A Rationale of Textual Criticism

POSTSCRIPT

Postscript EACH of the concerns touched on here has been the subject of a voluminous literature, extending back over the centuries, and debates about such issues will continue endlessly, as long as there are minds to address them. Readers who desire suggestions for pursuing what has been said about one or another of these questions may find a useful starting point in the Modern Language Association's Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (edited by Joseph Gibaldi, 1981), which contains introductory surveys, with reading lists, on linguistics (by Winfred P. Lehmann), historical scholarship (by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski ), literary theory (by Paul Hernadi), literary criticism (by Lawrence Lipking), and textual scholarship (by the present writer). For the philosophy of mind, knowledge, and history lying behind the points I have made, one might take up Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970), Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and-for a collection of essays with extensive reading lists-Philosophy in History (edited by POSTSCRIPT Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, 1984). Among the twentieth-century classics of textual criticism are A. E. Housman's preface to his edition of the first book of the Astronomicon of Manilius (1903) and "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism" (1921), both available in his Selected Prose (edited by John Carter, 1961) and in his Collected Poems and Selected Prose (edited by Christopher Ricks, 1988); R. B. McKerrow's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (1939); W. W. Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text" (1950), available in his Collected Papers (edited by J. C. Maxwell, 1966); and Fredson Bowers's Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964) and "Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text" (1972), the latter (and much else of related interest) available in his Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (1975). Admirable accounts of the long development of textual criticism as applied to biblical and classical texts are provided by Bruce M. Metzger's The Text of the New Testament (1964, 1968), L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson's Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1968, 1974), and E. J. Kenney 's The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (1974). In an essay called "Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Textual Criticism and Modern Editing" (Studies in Bibliography 36 [1983]: 21-68), Ihave tried to offer an overview of this history and to relate it to the textual approaches that have been taken, mostly in the twentieth century, to post-medieval writers. I have also written three essays, now collected as Textual Criticism POSTSCRIPT 97 since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-1985 (1987), analyzing the extensive discussions of editorial theory that have occurred since Greg's landmark essay. I mention these pieces of mine because they provide (whether or not one agrees with their judgments) a convenient guide to a large mass of material and because their arguments underlie the rationale presented here. As one reads through all these works (and the works mentioned in them-and then the works cited in those works), one gains an understanding of the cycles of thought through which these several fields have passed. One also comes to see, ever more clearly, that these fields, like all fields, are thoroughly interconnected: all are the products of the human mind. This spaciousness of view puts one in a position to conclude that progress toward understandingin these endeavors as in others-entails an openness to the various ideas that have served temporarily, each in its turn, to satisfy the persistent human craving for absolute truth. This page intentionally left blank ...