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Mind and Textual Matter

The things which the textual critic has to talk about are not things which present themselves clearly and sharply to the mind. . . . Mistakes are therefore made which could not be made if the matter under discussion were any corporeal object, having qualities perceptible to the senses.” This remark, made nearly ninety years ago by A. E. Housman in his well-known address “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” suggests the crux of many recent editorial discussions, in which some of editing’s most basic humanistic assumptions have been challenged with arguments infl uenced by the movement sometimes called “postmodern” literary theory.1 Many of the challengers are themselves editors, and were motivated at least in part by a sense that textual criticism was both technically overdeveloped as a fi eld and falsely estranged from literary criticism. An expressed interest in drawing textual and literary criticism nearer to one another (as if they were not already interpenetrated dimensions of the same discipline) was thus a prominent feature of many of the discussions. A second interest, also of an integrating character, was in surmounting the perceived national or linguistic isolation of Anglo-American editorial scholarship through an engagement with editorial traditions of other countries, especially Germany and France. Movements to open intellectual horizons in this age of overly determined specialization are to be welcomed, and this one has had its benefi ts, as readers of Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research can attest.2 Many of the two dozen scholars whom David Greetham assembled for this unusual project exhibited a felt sense of responsibility in their contributions, which taken together provide Anglophone students with a useful history of textual criticism across several periods of time and many languages. Other expressions of dissatisfaction with a perceived narrowness in the editorial status quo have been less progressive, however, including