Recalling that almost all manuscripts postdate the life of the author by decades or even centuries, one recognizes the manuscript matrix as a place of radical contingencies: of chronology, of anachronism, of conflicting subjects, of representation. The multiple forms of representation on the manuscript page can often provoke rupture between perception and consciousness, so that what we actually perceive may differ markedly from what poet, artist, or artisan intended to express or from what the medieval audience expected to find.23
The challenges posed by this conflicted multiplicity will be one of the recurring themes of this book.
The recognition that an early text exists diachronically in the different layers of its copying and glossing can also be extended to cover the text’s printed history. The tendency had long been to see the printed edition as a reproduction of the manuscript’s text, one that was either neutral or, as Didron argued, deficient. More recently we have come to recognize that the poem we read is in significant ways the product of its editorial history. By stabilizing the textual tradition and isolating “literary” texts from the diversity of their earlier circulation, traditional textual editing has produced an origin for vernacular literature. It has excerpted texts from their codices in accordance with generic categories that are central to Romantic philology, concentrating on those vernacular texts that most readily conform to the category of “literature,” secular poetry expressing the genius of a people and the creative imagination of the artist. Finally, it has grouped these works together around categories of authorship that often differ significantly from those of their original makers, whether poets, compilers, or scribes.
Unless we were to revert to the world of eighteenth-century antiquarians like Thomas Tyrwhitt, one of the first editors of Chaucer, who appears to have read the entire Roland in the Oxford manuscript just to cull information on medieval literary traditions, what we read when we read a medieval poem will be some form of printed edition—and the form matters. Medieval poetry has been shaped into modern literary canons through the visual design and interpretive apparatus of modern editions. Taking as his example the Vie de Saint Alexis and comparing various editions to the illustrated manuscripts, Michael Camille demonstrates how nineteenth-century philologists “erased all aspects of enactment—sound, sight, and sense” from poems: “Carefully classified blocks of print and their footnoted apparatus, together with clearly demarcated beginnings and endings, remade texts written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries into nineteenth century intellectual commodities.”24 The choice of titles, the connotations of different fonts, the treatment of illustrations and musical notation, as well as the layout—all these details of print bibliography are therefore of concern for those who wish to study medieval texts. The full range of the material support of any given text across the centuries deserves attention. Why then is such attention so often wanting?
Those who edit early materials, both manuscript and print, are eloquent in their condemnation of literary critics who accept a modern edition at face value without bothering to read its apparatus or give thought to its sources. Fredson Bowers laments that many readers show less concern for the sources of an edition than they would for the pedigree of their dog, while George Whalley warns us that “without scholarship the criticism of a poem may easily become a free fantasia on a non-existent theme,” and textual scholars happily furnish examples.25 Siegfried Wenzel lays out three decades of elaborate close readings of the enigmatic Middle English “lyric” sometimes called “How Christ Shall Come,” only to show that it is no lyric poem at all but a formal division of a Latin sermon into English rhymes.26 Jerome McGann has provided numerous instances in which a modern poem that critics think of as stable turns out to involve complex textual conundrums.27 However, the same reluctance to confront the material also extends to many editors. Classical stemmatic editing brought a curiously conflicted attitude to its sources, examining them in minuscule detail only to dismiss them in favor of a lost and hypothetical original. Bowers is characteristic in describing the work of the editor as “the recovery of Shakespeare’s true text from the imperfect witnesses of the past.”28 As we shall see, this attitude pervades the editorial history of the Song of Roland, which endeavors to separate the pure, original French poem from the taint of its Anglo-Norman witness.
Various explanations might be offered for this hostility or indifference to the material support. For some, it may simply be a frustration with the myopic interests of technical bibliography, whose learning is strung up like barbed wire to keep out the general reader.29 The suspicion is particularly strong among those reading medieval works that textual criticism, paleography, and the various associated disciplines serve as a professional rite of passage, guarding the old ways and excluding the new.30 For others the transcendental text is a principle of interpretive economy: the prospect of four or more Lears will dismay those who find the mastery of the Shakespearean canon a reassuring class marker or those who make their living teaching such mastery. Some see the editorial drive for a single correct text as a reflection of a humanist ideology in which literary discrimination is a mark of gentlemanly refinement and moral rectitude.31 For McKenzie, on the other hand, those who denigrate the material or physical book do so as part of an idealistic denigration of materiality in general, as he indicates in a brief but telling reference to the almost “Platonic distinction between idea or essence on the one hand and its deforming, material embodiment on the other.”32 McGann similarly classifies New Criticism as fundamentally Idealist.33 De Grazia sees indications of disgust at the carnal disorder of the early printed text, with its thick and smelly ink reminiscent of bodily secretions, and describes the efforts to redeem the book from its physicality as reflections of an incarnational need.34 Then too, to borrow a central theme from Shakespeare’s sonnets, the enduring stability of the text is a guarantee of immortality for both writer and subject. When parchment and paper molders, it calls this vision into question. If “Le Livre is the proven talisman against death,” then the physical book is a memento mori.35
Chartier suggests another reason for the hostility to the material support when he refers to the stable text as a representation elaborated by literature itself. Here it is not immortality but social order that literature offers, a world removed from the exigencies and compromises of daily life. “Gentle reader,” the text whispers. “Listen Lordings,” it cries. But the material witnesses tell a different story, their popular circulation or mass publication revealing the social situation of many a reader to have been anything but lordly or gentle. To turn to the textual materials is to break with the imaginary community of sympathetic kindred spirits and reinsert the text in the order of economic and cultural production, to “think it through as labour.”36 It is in part the texts themselves, then, that offer the lines on which later editors will construct them, even at the expense of the material witnesses.37
With medieval texts these imaginary communities often bear strong nationalistic overtones. This is the case with two of the manuscripts I consider. The first, Digby 23, contains what is often considered the foundational text of the Old French literary canon, the poem known by its modern title as La Chanson de Roland, yet Digby 23 is an Anglo-Norman manuscript, copied and read in communities located in what is now called England. Marie de France, too, has been claimed for French literature as a writer who “gazes from the elegant window of a truly French castle upon a legendary and mythical landscape.”38 But this French castle is no less mythical, hovering somewhere between the modern French nation and the medieval diaspora where some version of romans was the language of cultural prestige but not of national union. With works like the Song of Roland or Marie’s lais, it is the perdurability of the nation and its literary heritage that is at stake, and this can only be undermined by a serious consideration of the manuscripts’ earlier social milieux.
To these varying explanations for the occlusion of the material, we must add one other: the condition of modern mechanical printing has so fused with our understanding of what constitutes a text that it has become difficult to untangle one from the other. The force of mechanical reproduction has allowed the printed text to approach both the stability of the transcendental text