Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T06:37:33.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

1 - Collecting the Witnesses

Get access

Summary

The note with which my introduction has concluded offers a salient moral. It is certainly possible to discuss textual criticism and the production of edited texts abstractly, as a theoretical endeavour. But it is always more efficacious and more pointed to work with a concrete example. Thus, this book is predicated upon documenting the procedures involved in producing an edited text of an important medieval English work not heretofore printed. For this purpose, I have chosen a brief and relatively simple Latin text.

In the early 1330s, a major English literary figure, the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle, produced a commentary on the biblical Song of Songs. Like many commentators on this work, Bernard of Clairvaux among them, Rolle found the text intensely engaging, and, as a result, he never commented upon the entire biblical book (and did not intend to do so). Although the commentary is reasonably extensive (around eighty typewritten pages), Rolle did not get past the third verse of the first chapter of the Canticle.

Rolle's total output was prodigious, in both English and Latin. He, not Chaucer, was the first person writing in English to be recognised as an auctor (author, and thus authority). Yet, since the coming of print, his availability to readers has been limited. Only excerpts from the English texts appeared in early printings, and these works only achieved wide dispersal through EETS in the 1860s. Only recently have they been available in any critically edited form, while the full transmission of only one of the Latin works has ever been critically examined. In this situation, the state of the commentary on the Song is perhaps not surprising. If one wants to read this text in something like its original form, one's most available recourse is a manuscript version. There is an obscure unpublished dissertation, with transcription of a single manuscript copy, and the more available alternative, a sequence of printed editions, all dependent upon one produced in 1535(!), presents an excerpt only.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×