Philology in Manuscript Culture
Philology in Manuscript Culture
Philology in Manuscript Culture
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Speculum.
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G. Nichols
In medieval studies, philology is the matrix out of which all else springs.
So we scarcely need to justify the choice of philology as a topic for the special
forum to which Speculum, in a historic move, has opened its pages. On the
other hand, if philology is so central to our discipline, why should one
postulate a "new" philology, however ironically? While each contributor answers this question in a different, though complementary, way, the consensus
seems to be that medieval philology has been marginalized by contemporary
cognitive methodologies, on the one side, while within the discipline itself, a
very limited and by now grossly anachronistic conception of it remains far
too current. This version, formulated under the impulse of political nationalism and scientific positivism during the second half of the nineteenth century, continues to circumscribe the "discipline" of medieval studies. The
forum presented here undertakes to explore and interrogate presuppositions
underlying current philological practices.
What is "new" in our enterprise might better be called "renewal," renovatio
in the twelfth-century sense. On the one hand, it is a desire to return to the
medieval origins of philology, to its roots in a manuscriptculture where, as
Bernard Cerquiglini remarks, "medieval writing does not produce variants;
it is variance."' On the other hand, a rethinking of philology should seek to
minimize the isolation between medieval studies and other contemporary
movements in cognitive methodologies, such as linguistics, anthropology,
modern history, cultural studies, and so on, by reminding us that philology
was once among the most theoretically avant-garde disciplines (cf. Vico,
Ampere, Michelet, Dilthey, Vossler).
Medievalists are frequently viewed by modernist colleagues as hostile or
indifferent to contemporary theory. In such strictures, philology often figures
both in the attack and in the defense: the modernists oppose theory to
philology; the medievalists cite philology as a sufficiency that either precludes
the need for theory or renders modern theories anachronistic in a medieval
1 "Or 1'ecriture medievale ne
produit pas de variafltes, elle est variance. La r6criture incessante
a laquelle est soumise la textualite m6dievale, l'appropriation joyeuse dont elle est l'objet, nous
invitent a faire une hypothese forte: la variante n'est jamais ponctuelle." Bernard Cerquiglini,
Eloge de la variante: Histoire critiquede la philologie (Paris, 1989), p. 111.
1
SPECULUM 65 (1990)
context. This split between modernist and medieval studies could be felt
already in 1948, when Rene Wellek suggested that "philology" should be
dropped from the lexicon of literary studies.2 It was open to misunderstanding, Wellek argued, because it had come to signify too broad a domain of
applicability:
Historically,it has been used to include not only all literaryand linguistic studies,
but studies of all products of the human mind. Though its greatest vogue was in
nineteenth-centuryGermany,it still survivesin the titles of such reviewsas Romance
Philology, Moder Philology, Philological Quarterly,and Studies in Philology. [Philip August] Boeckh, who wrote a fundamental Encyklopidie und Methodologieder philolo-
gischenWissenschaften
(1877, but based on lectures partly dating back to 1809),
defined "philology"as "the knowledge of the known" and hence the study of
languages and literatures,arts and politics, religion and social customs. (P. 38)
Even while Wellek composed its obituary, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach,
and Ernst Robert Curtius were at the summit of their careers, practicing
philology that ranged from Spitzer's etymologically based stylistic studies,
through Auerbach's efforts to see in linguistic expression a profile of historic
moments, to Curtius's insistence that poetic form, thanks to the power of
transhistorical typologies, asserted the complex unity of European culture.
The philology of all three of these masters was grounded in texts, but
edited texts, rational products of philological endeavor. This was consistent
with Auerbach's conviction that philology grew out of specific Renaissance
technological and intellectual movements: humanism, the Reformation, and
the invention of the printing press. Humanism and the Reformation needed
to collect and edit manuscripts from the ancient world to better articulate
principles of moral philosophy and theology, while the printing press permitted the fixing and dissemination of sources and the new principles predicated on them.
The need to go back to the sources, a need felt as much by the Humanists as by
the reformers (many Humanists were among the chief proponents of the Reformation), led to thefoundingof philology.And the invention of the printing press also
contributedtowardthis end; many printerswere also distinguishedHumanists,and
some of them were strong adherents of the Reformation. It was at this time and
under these circumstancesthat the collectingand editing of manuscripts... became
necessaryand developed with complete spontaneity.In addition to their scholarly
work, which involved editing, composing works on the grammarand style of Latin
and of their own mother tongues, on lexicography and on archaeology, these
Humanistphilologistsaccomplishedan importanttask of popularization:they were
translatorsof the great works of antiquity.3
By its origins, in Auerbach's view, philology represented a technological
scholarship made possible by a print culture. It joined forces with the mechanical press in a movement away from the multiplicity and variance of a
manuscript culture, thereby rejecting, at the same time, the representation
2
3
to RomanceLanguagesandLiteratures
Erich Auerbach,Introduction
(New York, 1961), p. 147.
Introduction
of the past which went along with medieval manuscript culture: adaptation
or translatio, the continual rewriting of past works in a variety of versions, a
practice which made even the copying of medieval works an adventure in
supplementation rather than faithful imitation. In its place, the philology
inherited by Auerbach's generation installed a preoccupation with scholarly
exactitude based on edited and printed texts. The high calling of philology
sought a fixed text as transparent as possible, one that would provide the
vehicle for scholarly endeavor but, once the work of editing accomplished,
not the focus of inquiry. It required, in short, a printed text.
We see this dramatically in Leo Spitzer. Most often working at the microtextual level with discrete words, phrases, or expressions in order to open
up insights into a poet's style, Spitzer based his philological analyses, which
frequently took into account variant readings, on edited texts in published
editions, rather than on manuscripts where the variants could be viewed in
context. Spitzer's article "Parelhparia chez Marcabru (ou l'origine de la pastorela)" offers a case in point.4 He makes a claim for an entirely new reading
of this famous pastourelle in a dazzling display of philological erudition where
the poem and its variants are conceived solely in terms of print, rather than
manuscript, culture. The crux on which Spitzer's whole claim for Marcabru's
poetic talent turns, the creation of a neologism, parelh-paria, "avec trait
d'union," as he insists (p. 419), could not possibly be found, or even conceived,
in the six (of seven extant) manuscripts that preserve this lesson. Compound
words identified by hyphenation are conventions of a print culture, not a
manuscript culture where writing is dictation and reading, oral (as Suzanne
Fleischman points out in her article below). Finally, it is notoriously difficult
to determine fully variant lessons from the critical apparatus of many editions
which are - as in the case of the poem Spitzer deals with - necessarily
incomplete. Editors of the "old" philological persuasion sought to limit variation, not reproduce it, as Fleischman makes clear. See also in this respect
"Modernite textuaire" in Cerquiglini's Eloge de la variante.
The medieval artifact, for Spitzer, was the edited text, or, preferably, edited
texts; literary language could only be adequately described by multiple examples from many texts, which then permitted him to identify the invariant
signaling a universal or to demonstrate the normative deviation signaling
stylistic originality which would reveal the mark of a superior poet. He made
this point in an anecdote contrasting himself to the famous positivist Fustel
de Coulanges. Spitzer recalled that Fustel de Coulanges insistently asked his
students when they made a historical statement: "Avez-vous un texte?" Spitzer's own response held that "the student in historical semantics must ask:
'Have you many texts?,' for only with a great number of them is one enabled
to visualize their ever-recurrent pattern."5
Philology was system, model, for Spitzer, as it was for Auerbach in a
somewhat different sense. Auerbach, too, conceived of the text as singular,
4
Spitzer'sarticlefirst appeared in Romania73 (1952), 78-82, and was reprintedin Romanische
1936-1956 (Tiibingen, 1959), pp. 418-21.
Literaturstudien,
5 Leo
Spitzer,Classicaland ChristianIdeasof WorldHarmony(Baltimore,1963), p. 1.
almost transparent, a vehicle for the higher ideals expressed by its language.
In his search for realism - which for him was perfected in its nineteenthcentury French version6 - it is not the materiality of texts (their physical
historical presence) that interests him so much as their ideality:
But an even stronger limitation than that in terms of class results for the realism
of the courtly romance from its legendary, fairy-taleatmosphere. It is this which
makes all the colorful and vivid pictures of contemporaryreality seem, as it were,
to have sprung from the ground: the ground of legend and fairy-tale,so that ...
they are entirely without any basis in political reality.The geographical,economic
and social conditions on which they depend are never explained. They descend
directly from fairy-taleand adventure.7
Auerbach's position here is a more sophisticated, but not qualitatively
different, conception of the Middle Ages viewed from the scientific (specifically, philological) perspective voiced by Gaston Paris in his inaugural lecture
at the College de France in 1866:
Le moyen age est une epoque essentiellement poetique. J'entends par la que tout
y est spontane, primesautier,imprevu:les hommes d'alorsne font pas a la reflexion
la meme part que nous; ils ne s'observent pas, ils vivent naivement, comme les
enfants, chez lesquels la vie reflechie que developpe la civilisationn'a pas etouffe
encore la libre expansion de la vitalitenaturelle. Ils n'ont ni dans le monde physique
ni dans le monde socialcette idee de regulariteprevue que nous a donne la raison.8
Gaston Paris's sentiments accord with his conception of literature as "being
no more in sum than one of the aspects of the life of a people." Before
undertaking to study literary history, in consequence, "one must understand
what the people are who produced it, ponder the influences they underwent,
what milieu traversed, and the phases of their development before the hour
when their literary history began."9 Neither here, nor later, when he outlines
the tools that gave philology its scientific status - etymology and "the inflexible laws which governed the evolution of Latin sounds for twenty centuries"'0
- does he talk about the material specificity of medieval texts, the manuscript
matrix, or the way they interacted with the social formation they describe.
6
Cf. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (New York, 1985): "Auerbach ...
wrote Mimesis
(1942-45) from the implied stance that nineteenth-centuryFrench realism is the only true
realism, and therefore that all attempts before Stendhal are but imperfect steps en route,and
that any after are a sign of its decline." The last remark corroboratesBernard Cerquiglini's
notion that the philology put in place in the latter part of the nineteenth centurywas one based
on decadence (Eloge de la variante, pp. 82-85).
7 Erich
Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representationof Reality in WesternLiterature, translated from
Gaston Paris, La poesie du moyenage: Lefons et lectures,2nd ed. (Paris, 1887), p. 9. We should
note that although this was indeed Gaston Paris'sinaugurallecture at the College de France, it
was prematurely so. His father, Paulin Paris, designated Gaston to replace him in 1866 but
reclaimed the chair for two more years in 1867. Gaston Paris again replaced his father from
1869 to 1872, when the elder Parisdefinitelyretired, leaving the chair vacantfor Gaston. Ibid.,
p. 240.
9 Ibid., p. 43.
10Ibid., p. 251.
Introduction
2
ed. Joseph Bedier (Paris,1913). The famous articlecontaining
Jean Renart,Le lai de l'ombre,
his "Reflexionssur l'art d'editer les anciens textes" appeared under the rather innocuous title
"Latraditionmanuscritedu Lai de l'ombre,"Romania54 (1928), 161-96 and 321-56.
the young Gaston Paris.13 The new approach had the virtue of emphasizing
an authentic medieval manuscript as opposed to a hybrid reconstruction,
since Bedier believed in finding and using one best manuscript as the basis
on which to edit a work (see his article championing the primacy of the
Bodleian Library's Digby 24 as the best manuscript of the Chanson de Roland). 14
Far from encouraging focus on the manuscript matrix, however, Bedier's
insistence on a single manuscript had the effect of putting that manuscript
into a relationship with its printed edition analogous to that of a unique
manuscript of a modern printed book. Indeed, the analogy of the modern
holograph manuscript is so real that Bedier even postulates a medieval poet,
like Jean Renart, revising his work for a "second edition" on the occasion of
copying a new manuscript for a patron. The seven existing manuscripts may
thus be related to two versions of the poem, both coming directly from the
poet's hand. Like the modern holograph manuscript, the medieval manuscript may thus be seen as linking us closely to the hand and mind of the
author. As though reinforcing this technocentric view of medieval manuscript
culture, Bedier uses terms - publication, tirer, etats - in speaking of this
"second edition" that have strongly marked semantic associations with the
lexicon of printing:
dans la circulation
Je suppose ici que Jean Renart a d'abordlance son Lai de l'Ombre
sous la forme d'un manuscritpur de fautes, O1.... Trois mois, six mois apres cette
premiere publication de son ouvrage, Jean Renart l'a relu dans un manuscrit
identique a 01, et en a tire de sa main une copie nouvelle, 02, pour l'offrira quelque
patron ou pour la vendre a quelque jongleur. En recopiant, chemin faisant, mecontent de son premierjet, il a refait certaines le(ons.... Si nous supposons ainsi
que nos sept manuscrits peuvent representer ... deux "etats" du texte tour a tour
avoues par le poete, quoi de plus naturel en soi qu'une telle supposition?Pourquoi
Introduction
simply reflect scribal errors. Where no author can be postulated for a work,
as with the majority of the early Old French epics, then place and function
generate an unknown poet. For the epic, this means anonymous clerics in
shrines along the pilgrimage route, or in Bedier's by now immortal dictum:
"Au commencement fut la route, la route jalonnee de sanctuaires."
B&dier did not lack for challengers, but his theory was so strong and such
a counterthrust to the genealogical-tree approach to text editing that it gained
enormous prestige during the years when Auerbach, Spitzer, and Curtius
were beginning their careers. We can better understand their relative lack of
concern for the material artifacts of medieval literature, the manuscript
culture per se.
It is that manuscript culture that the "new" philology sets out to explore
in a postmodern return to the origins of medieval studies. If one considers
only the dimensions of the medieval illuminated manuscript, it is evident that
philological practices that have treated the manuscript from the perspective
of text and language alone have seriously neglected the important supplements that were part and parcel of medieval text production: visual images
and annotation of various forms (rubrics, "captions," glosses, and interpolations).
The medieval folio was not raw material for text editors and art historians
working separately. It contained the work of different artists or artisans poet, scribe, illuminator, rubricator, commentator - who projected collective
social attitudes as well as interartistic rivalries onto the parchment. The
manuscript folio contains different systems of representation: poetic or narrative text, the highly individual and distinctive scribal hand(s) that inscribe
that text, illuminated images, colored rubrications, and not infrequently
glosses or commentaries in the margins or interpolated in the text. Each
system is a unit independent of the others and yet calls attention to them;
each tries to convey something about the other while to some extent substituting for it.
Sometimes we see graphic examples of the systemic rivalry, as, for example,
in the case of decorated or historiated initials at the beginning of passages
which are so ornate that it may be difficult to read the image as a letter.
Similarly, the rubric - the annotations in red that comment on the text or
provide captions to images - does not simply "explain" or describe what is
to be found in the miniature or passage it introduces. Appropriating to itself
the role of commentary or directed reading, the rubric focuses attention at
specific moments, telling us what it is we are to see in the visual scene or
laying out the narrative thrust of the verbal text.
The same kind of mimetic appropriations occurs in the relation between
painted miniature, poetic text, and the copies of a manuscript. A miniature
we admire as a work of art in its own right also represents a scene in the
poetic narrative, now transposed from the verbal to the visual medium. On
the other side, the poetic narrative offers luxuriant ekphrases that we recognize as poetry substituting for picture. Not infrequently, such ekphrastic
passages form the basis for miniatures (such as the illuminations accompanying the portraits on the wall of Deduit's garden found in many manuscripts
Introduction
accept the multiple forms in which our artifacts have been transmitted, we
may recognize that medieval culture did not simply live with diversity, it
cultivated it. The "new" philology of the last decade or more reminds us
that, as medievalists, we need to embrace the consequences of that diversity,
not simply to live with it, but to situate it squarely within our methodology.
That is what the contributions to this forum have tried to suggest.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS
10