The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (review)

This collection of essays has its origin in a 1999 workshop organized by the editors. The intended focus was to be codicology, and one assumes that the title of the book reflects that early intention. In the event, other aspects of editing and studying texts were emphasized, and the title serves to hint at these interests as well. That is, the book to be unbound is not the ancient codex but the modern edition. And it is to be unbound in two senses. First, as a book publication, the modern edition need not be hogtied by theories of editing. Second, many of the essays point toward and encourage electronic, web-based editions, “texts” that are not bound between covers. Of course, an electronic edition is also unbounded, unconstrained by the limits of conventional publishing. Some of the essays seek to show, in particular cases, what opportunities electronic formats can provide.

It should be noted that most of the essays, while they do address editorial issues, are essentially briefs for editorial projects undertaken by the contributors. And each clarion call for one kind of editing is made, at least in part, to validate the project in hand. Thus broader debates regarding editorial practice are addressed only briefly and intermittently. One consequence of this orientation is that, with the exception of Joan Grenier-Winther's description of how to set up an electronic database for a web-based edition, the essays speak less to editors than to scholars interested in the texts under discussion. That said, I should also observe that for the most part the discussions are learned and interesting.

Three of the essays consider the diachronic study of texts, with an eye not necessarily on the original version but on an altered version. Anne L. Klinck, who completed an edition of the Southern Version of Cursor Mundi begun by Sarah Horrall, offers telling remarks aimed at those who theorize editing but do not put their theories to the test of application. And she calls attention to the sleight of hand practised by one proponent of textual mouvance (each version of a text has its validity) who cannot escape the analytical imperative of distinguishing between better and worse texts, between shifts that are accidental and meaningless and shifts that are deliberate and significant. In turn, Meg Roland proposes a parallel-text edition of the “Roman War” episode in the “Malory Documents.” Her proposal seems reasonable, but she never demonstrates its utility. Caught up in larger debates and peripheral matters, Roland provides merely a decorative sample of parallel texts, one that is not quite linked to the brief commentary that she offers. She cites comparative analyses of the Roman War section that have already been published by others but asserts simply that a parallel-text edition would highlight “the dynamic interaction of the two versions.” A more persuasive case for the study of mouvance by way of a comparative edition is made by Peter Diehl, who examines an inquisitor's manual as it existed in a fifteenth-century manuscript and in a sixteenth-century printed text. Substantial differences between the two versions allow one to trace cultural shifts, and an edition for this purpose would be especially valuable to scholars who are interested in the later era. That is, editions need not be founded on interest in original texts; rather, they must serve particular audiences.

A more theorized discussion, titled “Toward a Disjunctive Philology,” is presented by William Robins, who offers some consideration of best-text and stemmatic editions in order to recommend, as a sort of compromise (or escape from the tyranny of these models), a parallel-text edition that highlights the very problems that editors must adjudicate. With a “best text,” one could juxtapose a “worst text” or a critical text (one's choice, as Robins observes about kinds of editions, “depends upon what you want to know”). He prefers this approach to...