groups of witnesses that agree with one another and not with others or to find the readings unique to one witness. The results of these searches are then displayed within a collation table that incorporates some paratextual elements. This tool will be described in more detail in Section 3.
Case study: Calpurnius Flaccus
9 The case study to which the visualization tool was applied is the Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus, a classical literary text in Latin from the second century AD. Declamation was originally a Greek practice which was adopted in the Roman world. The production of declamations started as school exercises meant for students to practice their rhetorical skills and the art of public speaking. The most difficult of those exercises were the controversiae, legal speeches in fictitious court cases. Given a situation of conflict (the theme) and a set of laws, the students had to play the part of a lawyer and learn to defend both parties. The characters portrayed in declamations are everyday members of society: fathers and sons, mothers-in-law, young women and rapists, rich and poor enemies, deserters and war heroes. From the personality associated with those anonymous persons, the purpose of the declamation exercise is to build a convincing plea with the help of witty traits, the sententiae. Declamations evolved also in a literary genre of its own, with performances from well-known rhetors for the public entertainment (Sussman 1994). The corpus of Declamations from Calpurnius Flaccus is a collection of fifty-three declamation extracts: besides the titles and themes, we do not possess complete speeches but only the most noteworthy sententiae of the author. Little is known about Calpurnius, except for his name; Sussman (1994, 6) places his work in the second century based on his style.
The Manuscripts
10 The text is transmitted by five manuscripts. The older surviving manuscript is codex Montepessulanus H 126 (A), held in the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine in Montpellier. Manuscript A is a very valuable witness, but unfortunately badly damaged. Only the last folio provides us with the first six declamations, which are very difficult to read due to dark stains on the page. A large part of the folio has become completely illegible. Because of its fragmentary and lacunose character, the manuscript was omitted in this visualization example. The treatment of this manuscript raises issues that will be discussed below (Section 5).
11 A lost manuscript (X) appears in the correspondence of Humanist scholars: this manuscript is likely the source of two manuscripts from the fifteenth century, codex Monacensis Latinus 309 (B) and codex Chigianus Latinus H VIII 261 (C), held respectively in Munich’s Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and in the Vatican Library. The tradition is completed by two other manuscripts from the sixteenth century, codex Monacensis Latinus 316 (M) in Munich and Bernensis Latinus 149 (N) in Bern. Also in
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the sixteenth century, the French scholar Pierre Pithou published the editio princeps in 1580, and reprinted it fourteen years later in 1594. The reprinted edition was used here in the collation because it is digitized and more easily available.9 Nevertheless, the two versions of 1580 and 1594 have been compared and three important differences, other than abbreviations, were noted: in Declamation 1, filii mei mortem was replaced with mortem mei filii (Pithou 1594, 383); in Declamation 21, possem was replaced with posse (Pithou 1594, 400); finally, in Declamation 34, medius was replaced with melius (Pithou 1594, 409).
12 The critical edition of Calpurnius Flaccus published by Lennart Håkanson in 1978 is also included in the collation. Håkanson’s text is still the best critical edition available, complete with a comprehensive critical apparatus. In his introduction, Håkanson gives a detailed analysis of the relationships between the different manuscripts and Pithou’s edition. The next section will summarize Håkanson’s conclusions, and Section 4 will then examine how the visualization tool could be used to analyse the tradition of Calpurnius Flaccus.
The Stemma
13 In the preface to the Declamations, Håkanson describes in detail the reasoning process behind the stemma construction. He gives a practical example of the application of Lachmann’s method to a Latin literary text. Here is a summary of how Håkanson established his stemma. We will compare his results with the ones we obtain through our automatic collation and interactive visualization later.
14 Håkanson shows first that all five manuscripts descend from a common archetype, since they share a few errors (Håkanson 1978 VI). He postulates then that A and X, the lost hyparchetype of BCMN, form two distinct branches of the stemma. However, the text of Calpurnius is too short in manuscript A to prove this point. Instead, Håkanson relies on other texts transmitted in the manuscripts A, B, and C.
15 Next, Håkanson proceeds to analyse relationships between BCMN: BMN have some errors in common which are absent from C. Therefore, the stemma is divided again in two branches stemming from X, with C on one side and BMN on the other side (Håkanson 1978 VII-VIII). Manuscripts M and N are separated from B by errors that they have in common (Håkanson 1978 VIII), and interpolations which have been introduced in their exemplar by an unknown witness Y (Håkanson 1978 IX). Furthermore, there was an exchange of readings between manuscripts B and N. A few readings from N have been added in the margins of B by a second hand (B2): vel (22.4), remittitur (24.11) and in vita liberis (25.17) (Håkanson 1978 XII).
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Figure 4.1: Calpurnius Stemma (Håkanson 1978, V).
16 The complete stemma of Calpurnius Flaccus is showed in Figure 4.1. After sorting out the manuscripts’ relationships, Håkanson examines how the editio princeps is related to the manuscripts. The editio princeps of Pithou is based in part on manuscript A. Since it is damaged and incomplete, Pithou had to rely mostly on another manuscript which he referred to as the “Italian exemplar”. Pithou does not give much detail about this codex, but the only manuscript that we know for certain to have been in Italy is manuscript C, now held in the Vatican Library. However, both M and N are written in italics, an indication of a potential Italian origin. In fact, Håkanson argues for N to be the Italian manuscript mentioned by Pithou, because readings unique to N were adopted by Pithou (Håkanson 1978, XIII).
17 Furthermore, Jacques Bongars, the last owner of manuscript N before its acquisition by the Bern Burgerbibliothek, was in close contact with Pierre Pithou (Banderier 2009, 397). Bongars could have shared the manuscript with Pithou.
18 Was N really the Italian manuscript that Pithou used for his edition, or is it possible that N was copied from Pithou’s edition? Both the edition and the manuscript are from the late sixteenth century and it is not possible to ascertain which one is oldest. In his apparatus, Pithou quotes the reading “miseriae nostre aur”. which is not present in any known manuscript of Calpurnius Flaccus.10 The other witnesses read gemitum miseri aures tuae (BCMN) or miseri mei gemitum aures tuae (A) at this point in the text. Is it only a mistake from Pithou or could this be an indication that N was not Pithou’s Italian manuscript? How could the relationship of Pithou’s edition with the other manuscripts be examined with the help of the tool and collation tables? In Section 4.2, we will see how this visualization tool is used and how it can help us to check Håkanson’s conclusions on the tradition of Calpurnius Flaccus.
Visualization tool: PyCoviz
19 In the Calpurnius case study, four manuscripts have been considered for visualization: manuscripts B, C, M and N. Each manuscript is split into two witnesses according to the different hands which wrote the text. For example, B1 is the code for the first hand of manuscript B and B2 is the code for the second hand responsible for corrections to the text of B1. There are also two editions in the collation, Pithou’s edition of 1594 (P1594)
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and Håkanson’s edition of 1978 (LH). There are thus ten witnesses in total, which have been transcribed following the XML TEI P5 guidelines, and then prepared to be collated with CollateX, version 1.7.1.
20 The method of visualization for CollateX’s results consists of two aspects: first, a Jupyter notebook, PyCoviz (for Python Collation Visualization), where the editor can interact with the collation results through a Python script (for instance to select agreements between a group of witnesses against another group) to make small corrections in the alignment or to search for readings.11 Second, a collation table in HTML format, with additional information such as reading’s location in the manuscripts or links to digital facsimile.
21 A Jupyter notebook is a document format that combines computer code with prose descriptions and that is accessible through a web browser. Notebooks are especially designed to share or publish executable code, which makes it a well-suited format for sharing the Python script developed for collation visualization (Kluyver et al. 2016; see also VanderPlas 2016). Since CollateX is distributed in Python, this was the preferred coding language for the customization of a Jupyter notebook. The combination of code and prose explanations should help to make the notebook accessible to scholars with little knowledge of coding or Python.
22 The addition of widgets into the Jupyter notebook offers an interactive way to explore collation results. Widgets are components of a user interface such as buttons, text boxes, and so on.12 The results from CollateX are uploaded in PyCoviz and then transformed into Python data format. Then the collation data can be manipulated through various interactions: first, a few functions allow for modifying or correcting the collation if the current alignment is not satisfactory. Second, the collation can be filtered in order to find agreements between selected witnesses. Finally, it is possible to search the collation results and to clarify a reading by displaying all its properties. According to Andrews and van Zundert (2013) essential interaction requirements should be twofold: 1. Alter or correct the collation alignment (this includes combining or splitting words into readings when necessary). 2. Annotate variants about how they are related to each other.
23 The first aspect is fully implemented in the notebook, but readings can be annotated only individually. However, it is arguable that the annotation of readings may be better represented in an external database such as described by Spadini (2015). In addition to those two kind of interactions, the possibility to search for agreements of witnesses offers another option to analyse collation results.
Collation Format
24 By default, CollateX can take as input plain text transcriptions of the witnesses to collate. The texts will be split into “tokens”, smaller units of text, at white spaces. This is the tokenization stage.13 The collation is then performed on these tokens, which are usually the words of the text. However, it is also possible to “pre-tokenize” the transcriptions and divide texts into tokens according to the user’s needs. The tokens may then be provided as input to CollateX, using for instance the JSON format, instead of plain text. The JSON format allows one to record not only the plain text words (t), but also a normalized form of the word (n) or other properties. There is no limitation to
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the token properties that can be added: they will simply be ignored during the collation stage, but still be available in the end results. In order to integrate folio location, links to digital images and editorial comments, the TEI transcriptions of Calpurnius Flaccus were transformed into pre-tokenized JSON. The tokens include, beside the (t) and (n) properties, a (location) property, eventually a (link) to a digital facsimile and/or a (note) property.
25 During collation, the properties of location, link and note are ignored, and only tokens (t) and their normalized (n) forms will be compared. Normalized forms are compared first. In the absence of (n), CollateX will then compare tokens in their original form, namely tokens (t) which represent the words as they appear in the witnesses. For the pre-tokenization of Calpurnius, abbreviations were expanded and punctuation was not included. This is not to say that punctuation marks or abbreviations are not important; in fact, a change in punctuation can considerably affect the meaning of the text and abbreviations are often a source of errors (West 1973, 27). However, in a Classical Latin tradition such as the one of Calpurnius Flaccus, both abbreviations and punctuation marks are more characteristic of the scribes who copied the manuscripts than of the author’s language, and for this reason have not been collated for the text discussed here. Tokens may be normalized in different ways, but in our case it derives directly form the TEI transcription of each witness in which spelling variations are normalized via the use of TEI elements
(a) Consecutive matching tokens joined into segments.
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(b) Tokens as separate rows in the collation table. Figure 4.2 : CollateX’s JSON output options.
The issue of normalized tokens
26 The collation tables in PyCoviz are all made by comparing normalized forms of tokens whenever possible. In practice, the orthographical differences are thus excluded from the collation tables. However useful it may seem, the use of normalized forms for the analysis of collation results may be problematic in certain circumstances. Comparing only normalized forms may hide variant readings that could be considered significant to an editor. In folio 83r, manuscript C reads liniamentis, while the other witnesses read lineamentis. This is a purely orthographic difference, and as such, does not appear in the collation table as a place of variation since the comparison is done on the normalized tokens. A user of the Jupyter notebook, selecting witnesses in order to find their (dis)agreements, would not see this row in the results for any combination of groups of witnesses. However, Håkanson (1978, 7) included this orthographic difference in his critical apparatus: therefore this reading was considered to be somehow significant to Håkanson, but according to the method applied here, the reading would not be visible while using the notebook to find agreements between witnesses. For this reason, the notebook also provides a set of functions to compare readings in their original forms, i.e. using tokens (t) instead of their normalized forms (n). Nevertheless, this approach is not a satisfactory solution, because CollateX’s results used here have consecutive matching tokens joined into segments. As a consequence, some large chunks of texts are combined into a single cell of the table when there is no difference between normalized forms. Even if there is an orthographic difference, it could be hard to spot it in the middle of a long block of text: the word liniamentis mentioned above appears in the middle of a 37-word reading that shows other orthographic variations (see Figure 4.3). Comparing orthographic differences is therefore difficult.
Figure 4.3: Liniamentis in the collation results.
27 CollateX does also provide results where consecutive matching tokens are not joined into segments, but in this case the information that some groups of tokens should be
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considered together is lost, especially when one token of one witness matches with several tokens in another witness. It is a fairly common situation in Latin, since texts used to be written in the scriptio continua style, without word division. Inconsistencies in word division are quite frequent in Calpurnius: rempublicam versus rem publicam, contradicit versus contra dicit, and so on. Some cases are more complex than just difference in word division, such as verberantibus in B1 corrected into verbera cibus by B2 (f. 148v), where one word matches two different words of another witness. In fact, these situations were so frequent that they were not normalized in the TEI transcriptions. Rather, it was decided to compare normalized forms without spaces in between words, so that word division would not be considered a variant: PyCoviz will consider that witnesses with the readings eius demet (BC) and eiusdem et (LH, P1594) agree together, because white spaces are not included. Hence the comparison will be made on the reading eiusdemet which is equivalent in the four witnesses. There are so many instances of one-to-many matching tokens that correcting CollateX results, when matching tokens are not joined into segments, would not be worth the effort. The example of Figure 4.2(b) showed how the alignment of tokens is much less accurate when each token is in a separate row. Any attempt to toggle between the two results of CollateX, with and without joint segments, is bound to be difficult because of these many places where there is no one-to-one matching token. One possibility would be to normalize tokens only after the collation is done. While it may be achievable for the Declamations or other texts with a limited amount of orthographic variation, it may not be desirable for other traditions, such as medieval traditions where there are countless orthographic variants. The best solution may still be to highlight the orthographic differences within the collation table, while using the CollateX results with consecutive matching tokens joined into segments.
Exploring the Collation of Calpurnius Flaccus
Corrections
28 Before analysing the collation and searching for witnesses’ agreements, it may be necessary to inspect the results and eventually correct them. The corrections described in this section were made with the help of widgets within PyCoviz and demonstrate how the Jupyter notebook may be useful to adapt the collation results according to the user’s need. In some cases, CollateX’s result was clearly incorrect: for instance, proximi, a conjecture by Håkanson (1978, 1.2), was not aligned with the reading proximae present in the other witnesses. The token was thus moved in order to be in the right place. The alignment could also be refined, even if it is not actually wrong: the reading luxuriosum ob amorem in Håkanson (1978, 27.13) is aligned with ob amore in the other witnesses. The user might want to split the reading in two, so that the conjecture luxuriosum printed by Håkanson does not match with other readings, whereas ob amorem would be aligned with ab amore present in the other witnesses.
29 Other situations are less obvious, and the final alignment might be debatable. For instance, the reading invitabo nisi in witnesses B1 (f. 155v), C1 and C2 (f. 87r) is closely related to in vita bonis found in M1 and M2 (f. 13 v). The variant appears to originate mainly from a word division issue: it seems thus that the readings might belong to the same row. However, witnesses N1, N2, B2 and LH read in vita liberis. Therefore, bonis was
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ultimately aligned with liberis and nisi, even if that means that the letters -bo in invitabo are not aligned anymore with bo- in bonis (see Figure 4.4). This alignment makes it possible to show the agreement of the witnesses with the reading in vita, however another user might decide that the whole group of words should be aligned together: invitabo nisi aligned with in vita bonis and in vita liberis.
Figure 4.4: Alignment of invitabo nisi with in vita bonis and in vita liberis.
30 Within the Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus, a total of 171 corrections have been made to the alignment provided by CollateX: these corrections include moving 157 tokens, adding two rows and deleting twelve. Out of the 68,914 tokens from ten witnesses, only 157 were not properly aligned by the algorithm, which represent around 0.23 percent of the total number of tokens. Even considering that some errors or mismatches in the alignment escaped correction, the percentage is unlikely to get higher than 0.5. This low percentage may attest to CollateX’s efficiency. However, the ten witnesses of this case study represent a small textual tradition, especially since four of the ten witnesses are actually artificially created by attributing the status of witness to corrections of second hands and thus are very similar to the first hand. In addition, only few transpositions can be found in Calpurnius, and the transpositions present in the text usually involve no more than two or three words.15 Therefore it is likely that, for texts with a more complex tradition, a higher percentage of errors may arise.
Analysis
31 Once the user is satisfied with the collation alignment, it is possible to explore the results. As discussed above (Section 1.1), it could be useful to search for and visualize agreements among witnesses in order to find patterns that indicate a relationship. To this end, PyCoviz provides an interactive widget which allows the user to find the agreements of groups of witnesses (see Figure 4.5(a)).
(a) View of the Jupyter notebook PyCoviz - Selecting agreements with widgets.
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(b) Agreements of BC and P1594, against MN. Figure 4.5 : View of the Jupyter notebook PyCoviz
32 The cells of the collation tables displayed in the notebook are coloured in red and green, according to their relationship to the reading of a base text; in our case, the base text is the edition of Håkanson (see the examples above, for instance Figure 4.5(a)). Each witness is in a separate column; the last column (ID) represents a way to identify rows in the table. Since the base text is the text printed in the edition of Håkanson, the readings he rejected as errors are shown in red, while the readings he accepted as genuine are shown in green. The colour pattern would of course be different if another edition had been selected as the base text. Using the red and green colour scheme was inspired in part by Stemmaweb, a tool for creating stemmata with computer algorithms (Andrews 2012).16
33 In the case of Calpurnius Flaccus, PyCoviz lets us reproduce Håkanson’s conclusions by filtering the collation to find shared errors among the witnesses. For instance, the editio princeps P1594 has close to forty errors shared with M and N, but only one error shared with B or C. Moreover this single error appears in the incipit: it is displayed as an error only because Håkanson did not include the incipit in his text. Further use of the Agreement widget can show that, according to Håkanson, P1594 has more errors in common with N than M. Finally, it is possible to see that P1594 has many more unique errors than N. This is how we can reproduce Håkanson’s conclusion that N is most likely the ‘Italian manuscript’ which served as an exemplar to Pithoeus for his editio princeps.
Collation Tables
34 PyCoviz can only display simple HTML tables. The tables show words in their original form, and colours to distinguish between errors and true readings. However, in Section 1.1 I outlined the importance of paratextual elements. As these elements are included in a token’s properties, they can be made available in a more complex table format. Figure 4.6 shows an example of an improved table visualization, where notes are included as well as the location of tokens in the witnesses. When possible, the location links to a digital facsimile of the page. Both notes and location can be hidden from the table by clicking on the symbols (i) and (⋮). Thus the readability of the collation is not impaired by the extensive additional data.
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Figure 4.6: Collation table with paratextual elements.
PyCoviz Issues and Further Development
35 The Jupyter notebook has advantages: it provides a user interface with interactive widgets and explanations along with the code. It is a great tool to share code and to make it available for other scholars to examine and review, and adapt it to their own needs if they wish to do so. The notebook was designed with reuse in mind. Consequently, it should be able to run with any CollateX result that has at least tokens (t). All other features of the tokens are optional. It is not necessary either to choose a base text and view readings as errors or genuine readings. There is no limitation regarding the number of witnesses present in the collation.
36 Nonetheless, there are a few inconvenient coding aspects with a Jupyter notebook. Version control is notably challenging because the notebook is saved in JSON format, which is not practical for visualizing changes in the code or in the code’s output. The presentation of code in blocs, without line numbers, can make it difficult to refer to a precise portion of code. Finally, it may be complicated to keep track of which version of the code produced which collation tables, based on which collation file (obtained from which version of CollateX). It is not an issue related to Jupyter notebooks alone, but to any output obtained with computational method. This kind of information is crucial for the reproducibility of materials obtained with computational methods, as well as for quoting those results in publications. The latest release of PyCoviz was prepared with Jupyter Notebook v4.3 and ipywidget v5.0. The collation of Calpurnius was obtained with CollateX v1.5.
37 There are still many technical issues that could be subject to improvement in PyCoviz. One of those issues is dealing with incomplete witnesses such as manuscript A in Calpurnius Flaccus. The collation results did not distinguish between text that is missing due to illegible text, or because folia are missing. In other cases, there are empty cells in the collation table when the text is absent for one witness but not in others: for instance, declamation 45 is present only in manuscript C and in Håkanson’s edition, but not in other witnesses, although there is no damage to the manuscripts, and the text is perfectly legible. The missing folia of A were represented by empty cells in the collation table. However, this would skew the results when looking for agreements. For instance, looking for agreement between A and other witnesses would return the rows where A is non-existent, and other witnesses happen to have an empty cell. The same problem appears when comparing other witnesses against A: the search would yield many results of agreements against A, when the witnesses agree together and A has an empty cell. This does not mean that the text of A was really different. We
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don’t know because the manuscript evidence simply does not exist for A at this point of the text. The collation table should therefore indicate explicitly the state of A, whether the manuscript is extant or not. When searching for agreements between A and other witnesses, it should be possible to ignore those rows where the folia are missing in A.
38 Another possible improvement would be to allow to choose a lemma among the available readings in a row and that way create a new base text instead of choosing one of the existing witnesses. It should also be possible to visualize uncertainty: it is not always possible to decide among several variants which is the true reading and which are the errors. Although editors have to choose one to print in their critical text, they often express their uncertainty in the critical apparatus. For instance, the use of a third colour such as yellow could express the editor’s uncertainty.
Conclusion
39 The two examples of visualization described above, PyCoviz and the collation table, demonstrate how to make use of collation in an electronic format for further research. The case study of Calpurnius Flaccus was based on a particular collation format obtained with CollateX. Nevertheless, the methodology behind the creation of this visualization should be applicable as well to collation prepared manually and in different digital formats. Collation results obtained with CollateX can benefit from the use of pre-tokenized JSON, as it was already done by other projects such as the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. However, it is possible to integrate more information into the collation with JSON tokens: elements such as location of a word in the manuscript, or editorial comments, are important aspects of collating texts and there is no reason to discard them in a computer-supported collation. As shown in the collation table, the use of a few symbols allows for making those elements easily available without overcrowding the results. The use of colours is a straightforward way to reveal groups of witnesses which agree with one another and thus help draw conclusions about the manuscript tradition. However, it is also important to keep in mind how the comparison is done and how normalization influences the collation tables obtained when searching for agreements of witnesses. Errors and genuine readings should also be carefully considered as the product of an editor’s judgement on the text, in this case the decisions of Håkanson. The use of a different base text allows for different interpretation of the text to be visualized. The collation table and Jupyter notebook presented here will hopefully provide suggestions on how to make available the extra material that is not yet fully exploited in collation visualizations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrews, Tara. 2012. “Stemmaweb ― A Collection of Tools for Analysis of Collated Texts”.
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Andrews, Tara. 2016. “Analysis of Variation Significance in Artificial Traditions Using Stemmaweb”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31(3), pp. 523-39.
Andrews, Tara and Joris van Zundert. 2013. “An Interactive Interface for Text Variant Graph Models”. In Digital Humanities 2013: Conference Abstracts, University of Nebraska-Lincoln USA, 16-19 July 2013, pp. 89–91.
Banderier, Gilles. 2009. “Bâle et la famille Pithou: Contribution à l’étude des rapports intellectuels entre Bâle et la France au XVIe siècle Bâle et la famille Pithou”. Revue Suisse d’histoire, 59, pp. 387-409.
Barbrook, Adrian C., et al. 1998. “The phylogeny of the Canterbury Tales”. Nature, 394 (27 August), p. 839.
Calpurnius Flaccus. 1978. Calpurnii Flacci Declamationum Excerpta. Ed. Håkanson, Lennart. Calpurnii Flacci Declamationum Excerpta. Stutgardiae: Teubner.
Calpurnius Flaccus. 1994. The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Ed. Sussman, Lewis A. Leiden: New York: E. J. Brill.
Cartlidge, Neil. 2001. “The Canterbury Tales and Cladistics”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 102, pp. 135–150.
Damon, Cynthia. 2016. “Beyond Variants: Some Digital Desiderata for the Critical Apparatus of Ancient Greek and Latin Texts”. In Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo (eds.), Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, pp. 201–218
Dekker, Ronald Haentjens et al. 2015. “Computer-supported collation of modern manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project”. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 30(3), 452-70.
Froger, Jaques. 1968. La critique des textes et son automatisation. Paris: Dunod.
Gilbert, Penny. 1973. “Automatic Collation: A Technique for Medieval Texts”, Computers and the Humanities, 7(3), pp. 139–147.
Heikkilä, Tuomas. 2014. “The Possibilities and challenges of computer-assisted stemmatology: the example of Vita et miracula s. Symeonis Treverensis”. In Tara Andrews and Caroline Macé (eds.), The Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Methods. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 19–42.
Hockey, Susan. 1980. A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities. London: Duckworth.
Howe, Christopher J., Ruth Connolly, and Heather F. Windram. 2012. “Responding to Criticisms of Phylogenetic Methods in Stemmatology”. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 52(1), pp. 51– 67.
Jänicke, Stefan, Marco Büchler, and Gerik Scheuermann. 2014. “Improving the Layout for Text Variant Graphs”. In VisLR: Visualization as Added Value in the Development, Use and Evaluation of Language Resources, pp. 41–48.
Jänicke, Stefan, et al. 2015. “TRAViz: A visualization for Variant Graphs”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30(1), pp. 83–99.
Kluyver, Thomas, et al. 2016. “Jupyter Notebooks — A Publishing Format for Reproducible Computational Workflows”. In F. Loizides and B. Schmidt (eds.), Positioning and Power in Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas. N.p.: IOS Press, pp. 87–90.
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Macé, Caroline, et al. 2015. “Textual criticism and text editing”. In Alessandro Bausi, et al. (eds.), Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction. Hamburg: Tredition, pp. 321–466.
Ott, W., 1991. “TUSTEP”. In Heinrich Best (ed.), Computers in the Humanities and the Social Sciences: Achievements of the 1980s, Prospects for the 1990s.Proceedings of the Cologne Computer Conference 1988 Uses of the Computer in the Humanities and Social Sciences held at the University of Cologne, September 1988. Köln: De Gruyter, pp. 432–37.
Pasquali, Giorgio. 1952. Storia della Tradizione e Critica del Testo. Firenze: Felice Le Monnier.
Pithoeus, Petrus, ed. 1594. M. Fab. Quintiliani Declamationes, quae ex CCCLXXXVIII. supersunt, CXLV. ex vetere exemplari restitutae. Calpurnii Flacci excerptae X. Rhetorum minorum LI. nunc primum editae. Dialogus de oratoribus, sive de caussis coruptae eloquientiae. Ex bibliotheca P. Heidelberg: Hieronymus Commelinus,
Prebor, Gila. 2013. “New Technologies for the Collation of Hebrew Texts”. Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, 10, pp. 53–64.
Robinson, Peter M. W., 1994. “Collate: A Program for Interactive Collation of Large Textual Traditions”. In Susan Hockey and Nancy Ide (eds), Research in Humanities Computing 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 32–45.
Roelli, Philip. 2014. “Petrus Alfonsi, or: On the Mutual benefit of Traditional and Computerised stemmatology”. In Tara Andrews and Caroline Macé (eds.), Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 43-68.
Roos, Teemu and Yuan Zou. 2011. “Analysis of Textual Variation by Latent Tree Structures”. Proceedings – IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining. N.p. IEEE Computer Society Digital Library, pp. 567–576,
Schmidt, Desmond and Robert Colomb. 2009. “A Data Structure for Representing multi-version Texts Online”. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 67(6), pp. 497–514.
Spadini, Elena. 2015. “Annotating document changes”. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on (Document) Changes: Modeling, Detection, Storage and Visualization Lausanne, Switzerland — September 08 - 08, 2015, pp. 23–26.
TEI Consortium. 2016. 3.4.2 Regularization and Normalization. TEI P5.
Trovato, Paolo. 2014. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method. A Non- Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cladistics, and Copy-Text. Padova: libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni.
VanderPlas, Jake. 2016. Python Data Science Handbook. Beijing: O’Reilly Media.
West, Martin L. 1973. Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique, applicable to Greek and Latin Texts. Stuttgart: Teubner.
NOTES
1. This research is conducted as part of my PhD research at King’s College London, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (project no. 155121). Figure 4.6 was developed with the help of my colleague Ginestra Ferraro, UX/UI developer at King’s Digital Lab. 2. Juxta Commons: http://juxtacommons.org and CollateX: http://collatex.net [Accessed 4 November 2016].
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3. See http://cosco.hiit.fi/Projects/STAM/[Accessed 16 February 162017]. 4. The Collation Editor is a tool produced by The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) at the University of Birmingham, as part of the Workspace for Collaborative Editing: http://vmrcre.org/ [Accessed 4 November 2016]. 5. Samuel Beckett. Digital Manuscript Project: http://www.beckettarchive.org/ and Digital Mishnah: Developing a Digital Edition of the Mishnah: http://www.digitalmishnah.org/ [Accessed 4 November 2016]. 6. Versioning Machine: http://v-machine.org/ [Accessed 2 December 2016]. 7. The TEI critical apparatus Toolbox: http://ciham-digital.huma-num.fr/teitoolbox/ [Accessed 28 June 2016]. 8. See the news update of 17 September 2014 at http://www.beckettarchive.org/news.jsp [Accessed 4 November 2016]. 9. The edition is available on the portal e-rara, a collection of digitized printed book from Swiss universities: http://www.e-rara.ch/gep_g/content/titleinfo/976587 [Accessed 22 February 2017]. 10. See Pithou’s apparatus: http://www.e-rara.ch/gep_g/content/pageview/1099004 [Accessed 23 February 2017]. 11. https://jupyter.org/ [Accessed 8 November 2016]. 12. For more information about Jupyter’s widget, see the documentation: https:// ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/Widget%20Basics.html [Accessed 14 December 2016]. 13. See CollateX documentation: http://collatex.net/doc/#input [Accessed 4 November 2016]. 14. Additional support to visualize transpositions in a table format will be added in the future, according to Collatex’s documentation: https://collatex.net/doc/#json-output [Accessed 5 March 2017]. 15. Transposition detection is a difficult problem for collation algorithms (Dekker et al. 2015, 5). 16. Stemmaweb makes it possible to visualize collation tables where readings are highlighted in green or red. A green highlight means that the reading is consistent with a given stemma hypothesis. A red highlight means that the reading is not consistent with that same stemma hypothesis. In a similar way, the collation table highlights readings that are consistent or not with a “text hypothesis”, the text that was selected as a base text.
ABSTRACTS
How can the results of automated collation facilitate the analysis of witnesses’ relationships? This article introduces the tool PyCoviz, designed to process a collation obtained with CollateX, focusing on the scholarly need to detect shared errors and unique errors. The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus serves as a case study to show how PyCoviz allows to reproduce an editor’s conclusions on the manuscript tradition. While analyzing the collation of Calpurnius’ text, this article discusses the difficulty of comparing orthographic differences, and how PyCoviz could be improved to deal with incomplete witnesses, or to visualized editorial uncertainty.
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INDEX
Keywords: variants, visualization, textual criticism, scholarly editing, philology, transmission history, automated collation
AUTHOR
ELISA NURY
Elisa Nury is a postdoctoral researcher in the Classics department at the University of Geneva. After studying Latin and Computer Science for the Humanities at the University of Lausanne, she completed a PhD in Digital Humanities at King's College London under the supervision of Elena Pierazzo. Her thesis, "Digital Editions and Automated Collation: from Theory to Practice", focuses on the application of automated collation tools to the process of scholarly editing.
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Prolegomena to the New Edition of Francesco da Buti’s Commentary on Dante’s Commedia. Purgatorio
Claudia Tardelli
"Gegen die Kontamination ist kein Kraut Gewaschen" (Maas 1957, 34)
1 Soon after Dante’s death in 1321, the popularity of the Commedia was already so extraordinary in its kind that it generated a need for an exegesis of the poem similar to that which had previously been reserved for Classical authors.1 The relevance of Dante’s early exegesis to both Dantists and, more generally, scholars of the medieval commentary tradition is not in doubt. Nevertheless, whilst these commentaries contain relevant information, they must be subject to careful interpretation because the textual tradition of each commentary has not always been studied as deeply as it should be and there are problems with the editions, mostly from the nineteenth century, that scholars have to rely on. Over the last two decades, however, enormous effort has been put in resolving this issue and most of the early Dante commentaries can now be read in modern and accurate editions.
2 The main objective of my new edition of Francesco da Buti’s commentary on Dante’s Commedia (1385–96), as of all the other Dante commentaries recently published, is to provide a reliable and accurate text, expurgated of errors, equipped with an apparatus which critically justifies the editor’s textual choices, and furnished with an apparatus fontium.2
3 This article is thus a preparatory study to the new critical edition, which will soon be published by Salerno Editrice (Rome) as part of the series ‘Edizione Nazionale dei Commenti danteschi’ in several volumes. The main aim is to investigate the manuscript tradition of the Purgatorio’s section of Francesco da Buti’s commentary. Since Buti’s commentary on the Commedia is a particularly long text (over one million words) it has seemed appropriate to offer separate preparatory studies for each canticle.3 After a brief introduction on Buti himself and on the genesis and fortune of his Dante
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commentary, I intend to discuss in these Prolegomena the relationships between the extant manuscript tradition of the Purgatorio section. In doing so, I will show that the constitutio textus cannot be arrived at in a mechanical way, owing to the numerous contaminations and interpolations. I will thus offer some general methodological reflections on how to critically edit a long prose text whose MSS tradition is contaminated. As a result of this discussion, I will argue that the most appropriate way to approach the making of the edition is to base its text on a single authoritative manuscript (i.c. MS N).
Introduction
4 Francesco da Buti (1324?–1406),4 born in Pisa, started his career as a Magister at the Studio pisano (the University of Pisa) in 1351 and became a notary in 1352. Twenty years later, he was appointed to the Chair of Latin by Pietro Gambacorta, the Governor of Pisa, at the Studio where he taught classical Latin literature for nearly the rest of his life.5 His scholarly production includes an Accessus to Terence’s comedies and commentaries on Horace’s Ars Poetica, on Persius’ Saturae, as well as on Alexander of Villedieu’s Doctrinale. Furthermore, between 1355 and 1378, he composed and published the Regule grammaticales, also called the Regule pisane or Notabilia pisana, “the most influential secondary school-level treatise of the fourteenth century” (Black 2013, 262). From 1349 onwards, Francesco took on numerous institutional and civic offices in the Pisan government. In 1365 he became Notary of the Seniors, and in 1369 Chancellor of the Seniors, the secretary and chancellor of the city government. As well as being appointed to the Chair of Latin, he was nominated to several other important offices, among others a second mandate as Chancellor of the Seniors and Official Ambassador to Florence (1397) and to Venice (1398).
5 In 1385 Buti was commissioned to give a series of public lectures in the Pisan Studium on Dante’s Commedia.6 The lectures were intended to confer prestige on the Studio, on Signore Pietro Gambacorta, and on the city of Pisa as a whole. They mark a vital moment both in the Pisan cult of Dante and in the history of the poem’s critical reception, particularly as regards Pisa’s longstanding rivalry with Florence, where no new lectures on Dante had been scheduled since Giovanni Boccaccio’s unfinished public reading (October 1373–January 1374). Their publication, sponsored by the Gambacorta family, was of some note, as is attested by the high quality of MS B, exquisitely illuminated, whose text was penned by the family’s chaplain, “Iohannes quondam Wilhelmi de Berlandia” (f. 92v).
6 Francesco da Buti produced two different versions of his Dante commentary (Franceschini 1995, 1998a and 1998b; Tardelli 2010, 20–23; Tardelli 2014, 101 and 2018a, 144–45). The first was completed in June 1394. This version of the text is the basis of the nineteenth century standard edition upon which scholars currently rely.7 However, as early as November 1394 Buti started revising the commentary on the Inferno and Paradiso making modifications and corrections, integrating new materials, and adding more citations from ancient authorities. This resulted in the completion of a new version of the commentary, finally released on 22 December 1396 (Franceschini 1998a, 219, and 1998b, 219–21 and n31). Whereas the commentary on Purgatorio seems to have been left untouched, both the Inferno and Paradiso present numerous textual changes, the latter being the most densely reworked part (Tardelli 2018a). Regretfully, this
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version of the commentary, representing the author’s latest intention, has so far only been accessible in manuscript form as it has never been published before. In order to redress this lacuna, the new edition of Buti’s commentary, which I am currently revising for publication, takes into account the author’s revisional process by offering the text completed in 1396; a provisional version of the text is already available in Tardelli 2010–11 (Inferno commentary) and Tardelli 2015 ( Purgatorio and Paradiso commentaries).
Transmission and Fortune of Buti’s Commento
7 The commento’s text is preserved in twenty-eight manuscripts, all of which have been dated between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of these only three contain the commentary in their entirety, whereas the others transmit the glosses on one cantica only (of either Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso), or, as in MS L, on two (Purgatorio and Paradiso). This is mainly due to the length of the text, which suggests that more than one copyist was commissioned to undertake its preparation.8 Furthermore, the three commentaries met with different degrees of success: not counting the manuscripts containing the complete commenta, the Purgatorio commentary exists in only six copies, whereas those on the Inferno and Paradiso are transmitted in respectively eleven and nine manuscripts.
8 The manuscript tradition indicates that between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries the commentary was well received in the whole of Tuscany. For instance, prestigious copies, exquisitely illuminated, were produced within the Pisa-Lucca area, such as the three MSS containing the commentary as a whole: MS B, commissioned by the Gambacorta family, was penned, up to Purgatorio 11, by their own chaplain, Johannes of Berlandia, in early 1390s; MS M, written in Lucchese vernacular, was owned by the Guinigi family from Lucca; and finally MS N, particularly important not only for being entirely written in Pisan vernacular, but also for transmitting the revised version of the commentary released in 1396. Across the region, many famous figures, such as Cione da Ravi of Maremma, owned a copy of the commento; intellectuals and members of the Florentine Academy, such as Vincenzo Borghini and Piero del Nero; Crusca Academy members, such as Pietro Segni “l’Agghiacciato” and Gianbattista Deti “il Sollo”, Antonio de’ Medici and members of the de’ Bardi family; Dante scholars such as Filippo Villani, lector in Florence, Bartolomeo Nerucci da San Gimignano, lecturer in Prato (Franceschini 1995, 100; 2013, 73–75). Moreover, the interest in Buti’s commento within religious circles is confirmed by fra Bartolomeo da Colle, one of the most famous preachers of the fourteenth century, who decided to include Buti’s glosses in his own copies of the Commedia (Franceschini 2013, 83–88). Interestingly, the MSS tradition is also composed of several copies whose features point to their having belonged to notarial and mercantile circles rather than professional ones (Pomaro 2003, 317–19). This shows that curiosity in Buti’s commentary was broad and not just limited to intellectual, political, and religious circles.
9 Nevertheless, Buti’s commento had little influence outside Tuscany; the vernaculars used in the MSS are all from the Tuscany region, which suggests its reach elsewhere was limited.9 Florence was the most receptive to Francesco’s work. The commentary met with very early success within the erudite circle of Santa Croce, where, as early as
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1394, one of the first copies of the Inferno commentary was completed in a manuscript penned by a particularly intelligent and active scriba (MS Città del Vaticano, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 1728). The commentary’s popularity in the Florence area is also confirmed by the influence of Francesco’s commentary on Filippo Villani’s work (Bellomo 2004, 387). The texts preserved in MSS Florence, Bibl. Medicea Laurenziana, Plutei 42.14, 42.15 (L2) and 42.16, and edited by Bartolomeo Nerucci da San Gimignano between 1431 and 1434, confirm the success it enjoyed particularly among students of grammar during the first half of the fifteenth century. Among humanists, Francesco’s chiose were used extensively by Cristoforo Landino while writing his Comento, which was first published in Florence in 1481 by Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna, as Barbi’s research showed in 1890 (1975, 146–79) and, more recently, that of Procaccioli (1989, 143–254), and Gilson (2005, 194–98; 213–28).
10 During the fifteenth century, Francesco da Buti was thus one of the best-known and most highly regarded Dante commentators, especially in the Florence area. However, despite these successes Buti’s commentary was gradually supplanted by Landino’s Comento and, although it was copied during the following centuries within erudite circles (Franceschini 2011a, 204), it was not printed in its entirety until the mid- nineteenth century, when it was edited by Crescentino Giannini (1858–62) and published in Pisa by the Nistri brothers. This is still the current standard edition.
11 Giannini’s edition is based on MSS Riccardiani 1006, 1007 (R2) and 1008, since the editor believed them to be “i codici più reputati esistenti nelle publiche Biblioteche di Firenze” (“the most authoritative manuscripts available in Florence public libraries”) (Giannini 1858–62, 1: viii). These manuscripts were chosen based on the fact that they had been considered written in good Florentine by members of the Crusca Academy (Giannini 1858–62, 1: viii). Established in Florence in 1583, the Academy’s main aim was to preserve the beauty of the Florentine vernacular that was modelled upon the authors of the Trecento. Giannini’s MSS choice effectively highlights one of the main problems regarding his text: its language; for the editor believed it was preferable to base his edition upon Florentine MSS rather than Pisan. In particular, Giannini’s text, for the most part, presents the phono-morphological and lexical characteristics of the Florentine vernacular rather than of Pisan, and thus departs from the author’s original language. Moreover, as briefly mentioned, the editor made Buti’s first version of the text available to the readers, i.e. the one released in 1394, rather than the last, completed in 1396.
The Manuscript Tradition of Buti’s Commentary on Purgatorio
12 The extant manuscript tradition of Buti’s commentary is not the richest among Dante commentaries.10 However, Buti’s commento is one of, if not actually, the longest (over one million-words) of all commentaries, which constitutes a considerable problem for the scholarly editor. The situation is further complicated by the fact that especially prose commentaries were written without strict formal constraints, which allowed modification, rewriting, re-arrangement, and the addition of new material. This phenomenon reflects the concept of “mouvance” of medieval texts described by Zumthor in relation to medieval French poetry in which vernacular works could be indefinitely reworked by several authors and pass through a series of different “états
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du texte” (1972, 72). Not surprisingly, and in keeping with the results previously obtained for the Inferno (Tardelli 2014) and Paradiso (Tardelli 2018a), it has not been possible to group the Purgatorio manuscripts in Lachmannian terms or reconstruct the author’s original text on account of contaminations and interpolations. Additionally, any conventional attempt at arriving at a restitutio textus is further complicated by the likely presence of a “originale in movimento”, which makes a Lachmannian approach to Buti’s text anachronistic and, to some extent, counter-productive.11 Therefore, after a thorough investigation of the MSS tradition, I have decided to base the edition on a single authoritative manuscript, according to the fundamental methodological principle suggested by Luca Carlo Rossi for editions of Dante’s oldest commentaries: Un’edizione tradizionale è forse improponibile. […] La contemperanza di un buon manoscritto base, […], e di un uso non rigido dello stemma che si è riusciti a tracciare (quando è possibile disegnarlo) offrono, in via di massima, sufficienti garanzie per la costituzione di un testo che sia provvisto di un valore critico o, per lo meno, criticamente tollerabile. [A traditional Lachmannian edition is perhaps unfeasible […] Working with an authoritative base-text […], together with a stemma codicum (should the editor being able to trace one), may be sufficient to provide a text that has critical value or that is at least rather critically tolerable].
13 (Rossi 2001, 130–31)12
14 The new edition of the Purgatorio text will therefore be based on a single, most authoritative MS, namely MS N. This MS is written in the Pisan vernacular, which is the original language; it transmits the commenta on all three cantiche; and it preserves the second and revised version of the text (Tardelli 2010; 2014; 2018a). No systematic philological study has ever been undertaken of the extant MSS tradition. The following pages offer the results of my exploration and findings, together with a discussion of the most significant errors and variant readings. A traditional word-by-word collation was carried out for the Proemio and the first two canti, thereby allowing me comprehensively to assess the dynamics of at least two complete cantos. Loci selecti have subsequently been identified and compared in the extant manuscript tradition from Purgatorio 3 onwards.13
15 From this investigation, I was able to identify two groups of MSS: the first, which I term α, is composed of N, L2, MB’ and R4; the second, which I designate β, is composed of B, M, C,14 L, and R2. Nevertheless, it is very important to note that the grouping outlined above does not consistently occur on account of conflation and contamination, as already noted. Consequently, the data reported in the tables below are not representative of a systematic pattern in the relationship of the manuscript tradition, but only reflect a tendency. However, in the table of errors below I demonstrate that it is possible to postulate the α group (N, L2, MB’, R4) by considering the following common errors:15
α group β group
che le ginocchia cali, cioè che tt’inginocchi. Ecco 2.25– om.* l’angel di Dio, ecco che llie manifesta, piega le mani 36 […]
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3. prima pone come pervenne ad Roma† prima pone come pervenne al monte Intro. al monte
secondo la lictera, finge Dante che secondo la lictera, finge Dante che corresse 3.10– corresse Virgilio, et elli dirieto a llui Virgilio, et elli dirieto a llui come l’altre anime 21 come l’altre anime correano‡ corseno
3.118– nel pecto sommo del pecto§ al sommo del pecto 32
Ad che debbiamo sapere che chi è scomunicato dal papa, o da’ suoi Ad che debbiamo sapere che chi è scomunicato dal vicari, è fuori della congregatione de’ papa, o da’ suoi vicari, di magior scomunicatione 3.133– fedeli cristiani, sì che nulla oratione è fuori della congregatione de’ fedeli cristiani, sì 41 che si faccia per la Sancta Chiesa di che nulla oratione che si faccia per la Sancta magior scomunicatione et per li Chiesa et per li catolici. catolici.¶
et dopo lo terço dì, avuto santo Gregorio che questi era per questo et dopo 30 dì, avuto santo Gregorio che questi era peccato gravemente tormentato per per questo peccato gravemente tormentato per revelatione, comandò al proposto che revelatione, comandò al proposto del monastero 3.133– tre|| giorni facesse dire messe nel che 30 giorni facesse dire messe nel monesterio et 41 monesterio et celebrare lo divino celebrare lo divino sacramento per l’anima di sacramento per l’anima di questo questo monaco. Facto questo, et infine de’ 30 dì monaco. Facto questo, et infine de’ adparve il dicto monaco tre|| dì adparve il dicto monaco
la quale pillia et unisce ad sé la vegetativa et sensitiva, dando loro perfetione, la quale non arebbeno da sé. Et fa questa unione per sì facto modo ch’ella è cagione del loro operare et mai non si disfà questa unione, ma anco quando si parte 4.1–18 om. l’anima dal corpo, ne la porta seco benché non abbino più actività niuna, et viene l’anima humana dotata de le infrascripte tre dote, le quali sono più active quando è separata dal corpo che quando è coniunta. Viene addunqua
16 The last case (4.1–18) is representative of the phenomenon of conflation. The part of the text that the α group omits here is in reality also transmitted in N, but in the lower margin, which shows that the copyist was working from two exemplars at the same time.
17 Furthermore, it can now be assessed that L2, MB’ and R4 are not direct copies of N, since N includes unique errors. It is thus more plausible that these four manuscripts derive from a common (and lost) intermediate source. The α group is also characterised by its many homeoteleuta and palaeographical errors, generally considered as polygenetic errors; these are errors that several copyists could have made
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independently from one another and they are therefore not useful for the genealogical classification of the manuscripts (Stussi 2001, 100–04; Trovato 2014, 55). However, the persuasive possibility of considering certain omissions as monogenetic rather than polygenetic errors is explored by Zaccarello (2012, 109–35; see also Reeve 2011, 55–103) who suggests that in some cases these errors ought to be considered ancillary evidence of relationship between MSS, especially when such errors can be systematically documented in all the MSS that are grouped together. The data gathered so far would suggest that N, L2, R4 and MB’ all originate from a common ancestor. However, some other findings would indicate that L2, R4 and MB’ actually derive from a collateral of N, at least as far as the later part of the copying process was concerned, i.e. from Purgatorio 20 onwards. In fact, another problem that arises when dealing with long prose texts is the possibility that scribes used an exemplar up to a certain point (i.e. until it was available) and then worked from a different one. As a result, the resultant version is a “hybrid text” whose relationship to its models is difficult, if not impossible, to establish. The following example usefully illustrate this kind of circumstance:
N (= β) L2= R4, MB’
Et intorno ad ciò è da sapere che, 20.85– essendo papa Bonifatio VIII natio Et per informatione di questo dobbiamo sapere che 96 d’Alagna, ‹nel› 1301 nel papato essendo papa Bonifatio nel papato […] […]
Et fu rubata la camera del papa dalla gente dell’arme et in Alagna et in Roma. Et dicesi che in quelli tre dì non Et in Alagna et in Roma prese altro cibo che uova fresche scaldate in su uno rubbonno li predicti la camera tésto di bruna ch’elli portava alla sedia. Et chi dice che del papa, per la qual cosa poi lo stette quelli tre dì et tre nocti assediato dalla dicta dicto papa visse poi 4 dì dipo’ la gente pure nella camera sua et fu liberato perché l’altra presura sua in Alagna, et da sua parte che non era nel tractato di quelli d’Alagna si levò antica infermità di fianco, strecto dipo li tre dì et cacciò fuora l’altra parte e lli Franceschi più fortemente che l’altre volte, et quelli della Colonna. Et liberato se ne venne papa forse per la malagevilessa che Bonifatio ad Roma. Et stato 4 (R4 MB’: quaranta) dì dipo’ sostenne in quelli tre dì et tre lo dicto stringimento si morì strecto dalla passione del nocti che fu ditenuto ch’era di fianco che aveva, ma forse per lo disagio che aveva verno, finitte la vita sua in Roma sostenuto quando fu sostenuto (assediato et sostenuto ne la camera sua MB’) o per malinconia più stretto che l’altre volte ne morì
Moreover, my findings indicate the necessity to postulate the α’ subgroup, composed of N and R4, which appears be contaminated at times with L2, and at other times with MB’, as the following mutual errors show:
α’ (N + R4) L2, MB’ (= β)
1.7–12 dell’amor/dall’amor dalla morte
1.85–89 come lo giunco in terra come lo giunco è fondato§§ in terra
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α’ + MB’ L2 (= β)
3.103– con Karlo, fratello del re Lodovico di Francia duca con Karlo conte di Provença 17 d’Angiò et conte di Provença
3.103– lo sconfisse a campo ove fu ferito et lo sconfisse a Ceparo l’ultimo dì di ferraio nel 1265, 17 morto lo re Manfredi ove fu ferito et morto lo re Manfredi
As for the rest of the manuscripts, in the table below, I demonstrate that it is possible to postulate the β group (B, M, C, L, R2) by considering the following common errors:16
N β group
1.28– Li raggi delle quattro luci sancte, cioè di quelle quattro stelle che significavano significano 39 le quattro virtù cardinali¶¶ le
Dunqua venimmo inansi ad voi un poco, presso alla levata del sole, per altra via, 2.52– perché venimmo per lo ’nferno et dal centro del Lucifero in su per lo luogo venneno‡‡ 66 obscuro et alto, et voi siete venuti per lo mare
These errors, albeit borderline in palaeographical terms, are considered significant in hypothesizing the β group (Zaccarello 2012, 109–35). In one case, the error alters the verbal tense (imperfect/ present), and it also produces a lacuna of the numeral/word “quattro”; in the other, the error alters the verbal person (first/ third plural), making it difficult to believe that the two copyists had produced both errors independently of one another, that is to say, that the two errors are polygenetical. Alongside these mutual errors, it is important to note that the β family always shares the same adiaphorous variants.
18 Furthermore, I was able to trace a few innovations in both L and R2, all limited to Purgatorio 2–4:17
N L, R2
quine, ma tucti si tornano al luogo suo, infine che ànno compiuto la sua penitentia della negligentia dell’ aspectare, et chi avesse peccato in tucte le 6 specie, dicte di sopra, in ogni luogo de’ dicti 6 luoghi sta tanto, che sia purgato quel grado di negligensia. Et questo si Et è da notare che l’autore finge dé intendere secondo la fictione dell’autore, et che tucti possano andare infine al 2.Intro. allegoricamente si dé intendere di quelli del mondo, purgatorio sì che a niuno è che tanto di tempo perdeno, quanto stanno negligenti vietato andare infine quine** ad tornare ad la penitensia, et li scomunicati per ogni uno, 30 imperò che perdono, mentre che stanno scomunicati, lo merito della santa chiesa che è valevile per virtù del sangue di Cristo venduto 30 denari, che no ne partecipano mentre che stanno scomunicati
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Uscìa di Gange, questo Gange è uno fiume ch’è nel nostro oriente, grandissimo fiume, et dice sancto Ysidoro che la Teologia lo chiama foce orientale, come Ibero che è ne la Spagnia, fiume 2.1–9 Geon Physon, et dice ch’esce del che corre inverso lo nostro occidente, chiamano foce paradiso delitiarum et entra in occidentale mare correndo verso l’oriente, et però lo chiamano li autori foce orientale††
corporale, se non nel volto. Li angiuli quanto ad la verità non ànno alcuna forma corporale imperò che sono spirito, ma dipingonsi col volto umano, ad et di socto a poco a poco un altro, dimostrare che ànno volontà libera, ma ora è biancho, a llui n’uscìo, et questo confermata in gratia: et con l’ali, ad significare la loro 2.10–24 era la stola biancha co·lla quale si leggeressa che subitamente possano essere dove dipingono li angeli sì che non si si vuolliano: et sono due bianche, ad significare la pare niuna forma corporale memoria et lo intellecto puro che ànno all’amore di Dio et del Cristo, et la stola bianca, ad significare che in loro è tucta nectessa da ogni peccato
Ecco l’angel di Dio, ecco che llie reverentia duo sono li acti della riverentia che si rende manifesta›, piega le mani, cioè ad Dio et ai santi, cioè lo inginocchiare et adiungere le 2.25–36 chinale giù addoppiate a farli mani, che significano rimentimento della affetione et reverentia dell’opere ad colui ad cui lo fano
2.106– a l’amoroso canto, cioè al canto che amore o vero che era sì piacente che ogni uno facea di 17 tractava d’amore sé inamorare
impaccia il raggio del superiore cielo lo ’nferiore, sì che non passi giuso infino alla terra, sì come si vede 3.22–33 impaccia raggio visuale che lli raggi delle stelle fixe et delle pianete passano giuso et fanno l’operatione loro. Et anco si può intendere del raggio visuale
opere. Lo ’ntrare la penitentia à le suoe malagevilesse, com’è stato dicto di sopra, ma lo cominciare ad 4.31–39 opere montare n’à più imperò che dice santo Agustino: “ Angusta via est, que ducit ad vitam, et tamen per eam, nisi dilatato corde, non curritur”
antartico. Dante si meraviglava che ’l sole entrava tra lui et la parte nostra septentrionale, et non imaginava che elli era nell’altro hemisperio di là da la torrida 4.58–76 antartico çona verso l’antartico, sì che la via del sole era tra lui et lo nostro polo artico, et però finge che Virgilio gliel dichiara, dicendo
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ragione, sì che per questo dà ad intendere così la ragione, che mi fa advedere di quello che io mi maraviglava, è questa: che ’l sole tanto va di là da 4.76–87 ragione l’Equatore verso septentrione, quanto va di là da l’Equatore verso l’antartico. Poi esce di questa materia, dicendo
19 Having shown the numerous contaminations and interpolations present in the extant manuscript tradition of the Purgatorio it is clear that the constitutio textus cannot be arrived at in a mechanical way. In other words, it is not possible to consistently group the MSS in a Lachmannian way nor to trace a reliable stemma codicum. It is thus appropriate to base the edition on a single authoritative manuscript. The new edition, based on MS N, will hence offer a text which, for the first time, is consistent and uniform in its language as well as in its “lezione”. Errors and vagaries of transmission will be amended through the comparison with the rest of the extant manuscript tradition whose significant variants are noted in the apparatus. Moreover, the edition will provide an apparatus fontium filling a longstanding gap in our knowledge of Buti’s intellectual background, his scholarly resources, and his modus operandi.18 The commentator drew on classical, Medieval Latin and patristic authors, as well as on the contemporary exegetical tradition on Dante’s Commedia. In order to better understand the ways in which Buti utilised his sources, it is important to identify as many of these as possible. In fact, one feature of the commentary that continues to require further investigation concerns the relationship between Buti’s commentary and the preceding and contemporary exegetical tradition on Dante’s Commedia as well as his relationship to classical, Medieval Latin and patristic sources. If Dante is still regarded as one of the greatest authors of the Western canon, it is in part because he had been perceived and treated as an Auctoritas by his very earliest exegetes. Building on the apparatus fontium of my new edition, scholars will soon be able to assess this vital aspect of the commentary, thereby allowing them to evaluate Buti’s work with particular regard to the historical and cultural context in which it was composed.
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List of Manuscripts
20 NB: The regesto of Buti’s MSS was first published in Franceschini 1995, 103–04. An up-to- date description of the Inferno MSS (+ B, N, and M) can be found in Tardelli 2014, 83–91; and of the Paradiso MSS (2nd redaction) in Tardelli 2018a, 137–42.
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Volpi, Mirko, ed. 2009. Iacomo della Lana, Commento alla ‘Commedia’, con la collaborazione di Arianna Terzi. 4 vols. Roma: Salerno Editrice.
Zaccarello, Michelangelo. 2012. Alcune questioni di metodo nella critica dei testi volgari. Verona: Fiorini.
Zumthor, Paul. 1972. “Le poète et le texte”. In Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Seuil, pp. 64–106.
NOTES
1. On the early commentary tradition, see Dionisotti 1965, Mazzoni 1965, Sandkühler 1967, Jenaro-MacLennan 1974, Vallone 1981, Minnis and Scott 1988, pp. 440–58; Hollander 1994, Parker 1997, Barański 2001, Bellomo 2004, Gilson 2005, Franceschini 2008, Malato and Mazzucchi 2011, and Nasti and Rossignoli 2013. 2. The number of editions that has appeared in the last twenty or so years is impressive. See, for instance, Bellomo 1989; Rossi 1990 and 1998; Pisoni and Bellomo 1998; Chiamenti 2002. See also the edition of the Ottimo (Di Fonzo 2008) whose flaws have been highlighted by Perna 2009. A useful work of reference on the Trecento Dante commentators is Bellomo 2004. For editions within the “Edizione Nazionale” project, see Procaccioli 2001; Mazzucchi 2002; Marzo 2003; Mazzucchi 2004; Abardo 2005; Marcci 2004; Pirovano 2006; Corrado 2007; Volpi 2009; Azzetta 2012; Rinaldi 2013; Boccardo et al. 2018. For information regarding the project itself, see Malato et al. 2008, 32–46. For a complete presentation of the entire manuscript tradition of Dante’s commentators, see Malato and Mazzucchi 2011. 3. For the Inferno section, see Tardelli 2014, for the Paradiso, see Tardelli 2018a. 4. The bibliography on Francesco da Buti is vast. See, at least, Mazzoni 1971, Alessio 1981, Banti 1995, Varanini 1995, Tolaini 2002, Costamagna 2003, Basile 2005. Additionally, see the many studies by Franceschini, which have contributed to a better understanding of Buti’s biography and his historical context, of the commentary’s genesis and of its structure, its linguistic concerns and its ideological dimension, and paved the way to the making of a new modern edition. 5. One of the first initiatives Pietro Gambacorta took when he became overlord of Pisa was to relaunch the University. In December 1370, a committee of Sapientes Viri recommended the appointment of the jurists Pietro del Lante and Piero degli Albizi, the medical doctor Andrea Gittalebraccia and Francesco da Buti as “doctor gramatice” (Archivio di Stato Pisano = ASP,
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Comune, divisione A, reg. 38, f. 290). See Franceschini, 2011a, 194. For more general information on Gambacorta, see Silva 1911 and Tangheroni 2002. 6. Thanks to a document discovered by Pietro Silva (ASP, Comune, divisione A, reg. 221, f. 76) we know that Buti’s annual salary increased significantly from 55 lire in 1355 to 308 in 1385. Scholars have claimed that this raise was linked to his public lectures on Dante (Silva 1918, 492; Franceschini 2011a, 195). 7. Giannini, Crescentino, ed. 1858–62, see below. 8. For instance, MSS Riccardiani 1006, 1007 (R2) and 1008 were edited as part of the same editorial project, as well as MSS Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense AF XI 31 and 32 (MB’), together with Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conv. Soppr. J III 4 (Paradiso). MSS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plutei 42.14 (Inferno), 42.15 (L2), 42.16 (Paradiso), written by Bartolomeo Nerucci da San Gimignano for his lectura Dantis in Prato, also belong to the same editorial project (Bellomo 2004, 250; Franceschini 2011a, 203). On Nerucci as reader of Dante, see Franceschini 2011b and 2013, 73–75. 9. MS Città del Vaticano, Bibl. Apostolica Vaticana, Rossiano 1069, (Inferno), is the only text demonstrating linguistic traits from the North of Italy. 10. The manuscript tradition of Iacomo della Lana’s Comento, for instance, is made up of over one hundred copies (Volpi 2008, 269–72). 11. On the “tradizione orizzontale” as opposed to the vertical line of descent, see Pasquali 1988, 140–41; on Lachmann’s limitations see Reynolds and Wilson 1974, 225–27. 12. The application of the same principles has been supported by Bellomo 2001, 26. 13. The same criteria were applied to the new edition of the Inferno (Tardelli 2010–11) and Paradiso (Tardelli 2015). Loci selecti are as follows: 3.Intro; 3.1–9; 3.10–21; 3.22–33; 3.34–45; 3.46–60; 3.61–72; 3.79–93; 3.103–17; 3.118–32; 3.133–41; 4.1–18; 4.31–39; 4.58–76; 4.76–87; 20.85–96; 21.103– 11; 21.103–11; 22.64–93; 25.31–60; 28.103–20; 29.82–96. 14. MS C, in relation to canti 1–4, presents numerous variae lectiones in the margins. A detailed study as well as a separate edition of these unpublished lectiones, which I believe are not authorial, is in progress. 15. Only some of the most significant common errors are noted in the table. *. Both R4 and MB’ have “eccho l’angiel di Dio”. †. Expunged in L2. ‡. The relevant folio is missing in R4. §. Both L2 and MB’ try to mend to error: L2 expunged the first “pecto”, MB’ only transmits “nel pecto”. ¶. L2 adds “di magior scomunicatione” in the upper margin but it also transmits it after “Sancta Chiesa”. |. | L2 amends “tre” in “trenta”. §. § L2 innovates: “nasce”. 16. However, as already noted, B is the only MS to carry an abbreviated version of the commento on Purgatorio from canto 11 onwards. ¶. ¶ MS MB’ also transmits “significano le”. ‡. ‡ L omits the verb. 17. I have also noted a saut du même au même which L and R2 have in common (presa/prese), which is also shared by the α group (3.103–17) “per questa Gostança venne lo regno di Sicilia allo imperadore Arrigo prima, imperò ch’elli, ‹presa la dicta Gostansa per donna cavata del monesterio di Palermo ove ella era facta monaca et consecrata, prese› lo regno e Tancredi”. The overall data suggest that the error has originated independently in the α group and in the L + R2 subgroup. *. * MS C transmits the same reading of N but with the integration in the left margin.
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†. † This particular variant could also be interpreted as a saut du même au même, which happens when the same word (in this case foce) occurs more than once on the page, and the scribe, after writing it for the first time, brings his eye back to the page at the second occurrence, and so fails to copy the text in between. In this case the variant would not be an innovation transmitted in both R2 and L, but an error propagated in the rest of the tradition. 18. The only comprehensive critical study so far of Buti’s sources is Sassetto 1993 whose methodological limitations have been effectively highlighted by Rossi 1993. On Buti’s sources, see Tardelli 2013a, 2013b, 2017, 2018b.
ABSTRACTS
In this article I discuss the relationships between the extant manuscript tradition of Francesco da Buti’s commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio. My argument shows that the constitutio textus cannot be arrived at in a mechanical way, owing to the numerous contaminations and interpolations. I thus offer some general methodological reflections on how to critically edit a long prose text whose MSS tradition is densely contaminated. With this in mind I make the case that the most appropriate way to approach the making of the edition is to base the text on a single authoritative manuscript.
INDEX
Keywords: Francesco da Buti, Dante Commentary, Contamination, Interpolation, Mouvance, Scholarly Editing, Variants.
AUTHOR
CLAUDIA TARDELLI
Claudia Tardelli (PhD, Cambridge, 2015) is Teaching Fellow in Italian Studies at the University of Reading. With Ambrogio Camozzi, she has recently edited the oldest ‘Florentine’ version of the life of Alexander the Great (c. 1350) in Vita di Alessandro Magno con figure secondo il manoscritto Cracovia, Biblioteca Jagellonica, Ital. Quart. 33 (olim Firenze, Bibl. Ricc. 1222) (Brepols, 2018). Her most recent publications also include ‘Dante’s la bella figlia as Circe: a Boethian Echo in Buti’s Unpublished Gloss on Paradiso XXVII, 137’, Italian Studies, 73, 1, 2018, and ‘Reading Aristotle through Dante: the Case of Meteorologica in Francesco da Buti’s Commento’, Medium Aevum, 86, 2, 2017.
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Textual Editing, Shakespeare’s Metre and the Reader on the Clapham Omnibus
Peter Groves
1 One of the roles of an editor of a widely-read early modern author like Shakespeare is to mediate between the inherent difficulties of the language and the intelligent but non-scholarly reader. Among the difficulties such a reader faces is the metre — and the metre of the plays, written for professional actors working under the poet’s guidance, is considerably more complex than that of his poems, employing whole categories of variation that are absent from his non-dramatic verse. Yet it cannot be ignored: Shakespeare’s metre is an important signifying system for creating and reinforcing meanings in the theatre, and in the reader’s mind, full of what John Barton calls “stage- direction in shorthand” (1984, 25), coded instructions or suggestions for performance (see Groves 2013, passim). The editor’s task is not to prescribe certain readings, but to enable metrically unsophisticated readers to make appropriate choices in reading, by making visible the less obvious ways in which metre and prosody structure the rhythm of the lines; it is the purpose of this paper to explore the principles under which this might be done, and to suggest a relatively unobtrusive way of doing it.
2 Critics are rightly suspicious of attempts to reconstruct the intentions of dead (or living) authors, in part because of the necessary indeterminacy of linguistic meaning and its complex interactions with cultural contexts. Metre, however, represents a special case where authorial intentions (conscious or otherwise) are broadly recoverable, simply because it is such a narrow code: an interaction between a relatively simple set of rules and a highly determined suite of constraints (the prosodic phonology of English). Legitimate choices involving question of meaning occasionally arise, but these are matters to flag in a footnote. It is true that some readers, even when shown the range of possible authorial intentions generated by the code, may choose to disregard them and do their own thing instead; this is no reason, however, to withhold this information from those who wish to try the rhythms the poet seems to have intended.
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3 An obvious objection to this project is that we still have no scholarly consensus about many aspects of Shakespeare’s metre. But neither do we have such a consensus on some basic questions about the editing of his texts. Could, for example, Q1 Hamlet be a ‘memorial reconstruction’—that is, do such things even exist? But the fact that there is no consensus in key questions does not inhibit editors from producing new editions, nor should it: let a thousand flowers bloom, and let the intellectual market decide. All an editor can do, to put it another way, is to mount cogent arguments for his or her view (and try to maximize consensus where possible). Perhaps the broadest consensus about metre lies in the two propositions that (a) a prototypical pentameter consists of ten syllables, alternately unstressed and stressed, and (b) many lines deviate from this prototype. The notation I am proposing merely records objectively determined deviations from the prototype: the controversies lie in how such deviations should be interpreted.
4 A wide consensus about the metre could be achieved by using the familiar traditional Latin-derived system of scansion with its spondees and pyrrhics, but such a consensus would come at too great a price: metre is a systematic organization of prosodic phonology, but traditional scansion has a grossly inadequate understanding of prosodic phonology and no principled way of distinguishing metrical from unmetrical lines. If your taxonomy cannot tell rats from mice, it cannot constitute a descriptive account of either. Moreover, using classical terminology brings with it a subtler kind of baggage: the unconscious assumption that metrical form is (as in Latin) baked into the text of the verse, and that therefore “the verse-shape of a poem remains completely independent of its variable delivery” (Jakobson 367). This precept is perfectly well- founded for any language where the metre is encoded entirely at the level of syntax and of the phonological structure of syllables, such as classical Latin. If English metre is so encoded, then it too should be automatically communicated merely by speaking the verse-text as though it were prose. Yet anyone who has sat through amateur Shakespeare knows that this is not the case, and it certainly did not seem so to the earliest analysts of English metre, writing long before the hardening of traditional metrics into an orthodoxy (see Groves 1999). Though they show much fumbling and disagreement, they are united by two things: their interest in the question of well- formedness or metricality, and their tendency to see English metre as co-operatively produced in the act of reading: as something negotiated, that is, in performance (and by “performance” here I mean simply verbatim reading, out loud or subvocalized). For the Elizabethan theorists, metre is directly not a property of texts or verses as such but of appropriate utterances of verses, and the reader’s task is one not of passively registering metrical form but of actively reconstructing it through some form of performative prosodic intervention. Consider figures 6.1 and 6.2 below: Gascoigne objects to 6.1(b) not because it doesn’t happen to be a pentameter, but because it can’t be made into one: for him, metre is a sensible pattern of alternating prominences to be manifested in the utterance of the line, and the job of the poet is to contrive the verse so “you wreste no worde from his natural and vsuall sounde” so “that all the wordes [. . .] be so placed as the first sillable may sound short or be depressed, the second long or elevate, the third shorte, [. . .] etc.” (1575, 294, emphasis mine). Figure 6.1(b) thus violates our expectations not of metre but of language: if we are to reproduce the iambic pattern in uttering it we must stress the second syllable of understand, “which is contrarie to the naturall or vsual pronunciation” (295). In the same way, Daniel rejects 6.2(b) not because it doesn’t happen to sound like a heroic line, but because “you
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cannot make [it] fall into the right sound of a verse [. . .] unlesse you [. . .] misplace the accent” (1603, H3v; emphasis mine). These theorists locate unacceptability in the relation between the structure of the verse and its possible performances: almost any verse can be made metrical in performance, that is, but if the cost is too radical a degree of linguistic distortion (and literary verse is far less tolerant of such distortion than the demotic variety), the verse is not well made.
5 The main method of recording such deviations from the prototype is metrical pointing, or the provision of orthographic cues to metrical congruence, which is the fit between potential metrical structures and the prosodic form of the line. It is helpful, for example, to indicate in some way which vowels in a line do not “count” in the metrical shape. This is not because Shakespeare’s pentameter is rigidly decasyllabic: clearly it isn’t, in particular towards the end of his career (if it were, there would be much less of a problem). The point is rather that in order to grasp the metrical form — and thus the basic rhythm —of a line we need to be able to relate the string of actual syllables to the underlying structure of ten syllable-positions: to know when a position contains one, two or even zero syllables. This can be clarified through performance, out loud or in the head, but in order to perform — and thus to read — the line appropriately we need to understand its metrical congruence.
6 Yet just as in recent years many editors have failed to take the evidence of the metre into consideration in the actual process of editing (or have done so inconsistently or even incorrectly), some of the most recent editions have begun to discard even the rather basic metrical pointing that has traditionally been supplied to readers: the Arden third series editions, for example, no longer indicate in the text the syllabic status of preterite suffixes, that information being relegated to a footnote, where those who need it will (for that reason) feel no need to look for it. The neophyte who reads Romeo’s line “Hence ‘banished’ is banished from the world” (RJ 3.3.19) 1 in a non- pointed edition will not only hear it as prose — or, worse, as rhythmically unintelligible pentameter — but will miss the way the first, formal, expanded use of the word (‘ba-ni- shĕd’), echoing Friar Laurence’s use of it four lines earlier, holds it up, as it were, in scare-quotes, as a rebuke to the perceived glibness of the Friar.
7 The editorial justification for abandoning this helpful practice in Arden 3 (and Arden editions are models that others are likely to follow) is that “[u]nfamiliar typographic conventions” present “obstacles to the reader” (Thompson and Taylor 2006, xv). But all conventions, however useful, are necessarily unfamiliar when first encountered: this doesn’t seem like a sensible reason to discard them. In any case, a reader who is tackling Shakespeare in a scholarly edition is tackling real obstacles, and is unlikely to be deterred by the occasional diacritic. However, Bate and Rasmussen’s recent RSC edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works (2007) doesn’t even claim that excuse for ignoring the valuable convention, normal practice for well over two centuries, of indicating the structure of shared lines by indentation; since shared lines often indicate the quick uptake of cues and short lines the reverse, this information is important. The RSC editors, however, “have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it” (2007, 58) — an argument which, extrapolated as a general principle, would obviate much of the duty of an editor, dull or otherwise. It is, surely, one role of an editor to do certain helpful things that the original text didn’t.
8 Strangely, this retreat from metrical pointing has coincided with large advances, based in part upon a linguistic understanding of prosody, in our knowledge of how English
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prosodic systems work. To put it another way, deviation from the prototypical pentameter is now for the most part an objective, linguistically describable phenomenon, even though our personal knowledge of it as readers may be (as with other linguistic systems) largely tacit and thus unavailable to introspection. In what follows I will be using my own Base and Template scansion, a post-generative synthesis, which describes how the prosodic structure or “base” of a line may (or may not) be accommodated to one or more of a number of pre-existing metrical patterns, or “templates” (see Groves 1998 or 2013 for a full account). The prototypical pattern consists of five feet (a descriptive economy — one could equally speak of ten syllable- position), each composed of a weak or “offbeat” syllable-position (“w”) followed by a strong or “beat” position (“S”): transformation rules allow one to create new patterns by adding an extra offbeat at the end of a template (the so-called “feminine” ending) and by switching positions: either reversing the strong and weak positions within a foot or swapping them between adjacent feet, provided that in each case the switched pair is followed by an unswitched position (the Switch Limitation Rule). A reversal pushes a beat one position to the left, a swap one position to the right, producing templates such as “S-w w-S S-w w-S w-S” as in (expected beats italic, actual beats bold) “Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play”, Henry V 1.0.34) or “w-S w-S w-S w-W s-S-o” (as in “The ditty does remember my drown’d father” (Tempest 1.2.406). A number of mapping rules specify how prosodic bases — to simplify a little, sequences of lexically stressed (A, B) and unstressed (O) syllables and pragmatically accented (O) syllables — may and may not be mapped onto one of the fifty-six possible templates.2 Crucially, an unstressed syllable adjacent to a stressed or accented syllable within an intonational phrase is ‘dominated’ (a status symbolized by a lowercase “o”), which means that it cannot carry a beat. If (to simplify slightly) one can map a base onto a legitimate template without placing an o-syllable in an S-position, the line is metrical. If it can only be so mapped onto a template that violates the Switch Limitation Rule, the line is metrical but irregular.
9 This system can explain historical judgments of metrical congruence. To illustrate: as I mentioned earlier, contemporaries of Shakespeare drew attention to the fact that of the following similar pairs in figures 6.1 (Gascoyne, 1575) and 6.2 (Daniel, 1603) the first is metrically acceptable and the second not. In traditional metrics the only way to distinguish them has been the reader’s intuition, or what Daniel called a “iudiciall eare” (H3v), but a base-and-template scansion makes the difference explicit (the unmetrical mappings are bolded and underlined; switches that violate the Switch Limitation Rule are italicized):
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Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.2.
10 To put it another way, a weak beat (an unstressed syllable in S-position) needs to be protected by a “buffer” from domination by a neighbouring stress: a buffer is either an unstressed syllable (which absorbs the domination) or a major syntactic break (which blocks it). Thus by in 6.1(a) is buffered by ing and your.
11 Metrical congruence may be objectively determinable, but clarifying it may not always be easy: in a text like Shakespeare’s, with its complex history of transmission, there will be times when an editor is faced (as in other areas) with intractable material. Nevertheless, one should start from the principle that Shakespeare doesn’t, on the whole, write unmetrical lines, since this would defeat the purpose of using metre (though he does, very occasionally, write irregular ones — there are three, for example, in the first 1,000 lines of The Tempest). It is scarcely bardolatry (pace Whitworth 1991, 126) to grant Shakespeare, on the evidence, a degree of metrical skill, and to assume in the first instance that unmetrical lines or passages in the earliest texts represent not slips on his part (since these are readily rectified in the process of writing) but error or interference in transmission. As Stanley Wells has said, “[w]e should pay our poet the
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compliment of assuming that he cares for metrical values, and be willing to emend where the surviving text is demonstrably deficient” (1984, 50).
12 For this reason, editors should (ceteris paribus) choose a variant that is metrical over one that is not, and where there is only one witness they should prefer an emendation that renders an unmetrical line metrical if it can be achieved through changing only what Greg called “accidentals” — semantically indifferent variation in “punctuation, word-division and the like” (1950, 21). Modern editors are, it is true, less interventionist than their predecessors, more aware of the complex social and collaborative process behind the production of play-texts and so less likely to emend them in the name of restoring the author’s presumed intentions. If a passage is grammatical and makes sense, the modern editor will not, on the whole, try to improve it. But metre, like syntax, is a public code, and when an editor successfully re-segments a mislineated passage like F1 Macbeth TLN 1068-913 (3.1.79-90) into demonstrable pentameters, he or she is not attempting to recover some unverifiable authorial intention, but rather is aligning the text with the set of possible structures generated by that code, just as when editors unanimously choose Q2’s “When he the ambitious Norway combated,” (Hamlet 1.1.61) over F1’s ungrammatical “When th’ Ambitious Norwey combatted” (TLN 77). The procedure makes no claim, for example, to distinguish between authorial text and metrically competent collaboration or emendation.
13 So what sort of assistance should an editor give the neophyte? While the Arden 3 editions throw in the towel too early, it is true that for the beginner too much help can become an encumbrance, and (as with footnotes) one risks alienating more advanced readers by telling them what they already know. For this reason, the proposed editorial assistance is divided into two levels: basic (i.e. self-evident in its purpose) and advanced (requiring some instruction). Editors can choose their level depending on the kind of edition they are producing; electronic editions, of course, could hide or reveal on command different levels of assistance. The symbols, mainly super- or subscripted, are fairly unobtrusive, and readers who do not wish to learn what they mean can simply ignore them.
14 I want to begin with something that properly belongs to the advanced category of pointing, but which will be useful to mention here so that it may inform subsequent scansions. This is the marking of metrical structure, or phonologically obligatory switches; this is essential to metrical congruence but should be done unobtrusively. I propose a preceding “<” for phonologically obligatory reversals (superscripted to be less obtrusive), “>” for swaps, in each case immediately preceding the beat-bearing syllable; it will also be useful to identify the epic cesura — an extrametrical offbeat preceding a major syntactic break — with a “(”: Miranda confesses to Ferdinand “Nor have I seen / Variants, 14 | 2019 116 readers discover them for themselves, or relegate such information (where it makes a difference) to a footnote. 15 In terms of marking metrical structure, it will also be helpful to indicate some unstressed (weak) beats — but only those where there might otherwise be confusion — with a breve: “ 16 Returning to basic assistance, the simplest thing that can be done to clarify metrical congruence is to indicate in the text (rather than the notes) the unfamiliar lexical stress-patterns that characterize about 100 of Shakespeare’s words (see Groves 2013, 165-70, for a list); currently this is almost never done, so that a reader puzzled by the apparent movement of lines like “Care is no cure, but rather corrosive” (Henry VI, Part 1 3.3.3) or “To both their deaths shalt thou be accessary” (Richard III 1.2.191) has to hunt for a footnote and thus break the flow of reading. The metrically unsophisticated reader who isn’t puzzled by Elizabethan stressing (and so will not seek the footnote) has even more need of the unobtrusive assistance of a harmless diacritic or two (“ 17 More complex than stress is the problem of prosodic elasticity, the variable length of certain phonological words in speech due to the optional shedding of weak vowels.5 Vowels that are retained by the metre where they might have been contracted should be marked with a dieresis (ä, ë, etc.): “And, be assur’d, you’ll find a diffërence” (Henry V 2.4.134); “And is’t not pity, O my grievëd friends,” (King John 5.2.24). To the breve- marked vowels we should add the syllabic semivowels ř and ļ: Henry, for example, is trisyllabic in “Is Cade the son of Henřy the Fift,” (Henry VI, Part 2 4.8.34), and fire is disyllabic in “ 18 There are two kinds of vowel-contraction: excision and elision. An excised vowel disappears completely, as in the case of contracted preterites or aphetic forms, and its excision is marked by an apostrophe (banish’d, aggriev’d, ’gainst). An elided vowel, however, need not — and usually should not — completely disappear in phonetic terms, which is why elided vowels should remain in the text, but be superscripted. Thus contracted goest shouldn’t rhyme exactly with most, because the elided vowel retains a ghostly presence and contracted minister(s) in “May be a coward’s, whose ministers would prevail” (Antony and Cleopatra 3.13.23 ) should be pronounced somewhere Variants, 14 | 2019 117 between the noun minster and the fully trisyllabic expanded form in “How sweetly you do ministĕr to love” (Much Ado about Nothing 1.1.312). In any case an elided vowel (unlike an excised one) always retains a ghostly presence in the verse, due to our knowledge of the language, and these presences play an important part in keeping the prosody of the line lively.7 Some of the most important kinds of elasticity (from the perspective of editing) involve function words, which are frequently subject to aphetic contractions like ’gainst, ’twixt, ’s, ’m, ’d, and so on. Function-word contractions are typically excisions (’gainst, let’s, she’d, I’ve, Sarah’s [a fool], life’s), but where contraction brings two vowels together there is also the possibility of elision (usually, synaloepha): shehad, Ihave, Sarah is. 19 In the case of syncopation and syneresis both long and short forms should be indicated in editing; this may seem redundant, but redundancy is an advantage in communication systems, particularly to someone trying to determine metrical congruence on the fly. Take, for example, a line like “Pernicious Protector, dangerous Peer” (2H6 2.1.21) or “Young, valiant, wise, and (no doubt) right royal” (R3 1.2.244); such lines on a first reading will seem problematic to those familiar with iambic pentameter (they are both fluffed in the BBC adaptations of those plays). This is because we naturally read the initial Pernicious as Pernicious (“w-S w”), only to find that the following S falls (impossibly) on a dominated syllable, Pro-. Similarly, it is natural to begin “Young, valiant, wise,” (because of a sensible heuristic procedure that encourages us to map lexical stresses where possible to S-positions), and then find that we have painted ourselves into a corner, with a forbidden final reversal: “Young, valiant, wise, and (no >doubt) right 20 Where there are two elastic words in one line there may be two different paths to metrical congruity for the line as a whole: an editor cannot possibly note all these variations, and will need to make a choice of which to represent. Logically there is no need to be bound by copy-text here unless the difference between the two readings is immaterial; if, however, one contraction or expansion seems less outlandish to modern ears one might go with that, preferring (for example) “Can’st thou not ministĕr to a mind diseas’d” to “Can’st thou not minister tŏ a mind diseas’d” (Macbeth 5.3.40). If the choice is not indifferent, one might want to choose the more complex metrical variant, by a version of difficilior lectio: where F1 Laertes blandly remarks of the plan to murder Hamlet “And yet ’tis almost ’gainst my conscïence” (TLN 3769), Q2’s version reveals something of an interior struggle by putting a kind of hesitant emphasis on the word almost, through forcing a reversal and a slight necessary exaggeration of the buffering phonological-phrase break that precedes it: “And yet it ĭs 21 Whereas no editions currently indicate metrical switches, and the marking of stress- differences is usually confined to footnotes, marking of contractions (and some expansions) is still a feature of many modern editions, but it is inconsistent and incomplete: they generally mark expansion only in preterites, for example, they indicate some syncopations and synaloephas but no synereses, and they do not distinguish excision from elision. The rule I am suggesting, then, is that the choice between long and short forms should in general be determined by local metrical congruence rather than by the copy-text: even if Hamlet Q2 is our copy-text, we should Variants, 14 | 2019 118 prefer F1’s congruent he is and I’d in “That he is mad, ’tis true: ’Tis true ’tis pittie,” or “Hath there bene such a time, I’de fain know that,” (Hamlet 2.2.97, 153; TLN 1125, 1183) over Q2’s incongruent variants he’s and I would (which Evans 1974 prints). This is not to assume that the choice does not in some cases affect meaning, and that there are not at times subtle differences in register between the long and short forms. Archaic depalatalizations, in particular, seem to have had a rather formal air: Morocco’s “ Mislike me not for my complexïon” is clearly meant to suggest a grand, exotic presence (compare Portia’s dismissive “Let all of his complexion choose me so” (Merchant of Venice 2.1.1, 2.7.80). Nevertheless, metre aside, function-word pairs like it is vs. ’tis/it’s seem on the whole to be interchangeable: between Hamlet Q2 and F1, in five of the thirteen prose occurrences the two texts differ, which suggests that in terms of register they are equivalent. The most elevated speech in the play, “To be or not to be”, contains two instances of ’tis, and the highly formal Murder of Gonzago contains three. Moreover, we may assume that where there is a meaningful difference in register the poet will have already taken that into account, and will have arranged the metre of the line to accommodate the appropriate form. The quiet menace of the carefully articulated dangërous in Hamlet’s warning to Laertes — “Yet have I in me something dangërous” (5.1.262) — is presumably engineered by the poet: the metre here is providing a “stage-direction in shorthand”. 22 Whether or not they are marked in the copy-text with apostrophes, for consistency syncopations and synaloephas will need to be registered with superscript vowels; due editorial caution suggests that in the case of function-word contractions that might be either excisions or elisions, we should give them as excisions if so marked in the copy- text, or in another witness, and otherwise as elisions. 23 At times, the marking of contraction in modern editions is just plain wrong. This is because orthographic contractions constitute accidentals, and in modern editing practice are subject to Greg’s rule that “the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals” (1950, 21). Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this rule, so long as we can distinguish accurately between substantives and accidentals, although this distinction has become more problematic since Greg wrote — indeed, he began the process of problematization himself, while declining to take it further.8 But the orthographic registration of contractions and expansions, though generally accidental for “the author’s meaning” (21),9 is substantive for the metre: specifically, an orthographic contraction that eliminates a necessary buffer will (unhelpfully for the reader) represent a line as unmetrical. In figure 6.3, for example, the is a buffer, and to elide it (as Q2 — but not Q1 or F1 — does) is quite simply to make a mistake, a mistake that Shakespeare’s editors from Rowe to Jenkins found rather easy to obviate by following F1: Variants, 14 | 2019 119 Figure 6.3. 24 Modern editors, however, generally take Q2 as their copy-text, and a surprising number of them (including Evans) follow Greg’s rule here and perversely print the unmetrical th’ominous, even when they dutifully indicate the expanded status of couchëd . But the task of an editor is to remove error, not to preserve it: it is better there be no pointing at all in a line than that it preserve the erroneous pointing of a compositor. 25 The rule that the choice between long and short forms should be in general determined by local metrical congruence applies even where there are no actual variants. Since F1’s orthographical syncopation of Macbeth’s offerings in 6.4(a), for example, eliminates a necessary buffer and thus renders the line unmetrical, it was rightly ignored as an error by most editors from Alexander Pope to Jenkins (1982): Figure 6.4. 26 Nevertheless, many modern editors (including Muir, Evans, Brooke, Braunmuller and Miola) insist on returning to the unmetrical off’rings of 6.4(a), in tin-eared deference to Greg’s rule. None of these editors accepts F1’s “I dare do all that may become a man, / Who dares no more, is none.” (TLN 524-5); they all adopt Rowe’s substantive emendation of no to do, because 525 as it stands, though grammatical, makes no sense Variants, 14 | 2019 120 in its context. Why, then, print metrical nonsense when it can be repaired by changing a mere accidental? This is truly what Greg called “the tyranny of the copy-text” (1950, 36). 27 This example (Rowe’s dares do more) reminds us that despite their modern reputation for arbitrary high-handed emendation, those first editors and their conjectures have shaped much of what now constitutes a broad consensus on the text of Shakespeare. Pope’s offerings should further remind us that some of those early editors, Pope not the least, were men who had an ear for pentameter (even if the prosodic constraints they expected were narrower than the ones Shakespeare allowed himself), and that their conjectures in this matter deserve at least to be considered with an open mind. R. A. Foakes, the Arden 2 editor of Henry VIII, having complained that F1’s 6.5(a) is “rhythmically not very satisfactory” (1957, 116n) rejects “Pope’s addition of a comma after ‘can’ [as] needless, for the sense is good”. As Wells has observed, where metre is concerned “[i]t is characteristic of modern practice that editors recognize the problem while shying away from the attempt to solve it” (1984, 53); Pope’s comma indicates a reading with an intonational phrase-break after can, functioning as a buffer against the domination of can to restore the metrical congruence Foakes realized was lacking:10 Figure 6.5. 28 As Greg once remarked, “where one reading is metrical and the other not [. . .] we have, I think, good and sufficient ground for judging” (1966, 287). Pope’s solution was reproduced by Theobald, Warburton, Johnson and Steevens among others, but has been lost to modern editions. 29 A more complex example of the metrical wisdom of the ancients is Hamlet TLN 3577-9 (5.2.73-5). This passage is unique to F1, where it is printed as three lines, only one of them a pentameter (non-pentameters are preceded by an asterisk): [A] Ham. *It will be short, The interim’s mine, and a mans life’s no more *Then to say one: but I am very sorry good Horatio, 30 Pope saw that one could up the count to two pentameters by splitting TLN 3579 (as in [B]), but it was the under-rated Thomas Hanmer (1744) who first noticed that the passage could be re-lineated as three pentameters by expanding interim’s (3578) to interim is (thus restoring a crucial buffer before is): [B] Variants, 14 | 2019 121 Pope (1725): The Interim’s mine, and a >man’s life’s no more *Than to say, one. But I am very sorry, good Hora(tio, [C] Hanmer (1744): It will be short. The intërim is mine, And a >man’s life’s no more than to >say, one. But I am very sorry, good Hora(tio, 31 Hanmer’s solution has been, since Steevens and Malone, the standard redaction of the lines (even Bate and Rasmussen accept it). Nevertheless, a number of recent editors such as Evans, Wells and Taylor, Edwards and Arden 3 print something like [D] retaining Hanmer’s re-lineation but rejecting its rationale by crippling the first line as pentameter in the name (presumably) of Greg’s rule: [D] Edwards (1985): *It will be short. The interim’s mine; 32 Edwards remarks: “The line is a syllable short. Editions universally mend it by printing ‘interim is’, but there is no authority for this” (1985, 240n), and the Arden 3 editors quote this justification approvingly (Thompson and Taylor 2006, 472n). But the argument is incoherent: [D], the sacrosanct “line [that] is a syllable short”, is the editor’s own invention. If Hanmer’s emendation of the lines metri causa is sufficient authority for Evans’ and Edwards’ re-lineation of F1, then it must also authorize the “mending” of a merely accidental contraction: both kinds of emendation — the relineation and the expansion of interim’s — have the same authority, the authority of the metre, and it is irrational to accept one and reject the other. There is, in any case, something perverse in clinging to a reading that you know subverts the metre precisely because you judge it to be unimportant, an accidental. As Stanley Wells says of a similar case, “[i]s this not an abnegation of editorial responsibility?” (1984, 51). 33 But Pope and Hanmer are far from infallible guides for the modern editor, in that for historical reasons they never understood an important area of prosodic variation in Shakespeare’s verse: catalexis, or the mapping of beats and offbeats onto silence (zero occupation of a syllable-position), which eighteenth-century editors attempted to “repair” by arbitrarily inserting words in the text. The line just before 6.4(b), for example, Pope gives as “The curtain’d sleep; now Witchcraft celebrates”, arbitrarily inserting “now” to make up the tally of syllables. There are three kinds of catalexis, and thus three advanced diacritics (those which register features that require some degree of sophistication or instruction to recognize). The subscript caret (“^”) for example, registers jolts, which are off-beats mapped onto breaks in the syntax, thus jerkily emphasising discontinuities where normal metre tends to minimize them and smooth them over; they function as (among other things) attention-getting surprises to underscore vocatives and imperatives: Variants, 14 | 2019 122 Figure 6.6. 34 The tilde (“~”), by contrast, represents a drag: an offbeat mapped onto a point within a phonological phrase where no syntactic break is possible, often between subordinated adjective and noun. The effect is legato rather than staccato, and tends to stretch out and to force accent (and thus emphasis, another stage direction in shorthand) onto the subordinated adjective so that it can function as a beat: Variants, 14 | 2019 123 Figure 6.7. 35 Finally, the inverted exclamation mark (“¡”) represents rests or silent beats, which like jolts occur in syntactic breaks, but which require some sort of gestural marking to be perceived: from 6.8(a), the slap Cleopatra gives her messenger (the stage direction is in F1), partly for his impertinent advice and partly for the manner of it (his prissy expanded patïence), to 6.8(b), the shrug with which Iago just hints a fault, and hesitates dislike of Cassio, nicely performed by Bob Hoskins in the BBC Othello, to 6.8(c), an angry or impatient gesture from Othello — perhaps a stamping of his foot (for many more examples of all three, see Groves 2013, 82-125): Variants, 14 | 2019 124 Figure 6.8. 36 Here is a brief passage, based on F1, to illustrate advanced pointing in action. Hamlet exclaims “My father! ¡ ˗˗methinks I see my father”, gesturing (perhaps pointing) on the rest, which alarms Horatio, who has in fact just seen Hamlet’s father, so that he answers with a startled initial jolt. Hamlet replies with a swap that puts reassuring (or perhaps patronizing) emphasis on “mind's eye”. To Horatio’s claim to have seen him the previous night, Hamlet responds with two puzzled jolts: “ ^ Saw? ^ who?”: Figure 6.9. 37 Not everyone will embrace all the suggestions I have made here, for a number of reasons, but nonetheless it is time for editors to reverse this modern neglect of metrical structure, and to make available to metrically less sophisticated readers and actors the wealth of information and performance direction locked up in the rhythmical ordering of Shakespeare’s verse; to begin the process would be the mark of Variants, 14 | 2019 125 (if not a definitive edition) then a defining one, setting a new standard for others to follow. Table of Symbols BIBLIOGRAPHY Barton, John. 1984. Playing Shakespeare: An Actor’s Guide. New York and London: Methuen. Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds. 2007. William Shakespeare: Complete Works. The RSC Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bevington, David, 1992. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins . Braunmuller, A. R., ed. 1997. Macbeth. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooke, Nicholas, ed. 1990. Macbeth. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Variants, 14 | 2019 126 Daniel, Samuel. 1603. “A Defence of Ryme: Against a Pamphlet Entituled: Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie.” A Panegyrike Congratulatorie. London: Imprinted [by R. Read] for Edward Blount. Edwards, Philip, ed. 2003. Hamlet. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton. Foakes, R. A., ed. 1957. King Henry VIII. Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series. London: Methuen. Gascoigne, George, 1575. “Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English” in The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire. London: For Richard Smith, pp. 291-300. Greg, W. W. 1950. “The Rationale of Copy-Text”. Studies in Bibliography, 3, pp. 19-36. Greg, W. W. 1966. Collected Papers. Ed. J. C. Maxwell. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Groves, Peter L. 1998. Strange Music: The Metre of the English Heroic Line. ELS Monograph Series 74. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria. Groves, Peter L. 1999. “The Chomsky of Grub Street: Edward Bysshe and the Triumph of Classroom Metrics”, Versification: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Prosody 2 [http:// www.arsversificandi.info/backissues/vol3/essays/groves.html] Groves, Peter L. 2007. “Shakespeare’s Pentameter and the End of Editing”. Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association, 3, pp.126-42. Groves, Peter L. 2013. Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare’s Verse: A Guide for Readers and Actors. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing. Hinman, Charlton. 1955. “Cast-off Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare”. Shakespeare Quarterly, 6, pp. 259-73. Hanmer, Sir Thomas, ed. 1744. The Works of Mr William Shakespear. In Six Volumes. Oxford: Printed at the Theatre. Jenkins, Harold, ed. 1982. Hamlet. Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series. London: Methuen. Miola, Robert S., ed. 2004. Macbeth. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton. Muir, Kenneth, ed. 1951. Macbeth. Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series. London: Methuen. Pope, Alexander, ed. 1725. The Works of Shakespear in Six Volumes, Collated and Corrected by the Former Editions. London: Jacob Tonson. Thompson Ann, and Neil Taylor, eds. 2006. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series. London: Thomson Learning. Wells, Stanley, 1984. Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, eds. 1986. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor. 1987. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Whitworth, Charles, 1991. “Rectifying Shakespeare’s Errors: Romance and Farce in Bardeditry”. In Ian Small and Marcus Welsh (eds.), The Theory and Practice of Text-editing: Essays in Honour of James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107-41. Variants, 14 | 2019 127 NOTES 1. References to Shakespeare (other than to F1) are to Riverside Shakespeare edition (Evans 1974). 2. “B” represents secondary stress within polysyllables, and stress in function words (capability, between, this); “ö” represents a syllable that may be elided. Lowercase “a” represents a subordinated stress, like that of “old” in “old dog” (default enunciation). 3. Citations of the First Folio follow the Through-Line Numbering (TLN) system. 4. Unfamiliar polysyllabic proper names should be marked for stress because they are a frequent source of confusion. Readers usually assume that such names will be paroxytonic, but those tempted to sabotage the metre with ‘ProsPEro’ and ‘HippoLYta” will pronounce Próspero and Hippólyta without difficulty (see Groves 2013, 171-76). Sounded final -es should also be indicated with /ĕ/: I have heard Níobĕ rhyme with globe. 5. A phonological word consists of a word and any associated clitics: the phrase a shoe-in or thou art is one phonological word. 6. Compare the old music-hall song by Fred Murray and R. P. Weston, “I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I am”. In some cases, words that were elastic for the Elizabethans have become inelastic in contemporary English, so that the short form has become the only available one. There are three kinds of archaic expansions: archaic desyncopation, as in “That croaks the fatal entřance of Duncan” (Macbeth 1.5.39); “The parts and graces of the wrestļer” (As You Like It 2.2.13); archaic depalatalization, mainly affecting words ending in ‑ion, ‑ious, ‑ient and so on, as in “The beachy girdle of the ocëan” (2H4 3.1.50), “Yet have I fierce affectïons, and think” (Antony and Cleopatra 1.5.22); and expanded preterites, as in “ In the >rank sweat of an enseamëd bed” (Hamlet 3.4.102), “ Variants, 14 | 2019 128 ABSTRACTS Just as in recent years many editors have paid insufficient (or inconsistent, or even contradictory) attention to the authority of the metre in editing early modem play-texts, so more recent editions have begun to discard even the rather basic assistance that has traditionally been supplied to the metrically unsophisticated reader: the Arden 3 editions, for example, no longer indicate the syllabic status of preterite suffixes in the text (perhaps fearing that the occasional grave accent might frighten the horses), and Jonathon Bates’ recent RSC edition rejects the helpful practice, normal since Edmond Malone and George Steevens, of indicating the structure of shared lines by indentation, on the cogent grounds that the First Folio didn’t do it. Ironically, this retreat from the authority of the metre has coincided with large advances, based in part upon linguistics, in our understanding of how metre works. But if metre is not some arid formality but rather a signifying system, this kind of negligence is doing that reader a disservice. This paper will explore some of the ways in which editors might discreetly assist the reader in grasping metrical and prosodic variation (where such variation seems relevant or important), and in exploring (without oppressing the reader with unnecessary detail) the kinds of editorial choices offered by two equally but variously substantive witnesses, such as Q2 and FI Hamlet: one role of the editor here is to draw attention to meaningful variation while filtering out mere noise. INDEX Keywords: textual editing, editorial tradition, metrics, prosody, William Shakespeare, drama. AUTHOR PETER GROVES Peter Groves is senior lecturer at Monash University where he teaches poetry, Shakespeare and Renaissance literature in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies. An expert in Shakespeare’s metrics, he has published Strange Music: The Metre of the English Heroic Line (1998) Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare: A Guide for Readers and Actors (2013). He has also published a series of articles on poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Philip Larkin and edited an edition of Samuel Daniel's poetry (with Geoffrey Hiller) and an annotated anthology of the seventeenth-century Theophrastan character. en Variants, 14 | 2019 129 To Edit a National Poem. The Editing of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Poem Metai and its Sociocultural Context Mikas Vaicekauskas 1 It is unanimously recognized, at least in Lithuania or by Lithuanian literary scholars, that the poem Metai (The Seasons, 1765–1775) by Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780)1 is one of the most outstanding (not to say: the most outstanding) and important works of Lithuanian literature.2 Written in metrotonic hexameter, in the low style, and in a language close to colloquial speech (highly untypical of literature of that time), the poem represented the life and daily routine of eighteenth-century peasant serfs during the four seasons of the year, prescribed and defined by the divine order. It is unknown if the author himself tried to publish his poem or at least had such intentions during his lifetime. However, the surviving part of the poem’s autographs shows how meticulously he worked on the text. Another important feature of Metai is that it can be described as one of the most intensely edited works in the history of Lithuanian literature. Historical periods and their socio-cultural context often determined the tendencies of editing or even publishing this nationally significant literary work. It is important to review and establish the main editing tendencies of Metai in different periods and different socio-cultural contexts, if only because Donelaitis’s poem has acquired the general status of the founding work of national literature and a poetic masterpiece. In addition to these epithets, it can be said that Metai is also the work of Lithuanian literature that went through the largest number of editions. As socio- political changes brought about new cultural contexts for the work, practically every generation of readers and researchers felt the need for a new edition or reprint of Metai; this is particularly noticeable in the twentieth century. In its 200-year history of publishing and editing, the poem saw distinct changes of the aims of the edition and the main editing principles. Considering the symbolic importance of Donelaitis’s Metai for Lithuanian national culture, the history of its publishing and editing reveals the Variants, 14 | 2019 130 general strategies of editing works of national classics and presenting them to the readers quite well, which are in turn characteristic of Lithuanian literature in general. 2 The poem Metai was published for the first time in 1818 ([Donelaitis] 1818), almost forty years after the poet’s death. Based on the poem’s autographs and copy, the edition was prepared by Martin Ludwig Rhesa (Martynas Liudvikas Rėza, 1776–1840), a professor at the University of Königsberg who also translated the poem into German.3 It should be noted that Lithuanian fictional writing at that time was only in its formative stage and did not have any tradition to speak of. Realizing the value of Donelaitis’s work, Rhesa sought to show that it was representative of the Lithuanian nation and its culture, and to do it in the most favourable way. 3 However, the representational nature of the publication, the personality of Rhesa himself (specifically: his penchant for idyllic tones), as well as the nineteenth-century Romanticist spirit, all determined the radical character of Rhesa’s editorial interventions. So much so, even, that he would later be accused of taking too much liberty with the editing. Wishing to present Donelaitis’s work and the Lithuanian peasant serfs depicted in the poem in the most favourable light (see Jovaišas 1969, 119, 120), Rhesa removed what were, in his opinion, expressions that were too drastic and rough, and sometimes even entire episodes (468 lines were cut out) that contained a negative view of Lithuanians and showed their faults as well as several naturalistic and extreme scenes (such as: passages blaming serfs for being conceited, lazy and ill- tempered [Vd 389–433]4, cruel treatment of a horse [Rg 122–130], women’s drinking in a wedding [Rg 189–209], stealing timber [Rg 549–590], etc.). Alongside these cuts, Rhesa added two lines of his own (between Rg 542 and 543, and Žr 641 and 642), and also inserted individual words here and there. 4 The most radical corrections were made in the poem’s lexis. Rhesa changed the personal names, split the same character into several persons or, vice versa, merged several characters into one (e.g.: Simas ← Stepas; Elzė ← Gryta; Enikė ← Katryna, etc.; Anusis, Bindus, Milkus, Lauras, Janas ← Krizas, etc.; Lauras ← Krizas, Paikžentis, Pričkus, Selmas, etc.); replaced some words in the poem with others without any reason (e.g.: kad [that; as; if] ← kas [what; who]; kiaunės [martens] or kregždės [swallows] ← žiurkės [rats]; Lietuwninkams [dat. pl. ‘Lithuanians’] ← baudzáuninkams [dat. pl. ‘peasant serfs’]; perdaug [too much] ← daug [much]; saldžiai [sweetly] ← šaltai [coldly]; štai [here is] ← tuo [at once; right away], etc.); removed Germanisms for the purpose of language purification (e.g.: durnas [fool; dumb] ← naras [German ‘Narr’]; keliaut [to travel] ← vandruot [German ‘wandern’]; midus [mead] ← brangvynas [German ‘Branntwein’]; žaidėjai [musician; minstrel] ← špielmonai [German ‘Spielmann’]; žvakės [candles] ← liktys [German ‘Leuchter’], etc.) (Krištopaitienė 2014, 54–58). Phonetic and morphological corrections were not abundant: sometimes he changed word forms – prefixes, tenses of verbs, and numbers of denominals – and restored full word endings from short ones. The spelling, punctuation and accentuation were quite well retained. Having made significant changes to the text, Rhesa thus created a romanticized or idyllic version of Metai that remained in use throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. 5 In the mid-nineteenth century, two critical editions of Donelaitis appeared in the German tradition. The first was prepared in 1865 by August Schleicher (1821–1868) a professor of Jena University ([Donelaitis] 1865). He expanded his edition by including all the known works by Donelaitis. Schleicher based himself on the manuscripts, copies and Rhesa’s edition. With the aim to convey the autographs as precisely as possible, he Variants, 14 | 2019 131 basically restored the places in the poem omitted by Rhesa. However, he was not very consistent either: omitted two lines (e.g.: Ir kaip kiaulės almono (tikt gėda sakyti) [And like prize pigs (I am ashamed to say)]5 Rg 186; O mažu jie dar man čia būtų mušę per ausį [And they might very well have boxed my ears] Rg 291), while retainint the two lines created by Rhesa. And while Schleicher reinstated the lexical barbarisms that were removed by Rhesa, as well as some of the words and forms that had been replaced, many interventions made by Rhesa remained in Schleicher’s edition. Furthermore, new digressions appeared in Schleicher’s edition, e.g., different phonetic and morphological forms (e.g.: angielas ← angelas [angel]; broliau ← brolau [voc. sg. ‘brother’]; kemšia ← kemša [fill; stuff]; pasakysiu ← pasakysu [I will tell you]; seikėt ← saikėt [to measure]; triūsas ← trūsas [toil; work]; vėversys ← vieversys [lark], etc.). Finally, as Schleicher was mainly interested in the linguistic aspect of Donelaitis’s work (as can also be seen from his abundant linguistic commentaries), his edition gave much attention to the spelling, accentuation and lexis (Lebedys 1972, 245–246). For example, Donelaitis’s spelling was adapted to contemporary use, some words were given different accents according to the requirements of that time without taking into account the hexametric features, and Schleicher changed the text’s punctuation. Hence, although Schleicher’s edition is important as the first scholarly publication of Donelaitis’s works, his editorial interventions prevented the edition from achieving the authenticity he claimed. 6 In 1869, a critical edition of Writings by Donelaitis ([Donelaitis] 1869) was prepared by Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (1811–1881), also a professor at the University of Königsberg. Nesselmann severely rebuked the former editors – Rhesa for his self-willed and unmotivated corruption of the text, and Schleicher for relying too much on Rhesa instead of turning to the autographs (Nesselmann 1869, IV, VII) and thus failing to correct Rhesa’s corruptions. Nesselmann prepared his edition very scrupulously and accurately, and took his best efforts to follow the autographs as closely as possible (Lebedys 1972, 248). Having rejected the cuts and the lines added by Rhesa and Schleicher, Nesselmann’s edition was the first to present the full text by Donelaitis that also retained the author’s accentuation, which was the basis of versification. He only deviated from the autographs with regard to their spelling and punctuation. From the point of view of textual scholarship, this edition has not lost its value to this day, as it remains the primary source of “Autumn Wealth” and “Winter Cares”, since the autographs of these two parts of the poem are unknown, and their copies were lost after World War II. 7 Schleicher’s and Nesselmann’s editions were aimed at the philological community rather than meant for general use. In addition, neither of these editions was distributed in Lithuania due to the sanctions of the ban on the Lithuanian press,6 even though Schleicher’s book was published in Russia. Still, these books reached and were known to Lithuanian scholars, writers and other educated persons living abroad, or could be smuggled into Lithuania. As such, they were the first projects of such scale and philological quality related to Lithuanian literature. These editions showed to the Lithuanian community that artefacts of national literature could be objects of international academic research, and moreover, that national culture had a certain basis and classical tradition – in other words, that there was a heritage of national culture that could make one justly proud. It was particularly important in the process of formation of a national consciousness. Variants, 14 | 2019 132 8 In 1914, philologist Jurgis Šlapelis (1876–1941) published Kristijono Duonelaičio raštai (The Writings of Kristijonas Donelaitis) ([Donelaitis] 1914), an edition meant for the Lithuanian reader, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the poet’s birth. The edition was prepared on the basis of Rhesa’s, Schleicher’s and Nesselmann’s earlier editions and was characterized by presenting all Donelaitis works and by the attempts to convey the authentic text without any cuts, though 24 lines of an early fragment “Fortsetzung” (“Sequel”) was included in the poem’s text. However, quite many minor inaccuracies from the earlier editions reappeared (e.g.: gyvolį ← gyvuolį [acc. sg. ‘animal’]; pavargęs ← parvargęs [tired]; puikiokų ← puikokų [gen. pl. ‘quite excellent’], etc.); part of the dialectal forms were standardized and part were retained as authentic: the suffix -in- was retained in all verb infinitives with -inti and their derivative forms, except in the future tense (e.g.: garbint [to worship] ← garbysim [we will worship]; pamokindams [instructing] ← pamokysiu [I will instruct]; sveikint [to welcome; to greet] ← pasveikys [will welcome; will greet], etc.); along with authentic forms, standardized forms were used (e.g.: bent ← ben [at least]; didžiai ← didei [dat. ‘great’]; rudenį ← rudenyj [in autumn], etc.); forms of pronouns (e.g.: kuo ← kuom [wherewith]; sau ← sav [for oneself]; šiame ← šime [in this one], etc.) and words (e.g.: bėdžius ← biedžius [unfortunate creature]; tik ← tikt [only], etc.) characteristic of Donelaitis were discarded; many errors of authentic accentuation remained; spelling inconsistencies were very distinct, etc. The editor himself acknowledged his mistakes and gave an explanation in “Leidėjo pasiteisinimas” (“The Editor’s Excuse”): Duonelaičio Raštai man netaip pasisekė išleisti, kaip aš juos dabar norėčiau matyti. Pradėjau juos spauzdinti ir pirmuosius lankus išspauzdinau dar 1909 metais, gerai į juos neįsigilinęs. Turinio ir prasmės, tiesa, niekur, rodos nebūsiu iškraipęs ir pagadinęs, bet rašyboje ir kirčiuose esu ne vienoje vietoje suklydęs. Vietomis visai be reikalo perdirbau paties Duonelaičio rašybą [...]. Bet daugiausia paklaidų įsibrovusių tai kirčiuose. [I failed to publish the Writings by Donelaitis in the way I would like to see it now. I started to publish it and printed the first sheets back in 1909, without going deep into the subject. True, I do not think that I corrupted or spoiled the contents and the meaning in any place, but I did make some mistakes in spelling and accentuation. In some places I changed Donelaitis’s spelling without any reason [...]. Yet the majority of errors are in accentuation.] (Šlapelis 1914, 88) In the early twentieth century, the formation of the standard Lithuanian language was in the early stage, and strictly codified norms of the written language did not exist. That is why Šlapelis’s publication reflected the development of Lithuanian philology of that time. 9 In 1918, when the Lithuanian state was established and the national school began to be built, a need for textbooks of Lithuanian literature arose. The first textbooks of the national school had to build the canon of national literature and emphasize the cultural values of the emerging national state. One of such textbooks was prepared and published by literary historian Mykolas Biržiška (1882–1962) in 1918. Donelaičio raštai (The Works of Donelaitis) ([Donelaitis] 1918)7 was a teaching manual, which contained Donelaitis’s works with linguistic and culture-specific commentaries, an overview of the poet’s life, and the main features of his work. In these school editions, the text of Metai was prepared according to the Šlapelis’s edition. There, the text was divided into thematic chapters, which were given titles. In addition, the text of the poem was heavily abridged to make it fit under these chapters. In most cases, the abridgements were not indicated (811 lines were cut out). Some rough, overly expressive or drastic Variants, 14 | 2019 133 scenes where the characters were presented in the negative light, or which contained obscene words according to the understanding of that time, were abridged. Sometimes such words were replaced with neutral ones (e.g.: purvas [dirt; mud], šūdas [shit; dung] → niekas [nothing; nil]). The text was characterized by inconsistent editing, standardization of dialectal words, and repeated mistakes from earlier editions. There were inconsistent adaptations of spelling, as the editor himself admitted: [...] vaduojantis p. Šlapelio išleidimu, pirmajame lanke ligi 24 psl. mūsų nenuolatinis korektorius paliko vienas kitas rašybos savybes, kurios toliau jau nebepaliktos (pvz., augštas vietoj aukštas, stebūklingas vietoj stebuklingas, grištant – grįžtant, džiaugties – džiaugtis, Jieva – Ieva, prasiplatįs – prasiplatins, tuojaus – tuojau, daugiaus – daugiau, jieškoti – ieškoti). [[...] referring to Mr. Šlapelis’s edition, in the first quire up to p. 24 our supernumerary proofreader did not correct certain spelling features that were further discarded (e.g.: augštas instead of aukštas [high; tall], stebūklingas – stebuklingas [magical], grištant – grįžtant [returning], džiaugties – džiaugtis [to rejoice], Jieva – Ieva [proper noun], prasiplatįs – prasiplatins [will be widened], tuojaus – tuojau [right away], daugiaus – daugiau [more], jieškoti – ieškoti [to search]).] (Biržiška 1918b, 89) The editor also admitted that scholarly precision was not his basic aim in this publication: Visos pataisos, pastabos ar šiaip nuomonės apie Duonelaičio teksto vartojimą ir paaiškinimus galima siųsti, be laikraščių, ir Lietuvių Mokslo Draugijai, pažymėjus: „del Duonelaičio raštų“. Gautoji kritikos medžiaga bus mielai priimta ir sunaudota, jei prireiks, antrajam vadovėlio leidimui; juo labiau, jog autorius nebūdamas kalbininkas, nėra perdaug savimi pasitikįs. Jam rūpėjo ne tiek mokslo žvilgsniu tobūlas vadovėlis pagaminti, kiek praskinti kelias šitokiems padedamiesiems literatūros istorijos raštams. [All the revisions, comments or opinions regarding the use and explanations of Donelaitis’s text can be sent, beside newspapers, to the Lithuanian Scientific Society with a note “in regard to Donelaitis’s writings”. The received critical material will be gladly accepted and used, if necessary, in the second edition of the textbook. After all, not being a linguist, the author is not overconfident. He is more interested in paving the way for this kind of supplementary writings of the history of literature rather than producing a perfect textbook from the scholarly viewpoint.] (Biržiška 1918a, 79) 10 Literary historians of that time considered Metai a realist or classicist poem, which basically spoke about nature, peasant life and other aspects of folk culture, and thus devoted much attention to Donelaitis’s life and his social and cultural environment (see Biržiška 1918a; Maironis-Mačiulis 1932; Miškinis 1939). As such, it completely complied with the goals of the emerging national state and its agrarian mentality. Šlapelis’s and Biržiška’s editions were not noted for scholarly precision, the aim of authenticity, nor for their printing quality, and they contained strong interventions in the authentic text (perhaps not so much made by Šlapelis and Biržiška as continuing from earlier editions), as well as new proofreading and typesetting mistakes and inconsistent standardization of spelling (Krištopaitienė 2007, 37–38, 142). And yet, Metai was a matter of national pride. Biržiška characterized the poem in the following words: “yra tai kilniausias lietuvių ir vienas žymiausių visuotinosios literatūros kūrinių” (“it is the noblest Lithuanian work of literature and one of the outstanding works of general literature”), which became “a national poem” (Biržiška 1918a, 74, 77). 11 While the school editions of Metai edited by Biržiška were still in circulation, in 1922 the Ministry of Education of Lithuanian Republic initiated the preparation of a new Variants, 14 | 2019 134 edition of Donelaitis’s works. An agreement was signed with a German Baltic and Slavic scholar at the University of Königsberg: professor Reinhold Trautmann (1883–1951). He was most probably chosen because he had an easy access to Donelaitis’s manuscripts and their copies held in Königsberg’s archives, and because he was acclaimed as a highly qualified philologist at the time, taking interest in the history of the Lithuanian language (Sabaliauskas 1979, 212–215). The agreement provided that Trautmann would prepare Donelaitis’s works from his autographs and copies and compare them with other editions of Donelaitis’s works. However, for unknown reasons (in 1926 Trautmann moved to work at Leipzig University), this project was never came to fruition. We can only guess the type and quality of this edition and what further impact on the development of Lithuanian philology would have been. Judging by the demonstrated efforts, it would undoubtedly have been one of the most complex and important textual research and publishing projects in interwar Lithuania – a national culture that was still in the early stages of building its philological tradition and practice at that time. 12 The need for an extraordinary work of literature that would represent the national literary canon became even more acute in the interwar period. Metai, as was already mentioned, was well suited for that role. In 1936, the Ministry of Education once again initiated the preparation of a representational edition. Artist Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas (1907–1997) received a commission to make illustrations, and literary historian Juozas Ambrazevičius (1903–1974) had to edit the text. The first representational edition of the poem Metai came out in 1940 (Donelaitis 1940), 8 already in the first months of Soviet occupation. With the aim to preserve and convey the authentic text by Donelaitis, Ambrazevičius would base the edition on Donelaitis’s autographs, copies and Nesselmann’s edition, but also asserted that the text had to be easily readable and adapted for a wide readership and schools: Kiti dabar laikai, kiti ir reikalavimai naujajam leidimui. Viena – didžiojo ir pirmojo lietuvių klasiko veikalas turėjo būti reprezentacinis; antra – jis turėjo išlaikyti pilną ir autentišką tekstą; trečia – turėjo būti lengvai paskaitomas jaunimui ir masės žmogui per mokyklas ir bibliotekas. [...] Norint išlaikyti griežtai autentišką tekstą, geriausia tiktų leisti fotografuotinis veikalas. Tačiau jis būtų sunkiai paskaitomas ir dėl to nepopuliarus. Todėl ruošiant šį leidimą, teko eiti kompromiso keliu: atsisakyti nuo Donelaičio rašybos, bet išlaikyti visą jo žodyną ir sintaksę. [...] Šiame leidime vartojama dabartinė rašyba. [The times have changed, and so have the requirements for the new edition. Firstly, the work by the great and first Lithuanian classic has to be representational; secondly, the full and authentic text has to be retained; thirdly, it has to be easily accessible for young people and society at large through schools and libraries. [...] With the aim to retain the strictly authentic text, a photographic edition would be the most suitable. But it would be very difficult to read and thus unpopular. That is why, in the preparation of this edition, we have to make a compromise: renounce Donelaitis’s spelling but retain all of his vocabulary and syntax. [...] Contemporary spelling is used in this edition.] (Ambrazevičius 1940, 182) 13 Thus, quite significant interventions in Donelaitis’s authentic text were made. Ambrazevičius did not formulate consistent principles of editing, but in an attempt to make the text comprehensible to the readers without a philological grounding, he standardized, albeit inconsistently, the spelling, punctuation, phonetics, morphology, lexis etc. according to the rules of the standard language (Krištopaitienė 2005). He replaced authentic dialectal forms (e.g.: niurnėti ← nurnėti [to murmur; to grumble]; siurbti ← surbti [to sip; to swig; to drink]; triūsas ← trūsas [toil; work], etc.); Variants, 14 | 2019 135 standardized the verbs in the future tense with the ending -su (e.g.: paminėsiu ← paminėsu [I will mention]; pridabosiu ← pridabosu [I will take a look], etc.); and replaced some word forms with more common standardized equivalents (e.g.: giria ← girė [wood]; grikis ← grikas [buckwheat]; skrynia ← skrynė [chest; coffer], etc.). Most probably because the edition was also meant for schools, the editor tried to give Donelaitis’s language a “nobler” sound by replacing the words of obscene meaning in the understanding of that time with softer or neutral ones (e.g.: juodvabalis [dung- beetle] ← šūdvabalis [shit-beetle]; kiaušas [balls; eggs] ← pautas [balls; testicles]; mėšlinėdams [grubbing around/living in muck] ← šūdinėdams [grubbing around/living in shit]; niekas [nothing; nil] ← šūdas [shit; dung]; teršia [litter; soil] ← meža [piss], etc.). The editor explained these interventions in the following way: ‘Metų’ tekstas duotas pilnas. Tik keliose vietose šiais laikais įgavę obsceniškos prasmės žodžiai yra pakeisti tais, prie kurių jau yra įprasta iš M. Biržiškos leidimo. [The text of The Seasons is given in full. Only in some places the words that nowadays have acquired an obscene meaning are replaced with those that have already become customary from Biržiška’s edition.] (Ambrazevičius 1940, 184–185) He also indicated concrete places in the text where the words had been replaced. Yet Ambrazevičius did not refer to Biržiška’s edition on all occasions, as almost all of such places had been cut out in that edition. Several new corruptions of words appeared (e.g.: kailiuką [little fur] ← kuiliuką [little pig]; prisišokt [to dance a lot] ← prisikošt [to get drunk]; rėžių [gen. pl. strips of land] ← rečių [gen. pl. ‘idle fields, fallows’]; sukrovęs [having stacked up] ← surokavęs [having arranged], etc.). Four lines of the poem were omitted: two due to their expressiveness: Juk ir ponų vaikesčiai taipjau per subinę gauna, / Kad jie, kaip kiti vaikai, į patalą meža [For gentry’s children too, like others, get / Their bum spanked when the bedding they have wet] Pl 312–313; and two most probably due to inattentiveness (of the editor or typesetter?): Tuos žodelius savo tėvo aš tikrai nusitvėriau [Father’s words firmly in my memory stay] Pl 453; Kad tikt varnos dar biaurybę rudenio garbin [That only crows laud horrid autumn days] Rg 52. Despite quite a strong intervention in the text, Ambrazevičius’s edition is considered to be culturally highly significant, as it was also noted for high printing quality and for the first time had original illustrations. It was this edition of Metai that both visually and textually conveyed the contemporaries’ view of Donelaitis’s poem as a classic of national literature that embodied the central element of Lithuanian identity – peasant mentality and culture, and naturally close relation to nature. Thus Metai became a representative of the national literary canon and a symbol of preservation of national culture. 14 The subsequent editions that came out in the Soviet period bear witness to the then prevailing tendency of standardizing not only the understanding of Donelaitis’s work, but also his language. The 1945 publication Metai ir pasakėčios (The Seasons and the Fables) (Donelaitis 1945) edited by Valys Drazdauskas (1906–1981) was prepared on the basis of Ambrazevičius’s edition. The presented text of Metai was incomplete – 49 lines were omitted (not all the cuts were indicated): some rough episodes and places containing obscene words were left out. Quite many interventions in the authentic text were made, and most often Ambrazevičius’s editorial corrections, corruptions and mistakes were mechanically repeated (e.g.: bematant [seeing] ← bepamatant [having seen]; rėžių [gen. pl. ‘strips of land’] ← rečių [gen. pl. ‘idle fields; fallows’]; susėdę [having sat down] ← susisėdę [having seated themselves]; valyt [to clean] ← suvalyt [to clean out], etc.). New mistakes also appeared – corrupted words, changed cases (e.g.: jauti [feel] ← jaugi [already]; kirminai [nom. pl. ‘worms’] ← kirminą [acc. sg. ‘worm’]; sparnų [gen. pl. Variants, 14 | 2019 136 ‘wings’] ← sparų [gen. pl. ‘joist’], etc.). Dialectal forms were replaced with normative variants of the standard language (e.g.: ąžuols ← aužuols [oak]; rupūžes ← rupuižes [acc. pl. ‘toad’]; sau ← sav [for oneself], etc.). In two places, printing errors occur, when two lines are merged by skipping the end of one line and the beginning of the next one (e.g.: Tankiai mes tvanke, prastai maišydami gėrėm Rg (1945) 366 (cf. Tankiai mes tvanke prastai maišydami skinkį / Ir vandens malkus iš klano semdami gėrėm [Often in heat waves nothing but thin beer / And water from a puddle we have drunk], Rg 366–367); Šalant be šiltos stubos kuršolės srėbt ir siurbt nenorėsi Žr (1945) 281 (cf. Šąlant be šiltos stubos išbūt negalėsi, / O šaltos kuršolės srėbt ir surbt nenorėsi [Without a warm home you‘ll not bear the frost, / And you‘ll not want to sip cold beetroot soup], Žr 281–282)). Like in Ambrazevičius’s edition, words with obscene meaning were left changed. 15 The edition of 1950 Raštai (Writings) (Donelaitis 1950) edited by Aleksandras Žirgulys (1909–1986) was characterized by quite radical editorial interventions and particularly distinct standardization tendencies, although the editing principles were not declared and no arguments were given. The text of Metai was incomplete (59 lines were cut out; the cuts were marked). Like in earlier editions, the tradition of replacing obscene words persisted. In the text of the poem, almost all the most typical phonetic and morphological features of Donelaitis’s language were discarded: the noun suffix -ukas was replaced with the normative variant -iukas (e.g.: veršiukai ← veršukai [calves], etc.); the adjective suffix -iausis, -iausi was replaced with the normative variant -iausias, - iausia (e.g.: brangiausia ← brangiausi [the dearest], etc.); “hard” spelling words were replaced with normative variants with a soft sign (e.g.: durniuoti ← durnuoti [to fool around]; niurnėti ← nurnėti [to murmur]; siurbti ← surbti [to sip; to swig; to drink], etc.); authentic word forms were replaced with normative ones (e.g.: nes ← nės [because]; sau ← sav [for oneself]; tik ← tikt [only], etc.). In preparing this edition, the earlier editions of Ambrazevičius and Drazdauskas were taken into account, and thus some editorial interventions coincided (e.g.: bematant ← bepamatant [upon seeing smth.]; gyvulį ← gyvuolį [acc. sg. ‘animal’]; išmetęs [having dropped] ← išmėtęs [having scattered], etc.). Other interventions in the authentic text were made (e.g.: bedainuojant [while singing] ← bedejuojant [while moaning]; numatyti [to allow] ← numanyti [to imply; to understand]; vieni [alone] ← vierni [faithful]; omitted words taip [so; thus] Žr 642; vėl [again] Pl 46, etc.). It is important to note that the editorial intentions, principles and reasons for making cuts in these editions remained undeclared. 16 In 1956, a Soviet representational edition of the poem Metai (Donelaitis 1956) canonizing the national poet, edited by Aleksandras Žirgulys and illustrated by Vytautas Jurkūnas (1910–1993), came out. The illustrations complied with the standards of Soviet conjuncture and socialized art. Notably, in this edition after quite a long time the text was presented without any cuts. And, most importantly, the tradition of “improving” the poet’s language by removing obscene words was rejected. Language standardization was less strict, and some dialectal forms replaced in the Žirgulys 1950 edition were reinstated. However, some other dialectal forms were replaced with normative ones (e.g.: bėdžius ← biedžius [unfortunate creature]; nės ← nes [because]; striokas ← strokas [fright]; šiame ← šime [in this one], etc.). There was no consistency in morphological standardization, e.g., some words with the authentic suffix -ukas were retained (e.g.: sturluks [rabbit], etc.), while other words were standardized by adding the suffix -iukas (e.g.: veršiukai [calves], etc.). Quite many corruptions and inaccuracies were transferred from earlier editions (Nesselmann, Variants, 14 | 2019 137 Ambrazevičius, Drazdauskas), e.g., omitted or added words (e.g.: omitted: taipjau [as well as] Pl 312; tik(t) [only] Vd 442; added: visur [everywhere] Rg 434); confused words (e.g.: pykčio ← papykio [gen. sg. ‘anger; rage’]; prisišokt [to dance a lot] ← prisikošt [to get drunk]; puikiai [excellently] ← paikiai [foolishly], etc.); different tenses of verbs (e.g.: dovanojo [gave a gift] ← dovanoja [is giving a gift]; klausiu [I am asking] ← klausiau [I asked], etc.); different prepositions of nouns (e.g.: nuo suolo [from the bench] ← po suolu [under the bench]). One can think that the aim of authenticity of the text, in particular on the lexical level, was also related to the changed socio-cultural conditions in the field of Soviet culture. Soviet culture needed a work of classical literature representing peasant-proletarian mentality. Not only the scenes of work, but also the related vocabulary used by Donelaitis could perfectly serve that purpose. In this respect, Donelaitis used rather rough, presumably colloquial language, as critics put it, “smelling of earth and dung”. 17 An important place in the history of Donelaitis’s editions is occupied by a documentary and critical edition of 1977 (Donelaitis 1977), which was at that time considered a model of a scholarly publication in Lithuanian philology. The text of Metai was edited by philologist Kazys Ulvydas (1910–1996). The editor’s aims were the stability and reliability of the text (Ulvydas 1977, 294). Donelaitis’s authorial punctuation was respected and conveyed more successfully than in other editions. On the lexical level, the editor retained many word forms typical of Donelaitis (e.g.: aužuolas → ąžuolas [oak]; biedžius → bėdžius [unfortunate creature]; didei → didžiai [highly; greatly]; morkas → morka [carrot]; rudenis → ruduo [autumn], etc.); adverbs with -iaus (e.g.: baisiaus [more scary], etc.); nouns with the suffixes -atis, -atė (e.g.: ožkatė [little goat], etc.), -ukas (bernukas [boy], etc.); and the syntax was fully retained (Ulvydas 1977, 303–312). This edition was prepared on the basis of the autographs and Nesselmann’s edition, which was the least removed from the primal source, and thus the corruptions and inaccuracies that had been mechanically repeated in the earlier editions did not appear here. Yet, full authenticity was not achieved, e.g. authentic pronoun forms were discarded (e.g.: sav ← sau [for oneself], etc.); as well as the long suffix of verbs -yn (e.g.: atsimyk ← atsimink [remember], etc.); the regular forms of the first person singular of the future tense with the ending -su were not retained (e.g.: krutėsu ← krutėsiu [I will keep moving], etc.); forms of prepositions were standardized (e.g.: nuo ← nu [from], etc.); word forms were standardized (e.g.: dosniai ← dosnai [generously]; išauštant ← išaušant [at daybreak]; stikliorius ← stiklorius [glazier], etc.). 18 Another edition by the same editor was published in 1983 (Donelaitis 1983). It was a representational edition with illustrations taken from the Ambrazevičius edition, dedicated to the 270th anniversary of Donelaitis’s birth. The editing was inconsistent and imprecise, and the editing practice of the earlier Ulvydas edition was not taken into account. One of the reasons was that the book was intended for wide readership and representational purpose: Šio leidimo tekstas ir dar vienu kitu mažmožiu skiriasi nuo 1977 m. K. Donelaičio raštuose paskelbto ‘Metų’ teksto. Visus tuos skirtumėlius lėmė ne tik pastangos siekti ‘Metų’ teksto stabilumo idealo, ne tik to teksto tolesnės studijos, bet ir paties leidinio paskirtis, taip pat atodaira į jo adresatą – plačiąją visuomenę. [The text of this edition differs in some minor features from the text of The Seasons published in the writings of Donelaitis of 1977. All these differences were determined not only by the efforts to seek the ideal stability of the text of The Seasons and further studies of the text, but also by the purpose of the edition itself, and its target – society at large.] (Ulvydas 1983, 176) Variants, 14 | 2019 138 Authentic punctuation was not retained, and standardization was more conspicuous than in the 1977 edition. The editor gave very weak arguments for standardizing certain forms of nouns according to contemporary requirements, though he did not do it in the 1977 edition (e.g.: bėdžius ← biedžius [unfortunate creature]; giria ← girė [wood]; išsiplėtęs ← išsisplėtęs [expanded]; kruopa ← kruopas [grain]; neprietelius ← neprietelis [hostile], etc.). Like in Ambrazevičius edition, two lines of the poem were omitted (Tuos žodelius savo tėvo aš tikrai nusitvėriau [Father‘s words firmly in my memory stay] Pl 453; Kad tikt varnos dar bjaurybę rudenio garbin [That only crows laud horrid autumn days] Rg 52). 19 In the text of the poem published in the period of independent Lithuania in 1994 (Donelaitis 1994),9 editor Vytautas Vitkauskas (1935–2012) declared his aim to retain the authentic dialectal forms: Šiuo leidimu Kristijono Donelaičio grožiniai tekstai pateikiami tradiciniai, t.y. išsaugota visa autoriaus sintaksė, leksika, morfologija, nedėsninga fonetika. [In this edition, the literary texts by Kristijonas Donelaitis are presented traditionally, i.e. the author’s syntax, lexis, morphology, and irregular phonetics have been retained in their entirety.] (Vitkauskas 1994, 169) 20 The verb forms with the long [i·] ( 21 In conclusion, we could say that Kristijonas Donelaitis‘s poem Metai was and still is one of the most conspicuously edited works in the history of Lithuanian literature. The editing strategies of the major editions of the poem were determined by the cultural context of the time and the type and aims of the edition. In many editions that revised the earlier publications of Metai, the aim of authenticity of Donelaitis’s work, above all, its language strongly related to the metrotonic hexameter was declared. The editors sought to present (i.e. edit) the text of Metai making it as authentic and close to Donelaitis’s original text as possible compared to editions intended for general use or, as they put it, to reveal “the very roots of the Lithuanian poetic word”. This approach followed from the assumption that Donelaitis was practically the first poet writing in Lithuanian, the father of Lithuanian poetry who wrote in the most authentic and genuine Lithuanian language, a language spoken by the peasants of his parish who were illiterate and ignorant of literary traditions. 22 In other words, in Metai and its vernacular, the essence of the Lithuanian language was revealed. Because of this status of the work, the authenticity of Donelaitis’s language (e.g., dialectal forms, variety and irregularities of linguistic forms, non-normative variants as compared to contemporary usage) is almost unanimously acclaimed as having literary and cultural value. As Donelaitis’s text could not be presented in its Variants, 14 | 2019 139 authentic spelling and punctuation to a reader without specialised philological training, editorial interventions in these fields were obligatory. However, in addition to this, one could say, formal editing, Donelaitis’s phonetics, morphology and even lexis were also affected. Practically all editions of Metai meant for general use rather than scholarly purposes were edited with distinct interventions in Donelaitis’s text; in other words, the text was corrupted. Besides all that, there was also the aim of the stability of the text – editing and presenting the text of Metai so that it would correspond to the norms of language usage of that time, but with the least possible intervention in the text, in order to ensure the reliability of the text, i.e. the author’s original intent as witnessed in the autographs of his work.10 The tendency to present Donelaitis’s text in the most authentic form and interpret only the most complex cases related to the phonetic and morphological word forms used by Donelaitis, let alone radical editing, cuts or intervention in the vocabulary, which became apparent since the middle of the twentieth century, persists until today. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrazevičius, Juozas. 1940. “Metų leidimai”. In Kristijonas Donelaitis. Metai. Ed. Juozas Ambrazevičius. Kaunas: Švietimo Ministerijos Knygų leidimo komisijos leidinys Nr. 524, spaudė akcinės “Spindulio” bendrovės spaustuvė Kaune, pp. 179–185. Biržiška, Mykolas. 1918a. Duonelaičio gyvenimas ir raštai su kalbos paaiškinimais. Vilnius: Martyno Kuktos spaustuvė, Lietuvių mokslo draugijos leidinys. Biržiška, Mykolas. 1918b. “Leidėjų pastebėjimas”. In [Kristijonas Donelaitis]. Duonelaičio raštai. Ed. Mykolas Biržiška. Vilnius: Martyno Kuktos spaustuvė, Lietuvių mokslo draugijos leidinys, p. 89. Citavičiūtė, Liucija. 2014. “Martynas Liudvikas Rėza – pirmasis Kristijono Donelaičio kūrybos publikuotojas”. In Martynas Liudvikas Rėza. Raštai. Vol. IV: Kristijono Donelaičio kūrybos publikavimas. Ed. Liucija Citavičiūtė. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, pp. 19– 51. Dilytė, Dalia. 2005. Kristijonas Donelaitis ir Antika. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. Dilytė, Dalia. 2014. Kristijono Donelaičio pasakėčios. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. 1818. Das Jahr in vier Gesaengen, ein laendliches Epos aus dem Litthauischen des Christian Donaleitis, genannt Donalitius, in gleichem Versmass ins Deutsche uebertragen von D. Ludwig Jedemin Rhesa, Prof. d. Theol., Koenigsberg: gedruckt in der Koenigl. Hartungschen Hofbuchdrukkerei. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. 1865. Christian Donaleitis Litauische Dichtungen. Erste vollständige Ausgabe mit Glossar von Aug. Schleicher. St. Petersburg: Commissionäre der Kaiserlichen akademie der Wissenschaften, in St. Petersburg Eggers u. Comp., in Riga N. Kymmel, in Leipzig Leopold Voss. Variants, 14 | 2019 140 [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. 1869. Christian Donalitius Littauische Dichtungen. Nach den Königsberger Handschriften mit metrischer Uebersetzung, kritischen Anmerkungen und genauem Glossar herausgegeben von G. H. F. Nesselmann. Königsberg: Verlag von Hübner & Matz. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. 1914. Kristijono Duonelaičio raštai: 1714–1914. 200 metų sukaktuvėms nuo autoriaus gimimo paminėti. Ed. Jurgis Šlapelis. Vilnius: Marijos Piaseckaitės-Šlapelienės knygyno leidinys. [Donelaitis, Kristijonas]. 1918. Duonelaičio raštai. Ed. Mykolas Biržiška. Vilnius: Martyno Kuktos spaustuvė, Lietuvių mokslo draugijos leidinys. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1940. Metai. Ed. Juozas Ambrazevičius, ill. by Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas. Kaunas: Švietimo Ministerijos Knygų leidimo komisijos leidinys Nr. 524, spaudė akcinės “Spindulio” bendrovės spaustuvė Kaune. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1945. Metai ir pasakėčios. Ed. Valys Drazdauskas. Kaunas: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1950. Raštai. Ed. Aleksandras Žirgulys. Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1956. Metai. Ed. Aleksandras Žirgulys, ill. by Vytautas Jurkūnas. Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1967. The Seasons. Transl. Nadas Rastenis. Los Angeles: Lithuanian Days Publishers. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1977. Raštai. Ed. Kostas Korsakas, Kostas Doveika, Leonas Gineitis, Jonas Kabelka, Kazys Ulvydas. Vilnius: Vaga, Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1983. Metai: Skiriama Kristijono Donelaičio 270-osioms gimimo metinėms. Ed. Kazys Ulvydas. Vilnius: Vaga. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1985. The Seasons. Transl. Peter Tempest. Vilnius: Vaga. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. 1994. Metai ir pasakėčios. Ed. Vytautas Vitkauskas. Vilnius: Baltos lankos. Doveika, Kostas, ed. 1990. Kristijonas Donelaitis literatūros moksle ir kritikoje. Vilnius: Vaga. Gineitis, Leonas and Algis Samulionis, eds. 1993. Darbai apie Kristijoną Donelaitį. Vilnius: Vaga, Lietuvos Mokslų akademija, Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas. Gineitis, Leonas. 1990. Kristijonas Donelaitis ir jo epocha. 2nd ed. Vilnius: Vaga, Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas. Jankevičiūtė, Giedrė and Mikas Vaicekauskas. 2013. “An Omnipotent Tradition: The Illustrations of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Poem Metai and the Creation of a Visual Canon”. Variants, 10, pp. 211– 34. Jovaišas, Albinas. 1969. Liudvikas Rėza. Vilnius: Vaga, Lietuvos TSR mokslų akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas. Krištopaitienė, Daiva. 2005. “Juozas Ambrazevičius – Donelaičio ‘Metų’ rengėjas”. In Juozas Brazaitis-Ambrazevičius – literatūrologas. Ed. Ramutis Karmalavičius. Colloquia 12. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, pp. 101–108. Krištopaitienė, Daiva. 2007. Kristijono Donelaičio raštų leidimai: tekstologinės problemos. Lietuvių tekstologijos studijos I. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas. Variants, 14 | 2019 141 Krištopaitienė, Daiva. 2014. “Pirmasis Metų leidimas: redakcinės pataisos”. In Martynas Liudvikas Rėza. Raštai. Vol. IV: Kristijono Donelaičio kūrybos publikavimas. Ed. Liucija Citavičiūtė. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, pp. 53–59. Lebedys, Jurgis. 1972 [1948–1949]. “K. Donelaičio raštų leidimai ir vertimai”. In Jurgis Lebedys. Lituanistikos baruose. Vol. I. Ed. Juozas Girdzijauskas. Vilnius: Vaga, pp. 237–262. Lebedys, Jurgis. 1977. Senoji lietuvių literatūra. Ed. Juozas Girdzijauskas. Vilnius: Mokslas. Maironis-Mačiulis, Jonas. 1932. “Kristijonas Duonelaitis”. Naujoji Romuva, 39, pp. 820–823; 40, pp. 845–848; 41, p. 868. Merkys, Vytautas. 1994a. Knygnešių laikai, 1864–1904. Vilnius: Valstybinis leidybos centras. Merkys, Vytautas. 1994b. Draudžiamosios lietuviškos spaudos kelias 1864–1904: Informacinė knyga. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla. Merkys, Vytautas. 2004. “Lietuvių tautos kova dėl spaudos laisvės 1864–1904 metais”. In Lietuviškos spaudos draudimas 1864–1904 metais. Ed. Aldona Bieliūnienė, Birutė Kulnytė, Rūta Subatniekienė. Vilnius: Lietuvos nacionalinis muziejus, pp. 7–22. Miškinis, Motiejus. 1939. “Kristijonas Duonelaitis”. In Motiejus Miškinis. Lietuvių literatūra. Part 1. Kaunas: Spaudos fondas, pp. 133–161. Nesselmann, Georg Heinrich Ferdinand. 1869. “Vorrede”. In [Kristijonas Donelaitis]. Christian Donalitius Littauische Dichtungen. Nach den Königsberger Handschriften mit metrischer Uebersetzung, kritischen Anmerkungen und genauem Glossar herausgegeben von G. H. F. Nesselmann. Königsberg: Verlag von Hübner & Matz, pp. I–XIV. Radzevičius, Algimantas. 2005. Klasiko kūrybos slėpiniai. Donelaitis ir Renesansas. Kaunas: Vilniaus universitetas, Kauno humanitarinis fakultetas. Raidžių draudimo metai. 2004. Ed. Darius Staliūnas. Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla. Sabaliauskas, Algirdas. 1979. Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija (iki 1940 m.). Vilnius: Mokslas, Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas. Stonienė, Vanda. 2006. Lietuvos knyga ir visuomenė: Nuo spaudos draudimo iki nepriklausomybės atkūrimo (1864–1990). Vilnius: Versus aureus. Šeferis, Vaidas. 2014. Kristijono Donelaičio “Metų” rišlumas. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas. Šlapelis, Jurgis. 1914. “Leidėjo pasiteisinimas”. [Kristijonas Donelaitis]. Kristijono Duonelaičio raštai: 1714–1914. 200 metų sukaktuvėms nuo autoriaus gimimo paminėti. Ed. Jurgis Šlapelis. Vilnius: Marijos Piaseckaitės-Šlapelienės knygyno leidinys, p. 88. Ulvydas, Kazys. 1977. “K. Donelaičio kūrinių kalbinis redagavimas”. In Kristijonas Donelaitis. Raštai. Ed. by Kostas Korsakas, Leonas Gineitis, Kazys Ulvydas, Kostas Doveika. Vilnius: Vaga, Lietuvos TSR Mokslų akademija, Lietuvių kalbos ir literatūros institutas, pp. 294–313. Ulvydas, Kazys. 1983. “Keletas redakcinių pastabų”. In Kristijonas Donelaitis. Metai: Skiriama Kristijono Donelaičio 270-osioms gimimo metinėms. Ed. Kazys Ulvydas. Vilnius: Vaga, pp. 173– 176. Vaicekauskas, Mikas, and Daiva Krištopaitienė. 2014. “Kristijono Donelaičio rankraščiai: šaltinio pristatymas”. In Kristijono Donelaičio rankraščiai: Fotografuotinis leidimas = The Manuscripts of Kristijonas Donelaitis: A Facsimile Edition = Die Handschriften von Kristijonas Donelaitis: Variants, 14 | 2019 142 Faksimileausgabe. Ed. Mikas Vaicekauskas. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, pp. 75–82. Vaicekauskas, Mikas, ed. 2001. Egzodo Donelaitis. Lietuvių išeivių tekstai apie Kristijoną Donelaitį. Vilnius: Aidai. Vaicekauskas, Mikas. 2009. “Donelaitis, Kristijonas”. In 300 Baltic Writers: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. A Reference Guide to Authors and Their Works. Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia, Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, pp. 71–73. Vaicekauskas, Mikas. 2012. “Lithuanian Handwritten Books in the Period of the Ban on the Lithuanian Press (1864–1904)”. Variants, 8, pp. 57–73. Vaicekauskas, Mikas. 2014. “The Problem with Red Ink: The Marking of Prosodic Signs in Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Manuscripts”. Variants, 11, pp. 153–179. Vaicekauskas, Mikas, ed. 2016. Kristijono Donelaičio reikšmės: Straipsnių rinkinys. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas. Vaškelis, Aleksas. 1964. “The Life and Age of Kristijonas Donelaitis”. Lituanus, 10(1), pp. 8–33. Vėbra, Rimantas. 1996. Lietuviškos spaudos draudimas 1864–1904 metais: Istorijos bruožai. Vilnius: Pradai. Vitkauskas, Vytautas. 1994. “Pastabos dėl Donelaičio tekstų tarmiškųjų dalykų”. Kristijonas Donelaitis, Metai ir pasakėčios. Ed. Vytautas Vitkauskas. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, pp. 169–170. NOTES 1. He was a pastor of the Tolminkiemis parish in Lithuania Minor (Lithuanian ‘Mažoji Lietuva’, German ‘Preussisch Litauen’; today’s ‘Chistye Prudy’ in the Kaliningrad region in Russia) since 1743 until his death in 1780. 2. For more on Donelaitis, see Vaškelis 1964; Lebedys 1977, 194–316; Gineitis 1990; Doveika 1990; Gineitis and Samulionis 1993; Vaicekauskas 2001; Dilytė 2005; Radzevičius 2005; Krištopaitienė 2007; Vaicekauskas 2009; Jankevičiūtė and Vaicekauskas 2013; Dilytė 2014; Šeferis 2014; Vaicekauskas 2014; Vaicekauskas and Krištopaitienė 2014; Vaicekauskas 2016. 3. More about Rhesa’s work on Donelaitis, see Citavičiūtė 2014. 4. Hereinafter, continuous line numbering is given; the following abbreviations indicate the parts of the poem: “Pavasario linksmybės” (“Joys of Spring”) – Pl, “Vasaros darbai” (“Summer Toils”) – Vd, “Rudenio gėrybės” (“Autumn Wealth”) – Rg, and “Žiemos rūpesčiai” (“Winter Cares”) – Žr. 5. For English translation, see Donelaitis 1985; another translation was published in 1967 (Donelaitis 1967). 6. For more on the Ban on the Lithuanian Press (1864–1904), see Merkys 1994a; Merkys 1994b; Merkys 2004; Raidžių draudimo metai 2004; Stonienė 2006, 17–32; Vaicekauskas 2012; Vėbra 1996. 7. The book was reprinted in 1921 and 1927. 8. The book was reprinted in 1941 and 1948. 9. This edition was reprinted in 2000, 2002, 2010, and 2011. 10. On the autographs of Metai and on writing, revising, correcting and retouching the text, see Vaicekauskas and Krištopaitienė 2014; Vaicekauskas 2014. Variants, 14 | 2019 143 ABSTRACTS Abstract: The poem Metai (The Seasons) by Kristijonas Donelaitis is unanimously recognized as one of the best and most fundamental works of the national canon of Lithuanian literature. The poem’s first edition came out in 1818, almost forty years after the author’s death. Already this edition was characterized by a huge editorial intervention in the authentic text of the work. Since that time, a variegated history of editing the poem’s text began, ranging from romanticized presentation of the text of the work and critical editions in the nineteenth-century German tradition to the building of the national literary canon and very obvious editorial interventions in the text of the twentieth century editions. The editing strategies of the basic editions of the poem were determined by the sociocultural context of that time as well as the type and aims of the concrete edition. Descriptions of the poem Metai as the first or most fundamental work of Lithuanian belles lettres can be supplemented by adding that it is also one of the most intensely edited works in the history of Lithuanian literature. INDEX Keywords: Editing, Scholarly editing, Editorial interventions, Lithuanian literature (18th century). AUTHOR MIKAS VAICEKAUSKAS Mikas Vaicekauskas is a senior researcher of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is author of Lietuviškos katalikiškos XVI–XVIII amžiaus giesmės (Lithuanian Catholic Hymns of the 16th–18th Century, 2005); Motiejaus Valančiaus užrašų ir atsiminimų rankraščiai Lietuvių mokslo draugijoje: 1911–1914 metų istorija (Motiejus Valančius’s Notes and Reminiscence Manuscripts in the Lithuanian Society of Science: The History of 1911–1914, 2009), and Visagalė tradicija: Kristijono Donelaičio poemos „Metai“ iliustracijos ir vaizdinis kanonas (with Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, An Omnipotent Tradition: The Illustrations and the Visual Canon of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Poem “Metai”, 2013), and editor of Kristijono Donelaičio rankraščiai: Fotografuotinis leidimas (The Manuscripts of Kristijonas Donelaitis: A Facsimile Edition, 2014); Kristijonas Donelaitis, Raštai, t. 1: Metai: dokumentinis ir kritinis leidimas (Kristijonas Donelaitis, Complete Works, vol. 1: Metai [The Seasons]: documentary and critical edition, 2015). Currently working on Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Complete Works, vol. 2: Poetical Works documentary and critical edition. Variants, 14 | 2019 144 Review Essay Variants, 14 | 2019 145 The (likely) Last Edition of Copernicus’s Libri revolutionum André Goddu REFERENCES Nicolas Copernic, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Des revolutions des orbes célestes. 3 volumes. Science et Humanisme, Collection published under the patronage of the Association Guillaume Budé (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2015). Vol. I: Introduction by Michel-Pierre Lerner and Alain-Philippe Segonds with the collaboration of Concetta Luna, Isabelle Pantin, and Denis Savoie, xxviii + 859 pp. Vol. II: Critical Edition and translation by Lerner, Segonds, and Jean-Pierre Verdet with the collaboration of Concetta Luna, viii + 537 pp. with French and Latin on facing pages and with the same page numbers. Vol. III: Notes, appendices, iconographic dossier, and general index by Lerner, Segonds, and Verdet with the collaboration of Luna, Savoie, and Michel Toulmonde, xviii + 783 pp. and 34 plates. 1 This edition of Copernicus’s major work, probably the last for the foreseeable future, represents the culmination of efforts that can be traced back to 1973. The two fundamental sources of De revolutionibus are Copernicus’s autograph copy which survived by sheer luck and the first edition published in Nuremberg in 1543. Since the publication of the first edition in 1543 there have been several editions, notably a Polish critical edition and a German critical edition which appeared respectively in 1975 and in 1984. The Polish edition is based on Copernicus’s autograph, and the German edition is based primarily on the 1543 edition. The Polish editors produced a mixed text, one that is essentially the autograph integrated with the 1543 edition, the aim of which was to produce a perfectly completed work, a goal that Copernicus and his disciple Georg Joachim Rheticus never achieved. The French editors of the volume presently under review, like their German colleagues, decided to adopt the 1543 edition as the basis for their critical edition, using the autograph to correct the published version only where the 1543 edition was faulty because of evident reading errors or Variants, 14 | 2019 146 typographical misprints. The critical edition (Volume II) is followed (also in Volume II) by an edition of the most important passages from the autograph that were not retained in the 1543 edition. While many of the differences between the French edition and the German edition are minor, the principal difference is that the title and prefatory materials in the German edition were contaminated by elements drawn from the autograph, and that the German edition does not include a German translation. The French editors are consistent in their application of the principles and the use of the 1543 edition as the base text and more complete in the production of a translation. After so many editions, one hesitates to pronounce this one “definitive”, but it is difficult to imagine any more major revisions. 2 Volume I, the Introduction, is divided into six chapters: Copernicus’s biography, his minor astronomical works and the preparation of De revolutionibus, a summary of the content of his major work, the reception of heliocentrism between 1540 and 1616, Copernicus’s precursors, and a history of the text. The volume opens with a table of abbreviations of editions and works of Copernicus, of other texts, and of works cited often in short form. It should be noted here that there is no comprehensive bibliography, meaning that the works of many authors cited in the footnotes are not included in the list of works cited in short form; readers will find the names of authors in the indices, but they will have to consult each entry for all of the works of authors cited. The six chapters of the Introduction are followed by 17 excursuses (Annexes) on topics that could not have received the attention that they deserve if they were treated in the main text of the Introduction. The last excursus deals with Copernicus’s library. Volume I concludes with indices of ancient and modern names cited in the introduction and a geographical index. 3 Volume II contains the critical edition and French translation, followed by an index of personal and geographical names cited by Copernicus, and by an index of words that furnishes an inventory of the astronomical, mathematical, and physical lexicon of De revolutionibus. Volume III contains an analytical summary of De revolutionibus, notes on each of its six books, a series of 17 complementary notes in which the editors have grappled with more general problems and subjects concerning different sections of the work, and notes on the passages in the autograph that were suppressed. The collection of notes constitutes a textual, historical, and technical commentary, followed by an appendix on the condemnation of heliocentrism and the censorship of De revolutionibus, a separate section on Spanish reactions to the Roman Index and the censorship of Copernicus’s work, an iconographical Dossier (with plates collected at the end of the volume), and it is completed with an index of ancient and modern names, a geographical index, and an index of notable subjects that bear on the astronomical, mathematical, and physical topics treated in Volume I and the notes of Volume III, and is complementary to the index of words from Volume II. 4 As I begin with my evaluation of the edition, readers should be aware that the editors have referred to several of my publications, some approvingly and some not, but on the whole constructively, and so it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge my favourable reception of their principles and their execution of such an intrinsically difficult project. They are conservative in their assessment of evidence, and on the whole I agree with their reliance on confirmable documentary evidence. That said, there are almost inevitably differences of opinion, and I shall attempt as objectively as possible to point out what I perceive to be some inconsistencies and problems. I should Variants, 14 | 2019 147 also add that since I received my copy of the edition, I have had only a month to examine it, so this will very likely not represent my final thoughts on these volumes. It should be noted as well that we do not know what differences of opinion there may be among the editors. This is presumably a work of consensus, and here and there one gets the sense that some carefully expressed opinions may be the result of discussions that did not lead to a complete resolution. Be that as it may, the completion of this project provides an outstanding platform for the continuation of discussion and debates on the Copernican achievement. By way of concluding these introductory remarks, I refer readers to pp. xiv-xv of Volume I for indispensable comments about the contributions of Denis Savoie, Michel Toulmonde, Isabelle Pantin, and Concetta Luna to the completion of the edition. Dedicated to the memory of Paweł Czartoryski and René Taton, the edition acknowledges its debt to predecessors, and it concludes with an appreciation for the contribution of the late Alain Segonds, who sadly did not live to see the completion of the project. 5 And now to matters of substance. I begin with comments on principles of interpretation. Although they do not cite an explicit formulation of a methodological principle of interpretation that they commend until p. 270, it is clear from their rejection of numerous conjectures and reconstructions and from their adoption of others that they shared a principle which they termed “methodological prudence”. In evaluating suggestions about sources that Copernicus supposedly used, this principle advises: “The kind of evidence that we need in such cases includes annotations in the books that we know Copernicus owned or read, expressions in De revolutionibus or in Commentariolus that parallel uniquely arguments or comments in sources that he consulted, or quotations and facts that we can show he borrowed from another author (for example, Copernicus’s evident reliance on Regiomontanus’s Epitome). Other than this quality of evidence, conjecture and speculation based on similarities can often be traced back to another text common to all possible intermediaries, such as one by Aristotle, Ptolemy, De sphera, or some version of Theorica planetarum. Such speculation leaves us with no way of knowing whether Copernicus responded to a suggestion in some commentary or reacted directly to the original text” (Goddu 2010, p. 187). The application of methodological prudence, however, still leaves room for disagreement, as we shall see in a number of cases discussed below. Copernicus’s Postulates. 6 According to Noel Swerdlow, “The seven postulates, incorrectly called axioms, [. . .] are hardly self-evident” (Swerdlow 1973, 435-438; see also 423-512,). In his view, one of the postulates (the first) stands by itself, and four of the propositions (2, 4, 5 and 7) are not postulates at all but rather deductions from postulates 3 and 6. In sum, the postulates are not axioms, and their logical relationship is far from clear. In distinguishing between an Aristotelian conception of axiom (according to which an axiom is a first proposition on which further demonstrations depend) and a Euclidean conception (according to which an axiom is a self-evident proposition accessible to all without instruction), the editors agree in part with Swerdlow on the first objection: Copernicus ’s axioms are not self-evident (I:233). The editors go further, however, and argue that there is a logical link in the succession of postulates (I:235). In enumerating the propositions, however, the editors do not explain exactly what is “logical” about the Variants, 14 | 2019 148 succession of the postulates. What is the logical connection between the denial of one centre of all the celestial spheres (first postulate) and the claim that the Earth is not the centre of the universe (second postulate)? And how does the third, which places the Sun near the centre of the universe, follow from the first? By what reasoning does one move from the first to the second, and from the second to the third? Enumerating and paraphrasing the postulates does not explain their logical connections. The editors understood the dialectical procedure that I used to explain the connections (I:251-253), but my brief recitation was evidently not clear enough. I proposed that Copernicus literally used a method of attack in the form of questions (petitiones) to formulate the postulates and their sequence. In other words, the postulates are both questions and answers. Do the celestial spheres have one centre or many? If many (first postulate), then Earth cannot be the centre of the universe but only of gravity and of the lunar sphere (second). Why are all of the models for planetary spheres related to the position of the Sun? If their motions are relative to the Sun, then we may assume that the spheres encircle the Sun approximately in the middle of their motions (third), and so on. In other words, the postulates are not logical in a deductive way but rather logical in the manner of a Socratic dialectical inquiry.1 7 The above comments apply the principle of methodological prudence advocated by the editors. Relying on a genuine Copernican annotation, I suggested how it could have motivated Copernicus to formulate questions and lead him from one postulate to the next. To sum up, we are in agreement to the following extent — the postulates are not axiomatic in the Euclidean sense, there is not a logically deductive relationship between the postulates, and the results described later in the text derive from the postulate of a moving Earth. Precursors and Maragha Precedents 8 The editors’ evaluation of the notion of “precursor” altogether (I:520-551) marks an important methodological contribution to discussion of the relation between Copernicus and his predecessors from epistemological and logical perspectives. The editors point out, however, that Copernicus himself mentioned authors who had put him on the path to heliocentrism. Indeed, Copernicus’s reliance on his predecessors is evident from the sources that he owned and some (now lost) that he consulted. His dependence on authorities is undeniable. That said, we also have to take into account the extent to which his sources provided him with cover for his almost universally rejected proposals about Earth’s motions. He was not a lone hero or completely original in his astronomical system, yet he was the first to propose a complete and detailed cosmological system based on Earth’s motions and the Sun’s stability. However much other authors may have been suggestive of a heliocentric system with Earth in motion, none of them proposed the system that he advanced. For instance, the Pythagoreans as cited by Copernicus proposed that Earth is not the centre of the universe and that it moves, but none of them created a cosmological and astronomical system based on those ideas that could account for the observed celestial motions. No predecessor who held some part of an overall theory had put it all together in the way that Copernicus did. Copernicus’s claims in this regard succeeded in fooling contemporaries and even some of his followers. Variants, 14 | 2019 149 9 In other words, and to be clear as possible on the subject, yes, there were authors before Copernicus who had proposed the Earth’s axial rotation, some who considered the possibility that Earth moves from its position, some who proposed that the planets move around a central fire (not identified with the Sun), but there is no one prior to Copernicus who adopted all of these ideas in the form of a heliocentric (strictly speaking, heliostatic) system with the Earth moving around the Sun with the Earth’s axis tilted so as to account for the Sun’s apparent motion on the ecliptic and for the change of seasons, and to account for the observed motions of the other planets. Beyond that, no one had proposed that Earth’s annual motion could contribute to saving the axiom about the perfectly uniform and circular motions of the celestial spheres. That last assertion brings us, then, to the hypothesis about Copernicus’s acquaintance with and dependence on Maragha theory, specifically the Tusi-couple and bi-epicyclic geometrical models. 10 The editors, reacting mostly to strong versions of what amounts to “blueprint copying” by Copernicus of Maragha models, cite a number of sceptics and questioners in order to reject the evidence of Copernicus’s dependence on these models. The editors raise a number of issues, and point out a number of weaknesses in the assertions of supporters. Their challenge will anger supporters and perpetuate the impasse that has existed for several decades. In my view, discussion of the hypotheses about Copernicus’s acquaintance with Maragha precedents has gotten entirely out of hand. Some proponents have over-reacted to those who have merely raised questions, resorting in the latest versions to, in effect, ad hominem arguments and ideological posturing.2 On the other hand, some opponents have not considered all of the arguments and evidence in a constructive fashion, adopting an excessively narrow view of transmission, albeit in reaction to versions that amount to blueprint copying. They have also, justly, raised pertinent questions about how Copernicus, incapable on his own of constructing geometrical models and, in effect, mathematically incompetent, could have understood, however incompletely, the complex kinematic models that he supposedly saw and that he then adapted for his own ends. From such considerations, the editors conclude, in effect, that none of the evidence provided to date prevents us from thinking that Copernicus produced his models independently (VI:554-555). I agree with that judgment, but it is also not entirely satisfactory. 11 As readers may surmise from the section above on postulates, I am looking for matters on which we agree or, at least, may be able to agree. It is probably hoping for too much to propose calm, reasonable, and fair discussion of the arguments and evidence, but I proceed here with a brief discussion of the main strengths and weaknesses of both sides, and conclude with a suggestion about a middle ground between blueprint copying and independent development. The editors cite the literature, excluding items that appeared after the edition went to press, but they do not consider adequately the strongest arguments, in my view, made in support of Copernicus’s acquaintance with Maragha precedents. In his 1973 edition and commentary on Commentariolus, Noel Swerdlow presented an argument that has the character of a “consilience of inductions” (469). After raising questions about Copernicus’s understanding of the fundamental properties of the first anomaly, and whether as a consequence his model was his own invention or something he learned from a still undiscovered transmission to the west of a description of Ibn ash-Shatir’s planetary theory, Swerdlow argues as follows: Variants, 14 | 2019 150 My own inclination is to suspect the latter, not because I think Copernicus incapable of carrying out such an analysis of the first anomaly in Ptolemy’s model (he certainly shows considerable ingenuity in deriving the heliocentric representation of the second anomaly), but rather because the identity with the earlier planetary theory of Copernicus’s models for the moon and the first anomaly of the planets and the variation of the radius of Mercury’s orbit and the generation of rectilinear motion by two circular motions seems too remarkable a series of coincidences to admit the possibility of independent discovery. (Swerdlow 1973, p. 469) 12 The strength of the argument rests on the convergence of four independent assertions and on the improbability of a coincidence. The second strong argument derives from Copernicus himself. In the autograph of De rev. III, 4 and III, 5, passages that were deleted in the final version, he indicates that others had called the model of reciprocal motion “motion along the diameter of the circle.” The editors discuss these passages (III:257-259), but in questioning Copernicus’s dependence on the Tusi-couple, perhaps preferring a dependence on Proclus, they are too hasty in dismissing the implication that versions of these mechanisms were known in the 16th century. I shall return to this issue below, but let us consider first Swerdlow’s claim about the improbability of coincidence among four independent items. 13 The independence of the items, when examined more closely and individually, exposes a weakness. Let us take them in order, referring also to arguments of other proponents that reveal the problem in its clearest form. First is the Tusi-couple, a version of which Copernicus used in De rev. III, 4. Proponents describe Copernicus’s version, sometimes explicitly but at least implicitly, as an example of blueprint copying. Some, referring to the Tusi-couple, also claim that he copied it from some unknown source. Furthermore, their language is puzzling. Although the models are very similar, they are not identical, yet some of them continue to insist on their identity. Accordingly, we encounter nonsense such as the following: The versions are not perfectly identical but are said to be identical nonetheless.3 In fact, even allowing for the fact that Copernicus saw a copy of al-Tusi’s version, they are not identical, meaning that if he saw the earlier version, he changed it. In the autograph version, routinely ignored by proponents, Copernicus rotated the outer circle 45° clockwise, and added another circle. The differences may be trivial, but they require explanation. Instead, proponents ignore them, almost always referring to the version that appears in the 1543 edition (also not completely identical with the earlier versions), which raises the additional question of why Copernicus and/ or Rheticus altered the figure as it appeared in the autograph. Were they relying on some more recent source, or was the reason itself a matter of conformity with the way other similar figures are presented in the edition? To my knowledge, there has been no examination of this matter. Instead, we get the following sort of explication: This is not to say that there are no remaining difficulties with attributing knowledge of Islamic astronomical models to Copernicus. We do not know in detail where, when or how Copernicus acquired this knowledge. We do not know how he bridged the gap between the original language and the Latin in which he himself worked. . . . In this paper we will suggest that the answers to the open questions outlined above are becoming more secure, but are still not firm. (Barker and Heidarzadeh, p. 22) After admitting and conceding these difficulties and others, they jump to a conclusion that we can describe only as a textbook example of a non sequitur: However, the basis for attributing knowledge of Islamic astronomical models to Copernicus is so firm that it cannot be seriously challenged. Variants, 14 | 2019 151 (ibid.) The paragraph should have ended with the sentence preceding the conclusion. The facts stated there represent the state of our knowledge and our ignorance of Copernicus’s precise hypothetical source. 14 The second issue concerns the double-epicycle model and Copernicus’s reliance on Ibn ash-Shatir for his version. Swerdlow (456) says that Copernicus’s lunar model, except for its parameters, is identical to the model of Ibn ash-Shatir. Later (p. 504) he says that he “copied” ash-Shatir’s model for Mercury without fully understanding it. What in fact are compared are modern versions of the models, not the ones found in De rev. IV, 3 and V, 4 (where Earth’s annual motion is included). Now, the descriptions indeed show that these are bi-epicyclic and epicyclet models respectively, but where are the versions that Copernicus supposedly copied? As far as I know, there is no example of a model in the sources that Copernicus could have copied, so how could this possibly be a case of blueprint copying? What original did Copernicus copy, and where is it? Now, even if my remarks expose a weakness in Swerdlow’s “consilience argument”, namely the implication that Copernicus merely copied models that he had seen, they do not touch on the apparent fact that there was acquaintance with, if not models, then at least descriptions of or, even more generally, ideas about reciprocation and bi-epicyclic models in the 15th and 16th centuries, and possibly even as early as the 14th century in Western Europe. 15 Taken together, these enigmas argue against blueprint copying, although they are not proof of independent development either. Here is where, in my view, some opponents have made a mistake. On the other hand, mere questioning of Copernicus’s reliance on Maragha precedents has evoked a disproportionate response from supporters, especially Ragep and Barker and Vesel. For example, in reaction to my first effort in this regard, they either ignored the tone of questioning that I clearly established, or they ignored my plea for additional archival research to discover the source that Copernicus used. The latter in particular has been greeted with a flood of more speculation, missing the point altogether. Ragep justly and correctly demolished my reliance on a flawed reconstruction by the late Garrett Droppers of an account by Nicole Oresme, but to his credit Ragep went on to propose a better interpretation that does indeed suggest a version of the Tusi-couple. My reconstruction was based to a large extent on the possibility that Oresme’s version could have been transmitted indirectly to Copernicus, but that would clearly mean that Copernicus did rely on predecessors, and so his version could not have been a completely independent development on his part. That admission seems to have eluded Ragep and Barker and Vesel. 16 Further reflection on these circumstances has also led me to re-evaluate my criticism of the discovery by Jerzy Dobrzycki and Richard Kremer of a source that was available to Copernicus around 1510 (see Dobrzycki and Kremer 1996, 187-237). Their focus was on the double-epicycle model. At first, I saw this as just another example of the same sort of argument advanced heretofore, but I overlooked their explicit assertions about a more widespread and diverse transmission of sources and models, which at the time I did not distinguish from the blueprint-copying versions. In his own inimitable and straightforward way, Owen Gingerich concluded that Copernicus may have learned of the double-epicycle model without any direct knowledge of Maragha precedents (Gingerich 2004, 264). What is especially intriguing about Dobrzycki’s and Kremer’s Variants, 14 | 2019 152 argument and Gingerich’s suggestion is that it leaves room open for a middle between blueprint copying and independent development. They are perhaps not as explicit or clear about this as they could have been, but in any case their version suggests the need for another category. Equally important is the possibility that Ragep might be open to the suggestion that follows.4 17 This brings me at last to my suggestion. Drawing on examples from the history of technology and anthropology, I suggest that we introduce into this discussion a middle category called “idea diffusion”.5 Idea diffusion is more nebulous than blueprint copying, but it also undermines independent development. In this case, we would be looking for sources in the 15th century, derived from Georg Peurbach, evidently transmitted to Albert of Brudzewo, Johannes Angelus, and probably others, and these are sources that we can at least place closer to Copernicus. For instance, in Brudzewo’s Commentariolum we find a spherical version of a double-epicycle model. Barker and Vesel have rejected this suggestion as too different from the kinematic version developed by Copernicus, but this objection clearly reveals the circularity of their argument.6 Copernicus, they claim in effect, must have copied a version that he saw because that was all that he was capable of doing. On the contrary, the version by Brudzewo and the reliance by Angelus on versions of the model may have given Copernicus sufficient information for him to develop his own version, and, in any case, he was thoroughly original in applying the solution to the motions of the planets in a heliocentric framework (in Commentariolus), and then adapting them for his mature version in De revolutionibus. In other words, he could have relied on suggestions or verbal descriptions that derived ultimately from Maragha sources without the slightest awareness of their origin.7 18 Earlier I had referred to the principle of methodological prudence. Here again in the case of Copernicus’s acquaintance with Maragha precedents, there are reasonable doubts and questions. It seems likely that the Maragha models or, at least, their ideas were known in western Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, in which case we would be talking about idea diffusion rather than blueprint copying or independent development. It seems to me that such a middle category fits better with the evidence provided by Dobrzycki and Kremer, Robert Morrison (2014, 32-57) and even Barker and Heidarzadeh. The interpretation of the editors of the French edition, recognizing European sources available to Copernicus, also fits better with idea diffusion than with independent development. Robert Westman’s Thesis about Astrology and Astrological Culture. 19 The next two issues also involve evaluation of evidence, and here I begin with the editors’ rejection of Robert Westman’s thesis about the role of astrology and astrological culture in motivating Copernicus to develop his theory. The editors have rejected Robert Westman’s account of the origin of Copernicus’s heliocentrism (Westman 2011) on the grounds that they find it insufficiently supported by the sources (for example: I: 90n3; I:388n2; I:391-395). As readers of my work know, I myself prefer an account that focuses on the problems that Copernicus recognized with Ptolemaic astronomy, and although I consider contextual matters seriously throughout, especially Copernicus’s reliance on predecessors and early printed books, my Variants, 14 | 2019 153 reconstruction is closer to those presented by Noel Swerdlow and Bernard Goldstein. Recently, I have published an article commending the reconstructions of Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer and Curtis Wilson, with which I am very sympathetic, all of which is to say that my proclivities lean towards accounts that begin with the technical problems (qualitatively considered) that bothered Copernicus and the solutions that he proposed for solving them (Goddu 2016, 225-253). 20 That said, I have also acknowledged the under-determination of Copernicus’s theory, by which I understand the absence of strict proof for his heliocentric cosmology. Such under-determination has been one of the main motivations for Robert Westman’s reconstruction, leading him to seek more contextualist and practical reasons that persuaded Copernicus to adopt a heliocentric theory. On this account, Copernicus recognized problems with the theories underlying the practice of astrology, with the relation between astrology and natural philosophy, and with the reliability of astrological forecasts. Because Copernicus says little about astrology, Westman’s account emphasizes the culture of astrology during the long sixteenth century, and the reasons why it is unlikely that Copernicus was exceptional in his regard for astrology. The strongest textual evidence comes from Copernicus’s reference to Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (1496), Rheticus’s enthusiastic comments about astrology in Narratio prima, and indirect evidence (a letter by Bernard Wapowski) of Copernicus’s having produced an ephemerides (the last overlooked by Westman). Westman, like Karl Burmeister, believes that Copernicus worked closely with Rheticus in the composition of the Narratio. Now, reviewers have pointed out problems with this evidence, and I have to admit that I share some of these doubts. First, Rheticus worked his way through Copernicus’s manuscript quickly, and most experts concede that he did not master all of the details. In fact, there are errors, and it is curious that Copernicus did not correct them. On the other hand, there are passages in the Narratio where Rheticus expresses a feature of the theory more clearly than Copernicus himself does (for example, III:412n7). Second, Rheticus presents his astrological interpretation as if it were his own idea and contribution. Third, his citation and “refutation” of Pico does not refer to the passage that Westman believes influenced Copernicus. To the last objection Westman responds that they were in Löbau, not Frombork, when they composed Narratio, and did not have the sources in front of them to check. Are we to assume that Copernicus forgot the source that supposedly inspired him to undertake the reform of astrology and astronomy? Fourth, we presume that Copernicus owned a copy of Narratio, but it has evidently disappeared, leaving us without a source that could possibly answer the relevant questions about his relationship with Rheticus and the writing of Narratio. Fifth, in the dedication to Pope Paul III, known for his encouragement of astrological practice, and whom Copernicus praises for his love of mathematics (II:9; III:59-60), it is curious that Copernicus passes up an opportunity to even suggest how his new theory will contribute to the reform of astrology. 21 All of that said, the dismissal of Westman’s thesis has been hasty in my view. One of the issues that deserves closer examination is the relation between the ordering of the planets and the effect that this would have on astrological prognostications. Westman thinks that determining the order was subservient to the aim of reforming astrology, but one could just as well argue that the relationship to astrology provided an additional reason for Copernicus to resolve one of his primary concerns, the unique Variants, 14 | 2019 154 ordering of the planets. He was, after all, explicit about the disagreements among geocentrists over the ordering of the planets, concluding that geocentrism did not possess the resources to settle the question. To Copernicus it was scandalous to suggest that the most perfect artisan had not ordered the planets according to a definite and knowable plan. Copernicus may have been more concerned, still, with the relation between astrology and natural philosophy than with astrological prognostication where not just the order of the planets but also the motions of the planets in longitude ought to be known with greater certainty. Indeed, in Wapowski’s letter he refers explicitly to modifications of the atmosphere. In other words, astrology provided another reason to settle definitely questions about the motions of the planets in longitude, the ordering of the planets, and the consequences for natural phenomena in the sub-lunar world. 22 The different propensities or inclinations that authors have towards different kinds of solutions leave us at an impasse. There is no objective way to resolve these differences. They are more than just matters of taste, but rather testify to deep-seated beliefs that cannot be analysed any further or adjudicated in a definitive way. Any continued argument over them is repetitive and circular. Where one finds the technical analyses deficient and even shallow, the other finds the contextual unpersuasive and trivial. Such differences cannot be settled by amassing more evidence – the differences prescribe the weight assigned to different kinds of evidence, and so the conclusion reached comes down to different philosophical and historical dispositions. My comments above suggest steps towards a compromise, but for those already committed to one or the other approach, the different inclinations will likely remain unaffected. Dilwyn Knox on Copernicus’s Sources. 23 The editors acknowledge Dilwyn Knox’s important studies on Copernicus’s theory of the elements and elemental motion (see for example Knox 2007). Citing the principle of methodological prudence, however, they are at best non-committal with respect to Knox’s hypothesis about Copernicus’s reliance on a text from the Suidae Lexicon for details about his analysis of natural and violent motions. The editors (III:118-119) are correct to point out differences between Knox and me about Copernicus’s reading of the passage, but I agree with Knox that Copernicus probably consulted the passage. There are some peculiar features in Copernicus’s assertions that parallel the text on kínesis that we find nowhere else. Now, we do not know for a fact that this lexicon was in Varmia, but, unlike Albert of Brudzewo’s Commentariolum, copies of which are rare, the lexicon was well known and widespread. In short, there are connections here that point uniquely to the Suda as Copernicus’s source. The editors’ doubt that Copernicus’s Greek was good enough to use the dictionary does not strike me as altogether fair. After all, Knox did not claim that Copernicus read the entire dictionary, but merely one verifiable entry. I see no reason to doubt his ability to work his way through that entry and find comments that he thought were relevant to his critique of Aristotle’s assumption about the simplicity of natural elemental motions. It seems to me that Knox has been very cautious in all of his publications, examining the sources meticulously, and correcting indeed my initial doubts about Copernicus’s use of both editions of Pliny’s Natural History that were in Varmia (Knox 2013, 77-86; Knox 2012, 111-148). Variants, 14 | 2019 155 Some Final Brief Comments. 24 I conclude this review essay with some reflections on the chronology of the writing of De revolutionibus, its title, the genesis of Copernicus’s heliocentrism, the Galileo affair, and the major achievement that this edition represents. The editors are rightly cautious about issuing any definitive resolution of disagreements about the dating of Copernicus’s major text. Copernicus may have begun composing De revolutionibus between 1524 and 1529 (I:101; I:563-577). Based on the earliest paper that Copernicus used, Edward Rosen thought that he wrote some parts as early as 1515, but Jerzy Zathey moved that date up to 1520 and concludes that much of it was written in the 1530s. The editors also point out that the catalogue of stars, in particular, probably went through several stages before the version in the holograph (III:475-478). Furthermore, Copernicus entered values for the apogees of the planets in the margin of the catalogue, but he may have added them much later, leaving the dating of the earliest stages of the catalogue perhaps earlier than 1520. The fact is that we do not know exactly when the earliest paper was available. For his part, Noel Swerdlow also concludes that Copernicus wrote most of the text in the 1530s, and the evidence seems to support his analysis. Jarosław Włodarczyk has made a useful distinction between a “long” and “short” chronology, which readers should consult (Włodarczyk 2015, 31-34). The editors provide a superb summary of all of the major evidence, explaining in meticulous detail the difficulties. On one detail there may be need for a slight revision, which, however, could have a consequence for the dating of the holograph. Copernicus evidently consulted George of Trebizond’s translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest, which was first published in 1528, for a comment in Book I and some other corrections. It has been generally assumed that Copernicus did not consult manuscripts; however, we should note that Grażyna Rosińska reports two manuscript versions of parts of Trebizond’s translation, one of which was copied by Martin Biem of Olkusz, dated to the second half of the 15th century, and the second is assigned to the first half of the 16th century.8 25 Likewise, we do not know with certainty the title that Copernicus preferred. The title of the 1543 edition is De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, but because Rheticus crossed out the words “orbium coelestium” in his copies, the editors suppose that Osiander added those words in addition to the unauthorized “letter to the reader”, and also because Rheticus believed them to refer to the “compensatory counter-turning” spheres of Eudoxos-Callippos-Aristotle (III:443-450). Although Copernicus probably preferred the title Libri revolutionum, it was not because he objected to celestial spheres. Almost all experts are in agreement that Copernicus adopted the existence of celestial spheres. 26 On the origins of Copernicus’s heliocentrism, the editors refer to Copernicus’s own comments about his objections to the equant (I:328-329; III:355n2; II:342:343, and III: 361n6 on the annual motion of Earth as cause of apparent non-uniformities), but they seem to be partial to Bernard Goldstein’s account (I:373-381; see Goldstein 2002, 219-233), and they cite a paper by me as essentially in agreement with Goldstein’s analysis (Goddu 2006, pp. 37-53). Unfortunately, they apparently overlook my observation that Goldstein accounted for Copernicus’s acceptance of heliocentrism, not its formulation. In other words, Copernicus adopted a theory, according to Goldstein, that was already formulated. It is curious that the editors would overlook this distinction, for they argue at some length for Copernicus’s originality (I:386-390) and that none of the theories prior to Copernicus, not even those cited by Copernicus Variants, 14 | 2019 156 himself, was a precursor of his theory. As they themselves maintain, whatever ideas there were prior to Copernicus about the motions of Earth, the motions of the celestial spheres around a central fire, and the like, no one prior to Copernicus proposed all of these ideas, locating a static Sun at the center of the cosmos, and attempted to construct a complete astronomical system with all of the planets in motion around the Sun that could account for the observed celestial motions. According to the editors, once Copernicus understood that the relationship between distance and period of revolution could not be completely verified without putting Earth in motion, only then did he focus on the calculations. The starting-point, then, was a cosmological intuition, not a derivation based on the analysis of technical propositions. To put it in other words, in Copernicus’s heliocentric theory the explication of a score of particular circumstances proper to planetary motions flow directly from the order, distances, and periods of the Earth and planets in ways that are either absent from or inexplicable in Ptolemy’s geocentric system (I:273n1). 27 The conclusions that the editors have reached, accommodating as best as they could the most complete and persuasive accounts produced to date, probably represent the state of the question in a form that will satisfy those who focus on Copernicus’s major works and their relationship to ancient cosmological tradition. That said, we must also acknowledge that many questions remain open, and that Copernicus’s comments about his objections to the equant remain a problem that just does not go away, at least not for some of us.9 28 On the Galileo affair I have only some suggestions that touch on the relationship between Osiander’s letter to the reader and the early stages of the affair between 1616 and 1620. The editors do not include Cardinal Bellarmine’s letter to Foscarini among their texts, but they refer to it, and, in any case, the letter is well known in the field. For my purposes here, its most important features are Bellarmine’s belief that Copernicus himself did not present his own theory absolutely but merely suppositionally, and his belief that Copernicus proposed his theory in order to eliminate eccentrics and epicycles. The first mistake is probably due to his ignorance of the authorship of the letter to the reader. The second probably derives from the figure that was published in De revolutionibus (I:10), which is highly misleading. I begin with Bellarmine’s letter because it sets up the confusion over “hypotheses” that contaminated the entire affair down to Galileo’s condemnation in 1633. While the heliocentric theory was literally condemned in 1616 as contrary to Sacred Scripture, Copernicus’s book was not absolutely prohibited but rather suspended until it could be corrected. Why? The authorities recognized that there was much in the book that was useful, but we may also suppose that they too were unaware of Osiander’s authorship of the letter. Had they known that Copernicus held his theory as absolutely true, then they might have prohibited the book altogether. The evidence for that conclusion appears in the censorship document of 1620, where the committee says that Copernicus’s book had been completely prohibited in 1616. If that had been the case, then surely the Congregation would not have suspended the book until corrected. Why correct or censor a book that has been completely prohibited? Now, the authors of the 1620 document address that question by emphasizing again the utility of the book, but it seems to me very likely that by 1620 the Congregation of the Index had become aware that Copernicus had really believed his theory, yet the committee completed the task which it had been assigned, the censorship of the book. Variants, 14 | 2019 157 29 There is some circumstantial evidence to support my emphasis on the confusion caused by Bellarmine. One other problem requires a correction, however. In some comments on the affair, the editors characterize Osiander’s position on astronomical hypotheses differently from their own edition. The edition (II :2, lines 13-15) reads: “Neque enim necesse est, eas hypotheses esse ueras, imo ne uerisimiles quidem, sed sufficit hoc unum, si calculum obseruationibus congruetem exhibeant, . . .”, translated: “Il n’est en effet pas nécessaire que ces hypothèses soient vraies, ni même vraisemblables, mais il suffit qu’elles fournissent un calcul qui s’accorde avec les observations, . . .” 10In a comment on a report by Francesco Ingoli in 1618, in which he adopts a very pragmatic view of hypotheses, the editors say (III :183n5) in referring to the view of Osiander: “Ce dernier dit qu’une hypothèse astronomique n’a pas besoin d’être vraie, il suffit qu’elle soit vraisemblable, pourvu qu’elle donne un calcul s’accordant avec les apparences célestes (Ad lectorem, p. 213-14).” The relevant phrase is “it suffices that they be likely”. Aside from the fact that the cited text says that the hypotheses need not be likely, the note even refers to the text cited above. This discrepancy is inexplicable. 30 Ingoli’s comment, in fact, reflects the distinction made by Bellarmine. The second point to observe is that by 1618 Ingoli may have realized that Copernicus did not write the “letter”, for he says (III:638-639) that Copernicus treats the movement of the Earth in a non-hypothetical manner, but if the passages are rendered hypothetically, they will not be contrary to the truth or to Sacred Scripture. The point is that sometime between 1616 and 1620, perhaps as early as 1618, members of the Congregation of the Index may have learned that Copernicus held his hypotheses absolutely, but they continued to repeat the explanation that Copernicus’s book was useful for a number of reasons, and so should not be completely prohibited. One might conclude that the authorities were trying to find a compromise that would make clear their condemnation of the theory without completely banning the book. In the event, they seem to have sewn only confusion. 31 The confusion over hypotheses persisted until 1633. Galileo had used the distinction between an absolute and hypothetical adoption of heliocentrism as a pretext to offer what support he could to the theory. He succeeded in fooling no one. In the sentence of 1633, the inquisitors spelled out his error in unmistakably clear terms. His error was that he had held as “probable” a theory already declared contrary to Sacred Scripture, for there is no way that a theory contrary to Sacred Scripture could be possibly, let alone probably, true. 32 Readers might understandably conclude that I find the new edition disappointing and unsatisfactory. On the contrary, it is by far, in my view, the most comprehensive and reliable study of Copernicus and his works ever published. Only use of the text over time will tell whether it is the definitive edition, but its many virtues make it an indispensable contribution, and one that marks a new turning-point in Copernican scholarship. By that I mean that anyone venturing to discuss the Copernican Revolution will have to turn to these volumes, and consider the editors’ methodological principles, applications of those principles, evaluation of previous scholarship, and interpretations of the reception of the Copernican theory. On technical matters the editors have relied extensively on what everyone recognizes as the most exhaustive analysis ever produced, the study by Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer (1984). The editors have checked every calculation, but it will require more time to assess their work completely. On some matters they disagree with Swerdlow/Neugebauer, but here Variants, 14 | 2019 158 again they have examined the evidence and explained their own take. The editors appear to have taken into account the criticisms by Swerdlow and Gerald Toomer of earlier editions, and of Edward Rosen’s English translation. There appear to be differences of opinion regarding the errata sheet for the 1543 edition and Owen Gingerich’s extended errata list based on handwritten corrections in copies of the 1543 edition, one example of which is from Leipzig. Another discrepancy concerns whether there was a working copy containing the revisions that appear in the 1543 edition – a hypothesis rejected by the French – in addition to the fair copy that Rheticus took with him to Nuremberg. But consistency is difficult to maintain; even Swerdlow, who argued that the 1543 edition should be the basis of a critical edition, deplored the deletion of the introduction to Book I. 33 On the relation between the French edition and the 1984 German edition, the French edition differs from the 1984 German edition in that it preserves the Roman numerals of the 1543 edition, which helps in evaluating whether an error is computational or the result of a slip of the pen while writing a Roman numeral. The French also followed Swerdlow’s advice in having checked the computations and set out the textual errors in their critical edition, but Swerdlow did not advocate a new edition. On the other hand, Swerdlow did not advocate a new edition even after the appearance of the Polish edition, flawed as it was. Swerdlow’s advice, if followed, would require readers to create their own text, but surely readers capable of doing that could also use a critical edition as long as they read it critically. In other words, a critical edition frees us from having to reinvent the wheel while still requiring us to check its condition from time to time. 34 Here and there the editors have supplied in the notes (not the text) improved figures for Copernicus’s, but readers will have to study them carefully to understand the improvement. I suppose that some critics will deplore the decision not to print the edition in folio (the details of some figures in octo format are too small to read without a magnifying glass); on the other hand, the format is handy and attractive. For example, their figures illustrating Copernicus’s explanation of retrograde motion (III: 413) may confuse some readers. In Fig. 13a, if we extend the lines T2-P2, T3-P3, and T4-P4 beyond the page, we can see that they will eventually intersect against the background of the stars, meaning that from T we will see them in the following order, P1, P4, P3, P2, and P5 (just as Fig. 13b depicts them). The commentary notes in Vol. III do not clutter the edition in Volume II, and having the French translation side-by-side with the Latin edition and variants at the bottom of the page is more than a convenience – it makes failing to consult the Latin text inexcusable. Remarkably, in over 2500 pages of text, of which I read about 1600 pages closely, I found only one typographical error – a period missing at the end of III:433n11! 35 Also on the subject of the Greek edition of the Almagest, Edward Rosen concluded that Copernicus received a copy of the Greek edition too late to take full advantage of it. The editors offer a remarkable reconstruction of one chapter from Book V (ch. 35) and thirty passages from Book VI, that contrary to Rosen, shows that Copernicus revised the text as it appears in the 1543 edition according to the Greek edition and, they suppose, a Latin translation probably supplied by Rheticus. In their reconstruction (III: 512-568), which also examines Book V, 36, they designate the 1538 Greek edition as G, the 1515 Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona as L1, and the translation by Trebizond as L2. By comparison of these versions with the text of 1543, they demonstrate that the revised version did not rely on the older Latin translations but rather on the Greek text Variants, 14 | 2019 159 from 1538. This is, of course, an analysis that will require careful examination, but if it stands up to scrutiny, it will probably constitute their major contribution to the reconstruction of the 1543 edition. 36 There is a good deal more in these volumes, but my considerations surely confirm the importance, indeed indispensability, of the new edition with its introduction and complementary notes for further research on Copernicus’s achievement. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albertus (Adalbertus) de Brudzewo. 1900. Commentariolum super Theoricas novas planetarum Georgii Purbachii, Ed. Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer. Cracow: The Jagiellonian University. Barker, Peter and Tofigh Heidarzadeh. 2016. “Copernicus, the Tusi Couple and East-West Exchange in the Fifteenth Century”. In Unifying Heaven and Earth. Ed. Miguel A. Granada, Patrick Boner, and Dario Tessicini. Barcelona: University of Barcelona, pp. 19-57. Barker, Peter and Matjaž Vesel. 2012. “Goddu’s Copernicus: An Essay Review of André Goddu’s Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition,” Aestimatio, 9, pp. 304-336. Copernicus, Nicolaus. 2015. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Des revolutions des orbes célestes. 3 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1999. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI, 1543 Nuremberg edition, CD-ROM. Palo Alto, California: Octavo Corporation. Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1973. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Opera omnia, Vol. 2. Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers. Copernicus, Nicolaus. De revolutionibus libri sex, 1984. Nicolaus Copernicus Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 2. Hildesheim: H. A. Gerstenberg. Copernicus, Nicolaus. 2007. De hypothesibus motuum caelestium a se constitutes commentariolus, edited by Jerzy Dobrzycki, in Mikołaj Kopernik, Dzieła wszystkie, Vol. 3. Warsaw: The Polish Academy of Sciences, pp. 10-18. Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York and London: Norton. Dobrzycki, Jerzy and Richard Kremer. 1996. “Peurbach and Maragha Astronomy? The Ephemerides of Johannes Angelus and their Implications,” in Journal for the History of Astronomy, 27, pp. 187-237. Evans, James. 1998. The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gingerich, Owen. 2004. The Book Nobody Read. New York: Walker. Goddu, André. 2006. “Reflections on the Origin of Copernicus’s Cosmology”. In Journal for the History of Astronomy, 37, pp. 37-53. Goddu, André. 2010. Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Variants, 14 | 2019 160 Goddu, André. 2013. “A Response to Peter Barker and Matjaž Vesel, ‘Goddu’s Copernicus’,” in Aestimatiio 10, pp. 248-276. Goddu, André. 2016. “Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer and Curtis Wilson on the Origins of Nicholas Copernicus’s Heliocentrism”. In Isis, 107, pp. 225-253. Goddu, André. 2018. “The Origin of Copernicus’s Heliocentrism Reconsidered”. In Kwartalnik historii nauki i techniki, 63, pp. 9-19. Goddu, André. 2018. “Birkenmajer’s Copernicus: Historical Context, Original Insights, and Contributions to Current Debates”. In Science in Context, 31, pp. 189-222. Goldstein, Bernard. 2002. “Copernicus and the Origin of His Heliocentric System” In Journal for the History of Astronomy, 33, pp. 219-233. Knox, Dilwyn. 2007. “Copernicus’s Doctrine of Gravity and the Natural Circular Motion of the Elements”. In Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 68, pp. 157-211. Knox, Dilwyn. 2012. “Copernicus and Pliny the Elder’s Cosmology.” In Renaissance Letters and Learning. In Memoriam Giovanni Aquilecchia. Ed. D. Knox and N. Ordine, London-Torino: Warburg Institute-Aragno, pp. 111-148. Knox, Dilwyn. 2013. “Copernico e la gravità, La dottrina della gravità e del moto circolare degli elementi nel De revolutionibus”. In Bruniana & Campanelliana, Ricerche filosofiche e materiali storico- testuali, Supplementi 35, Studi 16. Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore. Morrison, Robert. 2014. “A Scholarly Intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe”. In Isis 105, pp. 32-57. Nicole Oresme. 1966. Questiones de spera. Ed. Garrett Droppers. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ragep, F. Jamil. 1993. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy. New York and Berlin: Springer- Verlag. Ragep, F. Jamil. 2014. “From Tun to Turun: The Twists and Turns of the Tusi-Couple”. Preprint 457, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; reprinted in 2017 as “From Tun to Toruń: The Twists and Turns of the Tusi-Couple.” In Before Copernicus: The Cultures and Contexts of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century. Ed. Rivka Feldhay and F. Jamil Ragep. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 161-197. Rosen, Edward. 1992. “Commentary to On the Revolutions”. Trans. Rosen. In Nicholas Copernicus, Complete Works, Vol. 2. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins, p. 341, comment on P. 4:15. Rosińska, Grażyna. 1984. Scientific Writings and Astronomical Tables in Cracow, A Census of Manuscript Sources (XIVth-XVIth Centuries). Wrocław: Polish Academy of Sciences Press. Swerdlow, Noel. 1973. “The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory, A Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary”. In Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia: APS press, pp. 423-512. Swerdlow, Noel and Otto Neugebauer. 1984. Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, 2 Parts. New York and Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Westman, Robert S. 2011. The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order. Berkeley: University of California Press. Variants, 14 | 2019 161 Włodarczyk, Jarosław. 2015. “Introduction”. In Narratio prima, a facsimile edition based on the first edition. Gdańsk, 1540, held by the Polish Academy of Sciences, The Gdańsk Library, shelf mark Sa 14 80. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, and Rybno, Poland: Nicolaus Copernicus Foundation. NOTES 1. The editors cite James Evans to support their claim about the logical connections between the postulates, but Evans rather explains the content of each without addressing their relation. Of only the seventh does he say that “[m]uch of the remainder of the Commentariolus is devoted to showing how the motion of Earth affects the apparent motion of the other planets” (Evans 1998, 415-416). 2. Barker and Heidarzadeh accuse opponents, some of whom have searched arduously for Copernicus’s sources and have emphasized his debt to Arabic sources and critiques of Ptolemy that we know were available to him, of clinging to an out-dated ‘lone-genius’ view, of ignoring Copernicus’s historical context, and of valorizing European exceptionalism (Barker and Heidarzadeh 2016, 19-57, esp. 21, 42, and 57). For his part, F. Jamil Ragep has focused on the evidence constructively. His devastating, if somewhat inflammatory criticism of my reliance on a reconstruction of Nicole Oresme’s models by Garrett Droppers was entirely just, although embedded in comments that overlooked the inquiring nature of my suggestions. Be that as it may, Ragep went on to show how Oresme did, it seems, describe a Tusi-couple model, although we continue to disagree on the question of whether and to what extent Oresme was dependent on predecessors (See Ragep 2014). In the relevant statement from Questiones de spera, Q. 13, Oresme says in response to objections by Aristotle and Averroes the following: “It is possible for some planet to be moved, according to something in its nature, perpetually in a rectilinear motion [that is] a composite of several circular motions, so that this motion proceeds from several intelligences, any of which intends to move by a circular motion and is not frustrated in this intention” (ed. Garrett Droppers 1966, pp. 283-285 [translation slightly modified]). There is no indication in that description that Oresme relied on a source. His subsequent proof is difficult to follow, but Ragep has supplied a reconstruction that seems to fit. As for Ragep’s protestations about conflation of a Tusi-couple with a Eudoxan-couple, even Ragep reports that Tusi himself presented the curvilinear version of his couple as an outgrowth of al-Haytham’s Eudoxan couple model, that is, that he used “it as a starting point with which to deal with the difficulties of Ptolemy’s latitude theory” (Ragep 1993, 2:453). 3. For example, see Barker and Vesel 2012, 329. For my response see Goddu 2013, 252-253. 4. See Ragep’s concluding remarks in Ragep 1997, 46-47. 5. For a readable, jargon-free, example, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York/ London: Norton, 1999), pp. 224-256, where he shows how re-invention of details of porcelain production depended on descriptions or models of earlier versions, the exact details of which were vague. 6. Barker and Vesel, 319-332. In 1973, Swerdlow did not share the assumption that Copernicus was incapable of constructing the figure (469). Ragep called my suggestion “bizarre in the extreme,” yet in his conclusion says: “Given what we know, it would seem that one possible scenario is that Copernicus was indeed influenced by Brudzewo’s comments to pursue the problem of the moon’s epicyclic apogee. And perhaps he realized at some point that what was needed was a curvilinear oscillation on the epicycle’s circumference, as Tusi had before him” (1997, 33). He also refers to Dobrzycki and Kremer in his concluding paragraph. 7. I have not included “models” in the sentence because the hypothetical source, as the comments above indicate, is not as specific as Copernicus’s known acquaintance with Brudzewo’s commentary or possible acquaintance with Angelus’s ephemerides. Variants, 14 | 2019 162 8. Rosińska 1984, 307, referring to item no. 1563: MS, BJ 591 and BJ 592. 9. I have attempted to deal with that puzzle in the article on Birkenmajer and Wilson cited earlier, but I have no illusions about a final resolution of reasonable differences of opinion. One of the remaining problems concerns the complications in Copernicus’s models for Venus and Mercury. Because Earth’s annual motion could account for the maximum elongations of Venus and Mercury from the Sun, Copernicus’s intention seems to have been to eliminate their epicycles altogether. Yet, in the Mercury model, for example, his own principles led him to restore an epicyclet with the planet moving not on its circumference but along its diameter (II: 398-401; III:394-397). In II:417-419 (see also III:409n4), however, Copernicus did propose another solution without epicyclet. 10. “It is not necessary for the hypotheses to be true, nor even likely; it is sufficient that they furnish a calculation that agrees with the observations.” AUTHORS ANDRÉ GODDU André Goddu, emeritus professor in the Department of Astronomy and Physics, joined the Stonehill College (Easton, MA) faculty in 1990 as a member of the Program in the History of Science, and became a member of the Department of Astronomy and Physics in 2012. He retired from full-time teaching in 2015, but teaches classes on science and religion and on astronomy in the scientific revolution on a part-time basis. He has published a book on William of Ockham, and another on Nicholas Copernicus in addition to many journal articles. He is currently translating Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer’s Mikołaj Kopernik (Cracow, 1900) into English. Variants, 14 | 2019 163 Book Reviews Variants, 14 | 2019 164 Gaspar Aguilar, La comedia segunda de los agravios perdonados. Santa Barbara: Publications of eHumanista, 2016. Bélen Almeida REFERENCES Gaspar Aguilar. La comedia segunda de Los agravios perdonados, edited by C. George Peale. Santa Barbara: Publications of eHumanista, 2016. 128 p. La comedia segunda de los agravios perdonados, which just appeared in a series of monographs of the journal eHumanista in an edition of C. George Peale, is a little-known Spanish comedy from the 16th-17th century. The edition is part of the efforts of Peale to edit the works of Vélez de Guevara, to whom Los agravios perdonados was traditionally attributed — yet the comedy appears in the edition, and for the first time, not under the name of that author, but under the name of Gaspar Aguilar. The edition is based on the only known manuscript witness, ms. 15067 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. As the title of the work makes clear (“comedia segunda”), there would have been a previous comedy of the same title, which is now lost but attributed to Luis Vélez de Guevara in the manuscript of this “second comedy”. 1 In a study preceding the work, Peale offers a practical summary of the convoluted plot (pp. 1-4) of the text: a classical palatine comedy with characters from the nobility and with a (pseudo)historical and international setting, in this case Scotland, England, and France. The editor also explains in the study the editorial principles for the presentation of the text (pp. 24-25), which are — generally speaking — the usual in scholarly editions of literary works of the Spanish Golden Age: regularization or modernization of b/u/v; c/ç/z; i/j/y for /i/; ph > f; th > t; ch /k/ > c/qu, modern accentuation and punctuation. 2 The lengthiest and most interesting part of the study (pp. 4-24) offers the motives the editor has to suppose that the work is not by Vélez de Guevara, as was until now assumed. The reasons that led Peale to ascribe the comedy to another writer, the Variants, 14 | 2019 165 Valencian Gaspar Aguilar (1561-1623), are many, ranging from thematic and compositional aspects (for example, the fact that the comedy opens with a loa, as is the case with most of Aguilar's works, and the vagueness of the setting, very untypical for Vélez de Guevara), motives (scenes of physical violence against women as found in the comedy would be, he postulates, impossible in a work by Vélez de Guevara) and, most convincing, the verse. Peale expounds at length the characteristics of versification in Los agravios perdonados, comparing it with Vélez de Guevara’s works, on one side, and on the other with Aguilar’s comedies. The result convinces the reader that Peale is right in his assumption that the work stems from the pen of Aguilar: the use of quintilla (five- verse strophe which rhymes ababa, abbab, abaab or aabba) represents an astonishing 95% of the verses of the comedy, as is characteristic for Valencian dramatists (Aguilar was Valencian), whereas Vélez de Guevara uses this strophe much more seldom (on an average, 5-30%). 3 The text is accompanied by a generous supply of footnotes on lexical, morphological, historical, metrical, and socio-linguistical issues, making the text easy to follow even for readers that are not well-versed in Spanish Golden Age literature. At the end, the editor has included a practical Index of the words explained in the footnotes. 4 One welcome feature of the edition is the fact that the text is available on line. Some minor typos or mistakes in font are found, but they are not many and do not distract from an excellent edition. AUTHORS BÉLEN ALMEIDA Belén Almeida is a professor in the Department of Philology, Communication and Documentation at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain). She is a member of the research group GITHE (Textos para la historia del español, Texts for the History of the Spanish Language). Her main areas of interest are Spanish historiography of the Middle Ages and (ortho)graphic aspects of hand written documents from the beginnings of written Spanish until the end of the 19th century, specially those written by less-able writers and by women. Variants, 14 | 2019 166 Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ann-Marie Einhaus REFERENCES Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, edited by Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 266 p. ISBN 978-1-137-30270-0 DOI: 10.1057/9781137302717 1 As Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King rightly state in their introduction to Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, inquiries into the practice of reading and into the cultural, social and literary history of First World War form a particularly productive partnership when combined. This edited collection is excellent proof of the validity of their approach. At first sight it seems extraordinary, given the much-noted literary nature of the First World War, that the act of reading should have been eclipsed almost entirely by the act of writing in research to date. Perhaps this is not entirely surprising, though: the vast number of written sources produced by combatants of (mostly Western) participating nations have facilitated research into writing in wartime, whereas records of reading practices are far more elusive. Scholars interested in reading practices may turn to autobiographical sources such as letters or diaries, to literary sources, and to the records of publishers, librarians or relief organizations distributing reading materials, many of which have become more readily available to researchers thanks to growing digitization initiatives, from commercial databases to crowd-sourced, freely accessible repositories such as Europeana. However, comments on reading experiences, habits, or preferences contained in these sources are by necessity almost always limited, coincidental, speculative or incomplete. 2 The strength of this collection is its range of approaches and focal points. Contributions range from case studies of individual readers and readership groups (established writers and artists as well as lesser-known soldiers, prisoners of war or conscientious Variants, 14 | 2019 167 objectors, and indeed civilians) to those scrutinizing particular kinds of reading matter and its providers (such as romance novels, soldier newspapers, libraries or publishing houses). The twelve contributors further employ a range of different methodologies for tracing the frequently elusive practice of reading, from in-depth scrutiny of individual reading records (Towheed on Edith Wharton and Jim Cleary on Australian barrister William A. Amiet) and literary engagement with the act of reading (Max Saunders on Ford Madox Ford), to work with the records of publishers (Jane Potter), libraries (Sara Mori) and relief organizations (Jonathan Arnold and King). While all chapters focus on Western combatant nations (Australia, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the United States), this bias is to a great extent caused by the fact that these nations at the time had the highest literacy rates, and consequently produced more records of reading than, for instance, the Ottoman Empire or India. The introduction perhaps initially generalizes a little too much on the literacy and literariness of different combatant nations, and overemphasizes the universal importance of the printed or handwritten word to the exclusion of other forms of ‘reading’ war experience, from ongoing oral traditions such as jokes or songs, to visual media. However, this is an excusable overstatement given the relative neglect of reading in scholarship to date, and the rich and fascinating array of essays on engagement with the written word gathered in this volume. 3 The volume offers a wealth of reminders that it was not only the content of reading matter that held significance to wartime readers, but often the physical nature of texts as well. Books, letters, and newspapers are firmly placed in relation to the material culture of the war by a number of authors included in the volume: from the fashion for patriotic gift books that were treated as prestigious objects rather than necessarily read (Towheed and King), to the desire for cheap portable editions (Alisa Miller), and the deteriorating quality of the paper on which German soldier newspapers were published (Robert L. Nelson). In their introduction, Towheed and King also note the double-edged nature of Bibles or prayer books distributed to soldiers, which acted as both talisman and reading matter (p. 13), and they emphasize a fascinating split between books as physical objects offering solace or diversion, and books present in memory only, remembered while absent and used as a reference point in letters or diaries (p. 14). 4 A recurring theme throughout the volume are reading tastes and their relationship to the experience of war. Three key points emerge from the array of case studies in the collection. Firstly, reading in wartime acquired if anything a heightened importance for a wide variety of reasons: escapism, self-improvement, patriotic or pacifist zeal. Secondly, reading became highly politicized in the hands of moral and religious agencies as well as in the hands of governments intent on shaping the minds and attitudes of their own citizens, whether civilian or combatant, and indeed those of enemy civilians, as Emmanuel Debruyne notes in his chapter on reading in occupied Belgium and France. And finally, despite official claims on the part of mainstream newspapers, relief organizations and certain individuals, reading tastes and habits remained staunchly individual. As Jonathan Arnold outlines in his chapter on American soldiers – drawing on a book by Edward Frank Allen, commissioned to describe America’s young citizen army in 1918 — the diversity among First World War soldiers in terms of class, educational background, spiritual and political allegiances in any given combatant nation makes generalizations as to reading tastes and habits virtually impossible. The same can, of course, be argued with regard to civilian readers, as Variants, 14 | 2019 168 chapters by Potter, Miller, Mori and Catherine Feely show. If there is one fundamental insight to be gleaned from this diverse and fascinating array of essays, it is that reading habits may have been intensified by war, but were not necessarily changed. AUTHORS ANN-MARIE EINHAUS Ann-Marie Einhaus is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. Her research interests encompass magazine culture, historical fiction, and literary responses to the First World War from 1914 to the present, particularly the short story, explored in her monograph The Short Story and the First World War (CUP, 2013). More recently, she co-edited a new interdisciplinary collection of research essays, The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts (EUP, 2017). Variants, 14 | 2019 169 Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses. Becoming the Blooms Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015 Hans Walter Gabler REFERENCES Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses. Becoming the Blooms. Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 2015. 1 “We are still learning to be Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter.” This is the opening sentence of Richard Ellmann’s biography with which in 1959 (and identically in the revision of 1982) he drew the sum of his engagement with Joyce’s many-faceted life. It has, six decades later, lost neither its truth nor its power. On the contrary: the incentive to such learning has, if anything, intensified. It springs today from a closely-knit material basis witnessing to the very life-forces powering the writer and man. The traces of his working life have survived into our posterity, inscribed in his authorial hand. As the historical, socially and intellectually networked subject of biography recedes, it is still what has remained of his writing on paper that has the potential to place us as readers, explorers, analysts and interpreters into an exquisitely privileged contemporaneity with the writer and creative author James Joyce. 2 In practical terms: over and above the book publications in full of his work, there exist (or have existed, but are mostly still at least mediately definable) several caches of notes, drafts, working manuscripts, fair-copy manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, pre- publications. The contents of his apartment, in rescue dispersed by Paul Léon on Joyce’s escape from Paris to Switzerland in 1940, were re-assembled in an exhibition (at La Hune, Paris) in 1949, and from there found their way to the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York. What Joyce, before, had left behind in Trieste when relocating to Paris in 1920, now resides by and Variants, 14 | 2019 170 large in the Cornell Joyce Collection. Assortments of proofs for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are to be found at Harvard, Buffalo, Princeton (thanks largely to Sylvia Beach) and the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks to Harriet Weaver, much of the richly surviving draft materials for Finnegans Wake, as well as most of what else had accumulated in her care during the 25 years of her association with Joyce, is accessible at the British Library in London. In parallel to this, the fair copy for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which Joyce presented to her went to the National Library of Ireland. This one NLI treasure turned out to be a mere nest egg when, as from about the turn of the millennium, the National Library in Dublin proceeded to acquire not only a major intermediate draft for Ulysses but, more still, a whole array of notes and drafts for Ulysses which, together with assorted Finnegans Wake materials, had been successive private gifts from Joyce to Paul Léon during the 1930s. Unsuspected even to exist; they had lain unrecognised for almost seven decades in the basement to the Léons’ flat in Paris. This summarily sketchy listing may be eked out by mention of smaller culls of Joyce materials for instance at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, or the Henry E. Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. What has so far remained in private hands (known or anonymously unknown, except to the manuscript curators of the auction houses) are comparatively few individual documents, sometimes perhaps even just a typescript page or two with traces of Joyce’s own hand; but also one manuscript in a copybook entitled Eumeo which, at brief public showings when it changed hands, stood revealed not just (unexpectedly) to exist at all, but to be an accretively many-layered and multi-coloured draft—in all likelihood the most intricate progressive material working platform for a Ulysses episode to survive. Ulysses in James Joyce’s hand throughout (but for about half of episode 10,Wandering Rocks, which Frank Budgen wrote out at his dictation) is the so-called Rosenbach Manuscript, a pride possession of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. It is a fair copy for sixteen episodes, to which are integrated two copy-books constituting the final-stage working manuscripts for episodes 17 and 18 (Ithaca and Penelope). 3 From knowing what there is materially, we may endeavour to learn what it is in itself , and what portals to discovery, insight and understanding it offers. From the materials as they are, as we encounter them and expose ourselves to them, incentives grow afresh to revive traditional competences of critical literary scholarship: skills in manuscript study and in textual criticism – meaning textual criticism as the fundamental analysis of material transmissions, such as it may optionally lead either into scholarly editions, or (more pertinently here) be deployed in the service of criticism. Critical skill so enlarged, in its turn, is likely to respond, moreover, to the very nature of the Joycean materials by extending, with them, into the genetic mode. 4 Luca Crispi’s monograph, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms, now provides an exemplary guide to Joyce scholarship and criticism moving anew into such pastures. It is the first full-length study ever attempted to follow closely James Joyce’s moves of invention, creation and exploration through the textual landscape out of which, from out of his mind and under his hands, and in progressive encounter with text already (by himself) written, he formed the novel he ultimately saw published under the title Ulysses. With the enterprise of this book, Crispi defines a new mode of scholarly contemporaneity with the author’s writerly processes and creative achievement. His investigations, analyses and lucid critical presentations help us to be there as Ulysses progressively happens. Variants, 14 | 2019 171 5 Luca Crispi has long lived in the material environment of the Joyce manuscripts and subsequent documents of transmission. Long before the times, as now, when every researcher into Joyce can view and can work with them in digital images, he already experienced them as natural givens to engagement. It is in the first place a natural familiarity with the archival records that Crispi consequently encourages us to attain. His book emphasizes, at the same time, that, and how, the stimulus of familiarity significantly deepens through skills in method and strategies of critical argument. It lays out before us what constant interactive analysis of the written traces of the processes of writing can tell about the genetic shaping of the Joycean texts. In exemplary ways, too, it offers critical conclusions from the analysis: templates for what manner of results may grow out of genetic criticism. 6 A central template is that of Joyce’s story-telling, and of James Joyce, the author, as story-teller. For the book, this provides the framework to hold the strands of narrative matter interwoven in Joyce’s art of narrative. ‘Joyce, the story-teller’ is the book’s governing thesis: from Crispi’s perspective, story-telling constitutes the core impulse for Ulysses. Accordingly, he structures his study out of the book’s sub-title, Becoming the Blooms, and unfolds this into the chapter divisions and sub-divisions. In terms of the book’s disposition, Crispi hence super-imposes his critical narrative on his subject matter, the written evidence of Joyce’s progressive telling by writing Ulysses. From the priority proposition that Joyce first and foremost tells stories springs the notion, secondarily, that ‘character’ and character naming are derivative functions of the story narratives. And indeed, by analysis of the genetic textual materials is shown convincingly again and again that the novel’s personnel builds up into coherently narrated characters only from out of the accretion of stories. Consequently, the characters’ names tend often not to be primary identifiers, but, in their turn, labels of secondary (or even tertiary) invention for them as actors in the accreted stories. 7 As the materials of its coming-into-being demonstrate, the invention of Ulysses was a process of constant, ever-fertile enrichment. To deal with what the materials reveal requires critical assessment of what it is that powers the process. What sets free the creative energy? What drives the given elements of text from notes (and whence and how were these taken, in the first place?) into drafting; into draft accretion; into copying-out (i.e., as fair copies, or typescripts, or settings-into-proof)? The initial taking of a note springs often enough (and pervasively, as we know, with Joyce) from reading—all the more, then, it stands to reason that reading, too, triggers each subsequent move along the trajectories the language material takes to coalesce into text. Crispi’s analytic argument brings out what is often less than duly considered even in genetic approaches to works and their texts, namely the significant co-creative role of (authorial) re-reading in authoring—whether instant or at later points-in-time of an extended creative process. such as the seven-year or, should its first germs indeed have been laid during Joyce’s first sojourn in Paris, the nearly 20-year process of coming- into-being of Ulysses. 8 The indication of the co-creative role of (authorial) re-reading in authoring is a fundamentally critical insight from textual criticism geared to genetic analysis. It distinctly furthers, too, observations specific to increasing the understanding in detail of the work-in-progress. Given that the materials for Ulysses allow for a pretty clear relative timing of the movements of text elements within and across the document network of notes/drafts/typescripts/proofs, it is often possible to determine when a Variants, 14 | 2019 172 motif, a story modification or extension, even a character first ‘came to’ the progressively writing author. Within the constant writing and (re-)reading process, it is not surprising that this was frequently later than when the latter-day readers, we ourselves in our linear progression through the text, first encounter that element. Genetic analysis quite regularly reveals our ‘firsts’ as moments of authorial late filling- in of narrative exposition, or pro-active preparation of events to come, all ‘planted’ in what may be termed prospective afterthought. Properly so recognised, these moments will commonly even be appreciated as deepenings of our reading experience. 9 However, for the author so to arrange the text in response to his initial re-readings of the writing-in-progress, was only feasible, if, when the element in question ‘came to’ him, he found the position materially still open where to place its anticipation. But so to compose Ulysses spatially still, up to the point in time when it could be declared finished, was quite early already technically impossible. From the spring/summer 1921 until the last days of January 1922, the production of the printed book and the continued composition of the novel progressed in parallel. Crispi’s most drastic example illustrating the impasse this creates in story and character development concerns Lunita Laredo. Had Joyce thought of providing Molly with a mother when actively at work on Calypso, we would as readers also remember her with Molly when she is made to think of her mother in Penelope. In actual fact, however, Lunita Laredo was invented as character and as text only very belatedly in the course of composition of the novel’s final episode. Retroactively planting a prospective mention in Calypso, say, was impossible for by the time of writing of Penelope, almost the entire book was already fully printed and its type distributed for re-use. That Lunita Laredo was such a late afterthought has, too, a further serious consequence. Leopold Bloom is through the entire novel oblivious (which attentive readers know) of having, or ever having had, a mother-in-law. Importantly, though, it is not that he has erased her from his memory. Being constructed, as is every character in every fiction, he can hardly be suspected of repressing thoughts and memory of her who was conceptually as well as compositionally never available to go into the constructing of him in the first place. 10 Correlative story and character construction, then, functions as the warp and weft of Ulysses. This is the bracket thesis which gives further coherence to Luca Crispi’s argument for Becoming the Blooms. How is the correlation effected? Its fulcrum is memory. Crispi operatively – and aptly – sub-categorises this into psychological memory and textual memory. Every reader soon catches on to the principle of textual recurrences in Ulysses, and how essential it is combinatory to grasp them in order to make sense of one’s reading experience. Appreciating the writing and the narration of Ulysses to the full, however, we also recognise that the fictional characters operate – are constructed – as our mirror-images. Their sense making (whether to themselves or for us) under the terms into which their lives and selves are constructed, is by their, as well as our, reading the world(s) and remembering the experience(s) invented for them. As characters, it is out of an assumed psychological memory that they are constructed into the language that shapes them. But in the pervasively constructed environment of fiction, psychological and textual memory are reciprocally mirrored, for they are together grounded in the language evoking that fiction: psychological memory and textual memory are equally embedded and intertwined in it. This is materially demonstrable from the documented source material of the writing-in- progress of that language, preserved in the notes, drafts, copies, proofs that survive as genetically preparatory to Ulysses and give evidence of the creative energies of Variants, 14 | 2019 173 invention, writing, (re-) reading and visionary outreach that went into its over-all composition. 11 The monograph Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms sets an important mark as paradigm to be emulated in the present phase of Joyce studies in which concern with the genetics of Joyce’s works and their texts is distinctly gaining ground. It is Luca Crispi’s pioneering achievement to have lucidly and soundly mapped the field in terms both of material substance available to work on and essentially, too, of method. Under the methodological aspect, indeed, his book is to be recommended widely beyond the confines of James Joyce studies as exemplary of how to conduct genetic criticism, and how, and on what manner of material grounds, to teach it. AUTHORS HANS WALTER GABLER Hans Walter Gabler is Professor of English Literature (retired) at the University of Munich, Germany, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, London University, and Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. From 1996 to 2002 in Munich, he directed an interdisciplinary graduate programme on “Textual Criticism as Foundation and Method of the Historical Disciplines.” He is editor-in-chief of the critical editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1984/1986), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Dubliners (both 1993). His present research continues to be directed towards the writing processes in draft manuscripts and their representation in the digital medium. Editorial theory, digital editing and genetic criticism have become the main focus of his professional writing. Variants, 14 | 2019 174 Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014 Simon Mahony REFERENCES Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches, edited by Tara Andrews and Caroline Macé. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014. 346 p. ISBN: 9782503552682. €97.00. The scholarship on texts and manuscripts is wide ranging, even more so when it comes to digital approaches, as is the content of this stimulating volume. This review thus gave me the opportunity to critically update my own perspectives on this important area of study. As the editors rightly point out, a work like this is only ever going to provide a snapshot. Nevertheless they raise important questions about how digital techniques have changed the way in which their work is conducted, and put to rest some of the scepticism of the value of digital methods witnessed within the discipline. There is always a time lag in quality publications and this volume is no exception; projects presented here will have moved on with some reaching the end of their funding period and now deemed to be complete. Overall, this volume covers an impressive expanse of material pulling together many fields of interest beyond the ability of any individual to be an expert in them all. It is usefully divided into specific sections to make things more manageable: Stemmatology, Statistics and Stylistics, Intertextuality, Script Analysis, and Codicology. 1 In all areas, and especially stemmatology, there is a need for transparency (Heikkila) and particularly so with computer-assisted scholarship, in order to remove the “black box” effect as we tease out the significant aspects for examination from a tool. The contribution of Camps and Cafiero includes helpful information for the non-specialist Variants, 14 | 2019 175 and extensive explanatory footnotes. The Stemma, they say, is always a “simplification” and we need to acknowledge the effects of time and space on vernacular texts. These effects are more than a medieval “localisation” effect, but rather conscious changes to make the text more “modern” or “appealing” to their specific audience. Understanding the mechanisms implicit in the copying of texts helps us to understand variants. It is a well-argued position, and the same applies to the following chapter (Cantera) that discusses the movement from the oral to written tradition. This movement makes the archetype model redundant, particularly in the case of the Avestan texts and the wide geographic dispersal of the rituals on which they are based. Something that is becoming an essential feature of research is that the source data itself should be openly available for future researchers to check and verify in order to support their own conclusions and arguments. It is good to see that development in process here, particularly as we see the important distinction being made between “unconscious mistakes” and “conscious corrections”. Simulating copyist and expected errors in artificially created corpora is an interesting approach to test algorithms looking at the accuracy of transmission (Hoenen). Cluster analysis and other statistical procedures borrowed from very different academic disciplines are indeed effective tools when looking at stylistic variations (van Dalen-Oskam) and open up the possibilities for measuring linguistic deviation and variation (Stella). 2 Beyond transparency, a major emphasis should be on openness and sharing. This is evident along with more technical methodologies in the chapters looking at intertextual research. The collections of wise sayings in SAWS are encoded in TEI XML and RDF to make them not only sharable, but also to identify who it was that made various assertions about the texts and to facilitate conflicting opinions (Tupman). Importantly, it also allows the editors to express their degree of certainty about those assertions, making the whole editorial process explicit and transparent. I trust there was ample opportunity to discuss the encoding of Arabic texts with Romanov and, with the recent developments, it may be possible to move that encoding to sharable TEI XML. 3 The changes to methodology that the digital turn brings to the interdisciplinary field of palaeography is explored in the penultimate section. Despite technological advances, human intervention is always going the be needed for the selection of features to be examined (Castro). The Hesperia project has many useful features and provides good faceted browsing to allow direct access to the texts, but the authors should (if they have not already done so) take a look at EpiDoc and the range of epigraphic corpora making use of this dedicated sub-set of TEI. 4 The concluding section on codicology pulls together pertinent projects on the identification of inks using sophisticated imaging techniques (Rabin), the divergent interests of manuscript scholarship and the removal of error through avoiding repetition of data (Andrist). Such processes can never be fully automated, as intervention and interpretation is always an essential part of the workflow. We need to move away from a focus on speed and ease of search to being able to ask new and better questions of our source material, in whatever form. One central element to that, and presented here, is that the research should be a shared partnership between so-called traditional scholarship and that of the technologists. It needs to address and drive forward the research agendas of both disciplines; not a case of technology simply being a tool to ease the workload of the textual scholar but one in which both parties benefit. Variants, 14 | 2019 176 Getting computer scientists involved in the research process, not just as tool builders but by giving them interesting problems to address, as van Zundert suggests, will go some way to achieving this goal. 5 Nevertheless, as the Introduction clearly points out, the intellectual focus must be on method and technique rather than specific software packages as these become outdated and obsolete whereas the method does not. Make explicit the links that existed previously only in the mind of the scholar and build on this to facilitate the serendipitous discovery of the intertext that was not previously recognised. Making data open and linked in order to allow interaction is the way things are moving and the projects in this volume support that. 6 The high editorial standard of this publication series is maintained in this volume with very few typos apparent. The occasional US English spelling creeps in along with the increasingly common but incorrect use of “digitalisation”. Overall, the strength of this volume is in its diversity both in terms of range but also the depth that is managed in a series of articles limited by wordcount; it represents a significant contribution to the field. AUTHORS SIMON MAHONY Simon Mahony is Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Principal Teaching Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Department of Information Studies, University College London. He has research interests in the application of new technologies to the study of the ancient world, using new web based mechanisms and digital resources to build and sustain learning communities, collaborative and innovative working. He is active in the field of distance learning, a member of the University of London's Centre for Distance Education, an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, and one of the founding organisers of the Digital Classicist. Variants, 14 | 2019 177 Ramon Llull, Vida i Obres. Volum I Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2015 Marco Matteoli REFERENCES Ramon Llull. Vida i Obres. Volum I. Anys: 1232-1287/1288. Obres: 1-37. Edited by Pere Villalba i Varneda. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Cata-lans, 2015, p. 1001. ISBN: 978-84-9965-259-7. 1 In 2016 the seven hundredth anniversary of Ramon Llull’s death (1232-1316) was celebrated, and the publication of the impressive work Ramon Llull: Vida i Obres has been the best way to commemorate it. The precious volume is edited by the Institute of Catalan Studies and published in five hundred numbered copies, funded by Elsa Peretti Foundation. It is the first of three books — the publication of the other two has been planned for the next two years — and offers a deep and extensive examination of the life and works of the Catalan philosopher and mystic, focusing on the first fifty years of Ramon Lull’s life. The editor, Pere Villalba i Varneda, is Professor of Classical Philology Emeritus at the Autonomus University of Barcelona, member of the Raimundus Lullus Institut of Freiburg, of the Maioricensis Schola Lullistica of Mallorca and of the Editorial Board of Raimundi Lullii Opera Latina (Corpus Christianorum - Continuatio Mediaevalis), within which he edited the Arbor scientiae (Turnhout 2000). 2 Because of the extensive aim of this volume, its approach is encyclopedic but not unfocused: the first two sections depict the historical and cultural background of Llull’s time, his family and roots, the ten years in which he realises his missionary vocation and the consequent radical change of life, his philosophical and theological studies, and finally the first two works he made: the Libre de contemplació en Déu and the Compendium logicae Algazelis. The third and largest chapter deeply analyses one by one the thirty-five works written in fourteen years, throughout his stay in Mallorca and Montpellier. Although they are less than a tenth of his whole intellectual production (which is around two hundred and eighty books), these works cover all the manifold subjects he dealt with during his long life: theology, natural philosophy, dialectic, grammar, logic, Variants, 14 | 2019 178 catechesis, devotion, morals, jurisprudence and education. It is impossible to give a full account of these thirty-seven works that are so punctually and extensively described in the volume, therefore we will briefly present only two of them, which represent the complexity and depth of Llull’s thought. The first one is the Libre de contemplació en Déu , is the first work written by Llull (Mallorca 1271). It includes all the fundamentals of the lullian philosophy, although not yet complete; in potential it contains all essential aspects of his ars: the encyclopedic and systematic view; the wide and structured schematism; the subjects’ hierarchies and trees; the recursive, crossed and circular references of terms and conceptual objects. This work also introduces the real meaning of the lullian mystique: it is not an irrational and transcendental insight into the Divine, but rather a complex intellectual experience which creates step by step an intuitive consciousness of the close relationship between the reality and God. This comes together in that ternary framework, so strictly developed in the mature stage of Llull’s thought, which sets and distributes the relationships between God himself, human knowledge and natural life. In the same period he attended to Libre de contemplació, he also wrote the Compendium logicae Algazelis (Montpellier 1271/1272), a short treatise about al-Ghazālī’s logic: this work shows the narrow and constant ties between Llull and Arabic philosophy, underneath the common roots of a Neoplatonist background. Arabic — which he studied during the period of his intellectual formation — is the language, together with Catalan and Latin, he often used for his manuscripts. He aimed to reach the Islamic readers in the Iberian peninsula and Northern African countries, such as Tunisia and Algeria he visited several times during his life, attempting to convert Muslims. The conviction of proselytism finally achieved the martyrdom that led to his death. Despite his primary missionary vocation, Llull’s is also interested in Arabic theology and philosophy on theoretical grounds: he derived from it, for instance, his peculiar idea of intentiones primae et secundae. However, he declines these gnosiological concepts on moral grounds, which also owe some of their conceptual components to St. Augustine. Instead he expresses them through an intellectual and mystical effort to abstract from human intellect the ideas of the last final cause (intentio prima) and, consequently, the instrumental one (intentio secunda). The hierarchical view of God’s attributes and principles — so often recurring in his works and one of the fundamental components of his dialectic framework — is also more based on Islamic theology than on the Neoplatonists. Finally, an atomistic idea of matter and natural elements, already present in his first work such as in the Liber Chaos (Montpellier 1288), informs both the physical theory and the combinatory logic — the latter in the way of a “corpuscular” referring of terms to one another — and also comes from kalam philosophy , i.e. the Islamic scholastic to which belonged al-Ghazālī. 3 Above all this “medieval-modern” philosopher paved the way of a different logic, a kind of “computational” dialectic that wants to disclose the many links among the things — rather than the relationships among words— showing an interrelated world which illuminates God’s perfection. It was an evocative idea that fascinated many later thinkers, such as Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jaques Lefèvre d'Étaples, Charles de Bovelles, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. So, this complete volume (also edited in a digital version provided with the book), with its deep descriptions, tables, pictures, including hard-paper movable combinatory wheels and an engaging DVD documentary, is the first step of an important cultural project which contributes to our understanding of what and how much this important author gave to our modernity’s view. Variants, 14 | 2019 179 BIBLIOGRAPHY Rigobon, Patrizio and Alessandro Tessari. 2015. Ramon Llull. Un home del nostre temps. Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Catalans –– Elsa Peretti Foundation. AUTHORS MARCO MATTEOLI Marco Matteoli is Research Fellow at Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in Florence. His research interests concern the History of Renaissance Philosophy, specifically dealing with Giordano Bruno’s art of memory, Ramon Llull’s Ars combinatoria, the reform of method and logic in the XVIth century (Pierre de la Ramée and Philippus Melanchthon), Renaissance natural magic (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim), astrology, hermetism, gnoseology and cognitive theories, geometry and atomism. With Rita Sturlese (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) and Nicoletta Tirinnanzi (Università di Chieti-Pescara and Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento di Firenze) attended to the critical edition of Giordano Bruno’s Opere mnemotecniche, I-II (Milano 2004-2009) and Opere lulliane (Milano 2012). He is presently studying the atomistic perspective of Giordano Bruno’s late naturalistic view, focusing on his mathematical works. Variants, 14 | 2019 180 Dirk Van Hulle, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière Bande Antwerp: University Press Antwerp and London: Bloomsbury. 2015 Anna McMullan REFERENCES Van Hulle, Dirk. 2015. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière Bande. Antwerp: University Press Antwerp, ISBN: 9789057181511, and London: Bloomsbury, 272 pp, ISBN: 9781472534231. 1 The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière Bande is number three of the printed volumes which complement the online resources of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP). The BDMP brings together the extant manuscripts, scattered across many collections world-wide, relating to the creation of individual Beckett works, enabling a detailed comparison of the different stages of composition. Since, as Stan Gontarski has argued (1985), Beckett often undertook a process of vaguening or undoing as he shaped his texts, this project is a major resource for the Beckett scholar and for the field of genetic criticism more widely, allowing glimpses into how Beckett worked, and into the wealth of literary, artistic or philosophical references that don’t always survive into the published versions, but that provide a rich hinterland of resonances and intertextual echoes. 2 The online BDMP, which requires individual or institutional subscription, allows different manuscript versions to be compared with visual ease and detail, and so it is useful to peruse the printed volume in tandem with the online resource, but the printed book also stands on its own, liberally illustrated by facsimile pages from the manuscript, typescript or proof text. What makes the BDMP so valuable is the scope of the project — which aims to digitize all of Beckett’s available manuscripts and includes the Universities of Antwerp and Reading and the Harry Ransom Centre at the Variants, 14 | 2019 181 University of Texas as partners — and the expertise of its scholarly team. The Making of Krapp’s Last Tape, authored by Dirk Van Hulle, co-director of the BDMP with Mark Nixon, is fascinating, authoritative and meticulous. 3 The book is divided into three sections: the first is a detailed description of the actual documents which make up the genetic history of Krapp’s Last Tape (KLT) while the second section takes the reader through each version or stage of the text, and also compares the changes across the different versions in relation to specific scenes. This is an effective way of structuring what is an immense amount of material. The scholarship is impressive, marshalling letters, archival material and interviews in order to establish an authoritative chronology for the different versions, and also cross referencing this play with earlier Beckett texts or with texts that Beckett was writing around the same time. This provides an illuminating context for the work, and traces motifs and allusions from text to text. The concept of layering or delving with its associations of geology and excavation is a particularly apt recurrent image. We know that Krapp’s Last Tape was inspired by Irish actor Patrick Magee’s “cracked voice” as Beckett listened to a recording of the BBC broadcast of Magee reading extracts from his novel Molloy in December 1957, but this book offers much more detailed information about the context of its creation between Beckett’s second radio play, Embers, and the English translation of the novel l’Innommable. Van Hulle traces the dense texture of allusions in KLT including Shakespeare, Yeats, Racine, Bergson, Petrarch, Montaigne to mention only a few, contributing to our sense of the rich seams of literary or philosophical reference that haunt Beckett’s creative work. Manicheism is discussed, but Heraclitus is also invoked in relation to the role of the elements and their transmutability. 4 Such a wealth of detail and scholarship is not always easy to absorb, but Van Hulle’s Introduction offers a guide to the reader about how to negotiate the diversity of material in the book, and defines genetic criticism as not only about the bibliographical description and chronology of manuscript texts, but also about the dynamics of the creative process. The Introduction therefore also offers an interpretation of the play based on cognitive philosophy, or theories of how our minds work. In particular, Van Hulle invokes the concept of the enactive mind where cognitive processes operate through embodied action, such as Krapp’s interaction with the tape recorder, in order to try to make sense of experience. This is an ingenious way of creating parallels between Krapp’s attempts to create coherence or derive insight from his temporally disparate selves as captured on his archive of annual tape recordings — Van Hulle cites Henri Bergson in his discussion of various models of consciousness and memory that Beckett drew upon — and the work of the genetic critic, sifting through the temporal layers of the genesis of the play manifest in diverse manuscript, typescript, proof or published versions or in production notes gathered from many different archives. 5 My only reservations in this impressive volume are from a theatrical perspective. Though Van Hulle acknowledges the embodied action implied in the enactive mind, his interpretation doesn’t always account for the dramatic qualities of the play. There are fascinating notes reproduced from the first French production of La Dernière Bande and a comparison of certain moments of staging in the section which analyses the notes that Beckett sent to Grove Press in January 1969, in relation to a possible TV version of KLT with Martin Held, but more references to Beckett’s directing notebooks (published by Faber and Faber under the general editorship of James Knowlson) might have added Variants, 14 | 2019 182 to Van Hulle’s discussion of the epigenesis or post-publication life of the text in relation specifically to staging. However, Van Hulle does include very illuminating and meticulous tables of the textual variants and errors in different translations and editions of the printed text. The invaluable resources in this book and the BDMP project will be drawn upon by scholars for decades to come. The volume is a rich addition to Beckett Studies and to genetic criticism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Gontarski, Stanley E. 1985. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. No. 133. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press AUTHORS ANNA MCMULLAN Anna McMullan is Professor of Theatre, Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading. She is author of Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (2010) and Theatre on Trial: The Later Drama of Samuel Beckett (1993), and co-edited Reflections on Beckett (2009) with Steve Wilmer. She is co-director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. Variants, 14 | 2019 183 Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes Paris: STFM, 2015. François Rouget REFERENCES Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, edited by Paul Laumonier, Raymond Lebègue and Isidore Silver, Paris: STFM, 2015, 7 vols. ISBN: 978-2-86503-293-8. 150 € 1 All specialists of the poetic works of Pierre de Ronsard, known as the “Prince of Poets”, have paid tribute to Paul Laumonier’s dedication in his chronological edition. His enterprise started in 1914 with the publication of volume I (Odes) and ended in the volume XVI (La Franciade). The next volumes (XVII to XX) were prepared by Raymond Lebègue and Isidore Silver after his death in 1949. The last was published in 1967 and was followed by a set of errata and addenda, as well as the useful index (tome XX) in 1975. The strengths of Laumonier's edition have been praised since the beginning of the project. These are mainly the chronological perspective that facilitate the understanding of the text within its context; the perception of the evolution of Ronsard’s poems with a list of their variants; critical notes that shed light on Ronsard’s literary sources, and his influence on the time. The result of this collaborative work, initiated by the founder of modern criticism in the field of Ronsard studies and carried on by his faithful disciples, has been a reference work used by generations of scholars. 2 The new edition that has been released by the Société des Textes Français Modernes is more of a reprint than a revised edition. In an attractive cream coloured box, readers will find the complete set of 20 tomes bound in 7 volumes. The editors of the new publication explain that they want to provide a corrected edition that includes errata which were listed and reprinted in some volumes for the past few decades. They also wish to present the complete set in a modernized binding (acid-free paper, new binding). The tables of concordance (t. VII, pp. 466-515) with the “Pléiade” edition (ed. J. Céard, D. Ménager and M. Simonin, Paris: Gallimard, 2 vols., 1993-1994), and the new pagination added at the bottom of each tome make it easier for the reader to navigate Ronsard’s complex works. Any initiatives to promote Ronsard’s poetry, are most Variants, 14 | 2019 184 welcome, as the quality, range, and volume of his works are to be celebrated. This reprint offers the opportunity to discover almost the entirety of Ronsard’s literary production and replaces previous copies in which the binding and pages are fragile due to much use. It is unfortunate that readers who wish to replace one or two volumes will have to pay for the whole set priced at 150 Euros. 3 It is also puzzling why the Société des Textes Français Modernes has not taken advantage of this opportunity to provide a fully revised edition. Since the completion of the Laumonier-Lebègue-Silver edition, a large quantity of first-class scholarship has been published, and this reprint does not include it. Since the first print, reprints have sometimes presented a list of errata and addenda, but this accumulation of “cahiers additionnels” does not help the understanding of Ronsard’s poetry (in this new edition, they are simply duplicated at their original place and in tome XIX). Also, these revisions may seem dated since the first set appeared hundred years ago, and tome XVIII fifty years ago. For example, La Franciade was printed in tome XVI in 1950. An appendix included earlier versions, both manuscript and printed, of the epics with numerous variations that are crucial in measuring the extent of Ronsard’s later revisions. These were unknown to Laumonier and were provided by R. Lebègue. In 1982, Lebègue and Guy Demerson printed a cahier additionnel with a bibliography, critical notes that affect some of Laumonier’s original footnotes (pp. 378-395), and the variations in Ronsard’s poems. In Laumonier’s time, the well-informed reader had to read Ronsard's text of 1572, with its variants on each page, as well as the ones listed at the end of the book to ensure proper understanding. Recent discoveries have brought to attention the existence of other variants collected in the Turin manuscript (book IV) as written about in Rouget’s Ronsard et le Livre (2010). To fully understand the text, the reader will have to have tome XVI of Laumonier’s edition, a second copy open to the “Cahier additionnel”-section, the list of variants found in the manuscript (Rouget, 2010), as well as the commentaries provided by the extensive notes of the Pléiade edition. In addition, these should be supplemented by the analysis recently published by D. Bjaï, C. Jomphe, J.-C. Ternaux, B. Méniel and many other scholars. La Franciade is not the only problematic edition. Tome IV of Les Amours (1552) is perhaps more significant, given its popularity in the field of Renaissance studies. In spite of attempts made by R. Lebègue to amend the poetic text and update bibliographic information, this edition presents Les Amours as it originally appeared with some corrections and bibliographical additions from 1982. He unfortunately chose to leave out the important Commentaire by M.-A. de Muret. This oversight is repeated in tome X, where the “Second livre des Amours” ignores the Commentaire by R. Belleau. Volume IV encompasses an antiquated analysis and lacks support from a diverse collection of scholarly study. 4 Laumonier’s intent was to provide a chronological set of the original editions of Ronsard’s books and to list all later variants of the individual poems. This was an extensive ambition that brought him the respect and admiration of all Ronsardian critics. Some of these scholars, in particular Silver in 1953, and J. P. Barbier-Mueller in 1982-1984, have noticed that the transcriptions of the poems are sometimes inaccurate. The reason for this can easily be explained by the turmoil of the World War as material could be lost or inaccessible editions. In spite of his devotion to Ronsard, Laumonier had initiated a monumental project that he could hardly achieve alone. The first tomes (the Odes, in particular, which were the focus of Laumonier’s thesis) are usually well edited. In the later ones, the editor has been less careful and discrepancies are found Variants, 14 | 2019 185 between the variants listed by Laumonier and the original collected editions that are now accessible online through Gallica of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. M. Simonin observed that Laumonier was not aware of existing manuscripts, as well as some earlier printed editions of Ronsard’s poems published in the books of his contemporaries. J. P Barbier-Mueller caught a number of typographical mistakes in Laumonier's transcription of the Second livre des Meslanges (1559) and the Discours (1562). My own reading has confirmed that there are numerous mistakes in the transcription of the other texts, for instance in the separate editions of La Promesse and Le Proces, and the collected editions from 1560 to 1587. Of course, some of these errors are inevitable and Laumonier cannot be held responsible, given the enormous task he was able to accomplish. However, these observations should warn the specialists who might be tempted to use this edition to interpret a poem and use the list of variants. 5 Laumonier was an immense scholar, a man with great vision who dedicated his life to the study and the dissemination of Ronsard’s works. He also deserves praise for his chronological edition produced with the Société des Textes Français Modernes. This edition, like any great monument, has revealed cracks and gaps over the years. Even the “établissement du texte” should be scrutinized carefully in some tomes. In short, we must read Ronsard’s epics with a modern eye. 6 It is now time to follow Laumonier’s footsteps in the preparation of a new edition, which should be strictly chronological and separate poems and books. Verification of all the variants on the originals, updated information on the early editions (Barbier- Mueller, Rouget), recorded semantic variants, and enriching the critical aspect with modern scholarship published since the Pléiade edition (Bjaï, Pouey-Mounou, Duport, Denizot, Pigné, Carnel, Ford, Langer, Maira, Alduy, Cornilliat, etc.) should be the focus. Finally, Ronsard’s texts (manuscripts and printed versions, both in verse or in prose) that were included in the final section of tome XVIII should include a critical edition fuelled by recent discoveries, and poems attributed to the poet deserve to be completed and reassessed. Until such a modern edition is published, continued use of Laumonier's edition should be done cautiously, and of course, with the aid of the Pléiade edition and modern editions of separate poetic books such as Les Amours (A. Gendre), Les Hymnes (A. Py), and Les Discours (M. Smith). AUTHORS FRANÇOIS ROUGET François Rouget is Professor of French and a specialist of Renaissance poetry at Queen's University (Canada). He has published in collaboration several critical editions of poets (O. de Magny, P. de Tyard, Ph. Desportes) and manuscript albums (Catherine de Clermont, Marguerite de Valois). He is the author of Ronsard et le Livre (Geneva : Droz, 2 vols., 2010-2012) and the general editor of the Dictionnaire de Pierre de Ronsard (Paris: H. Champion, 2015). Variants, 14 | 2019 186 James Joyce, Brouillons d’un baiser : premiers pas vers Finnegans Wake Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Sam Slote REFERENCES James Joyce, Brouillons d’un baiser: premiers pas vers Finnegans Wake, edited and introduced by Daniel Ferrer, translated by Marie D’Arrieussecq. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. 133 pp. ISBN 978-2-07-014374-0. €14.90. 1 In March 2006 the National Library of Ireland acquired a small but significant tranche of Joyce manuscripts that hailed from the earliest phases of the composition and conceptualization of Finnegans Wake. The manuscripts fit within the already well-known series of Irish-themed vignettes that Joyce wrote in 1923 (Tristan and Isolde, Roderick O’Conor, St Patrick, St Kevin). Most of the new drafts were completely unanticipated and thus their appearance forced significant revisions upon our understanding of the genesis of Finnegans Wake. At the time of their discovery, along with my colleague Luca Crispi, I was in the final stages of editing the volume How Joyce Wrote “Finnegans Wake”; fortunately, we had enough time to incorporate a brief and preliminary assessment of these manuscripts and their significance. Now that a few years have passed, we can progress beyond preliminaries. Indeed, in 2012 – when Joyce’s works entered the public domain in the EU and elsewhere — the NLI made high quality scans of all their Joyce holdings available online (http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000252560). The NLI material is not accessible from UK-based IP addresses because EU copyright law concerning posthumous and unpublished material is not harmonised. 2 The present volume — Brouillons d’un baiser — collects together the new NLI Finnegans Wake material supplemented with relevant, previously-known documents held at the British Library. The drafts are presented in the original language along with meticulous translations by the renowned novelist Marie D’Arrieussecq. The volume also includes a significant introductory essay by Daniel Ferrer. This volume is not a genetic edition of Variants, 14 | 2019 187 the early Wake vignettes, but rather a selection — focused around the NLI holdings — that emphasises specific moments within the inception of Finnegans Wake. In effect, and this is meant as high praise, the volume should be considered as Ferrer’s essay about the genesis of Finnegans Wake supplemented by draft transcriptions (and translations), and not as a volume of transcriptions of the Wake’s earliest drafts accompanied by an introductory essay. In part, this assessment follows from the fact that the drafts are presented in linear (and not diplomatic) transcription, which slightly reduces their usability for genetic research even when considering the availability of the NLI’s online scans. 3 In 1922, when Joyce began work on Finnegans Wake, he had little idea as to what form his next book would take. In effect, as Ferrer convincingly argues, Joyce was also one of the writers paralysed by the audacity of Ulysses. The vignettes were thus little writing experiments that worked as points of possible inspiration in terms of narrative, theme and style. The new NLI drafts reveal that Joyce was more concerned with the story of Tristan and Isolde than most scholars had previously supposed. The one exception to this is David Hayman, who had previously proposed that at key moments in 1923 the story of Tristan and Isolde provided Joyce with a kind of narrational template from which he could begin, even as the subsequent development of the Wake progressed in directions that occulted this initial impetus. Ferrer argues that the new NLI drafts mostly corroborate Hayman’s earlier assessment. 4 Joyce’s first Finnegans Wake notebook includes entries from an article by Thomas Sturge Moore on the multiple versions of the legend of Tristan and Isolde, which suggests that Joyce was not just interested in the story as such but also in the fact that it exists in multiple configurations and, perhaps more interestingly, lacks a definitive Ur-version (Joyce’s reading also includes Joseph Bédier’s attempts to reconstruct an Ur-version). Likewise, the new NLI drafts show Joyce playing around with different versions and configurations of the story of Tristan and Isolde. Previously we only had known of one Tristan and Isolde vignette (or, more precisely, half a vignette, at the British Library, since its other half was missing until the announcement of the NLI acquisition) and now we have five. Ferrer’s collection is centred around Joyce’s different versions of Tristan and Isolde (and thus omits the other vignettes altogether) and emphasises how these different versions refract around a sloppy kiss Tristan gives to Isolde — hence the title of his volume, which translates as “drafts of a kiss.” 5 Ferrer’s is not the only argument or arrangement possible with this material: Danis Rose has long proposed a different genealogy of the Wake’s early vignettes, that they were intended for a work sufficiently distinct from Finnegans Wake as to merit the title Finn’s Hotel (which Rose published in 2013). However, Rose’s theory relies on large amounts of conjecture. In contrast, Ferrer’s theory is much closer to the texts themselves and is more attuned to the play of variations across the different documents presented. Indeed, the heart of his argument is a precise analysis of Joyce’s mechanics of repeating and reprising narrative elements across his different versions of Tristan and Isolde. Ferrer argues that Joyce’s patterns of revision across his vignettes are his way of thinking through the possibilities of myth, history and narration and, in this, the Tristan and Isolde vignettes comprise a matrix for Wakean style. That is, through the act of writing these vignettes — of writing and rewriting Tristan and Isolde — Joyce begins to learn how to write Finnegans Wake. Ferrer has argued elsewhere that a manuscript is not a text but rather a “protocol” for making a text. His introduction Variants, 14 | 2019 188 argues that for Joyce these vignettes represent Joyce’s first steps towards the protocols of Finnegans Wake and that, likewise, for the reader they can offer an alternative mode of accessing Joyce’s last book. 6 Overall Ferrer’s essay is subtle, tightly-argued and persuasive. The transcriptions — despite being linear — are precise and accurate; the translations are elegant and, likewise, accurate. The transcriptions are well and copiously annotated and so this volume would even be useful for scholars bereft of a fluent French. It is one of the happy characteristics of Joyce studies that significant — even transformative — works of criticism appear outside the Anglosphere. AUTHORS SAM SLOTE Sam Slote is Associate Professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. His most recent book is Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave, 2013). In addition to Joyce and Beckett, he has written on Modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Queneau, Tom McCarthy, Dante, Mallarmé and Elvis. Variants, 14 | 2019