Stepping Back and Leaping Forward

Beginning with this issue, 8.1, Textual Cultures moves to the online, open-access platform managed by IUScholarWorks. Consequently, the studies henceforth bearing the imprimatur of the Society of Textual Scholarship may reach a worldwide audience without the restrictions of paid subscriptions or passwords. Open access, however, does not lead to a loosening of editorial standards. Peer evaluation and careful collaboration among authors and editors will remain hallmarks of the work contained within the journals “pages”, that is, its electronic pages, for the convention of pagination will be retained for ease of citation.

An online format provides a convenient milieu for discussions of hyper-textuality, image/text relations, film studies, music, and other fields that rely on technologies to which the printed medium proves less conducive. Moreover, as those who work in digital editing and the creation of digital databases make improvements to their projects and techniques, pulling examples from those powerful tools into articles in Textual Cultures will be effortless. The articles contained in the inaugural online issue make use of hyperlinks as well as PowerPoint slides, and soon we hope to include music and video files, 3D model files, and anything else that might come down the fiber-optic highway.

When moving forward, it is wise to step back and assess the situation in which we find ourselves. I was reminded of this just recently, during a research trip. Christopher Callahan (Illinois-Wesleyan University), Marie-Geneviève Grossel (Université de Valenciennes), and I are producing an edition of the melodies and texts of the songs of Thibaut de Champagne (d. 1253). Most of Thibaut’s manuscripts are catalogued in Paris, and the major sources have been filmed and put online as digital facsimiles. One manuscript, however, is not readily available from a distance: British Library, Egerton MS 274, admittedly a minor source for its contribution to Thibaut’s corpus. However, in the interest of scholarly thoroughness, I traveled to London in October 2013 to study the manuscript.

Upon asking to see the codex, I was informed that it would take at least an hour before it arrived, so I set about consulting secondary literature in the reading room. The entry in the British Library print catalogue for Egerton 274 provides only a short paragraph acknowledging its inclusion in the collection. The British Library online publishes a more detailed description, which appeared reasonable at first glance, and I felt satisfied that I would have something of a roadmap to follow when the manuscript appeared in front of me. Upon further investigation, however, I discovered another description published by the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, which in this case reproduces verbatim the description from the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales . DIAMM links to digital facsimiles of the print publication here and here . At first blush, the DIAMM/RISM description appeared substantially longer, and I initially assumed that this account would supplement the first. I felt dismay, however, as I began to compare the two.

The British Library online catalog breaks the codex down into two “parts”: cc. 3r–118v and cc. 119r–132v (cc.1–2 are flyleaves). This struck me as quite odd, for below this two-part description, the site claims that the manuscript is composed of 160 not 132 folios. On how the remaining quires and folios might fit into the rest of the codex’s structure, the catalog falls silent.

According to DIAMM/RISM, the manuscript is divided into six “fascicles” accounting for 160 folios.¹ When the manuscript arrived at my assigned seat, I began the painstaking process of codicological analysis, and I came to a conclusion: both descriptions were misleading, if not outright wrong. I counted 22 quires with one interpolated folio and discovered evidence both for and against the division of the codex into six fascicles. For example, quires I–VII are all linked together, not by catchwords, but by custodes in the music and by virtue of the positive or probable attribution of most songs to Philip the Chancellor. However, the status of quire VIII, which DIAMM/RISM places into the first...