ABSTRACT
WRITTEN FOR A MEETING OF THE Association for Documentary Editing at which Fredson Bowers was to receive a special commemoratory medal, my essay “The Place of Fredson Bowers in Medieval Editing” is obviously an occasional piece. The original conference title of the paper was something like “Bowers and ‘Ancient’ Editors,” a play on the running head (“Older Textual Criticism and Modern Editing”) of Tom Tanselle's survey of the editing of classical, biblical, and medieval literature (“Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Textual Criticism and Modern Editing,”), and was specifically intended to draw attention to my peculiar status as a medievalist in a panel honouring Fredson. The other speakers—Jo Ann Boydston for the Dewey edition, Frederick Burckhardt for the Darwin correspondence, and Matthew J. Bruccoli for the Fitzgerald edition—represented periods and documentary conditions in which the influence of Greg-Bowers copy-text theory had already achieved a distinguished exemplification. My presence, and my point, was to show that copy-text theory might similarly be useful in editing medieval literature, but that to date it had not been given an opportunity to demonstrate its potential value. Just as Tom had shown in his SB article that “ancient” editors were somehow different from the rest of us (for example, in their preoccupation with manuscript genealogy and their general lack of concern for authorial accidentals), so I now wanted to take that difference, and speculate whether it was a permanent and inevitable product of the documentary state of the corpus of medieval literature, or whether (again, speculatively) some aspects of copy-text theory could not be read into the “alterity” of medieval editing practice. As the interweave introducing my two Hoccleve essays has already shown, the marriage of Greg-Bowers copy-text with medievalist base-text theory and practice was not contemplated with any enthusiasm by most medievalists, and I had no serious hope (or even desire) that my celebratory piece for Fredson would forever change the editorial landscape of medieval studies. On the contrary, my assumption was that it was precisely because the conference paper and the later published version were highly speculative that we could regard the ultimate title as rhetorical, almost facetious. Fredson Bowers did not have much influence on medieval editing, and the great divide of manuscript and print culture, medieval and renaissance, still held.
