Pursuing History (Ralph Hanna)

Ralph Hanna's Pursuing History is a complex work, both in thought and form. The major ideas themselves, though not difficult conceptually, are problematic in application (which Hanna acknowledges). Moreover, their presentation within the book is not systematic: instead of a sustained and developed argument, what Hanna presents is a series of thematically related book chapters and articles. Some of the disjointedness of the presentation is mitigated by Hanna's introduction and initial chapters, which orient the reader conceptually; however, the later chapters, which apply the notions put worth earlier, were generally written without reference to the preceding chapters -- the reader is left the connect the dots on his own. Nonetheless, Hanna is a lucid writer and, in spite of the difficulties involved, the book's lessons are well worth internalizing.

Hanna's overall project is to anchor our understanding of Middle English literature more firmly in the actual material artifacts -- the manuscripts -- and in the actual historical situations of those artifacts and their production. His concerns are largely not "theoretical" but practical; even his more abstractly phrased arguments about the dominance of edited versions over the actual extant ms. are based in desire for the accurate representation of the concrete, not a (strictly) ideological point. (I like him!)

Some of Hanna's observations about medieval book manufacture:

* The content of medieval books was open-ended and flexible. Individual books were produced by special order, and contained whatever suited the customers' tastes, though the availability of exemplar texts was often a limitation.

* Medieval books were often produced asynchronously, with new quires and leaves added as formerly unavailable exemplars are acquired.

* Medieval books were often written piecemeal, in the form of semi-independent booklets: whole works occupying full quires. These booklets could be inserted into a book anywhere the arranger desired. Booklets permitted booksellers to stock popular items, while giving the customer freedom to use the booklet as he chose. Booklets also allowed a work to be broken into discreet parts, to facilitate copying of one large work by different scribes simultaneously.

Some conclusions Hanna draws based on these observations (and similar materialist considerations):

* Stemmatics are not a reliable method for determining the primacy of one ms. version vs. another. A single work in ms. may in fact be composed of multiple quires copied by separate scribes from different exemplars of the same work; no single ms. is necessarily the single immediate ancestor of any other ms.

* Modern print editions do not adequately represent the complicated material evidence underlying the presented text, nor the multiple levels of editorial intervention that mediate that material evidence.

* Editorial judgment will always be necessary, since they will never be a real "best text" (contra the Hengwrt fetishists among the Chaucerians, i.e. Manly & Rickert). The best options are (1) the attempt to recover the ancestral copy of the existing ms. traditions (using judgment to choose between attested readings), (2) the attempt to recover the author's own holograph (using judgment to sometimes recreate readings not even attested), and (3) "responsible best-textism," which chooses an existing ms. as the most reliable version in aggregate (trusting the "best text" in general, but still using judgments for particular readings).

* Why try to present just one version of a text? Why not publish the major ms. versions and let the differences stand? After all, the existing ms. are the ones that were actually read. Also, mimic as closely as possible the page layout of the source ms. And why not bind it along with the random miscellany of works it was found with? Then we can read the miscellany!