Texts in motion

Posted by: MFLC Team 13 years ago

By Simon Gaunt

After all the excitement of being awarded a major project grant, there follows a period devoted to intense organization: setting up accounts in three different institutions, appointing the team, arranging schedules for meetings and events, exploring software etc. Finally, one’s mind settles in a more focussed way on the project itself. In our case this led us pretty quickly back not just to the research questions that had been central to our proposal but also (and somewhat alarmingly) to one of the basic questions of the discipline: what is a text?

Our intention had been simple enough (in conception at least): to map the dissemination and transmission of 6 major literary texts through time and space in order to assess the role of French as a pan-European literary language in the Middle Ages. Our corpus in the proposal had been defined simply by listing the six texts on which we had, with good reason, alighted: the Roman d’Alexandre, the Roman de Troie, the Tristan en prose, the Lancelot en prose, Brunetto Latini’s Trésor and the Roman de la Rose. But once we started looking at manuscripts, it quickly became apparent that if we persisted in defining our corpus by text in this way, we ran a serious risk of packaging the data in such a way as to predetermine, or even falsify our findings.

We already knew of course that many manuscripts do not contain a ‘text’ as defined by modern critical editions. For instance and to take examples almost at random relating to just one of our texts, the Tristan en prose, what are we to do with a fifteenth-century manuscript like Bibliothèque Nationale de France fonds français 99, ostensibly a manuscript of the Tristan, but with ‘interpolations’ from Alexandre l’Orphellin, the Lancelot en prose, and from Rustichello da Pisa’s Arthurian compilation? Or, more pertinently for our project in that the manuscript is of Italian provenance and much earlier, the late thirteenth-century BNF fonds français 12599, now composed of five fragments in two hands and including portions of Guiron le Courtois, the Tristan (but with some parts also corresponding to sections of the text found in Rustichello da Pisa), the Queste del saint Graal (in its so-called post-Vulgate articulation), and the Suite du Merlin? Even just on the basis of these two manuscripts, it quickly becomes obvious that any map of the dissemination and transmission of the Tristan even at an early stage of the tradition will require similar and overlapping maps for several other texts—not necessarily all in our original corpus—if it is to be grounded in robust data and tell us something new.

In other words, it already seems clear that we need to jettison the category ‘text’, at least as defined in practice by modern critical editions and think in terms rather of fluid textual traditions. We also need to develop a way of collecting our data that will enable us to represent how porous some traditions can be, as well as how the various permutations this produces evolve over time and space. Is this a daunting task? Undoubtedly, since it entails the redefinition of our corpus along far less precise lines than we had anticipated. But equally—like all genuinely exploratory research—it feels very exciting.