Edition Of Manuscript Research Articles

Personal Accounts: Schizophrenia: A Terminal Disease?

Personal Accounts: Schizophrenia: A Terminal Disease?

The Anaphora and the Thanksgiving Prayer from the Barcelona Papyrus: An Underestimated Testimony to the Anaphoral History in the Fourth Century

AbstractNew critical text edition (with translation and a commentary) of the oldest extant manuscript containing a complete set of prayers, P.Monts.Roca inv. 154b-157b. This text is of prime importance for liturgical studies, especially of anaphoral development.

Acknowledging Reviewers

Dear colleagues and reviewers As we are cognizant of the fact that publication of research and other pedagogical activities in any filed is the most appropriate modus of recognition of work. The process from submission to reviewing and editing of manuscripts is a tedious job and needs a team of editors and reviewers who could devote their prime time to accomplish job in a coherent manner. As a matter of fact and policy of many journals, reviewers’ names are not acknowledged for sake of transparency. Scientists have multitier activities related to teaching, research, attending symposia, writing papers and grant writing and reviewing manuscripts. These tasks are time demanding and are recognized by their universities or agencies at the time of their appraisal.

"Holo and unholo": The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

The following short piece aims to introduce ongoing work on the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, a prototype of which was presented at the Beckett at Reading 2006 conference. An overview of the benefits and some of the key (technical) features of the genetic electronic manuscript editions will be preceded by a short examination of Beckett's own attitude towards his manuscripts.

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts

ZOOMING IN: a new high‐resolution gene expression atlas of the brain

Mol Syst Biol. 3: 75 If you walk through a laboratory at the Salk Institute, all the people working in it look fairly similar: two legs, a head and so on. However, it is only through a more detailed analysis that one could reveal the differences between the first year graduate student (nervously pipetting) and the well‐respected principal investigator (PI) (editing manuscripts). Analogous to this, how can we discriminate diverse neuronal populations (e.g. graduate student versus PI) and even understand their function in the adult brain? Genome‐wide, unbiased gene expression studies using DNA microarrays or serial analyses of gene expression have created a tremendous amount of data defining tissue‐specific and even region‐specific gene expression in mammals (Lockhart et al , 1996; Datson et al , 2001; Lewandowski and Small, 2005). In other words, the ‘laboratory’ (in analogy to organs, e.g., the brain) and maybe even the ‘job description’ (e.g., the substructure of the brain) of many genes have been already identified. In a study recently published in Nature , Lein et al (2007) went one step further and have provided a genome‐wide gene expression atlas of the adult mouse brain (the Allen Brain …

Preceptor rewards: How to say thank you for mentoring the next generation of nurse practitioners

To answer the question how do faculty nurture and reward clinical preceptors and what supports do preceptors require? Data came from the literature and from surveying a purposive sample of 26 faculty members teaching clinical courses and arranging precepted experiences for nurse practitioner (NP) students at 26 public and private institutions across the United States. The vehicles for the survey were personal contact and e-mail. Schools offer preceptor rewards varying widely in their monetary value, from tuition and continuing education vouchers, verification of hours toward recertification, access to services and events on campus, reduced price or free admission to museums, cultural and sports events, and lectures. Faculty nurture preceptors by nominating them for awards, providing letters of reference, editing manuscripts, and collaborating on research projects. Supports for preceptors from the literature reflected National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties guidelines (2000), and the policies of schools and clinical agencies, such as providing copies of program objectives and student credentials. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE AND EDUCATION: As NP programs have proliferated, there is increased pressure on faculty to find, nurture, reward, and retain good preceptors. Faculty must continue to work with program and agency administrators to comply with policies and create preceptor rewards to recognize their gifts to us, to our schools, and to the profession.

Dry Water (review)

Reviewed by: Dry Water Alison Calder Robert J. C. Stead. Dry Water. Edited and with an introduction by Neil Querengesser and Jean Horton. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2008. 338 pp. Introduction. Notes. Variant readings. $38.00 sc. Robert J. C. Stead’s novel Dry Water is new and old at the same time. Between 1935 and 1948, Stead tried to place the novel with a number of Canadian and American publishers, but could not, and the novel was never published during his lifetime. His [End Page 222] attempts at revision resulted in two significantly different manuscripts, one much shorter than the other. The shorter version, published in a critical edition in 1983, is not well-known and has received little scholarly attention. Now, the University of Ottawa Press has released an edition of the longer manuscript, and it is a valuable contribution to the bookshelf. In addition to its scholarly interest, the novel is an entertaining read. It is divided into three parts, each concentrating on a different stage of the life of Donald Strand, the protagonist. Part 1 opens in 1890 as Donald, an orphan at age ten, arrives at his uncle and aunt’s Manitoba farm. Despite his grief over his parents’ deaths, his childhood experience of the farm is largely idyllic, as he plays schoolyard games, revels in the farm’s bounty, and begins a strong and loving relationship with his cousin Ellen. Part 2 picks up Donald at the age of twenty-one, when he learns that his parents have left him a legacy of $5,000. This bequest enables him to benefit from the poor money management of a neighbour, who must sell his debt-laden farm for a low price in order to avoid repossession. While this purchase sets Donald up to succeed as a farmer himself, his treatment of the bankrupt seller also reveals a hardness to his character, and a willingness to exploit others’ misfortunes for the sake of his own advancement. Having settled on a career, Donald turns his attention to the romantic choices he faces. He and Ellen love each other, but the fact that they are cousins causes them to refuse a sexual relationship (although such a relationship seems fine with others in the community). His choice is thus between Hester, a pedestrian but capable farm girl with whom he grew up, and Clara, the glamorous and sexually exciting newly-arrived schoolteacher. Eventually, through some machinations on her part, Clara wins out. Part 3 rejoins Donald at the age of forty-nine, when he is the most successful farmer in the district, with a large house, three children, and a still-desirable wife. However, the couple has become emotionally estranged, and the children, rebellious. The eldest son, Tom, has left the farm to work in a bank; Clarissa, the daughter, dresses provocatively and dates a Communist; and Walter, the youngest son, stays out late, drives too fast, and generally worries his father. Donald’s solace comes from isolating himself in his home office, calculating and recalculating his monetary worth. His competitive spirit is roused by the success of Jimmie Wayne, a childhood friend who has grown up to be a lawyer in Winnipeg and who has married Ellen. Spurred on by Jimmie, Donald overcomes his initial misgivings and invests in the stock market, rapidly making a fortune. At the same time, though, he becomes aware that Clara and Jimmie are engaged in a flirtation, and even Ellen seems to be advocating an open-marriage policy. Matters come to a head when he is caught up in the stock market crash of 1929 and must deal with the consequences of his own financial and romantic missteps. At the novel’s end, he is resolutely facing the future, [End Page 223] happy in his return to the plow, and with a sense of consolation in having had some artifice stripped away. This book is compelling for a number of reasons. While the situations with which Donald is presented are far from unique, he is an appealing protagonist, suffering misgivings about his actions and questioning the moral and ethical foundations of the life he leads. The text paints an unusually detailed...

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (review)

Reviewed by: The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts Daniel J. Ransom Siân EchardStephen Partridge, eds. The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. xx+236 pp. $50.00 cloth. This collection of essays has its origin in a 1999 workshop organized by the editors. The intended focus was to be codicology, and one assumes that the title of the book reflects that early intention. In the event, other aspects of editing and studying texts were emphasized, and the title serves to hint at these interests as well. That is, the book to be unbound is not the ancient codex but the modern edition. And it is to be unbound in two senses. First, as a book publication, the modern edition need not be hogtied by theories of editing. Second, many of the essays point toward and encourage electronic, web-based editions, “texts” that are not bound between covers. Of course, an electronic edition is also unbounded, unconstrained by the limits of conventional publishing. Some of the essays seek to show, in particular cases, what opportunities electronic formats can provide. It should be noted that most of the essays, while they do address editorial issues, are essentially briefs for editorial projects undertaken by the contributors. And each clarion call for one kind of editing is made, at least in part, to validate the project in hand. Thus broader debates regarding editorial practice are addressed only briefly and intermittently. One consequence of this orientation is that, with the exception of Joan Grenier-Winther's description of how to set up an electronic database for a web-based edition, the essays speak less to editors than to scholars interested in the texts under discussion. That said, I should also observe that for the most part the discussions are learned and interesting. Three of the essays consider the diachronic study of texts, with an eye not necessarily on the original version but on an altered version. Anne L. Klinck, who completed an edition of the Southern Version of Cursor Mundi begun by Sarah Horrall, offers telling remarks aimed at those who theorize [End Page 243] editing but do not put their theories to the test of application. And she calls attention to the sleight of hand practised by one proponent of textual mouvance (each version of a text has its validity) who cannot escape the analytical imperative of distinguishing between better and worse texts, between shifts that are accidental and meaningless and shifts that are deliberate and significant. In turn, Meg Roland proposes a parallel-text edition of the “Roman War” episode in the “Malory Documents.” Her proposal seems reasonable, but she never demonstrates its utility. Caught up in larger debates and peripheral matters, Roland provides merely a decorative sample of parallel texts, one that is not quite linked to the brief commentary that she offers. She cites comparative analyses of the Roman War section that have already been published by others but asserts simply that a parallel-text edition would highlight “the dynamic interaction of the two versions.” A more persuasive case for the study of mouvance by way of a comparative edition is made by Peter Diehl, who examines an inquisitor's manual as it existed in a fifteenth-century manuscript and in a sixteenth-century printed text. Substantial differences between the two versions allow one to trace cultural shifts, and an edition for this purpose would be especially valuable to scholars who are interested in the later era. That is, editions need not be founded on interest in original texts; rather, they must serve particular audiences. A more theorized discussion, titled “Toward a Disjunctive Philology,” is presented by William Robins, who offers some consideration of best-text and stemmatic editions in order to recommend, as a sort of compromise (or escape from the tyranny of these models), a parallel-text edition that highlights the very problems that editors must adjudicate. With a “best text,” one could juxtapose a “worst text” or a critical text (one's choice, as Robins observes about kinds of editions, “depends upon what you want to know”). He prefers this approach to...

The Bannatyne Club and the Publication of Scottish Ecclesiastical Cartularies

Investigative research on Scottish cartularies has been grossly neglected in comparison to other European countries. In fact, over 90% of the printed Scottish cartularies were published by antiquarian groups like the Bannatyne, Maitland and Spalding Clubs between 1832 and 1893 and no substantive work on these editions has occurred since that time. They are now both commonly treated and used as primary sources in their own right. To date, nobody has delved too deeply into the methodologies employed to convert the manuscripts into printed material in the first instance. This has placed a huge burden of trust upon the accuracy and editorial skills of the men who were employed as editors by the various clubs. The focus of this investigation is the Bannatyne Club and its most prolific editor of ecclesiastical manuscripts, Cosmo Innes. It is suggested that these editions can be divided into different categories, depending on the number of source manuscripts available to Innes and his editing teams. As a rule of thumb, the greater the number of sources Innes and his scribes used, the greater the latitude for error. Using the Moray register as a stark example, it is argued that the editorial team involved in its production radically re-ordered and re-worked much of the source material to fit the editorial conventions of that time.

Non-Canonical Readings of the Qur'an: Recognition and Authenticity persist? (The Himsī Reading)

Recently, Yasin Dutton published ‘Some Notes on the British Library's “Oldest Qur'an Manuscript” (Or. 2165)’, in which he concludes that this 1st/7th century Qur'anic manuscript aligns with the Damascene reading of Ibn Āmir. Dealing with the same manuscript, this paper first qualifies that conclusion and attempts to shed more light (and raise further questions) on the location and number of the manuscript copyists or editors by examining variants in orthography, verse-divisions, the style of the text, and symbols within the manuscript, with attention to both the canonical and non-canonical variants. When viewed alongside studies of Qur'anic history rooted in traditional Hadīth, some observations emerge that have to do with the two overwhelming, and somewhat paradoxical features of the manuscript: its striking uniformity and the discrepancies within it. The second section of this paper thus seeks to evaluate this manuscript against works on the qirācāt tradition and its systemetisers, in order to seek out clues for a clearer view of the pre-canonical landscape of readings, and indeed of the nature of the canon itself. It notes the apparent fluidity of Qur'anic manuscript production and readings transmission, identifies concerns that may have driven tradition-minded scholars to settle the text, and explores the criteria they developed for assessing recognition and authenticity in the formation of the canon.

Textual Identity and the Problem of Convention: Recovering the Title of Dresden Oc 66

Designating a title for anepigraphal manuscripts requires editors and readers to choose between what they deem to be the work’s main subject and the conventional names that have been used to refer to it over its history. The problem may be complicated by competing manuscript editions of a text that excerpt or present a fragment, skewing the estimation of topic by abridgment. Dresden Oc 66, a fourteenth-century Old French allegory of love, reason, and chess, presents precisely this problem, raising questions of what a title is and does in a medieval work.

INCREASING FICTION WRITERS' PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH AN INTERNET‐BASED INTERVENTION

Ten participants from an online community of fiction writers were exposed to a treatment package intended to increase their writing productivity. The package consisted of graphic feedback provided through a Web page, praise for goal completion delivered via e-mail, and editing of manuscripts by other members of the community dependent on the completion of word-count goals. A multiple baseline design across groups was used to evaluate the effects of the intervention, which was successful in increasing the number of words written.

Scriptores Ordinis Cartusiensis: Tomus Primus. 2 volumes. By Dom Stanislas Autore. Transcribed and arranged by Jean Picard. Pp. iv + 257 and ii + 141. (Analecta Cartusiana, 200:4 and 5.) Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2005. isbn 3 900033 21 8 and 22 6. Paper €40 each.

TheScriptores Sacri Ordinis Cartusiensis by Dom Stanislas Autore (1853–1920), who died at the now defunct Charterhouse of Naples, appeared in the Analecta Cartusiana as a facsimile edition of the original manuscript (AC 120, 20 vols.). This important work, the fruit of many years of research, contains alphabetical lists featuring anonymous Carthusian writers and identifiable authors and scribes—with biographical information—and includes spiritual and liturgical works, correspondence, details of manuscripts, and writings in print. At the time of publication (1993–5) ‘Tomus Primus’ of the Scriptores, listing authors and copyists from A to C, was lost, but it was fortunately rediscovered and reproduced in 2003 (AC 200:1–3). The two volumes considered here are a transcription of Autore's ‘Tomus Primus’, made by the late Jean Picard (1921–86), omitting ‘Sacri’ from the title. Picard spent a great deal of time studying the Carthusian Order. Although his researches were frowned upon by some academics, he was held in high esteem by Carthusian experts such as Jan de Grauwe and James Hogg. The latter published several of Picard's writings in the Analecta Cartusiana, mainly on the Charterhouse of Portes. In the preface to the present publication, in the first volume, Hogg expresses his appreciation of Picard's work on St Anthelm (d. 1180), prior of La Grande Charteuse and later bishop of Belley (p. iii). The first volume also includes notable individuals such as Dom Boniface Ferrer (d. 1417), who was prominent among the Spanish Carthusians during the Great Schism, not to mention brother of St Vincent Ferrer (pp. 112–18); and Dom Charles le Couteulx (d. 1715), editor of the Annales Ordinis Cartusiensis (pp. 150–4). The second volume features anonymous Carthusian writers who wrote in Latin, and those of French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Belgian origin, followed by indexes for both volumes. It is unfortunate, as Hogg indicates (p. iii), that Picard was unable to transcribe the remaining volumes of Autore's Scriptores. However Picard's painstaking transcriptions should encourage others to evaluate, if not revisit, Autore's work. It is to be hoped that greater efforts can be made to compile a modern, scientific catalogue of Carthusian authors and scribes, including their writings and manuscripts. Judging from a recent list of Carthusian spiritual writers compiled by James Hogg, such a venture would have excellent foundations (see AC 185:3, pp. 1–89 and 225, pp. 27–123). Some readers may view the text with difficulty, from a typographical perspective, and its location in volume 200 of the Analecta Cartusiana, with ‘Tomus Primus’ of Autore's Scriptores, as somewhat misplaced, since the facsimile reproduction of sections D–Z are in volume 120. However, in the reviewer's opinion, this would be to pronounce a rather harsh verdict upon the work. Considerable efforts were evidently made to print Picard's transcripts from an idiosyncratic typescript (in places incomplete), largely due to the work of Pierre-Aelred Henel, who was aided by the general editors of the Analecta and Dom Gabriel van Dijck and Dom Benoit Pétin. The content of Picard's transcriptions clearly overrides such infelicities as it is clearly of great interest to Carthusian scholars and those with more than a passing interest in Carthusian authors and scribes. The editors should be rewarded by a detailed study of the material which Picard's transcriptions contain.

Melville's Prisoners (review)

R E V I E W HARRISON HAYFORD WITH A FOREWORD BY HERSHEL PARKER Melville’s Prisoners Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Cloth, $59.95; xi, 213 pages. I n the concluding chapter to A Companion to Melville Studies (1986)—the magisterial essay titled “Melville and the World of Books”—G. Thomas Tanselle traces over a hundred years of writing by and about Herman Melville, and flatly concludes: “Of the events chronicled in these pages, there is no doubt who the hero is: Harrison Hayford has been responsible for more basic work—from the maintenance of a file of secondary material to the production of critical editions—than anyone else” (820). At the time Tanselle wrote these words, I had known Hayford for ten years. When I first met him, we both happened to live in the same metropolitan area: I was a graduate student on Chicago’s South Side; he, a world renowned Melville scholar and editor up north in Evanston. We agreed to meet half way, in 1973 at The Newberry Library, where he showed me the Library’s famous (now dispersed) Melville Room with its remarkable collection of materials including an equally famous (among Melvilleans) file cabinet of articles on all things Melville. He asked me questions about my dissertation and made me feel real, and his presence and nod gave me a crucial boost during a period of academic depression that drove many away from the profession. He did that for many younger scholars. So ten years later when I was compiling the Companion and first read Tanselle’s final paragraph, I fully agreed that Harrison Hayford was a great champion, but I queried Tanselle on that word “hero.” Wouldn’t Hayford, son of Maine and ever the New Englander, squint at the immodesty of that epithet? Perhaps so, was the reply, but he is a hero nonetheless. Now twenty years later, and a few years after Hayford’s death, Northwestern University Press has published a collection of essays and lectures that Hayford had been assembling in his retirement. Titled Melville’s Prisoners after its lead essay, the volume has been edited by Hershel Parker, one of Hayford’s students. In his Foreword, Parker relates how he had underlined the very passage quoted above in his copy of the Companion, how Hayford had come upon the underlined words while perusing Parker’s copy of the book during C 2006 The Authors Journal compilation C 2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 89 R E V I E W a visit with Parker, and how Parker later found, initialed and dated, Hayford’s predicted marginalia: “Who? me?” Hayford was a large man in height and breadth, and large, too, as a critical presence. He was the leading force behind the Northwestern-Newberry (NN) edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, which remains a model of eclectic textual editing; he was a brilliant reader and editor of manuscripts as well, and a major contributor to the facts of Melville’s life. However, his contributions to literary criticism were few, and Parker’s repeated claim that Melville’s Prisoners is “the finest set of scholarly-critical essays ever written on Herman Melville” is the kind of exaggeration next to which Hayford might have penned once again: “Who? me?” Of course, Parker’s exaggeration carries within it its own qualifying phrase; this is a book of “scholarly-critical” essays, by which Parker means to indicate that they represent that intellectual genre in which scholarship (textual history and bibliographic facts) shapes and informs critical insight, and in which historicism and aesthetics fuse. In Parker’s view, Hayford is not only the “hero” who led the team that created the NN edition, and not only the “hero” on campus who inspired so many to “do” Melville or literature or good research and critical thinking, but he is also the hero who exemplifies the best that a scholar might do to explicate a text. In fact, Melville’s Prisoners contains several kinds of criticism: explication de...

Editing as a psychological practice

The experience of the Jungian analyst in the role of editor of manuscripts by creative colleagues is examined. Historical precedents include Michael Fordham's editorial correspondence with Jung around the latter's synchronicity essay; Jung's handling of manuscripts submitted by Sabina Spielrein to the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen and various authors to the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete, and the author's close editing of a paper submitted by Andrew Samuels to the Journal of Analytical Psychology. In addition to mustering an adequate amount of generosity, erudition, and availability, the analytic editor must know how to clarify a psychological argument and to gauge the psychological impact of the written text. Notwithstanding transference/countertransference phenomena that can emerge around issues of competition, envy, and territoriality when author and editor are also fellow-authors working in the same field, the editor needs to be comfortable about serving as the author's selfobject and midwife. From an analytic perspective, although communicating decisions about the best way to put ideas into words can sometimes attract transference to the editor, the more profound transference that analysts experience in the editing situation is toward the text being edited, which helps to motivate donated time spent caring for journal manuscripts.

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (review)

Reviewed by: The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts Nicholas Watson (bio) Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge, editors. The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and TextsStudies in Book and Print Culture. University of Toronto Press. xxii, 238. $50.00 This collection of eleven essays is a product of the twenty-ninth of the University of British Columbia's series of Medieval Workshops, one of the mainstays of Canadian medieval studies. Editing is a topic of lively interest to medievalists, and a topic to which Canadian medievalists have made signal practical and theoretical contributions over more than a century. Written before the invention of printing and for the ear as much as the eye, medieval texts offer a varied challenge to the assumptions moderns bring to issues of authorship, textual integrity, and hence editorial theory, and an equally varied technical challenge to editorial practice. Several essays in this volume are preoccupied with the issue of how to represent medieval textuality, making it available for modern readers and scholars, either in print or in digital form, without fundamentally compromising its integrity. Editing is, indeed, a field of literary scholarship in which theory and practice are unusually intertwined. As the field has become more self-conscious over the last four decades it has also become more openly pluralistic, to the point that almost every editorial encounter with a next text now seems to involve a new theorization of editing, one responsive (as Tim Machan put it a decade ago) to the way a particular text 'asks' to be edited. This is frustrating for those who think editors should work behind the scenes and not trouble readers with minutiae, as it is for those who like their theories to be as comprehensive as Paul Zumthor and Bernard Cerquiglini's theory of mouvance and variance, around which (as Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge point out in their helpful introduction) many of these essays move. But editors have to deal with more kinds of textual phenomena than any other literary practitioner, and the heterogeneous discipline of their intellectual and practical solutions deserves the respect and attention it here demands. Several contributors offer retrospective accounts of their own editing practice or preview prospective editions. Anne L. Klink defends the edition of the southern version of Cursor Mundi she completed for Ottawa University Press after the death of Sarah Horrall; Meg Roland, Peter Diehl, and Stephen Reimer make the case, respectively, for a parallel-text edition of parts of Malory's Morte Darthur, an eclectic edition of Zanchino Ugolini's [End Page 238] inquisitorial manual, the Tractatus super materia hereticorum, and a richly contextualizing hypertext edition of Lydgate's Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund, a text which absolutely requires its manuscript images. The successes and failures of earlier editors elsewhere come under scrutiny: Julia Marvin offers a particularly sensitive analysis of the late Victorian editor of the Anglo-Norman Year Books of Edward ii, F.W. Maitland; Andrew Taylor asks why editors continue to ignore the acoustic properties of medieval texts, despite all the attention now paid to minutiae of layout; Carol Symes explores the special difficulty of editing a medieval play, The Boy and the Blind Man, whose manuscript tells a complex and partly untraceable story of successive medieval rewriting and performance. Two more technical essays explore the uses of digital media, in one case in the deciphering of a nearly unreadable text (William Schipper on fragments of a fourth-century manuscript of the epistolary of St Cyprian of Carthage), in the other in Web publication (Joan Grenier-Winther on her edition of one of the minor poems in the fifteenth-century Querelle des femmes corpus, La Belle dame qui eut mercy). One essay expresses suspicion of the indefinite expansion of material and readerly choice seductively promised by hypertext: Will Robins's learned argument for a 'disjunctive' editorial practice, in which facing-page editions of a text juxtapose contrasting editorial theories so that the consequences of editorial decision-making and scribal intervention are made visible. Read alongside Echard and Partridge's introduction, Robins makes the best case for a volume such as this, whose mix of methodological reflections...

Chaucer's Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus Dosia Reichardt Prendergast, Thomas A. , Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus, New York/London, Routledge, 2004; cloth; pp. vii, 180; RRP £16.99; ISBN 0415966795. This is one of those strangely unclassifiable academic works that draw one down unexpected paths. Thomas Prendergast starts with the actual body and tomb of Chaucer and in a fascinating journey explores how the corpse, and the reception and re-making of Chaucer's body of work, come together over the last seven centuries. Prendergast avoids entering into a discussion about the editing of Chaucer manuscripts or the continuing debate about the order of The Canterbury Tales, but a summary might have been useful as an illustration of how canon formation occurs and especially since Chaucer has become synonymous with only one portion of his entire corpus, The Canterbury Tales. Of the 84 surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (55 of which are 'complete'), none is in [End Page 192] Chaucer's own hand and yet Chaucer's authorship has never been in doubt. However, scribal choices have been made on the 'original' tales and editorial choices have been made on the various manuscripts – either in an attempt to recover the postulated Chaucerian 'original' or to provide structure and sense for the reader who is contemporary to the editor(s). Only two of the extant manuscripts have found favour with editors – Hengwrt and the Ellesmere. The former is the earliest of the surviving manuscripts and may have been produced in the year of Chaucer's death as a result of which it is assumed to be the closest to the author's intentions. Physically, however, it is rather tatty, incomplete and has been rebound several times. The Ellesmere is a much clearer text and is the most famous literary treasure in the Huntington Library's collections. The pages are embellished with floriated borders, illuminated initials, and other decorations, as well as 23 portraits of the pilgrim-storytellers. These illustrations as a whole disappear from every contemporary edition, but Prendergast sticks to his equation of text with body and does not deal with the excision of such matter. The book really begins in Westminster Abbey with some anecdotes about the location and re-location of Chaucer's body, which had not been allowed to rest in peace after all. It was 'translated' to the altar tomb in the south transept by the mysterious Catholic Nicholas Brigham in 1566. However, a belief arose that the body had never been moved to the tomb built by Brigham and that Dryden had been buried in Chaucer's place. Problems of confused identity came to a head in the nineteenth century, at the same time that a controversy arose over the upkeep of the tomb. Dean Stanley had serious doubts about the location of the body and solved them by having a large stone cut with the inscription, 'NEAR THIS STONE LIE BURIED Geoffrey Chaucer 1400, John Dryden, 1700…' As Chaucer now stood at the head of English poetry his tomb was a sort of secular shrine, which could bind London with Canterbury, nation and religion. Prendergast follows the twin translations of Chaucer's body and his works – one to the altar tomb and the other, ironically, via Dryden's re-writing of Chaucer into the vernacular. Dryden did not want Chaucer to remain available only to an elite and was criticized then and later (by Hazlitt for instance) for pandering to the taste of the readers of his own time rather than letting them have acquaintance with the original. In subsequent chapters Prendergast looks at nineteenth-century responses to tomb and to text and at the last great 'purification' of Chaucer's legacy. Part of this involved criticising an early 'canon-maker', the antiquarian John Stow who added some 17 works to the Chaucer canon in his 1561 edition. The final chapter brings us up to date with modernist formulations that effectively [End Page 193] disembody Chaucer and the paradox that Chaucer, having been selected as the 'father of English poetry', becomes less representative of his age and disconnected from his own poetic tradition. This, however, may...

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts by Siân Echard, Stephen Partridge

The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts by Siân Echard, Stephen Partridge