Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
10
General Editor
Wim Van Mierlo
Associate Editor
Alexandre Fachard
The Journal of the European Society
for Textual Scholarship
Editor
Wim Van Mierlo
Associate Editor
Alexandre Fachard
The cover image is the second annotated proof of the Finnish poet Aaro
Hellaakoski’s “Dolce far Niente”. Reproduced with kind permission from
the Literary Archives of the Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura [Finnish
Literature Society].
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3632-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0902-1
ISSN: 1573-3084
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Printed in The Netherlands
Variants 10
Editor's Preface 9
Essays
Teresa Marqués-Aguado 17
Editions of Middle English Texts and Linguistic Research:
Desiderata regarding Palaeography and Editorial Practices
Pietro G. Beltrami 41
Textual Criticism and Historical Dictionaries
Tara L. Andrews 61
The Third Way: Philology and Critical Edition in the Digital
Age
Franz Fischer 77
All texts are equal, but... Textual Plurality and the Critical Text
in Digital Scholarly Editions
Annemarie Kets 93
Texts Worth Editing: Polyperspectival Corpora of Letters
Peter Robinson 105
Towards a Theory of Digital Editions
Wim Van Mierlo 133
Reflections on Textual Editing in the Time of the History of
the Book
Veijo Pulkkinen 163
A Genetic and Semiotic Approach to the Bibliographical Code
Exemplified by the Typography of Aaro Hellaakoski’s “Dolce
far Niente”
Jon Viklund 187
Gunnar Ekelöf and the Rustle of Language: Genetic Readings
of a Modernist Poetic Œuvre
Giedrŝ JankeviĀiƈtŝ and Mikas Vaicekauskas 211
An Omnipotent Tradition: The Illustrations of Kristijonas
Donelaitis’s Poem Metai and the Creation of a Visual Canon
5
6 VARIANTS 10 (2013)
David Atkinson 235
Are Broadside Ballads Worth Editing?
Kiyoko Myojo 257
The Functions of Zenshƈ in Japanese Book Culture: Practices
and Problems of Modern Textual Editing in Japan
Work in Progress
Arianna Antonielli and Mark Nixon 271
Towards an Edition of Edwin John Ellis and William Butler
Yeats’s The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical
Book Reviews
Sarah Laseke 287
Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath, Authorship and First-Person
Allegory in Late Medieval France and England
Orietta Da Rold 288
Michael Calabrese, Hoyt N. Duggan, and Thorlac Turville-
Petre, eds., The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, 6: San Marino,
Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm. Hm2): William Langland,
SEENET, A.9
Sandra Clark 291
Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works. Eds. Gary Taylor and
John Lavagnino
Wim Van Mierlo 295
Charles Dickens, The Manuscript of Great Expectations: From the
Townshend Collection, Wisbech
Geert Lernout 297
David Butterfield and Christopher Stray, eds., A. E. Housman:
Classical Scholar
Pim Verhulst 300
Mark Nixon, ed., Publishing Samuel Beckett
Iain Bailey 304
Dirk Van Hulle, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Stirrings Still/Sou-
bresauts and Comment dire/What is the Word and Samuel Beckett.
Stirrings Still/Soubresauts and Comment dire/What is the Word. Eds.
Dirk Van Hulle and Vincent Neyt
Adam Smyth 308
Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Metaphysics of Text
VARIANTS 10 (2013) 7
Geert Lernout 312
Joseph A. Dane, Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture
Most of the Italian corpus of texts written before the end of the
fourteenth century is currently available in editions of varying qual-
ity, established in accordance with varying methodologies and to
satisfy various agendas — some very old, others more recent. For the
compiler of historical dictionaries who must rely on lexicographical
evidence, such qualitative fluctuations pose considerable problems,
where the core task consists of collecting each attestation of a word
and its meaning. Where accuracy is a prerequisite condition, many,
especially older editions prove unfortunately unreliable. A lexi-
cographer of early Italian would find no difficulty in drawing up a
wish list of texts that are worth editing to replace many of the older
editions with new, more accurate ones.
1
See also Beltrami 1999 for further details on the Tesoro and Beltrami 2010b in
which I set out in detail my views on textual criticism.
41
42 VARIANTS 10 (2013)
2
Incidentally, A. Fratta, in his new edition of Iacopo Mostacci’s Umile
core e fino e amoroso (included in Di Girolamo 2008, 412 and 415) prints intend
according to the manuscript and emends tanto, v. 24, to tando, a supposed alter-
native form of the same word. This could be an instance of the so-called “French
rhyme”, –an sometimes rhyming with –en in old Italian poetry.
3
In my review (Beltrami 2010a) I criticized Di Girolamo’s edition (Di
Girolamo 2008) for its stance on metrics.
44 VARIANTS 10 (2013)
Figure 1: TLIO, main entry for “inantire” and Figure 2: TLIO, main
entry for “avamparliere”.
Pietro Beltrami Textual Criticism and Historical Dictionaries 45
5
Another recent example of an edition based on a single manuscript,
emended with readings taken from other manuscripts, is Sharman’s edition of
Giraut de Borneil’s poems (Borneil 1989).
52 VARIANTS 10 (2013)
6
See the study on the Vatican Codex Lat. 3793, one of the three manu-
scripts I mentioned, by Roberto Antonelli (Antonelli 1992).
7
The lemmatized concordance to the corpus still awaits publication due
to technical difficulties.
Pietro Beltrami Textual Criticism and Historical Dictionaries 53
treatises also record the only instance of the verb disvilare [“not to
give importance to”].
However, one must guard against dating earliest usage on the
basis of the dates of surviving manuscripts. For instance, Brunetto
Latini wrote his Rettorica around the years 1260–1261, surely before
1266, yet the earliest surviving manuscript dates from the late-thir-
teenth or early fourteenth century. Likewise, the only occurrence of
the word badaggio [“waiting”] (from old Occitan “badatge”) appears
in a sonnet by the thirteenth-century poet Dante da Maiano, whose
poetic corpus, however, was published by the Florentine Filippo
Giunti more than two-and-a-half centuries later, in 1527. To be more
precise, the form badaggio looks like a thirteenth-century word, but
this may not be more than an impression that has no grounding
in fact. Cases like this, where the authorship of a certain form is
in doubt, show how one must treat unusual forms in the transmit-
ted text (and their authorship) critically. When the text of a thir-
teenth-century author is transmitted only in a source dating from the
sixteenth century (regardless of whether this is a manuscript or a
printed source), we must refrain from dating the lexicographical evi-
dence to the thirteenth century because the authorship attribution
is wrong or doubtful, or the transmission unreliable; however, if nei-
ther the authorship nor the transmission is questionable, we must
date the attestation to thirteenth century even if the actual source is
from the sixteenth century. Such chronological aberrations argue in
fact for the continued use and relevance of text-oriented editions as
sources of lexicographical evidence.
Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica offers another interesting example,
explained in a recent paper by Elisa Guadagnini (2010). In his De
inventione, from which Brunetto translates, Cicero speaks of the con-
stitutio iuridicialis, i.e., the final point in a legal argument that deter-
mines whether the points at issue are right or wrong. The Latin word
iuridicialis is trivialized into iudiciale (modern Italian giudiziale [“relat-
ing to the judgement”]) in the texts of the branch that Francesco
Maggini used for his edition in 1968 (M= Florence Biblioteca Nazio-
nale Centrale, II.IV.124, 13th cent. ex-14th cent. in., and m = II.IV.73,
14th cent. ex.). But the texts in the other branch (including M1 =
the MS of the same Library II.IV.127, 2d quarter, 14th cent., L = the
MS Firenze, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. XLIII.19, 15th cent., and
S = the editio princeps by Serfranceschi [1546]) turn up “iuridiciale”
54 VARIANTS 10 (2013)
8
The reason why my co-editors and I decided to preserve variant spellings
in our edition of the Tresor was because a substantial bit of work still needs to be
done on the manuscript tradition; we felt that for the time being it was safer not
to go against prevalent editorial policies and standardize the spelling.
Pietro Beltrami Textual Criticism and Historical Dictionaries 55
the old (and variable) spellings.9 A modern reader expects that the
same word is spelled the same way throughout the text. One solu-
tion therefore is for the editor to select the most frequently-used
spelling from the manuscript and use it for all spelling variants of
the base manuscript, but also for readings admitted into the text
from other manuscripts.
However, no edition can meet the needs of all users: just as there
may be various answers to the question What texts are worth edit-
ing?, there are various ways, determined by various goals, to answer
the question of what method to adopt for the editing of a text.
Bibliography
9
The same does not apply, of course, for other medieval languages which
changed so much that there is little correspondance. It is impossible, and it
makes no sense, to spell old French and old Occitan texts according to modern
usage.
Pietro Beltrami Textual Criticism and Historical Dictionaries 57
——. 2010b. A che serve un’edizione critica? Leggere i testi della letteratura
romanza medievale. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Bonvesin da la Riva. 1941. Le opere volgari. Ed. Gianfranco Contini.
Rome: Società Filologica Romana.
Borneil, Giraut de. 1989. The Cansos and Sirventes of the Troubadour
Giraut de Borneil: a Critical Edition. Ed. Ruth Verity Sharman.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lo diretano bando. 1997. Ed. Rosa Casapullo. Florence: Accademia
della Crusca.
Cerquiglini, Bernard. 1989. Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la
philologie. Paris: Seuil.
Contini, Gianfranco, ed. 1984. Il Fiore e il Detto d’Amore attribuibili a
Dante Alighieri. Milan: Mondadori.
Contini, Gianfranco. 2007. Frammenti di filologia romanza: Scritti
di ecdotica e linguistica (1932–1989). Ed. G. Breschi. Florence:
Edizioni del Galluzzo.
Del reggimento de’ principi di Egidio Romano: Volgarizzamento trascritto nel
MCCLXXXVIII. 1858. Ed. Francesco Corazzini. Florence: Felice
le Monnier.
Di Girolamo, Costanzo, ed. 2008. Poeti della corte di Federico II. Milan:
Mondadori.
Corpus OVI dell’Italiano antico. 2012. Florence: Institute Opera del
Vocabolario Italiano. <http://gattoweb.ovi.cnr.it/>.
Corpus TLIO (Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini). 2000–. Florence:
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it/>.
Faleri, Francesca. 2009. “Il volgarizzamento dei trattati morali di
Albertano da Brescia secondo il ‘codice Bargiacchi’ (BNCF
II.III.272)”. Bollettino dell’Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, 14, pp.
187–368.
Formentin, Vittorio. 2002. “Antico padovano ‘gi’ da illi: condizioni
italo-romanze di una forma veneta”. Lingua e Stile, 37, pp. 3–28.
Gaiter, Luigi, ed. 1878–1883. Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latini volgarizzato da
Bono Giamboni. Bologna: Romagnoli, I–IV.
Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana. 1961–2002. Ed. Salvatore
Battaglia and Giorgio Barberi Squarotti. Turin: UTET.
Guadagnini, Elisa. 2010. “Una nuova edizione della Rettorica
di Brunetto Latini”. Paper delivered at the 26th Congrés
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