1. McNeal, R.A., “How Did Pelasgians Become Hellenes? Herodotus I. 56-58,” Illinois Classical Studies, 10 (1985), 11.Google Scholar

2. The problem is discussed in Henige, David, “‘In the Possession of the Author’: the Problem of Source Monopoly in Oral Historiography,” International Journal of Oral History, 1 (1980), 181–94.Google Scholar

3. An exception to this merely ritual obeisance is Kea, R.A., Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982).Google Scholar

4. Though I might mention that Jones seems to have overlooked the series of some forty letters written from Cape Coast Castle in 1658 and 1659 during its brief association with the East India Company. These letters, now in the India Office Records, are noticed in Henige, , “Some Materials on the Early Gold Coast in the United Kingdom,” African Research and Documentation, no. 11 (1976), 25.Google Scholar

5. The collection is more accessibly described in Heintze, , “Written Sources and African History--a Plea for the Primary Source: the Angola Manuscript Collection of Fernao de Sousa,” History in Africa, 9 (1982), 77–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Thereby increasing Jones' disappointment, as expressed in his “Still Underused: Written German Sources for West Africa Before 1884,” History in Africa, 13 (1986)Google Scholar, that few reviews of GS have commented on the technical merits (or demerits) of his translations. But why should it be otherwise? In the first place, for better or worse, historians--even classical historians--are less interested in the purely literary aspects of translation than philologists are. Moreover, how many Gold Coast historians are in a position to chance critical commentary on these translations? If more were, they would be the less valuable!

7. Tanselle, G. Thomas, “The Editing of Historical Documents,” Studies in Bibliography, 31 (1978), 47.Google Scholar

8. A random, and far from complete, sampling of recent writing on the subject includes: Tanselle, , “Editing,” 1–53Google Scholar; Christaller, Paul O., “The Editing of Fifteenth-Century Texts: Tasks and Problems,” Italian Culture, 4 (1983), 115–22Google Scholar; Gaskell, Philip, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford, 1978), esp. 1–10Google Scholar; Blackwell, Kenneth, “‘Perhaps you will think me fussy’: Three Myths in Editing Russell's Collected Papers“ in Editing Polymaths: Erasmus to Russell, ed. Jackson, H.J. (Toronto, 1983), 111–38Google Scholar; Tanselle, , “Historicism and Critical Editing,” Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 1–46, and the many sources cited there.Google Scholar

9. Agustín, Antonio [Albanell, ], Dialoghi intorno medaglie inscrittioni et altre antichita; (Rome, 1587), 2.Google Scholar

10. Or if the original text was written in a non-Roman script requiring unacceptably expensive typography, which is one reason why several recently-edited Armenian historical texts, edited and translated by Robert W. Thomson, have appeared only in English translation.

11. This issue has recently been discussed at some length for Hiberno-Latin texts by Dumville, David, “On Editing and Translating Medieval Irish Chronicles: The Annals of Ulster,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, no. 10 (Winter 1985), 67–86Google Scholar, in which he makes some telling points about thevagaries of translating even some very common (and important) terms. See also Halporn, James W., “The Editing of Patristic Texts: the Case of Cassiodorus.” Revue des études augustiniennes, 30 (1984), 107–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Johnson, Samuel, Shakespeare, [1765] in Johnson, Samuel, Works of Samuel Johnson (15 vols.: New Haven, 1958–1985), 7: 109.Google Scholar

13. Or it could be that Jones and Heintze have adopted a non-interventionist and non-judgmental stance in this regard by allowing obvious errors to speak for themselves and granting the benefit of a doubt to seeming, but undemon strable, lapses. The policy for employing “[sic]s” can sometimes provide glimpses of a particular editorial attitude; certainly it is one way in which literary and historical editing do and must differ. The historical editor, with a certain known reality as his/her guide, is able to employ “[sic]s” both more liberally and more categorically, whereas the literary editor is ordinarily required to grant to his/her author, at least in the case of fiction, pretty much carte blanche. For instance, he/she can scarcely consider “Absolom” and “Aqua Vita Motel” (to cite two examples I have recently come across) as outright errors. Or, rather, it might be better to say that both historical and literary editors employ “[sic]” but with different connotations. For the latter, the usage can never mean “Thus (tsk, tsk),” but only “thus,” as a means to indicate to the reader that it is the author's usage and not some kind of lapsus calami on the part of the editor. The former, conversely, uses “thus” not only in selfdefense, but additionally to inform the reader that, yes, the author not only used a particular term or spelling, but definitely did so incorrectly, whether or not inadvertently. It is harder, then, to know when a historical editor is encumbering his/her “[sci]s” with value judgments; perhaps it does not matter much.

14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, no. 556.

15. This faith is momentarily sustained by the knowledge that an edited translation of Pieter de Marees' Beschryvinghe ende historische verhael van het Gout Koninckrijck van Gunea (Amsterdam, 1602)Google Scholar, prepared by Jones and Albert Van Dantzig, is imminent. Moreover, a similar edition of Jean Barbot's 1688 synthesis of his 1678/79 and 1681/82 voyages (a direct account of the first survives and has been edited and published) is being prepared by a team of scholars of the Gold and Slave coasts. This should replace as a source the long-available 1732 publication which, though much revised and posthumously published, has long laid claim to being a primary source and has, for almost as long, been treated as just that. For a recent discussion of differences between the two versions see Law, Robin, “Jean Barbot as a Source for the Slave Coast of West Africa,” HA, 9 (1982), 155–73.Google Scholar

16. Dare I use the term? I was recently asked--independently, it appears--by three referees either to abandon the term in a manuscript or to gloss it, since none of them was aware of its exact meaning! True, the journal in question (and its readers?) views history through a social-science prism, but… In the event, I glossed the term in hopes that it might somehow be a tiny crumb of bread on the waters.

17. For an irreverent, but by no means irrelevant, parody of this state of affairs see Flannery, Kent, “The Golden Marshalltown: a Parable for the Archaeology of the 1980s,” American Anthropologist, 84 (1982), 265–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Macpherson, James, Fingal (London, 1762)Google Scholar, i. Macpherson never managed to publish his originals simply because, as time proved, they were his own fabrications of allegedly ancient Celtic poetry. For a brief discussion see Henige, , “‘In the Possession of the Author’,” 181–82.Google Scholar

19. Two historians who have done so, and who come to mind, are Thomas Spear and Donald Wright. I apologize to those others who do not come to mind at the moment--that failure is mine, not theirs.

20. For instance, in his mimeographed Selected Texts: Busoga Traditional History (Baltimore, [1969?])Google Scholar, which is deposited, among other places, in the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago.

21. Though considerably less monumental than The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring People, ed. Webb, Colin deB. and Wright, J.B. (3 vols, to date: Pietermaritzburg, 1976---).Google Scholar This, however, has the disadvantages (and advantages) of being more like textual editing--vicarious and necessarily lacking the insights and viewpoints that can result when the collector also serves as editor.

22. TRP has been published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy in the Fontes Historiae Africanae, Series Varia, III, but a copy has not yet reached me. I am working from a copy of the manuscript kindly provided some time ago by David Cohen. I assume that there have been few or no changes from manuscript to published copy, but I cannot cite page numbers for my references and quotations.

23. There are apparently several maps as well, although these did not accompany the manuscript I have.

24. Cohen has deposited at least 140 hours of tapes in the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University. See Stone, Ruth M. and Gillis, Frank J., African Music and Oral Data: a Catalog of Field Recordings, 1902-1975 (Bloomington, 1976), 30.Google Scholar In both the number and in the fact that he has not restricted their use, Cohen has excelled most other fieldworkers.

25. Caxton's, William prologue to his second edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (London, 1483).Google Scholar Caxton had printed the work only five years before but was apprised that he had used a defective manuscript, with resulting errors of omission and commission.

26. Let me reiterate that the pages of HA are open to edited texts that run no longer than fifty to sixty double-spaced typed pages. Texts that are longer than this but shorter than book-length (say, from sixty to about 150 pages) would be considered by the Africa series published by Ohio University, the Primary Sources series published by the African Studies Association's Crossroads Press, the about-to-begin publications program of the African Studies Program of the University of Wisconsin, and others.