RICERCA ITALIANA     

Composition, transmission and instability of Medieval Germanic texts: new criteria and methods in textual editing

Università degli Studi di Trento

Abstract

The research programme intends to analyse and discuss new methodological proposals concerning the editing of medieval texts by assessing their adequacy and their applicability to the field of the Germanic textual production of the Middle Ages and by making editions which aim at experimenting and making innovative proposals.
The main fields of research which have been singled out for the development of the present work are:

1. The literary tradition of the late Middle Ages in the Old Norse area: this field is characterised by a strong instability of the textual traditions and by the tendency to form narrative cycles. Thus, it allows a reflection and an experimentation of editorial practices whose aim is to point out the close connection between the transformation of the text and the changes occurring within the cultural and social context;
2. The Anglo-Saxon elegy in the early Middle Ages: particularly interesting are in this case the strong ties between the text and the oral tradition. The study of three Old English elegies (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor) allows on one side a discussion of the criterion of textuality applied to this class of texts and on the other to create a hypertext which may point out the intertextual references;
3. The Old Saxon epics: it has been chosen to study the Heliand in order to make a new edition of the poem in electronic format. Also in this case we have to deal with a secular tradition of the early >>>

Principal Investigator

Fulvio Francesco Antonio Ferrari Università degli Studi di TRENTO

Research Objectives

The research programme intends to deepen and update the discussion on the methods and goals underlying the editing of the Germanic medieval text and to make new editions on the basis of the results achieved thanks to both the development of the theoretical debate and to the tools provided by the most recent information technologies.
The collaboration among scholars studying various literary genres and various linguistic areas will allow a general overview of the necessities and the problems an edition has to cope with, formulating different answers according to the classes of texts taken into account. In particular, the project will have to yield methodological proposals which may make it possible to present the text so as not to conceal its history (its tradition, its relationships with orality, its processes of resemanticization....), and at the same time to make known to the reader the complex web of relationships existing between the single witnesses and the historical context in which they were produced.
The methodological reflection, on the other hand, cannot leave aside the issue concerning the communicability of the edited text: every edition responds to a communicative purpose, aims at making known a text to an audience and at the same time at providing the audience with the tools necessary for an adequate understanding and contextualization.
Working on Germanic texts of the Middle Ages, and therefore written in languages not comprehensible for >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

For the last decades a lively debate on international level has been taking place about procedures and aims of the editorial practice. The study of the specific ways of transmission and communication of medieval texts, mainly as regards vernacular works belonging to the lyrical and narrative genres, has brought to the fore the necessity of considering the interaction between written transmission and orality, with respect to both the interpretation and the editorial work. These efforts have allowed to point out the peculiar instability (the mouvance) of the medieval text (see, for example, Zumthor 1987, Pasternack 1991 and 1995), that is to say the tendency in the process of transmission and reception to modify the text according to the purposes of each act of communication, to the cultural and ideological background of the scribe/reteller, to the supposed expectations of the audience and/or of the client.
This new awareness of the conditions regarding the transmission of the text and of manuscript production has unavoidably aroused a debate which has questioned the editorial practice based on Lachmann’s method. In fact, still in recent times the study of single textual traditions often started from the assumption of an exclusively written transmission, representable through a stemma codicum and reconstructable through a systematic comparison of all the variants and errors. At the most, it was supposed that the scribes/retellers contaminated (modified, extended...) the >>>