Aspects of philology: Introductory remarks

The exhibition ‘Uns ist in alten Mären … Das Nibelungenlied und seine Welt’ (‘To us in olden story … the Nibelungenlied and its world’), held at the Baden State Library, Karlsruhe in the years 2003–2004, offered its visitors a unique experience indeed. For the first time in history, the three most important manuscripts – A, B, and C – of the famous Middle High German epos could be seen together in the same display case.

About ten years later, this kind of experience was not unique anymore. Anyone with a computer and access to the internet can now download copies of the three manuscripts and read them parallel on their computer screen. Material is now available in an abundance that was not imaginable at the turn of the 21^st century. No extended library trips seem to be necessary anymore; thousands of manuscripts are just a click away.

The ready availability of material has stimulated a new, strong interest in pre-modern texts generally and, in particular, a revival of the philological questions and methods that have as their aim to make these texts comprehensible and available to our time.

This renaissance of philology – the new ‘hotness’ of the term and of the discipline it designates – was prepared for a long time and anticipated, not least, through the invigorating and impassioned debate between traditional philology and the ‘New’ or ‘Material Philology’. In the present introductory remarks, we start by outlining some of the landmarks in the history of philology and then survey the eight contributions selected for this issue.

Around 1970, the need for an infusion of new life into the research field had become increasingly apparent. From having been the flagship of many universities in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, philology as a discipline had seen itself pushed aside, beginning in the 1930s and culminating in the 1950s, by the New Criticism. Within this paradigm, philology was seen, at best, as a preparatory stage to the ‘proper’ goal: interpretation.

Other factors had also complicated things, including the advent of Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s Oral-Formulaic Theory. But the main circumstance contributing to the decline of philology at this time can most likely be subsumed under the catch phrase the ‘Linguistic Turn’. This intellectual development had begun as a current in philosophy, where it provoked a strong focus on language; however, the current soon flooded and influenced all the humanities. According to this new way of thinking, everything was language, and everything could be theorised in analogy to language. Philology did not ‘turn’, theoretically, nor was the discipline very outspoken about the theoretical assumptions and underpinnings it actually had. In an increasingly theoretical academia, philology was seen as somewhat dusty, or antiquated.

In 1982, however, the deconstructionist and literary theorist Paul de Man published an essay that would begin to shake things up. De Man’s ‘The return to philology’ has been criticised as being ‘remarkably thin and blurry’; in fact, it is even unclear how exactly de Man defines the central term philology (Ziolkowski 2015: 241). Roughly, de Man seems to advocate a return to philology as the art of slow reading, without turning, first, to our own cultural and theoretical (pre)conceptions – a notion that would resonate well with one of de Man’s favourite philosophers, Nietzsche, incidentally the only philologist mentioned by name in de Man’s essay.¹ But, as Jan Ziolkowski notes, whatever de Man meant by philology, ‘his advocacy of a return to it sufficed in that period to make the term chic and to put it into contention’ (ibid.: 243).

The new interest in philology from outside the field soon led to a call for scholars within the discipline to define their own practice. The 1988 conference ‘What is philology’ (Ziolkowski, ed. 1990) is an indication of a heightened level of self-reflection within philology as a field. Soon, however, new winds began to blow which would lead to a split within the field and further raise the temperature of the discussion.

A sign of the simmering debate was Bernhard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante (1989 [1999]); the culmination, however, is usually seen in the 1990 special issue of Speculum, the U.S. flagship for medieval studies, edited by Stephen G. Nichols and programmatically entitled The New Philology. The ‘new’ in this take on philology can be captured in terms such as mouvance and variance. Whereas traditional philological work concentrates on the beginning of a textual tradition in the attempt to reconstruct an archetype, a text reflecting the author’s intentions as far as possible, the new approaches were interested in the details of transmission. This new interest in the variant was of course stimulated by the snowballing availability of digital manuscript facsimiles. The main focus was now transferred from the author to the scribes and/or printers, and as a consequence also to the material aspects of individual text carriers: ink, paper/parchment, text layout, illustrations, binding, etc.

The differences between the traditional and the new school soon developed into conflict and strong polemics. Adherents of the old school were quick to point out that some of the aspects of ‘New’ Philology, especially when it came to the history of transmission, were really not that new.² Accordingly, Nichols soon renamed the movement ‘Material Philology’ (Nichols 1997). Nevertheless, the debate about the aims and methods of philology continued, in what Michelle R. Warren in hindsight has characterised as ‘a zero-sum game in which the truth-value of one method is predicated on demonstrating the worthlessness of another’ (Warren 2013: 6).

On the whole, however, this debate has been wholesome. It has brought philology – ‘old’ and ‘new’ – to self-awareness of its methodological and epistemological assumptions, and, not least, it has brought theory into philology. The tension between approaches might even be productive. The term philology, Julie Orlemanski contends, ‘convokes different moments of disciplinary history, different conceptions of scholarly method, and different relations to academic institutionality and makes the difference available for reflection and argument’ (Orlemanski 2015: 172).

In fact, a reconciliation between the two perspectives might be impossible. In a suggestive article, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that it is not only the innovations in electronic technology that have been important for the recent changes in the theory of philology, but also ‘a profound shift in our relationship to the past’, which he calls the shift from the ‘historicist chronotope’ to the ‘chronotope of the broad present’ (Gumbrecht 2015: 274). Adherents of historicism as a chronotope have a desire for the ‘“critical edition” (in Karl Lachmann’s sense)’, a desire to (re)construct ‘the texts situated at the beginning of each genealogical line of transmission’ (275). The approach of New Philology, on the other hand, was ‘a consequence of a then innovative construction of temporality’. Unlike

the ever-shrinking and therefore ‘imperceptible short’ present of the historicist chronotope, the new present (that continues to be our present in the early twenty-first century) is one in which all paradigms and phenomena from the past are juxtaposed as being ready to hand. (276)

The interest in the classical text, which can bridge large historical distances, has been replaced among many recent philologists by a fascination ‘to find out about the actual “life” of individual texts in the past in a constant movement of ever new performances and variants’ (276).

Gumbrecht’s discussion is illuminating and explains why it seems hardly possible to reach a synthesis between the two philological perspectives, since they are so firmly rooted in two different views of historical time. However, this should not in principle preclude a dialogue.

It is important to point out that philological work consists of the (re)construction, presentation, and contextualisation of texts. Its result is always a new text – an edition, a commentary, an article, or a monograph. We must, however, accept the fact that the texts produced by philologists have their specific aims and their specific scholarly target audiences. Analyses of text transmission can never replace works on text origin and vice versa. For anyone interested in the history of texts and the culture of writing, this is a most exciting and thought-provoking tension.

This special issue of Studia Neophilologica contains eight selected articles on different aspects of medieval philology. They concern both the origin and the transmission of texts. The differences in languages and cultural milieus reflect the international orientation of the journal. The authors are scholars from the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S.A., and they discuss texts in Old English, Old Frisian, French, Latin, Old Norse, and Portuguese. The topics, however, are not language-specific, but of general importance for anyone interested in the currently highly dynamic field of philology.

In the opening article, ‘Textual criticism and Old Norse philology’, MIKAEL MALES calls for increased methodological reflection when applying a reconstructive approach to the sources. In the decades after the inception of New or Material Philology, with its turn away from reconstruction, Males distinguishes a tendency among scholars to misinterpret or disregard the basic assumptions of textual criticism, both when representing it theoretically and when applying it practically. Specifically, Males discusses how previous scholars have analysed scribal errors, defined, for the purposes of Males’ article, as ‘violation[s] of the morphological, syntactical, phonological or metrical system’ (p. 181 – thereby eliminating from the analysis other non-original readings that do not break the rules of grammar; cf. the concept ‘innovation’). To recognise the epistemological underpinnings of textual criticism – the traditional backbone of philology – is, Males argues, a precondition for retaining the credibility of the field.

KLAUS JOHAN MYRVOLL’S article, ‘The ideo-political background of New Philology’, can be seen as an addition to Males’ text from a different perspective. Myrvoll poses the ‘nagging question’, only touched upon in Males’ article: how did it come to this? Through an analysis of the seminal texts by the founding fathers of New Philology, Myrvoll traces still current polemical misrepresentations of textual criticism back to the intellectual discourse of nascent New Philology and its wish to distance itself from the conceived ideological roots of traditional philology.

The articles by Males and Myrvoll may be seen as the expression of a desire to return to the probabilistic and intersubjective methodological basis of philology, a basis that has been – as both argue – partly hidden and distorted by an antagonistic narrative.

In her article, ‘Transcription errors and typologies: A contribution’, CRISTINA SOBRAL further elaborates and strengthens the methodological foundation of philology by developing a typology of transcription errors based on functional categories. For her purposes, Sobral elaborates a wider definition of error than the one found in Males. Error is, here, seen as a deviation from ‘either a real and concrete matrix (a specific witness), or [from] an ideal and abstract matrix (the text that the author would write if he were always perfectly aware of his enunciative act)’, a deviation that may, in turn, be either accidental or non-accidental (pp. 213–215). By highlighting the error – a central issue within textual criticism, – Sobral brings us closer towards a better understanding of the transcription process and, at the same time, towards a characterisation of individual copyists. A deeper insight into, among other things, the psychological and cultural factors behind individual errors may, in the end, contribute to a general theory of writing.

The main perspective on text transmission shared by Males, Myrvoll, and Sobral – as, we can argue, by textual criticism in general – can be identified as belonging to the historicist chronotope (Gumbrecht). As is apparent from these texts, a focus of interest in the archetype or the original and in authorial intentions does not preclude attention to the variants and scribal deviations that are part of the transcription process. Sobral even attempts a new, striking definition of textual criticism as ‘a discipline that studies the processes of production (genesis) and transmission of texts and that conceives models of representation of these processes (editions), adapting them to different types of public’ (p. 212). In this definition, the process itself is emphasised as an object of study in textual criticism. However, the focus still differs from that found within the chronotype of the broad present, since the interests and research goals of the two perspectives diverge.

Nevertheless, these perspectives are sometimes mutually illuminating – so, for instance, in the article by RACHEL BURNS, ‘God send vs þe dew of heuene in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 172: A new edition of an autograph lyric, with commentary’. The poem in focus is attested in only one text witness; at the same time, this single witness is ‘replete with editorial compositional activity’ (p. 227). Burn’s edition – the first since 1880 – attempts to display the dynamism of the text as a work-in-progress, a view which, in the end, circumvents the traditional notion of a gap between the scribe and the author (and the privileging of the latter) to concentrate, instead, on the signs of textual creativity.

SALLY ANN DELVINO endorses a similar view, increasingly topical during the last few decades, of the ‘manuscript as artefact and vehicle of interpretation’ (p. 241). Previous scholarship has noted that the different punctuation in multiple manuscript witnesses points towards the scribe’s interpretative engagement with the text. In her article, ‘Sense and sensibility: Point to point in The Wanderer’, DelVino argues that the punctuating point in the single extant manuscript of the Old English poem The Wanderer must be understood beyond modern concepts of analytic language; rather, the point is, according to DelVino, a ‘visual rhetoric’, indicating rhetorical patterns and variations at micro- and macro-levels of the narrative, and, thereby, functioning as a vital guide to interpretation.

Traces of additional routes into the text are also the topic of GUILLEMETTE BOLENS‘ article, ‘Kinesic intelligence, medieval illuminated psalters, and the poetics of the psalms’. Here, however, the theoretical point of departure is human ‘embodied cognition’. Bolens argues that his object of study – medieval illustrations and translations of the psalms – cannot be seen as literal renderings of phrases or words; rather, they are interpretations, triggered by the original text, but ultimately rooted in perceptual simulations of physical movements. These traces of historical readings – constants and variations in the flow of transmission – could act on the medieval audience to intensify the cognitive participation in the psalms but could also provide hermeneutical cues for the modern interpreter.

New approaches to medieval texts can also be gained by a reconsideration of their conceptual framing. Old Frisian literature, consisting mainly of legal texts, has, for the most part, been treated within the genre of law. Deviations from our modern expectations of law, on the other hand, have ever since Grimm been seen as vestiges of other genres (e.g., alliteration as a ‘poetic element’) that could, at the most, qualify the legal texts as ‘proto-literature’.

In his article, ‘Reading Old Frisian laws as literature’, ROLF H. BREMMER JR suggests that we should take the fictionality of the laws seriously and read them as literary works. This opens up a new field of research, which allows for the exploration of rhetorical and narratological strategies. From this perspective, the religious texts contained in the legal codices could be seen as an integral part of a legal discourse that was tied – and that the scribes and compilers wanted to tie – to a wider European Christian tradition.

The final article in this special issue, ‘Lost sheep: Metaphor and simony in John Gower’s Latin poetry’ by ERIC WEISKOTT, is a literary analysis of the metaphors of lost sheep and negligent shepherds in the poetry of John Gower (d. 1408). Weiskott traces the metaphors from Gower’s trilingual trilogy – Mirour de l’omme (French), Vox clamantis (Latin), and Confessio Amantis (English) – but concentrates on the last poems, written almost exclusively in Latin. The analysis shows that the lost sheep, which, in these texts, are systematically associated with simony (the selling of church privileges), are central to the understanding of the formation of Gower’s moral and poetic project in his late poetry, where the Latin poet finally became the political writer latent in the earlier texts.

The contributions to this special issue of Studia Neophilologica exemplify the wide range of research interests that can all be meaningfully included under the title ‘philology’. Their perspectives and approaches span from textual criticism through interpretation and hermeneutics to literary criticism. The discussions show both the need for further theoretical and methodological development and awareness, for a reassessment of old frames of understanding, and for an openness to cross-disciplinary angles, and the value of detailed empirical analyses. What unites them is, among other things, a ‘love for language’ or for the ‘word’ (φιλολογία) and a related preference for slow reading, for understanding related to the minute detail. In sum, they illustrate different aspects of philology and show that fruitful philological research can be conducted from a number of different perspectives. The abundance of material now digitally available and the intense theoretical discussions within the field have led to a renaissance of philology, which opens bright prospects for the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Cöllen

Sebastian Cöllen is a Research fellow of German at Uppsala University funded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

Bo Andersson

Bo Andersson is Professor emeritus of German at Uppsala University.

Notes

¹ Cf. also Jordheim 2017. The ‘grammatical interpretation of texts’ (‘die grammatische Interpretation der Texte’) is also identified by Stackmann (1994: 410) as the primary task of philology, echoing, here, Boeckh’s definition of the grammatical understanding of texts as an attention to ‘[dem] Wortsinn an sich’, i.e., without consideration of ‘reale Verhältnisse’ (Boeckh 1886: 81–83).

² For an early response, see Stackmann 1994, who discusses both what was always already well known in traditional philology and what might be valuable reminders in New Philology. A recent overview, with references to other literature on the topic, is given in Stock’s introduction to the special issue of Florilegium 2015.