Free A Companion to the History of the Book by Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose

in inspiring the efforts of textuists to “cleanse” or to “purge” the received text of its inevitable corruptions and to present an ideality of text fresh to current readers, a text that, in some almost beatified state, stood outside the history of its own production.
    The shift I am acknowledging can be illustrated by a couple of examples from my own textual experience. In the first case, when I participated in the collaborative editing of Trevisa’s Middle English translation of the
De Proprietatibus Rerum
(
On the Properties of Things
), under the general editorship of M. C. Seymour (Trevisa 1975), there was an unquestioned assumption that what we were aiming to produce was a text as close as possible either to what Trevisa had actually written or at least to what he must have intended to write. The fact that our author had almost certainly made his “fair copy” of that text in the muniments room of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire (one of the few remaining privately held castles in England) and that the current owners had refused the editors access to the room was a great hindrance but, at the same time, it ironically conferred enormous editorial license upon us as textual scholars. Lacking any possibility of an authorial original intention, we were free to construct this intention out of the inevitably “corrupt” scribal copies. In the mid-1970s, that meant arranging the extant manuscripts into a “family tree” (
stemma
) of relationships based on the charting of “error,” with the most erroneous at the bottom of the tree and those least affected by scribal intervention at the top. And we went even further than this. Since Trevisa’s Middle English was a translation from the Latin of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (for whom there was similarly no authorial autograph text), and since we assumed that Trevisa (a) was a good Latinist and (b) wanted to represent Bartholomaeus’ Latin accurately, we were presumptuous enough to use two Latin texts of the
Proprietatibus
as arbiters when a “crux” (or otherwise unresolvable ambiguity) occurred in the English witnesses. In other words, we were so intent upon this reach for origins that we were prepared to go beyond the actual English transmission to construct a text that Trevisa
ought
to have written, whether he did or not.
    The basic ideology behind this arrangement and use of witnesses was for the most part thought unexceptionable at that time (though we did come in for a bit of flak for the over-reliance on the Latin). We were simply “doing what comes naturally”; for textual scholarship, just like any other intellectual or artistic endeavor, is always firmly embedded in its own culture and the basic assumptions about creation, aesthetics, and reception. Indeed, in a justifiably influential essay, and working under the “originalist” principles I have described for traditional textual criticism, Lee Patterson (1985) claimed that the Kane–Donaldson edition of the B Text of
Piers Plowman
(Langland 1975) was a “modernist” (and specifically a “New Critical”) edition, produced under the auspices of the late formalism of the mid-1970s, the same period as our production of Trevisa.
    In claiming to be able to discover an original text from the fragments and vestiges that history has left us, textual criticism subscribes to this general idealism . . . textual criticism . . . deploys its erudition in a struggle to wrest from the past an originality that time threatens to efface, an originality it designates as the text. In this effort, then, textual criticism aligns itself more closely than might be expected with New Criticism. Just as New Criticism proclaims the text’s autonomy from historical forces, so does textual criticism reconstitute the text from the context of scribalisms in which it is submerged. (Patterson 1985: 86)
    At this remove, the single most startling (and now embarrassing) sin of editorial
omission
that we made in the Trevisa edition