[ Textual Blog ]
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Intute has now separated its sections in archeology and classics. Textual scholarship of classical texts can be found under Classics.

For other subjects, you need to find the entry “textual criticism.” For example, for English you have to find Textual Criticism under English. The same for French, Italian or other featured languages.

With thanks to Dr Andrea Vianello, who is in charge of the archeology and posted a comment to this blog.

Last week, at the ITSEE launch, I –and several other people– had the opportunity to hear Michael Reeve. He delivered a talk called “Disembodying texts: inflammatory thoughts fuelled by the editing of Pliny’s Natural History,” during which he stated that classicists, unlike New Testament scholars and those in other fields, did not readily make use of computer technologies. An alarm went off in my mind, while images of Digital Classicist and Perseus flashed in front of my eyes. Is it possible –I thought– that I have just imagined these things?

Fortunately, a quick look at the Digital Classicist Wiki makes evident that Classicists clearly are making use of electronic resources. Well, then I am not as out of touch as I thought. However, the fact that classicists might be using some electronic resources does not mean that these resources concentrate in textual scholarship. Indeed, a survey of the Projects found in the DC Wiki shows that of the 20 listed projects, only 5 appear to present edited texts (Curse Tablets from Roman Britain, Digital Nestle-Aland Prototype, Electronic Boethius, Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project and Vindolanda Tablets Online). The other 15 projects are databases, archives, concordances and other tools for the study of classical texts. But there is even more, Netither the Digital Nestle-Aland nor the Electronic Boethius really fit in the “Classical box.” The Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament is not in classical Greek and the Boethius is an Anglo-Saxon translation. Naturally, there is nothing wrong with either of these projects, it is just that counting them as Classical takes a leap of faith.

The Intute records for classics does not yet have a separate entry for textual scholarship. Despite that, several interesting resources can be found here –although, one has to work to find them among so many other projects. Notable are: the Aesop Text Project, Homer and the Papyri and The Multitext Edition of Homer.

Given the small number of textual critical projects involving electronic tools in the world of Classics, one has to wonder whether the reluctance to take on the new technologies might be directly proportional to the age of the studied texts. Fortunately, Caroline Macé’s work on Gregory of Nazianzus and especially on the applications of philogenetic software to the study of large textual traditions come to the rescue and stand as examples of the work that Michael Reeve does not seem to have noticed.

I have been away for a few days at the New Chaucer Society Conference, in New York. There I was, once more, surprised by the fact that people who call themselves “literary critics” do not seem to be any kind of interest on textual matters.
There were several well-intentioned people who had worked very hard to try and understand what is it that we do. However, they seem to be getting a lot of “publicity” about what textual scholars do. This publicity seems to have a direct time warp link to the 19th Century.
The publications we produce –I am thinking of the Canterbury Tales Project– do not have a wide audience, so often scholars receive second hand –through articles by others, news of our work. Of course, second hand news is not always as precise or accurate as one would like them to be.
It is like a nightmare from the Bowers Zone. And we were thinking that we were over that. As it turns out, our destiny is to talk to other textual critics –who seem to have more of an idea of what we do– and never to see the day in which literary scholars take editions and texts seriously. Alternatively, we might have to make a bigger effort to communicate with those not involved in textual criticism –this blog that no one reads might be a place to start.
Of course, I wonder if this also happens to others. Is there any communication between those studying the text of Shakespeare and those producing interpretive essays about his works? What about Joyce scholars? What about the rest?

Recently I received a very long e-mail requesting some clarification regarding the way in which Peter Robinson and I have described the New Stemmatics in different publications.
This scholar thought that our ideas about the New Stemmatics appeared to be new and that they differed from the Stemmatics she was familiar with. Her questions were all interesting and insightful and showed that she had carried out a thorough research on our writings. What surprised me was that she had not come across any of the other contemporary approaches to the genetic study of texts. Indeed, in Holland and Germany many refer to these new approaches as “Stemmatology,” in Spain they are generally referred to as “Neo-Lachmannian” approaches.
It was also interesting to confirm, that the scholarly perception -of non-specialists- of the Lachmann method is clearly filtered through the very loose interpretation by Paul Maas (Textual Criticism, 1958). The notion that this method attempts to recover an authorial original is imprinted in people’s minds. It is more accurate to say, that the Lachmann method did not attempt to recover an authorial original, but instead proposed to reconstruct the archetype of the tradition –there is a big difference between these. The New Stemmatics does not even attempt to reconstruct an archetype; instead, it tries to construct “the latest, well-informed, link of that textual tradition: a text that could potentially explain all extant texts at a given point in time, but that does not aspire to be ‘authorial’ or ‘definitive.’” (from a paper presented at the 2005 DRH conference).
The idea of an edition produced following New Stemmatical principles is to present the text in such way that it helps the reader to understand the textual tradition and all the variation at a particular point.
So, I guess that when it comes to what a scholar thinks about Stemmatics, we have to ask: which stemmatics?

During the second day of this year’s Master Classes, after Warwick Gould’s presentation a debate ensued in which several very intelligent and well informed scholars argued about whether authorial “intention” should rather be authorial “intentions.” The main proponents of the argument, Sally Bushell and Win Van Mierlo argued that, because texts were the result of a process, surely it was much better to refer to “authorial intentions” as the author often changed his mind, revised and rewrote.
It seems to me that although there is an important point that these colleagues were trying to make –that it is extremely difficult to determine how an author might have changed his mind during the creative process–, they appeared to be arguing a strange point.
The question of whether it is more correct to refer to author’s “intention” or “intentions,” appears to have a straight forward answer. At any given point in time, a normal person has one intention. Naturally, this intention might change in the second that immediately follows. From this, it seems that people assume that there should be more than one intention –which could be accepted if . However, at any given point in time, there is only one. Even schyzophrenics or suferers of multiple personality disorders might have trouble both wanting and not wanting at the same time to write “to be or not to be.” Even if this were possible from a psychological perspective –and I don’t claim to be a psychologist– it would be impossible for us to prove it.
Clearly, textual scholars would fail their physics classes: the speed of a car does not become “speeds” at different points in time. Instead the only speed changes. Textual criticism is better served when the time of the intention is specified.
The problem that the discovery of the “authorial intention” might be an unatteinable goal is a completely different animal.