Uniformity and Sense in Editing and Citing Medieval Texts (Medieval Academy News, Spring 2004, pp. 8-9)

Henry Ansgar Kelly, UCLA

I find it disconcerting to read articles and books in which the author reproduces passages of medieval texts by slavishly following the punctuation, capitalization, and other editorial policies of the individual editors of each passage. The result is that coeval or identical texts which are cited for comparison look as if they come from different worlds; specifically, some seem distinctly "older" than others. For instance, here is Piers Plowman B Prol. 32 as edited by Walter Skeat (1) and A.V. C. Schmidt (2):

(1) As it semeth to owre sy3t . that suche men thryueth

(2) As it semeth to oure sight that swiche men thryveth

My own practice, which I would like to recommend to other medievalists, is to re-edit all passages to conform to a single standard, which is the same as that which I use when making my own transcriptions from manuscripts. But before I explain my rules, I would like to expose a number of widespread misunderstandings.

Note: The following observations and rules hold mainly for post-millennial Latin and for Middle English, and Old French and Italian. Editors of texts in other vernaculars (including Old English) may have to formulate other rules.

Common Fallacies

Fallacy 1. The idea that manuscript punctuation and capitalization is important and should be reproduced. For normal purposes, not so, unless one is tracing scribal transmission and the like.

Fallacy 2. The idea that medieval Latin should be treated differently from medieval vernaculars. Not so; Latin was pronounced with the same sound-values for each letter that the speakers used for their own languages.

Fallacy 3. The idea that i and j are two different letters. Not so: they are two different forms of the same letter, like a and a, or g and g.

Fallacy 4. The idea that u and v are two different letters. Not so.

Fallacy 5. The idea the medieval "positional" placing of i and j (using j only to follow i, as in filij and iij) is important and should be preserved. Not so. Doing so makes no more sense than insisting on the old positional distinction of s, that is, using "short s" only at the end of words and "long s" everywhere else.

Fallacy 6. The idea that the positional placing of u and v (using v only at the beginning of words) is important. Not so.

Fallacy 7. The idea that whether words are spelled with i or y is important. Usually not so. Both j and y are "allographs" of i. The Italians know this; they call j i lungo and y i greco. The medieval positional distinction of i and j (see Fallacy 5) gave way to a modern phonological distinction (see Rule 4 below). The medieval distribution of i and y was arbitrary, but in modern times it has become positional, at least in English: we normally put y in final place and i in all other positions. Lately, however, it is sometimes fashionable to do the opposite: for instance, spelling "Cindy" as "Cyndi." Note also the cutesy-pie commercial spelling of "Infinity" as "Infiniti" and "City" as "Citi" (as in "CitiBank"). Can "Infynyti" and "Cyti" be far behind?

Rules for Editing and Re-editing Medieval Texts

1) Use modern captitalization and punctuation.

2) Unless you state otherwise, preserve the spelling of the original, except for normalizing i/y, and respelling obsolete letters (yogh, edh, thorn). If, however, you wish to respell a medieval text (especially prose) entirely in modern spelling, for the sake of clarity and ease of reading, say so, and do it without any sense of shame or guilt.

3) Treat medieval Latin in the same way as medieval vernaculars (see the further explanation below).

4) Follow the modern (post-seventeenth-century) policy of distinguishing between the two main forms of the letter i/j That is, use the short form for the vowel sound and the long form for the consonant sound.

5) Follow the modern policy of distinguishing between the two forms of the letter u/v. That is, use the rounded (or double-minim) form for the vowel and semi-vowel sounds, and the pointed (or non-minim) form for the consonant sound.

6) When citing passages in which medieval e has been classicized to ae or oe, revert to the medieval spelling.

Thus, of the two versions of the line from Piers cited above, I would change Skeat's "si3t" to "sight," as in Schmidt's text, and change Skeat's "thryueth" and Schmidt's "thryveth" to "thriveth." I would eliminate Skeat's caesura point if I did not mark cesuras in other texts.

Let me say more about the treatment of medieval Latin. It is a mistake to edit line 646 of the General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as is done in the Riverside and other modern editions:

Ay "Questio quid iuris" wold he crie,

while giving Friar's Tale 1330 thus:

They han of us no jurisdiccion

—as if the Summoner would pronounce the first syllable of "iuris" one way and the first syllable of "jurisdiccion" another way. In so rendering the Summoner's Latin, the editors show that they are under the sway of Fallacy 2. Their false assumption is that iuris was pronounced "YOO-ris" in Chaucer's England. It was in fact pronounced "JOO-ris." The Globe edition of 1898 properly prints it as juris.

Modern Chaucer editors do not fully classicize the Latin tag, since they do not put Quaestio for Questio. A good thing, too, because otherwise their readers would have the Summoner shouting out, "KWIGH-tee-oh KWID YOO-ris!"

I would punctuate the Summoner's phrase differently, thus: Questio! Quid juris? It means, "Question! (pounding the table). What's the law?" It is a sure-fire way of stopping short any bar-room conversation.

The cause of Fallacy 2 is that most medievalists have learned the classical pronunciation of Latin, and they think that it is the "proper" way to pronounce all Latin. But the classical pronunciation was formulated (towards the end of the nineteenth century) only for the purpose of reproducing the state of Latin for the century between 50 B.C. to A.D. 50.

The Latin word juris would have been pronounced in French with a French j and in Castilian with the same sound as in modern French, Portuguese, and Catalan (not with the aspirated sound of modern Spanish "Jorge"). It would have been pronounced in Italian as if written "giuris." Note the two MS spellings of Dante's Paradiso 11.4:

Chi dietro a giura e chi ad amforismi

Chi dietro a jura e chi ad amforismi

(I have, of course, re-edited the MS iura to jura, in keeping with Rule 4 above).

In German-speaking areas, juris would have been pronounced as in modern German, "YOO-ris."

Letter

Medieval Academy News, Spring 2005, p. 6

I would like to clarify a couple of points that I made in my editorial manifesto, "Uniformity and Sense in Editing and citing Medieval Texts," which appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Medieval News.

Rule no. 6 has proved misleading: "When citing passages of medieval Latin in which e has been classicized to ae or oe, revert to the medieval spelling." By "classicized," I meant "by editors in postmedieval editions," such as those in the Patrologia Latina.

In other words, I am urging reversion to the genuine medieval spelling of each text. I am not advocating changing medieval texts in which ae is used to using only e. I maintain that the medieval spelling of the text should be kept, unless due notice is given that spelling is modernized.

My own practice is to change ae/oe (in modern printed editions) to e when the original texts date from between ca. 1100 and ca. 1500.

On the question of regularizing i/j and u/v, it is my position that doing so is not a matter of respelling, since these are "allographs," that is, different forms of the same letter, like f/s, as in the word feffiones (please pretend that small F is long s).

It is standard practice for editors of both Latin and vernacular texts (for instance, those of MGH and CCCM) to regularize i/j and u/v, whether by classicizing them (using only i and u), or using the modern distinction (i & u for vowels, j & v for consonants), or a mixture of both. For instance, R. B. C. Huygens in his various editions in CCCM silently classicizes i/j (spelling MS ieiunij as ieiunii) and uses the post-17th-cent. convention for u/v (spelling MS vua as uva).

Huygens does not think it necessary to refer to the question of i/j and u/v in his Ars edendi: A Practical Introduction to Editing Medieval Latin Texts (Turnhout 2000). He does indicate, however, that punctuation and capitalization are up to the editor (pp. 54-58), unless one is editing charters (p. 21). Manuscript punctuation, however, "whilst on the whole being unsuitable for modern readers," may provide clues to meaning, and should, of course, be carefully examined—by the editor, not by the editor's reader!

What Huygens says about too many commas (p. 56) is particularly important for Renaissance and post-Renaissance editions of Latin texts, which tend to put commas before every quod and every et. They should be struck out, like the two "breathing commas" in the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, (!) being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, (!) shall not be infringed." While we are at it, let's lower-case "Militia," "State," and "Arms."