Editing Medieval Texts: An Introduction, Using Exemplary Materials Derived from Richard Rolle, "Super Canticum" 4

196 Pages·2015·1.682 MB·English

by  Ralph Hanna

exeter medieval texts and studies
Series Editors: Vincent Gillespie and Richard Dance
Founded by M.J. Swanton and later co-edited by Marion Glasscoe
Editing Medieval Texts
An Introduction,
Using Exemplary Materials Derived from
Richard Rolle, ‘Super Canticum’ 4
Ralph Hanna
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published in 2015 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2015 Ralph Hanna
The right of Ralph Hanna to be identified as the author of this book has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
print ISBN 978-1-78138-272-1
epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-443-5
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Printed and bound in Poland by BooksFactory.co.uk
Contents
Foreword vii
Preliminary: On Editions 1
1 Collecting the Witnesses 17
2 Finding a Copy-text and Transcribing it 29
3 Comparing the Witnesses, or Collation 39
4 The Examination of the Variants 45
5 Annotation 99
Richard Rolle, ‘Super Canticum’ 4: Edition, Collation,
and Translation 107
Appendix: Additional Manuscript Descriptions; the Manuscripts
and the Text 141
Notes 161
Index 179

Foreword
I wrote this book, designed for students new to the enterprise, because
I recalled my early frustrations at trying to edit texts transmitted in
medieval and early modern manuscripts. And although the practical
experience of examining a number of such texts has given me a certain
measure of confidence in my skills, one frustration still remains. This
is the absence of any practical handbook for beginners, one that might
show what is at stake in the process of editing a text and what steps one
might take to address the attendant difficulties.
Central to the whole argument here is ‘experience’. There is nothing
‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ about the production of reading texts of medieval
works, only an assessment of probabilities guided by one’s acquired
knowledge. Of course, most of the knowledge that might be on display
here has not been my own. I owe a very great deal to two teachers
who directed my work early on, E. Talbot Donaldson and Richard
S. Sylvester. I owe much more to a sequence of collaborators, people
with whom I have joint-edited texts over the years and from whom,
as we argued variant by variant, I have derived vastly more instruction
than I could possibly have given in return: M. C. Seymour, Robert
A. Pratt, Hoyt N. Duggan (and Robert M. Adams, and the rest of the
Piers Plowman Electronic Archive team), David A. Lawton, and Traugott
Lawler. Traug, in particular, will probably find this volume intensely
amusing in its various flailings; an expert Latinist and an extraordinarily
organised thinker, he would have done the whole with greater authority,
clarity, and acumen.
I have also profited from intensely critical readings the script has
received. In addition to the customary incisiveness of the series editors,
Vincent Gillespie and Richard Dance, I am particularly grateful for three
viii editing medieval texts
readings, all producing extensive suggestions about both content and
presentation, from Nicholas Perkins, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and Sarah
Wood. Of course, given my intellectual stubbornness, many of their fine
suggestions have gone unheeded, and I am solely responsible for what
remains.
Finally, I am grateful to my editor, Helen Gannon, and the rest of the
team at Liverpool University Press for converting my work into attractive
published form. In particular, Rachel Clarke – who set two of my earlier
volumes – has utterly outdone herself this time. Her exquisite care with
the text and apparatus has been a joy to see.