Your reply, David, sounds like the course I have been giving for the past
thirty years, --Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser (VATS). It is an
awful lot of reading for 12 weeks, but it pays off. Also on the subject
of when you identify figures in the FQ, I chose to "identify" them only
when Spenser does to avoid flattening out the student-as-reader response.
For example, Una is first named only after the appearance of Duessa, which
is brilliant theology as well as poetry. You don't know what Una is
until after you meet Duessa. I suggested to Anne Lake Prescott that
we have a session on what Una means at Kazoo, but since I have not heard
back, I suppose not. I want to follow this correspondence and jump back
in later. tpr
5. Michael Saenger:
I agree that it's a great assignment and I'd venture an answer
for a and b.
I think a scholarly edition should responsibly communicate the
best text(s) available and give a reasonably comprehensive, though truncated,
explanation of a variety of topics such as provenance, explication, date,
basic textual conception, etc. However, I think it should be alert to
interpretative liberties which either were intended to reside with the reader
or must reside there due to limited contact with dead authors. A scholarly
edition can err either in inadequately explaining the obscure, or in excessively
explaining the ambiguous. The latter is increasingly a problem with
modern editions which seek to establish a reading by the "wink and nudge"
hint. The work of a scholarly edition is quite subtle, since it demands
a careful negotiation of the grey area between making scholarship useful
and protecting the readerly questions which are so crucial to the act of
reading -- and both sides are very important in Spenser, because Spenser
depends upon a great deal of material which is completely unfamiliar to
modern undergraduates, but he also often mischievously plays with readerly
expectations. To be practical, should the editor name a character
like Malecasta before Spenser intends the reader to "find out" her identity?
To do so changes, and to some extent mars, the reader's intended experience.
But most cases are far more subtle.
6. David Miller [reply to Sanger]
This is excellent, and for my money,
just right. It pinpoints the way this assignment leads the students
to consider, from a different angle, the same critical and interpretive
questions that a standard essay assignment would engage.
Naming Malecasta, or any character, before the author does, would in
my view be a "textbook" case of intrusive commentary.
7. Roche again:
David, I like the phrase "intrusive commentary," it is everywhere in
the poem, what CS Lewis called "Skeptophilia."
Your kind of intrusion is when the critic or editor feel he knows more than his
poet, and that is the greatest of intrusions. tpr
8. Robert Darcy:
This is perhaps an obvious route, but E.K.'s glosses to the Shepheardes
Calender might be a nice place to begin talking about annotative "intrusions"
of this kind. The notion of the poem free of interpretive intrusion
in the first place is also probably worth some classroom-level consideration.
There is an excellent essay by Andrew Ford called "Performing Interpretation" which argues that
epic poetry of this sort (Ford spotlights Homer) is always already glossed--that
the activity of poetic exegesis is older than we tend to think and that
the poems we receive (and that our traditions have long received) are indivisible,
both theoretically and historically, from the annotation that helps package
them. It is a form of false nostalgia maybe (or false consciousness)
to envision or even publish an un-annotated text.
As for glosses that reveal Una's or Malecasta's (or Saint George's) name
before the poem itself does, I'd wager that the surprises are safe in most
cases for first-readers of the poem. Reading annotation is not a spontaneous
activity, is it? Don't we begin paying attention to annotation only
when we don't understand what we're reading or when we are reading a second
or third time through with an eye to puzzling out fuller subtexts and connections? Aren't we annotation-blind
until we sense a need for the help editors might be able to offer us, and
isn't this, generally speaking, only after we've discovered the first-order
surprises for ourselves?
9. Peter C. Hermann:
For what it's worth, here are my responses
to the two questions. I'd begin by saying that a "scholarly" edition is
the foundation for a "popular" edition of the text, be it Chaucer, Spenser,
or Dickens. that is to say, a "popular" edition presents just the text itself,
with no scholarly apparatus at all. But a "scholarly" edition makes explicit
all the decisions that went into formulating the "popular" edition.
Or to put the matter another way, a
scholarly edition helps explain two different problems. First, the "scholarly"
edition makes explicit all the problems and issues that went into deciding
what exactly the text *is*. With Spenser, the Letter to Raleigh seems
to me a particularly acute and obvious example, one that still can raise
passionate responses (I got my head bitten off after opining perhaps a
little too confidently on this
topic a little while ago, which is one of the reasons why I decided to send
this note privately). What do you do with the Letter? It's in one
place in one edition and not present in a later edition. Contemporary scholarly
utility suggests that the best place for the Letter is in the front. Yet
Spenser apparently put it in the back. A "popular" edition would make
a decision and leave the matter at that, but a "scholarly" edition will inform
the reader of the various possibilities and problems associated with that
particular passage, whatever decision the editors ultimately come up with.
Second, I would tell students that a "scholarly" edition helps understand
the text in its own time by explaining to later readers seemingly arcane
references that (probably) made all the difference in the world to Spenser's
original audience but are lost to us. The quote from Vergil at the very
start is a perfect example. Or to put the matter another way, the "scholarly" edition makes explicit all the
cultural connections and associations that Spenser and his audience (likely)
assumed that everybody would automatically. An example I often use: if
I invoke the name "Homer" today, most people would assume I mean Homer Simpson.
For Spenser, it would be the blind guy. The "editorial commentary" thus
allows the reader to formulate a more informed interpretation of the text.
The question of "why we produce them"
is, I think, very tough to answer, because it cuts to the heart of the utility
of literary criticism. Why, students will often ask, can we not just READ
the text? And my response is to show how an informed response is often
a more interesting, more intellectually and emotionally profound, response.
My best example here is Romeo and Juliet. If you assume that it was normal
to marry at such a young age in 1590, the play looks one way. But when you
inform students that in fact,
people got married in their early to mid twenties, then the play looks very
different (and from the reactions I get, much more attractive and "relevant"
to them).
10. Glenn A. Steinberg:
I'm not sure how easily you might work
extra-Spenserian material into your course, but Dante and Malory provide
some interesting challenges with respect to scholarly editing on the very questions you've raised above.
Scholarly editions of Dante have been
common since just after his death (including one by Boccaccio). If
you could have your students read a portion of the Inferno and then look at various editors' glosses on that portion,
you could ask students which kinds of commentary were helpful and which
were not. When does commentary get in the way and when does it improve
understanding? In this way, you could explore questions about the
format, comprehensiveness, and purpose of editorial commentary.
The textual questions in Malory's case
are particularly interesting, though perhaps more difficult to incorporate
into your course. Caxton's edition has been the standard text of Malory's
Morte Darthur for centuries, but the Winchester MS, rediscovered in the
1930s, has changed how scholars perceive Malory. Caxton's edition set
out Malory's text as a series of books and chapters in one long, continuous
narrative, but the Winchester MS, more likely Malory's true intent for the
work, structures the text as a series of independent stories, discrete from
one another (ending with a novella on the death of Arthur). As a result
of this unique textual history, you might use Malory to explore several pertinent
questions with your students:
1.) What is a scholarly edition today
to do? Should it try to recapture Malory's original intent (by following
the Winchester MS's structure), or should it follow the textual tradition
that has been most influential over the centuries (i.e., Caxton)?
What is the purpose of a scholarly edition -- to reconstruct an author's
intention(s) or to (re)present a cultural icon?
2.) How does the layout and structure
of an edition affect our interpretation and understanding of the edited
text? For a fuller understanding of this aspect in Malory's case, students
would have to read a sizable chunk of Malory from the two different textual
traditions. Such reading in Malory might not be possible in your course
because of time constraints. On the other hand, Malory might be good
background reading for students who want to include material about Spenser's
sources in their editorial commentary. So, you might be able to work
quite a lot of Malory into the course.
11. Germain Warkentin:
David Lee, I am in England now, and can't reply at length to your query
or the responses of others. But let me say that I think to enter the
problem of the text at the level of "scholarly edition" is a bit premature
for undergrads. I have done it, and suffered for it.
What they really need is to defamiliarize
the easy appearance of the immaculate text on the anthology page by asking
themselves how it got there. Long ago I used to give a funny lecture,
when things got dull, on the multitude of things that could have happened
to a Shakespearian text (performance changes, foul papers, drunken compositor
B, bowdlerizing Victorian editor,
etc.) before it got to the seeming purity of the Riverside edition.
The same can be done with almost any 16th-17thC text, as I later did in
the classroom. In fact it can be done with modern texts as well, but
that's a topic for another list.
Few people -- including a lot of our
fellow scholars -- really think about the varying material conditions in
which a poem or play is drafted, copied, printed, marketed, reprinted, annotated
by people of very different historical needs, stripped of annotations by
anthologists, reprinted in bad forms, etc. Just to get that idea across
is a big achievement. The "scholarly edition" is only part of that sequence
of events. So I would advocate a "book history" approach, partly because
it puts the horse before the cart, and partly because students often find
it inherently interesting, and applicable to other stuff they are reading.
12. Jon Quitslund [who volunteered
as a consultant for those who wish to contact him at jonquitslund@att.net]:
Dear Spenserians,
David's questions and the string of
good responses are most welcome, as rich food to chew on now that Thanksgiving
dinners have been reduced to a few leftovers.
My main suggestion, concerning
the 'models of commentary' that might be furnished to students, builds on
Glenn Steinberg's post. Students might be intrigued and motivated
by some photocopied pages from 16th-c. editions of poets important to Spenser,
in some of which a small patch of the poet's text is surrounded by a sea
of small print elucidating it.
I think first, because I've worked on them, of Landino's commentary on
the Aeneid (combined with the comments of Servius and Donatus in the often-reprinted
'Virgilius cum commentariis quinque') and Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo's edition
of Petrarch's Rime. Jodocus
Badius Ascensius' edition of Virgil offers more 'modern' philological and
historicist scholarship; others have worked with it more than I have.
Editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses might be sampled; some, including Sandys',
are available in facsimile I believe, and there is Fraunce's 'Third Part
of ... Yuychurch, entituled Amintas Dale.' Harington's Ariosto includes
commentary that excerpts the more elaborate Italian editions. Among
the important commentaries on poets after Spenser, there is Maynard Mack's
on Pope's Essay on Man, which (taken with its Introduction) is in some respects not only bigger but better than the poem.
What is a 'scholarly' edition and why
are they produced? Like the audience for poetry from earlier times
down to our own, the audience for editions with full apparatus can be distinguished
in several tiers. Scholars (like poets), I believe, write for their
peers, including some who have gone before them, even centuries before them;
they also write for those 'ephebes,' as Stevens called them, who aspire,
at least half-heartedly and for the duration of serious engagement with
a book, to be like the scholars and poets they read. A commentary should,
I would say, aim to level the playing field for those of all ages and levels of learning who wish to play
seriously, in the Erasmian spirit, with the poetic text and the discursive
traditions it invokes.
What should students in an undergraduate class aim to produce in their
own commentaries? What should their audience be? I applaud
all pedagogical efforts to subvert the kind of writing (and even more the
habits of mind behind it) that is designed to be read once, and once only,
by one person, the Professor. I would suggest, therefore, that students
should be urged to write, first and foremost, for an audience of other students,
offering the fruits of their research (perhaps also, their frustrations
and differences of opinion) to their peers and peers-to-be.
It sounds like David's project, if he persists with it, is destined to
become an electronic archive to which other students, perhaps in courses
elsewhere, could contribute in the future, and that could be a powerful
incentive for students in this trial run. Sounds like something the
ISS should encourage, if not sponsor. I would be happy to collaborate
in the effort, on a catch-as-catch-can basis, in the months ahead.
13. Anne Lake Prescott:
Dear David--I'm racing to a class and
can't answer--yet--the deeper questions here, but I do volunteer as a consultant
for your students, if only because I have done some editing of a half-scholarly
nature (the Norton, Hugh Maclean kept reminding me, is largely for undergraduates--"Don't try to impress your
friends," he told me kindly but firmly over our frequent lunch meetings
at the Princeton Club,"and remember your reader is nineteen").
I gave a talk a couple of years ago at the MLA for a panel on editing--it
was on the Variorum Spenser with a focus on the Giant with the Scales (you
must know the commentary by heart--this is the bit with the allusions to
Spenser's prophetic understanding
of the dangers of socialism and the French Revolution). I solicited, as
a sort of game, electronic commentary and I have a collection of the results
that I can copy for you and anybody else who would be amused. Your questions
are terrific. Off to class. Anne.
14. Craig A. Berry:
Those are great questions [referring
to the two questions posed in the initial query], and like most great questions
they can only be dilated upon and not fully answered.
One way to approach the significance of commentary would be to look at
it the way those of us who happen to like old books tackle nearly any problem:
let's delve into its intellectual history. How did commentary come into
use and why were the various innovations introduced and what did those innovations
reveal about their practitioners?
I'm thinking of things like the fact that it was scholastics, not monastics,
who introduced the interlinear
gloss; they were interested in reading a whole lot more than just the bible
(which I think many monastics would know more or less by heart) and they
needed help linking up the text at hand with other texts too numerous for
one person to remember in detail.
Of course the interlinear gloss is very limiting for any kind of discursive
commentary, so the commentary inevitably moved to the margin, and by the
time of the humanists the marginal commentary had become the 800-pound gorilla
of literary studies; we've all seen those folio volumes with two square
inches of text in the middle of the page surrounded by yards and yards of
commentary. How we read and why we read are inseparable and I think
each change in the technique of commentary registers a change in the purpose
of it as well.
15. Saenger again [responding to Berry]:
Craig's plea for historicity is very
important. We have all encountered humanist books where commentary
both on the page of the "main text" and in pages preceding and following
it takes on a life of its own -- at times parodically. We revisit this
problem in creating and using modern editions, whose annotation at times
seeks to recapture the sort of context which was unnecessary for contemporary
readers. If these commentaries "elucidate" then it might be a useful goal
to contextualize and/or historicize the concept of lux which operates.
16. Michael Patrick O'Connor:
I am hardly fit to read this list, but
I must say that I am surprised in reading over the current thread that there
has been no mention of the Jewish medieval Bible and Talmud commentary tradition.
Rabbinic Bibles (the ones with various commentaries) and fully commented
Talmuds would have been known (as artefacts if not tools of study) to all
variety of educated Christian Europeans. There is a brief introduction
to these books in an essay by E. L. Greenstein in a book edited by Barry
Holtz called Back to the Sources (New York: Summit, 1984); there must be
something that makes the connections forward to early modern Europe, but
I can't think of anything just now.
17. David Wilson-Okamura [responding
to O'Connor]:
O'Connor makes a good point here. Several years ago I was giving a talk
on Virgil commentary and handed out a sample page in facsimile. Someone
in the audience mentioned that Hebrew commentaries were printed in the same
format, asked about the relationship with Western texts.
I didn't know the answer, but someone
on the MEDTEXTL list did, and I reprint his response below. The only thing
I have to add to it is this: the island-of-text-in-a-sea-of-commentary format
that we are all talking about is called -- are you ready for this? -- modus
modernus. (I guess this is only funny if you already know that it came
into being in the twelfth century, and by the fifteenth century was getting
downright hoary. Sorry.)
Maybe I should add that this format
was also used at an early date for law texts, both canon and civil; for
this usage, Anthony Grafton cites K. Haebler, The Study of Incunabula, tr.
L. E. Osborne (1933), p. 91. Now, on to the good stuff:
Date:
Thu, 11 Feb 1999 23:20:22 -0600
Sender: Medieval Texts - Philology Codicology and Technology
<MEDTEXTL@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
From: Willis Johnson <willis@UCHICAGO.EDU>
Subject: Re: origins of Hebrew commentary
format
The format you described was developed by the redactors of the Latin
Glossa Ordinaria on the Bible working in northern France in the early 12th
century.
The format had stabilized by
1200 and in Latin manuscripts looks similar to what one finds in printed
editions of the Gloss. Somewhat later,this format was imitated by Hebrew
scribes in their production of glossed biblical and legal texts. The
format of the printed Talmud, though, did not appear until the first printings
in the late 15th century.
This format evolved as reading and teaching practices changed with the
rise of the university
system. The new teaching format required standardized books that were
easy to use for reference. Glossed books (whether the glossa ordinaria
or modern talmuds) always have running headings and clear sectional divisions,
as well as numbering systems and complex indexes. Great for the classroom--none
of these were necessary when reading was solitary and self-paced.
As a talmudist, I use glossed books in my daily research and teaching and
lament the absence of this form in English. It's tremendously handy to have everything together on
one page.
There's a study of the evolution of the layout of the gloss by ChristopherDe
Hamel: Glossed books
of the Bible and the origins of the Paris. Woodbridge, Suffolk : D.S.
Brewer ; Totowa, NJ : distributed in the USA by Biblio, 1984.
Also take a look at the introduction to the Brepols reprint of the glossa
ordinaria, where there are good essays by Karlfried Froehlich and MargaretGibson:
Bible. Latin. Vulgate. 1480. Biblia
latina cum glossa ordinaria : facsimile reprint of the editio princeps
Adolph Rusch of Strassburg 1480/81 / introduction by Karlfried Froehlich
and Margaret T. Gibson. Brepols : Turnhout.
18. Daniel Knauss [responding to the
initial pair of questions]:
a.) See "The Reader to Geffrey
Chaucer" in the 1598 Speght edition of the Works of Chaucer. In more contemporary
terms, a scholarly edition aims to extract a "text" from its messy,
foreign, multiplicitous historical embeddedness as a book. Scholars
produce scholarly editions to 1) increase and aid serious readers' access
to old books in the absence or inutility of the old books themselves, 2)
to increase the pool of serious readers, and 3) to increase the pool of
scholars. (Which is also to say they're doing what they do to earn a living
and the legitimize and bring honor to the way they earn their living.)
b.) As others have already indicated,
each editor has their own purposes with commentary. There is what they
say they will and won't do, what they in fact do and don't do, and what
others say about what they should or shouldn't have done.
It might be interesting to look at something
very specific, like the envoi of SC, where there is a long-standing and probably
unresolvable argument about the existence or non-existence of a literary
bow to the author(s) of Piers Plowman. Critical editions and commentaries
differ, sometimes substantially, in how they handle this problem, and they're
all participants in a 400+ year-old canon controversy. It doesn't take much
evidence from Piers' editors' comments to see that the arguments in favor
of a Piers reference in the envoi are probably biased by the editors' involvement
in the 18th-19thC "invention of Middle English" and the need
to legitimize the work they were doing. And for the other side,
there is the equally compelling accusation of bias (since Puttenham at least)
against the native, non-classical plainness of Piers. The ongoing editorial
problem is consequently a paratextual elaboration of the thematic
ambivalences in SC, from the preface onward, which editors will always
be tempted to collapse one way or the other. (There are some old sidney-spenser
threads on this.)
Less involved pedagogical schemes--Show
students a Riverside Chaucer, Skeat's multivolume Chaucer with apocryphal
works, and a 16thC facsimile of Chaucer's works. Ask what the benefits
and drawbacks are for each as companions to Spenser. Have students
read editorial prefatory material from 16thC Chaucer editions, especially
the 1598 Speght:
1) "The Reader to Chaucer" poem
that has the ghost of Chaucer praise the editor for "restoring" him.
2) The bogus "Chaucers Life" that
quotes Sidney very selectively on Chaucer and presents Spenser's completion
of the Squire's Tale as an act of literally inspired channelling rather
than creative commentary
19. Prescott again [responding to #16
above]:
A very useful reminder--Beryl Smalley
(if I'm spelling her right, which is always unlikely with this literally
somewhat dyslexic professor)--in her now dated but still impressive book
on biblical commentary in the Middle Ages stresses this point.
At "my" conference on [the Biblical] David this weekend we will have
talks by Jason Rosenblatt (English, Georgetown), who does Milton's Hebraism,
and Chanita Goodblatt (Ben Gurion Univ. of the Negev), who does Donne's.
Both are excellent sources of how Renaissance Christians like oh, say, John
Selden knew rabbinic commentary.
By now so many have had their say that I'll just add that we now have
an interesting irony of in some cases needing to comment on commentary on
commentary. And so on, says Pope's poem on fleas, *ad infinitum*. A complicating
factor that seems worth mention is what my colleague David Kastan calls
"the new boredom"--the study of the cultural meaning of the physcial presentation
of a book. Hence, I think, the importance of including past commentary in something
like its original shape--and not, as does the Norton Spenser, busting EK down
to footnotes. Maybe in the next edition . . . . Anne Prescott.
20. Andrew Ford:
Gentlemen,
Tom Roche, a dear friend (and , I'm
proud to say, erstwhile Greek student), has forwarded your query about one
of my articles. The reference is: "Epic and the Earliest Greek Allegorists."
Pp. 33-53 in Epics and the Contemporary World, edd. M. Beissinger, J. Tylus
and S. Wofford. Berkeley and London: Univ. of California Press: 1999.