Christopher Kleinhenz

How do you review a book when almost no one knows what you're talking about? This is the dilemma that will inevitable face reviewers of this book who are trying to write for a general audience.

The problem here is that most people neither know what textual criticism is nor why it's needed. As for what it is, it is the process of taking a book that exists only in copies of copies of copies, and trying to figure out what the original said. As for why it's needed, it's because many great and important works -- the Bible, Homer, Vergil, Chaucer, the list is very long -- exist only in copies of copies; although we have a few originals of writings made before the invention of printing, in the case of great literary works, the originals are long gone. Hence the copies of copies of copies. But those copies were made by human beings. Sleepy human beings. Nearsighted human beings. Bored human beings. In other words, human beings! They made mistakes. Their copies don't match the original.

Textual criticism is, in a way, the process of seeking the lost -- taking the printed or hand-written descendants of early documents and trying to figure out what the originals said. There are many tools that we use, depending on the exact nature of the problem (reconstructing the Bible or the Iliad, for which there are hundreds or thousands of copies, is hardly like reconstructing Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where there is only one copy -- and, in the case of Beowulf, that copy damaged by fire).

This book certainly won't teach you what textual criticism is, and it won't teach you how to do it, either. It's an auxiliary text, a text that you use for your second or third course in the subject once you've mastered the basics. Even for that, it's a somewhat mixed bag. There is a solid article on medieval paleography -- how to read medieval writing, and date it based on the way the writing looks. There are several articles about the hotly contested topic of conjectural emendation (that is, adopting a reading not found in your manuscripts); on the whole, these are very good. There are others addressing what is known as the Bédier Problem -- a genuine problem within a widely-known technique: too often, when we try to create a "family tree" of manuscripts, we find that the earliest parent had two and only two offspring. Addressing the Bédier Problem is important -- but I honestly don't think they've solved it; the real solution to the Bédier Problem is to understand a phenomenon known as "long branch assimilation" (which I won't try to explain. Believe me, you'll thank me. :-)

So this ends up being a book which an instructor might choose to assign parts of. But that becomes tricky, because while the book covers many important topics, it often covers them in difficult ways. When I ordered this, I expected to get essays primarily on Latin and Greek and maybe Middle English. I can deal with those. But while there is some discussion of Middle English (Malory in particular), many of the essays are about Middle French literature -- or, even worse, Italian literature. There is no question but that these writings deserve textual criticism. But I don't read the languages involved. If you don't, either, then the book will have much less utility to you than one that works from languages you do know.

I want to stress that that doesn't make this a bad book -- it's a pretty good book, in its way and in its place. But its place is a very narrow one. Even narrower than a general work on textual criticism. And even textual criticism in its broadest form is a narrow enough field that most people have never heard of it.… (mehr)