Text Editing: Past, Present, and Future

As I've been thinking about Romanic Review's 100th anniversary, I was tempted, as I gather many participants on the program were, to dip into some of the first issues of the journal in order to take a look at the sorts of articles being published in 1910 and the few years following. Among other observations, it is intriguing for us to discover the preponderance of studies devoted to either linguistics or philological topics as well as, historically speaking, to medieval and Renaissance literature. Only a handful of articles over the first ten years extend into the seventeenth century and beyond. This of course reflects the nature of graduate training at the time as well as the individuals who were forming graduate students and future professors at the most prominent institutions of higher education: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and a handful of others. Among the medieval contributions, I was struck by the slight number of studies devoted to editions of shorter texts--at the time, a more common type of contribution to the French journal Romania--or to editorial questions in general, which seem to have been relegated to the review section. My attention was thus drawn, for rather different reasons, to two items in volume 1, dated 1910. The first was a review of an article that had been published the previous year, in July 1909, in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Written by an assistant professor of Spanish at Yale named Frederick Bliss Luquiens, the article under review had the straightforward yet provocative title "The Reconstruction of the Original Chanson de Roland." (1) The reviewer, J. A. Will, summarily dismissed the young professor's argument, accusing him of subjectivity and specious reasoning. The second item in that first volume of Romanic Review that attracted my attention appeared in the second fascicle for 1910, an article by the distinguished French medievalist Joseph Bedier, innocuously entitled "Richard de Normandie dans les chansons de geste." (2) The author's name is printed at the end, followed by the date, December 22, 1909, and the place, New York City. There would at first blush seem to be little affinity between the Yale professor arguing somewhat loosely in favor of the "technical excellence" of the Oxford manuscript as a way of approaching a satisfactory "reconstruction" of the archetype of the Roland and Bedier's own work at the time, which concentrated on analyses of the epic tradition that would lead to the publication of his four-volume Legendes epiques, the first two volumes of which had appeared in 1908 and the final two of which would be published in 1912 and 1913. The Romanic Review article, which was later incorporated into the Legendes epiques, as were many of his articles devoted to epic at that time, studied the anachronistic presence of Richard the First, duke of Normandy, in a number of chansons de geste related to the cycle of Charlemagne in order to add one more piece of evidence in support of his thesis concerning the learned and clerical origins of French epic, which defied the prevailing orthodoxy of popular origins. Before coming back to a possible relation between these two items in the first volume of Romanic Review, a few words should be said about the importance of the period between 1907 and 1913 for editorial work in France and Germany, the status of the Chanson de Roland as an exemplary editorial challenge, and Joseph Bedier's career-long contributions to the theory and practice of text editing. As is well known, Gaston Paris, through his courses and his landmark publication of the Vie de Saint Alexis in 1872, had introduced a method of text editing developed in Germany that was perceived as more scientific than the less systematic approaches of his predecessors. The method, commonly associated with the German textual scholar Karl Lachmann, attempts to establish the interrelationships between and among extant manuscripts of a given work in order to show how they relate to the now-lost common archetype, itself a descendant of the authorial original. …