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

was our very deliberate dismissal of the evidence contained in what at the time seemed to us an irrelevant, idiosyncratic, and almost perversely variant manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS Ii.v.41. This manuscript, unlike the other, more formally produced witnesses, was on paper not vellum, was written in a careless, casual, amateur hand, and was full of erasures, second thoughts, interlinear comments, and other marks of a highly “personal” take on the text. (Where the other witnesses read “loued,” the Cambridge preferred “desirid” and so on: variance for variance sake.) To our editorial purposes, it was simply unusable to help establish textual authenticity: we considered it a manuscript put together in a slapdash way, probably for the scribe/reader’s own use rather than as part of the professional production of the work. We thus placed it way off to the side in our
stemma
, in a graphically marginal position, with no obvious descendants.
    That was then. What if I (or any other textual scholar attuned to the shifts of the early twenty-first century) were now confronted with the same set of witnesses? The irony is that the dismissed and unusable manuscript would probably have acquired a very different cultural status. It might not contribute much to a reconstruction of a putative original, but it would show the text in social negotiation, being worked on by an intelligent
user
, someone who was more concerned with making the
Properties
a part of his own culture than with reaching after a lost and unrecoverable authorial intention. If I were to edit the
Properties
now, in this period of the “socialization” of text, this aberrant witness would be the most fascinating, if still the least “authentic.”
    The second example illustrates a similar shift but on a much larger scale. While by no means an expert on ninth-century Irish philosophy or theology, I was asked to contribute an essay on a recent edition of Eriugena’s
Periphyseon
to a commemorative issue of the
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
(Greetham 2005). The terms of this invitation were very specific, ideologically and methodologically: I was to examine the weighty, five-volume edition of the
Periphyseon
– produced under the auspices of the Corpus Christianorvm Continuatio Mediaeualis (CCCM) by a learned Jesuit, Édouard Jeaneau – “like the postmodernist you really are” (as the journal editor put it). What could this mean? Could there be such a thing as a “postmodernist” edition of an early medieval work in the same way that Patterson had posited “modernism” as the guiding principle for the Kane–Donaldson
Piers
of thirty years earlier?
    As I began to do research into the history of the editing of Eriugena, I began to see what the journal editor had meant. I discovered that the precedent edition of
Periphyseon
, produced from the mid-1960s by Sheldon-Williams, was guided by the twin tropes of “satisfaction” and “fullness.” The editor had claimed that “[
t
]
he present edition
attempts to present the text with which the author finally came to be satisfied, and at the same time to exhibit the stages of its development” (1968: 1.27, italics in original), a teleological/processional relation that, as I was soon to discover, is inverted in the Jeaneau edition. Then, Sheldon-Williams had articulated his rationale for the critical apparatus by observing that “[i]n view of the fact that MSS RBP represent three successive recensions of the text it has been decided to give a full ‘positive’ apparatus criticus, and to do so, for the sake of consistency, even where a manuscript variant is merely a scribal blunder” (1.34).
    These desires for “satisfaction” (the “making complete” of a work as it progresses toward that most thorny of contemporary textual states, “authorial final intention”) and for “positive” evidence (again, for the sake of “fullness,” and in a confidence that the “scribal