“Closed Circles”: Edward L. Keenan’s Early Textual Work and the Semiotics of Response

Abstract

Historians are at times divided in their views by “closed circles” of arguments based on differently prioritized premises. An instance of this occurs in the responses to the early textual work of Edward L. Keenan and his challenges to the traditional dating, attribution, and textual relations of four Muscovite texts. Preference is frequently given in the responses to arguments in a different register—to semiotic description and content interpretation over internal text-structural analysis—and even within the same register, to an appeal to textological over text-critical principles.