Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson (review)

The Early English Text Society (EETS) was founded in 1864 by Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910). The main original purpose of EETS was not textual but lexical, to provide materials for the Oxford English Dictionary, then in its initial planning stages. This association with the OED is reflected in a continuing lengthy preoccupation in EETS editions with linguistic matters. The Society’s engagement with matters of editorial method over a century and half has been more intermittent and often not explicit. For example, when the Society chose to initiate a series of diplomatic transcripts of versions of the Ancrene Riwle (including versions in Latin and French as well as those in English) the rationale for this extended project was not explained in the published versions.

For the first time in its history, in 2010, EETS held a conference on editing, the papers from which largely constitute the present volume. Both in the overall design and in a number of particular discussions these papers reveal a rather unfocused approach to editorial matters. It would be possible to linger over the opaque title (the source for which is incorrectly given on p. 2, fn. 2), were there not larger problems of both conception and execution. In a volume subtitled ‘Editing Medieval Texts from Britain’ the longest essay (pp. 167–94) is on Peter of Limoges, a late thirteenth-century French author. Other papers are concerned with lexical, not editorial matters—on the Anglo-Norman Dictionary and on ‘New Software Tools for the Analysis of Computerized Historical Corpora’, for example. I do not propose to discuss these papers, since they seem outside the asserted scope of this volume. The geographical range of ‘Britain’ is seen as warranting the inclusion of papers not just on Scottish texts, but on those in Anglo-Norman, Celtic, Welsh and medieval Latin. Thus, the linguistic and geographical scope of this volume extends into areas generally outside EETS’s concerns, while at the same time the historical range of EETS editions is not fully represented—the Society has published quite a lot of early modern editions, they get no mention here. The criteria of inclusiveness here seem rather confused.

Difficulties about the scope of this volume do not stop with its geographical and chronological range. The first paper is not on editing, but on the history of EETS, covering the years 1930 to 1950. Helen Spencer’s account of this period focuses on the Editorial Secretary at this time, Mabel Day. Though her paper is well written and carefully researched it is hard to see why this period in particular provides a focus in a volume ostensibly concerned with editing, since it is primarily biographical, and this is not a particularly significant period in the development of EETS. That this should be so is perhaps explained by a striking point, one not made by Spencer. Few of the EETS Council members in this period (they are listed, pp. 21–22) were actually Middle English editors—there were lexicographers, experts in place names, Celticists and Elizabethan scholars like Greg and McKerrow. This seems to have been a rather slack period in Middle English editorial studies in England. Not much can be usefully achieved, in the context of this volume, by highlighting it.

Several of the papers are keen to consider modern methodological questions in relation to editing. One issue for some is the role of electronic editing. Bella Millett poses the question: ‘Whatever Happened to Electronic Editing?’ in a lucid and very helpful overview of trends over the last twenty or so years. Her conclusions about the future of internet editorial projects are largely pessimistic, although she does claim that ‘new technology has . . . opened new possibilities for editors, allowing them to explore the manuscript tradition of medieval works in much greater...