Genesis A: A New Edition, Revised ed. by A. N. Doane (review)

A. N. Doane is a name synonymous with the Old English Genesis, the longest Anglo-Saxon vernacular poem after Beowulf. Doane is the authoritative editor of the two poems that make up the Genesis found in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11. His first edition of Genesis A appeared in 1978, at a time when the poem, in critical terms, had become something of a poor cousin, especially when compared with interest in Genesis B (interpolated into Genesis A about a century before Junius 11 was copied). Doane’s edition of Genesis B and its Old Saxon source appeared as The Saxon Genesis in 1991. Over recent decades, interest in all aspects of the Old English Genesis has blossomed, and Doane’s editorial work has been at the center of this development, but aspects of the 1978 edition of Genesis A have made the volume outdated. There is no doubt that a new edition of a text that has moved to the center of Old English Studies is highly desirable, and this revised edition will undoubtedly satisfy the needs of a new generation. This revised edition will also serve as a better companion volume to the edition of The Saxon Genesis.

Doane’s 1978 edition was the first full, critical edition of Genesis A published since Ferdinand Holthausen’s in 1914. Between these appeared George Philip Krapp’s widely influential edition of the poems of Junius 11 in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (1931). One of the virtues of Krapp’s edition is its arrangement of the Genesis poems in manuscript order; however, this obscures the heterogeneity of Genesis A and B. The ASPR editions aimed to be less interventionist with textual emendation than earlier editorial conventions allowed, though the shift toward diplomatic editing of OE Biblical poetry probably explored its farthest shore in Doane’s Genesis A. The book appeared the year after Peter J. Lucas’s 1977 edition of Exodus, and against the background of debates about Edward B. Irving Jr.’s 1953 Exodus edition, in which Irving had removed the so-called patriarchal digression from its manuscript order, and appended it to the poem. By the early 1970s, Irving had rescinded, publishing supplementary essays complementing and correcting his edition. Lucas’s treatment of Exodus was criticized by various scholars, and his revised edition in 1994 significantly moved toward a less diplomatic approach in places. Doane has rightly stuck to his guns, so that Genesis A in this revised edition offers the reader substantially the same text, though in a more readable and accessible format. Genesis B is the early West Saxon translation of an excerpt from an Old Saxon poem, separately conceived from Genesis A, and grafted into it. Doane’s editions facilitate the separate study of the poems but are also companion volumes for scholars interested in the study of the relationship between the poems. Since 1978 the digital revolution has challenged the role of editors, especially when digital facsimiles of texts are readily available, where printed facsimiles might not have been; a digital facsimile of Junius 11 was published by Bernard Muir in 2004. Doane’s Genesis A editions straddle this development, and the revised edition can presume the reader’s digital access to the manuscript in a way unimagined in 1978. Much of the revised edition’s detail reveals the value of a careful edition as a tool for interpreting a manuscript text.

The edition is organized in a straightforward manner. The Preface explains to the reader how this revised edition has come about, and the table of abbreviations follows. The list does not seem to be complete: OE (for Old English) appears in the body of the text, as does ME (for Middle English), but not in the list. These are hardly difficult to interpret, but neither would the abbreviations A-S (for Anglo-Saxon) or ON (for Old...