Scholarly Editing

Editors are the football referees of text-based research. Everyone has an opinion about how they perform; many confidently believe they could perform far better; very few can imagine ever wanting to do so; but activity in the field would be impossible without them. Scholarly editing underpins a vast range of research across the discipline: an edition may well become a scholar’s most durable and widely cited publication. But what, if anything, is distinctive about editing materials in French as opposed to other languages? How have editors practised and preached as communication and information storage have become increasingly digital? And what prospects do editors face in a rapidly changing research environment?

An uncomfortable truth must be confronted at the outset: non-specialists often misunderstand, underestimate, or simply disregard not only the extent of philological work in which editors engage, but also the ways in which they address and shape larger intellectual issues.¹ To edit a premodern text with a moderately complex tradition involves making literally hundreds of decisions per page: identifying a base text, attending to orthography and punctuation, selecting and presenting variants, supplying notes and glossary entries. All these decisions are informed by an expertise that embraces not only technical skill, but also an awareness of epistemological and methodological concerns, and a capacity for judgement that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has aptly characterized as ‘aesthetic’.² Not for nothing does David Greetham treat editing only in the final chapter of his admirable Textual Scholarship: An Introduction, for ‘it is in editing that the full scholarly dispensation comes into play’.³ What this dispensation generates is of much more than technical interest: in many fields, new editions have changed the ways in which researchers understand a text, an author, or a wider field. Medievalists, for instance, have come to appreciate the poetics of Chrétien de Troyes quite differently thanks to Alfred Foulet and Karl Uitti, whose ‘gridediting’ of Le Chevalier de la charrete reversed the systematic scribal interventions in rhetoric and versification that characterize the base manuscript used by most Chrétien editors.⁴ Similarly, historians of the Wars of Religion owe much to the team led by Bernard Barbiche, whose online edition of the various edicts of pacification is the first to rely on manuscript copies rather than early printed texts, and (thanks to a detailed concordance) to convey exhaustively the relationships between the edicts.⁵ These and countless other editorial achievements bear out Gary Taylor’s contention:

The end of editing is to change literary history: to change our collective organization of the intertextual spaces of the past, and by doing so to change the kind of intertextual spaces that may be created by future readers, critics, and writers. To change our reading of the past, in order to change the future of reading.⁶

While its findings have rich implications for other types of research, editing is perhaps subject to more external influences than any other form of humanities scholarship. Most obviously, it is intimately bound up with intellectual agendas, with attitudes towards authorship, textuality, and cultural history. In recent decades, shifts in these attitudes have prompted sophisticated reflections on editorial theory and practice.⁷ Equally, editors are more immediately and pervasively dependent than other researchers on institutional factors: the norms established by learned associations or long-running publication series. Gumbrecht suggestively compares editing to a traditional craft, in so far as its practices are validated by collective bodies.⁸ In the case of French-language editing, these bodies include the MLA’s Committee on Scholarly Editions; France’s Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and É cole nationale des chartes; publishers such as Champion, Droz, and Garnier; and the Voltaire Foundation, whose Œuvres complè tes de Voltaire have been in progress since 1968.⁹ Inseparable from these concerns, and from each other, are further external dynamics: changes in government research policy and evaluation, which influence individual researchers’ publication and career choices; technological developments and their implications; the economics of the scholarly publication industry; and legal considerations that affect the possibility of reproductions and the accessibility of archives and estates.¹⁰ Hence editorial work is...