Karl Lachmann Research Articles

Karl Lachmann (1793–1851): Reconstructing the Transmission of a Classical Latin Author

Karl Lachmann (1793–1851): Reconstructing the Transmission of a Classical Latin Author

Interpunktion mittelalterlicher deutscher Texte durch die Herausgeber

Concerning the editorial punctuation of mediaeval German texts in modern editions, it has been a point of discussion whether this punctuation should follow the procedure established by former editors or the modern rules (Duden). The article explains that 19th century editors like Karl Lachmann explicitly tried to use contemporary punctuation, which enforces the adoption of modern rules. Syntactical peculiarities of mediaeval German and the use of different punctuation marks are discussed.

Wider den Mythos des Unnahbaren. Zu Joachim Bumkes neuer ›Parzival‹-Ausgabe

Since the year 1833 Karl Lachmann's edition has been the basis for every literary analysis of ›Parzival‹. The new edition by Joachim Bumke derived from the St. Gallen manuscript D provides for the first time a basic text that complies with today's requirements. The current article deals with the principles of Bumke's edition and discusses the consequences this new textual basis could have for the text analysis.

Text Editing: Past, Present, and Future

As I've been thinking about Romanic Review's 100th anniversary, I was tempted, as I gather many participants on the program were, to dip into some of the first issues of the journal in order to take a look at the sorts of articles being published in 1910 and the few years following. Among other observations, it is intriguing for us to discover the preponderance of studies devoted to either linguistics or philological topics as well as, historically speaking, to medieval and Renaissance literature. Only a handful of articles over the first ten years extend into the seventeenth century and beyond. This of course reflects the nature of graduate training at the time as well as the individuals who were forming graduate students and future professors at the most prominent institutions of higher education: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and a handful of others. Among the medieval contributions, I was struck by the slight number of studies devoted to editions of shorter texts--at the time, a more common type of contribution to the French journal Romania--or to editorial questions in general, which seem to have been relegated to the review section. My attention was thus drawn, for rather different reasons, to two items in volume 1, dated 1910. first was a review of an article that had been published the previous year, in July 1909, in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Written by an assistant professor of Spanish at Yale named Frederick Bliss Luquiens, the article under review had the straightforward yet provocative title The Reconstruction of the Original Chanson de Roland. (1) reviewer, J. A. Will, summarily dismissed the young professor's argument, accusing him of subjectivity and specious reasoning. second item in that first volume of Romanic Review that attracted my attention appeared in the second fascicle for 1910, an article by the distinguished French medievalist Joseph Bedier, innocuously entitled de Normandie dans les chansons de geste. (2) author's name is printed at the end, followed by the date, December 22, 1909, and the place, New York City. There would at first blush seem to be little affinity between the Yale professor arguing somewhat loosely in favor of the technical excellence of the Oxford manuscript as a way of approaching a satisfactory reconstruction of the archetype of the Roland and Bedier's own work at the time, which concentrated on analyses of the epic tradition that would lead to the publication of his four-volume Legendes epiques, the first two volumes of which had appeared in 1908 and the final two of which would be published in 1912 and 1913. Romanic Review article, which was later incorporated into the Legendes epiques, as were many of his articles devoted to epic at that time, studied the anachronistic presence of Richard the First, duke of Normandy, in a number of chansons de geste related to the cycle of Charlemagne in order to add one more piece of evidence in support of his thesis concerning the learned and clerical origins of French epic, which defied the prevailing orthodoxy of popular origins. Before coming back to a possible relation between these two items in the first volume of Romanic Review, a few words should be said about the importance of the period between 1907 and 1913 for editorial work in France and Germany, the status of the Chanson de Roland as an exemplary editorial challenge, and Joseph Bedier's career-long contributions to the theory and practice of text editing. As is well known, Gaston Paris, through his courses and his landmark publication of the Vie de Saint Alexis in 1872, had introduced a method of text editing developed in Germany that was perceived as more scientific than the less systematic approaches of his predecessors. method, commonly associated with the German textual scholar Karl Lachmann, attempts to establish the interrelationships between and among extant manuscripts of a given work in order to show how they relate to the now-lost common archetype, itself a descendant of the authorial original. …

Gender erasures, knightly maidens and (un)knightly knights in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein

This article proposes that in the editing process of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, Karl Lachmann and G. F. Benecke suppressed and edited out aspects of the gender system and reduced it to a binary system that in many ways reflects nineteenth-century notions more than medieval ones. The article clarifies that the greater gender ambiguity created by Hartmann becomes more readily apparent through the comparison to contemporary versions of the tale. This gender ambiguity exists on the semantic, syntactic and plot levels, which this article proposes to show along with a more nuanced interpretation of what knightly and unknightly behavior means in Hartmann’s adaptation of Iwein.

The Genesis of Lachmann's Method by Sebastiano Timpanaro, Glenn W. Most

MLR, I02.2, 2007 469 Its English is also at times not fully idiomatic, so it is not always easy to read. Its consolidation of such a wealth ofmaterial, however, makes it a valuable reference tool, and itoffers, in its intermittentattention to the importance of literaryand mate rial intertextuality,and tobroad cultural contexts, including audience and patronage, timely and productive suggestions for further work in this field. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS CATHERINE BATT The Genesis ofLachmann's Method. By SEBASTIANOTIMPANARO. Ed. and trans. by GLENN W. MOST. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2005. 252 pp. $47-50; ?30. ISBN 978-o-226-80405-7. La genesi delmetodo del Lachmann by Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000), firstpub lished in I963 and acknowledged on the dust jacket of this firstEnglish translation as 'the best contribution that anyone has made in the last fifty years to the history of classical scholarship' (M. D. Reeve), is amasterly analysis of theways inwhich themodern method of editing texts came intobeing. Although pursued and at times prefigured by other scholars before him, themethod was named after theGerman scholar Karl Lachmann (I793-I 85 I), who vigorously advocated the need for rigor ous procedures in theevaluation of the textualwitnesses of fundamental works in the West-the Bible, the JustinianCodex, the classics of the ancient andmedieval world. His ultimate goal was the establishment of texts thatwould constitute the nearest possible approximation to the authors' originals. Such was the success of themethod that itwas soon adopted for the editing ofmodern and contemporary texts as well. The method also succeeded in subverting the generalized acquiescence to any text transmitted bymere forceof tradition-the so-called textusreceptus ('received text'). In his examination ofLachmann's contribution, aswell as of thatof predecessors and followers, Timpanaro explores intellectual and doctrinal motivations, conditions of work, achievements, and failures of his protagonists, giving unicuique suum, and pro gressing from the incunabula ofmodern textual philology to themost urgent issues at stake in thecontemporary scholarly debate. Glenn W Most's excellent translation is 'based onTimpanaro's own copy of the last edition printed during his lifetime' (p. 2 I7), and complemented with an introduction, the variant readings of the earlier editions, an unpublished essay by Timpanaro, an up-to-date bibliography, and indexes of names, topics discussed, andmanuscripts-a piece of exacting scholarship, yet somewhat diminished by the (publisher's?) decision to impose theEnglish language throughout. The charming symphony of theoriginal, where quotations inancient and modern languages offera genuine sense of a republic of letterswithout frontiersand provide a guarantee of terminological accuracy, is lost in this translation, and will be sorelymissed by anyone who cannot content himself or herselfwith translated sources (however accurate thesemay be). One is lefttowonder whether the current, strictlymonolingual approach, which now applies to the vast majority of scholarly publications, is in fact foreshadowing a rather gloomy future, when a decreased familiaritywith formsof expression belonging to alien cultures will impose drastic limitations upon our ability tounderstand alien cultures at all. Timpanaro the classicist has also exercised a positive influence upon scholars in medieval and modern studies, while being at the same time extremely receptive to their ideas. Beside his multifarious competence, itwas his genuine and passionate inclination todebate that made him a leading authority not only inclassics, but also in such diverse fieldsas thehistory of linguistics,Marxist theory,psychoanalysis applied to literature, and nineteenth-century Italian intellectual culture. The text published here in English for the first time is a reply toM. D. Reeve 470 Reviews on a particular aspect of post-Lachmannianism, the nature and frequency of bi partite stemmas ('Additional Materials A. [Final Remarks on Bipartite Stemmas]', pp. 207-15; the Italian original is inBelfagor, 6i (2006), 452-65). Despite itsbeing an unpolished torso, this isTimpanaro at his best. He concedes defeat with unreserved frankness, and yet keeps on discussing with no hidden intent to reverse the already accepted verdict, but rather to clarify, to the best of his knowledge, the ramifications and implications of the complex argument. A lesson tobe learnt. DURHAM UNIVERSITY AND UNIVERSITA DI SIENA CARLO CARUSO Ecrire l'animal aujourd'hui. Ed. by LUCILE DESBLACHE. (Les Cahiers de Recherche du Centre de Recherches sur les Litteratures Modernes et Contemporaines) Clermont...

Emilia Galotti: Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

MLR, 10I.2, 2006 57I Emilia Galotti: Ein Trauerspiel in finf Aufzuigen. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. By GOTTHOLDEPHRAIMLESSING. Ed. by ELKEMONIKA BAUER. Tiibingen: Nieme yer. 2004. xxvi+897pp. Ei88. ISBN 3-484-i0848-7. With thismonumental volume, the growth of commentaries on classic texts of German literature continues exponentially. The seventy-five pages of Emilia Galotti are here accompanied by over eight hundred pages of editorial apparatus, including a long introduction and by far the largest collection of materials yet assembled on thework's genesis, successive editions, performances, and reception down to Lessing's death in 178i, followed by multiple indexes and inventories of sources. The line-by-line commentary on the text is, on the other hand, comparatively short, for it lists only the variants in survivingmanuscripts and early editions; the only interpretative comments are those of Lessing's contemporaries in the collection of historical documents. The need for a new historical and critical edition of Emilia Galotti is unquestion able, for that in the standard edition of Lessing's works (Sdmtliche Schriften, ed. by Karl Lachmann, 3rd edn by Franz Muncker, 23 vols (Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Berlin: Goschen, I886-I 924)) is based on the third impression by Lessing's publisher, dated I772 but perhaps of later origin, inwhich Lessing probably had no hand. Besides, neither Muncker's nor any subsequent edition takes adequate account of the printer's manuscript of the first edition, discovered inAmerica in I948, with corrections by Lessing, his brother, and an unidentified compositor. Elke Monika Bauer bases her text on the first edition, correcting various misprints, errors, and omissions; she suc ceeds admirably in unravelling the complex history of the surviving manuscripts and the numerous authorized and pirated editions of the text published in Lessing's life time. Since the textual variants are predominantly minor, this major editorial effort is unlikely to change our vision of the play substantially. Besides, asBauer herself admits, the choice of variant readings is often debatable: it is rarely possible, for example, to determine whether Lessing tacitly approved or simply failed to notice textual changes introduced by others. Nevertheless, this new edition is likely to remain the definitive version of the text-at least for scholarly purposes-for the foreseeable future, and the editor is to be congratulated on her impressive achievement. For many readers, themost useful part of the volume will be the extensive collec tion, nearly three hundred pages in length, of mainly unfamiliar documents on the early reception of the play in print and in performance. Particularly striking is the fact that most of the principal arguments, both critical and apologetic, of modern commentators merely repeat those of Lessing's contemporaries-on the consistency of the heroine's character, the reality of her supposed weakness, the necessity of her death, the naturalness or artificiality of the dialogue, the play's political significance, its compatibility with the Hamburgische Dramaturgie and with definitions of domes tic tragedy, and so on. Students of theatre history will also find more records here of early performances than inUrsula Schulz's hitherto authoritative Lessing auf der Buihne: Chronik der Theaterauffiihrungen I748-I789 (Bremen andWolfenbiittel: Ja cobi, I977). The deficiencies of this work are the obverse of its strengths. Its very thorough ness- ven the textual variants in reprints of early reviews are catalogued, and the editor's long introduction duplicates much of thematerial included inother sections generates inflation, and the law of diminishing returns sets in: the sheer length of the work, with its large pages and small print, will render its most valuable elements difficult of access to all but the most assiduous readers. SIDNEY SUSSEXCOLLEGE,CAMBRIDGE H. B. NISBET ...

Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800-1950 (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 577 (supported by his colleague Michael Clyne, whose work on pluricentric languages he often cites) and in the place of Austria within German language and culture. As features of Austrian identity Bodi singles out an intense linguistic consciousness and a fondness forparody. Both are illustrated from the Austrian Enlightenment, the for? mer in an important essay entitled 'Sprachregelungals Kulturgeschichte. Sonnenfels: Uber den Geschaftsstil (1784) und die Ausbildung der osterreichischen Mentalitat', the latter by a study of Paul Weidmann's astonishing Der Eroberer (1786), which anticipates Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun' in its resourceful parody of innumerable styles. Generally, the reflections on identity are welcome in suggesting how to liberate one? self from the narrow nationalism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and participate fluidlyin a wide range of cultural settings?something which Leslie Bodi's life and career exemplify most inspiringly. St John's College, Oxford Ritchie Robertson Internationales Germanistenlexikon 18 00-1950. Ed. by Christoph Konig. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2003. 3 vols: lxxxv +2200pp. + CD-ROM. ?428. ISBN 3-11-0175886 (the set); 3-11-015485-4 (book only); 3-11-017587-8 (CD-ROM only). Historical self-reflection has been a growing trend in many of the cultural sciences in recent years, and in German studies this has been reflected in a flood of new work on the history of Germanistik. The historical philology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has become the subject of renewed research, biographies of nineteenth-century Germanists are in vogue, dissertations on classics of literature now typically include a chapter or more on the history of their interpretation, and the MLA has just produced a 'Historical Handbook' of German studies in the United States. One driving force behind this interest has been the Arbeitsstelle fiir die Erforschung der Geschichte der Germanistik in Marbach, which has been gathering data since its inception in 1972. The fruitsof the Marbach project are now presented in a new Germanistenlexikon, begun under its auspices in 1995, which henceforth will be the primary point of reference for all metascholarly work in the discipline. The Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800-1950 is a massive three-volume refer? ence work with an accompanying CD-ROM which documents the lives of influential Germanists from Karl Lachmann onwards. The printed version is lavishly laid out, with very full biographical articles of up to five columns in length on each of the scholars selected for inclusion. The entries have a standard format with bold-print headings, rendering the most basic information at a glance. Typically an article begins with data on birth and death, parents and spouse, native language when this is not obvious, followed by a multi-purposeheading 'Lebensumstande' rehearsing such key stages ofthe subject's non-academic biography as government service, party member? ship, adoptionof a new citizenship, serious illnesses, or occasionally colourful touches like James Boyd's hand injury which ended his promising career as a violinist, or, in the case of Hans Ferdinand Massmann: April-Nov. 1815 freiwilliger Auszug in den Kampf gegen Napoleon, ohne den Kriegesschauplatz rechtzeitig zu erreichen'. Re? ligion, if noted, is a separate heading, relevant especially in the nineteenth century, when it was still acceptable for this to affect scholarly judgement. Here, 'Jewish' refers to a professed religious affiliationrather than an ethnicity: thus Stephan Born is entered as 'jiid., dann konfessionslos'. Next the entries turn to academic career, with data on school and university study, doctorate and Habilitation, academic appointments , honours received, memberships, teaching and research specializations, and prominent disciples. The publication list is of necessity limited to highlights, yet even so, it frequently fillsa whole column. Editorial work is particularly highlighted. 578 Reviews The final section of each entry,'Literatur', lists publications and other sources which in some way document the life of the scholar, including biographies, Festschriften, obituaries, critical studies, archives, and Nachlasse. The result of this approach is an extremely thorough and systematic depiction of the personalities who have shaped the history of German studies. The CD-ROM version includes 114 extra articles, taking advantage of the fact that pressure of space is never as great in electronic publishing. Running on the software 'Folio Views', it provides a complete text...

The Germanic Heldenlied and the Poetic Edda : Speculations on Preliterary History

One of the proudest inventions of German scholarship in the nineteenth century was the Heldenlied, the heroic song, which was seen by scholars as the main conduit of Germanic heroic legend from the Period of Migrations to the time of their being written down in the Middle Ages. The concept stems indirectly from the suggestions of several eighteenth-century Homeric scholars that since the Homeric poems were much too long to have been memorized and performed in oral tradition, they must have existed as shorter, episodic songs. Friedrich August Wolf's well-known Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) collected evidence for the idea that writing was not used for poetry until long after Homer's time. He argued for a thorough recension of the poem under (or perhaps by) Pisistratus in the sixth century BCE as the first comprehensive written Homer. These ideas were almost immediately applied to the Middle High German Nibelungenlied by Karl Lachmann (1816), who was trained as a classical philologist and indeed continued to contribute in that area at the same time that he was one of the most influential members of the generation that founded the new discipline of Germanistik. On the basis of rough spots and contradictions (not only Homer nods!) Lachmann thought he could recognize twenty separate Lieder in the Middle High German epic. At the same time that Lachmann was deconstructing the German medieval epic, Elias Lönnrot was assembling the Finnish epic he called Kalevala from shorter songs in conscious imitation of the Homer (or Pisistratus) described by Wolf. The Liedertheorie advanced by Wolf and Lachmann was revised by Andreas Heusler in the early years of the twentieth century. Heusler (1905) used the songs of the Poetic Edda as his models and decided that the way from song to epic was not by stringing the songs together with clumsily [End Page 43] composed bridge passages, but by a process of expansion (Aufschwellung).1 The individual song contained within it the entire story (Fabel) and the epic poet simply expanded material contained within the song to produce his work. The relationship between Lied and Epos was, Heusler argued, like that between an acorn and a tree, not the relationship between individual pearls and a necklace. A by-product of these theoretical musings is the concept of the Germanic Heldenlied, which was essentially a product of cogitation at the writing desk. Few of its spiritual fathers ever heard an oral heroic song or epic of any kind, and they worked out the form mainly from a conviction of what the transmission of heroic legend would have had to be, rather than from a consideration of the surviving evidence. Preliterate poetry, they argued, must have been composed just like literate poetry, that is, by a poet who composed by "writing" on the tablet of his memory, very much as the literate poets of the nineteenth century wrote on paper. The theory came first and the evidence was adjusted to fit. The fact that there is not a single Germanic Heldenlied of the type described by Lachmann or Heusler surviving from anywhere outside of Iceland never seems to have bothered them.2 Heusler used the heroic poems of the Icelandic Poetic Edda as his models for the Heldenlied, the assumption being that the Icelanders had maintained the form and content of Old Germanic heroic poetry until they were written down in the late thirteenth century. In the summation of his theory in Die altgermanische Dichtung Heusler characterizes the genre in his typical style (1923:147): Auch das Heldenlied ist ein größeres Werk, etwa zwischen 80 und einigen 200 Langzeilen; vorbedacht und auswendig gelernt, für Einzelvortrag bestimmt. Es gehört zu den objektiven Gattungen, ohne ausgesprochene Beziehung auf die Gegenwart. Sein Inhalt ist eine heroische Fabel aus zeitlosem Einst; eine einkreisige Geschichte von straffem Umriß, sparsam mit Auftritten und Menschen. Die Darstellung ist episch-dramatisch zu nennen: Erzählung...

New Philology and New Phylogeny: Aspects of a Critical Electronic Edition of Wolfram's Parzival

Karl Lachmann's edition from 1833 still provides the basis for Parzival scholarship. Although the text has subsequently been revised in parts, a fundamentally new edition considering all extant manuscripts is required. Computer technology offers means for tackling this task in an effective and reliable manner. A critical electronic edition will give access to the manuscript material, which may be published stage by stage, corresponding to different sections of the text. Such an edition will allow users to consult a base text, electronically linked to an apparatus of variants, to manuscript transcriptions, and to facsimiles. Browsing among these components, readers will experience the extent to which the Parzival romance was open to textual variance in the course of its transmission (an aspect stressed by theories of the so-called 'New Philology'). Furthermore, new stemmatological methods borrowed from evolutionary biology (phylogeny) will provide insight into manuscript groupings that may reflect early textual versions that relate to the semi-oral status of vernacular literary culture. Thus, an electronic edition will be the essential prerequisite of any new Parzival book edition. But it also constitutes an edition in its own right, revealing the discursive and visual richness of medieval text traditions and involving the readers in the editorial process.

Ethical principles for ageing and Alzheimer's disease in mount athos

The Bavarian J. A. Schmeller hoped that the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi would appoint him as a teacher. When this failed, he joined the Swiss military in Spanish services carrying out Pestalozzi's principles at military schools by teaching languages in Tarragona and Madrid, and, finally, at a private teaching institute in Basle. He was inspired by the Swiss dialect dictionary when he decided to make a Bavarian dialect dictionary and, based on this, a Bavarian dialect grammar. This was the beginning of German scientific dialectology. He was appointed member of the Bavarian Academy of Science and professor at Munich university. As curator of the Royal Court and State Library (1829) he was to systematize about 25 000 handwritten documents confiscated when 150 monasteries were secularized in 1803. Along with the Grimm brothers and Karl Lachmann, Schmeller was a famous editor of medieval texts.

Musical Sources and Stemmatic Filiation: A Tool for Editing Music

Ever since the philologist Karl Lachmann, in the last century, announced the startling results of his investigations into the texts of the New Testament and the Classical Latin poet Lucretius, textual critics have sought to apply his principle of common error to establish the genealogical relationships of the sources of a wide variety of texts.' Lachmann's method arose from the problem of dealing with a text that was central to the fabric of Western Civilization, the New Testament. In its witnesses, as in those of all texts, he found three types of readings: good readings, places where the witnesses offered variant reasonable readings, and clear errors. (The following discussion naturally pertains to both printed and manuscript sources. To avoid cumbersome locutions like scribal/ typographical, or scribe/typesetter/engraver, I have chosen to use scribe or scribal to stand for the various possibilities.) The

Some remarks on the origin of ‘assimilation’ and ‘dissimilation’ in linguistic terminology

Summary The paper attempts to reconstruct when and by whom the terms ‘assimilation’ and ‘dissimilation’ were used for the first time in an expressly linguistic context, and thus became part of the scientific nomenclature. In the case of ‘dissimilation’, it may be said that it received wide currency through A. F. Pott’s use of the term in volume II of his Etymologische Forschungen in 1836. However, Pott used ‘dissimilation’ as early as 1832 and it appears that he was the introducer of the term into linguistics. The history of the term ‘assimilation’ goes further back than has thus far been assumed. Franz Bopp made use of it in 1824, and Jacob Grimm used it earlier in the second edition of volume I of his Deutsche Grammatik (1822) and even two years earlier in a letter to Karl Lachmann. It would appear, however, that the original source of ‘assimilation’ was Rasmus Rask’s Vejledning til det Islandske eller gamle Nordiske Sprog (1811), in which the term is frequently used. Grimm reviewed the book in 1812. Yet there is no indication in Rask’s writings that he considered himself the coiner or first user of ‘assimilation’ in linguistics.

Notes On Ovid, Heroides 9

Recently Mr. E. Courtney has reopened discussion on the authenticity of the last six Heroides, a subject which had almost universally been accepted as settled by scholars.2 He also briefly discussed the ninth epistle and examined certain grounds for doubting whether it is rightly included in the Ovidian canon. In this he is following Karl Lachmann, who was disposed to doubt the authenticity not only of the last six but also of those of the remainder which are not mentioned in Ovid's catalogue of the epistles given at Amores 2. 18 f.3 This despoliation of the canon has not generally found favour since Lachmann, and in the case of Heroides 9 (Deianira Herculi) the editors (e.g. Palmer) and other scholars working on the poems (e.g. Housman and recently Dörrie)4 have without exception regarded the poem as a genuine specimen of Ovid's work.