What is Scribal Error, and What Should Editors Do (or Not Do) about It?

Résumé 0

Editors of Middle English texts rarely see eye to eye on all matters, not simply on the plausibility of a given reading here or there, but, more fundamentally, on the perception of the nature of the text to be edited, a perception witch is bound to shape the overall strategy, or set of editorial principles, which the editor (with the model of a modern text in mind) will seek to bring to bear on a medieval text wholly lacking in such strategies or principles. This is perhaps not one of Life's Little Ironies as envisaged by Thomas Hardy, but certainly one experienced by editors of texts produced in manuscript culture, which is the broad subject the author narrowly conceived seeks to adress. It is narrow in the sense that its illustrative material is drawn from one (one only) late fifteen-century sermon cycle, admittedly long, an edition of which has just been completed. Yet, despite the reliance on one text and on one literary genre, the examples the author wishes to present have, been chosen on the basis of their presumptive representativeness of textual situations routinely encountered in prose texts belonging to a variety of literary genres producted before the advent of the printing press. Her subject is therefore not so much medieval sermons per se, rather scribal behaviour observable in the transmission, in three distinct stages, of what is ostensibly the 'same' text in the course of the latter half of the fifteenth century. The author's aim is not always to argue one position to the detriment of another, rather to expose the problems such positions throw up.