ABSTRACT

One of the most exciting developments in literary and cultural studies over the past two decades has been the rediscovery of disciplines which might be called philological. Of course, these disciplines – codicology, palæography, material bibliography, critical editing, and the like – have never been dormant, nor divorced from literary scholarship. What is relatively new, however, is the extent to which numerous recent publications and conferences explicitly seek to integrate philology and textual analysis, and the manner in which this integration is carried out.1 The minutiæ of a text’s transmission are increasingly considered not as a rather unpalatable prerequisite to the study of its thematic and formal properties – as something to be left, if at all possible, to someone else – but as decisively infl uencing this study. Progress has been uneven across the fi eld of literary studies: some medievalists have quite justifi ably observed that this ‘new’ approach has always been the practice of good scholars, while certain efforts at integration involve little more than a thin veneer of philology sprayed onto a kernel of literary analysis.2 As in all academic trends, the role of what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital – the acquisition of which entails, among other things, participation in initiatives perceived as prestigious – plays its part.3 But this does not invalidate the

1 Important examples include the conferences of the Early Book Society, founded in 1987, and the sequence of cross-disciplinary conferences ‘Ma(r)king the Text’ (Cambridge, 1998), ‘Re-Ma(r)king the Text’ (St Andrews, 2001), and ‘Texts, Ma(r)kers, Markets’ (York, 2003). Selected publications from the Cambridge and St Andrews conferences have appeared as Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley and Anne C. Henry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), and in TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, 15 (2002), respectively. Among numerous publications on specifi c periods, literatures, or authors, see Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), and Rachel Lynn Schmidt, Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999).