Textkritik. Eine Einführung in Grundlagen germanistisch-mediävistischer Editionswissenschaft (review)

Thomas Bein's slim volume introduces the student to the very foundations of medieval studies in Germanistik: to textual criticism, text editing, the history of texts and their transmission. His starting point is the most basic of questions, "what is a text," and this he explicates by way of analogy, from the literal meaning of textus to its metaphorical manifestation in the web of sounds, words, syntax, etc., in a text. He discusses the transition of the text from oral to written form, in manuscript, print, and electronic form. On the way he explains the roles of author, redactor, scribe; of patron, compiler, and text editor. Students are introduced to the various types of texts subsumed by the concept "literature" and its transmission in manuscripts and their various types. This in turn leads to a discussion of the various types of writing found in manuscripts containing Old High German, Middle High German, Early New High German, and New High German texts. Each of the first three chapters, as also those following, concludes with a useful introductory bibliography for the subject under discussion. The end of chapter III is devoted to the history of manuscripts (pp. 49–65) and contains illustrations from and discussion of some outstanding German manuscripts, starting with Otfried von Weißenburg's Evangelienharmonie (p. 49) and concluding with the Kolmarer Liederhandschrift (p. 63).

Subsequent chapters of Textkritik are devoted to the problem of "original" texts and their copies and/or redactions, to a discussion of the history of textual editing and criticism in the field of medieval German literature, beginning with Karl Lachmann (pp. 76–84) and ending with "New Philology" (pp. 90–92). Throughout, the discussion is accompanied by most useful diagrams, for example, for "Hauptwege der germanistisch-mediävistischen Editionsphilologie" (p. 86), as well as bibliographies for the subsections of each chapter. The second half of the book (chs. VI–VII) is devoted to the transition of a text from manuscript to edition, to the various types of edition, to such problems as determination of dialect, issues of metrics and authenticity, the question of normalization, and the presentation of variants. Bein concludes with some words of advice concerning the use of editions and the relationship between editor and literary historian, the importance of the latter's familiarity with the specific character of an edition and its critical apparatus and the transmission of the work in question (p. 151).

The book is intended for students of medieval German literature; it therefore not only instructs but also provides material for application in ch. IX, "Übungen" (pp. 153–63). The volume concludes with a general bibliography (pp. 165 68), intended to augment the bibliographies strewn throughout the book, and a most useful glossary (pp. 169–76).

From my own perspective as both literary historian and editor of medieval texts, albeit Old Norse-Icelandic, I can attest the usefulness of Textkritik, not only for the beginner in medieval studies but also the seasoned scholar. Although the examples are all taken from German manuscripts, the book can profit all students of the various medieval literatures, be it French, English, or Old Norse, and might even prove useful to literary historians whose scholarship must rely on the texts prepared by their editorial colleagues.