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Declension in Twelfth-Century Occitan: On Editing Early Troubadours, With Particular Reference to Marcabru

In the late nineteenth century scholars imbued in neoclassicism assumed that the system of declension in two cases in medieval French and Occitan must have functioned, in principle, as flawlessly as did the system of declension in five cases in Classical Latin. Therefore these scholars felt justified in correcting aberrations from the presumed norms, attributing the aberrations to scribal error. When such editorial confidence extended beyond declension onto every aspect of morphology, orthography, and dialect, it produced the so-called "scientific" editorial practice employed by Gaston Paris in his edition of the Vie de saint Alexis (1872), which he restored to its supposedly authentic eleventh-century Francien language on the basis of two manuscripts written a century later in Anglo-Norman and two others written two centuries later in Francien.1 To gauge how obsolete this method has become one may consider the abundance of more recent editions of the Alexis.2 The caricature of Gaston Paris as "Monsieur Procuste, philologue" that we owe to Bernard Cerquiglini (1989) represents a popularization for our age, a time when the axioms of neoclassical philology have lost so much of their former effect that they seem little more than curious reminders of a distant and foreign era.3