Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus: Papers Given at the Thirtieth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 4–5 November 1994 ed. by Erika Rummel (review)

HUMANITIES 181 engendered a fierce outcry from country folk who declare that they must defend their traditional rights and way of life. I have only praise for the work of the editors of these volumes and for REED'S continued enterprise in the project to make the dramatic records of the whole of England available in due course. This is a splendid scholarly product and one which will materially enhance our understanding of the evolution of dramatic entertainment in the south-west of England. I am delighted to possess a copy of these volumes, thanks to being asked to review them, but I lament their cost. Clearly they are out of reach of the average scholar; can we not find some way around this problem? Could simultaneous printing on paper and on CD-ROM be the answer? The latter form is much cheaper to produce and could be made available only to individuals; it also has the immense advantage that it is easy to update when those volumes, atpresent too fragile to examine,dobecome available. (REAVLEY GAIR) Erika Rwnmel, editor. Editing Texts from the Age ofErasmus: Papers Given at the Thirtieth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University afToronto, 4-5 November 1994 University of Toronto Press. xviii, 104. $35.00 The annual Conference onEditorial Problems must be, at over thirty years, the longest-running meeting of its kind in the English-speaking world. It is held at the University of Toronto, and is a two-day focused discussion of a single topic in scholarly editing. In the past, the conference has produced Editing Sixteenth-Century Texts, Editing Medieval Texts, Editing Correspondence , and, as the organizers began to think in new directions, the odder, less obvious ones, such as Editing Polymaths, Editing Early and Historical Atlases, even the self-reflexive Editors and Editing. A conference devoted to Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus is appropriate, given Toronto's distinguished place in early modem studies and the University of Toronto Press's outstanding edition of the Collected Works of Erasmus (1974-). Erika Rummel, the indefatigable Erasmus scholar, introduces the six speakers: James Farge on registers at the University of Paris, Robert Kingdon on ecclesiastical registers at Geneva, Daniel Kinney on More's humanist defences, Anne O'Donnell on William Tyndale's 'independent works' (by which she means his works excluding Bible translations),Joseph McLelland on the works of the religious reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli, and James McConica on the massive Amsterdam and Toronto editions of Erasmus. The volume concentrates on a historical period and on historical concerns, less on the nature of text or the problems of its reproduction. Most of the essays are reports of works completed or in progress, with 182 LETIERS IN CANADA 1996 relatively little analysis of the theoretical or even practical problems of editing. Though these distinguished editors obviouslyknow a lot about the complications of their work, only O'Donnell quotes anything in the theory and shows us a few of the nuts and bolts. Kinney discusses the significance of his text and acknowledges the historical specificity ofmodern editing. At one point Kingdon brieflyaddresses the significance of electronic media for the modern editor. The essays emphasize extra-textual matters: how the editors came to their texts, how the texts form a corpus, why this corpus is significant today, who is (or was) on the team of editors, how they go (or went) about their work, and so on. An important theme emerges, perhaps ofgreater interest to sociologists of acad~rnic life than to editors, though, if we are to follow the well-known path of D.F. McKenzie, perhaps textual scholars are all, deep down, . sociologists. The theme is teamwork. Not one of these scholars works independently, and most write feelingly of their relations, either personal or institutional, with others. Farge speaks at the end of his essay of declining library conditions in Paris, Kingdon names the many teachers and colleagues who helped him learn to read and identify the hands in his ecclesiastical registers, McLelland sees Peter Martyr within the context of a conununity ofmodernscholarship, and McConica gives rich details about the remarkable personal histories of some of the organizers of the two great Erasmus...