Here we have a prima facie context for the Tremulous Hand's archaizing glosses: the perpetuating of a glorious tradition of vernacular sermon-making through the copying of old texts and, in some cases, the creation of new ones in the old vein.
But let us not forget our earlier observation that the Tremulous Hand was caught between two linguistic codes, and that he increased his archaising tendencies over the course of his career, sometimes when he returned to texts he had already glossed. Perhaps he was becoming more "backward-looking," "antiquarian," or "nostalgic" in his attitude towards the sermons. Elaine Treharne has remarked that such descriptions of the compilers of the Trinity and Lambeth Homilies is misleading.
Both collections contain material which reflects the "changed theological and pastoral context" of the post-Conquest period Millett Millett attempts to describe this context in more detail through a comparison of the variations between the Trinity and Lambeth Homilies.
A brief look at her evidence helps to shed light on the questions invoked by Franzen's study of the Tremulous Hand of Worcester.
Lambeth was produced in the West Midlands sometime between the very late twelfth century and , and Trinity B. Millett identifies this as a period of "radical change in preaching and pastoral care," in which the "scholastic" style of preaching in the Paris schools converged with reforms designed to "improve the morals and education of the secular clergy" Millett , Canons from the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils were designed to strengthen pastoral care, and a growing number of preaching aids began to appear during this period.
Stylistically, the "scholastic" method of preaching made increasing use of schematic division and subdivision, a feature which is to be found in a number of sermons shared between both the Trinity and Lambeth collections. In particular, "the use of divisiones usually biblical distinctiones to structure the sermon as a whole rather than simply the subdivisions of its argument," is a sign that some of these sermons were composed at quite a late date Millett , The number of points within a divisio also increases over time, a phenomenon which Millett observes in the sixteen-point list of "conditions of confession" in Ancrene Wisse Millett , Following up on such phenomena, Millett concludes that five of the shared sermons are likely to be late compositions, perhaps based on twelfth century Latin models of contemporary developments in preaching.
In an attempt to characterize the environment in which these sermons were produced, Millett finds little internal evidence for their use in a pastoral context. The intended audience seems to have been mixed, sometimes indicating the clergy, sometimes the laity, or both.
External evidence about pastoral care in thirteenth century England suggests that even these communities included considerably diverse groups of people of all levels of education, to whom the sermons could have been addressed. According to Millett, "a diocesan pastoral context Millett argues that this last possibility links these collections of homilies with the Ancrene Wisse group of texts which expanded after in the context of continuing clerical reforms.
She points out that "the Trinity collection, the Lambeth collection, and the works of the Ancrene Wisse group could be seen as "marking consecutive, and to some extent connected, stages of a revival of vernacular religious prose produced by a broader English movement of pastoral reform, dating back at least to the Third Lateran Council of " Millett , We may at this point return to Franzen's own assessment of the implications of her analysis of the language of the Tremulous Hand and Nero scribes.
She suggests that. That is, somewhere in Worcestershire probably in Worcester itself in the first half of the thirteenth century very likely after and possibly in the second quarter , there may have been a centre for the production of vernacular manuscripts in which scribes were trained to produce, perhaps among other things, up-to-date English books in the local dialect from older, and sometimes much older, English material.
The most intriguing aspect of this is that two scribes who may have been trained in such a centre seem to be dealing with English material from very different sources and religious milieux and for very different audiences. Whether these two scribes produced their surviving work while at such a centre or elsewhere, having moved on to join, for example, the bishop's household or the Benedictine priory at Worcester, is not clear.
Nor is it clear what religious affiliation, if any, such a centre may have had. But further work on the dialects of these scribes and on book production in the West Midlands in the thirteenth century may help to answer some of these questions Franzen , Let us consider some of the similarities in this assessment to Millett's conclusions about the Trinity and particularly Lambeth Homilies.
We have a somewhat mobile authorship which caters flexibly to a diverse audience, reproducing and supplementing older material. These "authors" were trained not only to write a contemporary form of Middle English but also to adapt and update pre-Conquest texts according to the requirements of their audiences and the latest developments in pastoral care.
Such a "training centre" implies that there was considerably more use of, and interest in, vernacular texts—both Old English and new ones—than the surviving evidence has indicated to date. More importantly, the textual culture which begins to emerge requires us to re-assess our views about the relationship of early Middle English writers to pre-Conquest literature. In this milieu, the Tremulous Hand appears to be less of an aberration—a lone antiquarian working at a time when Old English texts were mostly unintelligible—than may at first appear.
Franzen's final words highlight the important role that philology must have in shedding further light on the vernacular literary milieu of the transition from Old English and of the early Middle English period. It is a dual role, in which scribal dialect and the history of book production are integral parts. This, we believe, highlights the perfect integration of the "old" philology with the "New", and the resultant synthesis of a "material philology" that has the potential to make significant contributions to medieval studies.
But for "material philology" to be more than just looking at manuscripts, it requires the hard-won knowledge base of the "old" philology, and no ideological critique or shift in emphasis can make those methods any less essential.
Thus it is vitally important that philological knowledge be preserved, and that a new generation of scholars be trained in the painstaking and complex methods of traditional philology. Otherwise, brilliant works like Franzen's will become merely the aberrations of lonely antiquarians working in a dead tradition, with the majority of living scholars unable even to understand, much less analyze or critique, the knowledge about lost culture that has been recovered.
Cerquiglini , — Our presentation of his material here is adapted from and partially inspired by Suzanne Fleischman's discussion in "Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text" , It must be acknowledged that there may have been significant differences in the practices followed by scholars in the English and French vernaculars. Whereas the New Philologists were primarily scholars of French literature, our perspective is based on that of English.
Contemporary Anglo-Norman scholarship, where French and English scholarly traditions intersect, very often has to rely on antiquated and reductive editorial practices. This career has not been dated more precisely than sometime between the late twelfth century and Franzen argues that the degeneration of his hand, if caused by a congenital tremor, might have occurred in as few as five or ten years , 7.
These, it should be noted, are the manuscripts cited by Treharne above. For clarity, we depart from Franzen's representation of the glosses and glossed items 'tylig': 'tilig' , using angular brackets for the Tremulous Hand's spelling and italics for that of the glossed form.
Since such spellings in the Tremulous Hand's glosses are not noticeably archaic, we omit them from our reproduction of Franzen's data. The Old English Anglian dialect region consisted of Northumbrian in the north and Mercian in the west. Since most Old English was written, to varying degrees, in the southern West Saxon dialect, this is the most likely model for linguistic archaizing in early Middle English. The consistent spellings in the AB texts demonstrate a continuity in writing traditions from the West Midlands from the Anglo-Saxon period until the thirteenth century.
For discussion, see Tolkien , — Cerquiglini Bernard, Paris: Cerf. Fleischman Suzanne. Philology, linguistics, and the discourse of the medieval text. Speculum — Millett, Bella. The pastoral context of the Trinity and Lambeth Homilies. In Essays in manuscript geography: vernacular manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the sixteenth century , ed. Wendy Scase. Turnhout: Brepols. What is mouvance. Smith, Jeremy J.
Tradition and innovation in south-west-Midland Middle English. In Regionalism in late mediaeval manuscripts and texts: essays celebrating the publication of 'A linguistic atlas of late mediaeval English,' ed. Felicity Riddy. Woodbridge: Boydell. Tolkien, J. Essays and Studies of the English Association — Treharne, Elaine. Bishops and their texts in the later eleventh century: Worcester and Exeter. An almost immediate reaction to the issues raised by Cerquiglini appeared in the unprecedented special issue of Speculum of January One needs to have lived through this period to remember the intensity of the reaction, linked as it was to the resistance to the new French scholarship associated in particular with Foucault, to whom the 1 Lerer , , reviewing the English translation The reaction of textual scholars was all the more pronounced because Cerquiglini had chosen a specific philological practice of textual editing and criticism as a focus for his critique, namely a rather dated, nineteenth-century practice, and an all too easy target to caricature.
At the same time, as Stephen Nichols has pointed out, a comparably anachronistic and limited conception of philology was current in North America. Obviously Cerquiglini had touched an already sensitive nerve. The two were still combined in an earlier generation of scholars, for example Eugene Vinaver, who edited Malory and wrote on the aesthetics of medieval romance as well as the theory of editing. In Germany we see a separation between Hermeneutik and Textkritik , although, again, an older scholar such a Friedrich Ohly practiced both.
The new method in literary criticism, werkimmanente Interpretation, moved away from Geistesgeschichte, the pearl in the crown of nineteenth- century philology as an interpretative discipline. As well, positivist Literaturgeschichte was challenged by Rezeptionsgeschichte and Rezeptionsaesthetik at Konstanz, introducing sociological and socio-aesthetic orientations. Moreover, New Historicism 3 Cerquiglini Busby d , The matter had become existential rather than a mere methodological dispute. And, as is common in such situations, even that which may be valuable or useful is resisted, resulting a circling of the wagons, a redoubt strategy leading to further isolation and a falling behind in a number of new areas affecting the interpretation of texts in broader contexts, such as literacy and orality, the status and function of texts, patronage, the text as a communicative act, the aesthetics of medieval literary composition, and its relation to the broader cultural paradigm.
Against this background, the ridicule of a dated practice of textual criticism was like holding a match to a keg of gunpowder. Cerquiglini obviously did not expect the explosive reactions he received, as is evident from his response to the reception of his work. Let us cite, for the United States, the murderous collection edited by Keith Busby, the review of which was cleverly confided to Mr.
Peter Dembowski : the equivalent of entrusting Jack the Ripper with a column as a court reporter. What did he expect? For the etiolated hulk of traditional textual scholarship to crumble at his clarion call? As already suggested, this academic controversy entailed a major ideological and generational confrontation.
The new scholarship from France was deconstructive and relativistic, seeing itself as progressive in its attack on the status quo and its academic institutions and doctrines. In the U. At the same time alarm is expressed at the discord in the house of Philology, with attempts to paper over the cracks in the walls, all this accompanied by dire existential warnings: What is at stake is nothing less than the survival of the discipline which should be precious to us.
Leupin , This warning has to be seen against the political climate of the times, with its threats to, or actual cutbacks of, philological disciplines and programs in North America and in Thatcherite Britain; in the Netherlands, then minister of Education Deetman proposed to do away with Papyrology, Post-Classical Greek, Byzantine Studies, Late Latin, Medieval Latin and Humanist Latin: all this in the land of Erasmus!
Yet it also had its artificial characteristics. Westra , ; Busby d , 86, Busby c , 31, n. Some even argued that the crisis was manufactured by the politics of rupture, and that the attention paid to it was excessive and had given it too much credence. This even led to a criticism in conference corridors of the special issue of Speculum which was felt to have been hijacked in order to publicise the new philology in North America.
This matter is all the more important since it determines the very manner in which an edition is produced and subsequently used. Post-modern philology dispenses with the notion of the author and the authorial text, and usually reduces scribal function to that of chaotic generation and inchoate variance.
Certain forms of literature, such as the chanson de geste, with its fluid verse form, its anonymity, and strong ties to an improvised oral tradition, lend themselves well to this view of textual transmission, but others most surely do not.
Here is another consequence of the unbending dogmatism of the New Philology, namely that it fails to take into account the vastly different circumstances in which different texts and genres were composed.
Busby d , 91 My own contribution to this volume dealt with the challenge posed to the editing of Medieval Latin texts by the new philology. Twenty years later we can assess its actual impact: there appears to be not a single edition of a Medieval Latin text that expressly espouses the ideas of the new philology.
Thank you. Dear Craig: I just got official word that the proceedings will not be published. I will publish my contribution in a journal. Your email address will not be published.
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