Open Recensions, Textus Recepti, and the Problems of Edition (original) (raw)

Editing Medieval Latin Text: Unusual Texts and the Need of New Type of Editions

Experience 1 will prove that when editing a Medieval Latin text in most cases one will be dealing with an exceptional or anomalous example, at least if our idea of normality is linked to the transmission and tradition of classical, Greek and Latin, texts, on which the so called Lachmann's method has been refined. Beyond anomalies in composition, which can characterize texts and writers of any time and century, there are two peculiarities that distinguish the tradition of the Medieval Latin texts (and, consequently, the editing work) from classical works.

The Politics of Text Editing in Carolingian France

Writing on the fringes of the Byzantine world about 562 CE, Cassiodorus, a retired Ostrogothic senator of Syrian extraction, undertook to summarize the protocols of textual criticism for the monastic community-the Vivarium-that he had founded near Scylacium, which passed them on in turn to the clerics of the Christian Middle Ages: 1 Among those pursuits which require bodily labor, the studies of the scribes who curate old manuscripts (studia antiquariorum), if they write correctly (veraciter), appeal to me the most, and not perhaps without reason: for by reading the divine scriptures they instruct their own minds in a most salutary manner and by writing out the precepts of the Lord they disseminate them far and wide. Happy the project, praiseworthy the zeal, to preach to men with the hand, to open tongues with the fingers, to give salvation silently to mortals, and to fight against the illicit pilferings of the devil with pen and ink: Satan receives a wound for every word of the Lord that the antiquary transcribes. . . .

Editing Mediaeval Texts from a Different Angle:

Scripta & e-Scripta, 20, 2020

Slavonic and Multilingual Traditions. Together with Francis J. Thomson’s Bibliography and Checklist of Slavonic Translations to Honour Francis J. Thomson on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday. Ed. by Lara Sels, Jürgen Fuchsbauer, Vittorio Tomelleri and Ilse de Vos. (= Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 276/ Biblioteque de Byzantion 19.) Leuven – Paris – Bristol, CT: Peeters Publishers, 2018, XII + 440 + [12] pp. ISBN: 9789042935310.