The Genealogy of Scribal Versions: A “Fourth Way” in Medieval Editorial Theory

This essay is concerned with the existing schism between a radical skepticism of the traditional methodology of textual editing present in the nonauthorial stance of mouvance and the Neo-Lachmannian notion that the primary goal of editing is the recovery of a lost authorial text. Working with Michel Foucault’s notion of genealogy as textual dispersion as opposed to the search for the origins of the genealogical tree, or stemma, this essay theorizes a possible common objective or “fourth way”: an editorial stance that can include both genealogical relationships in the manner of neo-Lachmannism praxis and material recognition of the value of the extant scribal versions as conceived by specialists of manuscript cultures and adherents to the notion of mouvance.