+A+C+33+81+1175+al.
For fuller discussion, see the appendix on
The Bédier Problem.)
Contents: Introduction * The Methods of Classical Criticism: Recensio, Selectio, Examinatio, Emendatio * Books Preserved in One Manuscript * Books Preserved in Multiple Manuscripts * Books Preserved in Hundreds of Manuscripts * Books Preserved in Multiple Editions * Textual Criticism of Lost Books * Other differences between Classical and New Testament Criticism * Appendix I: Textual Criticism of Modern Authors * Appendix II: History of Other Literary Traditions * Appendix III: The Bédier Problem
Textual criticism does not apply only to the New Testament. Indeed, most aspects of modern textual criticism originated in the study of non-Biblical texts. Yet non-Biblical textual criticism shows notable differences from the New Testament variety. Given the complexity of the field, we can only touch on a few aspects of non-Biblical TC. But we'll try to summarize both the chief similarities and the major differences.
In one sense, the materials of secular textual criticism resemble those for Biblical criticism. Both are involved with manuscripts other than the autograph -- or, in a few strange cases such as Malory's Morte D'Arthur and the works of Shakespeare, with the relationship between editions and autographs. (We have only two references for Malory, both near-contemporary: Caxton's printed edition and a manuscript presumably close to the autograph. They differ recensionally at some points: Caxton evidently rewrote.) The works of Sir Walter Scott are an even more complex case: Scott's native language was Braid Scots; it differs in pronunciation and vocabulary, though hardly in grammar, from British English, which is the language in which his books to be published. To a significant extent, he relied upon his publisher to correct his Scotticisms. He also produced a second edition of many of his works, making marginal emendations in the first edition. So what is the authoritative text of, say, Ivanhoe -- Scott's manuscript, Scott's first edition, Scott's interlinear folios which were the source for the second edition, or the second edition? And how do Scott's corrections to the galley proofs fit into this? Not all of his corrections were proper English, and the editors ignored some of these. | The sole manuscript of Malory, British
Library Add. 59678. The top portion of folio 35, showing the change from
the first hand to the second (a change which seems to prove that it is not
the autograph). The manuscript is imperfect; eight leaves are lost at the
beginning, and probably as many at the end.
This manuscript seems to have been known to Caxton; there are
marks from his print shop in it. But the published edition differs, sometimes
dramatically, from the manuscript. It appears that Caxton rewote most extensively in the earlier portions, where Malory was, in effect, writing independent short stories; the end, in which Malory seems to be trying to create a unified narrative, is almost the same in manuscript and print book. The whole still poses an interesting challenge to textual critics, since the manuscript is not the autograph and there are hints that Caxton had some other source -- perhaps another manuscript. Copies of the printed version are almost as rare as manuscripts: Only two survive, and one of them imperfect. Simply being printed did not assure the survival of documents! |
The history of printed editions of classical works is often similar to that of the New Testament text following Erasmus: "[T]he early printers, by the act of putting a text into print, tended to give that form of the text an authority and a permanence which in fact it rarely deserved. The editio princeps of a classical author was usually little more than a transcript of whatever humanist manuscript the printer chose to use as his copy.... The repetition of this text... soon led to the establishment of a vulgate text... and conservatism made it difficult to discard in favour of a radically new text." (L. D. Reynolds & N. G. Wilson, Scribes & Scholars, second edition, 1974, p. 187)
There is, however, one fundamental difference between classical and Biblical textual criticism. Without exception, the number of manuscripts of classical works is smaller. The most popular classical work is the Iliad, represented by somewhat less than 700 manuscripts (though these manuscripts actually average rather older than New Testament manuscripts. Papyrus copies of Homer are numerous. As early as 1920, when the New Testament was known in only a few dozen of papyrus copies, there were in excess of a hundred papyrus texts of the Iliad known, a fair number of which dated from the first century C. E. or earlier.) But the case of Homer is hardly normal. More typical are works such as Chaucer (somewhat over 80 manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, of which about two-thirds once contained the complete Tales; a few dozen copies of most of his other works). From this we work down through Piers Plowman (about forty manuscripts) to the literally thousands of works preserved in only one manuscript -- including such great classics as Beowulf, the Norse myths of the Regius Codex, Tacitus (Tacitus's Annals are preserved in two copies, but as the copies are partial and do not overlap at all, for any given passage there is only one manuscript). Indeed, there are instances where all manuscripts are lost and we must reconstruct the work from excerpts (Manetho; the non-Homeric portions of the Epic Cycle; most of Polybius, etc.)
This produces a problem completely opposite that in New Testament TC. In New Testament TC, we can usually assume that the original reading is preserved somewhere; the problem is one of sorting through the immense richness of the tradition to find it. In classical criticism, the reverse is often the case: We know every manuscript and every reading in the tradition, but have no assurance that the tradition preserve the original reading. As an example, consider a reading from Gregory of Tours' History of Tours: in I.9 the manuscripts of Gregory allude to the twelve patriarchs (specifically mentioning that there are twelve) -- and then list only nine: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Gad, Asher. Clearly, three names -- Naphtali, Benjamin, and either Joseph or his sons -- have been omitted. But where in the reading? And is it Joseph, or his sons? We simply cannot tell.
It will be observed that many of the documents cited above are in languages other than Greek. Textual criticism, of course, can be applied in all languages; the basic rules are the same (except for those pertaining to paleography and other aspects related to letter forms and the history of the written language). For perspective, many of our examples will be based on works written in languages other than Greek -- though, for lack of background, none will be taken from ideographic languages.
Classical textual criticism, as its name implies, goes back to the classical Greeks, who were concerned with preserving the text of such ancient works as Homer. One of the centers of ancient textual criticism was Alexandria; it has been theorized (though there is no evidence of this) that the reason for the relative purity of the Alexandrian text is that Egyptian scribes were influenced by the careful and conservative work of the Alexandrian school. Their textual work on Homer was not always sophisticated (indeed, their conclusions were often quite silly), but they developed a critical apparatus of high sophistication (see the discussion of Alexandrian Critical Symbols).
Modern textual criticism, however, dates back to Karl Lachmann, who would later edit the first text of the New Testament to be fully independent of the Textus Receptus. In his work on Lucretius, Lachmann defined the basic method that has been used ever since.
Textual criticism, in this system, proceeds through four basic steps (some of which will be neglected in certain cases, and which occasionally go by other names):
Recensio is the process of grouping the manuscripts into a stemma or family tree. Of all the steps involved in classical textual criticism, this is the one regarded as having the least direct relevance for New Testament TC. In this stage, the differences between the manuscripts are compared and a stemma compiled. (This assumes, of course, that several manuscripts exist. If there is only one manuscript, we will omit this stage, as described in the section on books preserved in one manuscript.)
The essential purpose of the stemma is to lighten our workload, and also to tell us what weight to give to which manuscripts. Let's take an example from Wulfstan's thirteenth homily (a pastoral letter in Anglo-Saxon). Five manuscripts exist, designated B C E K M, the latter being fragmentary. According to Dorothy Bethurum, these manuscripts form a stemma as follows (with lost manuscripts shown in [ ] -- a useful convention though not one widely adopted):
[ARCHETYPE]
|
-----------
| |
[X] [Y]
| |
----- |
| | |
C E B
|
[Z]
|
-----
| |
K M
That is, the archetype gave rise to two manuscripts, X and Y, now both lost. (Based on the stemma itself, it would appear that the archetype was actually the parent of X and Y, but this is by no means certain in reality.) B was copied from Y, and C and E were copied from X. Another lost manuscript, Z, was copied from C, and gave rise to K and M.
Observe what this tells us. First, K and M are direct descendents (according to Bethurum, anyway) of C. Therefore, they tell us nothing we don't already know, and can be ignored. Second, although C, E, and B are all primary witnesses, they don't have the same weight. Since C and E go back to a common archetype [X], their combined evidence is no greater than B alone, which goes back to a separate archetype. (We might find that [X] was a better witness than [Y], but the point is that C and E are dependent and B is independent. That is, the combination B-C against E is a good one, and B-E against C is good, but C-E against B is inherently weaker; it's ultimately a case of one witness against another.)
So how does one determine a stemma?
One begins, naturally, by collating the manuscripts (in full if possible, though family trees are sometimes based on samples). This generally requires that a single manuscript be selected as a collation base. (Unfortunately, since the manuscripts are not yet compared, the manuscript to collate against must be chosen unscientifically. One may choose to start with the oldest manuscript, or the most complete, or the one most superficially free of scribal errors; as Charles Moorman comments on page 35 of Editing the Middle English Manuscript, the determination can only be made "by guess or God.")
Once the manuscripts are collated, one proceeds to determine the stemma. Methods for making this determination vary. Lachmann based his work on "agreement in error." This is a quick and efficient method, but it has two severe drawbacks: First, it assumes that we know the original reading (never a wise assumption, although critics as recent as Zuntz have sometimes used this technique), and second, it requires a fairly close-knit manuscript tradition. Both criteria were met by Lucretius, the author Lachmann studied. Other books are not as cooperative. Paul Maas observed that the method requires two presuppositions: "(1) that the copies made since the primary split in the tradition each represent one exemplar only, i.e. that no scribe has combined several exemplars (contaminatio), (2) that each scribe consciously or unconsciously deviates from his exemplar, i.e. makes peculiar errors" (Paul Mass, Textual Criticism, translated by B. Flowers, p. 3). The first of these conditions will generally be true for obscure writings -- but it is no more true of the Iliad or the Aeneid than it is of the New Testament. As for the latter requirement, it makes scribes into badly-programmed computers -- they are not accurate, but are inaccurate in particular and repeatable ways. This can hardly be relied upon.
In addition, there is an unrecognized assumption in Maas's Point 1: That
there is a "primary split" -- i.e. that the text falls into
two and only two basic families. Bédier noted that the
"agreement in error" method seems always to lead to trees with
two and only two branches. (This is not as surprising as it sounds. First,
it should be noted that most variants have two and only two readings. Thus
a single point of variation can only identify two types. On this basis, if there are
more than two types, the types which are more closely related will tend
to be grouped as a single text-type. Thus when trying to seek new text-types,
the first place to look is probably in the largest and most diverse of the
established types. This is certainly true in the New Testament; the "Western"
text has generally defied attempts to subdivide it, but the Alexandrian text often
can be subdivided -- in Paul, for instance, the manuscripts called Alexandrian
actually fall into three groups: P46+B, Family 1739, and
+A+C+33+81+1175+al.
For fuller discussion, see the appendix on
The Bédier Problem.)
|
In any case, for most sorts of literature we cannot identify errors with the certainty that Lachmann could. As Moorman notes (p. 50), "For what passes in recension as science is in fact art and as such depends for its success upon the artistry of the editor rather than the accuracy of the method." E. Talbot Donaldson makes this point even more cogently in "The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts": "It is always carefully pointed out that MSS may be grouped together only on the basis of shared error, but it is seldom pointed out that if an editor has to be able to distinguish right readings from wrong in order to evolve a stemma which will in turn distinguish right readings from wrong for him, then he might as well go on using this God-given power to distinguish right from wrong throughout the whole editorial process, and eliminate the stemma. The only reason for not doing so is to eliminate the appearance -- not the fact -- of subjectivity: the fact remains that the whole classification depends on purely subjective choices made before the work of editing begins." The student, therefore, who wishes to have a truly repeatable method and must be content to work from agreements in readings (which is slower but does not depend on any assumptions). This, if pursued consistently, is a more than adequate method (and it can be made to work even if our manuscripts are mixed, as Lachmann's were not). It can also, if a system of characteristic readings is used, identify multiple independent branches of the tree, even if two branches are more similar to each other than to a third branch. | Below:
Perhaps the single important manuscript of Wulfstan: Cotton Nero A I,
bearing corrections perhaps by Wulfstan himself. This is the introduction
to Homily XX, the Sermon to the English. Observe the Latin introduction --
and how distinct are the alphabets used for the Latin and the Old English!
The Latin preface reads (abbreviations expanded; note the interesting use of the chi-rho for "per"): SERMO LUPI AD ANGLOS QUANDO DANI MAXIME PERSECUTI SUNT EOS, QUOD FUIT ANNO MILLESIMO .XIIII, AB INCARNATIONE DOMINE NOSTRI IESU CRISTI The five complete lines of the Old English text shown here are Leofan men, gecnawa 
 æt
so
is: eos worold
is on ofste, 7 hit nealæc
am
ende, 7 y hit is,
on worolde aa swa leng swa wyrse; 7 swa hit sceal nyde for folces synnan, ær antecristes tocyme, yfelian swy e,
7 huru hit wyr
ænne
|
(Note: There are cases where agreement in error is absolutely reliable. A classic instance is in Arrian. Here, one codex is missing a leaf, causing a lacuna. Every other known copy -- there are about forty -- proceeds from the last word on the page before the loss to the first word of the page after, with no indication of anything missing. Thus, one can be sure that all the manuscripts are descended from this one -- and that it lost the leaf before the others were copied. Observe that this is identical to the situation of Fp and Gp.)
(Additional note: It appears that this method has now been rendered truly reliable. Stephen C. Carlson's work on Cladistics seems at last to have rendered stemmatics mathematically coherent and repeatable.)
This is not entirely to dismiss agreements in error even in the New Testament tradition. I use agreements in error regularly in grouping Byzantine manuscripts. For closely-related texts such as those, it is a completely reliable method. The problem comes in when one moves away from the closely-related texts. Zuntz, for instance, classed P46, B, and 1739 together based on what he considered shared errors. But looking at overall agreements makes this appear quite wrong: P46/B and 1739 are separate types, and Zuntz's shared errors in fact give every evidence of being the original text!
It's worth stressing that there are instances where scholars have created inaccurate stemma by the above means. The Middle English work Pierce the Ploughman's Creed (Piers Plowman's Creed) exists in three substantial copies. W. W. Skeat thought all three to be derived from the same original. A. I. Doyle offered strong evidence that this is not so. An even more absurd situation occurs in the homilies of Wulfstan. There are four extant manuscripts of Homily Xc: C E I and B. N. R. Ker suggested that I contained marginalia in the hand of Wulfstan himself, and Dorothy Bethurum concedes that it offers "a more authoritative text of the homilies it contains than do any of the other manuscripts" -- yet she offers this stemma, which puts I and its marginalia at the end of the copying process:
[Archetype]
|
-----------------
| |
[X] [Y] <-- lost heads of manuscript families
| |
--------- ------
| | \ | |
C E \ I* B
\ /
\ /
I**
Even if documents do descend from the same original, it cannot automatically be assumed that they are sisters as opposed to cousins at some remove. If manuscripts are sisters, then every deviation, be it as small as a change in orthography, must be explained. These requirements are much less strict for cousins, since there could have been work done on the intervening copies. It is much easier (and probably more accurate!) to produce a sketch-stemma than a detailed stemma -- and there is really no loss. If you know which manuscripts are descended from others, no matter at how many removes, the primary purpose of recensio has been served. (And it's worth noting that sketch stemma are possible even for New Testament manuscript groupings such as Family 2138.)
Sometimes it will be found that recensio brings us back to a single surviving manuscript. For example, it is believed that all Greek manuscripts of Josephus's Against Apion are derived from the imperfect Codex Laurentianus (L) of the eleventh century. In this case we are, in effect, in the situation of having only one manuscript (or, in the case of Against Apion, one manuscript plus a Latin translation and extensive quotations from Eusebius, the latter two being the only authorities for a large lacuna in L and all its descendants). We proceed to the final stages (examinatio and emendatio) as described below.
(We should add a few footnotes to the above statement, which is absolutely true only if the archetype manuscript is complete and entirely legible, and if all the descendents are immediate copies. If, for instance, the exemplar is damaged, even for just a few letters, we may need to turn to the copies to reconstruct it. This happens in the New Testament, e.g., with Codex Claromontanus and its copies. D/06 has lost its first few verses, and we use Dabs1 -- which has no other value -- to reconstruct them. Also, if manuscript B is not a daughter of manuscript A, but rather a granddaughter or later descendent, it may have picked up a handful of reading from mixture in the intervening steps. Although most places where B differs from A can be ignored as scribal errors, it is not proper to dismiss them entirely out of hand. Similarly, there may be marginal scholia in B which come from a different source, and may inform us of other readings.)
While some traditions will resolve down to a single surviving archetype, it is also common to find that all the manuscripts prove to derive from a lost archetype which is not the autograph. This is the case, for instance, with Æschylus. We have dozens of manuscripts all told (in fact, the number approaches one hundred) -- but they all contain the same seven plays or a subset. It appears that every extant manuscript derives its contents from a single manuscript of about the second century, which contained these seven and no others. (The later copies may include a few readings derived from other ancient manuscripts, but the plays they contain are based on that one manuscript.)
To critics accustomed to the riches of the New Testament, this may seem highly unlikely. But we should recall that most classical texts, including Æschylus and the other Greek dramatists, were the sole preserve of the educated -- used only in the schools to teach Attic grammar and the like (even a relatively small book cost the equivalent of a month's wage for a civil servant, and could be more; the tenth century Archbishop Arethas's copy of Plato cost 21 gold pieces when the annual salary was 72). In a number of cases, it is theorized that the ancestor of all copies was a lone uncial. In the ninth or tenth century, perhaps as a result of Photius's revival of learning, this uncial was transcribed into minuscule script. Since this transcription took real effort (the scribe had to determine accents, word divisions, etc.), all later copies would be derived from this one ninth century minuscule transcript. The only way multiple families would emerge is if two different schools transcribed their uncials. (Or, of course, if the text evolved after the ninth century, but given the limited number of copies made in that time, when the Byzantine Empire was much reduced and under severe stress, this seems relatively unlikely.) Even if other copies existed in Byzantine libraries, vast numbers were destroyed in the sacks of Constantinople in 1204 and 1453. (It is believed, in fact, that the Christian Crusaders who sacked Byzantium are more at fault than the Ottoman Turks who finally captured Constantinople in 1453. The Crusaders had no use for literature, while the Ottomans respected learning. In addition, real efforts were made to rescue surviving literature after 1204. So if an author's work was not made accessible in the years after 1204, it is probably because all copies had been destroyed by then.) Therefore, when confronted with a single lost manuscript, we reconstruct that archetype and then proceed to examinatio and emendatio.
But for documents which were widely copied (even if only a limited number of copies survive), we usually find more complex traditions, such as those shown here for Seneca's tragedies and Xenophon's Cyropædia. In these instances, there were a handful of early copies which spawned families of related manuscripts.
In these charts, extant manuscripts are shown in plain type and lost, hypothetical manuscripts are shown in [brackets]. Fragments are marked %.
[Seneca's Autograph]
|
------------------
| |
[E-Group] [A-Group]
| |
------------- -----------
| | | | | |
E R% T% a y A1
|
[S]
|
-----
| |
M N
[Xenophon's Autograph]
|
----------------------------------------------
| | | | | |
[x] [y] [z] | | |
| | | | | |
----- ----- --------- | | |
| | | | | | | | | |
C E D F A G H r% m% p2%
This situation also occurs in New Testament manuscript families. (So there is actually some relevance to this.) For example, Von Soden's breakdown of Family 13 would produce a stemma like this (note that other scholars have given somewhat different, and perhaps more accurate, stemma):
[F]
|
----------------------------------------------------
| | | |
[w] [x] [y] [z]
| | | |
----------- ------- --------------------- |
| | | | | | | | | | |
13 788 69 1689 983 826 543 346 230 828 124
It should be noted that stemma are not always this simple; families may have sub-families. Rzach, for instance, found two families in Hesiod' Theogony, which he labelled Y and W. But W, which consisted of seven manuscripts (to two for Y), had three subgroups, Wa, Wb, and Wc.
This reminds us of Bédier's warning about finding only two branches, and also about making casual assumptions about the relationships of the groups. Can we be sure that the two manuscripts of Y actually form a group, or are they simply non- W manuscripts? (This problem is well known in other contexts: It's called "long branch assimilation," where two specimens far from the main mass appear to converge simply because they're so different.) Do the three subgroups of W actually form a larger group, or are they simply closer to each other than to Y? There is no assured answer to any of these questions, but it reminds us that we must be careful in constructing our stemma. One should also be aware that new discoveries can affect the stemma. (This, in fact, can apply also in NT TC; the discoveries of P46, P47, and P75 have all given us reason to re-examine the textual picture of the books they contain.)
Having determined the families, their nature must be assessed. This process has analogies in New Testament criticism (consider Hort's analysis of the "Western" and Alexandrian/"Neutral" types), except that in classical criticism it usually applies to precisely defined texts as opposed to Hort's less-well-defined text-types. (The difference being that the reading of a text, being derived from a single ancestor, can in theory be determined exactly; text-types properly speaking will not have a single ancestor, and so no pure original can be reconstructed. Text-types are a collection of similar manuscripts.)
Once the types have been assessed, it may prove that one or another group is so corrupt as to offer little more than a source of possible emendations. (This is almost the case with the families of Seneca shown above: The E text is regarded as clearly superior, so much so that A-group readings are rarely considered if the E group makes sense. This rule is also often applied, though unjustifiably, in Old Testament criticism, where the LXX usually is not even consulted unless the Masoretic Text appears defective.) But this situation where one particular family is universally superior is not usual; more often we find that each group has something to contribute -- though we may also find that different groups have different sorts of faults (e.g. one may be prone to omission, one to paraphrase, and another to errors of sight).
Once we have assessed the types, we proceed to the next step in the process....
This phase of the critical process occurs only if recensio reveals two or more textual groupings more recent than the autograph. If we have only one manuscript, or if our manuscripts all go back to a single ancestor, selectio has no role to play. For selectio consists of choosing the most primitive of the surviving variants.
When we begin this process, we know our materials. Manuscripts have been grouped, their local archetypes more or less reconstructed, and their variants known. Now we must proceed to assess and choose between the variants.
Here one applies canons of criticism generally similar to those applied to the New Testament, though there are exceptions. So, for instance, we still accept the rule "that reading is best which best explains the others." And obviously the same basic scribal errors (homoioteleuton, etc.) still occur. But in secular works, one is unlikely to see the piling on of divine titles one often observes in the Bible (so, e.g., if a Greek author refers to "the Lord," it is hardly likely that a scribe will expand it to read "the Lord Jesus Christ"). Similarly, there is little likelihood of assimilation to remote parallels such as we find in the Gospels and Colossians (although assimilation to local parallels can and does occur). And, of course, there is no Byzantine text to influence the tradition (though there may, in some limited instances, be some equivalent sort of majority text that affects other manuscripts).
For all that we apply canons of criticism here, the usual approach is a sort of "modified majority" process (rather like the American electoral system, in which each congressperson is elected by a majority in that person's district, and laws are passed by a majority of those congressmen -- meaning that a law can actually be passed despite being opposed by the majority of the general electorate). Consider the following provisional stemma of nine manuscripts M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U. The manuscripts A (the archetype), B, C, D, and E are all hypothetical (indicated by square brackets about the letters).
[A]
|
--------------------------
| |
[B] [E]
| |
----------- |
| | |
[C] [D] |
| | |
----- ----- -----------------
| | | | | | | | |
M N O P Q R S T U
Now suppose we have two readings, X and Y. Assume these two are equally probable on internal grounds. Assume that X is read by M, N, P, and R, while O, Q, S, T, and U have reading Y. Thus, Y is the majority reading. However, reconstruction indicates that X is actually the correct reading. How do we determine this? We follow these steps:
The above is not absolutely certain, of course. If reading X could have arisen as an easy error for Y, then Y might be original. Or there might be mixture -- the eternal bugaboo of critics -- involved. Intelligence and critical rules must be applied. But the above shows how a text can be reconstructed where critical rules are not clear. Whatever rule we use for a particular reading, we eventually reconstruct the set of readings we believe to have existed in the archetype.
When this is done, we have achieved a provisional text -- the earliest text obtainable directly from the manuscripts. It is at this point that Biblical and classical textual criticism finally part ways. As far as Biblical TC is concerned, this is usually the last step -- though Michael Holmes has argued ("Reasoned Eclecticism in New Testament Textual Criticism," published in Bart D. Ehrman & Michael W. Holmes, editors, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, p. 347), that there is no fundamental reason why New Testament criticism must stop here. The general opinion of New Testament critics was expressed by Kirsopp Lake in this way (The Text of the New Testament, sixth edition revised by Silva New, pp. 8-9): "In classical textual criticism, the archetype of all the extant MSS. is often obtainable with comparatively little work, but often is very corrupt. There is therefore scope for much conjectural emendation. In Biblical textual criticism, on the other hand, it is still doubtful what is the archetype of the existing manuscripts. But at least we may be sure that it is an exceedingly early one, with very few corruptions, and therefore the work of conjectural emendation is very light, rarely necessary[,] and scarcely ever possible.")
Thus it is only in classical criticism that we proceed to...
This process consists, simply put, of scanning the text for errors. This step, though it may be distasteful, and certainly difficult, is necessary. Classical manuscripts were no freer of errors than were Biblical manuscripts, and are often further removed from the archetype, meaning that there have been more generations for errors to arise. So the scholar, armed with knowledge of the language and (if possible) of the style of the writer, sets out to look for corruptions in the text. If they are found, the editor proceeds to...
If examinatio consists of looking for errors, emendatio (also known as divinatio) consists of fixing them. This, obviously, requires the use of conjectural emendation. This is no trivial task! Take the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf as an example. The Chickering text (Howell D. Chickering, Jr., Beowulf, Anchor, 1997) includes about 280 readings not in the manuscript (of which some 200 are conjectural emendations), and other editors have proposed many emendations not adopted by Chickering. The case of the Old English poem "The Seafarer" is even worse: in 124 lines of four to ten words each (usually toward the lower end of that range), the edition of I. L. Gordon adopts 22 emendations (I. L. Gordon, The Seafarer, Methuen's Old English Library, 1960). Thus the effort involved in correcting these texts can often be greater than that of simply comparing manuscripts.
Of course, the way one proceeds through the four steps of classical criticism depends very much upon the actual materials preserved. We say, for instance, that emendatio is the final step in the process. But it should use the results of the other steps. The variants at a particular point, for instance, may give a clue as to what was the original reading. If, for example, we were to find two variants, "He went to bet" and "He went too bad," a very strong conjecture would be that the original was "He went to bed." Therefore we must perform each step based on the materials available. Nor is emendation a trivial task. To repair a damaged text requires deep understanding of the language and the author's use of it (a better understanding than is required simply to read the text; when reading, you can look up a word you don't know. How can you look up a word which may not even exist?). It also requires great creativity -- and knowledge of all the materials available. The following sections outline various scenarios and how critics proceed in each case.
In terms of steps required, this is the easiest of the various sorts of criticism. There is no need for recensio or selectio. One can proceed immediately to examinatio and emendatio.
|
But there are complications. For one thing, when there is only one manuscript, one is entirely dependent upon that manuscript. There is nothing to fall back on if the manuscript is illegible. And this can be a severe problem. Again taking the case of Beowulf, the only surviving manuscript was burned in the Cotton Library fire, and is often illegible. So we are largely dependent on two transcripts made some centuries ago, both of which have problems of their own. Similar difficulties are found in other texts. The manuscript may be a palimpsest. Or it may use a non-standard orthography. In a handful of instances we may not even be able to read the script of the original (e.g. the Greek Linear A writings, but also some Persian inscriptions and even Old English writings in odd forms of the runic alphabet.) Thus the scholar must pay particular attention to the seemingly simple text of just reading the manuscript. The second problem of texts preserved in a single copy is that we have no recourse in the event of an error. If a Biblical manuscript has lost a line, we can determine its reading from another copy. But if the ancestral copy of the Antigone has lost a line (and we can tell that it is missing because the surrounding lines make nonsense), how can we correct it? (There is an instance where we can show this happened; the text of Antigone 1165-1168 makes nonsense in all the manuscripts. We know the correct reading only because Eustathius's commentary preserves the missing line.) In the case of multiple manuscripts, even if all of them have an error, the nature of the mistakes may tell us something about the original. Not so when there is only one copy. | The sole manuscript of Beowulf, Cotton Vitellius A.xv. The first
page of the poem. The photograph, digitally adjusted to increase
legibility, still shows the scorch marks at the bottom of the page;
the outer margin has also been eaten away by the fire, with some
loss of text (corrections in []). For a better view of the actual manuscript,
see the British Library site; there it an image
here.
The first seven lines of the text read as follows (the
*, equivalent to a raised point in the Old English, indicates the end
of a metrical line; these are not always marked in the manuscript; where
they are not, {*} is used; suspended letters are spelled out. The word division
matches the manuscript as I read it, though modern editions consider this defective):
HWÆT WE GARDE |
Thus the task of editing a book preserved in only one manuscript is arguably the most complex and difficult in textual criticism, for the scholar must reconstruct completely wherever the scribe has failed. We have already seen that these manuscripts often need vast numbers of emendations. They also require particularly clever ones.
There is a minor variation on this theme of emendation in the case of works which exist in only one manuscript, but for which we also have epitomes or other works based on the original source. (An example would be the portions of Polybius which overlap the surviving portions of Livy. Livy used Polybius, often quoting him nearly verbatim but without identifying the quotations.) These secondary sources can supply readings where the text is troubled. However, since the later sources are often rewritten (this is true even of the epitomes), and may be interpolated as well, it is usually best to use them simply as a source for emendations rather than to use them as a source of variant readings.
This theme has a variation in the case of editions copied from other editions: This applies in the case of Malory above, and also some of Shakespeare's plays, where we have two semi-independent editions. Caxton surely consulted British Library Add. 59678, but he must have consulted something else, too, even if it was only his own head. In the case of Shakespeare, we can take A Midsummer Night's Dream as an example: There are two texts, the quarto (properly, the first quarto, but the second quarto was copied from the first quarto), and the folio, copied from the second quarto but with corrections seemingly from an authoritative second source. The interesting question here, then, is how authoritative is the text in the places where our two sources agree: Does this agreement have as much strength as an instance where two genuinely separate sources agree (meaning that we trust the joint reading as much as a reading supported by two different manuscripts), or is it a case where one corrector or another didn't notice a divergence? This question, unfortunately, has no simple answer -- but one should be aware of the problem.
Another variation is the criticism of inscriptions. Although an inscription is, of course, the original inscription, it is not necessarily the original text. When Darius I of Persia ordered the making of the Behistun inscription, he certainly didn't climb the rock and do the carving himself -- rather, he composed a message and left it to the workers to put it on the rock. Thus the inscription will generally be a first-generation copy of the original. This is still much better than we expect for literary works -- but it is not the original.
Still another variation is the Gilgamesh Epic. This exists in multiple pieces, recensionally different, in multiple languages, from multiple eras, with some of the later versions incorporating material originally separate, and not one of the major recensions is complete. Here one has to step back from the problem of deciding how to reconstruct and first settle what to reconstruct.
This is the case for which Lachmann's technique is best suited. It is ideal for traditions with perhaps five to twenty manuscripts, and can be used on larger groups (though it is hardly practical if there are in excess of a hundred manuscripts).
We begin, of course, with recensio. This can have three possible outcomes:
This is an unusual situation; very few ancient works are preserved in more than a few dozen manuscripts. But there are some -- Homer being the obvious example. (Another leading example, the Quran, is rarely considered as a subject for textual criticism. At least one major edition of the Quran, in fact, was not even taken from manuscript; it was compiled by comparing the recitations of 20 or so Quranic scholars. The primary tradition of the Quran is considered to be oral, not written.) The Iliad, which is preserved in somewhat more than 600 manuscripts, is believed to be the most popular non-religious work of the manuscript age. (Of course, it should be noted that the works of Homer were regarded as scripture by the Greeks -- but certainly not in the same way that the New Testament was regarded by Christians!)
In the handful of cases where manuscripts are so abundant, of course, the stemmatics used for most classical compositions become impossible. We have the same problem as we do with the New Testament: Too many manuscripts, and too many missing links. We are forced to adopt a different procedure, such as looking for the best or the most numerous manuscripts.
Since the methods used are fundamentally similar to those used for New Testament criticism, we will not detail them here. It is worth noting, however, that most critics consider the Byzantine manuscripts of Homer to be more reliable than the assorted surviving papyri. The papyri will occasionally contain very good readings -- but in general they seem to contain wild, uncontrolled texts. Whereas the Byzantine manuscripts reflect a carefully controlled tradition, presumably going back to the Alexandrian editors who standardized Homer.
This fact should not be taken to imply anything about New Testament criticism; the situations are simply not parallel. But it serves as a reminder that a late manuscript need not be bad, and an early one need not be good. All must be judged on their merits.
| A special complication arises when books are preserved in multiple editions. This is by no means rare; an author would often be the only scribe available to copy his own work, and should he not have the right to expand it? (We may even see a New Testament parallel to this in the book of Acts, where some have thought that the author produced two editions, one of which lies behind the Alexandrian text and the other behind the text of Codex Bezae.) Even authors who were not their own scribes would often expand their work. The Vision of Piers Plowman, for instance, exists in three stages (perhaps even four, though the fourth is actually a prototype and was not formally published). The first stage, known as "A," is 2500 lines long, and does not appear to have been finished. Some years later the "B" text, of 4000 lines, was issued (this is the text most often published). A final recension, the "C" text (only slightly longer, but considered to be of poorer quality) followed a few years later. All were probably by the same author (though this is not certain), but it is believed that, in revising the "B" text to produce the "C" version, the poet used a manuscript that was produced by a different scribe. What became of the original copy of the "B" text is unknown; perhaps it was presented to a patron. | Near-contemporary but not really a witness: Piers the Plowman, the upper portion of folio 9 in Cotton Vespasian B.xvi (cited in critical editions as "M"). Thought to date from the late fourteenth century, which, since the "C" text dates from around 1385 and the author died within a year or two of that date, was copied within a generation of the author's death. But, since it is a revision of the "C" text, itself a revision of the "B" text, it tells us nothing useful about the "A" text shown in the stemma at left. Note how different this hand is from the Anglo-Saxon hands used for Beowulf and Wulfstan. Note also the elaborate use of coloured inks: the red dots to indicate line breaks, the red in the first letter of almost every line, the coloured first letters of sections, and the marginal squiggles which also mark section breaks. Observe also how very different is the hand scribbling in the margin. |
This also poses a problem for the scholar working on a stemma. The edition of the "A" text of Piers Plowman by Thomas A. Knott and David C. Fowler, for instance, gives the following stemma (somewhat simplified), with actual manuscripts denoted by upper case letters (sometimes with subscripts or two-letter abbreviations) and ancestors in lower case letters:
|----x-----V H
|
Archetype---|----y--|--y1----T H2 Ch D
| |
| |--y2----U R T2 A M H3
| |
| |--y3----W N Di
| |
| |--------I
| |
| |--------L
|
|----------------B text
Thus, for Piers Plowman, a later recension must be used as one of the three witnesses to the earlier recension -- a practice which, if we were to do it in another context, we would not call "reconstruction" but "contamination" (or, if we want to make it sound nicer, "harmonization").
Even more curious is the case of the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, which exists in a long form, in the Roman alphabet, in the tenth century Vercelli Book, and in a much shorter form, in a runic script, inscribed on the eighth(?) century Ruthwell Cross. (In this instance it is not really clear what the relationship between the texts is.)
We could cite many other instances of works existing in multiple editions (e.g. Julian of Norwich; for that matter, we know that even Josephus issued multiple editions of his works). Indeed, there is a modern equivalent, even if I hate to mention it: Consider the movie, which often has a "studio cut" and a "director's cut." But citing examples is not our purpose here; our interest is in what we learn from these examples.
In addition to editorial work, multiple editions can come about as the result of ongoing additions to a document. This typically occurs in chronicle manuscripts. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, begins with a core created by King Alfred of Wessex (reigned 871-899). But from then on, the various foundations maintaining it kept their own records, often comparing the documents. In addition, a new foundation might make a copy of an older Chronicle then add its own additions (so, for example, with Chronicle MSS. A and A2). And, since the Chronicle was updated sporadically, it is theoretically possible for a manuscript to be "its own grandpa" -- the first part of A2 is copied from A, but later parts of A might (barely possibly) be derived at some removes from A2 or another lost descendant. To add to the fun, the manuscript A is in a different dialect of Anglo-Saxon from all other Chronicle manuscripts. The different recensions cannot be considered translations -- the dialects were still one language -- but adjustments had to be made to conform the text in one dialect to the idiom of another.
When multiple editions of a work exist, of course, it is not proper to conflate the editions to produce some sort of ur-text. The editions are separate, and should be reconstructed separately. The question is, to what extent is it legitimate to use the different editions for criticism of each other?
Although the exact answer will depend on the circumstances, in general the different editions should not be used to edit each other. (They can, of course, be used as sources of emendations.) They may be used as witnesses for one or another variant reading -- but one should always be aware of the tendency to harmonize the different editions.
At first glance, textual criticism of a lost book may seem impossible. And in most cases it is; we cannot, for instance, reconstruct anything of Greek tragedy before Æschylus.
But "lost" is a relative term. The "Q" source used by Matthew and Luke is lost, but scholars are constantly reconstructing it. The situation is similar for many classical works. Consider, for example, the Egyptian historian Manetho. We have absolutely nothing direct from his pen. So much of his work, however, was excerpted by Eusebius and Africanus (and sometimes by Josephus) that Manetho's work still provides the outline of the Egyptian dynasty list.
This is by no means unusual; many classical works have perished but have been heavily excerpted. Polybius is a good example. Of his forty-volume history, only the first five books are entirely intact (we also have a large portion of book six, and a few scattered fragments of the other books). But most of the information from Polybius survives in the writers who consulted him -- Livy and Diodorus used him heavily, and Plutarch and Pliny occasionally.
The problem in Polybius's case -- as in Manetho's -- lies in trying to determine what actually came from the original author and what is the work of the redactor. (We can perhaps grasp the scope of the problem if we imagine trying to reconstruct the Gospel of Mark if we had only Matthew and Luke as sources.) This is made harder by the fact that the redactors often introduced problems of their own. (A comparison of Africanus's and Eusebius's use of Manetho, for instance, shows severe discrepancies. They do not always agree on the number of kings in a dynasty, and they often disagree on the length of the reigns. Even the names of the kings themselves sometimes vary.)
Thus it is often possible to recover the essential content of lost books. However, one should never rely on the verbal accuracy of the reconstructed text.
There are variations on this theme. When the second part of Don Quixote was long delayed, an enterprising plagairist published a continuation in 1614. This was not an actual work of Cervantes (who published his correct continuation in 1615), but it thought to have been based at least in part on a manuscript Cervantes allowed to circulate privately. The result is at least partly genuine Cervantes -- but not something the author wanted published, and not entirely in his own words, either.
We have already alluded to several of the differences between Classical and New Testament criticism: The difference in numbers of manuscripts, the use of stemmatics, etc. There are other differences which much sometimes be kept in mind:
are only a few centuries more recent than the autographs. Manuscripts
of the versions or their recensions may be even closer to the original -- as, e.g.,
theo of the Vulgate may have been prepared under the supervision of
Theodulf himself.
).
We know that Homer used this obsolete phoneme, and Hesiod seems to have used
it as well (though it was less important by his time). But our extant manuscripts
do not preserve it. The scholar who reconstructs an early Greek text must therefore
be careful to note the possible effects of its disappearance.
)
while the Attic used a three-stroke sigma
(
). But some were
more significant: The Ionic alphabet had used the letter Omega, but the Attic
didn't, and Corinth used M for the s sound. It wasn't until 403/2 B.C.E.
that Athens formally adopted the Ionic alphabet, and some older writers probably
continued to use the Attic alphabet for some time. Thus the earliest copies of
most of the Greek tragedies, and very likely Homer and Hesiod as well, were originally
written in alphabets other than the Ionic, and had to be converted. This means, first,
that there could be errors of visual confusion in the text based on both Ionic and
Attic forms, and second, that there could have been errors in translation between
the alphabets.
At this point it is perhaps worth quoting another passage from Reynolds & Wilson (page 212):
[Rules such as the above] will inevitably give the impression that textual criticism is a tidier and more cut-and-dried process than it proves to be in practice. While general principles are undoubtedly of great use, specific problems have an unfortunate habit of being sui generis, and similarly it is rare to find two manuscript traditions which respond to exactly the same treatment.
Most of the preceding discussion has been directed toward writings which, in broad outline at least, have histories similar to the New Testament: Written in manuscript, and copied one at a time by scribes, with most of the copies being lost.
It should be noted, however, that there is a form of textual criticism practiced on works written since then, though it is a very different sort of subject. The difficulty is that a printed copy of a book, or even the author's autograph, my not really represent the author's actual intentions. (Compare the case of Malory described above, where Caxton much expanded from the manuscript.) A modern example of this is noted by Jerome J. McGann in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Virginia, 1992), p. 59. He notes Byron's poem The Giaour. This had an extraordinarily complex history, with most "states" of the text surviving:
First draft: 344 lines
Fair copy by the author: 375 lines
Printed trial proof: 453 lines
First edition: 684 lines
Second edition (not corrected by Byron): 816 lines
"Third" edition, first run: 950 lines
"Third" edition, second run: 1014 lines
Fourth edition (not corrected by Byron): 1048 lines
Fifth edition: 1215 lines
Sixth edition: (lineation not noted)
Seventh edition: 1334 lines
And so on, through fully fifteen editions in a very short span of time (supposedly 14 editions between 1813 and 1815).
Now it should be obvious that the first and fourteenth editions aren't really "the same," and a textual critic shouldn't be reconstructing one with reference to the other. But there is another question: What did Byron intend each edition to look like?
This is an even more complicated question, because of orthographic considerations. Particularly in the early era of printing, there was no standardization of spelling or punctuation. We see faint vestiges of this even today -- e.g. Americans refer to workers as "labor," the British refer to them as "labour." Again, newspapers tend to omit the serial comma ("I went to work, the store and home") while higher-end books tend to include it ("I went to work, the store, and home").
And authors often expected their publishers to help them in this regard. Sir Walter Scott wanted his writings to be "de-Scotticised" by the publisher. Byron's works were overseen by Mary Shelley, who introduced corrections both orthographic and substantial -- and Byron accepted a very high fraction of these changes, implying that he desired the help.
Thus, even the author's final draft was not necessarily regarded as final in the author's mind. So what does one reconstruct?
And even if one has decided what to reconstruct, does it follow that one should actually retain that form? Should an American version of Byron, e.g., use the spelling "labour"?
This is apparently a rather hot topic in textual criticism of modern works; it is the whole and entire subject of the McGann work cited above. (Though I must confess that I never figured out what McGann actually wanted to see happen.)
I suspect, however, that the issue is not of much interest to NT critics. (I know it isn't of much interest to me!) NT editions necessarily create their own punctuation (derived perhaps in part from a manuscript -- see the article on Copy Texts), and the tendency is also toward modern orthography.
A matter somewhat more serious (to my mind) is the case of Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765 and later editions). This was an annotated edition of poems Percy collected here and there, most particularly from a manuscript of the previous century which he had saved from burning.
The manuscript, however, was mutilated, and much of what was still intact had nonetheless been damaged in transmission, and several of the pieces were indelicate. So Percy included pieces not from the manuscript, omitted much that was in the manuscript -- and heavily rewrote it all.
The result, frankly, was a botch. Many versions of traditional songs are defective, and it is accepted that an editor who wishes to prepare a song for singing must sometimes conflate or rewrite. But this still leaves two obligations: The author should admit to rewriting -- and the author shouldn't produce garbage. Also, the author should not hide the manuscript (as Percy did), so that later editors can produce diplomatic editions or propose their own emendations.
Take it as given that Percy failed in all three of his tasks. But what should be done instead? About a century after Percy performed his butchery (an ironically successful butchery, since the Reliques was the most popular collection of tradition-based ballads to that date), an author produced a revised edition. What should he have done? Replaced Percy's hacks with the original manuscript versions? Printed Percy's version with footnotes? Something else?
There is no answer, really -- but it reminds us of just how bad an editing job can be. Percy's edition was not useful to scholars because it was too heavily edited, and was no use to ordinary people because it was too badly edited, and at no point said what it did. Whatever else modern critics do, they really need to learn the Percy Lesson.
Note: This is not a history of literature, nor an account of literary criticism. It is simply a very brief account of the manuscript history of non-Biblical traditions. (Limited by what I myself know or can find out about these traditions. The primary sources for most of the shorter entries is David Crystal's An Encyclodepic Dictionary of Language and Languages and the Encyclopedia of Literature edited by Joseph T. Shipley, though I have consulted fuller literary histories for most of the longer entries. I have attempted to cover all current European languages, though examining the remaining languages of the world is beyond either my powers of the scope of this article (yes, I know this is unfair; a language such as Persian, e.g., has inscriptions from Biblical times, and a large literature, and its speakers have influenced Biblical history. But I have to draw the line somewhere). For that matter, even deciding what constitutes a language is difficult; the definitions are as often political as linguistic. Czechs and Slovaks, for instance, can understand each other, but their languages are called distinct. Different dialects of Italian, by contrast, are mutually incomprehensible but labelled as one language.) Knowledge of this history can be helpful in reconstructing manuscripts. Our understanding of the history of the New Testament text, for instance, is strongly influenced by the manuscripts which have survived. We have a handful of early manuscripts from Egypt, then a very quiet period in the sixth through eighth centuries, from which little of significance survives, then a great flowering beginning with the ninth century.
Latin literature and manuscripts have a history somewhat like that of the New Testament, though the dates are later, and there is no early phase. There are effectively no Latin manuscripts from the papyrus era; the areas where Latin was spoken generally did not have a climate suitable for long-term survival of papyri. We have some inscriptions, but few are literary.
The transition from uncial to minuscule happened somewhat earlier in the Latin than in the Greek tradition; the west, which was poorer than the Greek East, probably felt the need for a smaller hand at an earlier date. In any case, we see attempts at literature in minuscules as early as the seventh century. By the late eighth century, the Carolingian Minuscule became dominant, and uncials all but died out.
The Carolingian period also saw the first real revival in Latin learning. Old texts were unearthed and recopied; most of our oldest manuscripts are from this period.
The impoverishment that followed the breakup of Charlemagne's empire saw literary productions decline, but there was another revival in the twelfth century. This was the heyday of Latin literature in Christendom, and the single richest period for Latin manuscripts.
The Romance Languages, naturally, have a much shorter literary heritage. Although tongues such as French and Italian were starting to take form by Charlemagne's time, a literature requires more than that: It requires both authors and copyists. Monks, at this time, were still concerned with Latin literature, and few if any vernacular writers seem to have existed.
While a language recognizeably French appears to have existed by the ninth century, French literature has a complex history, as France remained a nation of semi-independent counties until the fifteenth century. (The French king was overlord of Normandy, Burgundy, Brittany, etc. -- but hadn't the strength or authority to control the dukes who ran those fiefs. At best, he was allowed to name a new Duke if the old line died out.) Language and culture were by no means united. So the earliest important French writing was the Song of Roland, regarded as the earliest (and certainly the best) of the chansons de geste. It is believed to date from around the beginning of the twelfth century, and other chansons date from somewhat later in that period. Also from the twelfth century (probably the latter half) is Marie de France (so named, it is thought, because of her birthplace; she seems to have worked in England), a writer of romantic fables (lais). At the same time, the flood of romances (many of them, ironically, connected with the legendary British King Arthur) began to appear. Few of these, however, survive in many copies. Even the Roland exists in only one significant manuscript, Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Digby 23, which seems to have been copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe. (There are many later manuscripts, but they are all so bad that the critical editions tend to work simply by emending the Digby text.) Similarly, there is only one complete manuscript of Marie's lais; British Museum Harley 978. A large subset, nine, are found in a Paris manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale nouv. acq. fr. 2168, also from the thirteenth century. There are a handful of other fragments, all from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It seems likely enough that the compositions survived primarily because they are so recent.
We tend to think of France as the country of French-speakers, but a significant minority still speaks Provençal (also known as Languedoc, and known to linguists as Occitan). Although a minority language in France, many of the traditions we regard as French are actually Provençal; in its early form (known since the tenth century), it was the language of the troubadours who created the "courtly love" mythology. The tongue itself was much more important in the past; today, northern French is imposed on southern children in the schools, and Provençal is a sort of a street language comparable to Braid Scots in Scotland. It flourished until the fourteenth century, but came under pressure thereafter (probably in part as a result of the Hundred Years War; many of the southern French had preferred English rule and the French government wanted to bind them more closely to France). The earliest written manuscript is a fragment of the Boeci, thought to have been written around the year 1000. Another fragment, the Life of Saint Fides, was copied at about that time. Then came William IX, Count of Poitiers, the so-called first Troubadour (who lived around 1071-1127). Although only about a dozen of his works survive, Provençal literature becomes common starting from him -- starting, of course, with the Courtly Love lyrics of poets such as Bernart de Ventadorn (mid-twelfth century).
It is not really proper to speak of Spanish literature of the manuscript era; for much of this period, the Iberian peninsula was in Moslem hands (Granada, in the south, was not dispersed until 1492). And even once Christians reclaimed the area, they formed separate principalities (Aragon, Castile, Leon, Navarre). Thus, properly, we should refer to either Iberian literature or the literature of the individual nations -- though almost no one does so. It was not until 1469 that Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile (with Isabella reigning from 1474 in Castille and Ferdinand from 1479 in Aragon), at last forming a united Spain. (And even this nation was not united administratively, and did not have a single monarch until 1516, when Charles I -- who was also the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V -- succeeded his grandfather Ferdinand, setting aside his mother Juana "the Mad.") There are, of course, manuscripts from Spain -- such as the excellent Vulgate manuscripts cav and tol, plus some Visigothic fragments -- but these properly fall under other headings.
Still, we have documents from this era. The earliest vernacular Spanish writings (as opposed to writings in late Latin) seem to be law codes from about tenth century. We do not find actual literature in Spanish until the about the twelfth century. From about this time come three epic romances: the Poema del Cid (Cantar de Mio Cid, about the Castilian Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, died 1099) was written about 1140 (which, although it survives entire in only one manuscript, is considered the great early example of Spanish literature; we also find extremely large portions of it quoted in later chronicles), the Crónica Rimada, and the Roncesvalles (a translation and adaption of the French Song of Roland), also surviving in a single manuscript. All of these are evolved works, hinting that there are older epics, but they are lost. From this time, we see increasing volumes of literature in all categories (epic, drama, poetry, etc.)
Portugese is now spoken primarily in Brazil, which has a far larger population than Portugal itself, but of course the language did not reach that nation until after the invention of printing. Portugal itself has had a complex history, occasionally being united with Spain; the two languages have influenced each other. The famous Portugese explorers also brought home many loan-words. The basic language, however, remains fairly close to the Latin from which it sprang. There is a strong literary tradition starting from the twelfth century (the earliest dated inscription comes from 1189); the songs of the troubadours, the most important part of the tradition, come from the next century. These have a complex history, written separately and combined, with many of the anthologies lost, but they may have cross-fertilized. Portugese is especially closely related to Galician, spoken primarily in the northwest corner of Spain north of Portugal (the two did not split until after Portugal became an independent country and the western Iberians were largely cut off from each other). Distinctly Galician literature is, however, rare and largely confined to the period after the development of printing and the split with Portugese; although there are cultural hints of a Celtic history in the region, this has not affected the language or literature.
Catalan was for much of its history the official speech of Aragon (which was incorporated into the larger Catalan region but retained the name Aragon because Aragon had kings and Catalonia only counts), but it is now the forgotten Romance language -- it's almost the only Romance speech not to be official somewhere. It is spoken primarily in northeastern Spain and surrounding areas (e.g. into the eastern French Pyrenees; the primary city of Catalan Spain is Barcelona). Catalan speakers have been oppressed at various times in Spanish history (as recently as under Franco), which has resulted both in the destruction of texts and in a strong tendency to conform to Spanish. Still, there are literary remains going back to about the twelfth century, and chronicles starting not much after -- and the fact that Aragon and the County of Barcelona came to be dominated by Castile, and that Catalan texts and speakers have been abused, means that there is much need for textual reconstructive work.
Even more thoroughly ignored is Corsican, spoken by only a few hundred thousand people on the island of that name. Although Corsica has been governed by France for more than two centuries, it is a language with Italian roots (closest to Tuscan). It has, however, no real literature (Corsica long remained a land of subsistance farmers and shepherds), particularly from the manuscript era.
Sardinian has been written since the eleventh century, but has only a small literature; the language (which is close to Italian, and also said to be closer to vulgar Latin than any other Romance language) has several dialects, none dominant, and it has never been an official language even on its home island.
Ladinic is the usual name for a Romance language spoken primarily by Jews. As such, it has a fairly large literature, though much of it is fairly recent. The tradition is confused by the fact that both Hebrew and Roman alphabets have been used for it.
The name "Ladinic" is also sometimes used for the fourth official language of Switzerland, but the correct name is Romansch or Rhaetian or Rhaeto-Romansch. It has several dialects, influenced variously by Italian and French. The earliest writings date from the twelfth century, but the small number of speakers has kept the tradition small.
It was Dante who truly put vernacular Italian literature on the map (though he wrote in Latin as well as Italian, his great work, the Divine Comedy, was the first major work of Italian vernacular literature, and written not many centuries after the first hints of Italian writing in the tenth century -- that earliest writing being scribbles in the margins of Latin documents. We have some verse fragments from the twelfth century, but their dialect seems to indicate that they were dead ends). So great was Dante's influence that Boccaccio, the second great light of Italian literature, adopted almost all of Dante's techniques. Dante did not invent everything he did -- his slightly older colleague Guido Cavalcanti, for whom Dante wrote the Vita nuova, pioneered a great deal. Dante, however, was the great voice who spread the literature to the wide world. Like Boccaccio, Petrarch (the popularizer of the sonnet) wrote in the period immediately after Dante (Petrarch too was of Florentine ancestry, though born outside that city). Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, however, wrote only a few centuries before the invention of printing. Thus the Italian manuscript tradition presents few interesting features. In addition, Italy, like Spain, was not united until after the invention of printing. The Divine Comedy is not really Italian literature (except in its language; Dante was one of the first to write in the Italian vernacular); it is the language of one of the city-states (even today, some of the Italian dialects are mutually incomprehensible; Received Italian is based on the Tuscan dialect of Florence, but about half the population does not speak this form as a native language; there are also minority languages. Francis of Assisi, for instance, wrote extensively in his local Umbrian dialect). There was thus no national literature in the manuscript era; Italy did not become a nation until the nineteenth century.
Widely separated from the other Romance languages is Rumanian. This has caused it to develop unusual features -- e.g. it adds articles as suffixes to nouns, and of course has many Slavic loan words. The language presumably evolved away from Latin very early, but the earliest writings seem to date from the sixteenth century, and these were confined to official documents and liturgical works. Even then, Slavic alphabets were used for several centuries.
Some texts will speak of Moldavian as a separate Romance language, but this is one of those political distinctions, since Moldova, prior to independence, was long part of Russia. Moldavian is really a dialect of Rumanian (with some Russian loan words) written in the Cyrillic alphabet, with no real literature from the manuscript era.
Dalmatian, which died out as recently as the end of the nineteenth century, was also a Romance language, but seems to have left little literature. (This is fairly typical of Balkan area languages.)
Romani (Romany, Gypsy), despite its name, is not a Romance language; its origin is something of a mystery although it has been attributed to the Indo-Aryan group. The language is very diverse, and tends to take on local attributes. When written, it tends to use the local alphabet. Romani literature, however, is oral; there is little if any need for textual criticism.
Greek Literature never went into as much of a decline as Latin, so we do not see as much of a revival. The strongest period of copying, however, is not that different; many of our earliest manuscripts date from the ninth to eleventh centuries. The Photian Revival of the ninth century is no doubt at least partly responsible. After the eleventh century, the decline begins. The Battle of Manzikert (1071) began the long slow Byzantine retreat which ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The worst destruction, however, was wrought by Christians, not Turks. The Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, and many of its treasures were either destroyed at that time or carried off to Western libraries where they were forgotten.
It is interesting to note that, for both Greek and Latin literatures, there is something of a break following the third century. Until this time, authors freely and regularly quoted works such as the Epic Cycle and the lost plays of the Athenian dramatists. Following the third century, this becomes much rarer. Occasional extremely diligent authors such as Photius will occasionally produce something from a lost work, but the strong majority of quotations are from works which still exist today. This cutoff is so strong and so obvious that scholars have speculated that the surviving works are part of some sort of official curriculum, with works outside that curriculum being ignored. (The problem with this theory is that there is absolutely no other evidence for it. The likely explanation is just the general decline of the Roman Empire.)
Russian literature really gives us very little to work with. There was not even a Russian/Slavic alphabet until the creation of the Old Church Slavonic version. Even then, there was little to write down (a fact which is to a significant extent responsible for out ignorance of early Russian history); Russia, more than almost any nation in Europe, was a land of poor peasants and wealthier but equally ignorant aristocrats. It also suffered outside disruptions -- the sack of Kiev in 1170, the Mongol and Tatar invasions, the later sack of Novgorod and the other battles for Russian unification. The problem is made that much worse by the various dialects of the language. (We truly do not know the extent to which early Russian differed from Old Church Slavonic.) Histories do not begin to speak of Russian literature until the eighteenth century. Prior to that, there were church manuals and a few chronicles and the like (starting from the twelfth century), but little else save the letters of Tsar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible, 1530-1584). From the manuscript era, there is little original literature except for saints' lives and monastery annals. The latter hardly need textual criticism. The former may have suffered more modification -- but in this case, the modifications may be of as much interest as the original text.
The situation is similar for most of the eastern Slavic languages (in the areas where the Orthodox church held sway). The situation is perhaps even worse for the western Slavs; since these regions were Catholic, they used the Latin Bible, and had no vernacular translation to inspire a literary tradition. Slovenian, for instance, is said not to have had any literature at all until the nineteenth century.
Interestingly, textual criticism continues to be an active need in some of the Slavic languages to this day. Because of the Habsburg Empire's lack of respect for its subject peoples, writings in these tongues were often published very casually. A classic example is Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, written after the First World War though including elements from the period before the war. Hasek's manuscript (written in Czech, though with bits of German) is incomplete, the two early editions differ substantially, and Hasek (who died in 1923) had no real part in either. (He was dictating almost to the day of his death, and exercised little control over the volumes which actually appeared in print.) Thus there is a real need for a critical edition of this famous twentieth century writing. This is all the more ironic in that Czech as a language (as opposed to a dialect of East Slavonic) did not emerge until the sixteenth century; had there been free publication in the Habsburg Empire, there would be little need for textual work. But government opposition was strong -- in no small part because much Czech literature was anti-Catholic. The literary impulse was largely a belated reaction to the work of Hus, who tried to regularize Czech orthography and conform the language to that of the people. From about 1350 to 1500, the period when Czech was becoming a distinct language, effectively all Czech works were religious and Husite. Hus's orthography eventually came to be widely accepted -- but, with the Habsburgs trying to suppress Czech aspirations, it took a long time for it to receive universal acceptance. A side effect of this is that many Czech writers, such as Comenius, had to work outside the Habsburg empire (Comenius, properly Jan Amos Komensky, worked in Poland, Sweden, and Holland; printers there naturally had some troubles with his works.)
The situation for Slovak is even worse. Almost indistinguishable from Czech (the two are fairly mutually intelligible, and might be considered one were it not for political reasons -- the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia were under Austrian control in Habsburg times, while the Slovaks were ruled by the Magyars), Slovak is a language of small farmers and villagers. It has many dialects, there were no schools, and the Magyar overlords used Latin or, later, Hungarian. The idea of a separate "Slovak" language does not seem to have existed before the time of Bajza (1754-1836), and there was little literary impulse until the nineteenth century, when Ludovít Stúr produced a newspaper using a standardized Slovak language. Even that was opposed by many Slovaks, some of whom preferred Czech as a literary language (Czech influence had long affected the few works published in Bratislava). And the outside pressure continued: the influence of first the Magyars and then the Czechs suppressed the development of a literary language. With no Hus to look back to, and no early works to preserve, Slovak has little need for textual criticism.
The other languages of the Former Soviet Union have suffered similarly. Belorussian (Byelorussian, White Russian, Byelo-Ruthenian) written in the Cyrillic alphabet, has literary remains dating back to the eleventh century, but the people has never been independent until now, and both Russian and Habsburg dynasties tended to hold down both people and language. Ukrainian has a curious history, as the Ukrainian/Russian separation was initially more cultural than linguistic. The Ukrainians had a tendency toward the Uniate church, and affiliations with the Poles, while the Russians are Orthodox. There are hints of a Ukrainian dialect as early as the thirteenth century, but the current language (marked, e.g., by Polish loan words) did not come into being until the late eighteenth century.
Polish as a language existed by the twelfth century, but literary works do not appear until the fifteenth century (we have catalogs of older works, but apart from a few surviving hymns and fragments, our earlier survivals are all in Latin; so too the writings of Copernicus, the first great Polish scholar), with a flowering in the sixteenth. There were few widely popular Polish works before the invention of printing. And after printing came along, Poland was the victim of cultural imperialism (the almost-universal fate of Eastern European peoples), with the country eventually being divided by Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg Monarchy, and was not reunited until after the First World War. This means that, although there was a standard literary Polish (derived from the dialect of Poznan), the local dialects were little influenced by this form. This slowed and fragmented the development of Polish literature, which did not really revive until the nineteenth century. In any case, there is little here for textual criticism to do.
Sorbian (Wendish, Lusatian) is a Slavic language spoken in primarily in Germany in the region of the Polish and Czech borders. There are only a few tens of thousands of speakers, but even so, the language has several dialects. The earliest texts date from the fifteenth century, but the remains are limited for obvious reasons. The New Testament was the first printed work, being published in 1548.
Bulgarian is unusual among Slavic languages in that it came to be written early (though the oldest Bulgarian inscriptions predate written Bulgarian, and are in ungrammatical Greek). Closely related to Old Church Slavonic (there are Slavonic biblical manuscripts which can be called proto-Bulgarian), the earliest Bulgarian literature dates from the tenth century, meaning that textual criticism has a genuine place in dealing with Bulgarian writings. (The earliest writings, for instance, will have been in the Glagolitic alphabet, later to be changed to Cyrillic.) The earliest works were mostly religious and mostly derivative; starting in the twelfth century, however, there was a flowering which lasted until the Ottoman conquest. Since the Ottomans suppressed education and technology, printing did not arrive until late; many works were destroyed and many that would otherwise have been printed survived in only a handful of manuscripts.
Macedonian is a curious language, fragmented into very diverse dialects, many of which are as close to Bulgarian as to each other. (Indeed, Bulgaria has claimed the Macedonian language as dialects of its own.) Some features of Macedonian appear in writings as early as the tenth century, but as a literary language, it did not emerge until late in the eighteenth century, and only quite recently has it truly come into its own.
The ultimate example of interplay between politics and linguistics may be in the case of Serbian/Croatian/Serbo-Croatian. The languages of Serbia and Croatia are mutually comprehensible in speech, but both parties insist that the languages are different; the Serbs are Orthodox Christians and write their language in the Cyrillic alphabet, while the Croats are Catholic and write using the Roman alphabet. There are remains of the language from the twelfth century, but politics can play a role in their interpretation. Making the matter even more complex is the fact that the Serbs long clung to Church Slavonic as their literary language. What few works there are are mostly liturgical, and needing examination by someone familiar with both Slavonic and Serbian. True Serbian literature did not come into being until the nineteenth century. Croatian saw a brief flowering in the sixteenth century, but the Croats, as Catholics, tended to use mostly Latin for their few writings until quite recently. The outcome of this was the very odd Knjizevni Dogovar agreement of 1850, which caused Croats and Serbs to formally adopt the same literary language!
Related to Serbo-Croatian, but more obviously distinct, is Slovene (Slovenian). Although there are signs of written Slovene from the eleventh century, a standard literary form did not develop until the nineteenth.
Related to the Slavic languages are the Baltic tongues of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian. Old Prussian is extinct; there are some written remains, but here the need is more for linguistic than textual reconstruction. Latvian (Lettish) was first written in the sixteenth century, in a Gothic alphabet, though the Latin alphabet has been in use since shortly after World War I. Lithuanian also gives us literary remains from the sixteenth century, though it uses a 32-letter alphabet based on the Latin.
Germanic literature (including English, Scandinavian, and German writings) had a more complex history than Greek or Latin or Romance literature, as there was never a united German nation in the manuscript era. Then, too, languages like English and Frisian and Dutch did not formally divide from Old German until well after the New Testament was written (indeed, the Germanic group continues to spawn new languages; Afrikaans sprang off from Dutch starting in the eighteenth century). In addition, many of these people acquired writing only after long periods of independent development, meaning that individual nations had completely independent literary histories.
English literature had a curious, rather roller-coaster-like history. The Romano-Celtic literature which preceded the Anglo-Saxon invasions (if there ever was one) was completely extinguished by the Germanic invaders. The invaders themselves seem to have had a rudimentary knowledge of writing (there are a few inscriptions, such as the Ruthwell Cross, in runic letters, and as the runes are of an ancient form, with no dependence on Latin letters, they presumably predate the invasions). There is, however, no evidence of a literature written in these characters. Indeed, there is no evidence that they had any form of written literature at all; all the earliest Anglo-Saxon poems, from Caedmon's Hymn to Beowulf, seem to have been originally oral. To make matters even more complicated, the invaders were not actually all one people, and in any case they did not at once form a unified England. (Traditionally there were seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms -- Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, and Kent -- but Northumbria, for instance, was formed by the union of Bernicia and Deira, and most of the other seven kingdoms were also assembled from smaller units.) The result was significant dialectial differences between the nations.
The Viking invasions of the ninth century did much to change this picture. First, they destroyed all of the ancient kingdoms except Wessex (without establishing anything of significance in their place), and second, they placed so much pressure on Wessex that it could not afford a child-king. As a result, when King Ethelred I died around 871, he was succeeded not by his son but by his younger brother Alfred.
This was significant on two counts. First, it made a united England possible; the old English nations were no more, and the new Viking states did not have the strength to resist Wessex. (Nor did they really object to English overlordship; at this stage, English and Norse were still fairly closely linked culturally and linguistically.) Alfred did not himself unite England, but his son and grandsons were able to create a unitary Saxon state which would last until the Norman Conquest.
More significant for our purposes, however, is the revival of learning encouraged by Alfred. We cannot really tell, from the surviving records, how much was actually the work of Alfred himself -- but there is no doubt that the survival of Anglo-Saxon literature is due to Alfred's efforts. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts almost without exception date from this era (Alfred took the throne in about 871; he held it until about 899). Even in Alfred's time, little Anglo-Saxon literature was written (other than several translations encouraged by Alfred, plus his own creation, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one of the most textually confusing documents ever written). But the old epics and poems were copied; the manuscript of Beowulf was written in the tenth century, and most other surviving texts were written in the same period (probably from about 880 to 1010, when the Danish invasions resumed).
Despite all of Alfred's work, almost all that survives of Old English poetry (the core of their literature) is found in four volumes, all from the post-Alfred period:
Also of note is:
Time has not been kind to the handful of other manuscripts containing small amounts of Old English material. The Cotton fire of 1731, already mentioned repeatedly (as a side note, we might mention that Richard Bentley was one of those who worked to save books from the fire), destroyed Otho A.xii and badly damaged Vitellius A.xv. What we have of Waldere came from the binding of a book in Copenhagen. The Finnsburh Fragment, Lambeth 487, is one of the several lost Lambeth manuscripts. Even much of what survives is on Christian topics; these are of relatively little value. In any case, with slight exceptions such as Caedmon's Hymn (existing in many manuscripts, including the Moore MS at Cambridge, Kk. 5.16, dating all the way to 737, and the Saint Petersburg manuscript Public Library Lat. Q. v. I. 18, believed to predate 746; also in Bede), The Battle of Brunanburh (multiple copies, with significant differences, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and The Dream of the Rood (three copies, with differences clearly recensional), almost all the works survive in single copies, leaving the textual critic with little to do except work at conjectural emendation.
In addition to Old English works, the pre-Conquest period produced a number of Latin documents, most notably Bede's history (as well as the Life of Alfred, but this was of interest primarily to the English). But since these could be circulated beyond England, they are properly the province of a history of Latin or Catholic literature.
Following the Normal Conquest, English literature as such effectively disappears for three centuries. With the exception of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which slowly faded out in this period), the surviving writings are all in Norman French or Latin. By the time English writings re-emerged in the fourteenth century (with Langland and Chaucer and Gower and the Gawain-poet), Old English had given way to Middle English -- and the dialects had separated to the point of being mutually incomprehensible. Gower (who also wrote in Latin and French) and Chaucer used the London dialect, close enough to m