The ideo-political background of ‘New Philology’

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ideo-political background of the so-called ‘New Philology’ by looking closely at some works by its ‘founding fathers’, Bernard Cerquiglini and Stephen G. Nichols. It addresses the tendency among adherents of ‘New Philology’ to downplay authorial intention in medieval works and to reject basic principles of textual criticism.

KEYWORDS:

• Philology
• New Philology
• medieval authorship
• textual criticism
• post-modernism

In his article in this Special Issue of Studia Neophilologica (2023, vol. 95[2]), my colleague, Prof. Mikael Males (University of Oslo) has pointed out some severe problems in the writings of adherents of the so-called ‘New’ or ‘Material Philology’ within his field of expertise, Old Norse philology (Males 2023). As a scholar of much the same field as Males, I have noticed similar pitfalls, and I agree that the field needs a reinforcement of the principles of sound methodology in general and of textual criticism in particular. Having read Males’ article, however, I was vexed by a nagging question: How did it come to this? How is it that apparently sensible scholars are willing to reject the basic principles of textual criticism, principles that form the basis of most editions of the texts we are studying and that have been progressively developed and adjusted over the course of nearly two centuries? For all its merits, I cannot see that Males’ study addresses this intriguing question. I will therefore seek to produce a tentative answer.

The modest method of this inquiry is to have a closer look at some of the writings of the ‘founding fathers’ of ‘New Philology’, Bernard Cerquiglini (1999 [1989]) and Stephen G. Nichols (1990, 1997). These publications have exerted a profound influence on subsequent ‘new-philological’ scholarship, and in many regards, the intellectual and ideological background of the discourse is clearer in these seminal publications than in many later contributions emanating from them. Cerquiglini and Nichols are open about their views and motifs, and they leave no doubt as to their place within the larger landscape of scholarly ideas and political affiliations. My hypothesis is that these scholars have mixed up traditional philological practices and methodologies with political ideologies from which they are eager to distance themselves. Furthermore, they are opposed to widespread ideas about the primacy of authorial intention for the interpretation of texts. In consequence, they aim to blur the distinction between the authors of medieval texts and the scribes of the manuscripts in which these have been transmitted. Within this framework, the contributions of medieval scribes are grossly exaggerated, resulting in an analytical framework approaching ‘collective authorship’, which then takes the place and – eventually – the intentionality of the traditional author. I will explain this in some detail below and substantiate my claims by quoting some of the writings of Cerquiglini and Nichols.

First, however, I will turn to one of the scholars discussed in more detail in Males’ article (Males 2023: 190–192), namely Old Norse philologist Matthew James Driscoll at the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen. His 2010-article includes a helpful list of bullet points containing ‘key principles of “New” Philology’ (Driscoll 2010: 90–91). These points are indebted to the publications of Cerquiglini and Nichols, and in their economical format they may serve as a ‘reader’s guide’ to these. The first bullet point reads:

• Literary works do not exist independently of their material embodiments, and the physical form of the text is an integral part of its meaning; one needs therefore to look at ‘the whole book’, and the relationships between the text and such features as form and layout, illumination, rubrics and other paratextual features, and, not least, the surrounding texts. (Driscoll 2010: 90; my italics)

In other words: Since the physical form of the text is an ‘integral part of its meaning’, it is not advisable to detach the text from its manuscript surroundings and to study it within another context, namely that of its original composition and its author’s intentions.

In the other bullet points, Driscoll elaborates on the concept of ‘author’, illustrating how this is programmatically downplayed within ‘New Philology’:

• These physical objects come into being through a series of processes in which a (potentially large) number of people are involved; and they come into being at particular times, in particular places and for particular purposes, all of which are socially, economically and intellectually determined; these factors influence the form the text takes and are thus also part of its meaning.

• These physical objects continue to exist through time, and are disseminated and consumed in ways which are also socially, economically and intellectually determined, and of which they bear traces. (Driscoll 2010: 91; my italics)

With this line of reasoning, the text is not the work of a single mind, but a collective product. No single person ‘owns’ the text – which is subject to constant renegotiation and change – and no single interpretation is in principle superior to others. The most relevant context is that of reception, not that of authorial intention. The attraction of such a position is obvious in the study of medieval literature, where information about authors is often scant or even non-existent. Nonetheless, it leaves out the most crucial part of the textual genesis, since one must assume that the author is the one individual who has left the clearest stamp on the text, even though it has been transmitted by several others. Authors also write ‘at particular times, in particular places and for particular purposes’, and they have the exclusive advantage of being the ones forming the texts and their content in the first place. The distinction between author and scribe is thus analytically important (cf. Males 2023: 183), and it therefore seems likely that the aim of blurring it is due to other interests than analytical ones.

Of the two ‘founding fathers’ of ‘New Philology’, Cerquiglini is the most candid. In Éloge de la variante (1989, English transl. In praise of the variant, 1999), he presents a caricatured image of traditional philology, which he simplistically and without reservation equates with Lachmannian textual criticism. Having produced what Cerquiglini admits are ‘renowned editions’ of the Greek New Testament and of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and having observed the work of scribes of late antiquity and the Middle Ages,

Lachmann assumed that these copyists were guilty only of mistakes due to incomprehension, inadvertence, and fatigue and that these errors represented degradation. Every copy represented decline. This philology, in common with the first Indo-European studies, made use of comparatist methodology, the desire for reconstruction, but also the feeling of decadence. (Cerquiglini 1999 [1999 [1989], 48–49; my italics)

What is left out of Cerquiglini’s description of textual criticism is its primary goal: to reconstruct the archetype as far as possible, and thereby to approach the assumed original of the author. From this perspective, the classification of scribal changes as vectors of ‘degradation’, ‘decline’ or even ‘decadence’ makes perfect sense, even though the Lachmannian philologist would prefer to use more neutral terms such as ‘errors’ or ‘innovations’. These are not general value statement, like ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather, their meaning is conditioned by the task; a reading may simply be an ‘error’ in the sense that it differs from the reconstructed archetype. For reconstructive purposes, individual scribes are not the primary focus of attention, but that does not mean that traditional philologists dismiss scribes altogether. On the contrary, a close analysis of the manuscripts and the scribal activity they document are the grounds upon which textual critics base their assumptions about the genesis of a given text. Cerquiglini is thus wrong to claim that the philologist reduces the scribe to ‘a machine’ that ‘had to function poorly in order for the multiplicity and the excess of variants to fall into place’ (Cerquiglini 1999 [1999 [1989]: 49). He also misconstrues the character of the discipline by attributing general value statements to it. This is by and large untrue, although examples of poor scholarship can of course be found within all disciplines. His description may partly be indebted to an unwarranted conclusion. Throughout his book, Cerquiglini portrays variants as inherently good, without specifying a clear analytical parameter according to which they are good. Since Cerquiglini himself reasons within such a semi-moral framework, he may have assumed that this was true also of textual critics, and since Cerquiglini disagrees with these, he may have concluded that they thought ill of his own objects of admiration. This does not follow, however, since textual criticism is a clear method with clear aims. Textual criticism does not, therefore, share Cerquiglini’s categorisation of textual entities into inherently good and bad ones. In what follows, Cerquiglini gives a revealing statement about his view of philology:

Philology is a bourgeois, paternalist, and hygienist system of thought about the family; it cherishes filiation, tracks down adulterers, and is afraid of contamination. It is thought based on what is wrong (the variant being a form of deviant behavior), and it is the basis for a positive methodology. (Cerquiglini 1999 [1999 [1989]: 49)

Even as metaphors go, this is confusing. Attributing strong emotions or ideologies to a method is nonsensical, and it would thus seem that we are again dealing with a projection of Cerquiglini’s own state of mind. The claims are so stark, however, that one must suspect that more is at play, and that Cerquiglini employs the rhetorical strategy of evoking disgust in the reader by attributing undesirable qualities to his perceived opponent. In 1989, and still today, attributing widely condemned ideologies and practices to one’s opponent is one of the most powerful varieties of such rhetoric. What makes the search of an authorial original ‘bourgeois’ or ‘paternalist’ remains unclear, but the claim that philology is a ‘hygienist system’ is apparently based on its aim to ‘cleanse’ texts of later errors. That this is a totally different activity from ‘hygienist’ anthropology – further hinted at by the mention of ‘deviant behavior’ – goes without saying, but Cerquiglini activates such associations by his choice of words, and not least by the claim that philology focuses on the family.

Stephen G. Nichols is more cautious in his wording, but he too uses the strategy of placing traditional philology in bad company. The good company is apparently that of post-modern scholars, since Nichols himself labels the ‘New Philology’ ‘a postmodern return to the origins of medieval studies’ (Nichols 1990: 7). By contrast, already in the first paragraph of the introduction to the now famous special issue of Speculum introducing ‘New Philology’, Nichols claims that traditional philology was shaped under the influence of ‘political nationalism and scientific positivism’:

… the consensus seems to be that medieval philology has been marginalized by contemporary cognitive methodologies, on the one side, while within the discipline itself, a very limited and by now grossly anachronistic conception of it remains far too current. This version, formulated under the impulse of political nationalism and scientific positivism during the second half of the nineteenth century, continues to circumscribe the ‘discipline’ of medieval studies. (Nichols 1990: 1)

That philologists were influenced by the nationalist currents so widespread in the nineteenth century is no wonder, but Nichols ignores the profound developments that have taken place within the discipline throughout the intervening period, leading to ever more refined methods for the reconstruction of texts. Typical of post-modern scholars like Nichols is that everything that can be connected to national cultures or literatures is portrayed as something negative, as if an interest for one own’s culture is something suspect or morally inferior. More importantly, the remark about ‘scientific positivism’ is beside the point, since the method of textual criticism has always been hypothetico-deductive: It tests assumptions about relationships and developments within the textual tradition against the data found in extant manuscripts. In sum, Nichols simply refers to ideologies and perceptions current at the time when modern philology emerged, but this is an irrelevant guilt by association that could equally well be used to denigrate ‘New Philology’ itself, since a strong focus on scribes and manuscripts emerged already in the decades around 1900 (see Males 2023: 185–186).

The fact that Cerquiglini’s and Nichols’ attribution of undesirable qualities to traditional philology does not withstand scrutiny correlates with a feature shared by both; namely, that they do not support their claims with empirical evidence. Since textual criticism has never been positivist, focused on the family, etc., there is reason to question the authors’ capacity to produce such evidence. I interpret Males’ rich documentation of his claims as an attempt to shift the discourse in favour of observable data and intersubjective scrutiny. This is also the aim of the present article, and for this reason I base the analysis on quotations from Cerquiglini’s and Nichols’ publications, rather than presenting sweeping statements without documentation. As seen from Males’ article, later ‘new philologists’ have continued the tradition from the ‘founding fathers’, making no attempt at evaluating the validity of their own claims or providing the reader with the means to do so. This disables the most important safety mechanisms of scholarship, such as testing and intersubjective scrutiny. I hope that Males’ and my own article may both serve to clarify the importance of remaining committed to such mechanisms, within philology as well as scholarship at large.

Nichols refers to Erich Auerbach (1961), who stressed the importance of the printing press for the development of philology. According to Nichols, philology ‘joined forces with the mechanical press in a movement away from the multiplicity and variance of a manuscript culture’, at the same time ‘rejecting […] the representation of the past which went along with medieval manuscript culture: adaptation or translatio, the continual rewriting of past works in a variety of versions’ (Nichols 1990: 2–3). What was in fact a technological advance, the ability to print a text in numerous (near-)identical copies, is here seen as a cultural regression. The reason behind Nichols’ preference for medieval ‘variance’ is likely the post-modernist appreciation for the unstable and for diversity in general (cf. the quotation on the ‘postmodern return’ above). Nichols describes the medieval copyist’s struggle to reproduce texts on parchment as ‘an adventure in supplementation rather than faithful imitation’ (Nichols 1990: 3). For a post-modernist such as Nichols, largely reliable scribes are apparently best passed over in silence.

There is an inherent tension in the way in which Nichols presents medieval manuscript culture. On one hand, he praises diversity and variance, and on the other, he describes the transmission of texts as a collective effort: ‘The medieval folio was not raw material for text editors and art historians working separately. It contained the work of different artists or artisans […] who projected collective social attitudes as well as interartistic rivalries onto the parchment’ (Nichols 1990: 7). By promoting the collective, the post-modern scholar tries to diminish the effort of the individual scribe – and especially the faithful one – and more importantly also the original creation of the author. In all this, we see a reaction against the romantic cultivation of the genius, which continued long into the modernist era. In the end, however, this reaction ends up diminishing individual contributions, and, in any event, medieval authors can hardly be held responsible for later romantic notions.

In his general exaggeration of the contribution of the medieval scribes, Nichols ends up contradicting himself. He states that even though ‘the scribal reworkings may be the result of changing aesthetic tastes in the period between the original text production and the copying’, ‘the scribe’s “improvements” imply a sense of superior judgment or understanding vis-à-vis the original poet’ (Nichols 1990: 8). Nichols here presupposes a feeling of superiority among scribes that is difficult to reconcile with the widespread medieval reverence for the authorities of the past. By contrast, a more traditional view would attribute most ‘reworkings’ to misunderstanding or ignorance on the part of the scribe, and the data presented in Males’ article suggest that the latter explanation is often more plausible. Be that as it may, in the next paragraph, Nichols claims that ‘what we actually perceive [from the manuscript page] may differ markedly from what poet, artist, or artisan intended to express or from what the medieval audience expected to find. In other words, the manuscript space contains gaps through which the unconscious may be glimpsed’ (Nichols 1990: 8). Suddenly, the scribes’ ‘sense of superior judgment or understanding’ is reduced to an ‘unconscious’ process. The only thing I can think of as ‘unconscious’ in the process of producing medieval manuscripts, however, is the often careless way in which scribes copied their exemplars, and even this is debatable. Thus, for instance, some of the errors discussed in Males’ article suggest active attempts at interpretation (see, e.g., his discussions of tregari and blám/bláms; Males 2023: 194, 196–197).

In a later article, ‘Why material philology?’ (Nichols 1997), in which he has implemented a change from ‘New’ to ‘Material Philology’, Nichols is clear about what distinguishes his philology from that of traditional philologists:

Our needs have changed over the last quarter-century to where it may well be useful to study medieval literature not as a continuity with modernist literary perspectives. We also need to break with the medievalizing viewpoint and disciplinary shibboleths of the founders of our discipline and their continuators. Those views manifested themselves by a preoccupation with origins, analogues, nationalist philology, the celebration of poetic genius incarnated in a given poet or text (…), genre and thematic criticism. Postulating a notion of literary universals, continuity of forms, rhythms, or lexical codes over time, these methods recommended themselves for tracking the kind of degenerative change that allowed scholars to confirm the ever-pressing need to search for origins. (Nichols 1997: 12–13)

The characterisation of traditional philology as a search for ‘origins’, ‘poetic genius’ and ‘continuity’ is probably meant to evoke scepticism, these traits presumably being old-fashioned and retrospective. When viewed without ideological condemnation, however, these hallmarks of philology are simply a consequence of a recognition of the importance of authors and their texts, each written in a certain language and genre and with a certain purpose. For instance, the fact that languages and literary tastes change does not imply that they must be analysed by use of a moral compass according to which some things are ‘good’, and others are ‘bad’. But to dismiss any origins or development of a language, genre or style, or that there is some sort of continuity within a literary tradition, is to ignore the very nature of language, literature or any other part of human culture. Most importantly: By being hostile towards the ‘poetic genius’, Nichols and other ‘new philologists’ renege on a plausible interpretation of historical developments and individual agency, and they do not recognise, for instance, that mastering a complex poetic tradition was a skill not possessed by all. This is an exorbitant analytical price to pay, and one must therefore wonder about its motivation. Cerquiglini’s and Nichols’ discussions of ideology in contexts where this is analytically irrelevant suggest that the explanation is to be found in ideological interests. These authors do not explicitly state their own ideological ideals, but it is clear enough that they are the opposite of the ones that they attribute to textual criticism. They thus appear to be anti-nationalist, anti-paternalist and anti-individualist (or at least opposed to the thought that some individuals may be particularly important). In reality, then, by claiming that a method should not be conceptualised as such, but as an ideology, they go a long way towards replacing analysis with political values. These foundational texts of ‘New Philology’ are thus good illustrations of the dangers of allowing political ideology, rather than analytical expedience, to serve as a guide to scholarly enterprises.

To these general observations, relevant to medievalist scholarship at large, I would add an observation pertaining to the field of Old Norse philology specifically. Prof. Males treats this field, and it would seem that ‘New Philology’ has enjoyed particular success there, becoming almost hegemonic. Why may this be? I would suggest that this, too, has an ideological explanation in the form of a somewhat delayed revolt against the aggressive nationalistic ideology with which the field of Old Norse became associated in the 1930s. This did not only affect Old Norse studies, of course, and it is no coincidence that both Cerquiglini and Nichols evoke the image of ‘nationalist philology’. Still, the fact that the concept of ‘New Philology’ has been so eagerly embraced by the Old Norse community is most likely because it ‘freed’ its practitioners from any preoccupation with ‘origins’, ‘genius’ and ‘continuity’, where the ghosts of the past would haunt them. The particular success of ‘New Philology’ within Old Norse philology is thus most likely due to a more extreme degree of ideological interference than in most fields. The thirst for freedom from one political ideology has driven Old Norse philology into the arms of another, however, and thus from bondage to bondage. In light of Males’ evaluation of the analytical consequences of this development, I would argue that scholars in their professional role should strive to free themselves of all ideological chains that may serve to cloud their analysis, including those of ‘New Philology’.

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Klaus Johan Myrvoll

Klaus Johan Myrvoll is professor of Nordic linguistics at the University of Stavanger.