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· 117 ·· CHAPTER 4 · Island Philology Bédier’s creole biography suggests that he turned to the Middle Ages partly in response to the disruptive effects of migration. His scholarship, in turn, refers explicitly to creole memories. As he brings the colonial and the medieval into dialogue, using each to explain the other, he weds exile to philology: both derive from experiences of rupture (in time, space, or both); both function between memory and forgetting. While the poignancy of exile lies in the persistence of the memory of a lost place, philology promises to restore lost forms to contemporary consciousness . For French medieval studies during the Third Republic, philological recovery fortified the nation by stabilizing its language, lineage, and literary history. The products of philology proffered images of continuity and purity that stretched to the nation’s earliest foundational moment (however defined). This nationalist philology, as developed after 1870, generated many influential documents and theories, some still in use today. In this chapter, I elucidate how the widely forgotten facts of Bédier’s creole heritage impinge on the practice of French medieval studies. Bédier’s scholarly references to Bourbon signify within the combined contexts of philology, nationalism, and colonialism. While in the previous chapters I discussed general interactions between medievalism and colonialism , here I elaborate on the technical role of philology. As a method of textual analysis, philology created the seamless continuities so coveted by nationalists and colonialists alike. Philology could regularize grammar, smooth over gaps in the documentary record, and turn strange forms into familiar words. Its powers to “purify” languages and texts legitimized national and imperial ambitions.1 Philology also relied directly on colonialist metaphors. The German classicist August Boeckh, for example, defined philology as a form of domination: “First and foremost, it is the task of reproducing all that alien thought so that it becomes mine, so that nothing external or alien remains. . . . At the same time, however, the task of philology is to dominate what it has thus reproduced, in such a way that, 118 ISLAND PHILOLOGY though it has been made mine, appropriated to myself, I can still hold it before me like an object . . .”2 Boeckh describes a totalizing obliteration of differences through philological conquest, every historical detail assimilated into a single object of possession. Although a classicist of the first half of the nineteenth century, Boeckh captures succinctly the aggressive stance on difference that characterized romance philology into the twentieth century (and sometimes still does). Bédier famously broke with the editorial methods of German philologists like Boeckh. When he began his career, the most widely accepted editing method derived from the work of Karl Lachmann, whose “critical method” involved combining different surviving manuscripts into a composite construction of the text’s “original” form. This process requires grouping manuscripts into “families”: all those deemed copied from a common original belong together; comparisons within and between families reveal the form of the original. In theory, the editing becomes scientifically mechanical: whenever a majority of the families agree, the editor simply selects their common text. The result would represent the oldest, least corrupt form of the author’s original text (which almost never survives). Bédier expressed skepticism of the “critical method” at the very beginning of his career, later developing a full critique based on the problem of classification: as soon as one began comparing texts, “the notion of the authentic and the primitive becomes confused.”3 Bédier noted that editors almost always organized manuscripts into two families—leaving the ultimate selection of text to their own taste. Since individual taste already drove the editorial process, he reasoned, the editor should select a single manuscript he considered the “best” and then edit with minimal emendation .4 The result would represent a “true” medieval text (rather than a modern composite), however “corrupt” or different from the author’s own creation. By hewing faithfully to single manuscripts, editions could establish continuity with the Middle Ages. Bédier detested the “monstrous hybridity” created by emendation; when possible, he preferred the most purely “French” manuscripts.5 And he could turn even the most seemingly “contaminated” document into a repository of pure French spirit. His “objective science” thus served the aesthetics of “taste” and the politics of prestige. Bédier’s critique of the German model, moreover, gave France its own unique editorial method. As a “national” practice, Bédier’s approach reflects his resistance to mixed forms [mélange, métissage] of all kinds, a distrust...

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