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Review Essays

Philipp Roelli, ed., Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches

Peter M. W. Robinson
p. 221-244
Référence(s) :

Philipp Roelli, ed., Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches. Berlin and Boston, Ma.: De Gruyter, 2020, DOI: 10.1515/9783110684384. 694 pp. ISBN (hardback): 978–3–11–067417–0; e-ISBN (pdf): 978–3–11–068438–4.

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1This review is an essay (and a long essay) for two reasons. Firstly, the single book published as a “handbook” by De Gruyter, under the title Handbook of Stemmatology, is actually two books, and this review unpacks the history of how one book, with its own title, editors and contents, came to be published with a different title and editor, and explores the implications of these shifts. Secondly, despite the “handbook” title, which promises a complete and up-to-date survey of the subject, two significant areas of textual scholarship related to stemmatology are almost completely excluded from the book. This review essay attempts to remedy that omission.

2The first paragraph of the book (1) offers its own account of how the collection came to be. In the account provided, scholars associated with the series of Studia stemmatologica workshops, initiated by three scholars from the University of Helsinki and held in various locations across Europe (Heikkilä, Myllymäki, and Roos 2010–), determined to create an online lexicon of terminology under the title Parvum lexicon stemmatologicum (PLS). This reached a “first final version” in November 2015 and is now available at web addresses quoted in the volume (Roelli and Macé 2015). In the same year, the contributors to the PLS decided that they would write a series of essays dealing at greater length with various aspects of stemmatology. According to the account given by Phillipp Roelli, editor of the volume, in the same first paragraph, at that time he “volunteered to become the editor-in-chief”. According to Roelli’s account, the series of essays became a “handbook of stemmatology” and was published as such by De Gruyter in 2020. A reader might reasonably infer that Roelli became the editor of the “handbook of stemmatology” in 2015 and that, from then onwards, authors and editor worked together to create the collection under review here.

3However, this is not what happened. Firstly, Roelli may have offered to become the “editor-in-chief” of this collection of essays in 2015, but it appears that for several years his offer was not accepted. One can find web references to the collection as jointly edited by a varying group of scholars, always including Roelli — sometimes called “chief editor” and sometimes not. Secondly, all the way from 2015 and as late as February 2019 (Research Group for Medieval Philology 2019), the collection had the title An Introduction to Stemmatology in the Digital Age. It is only with the publication of the collection that it was denominated as a “handbook” and not as an “introduction”. This shift matters for two reasons. The presentation of events in the first paragraph is strictly correct. But the omission of parts of the narrative leads the reader to presume that something happened which actually did not: Roelli did not become “editor-in-chief” of a projected “handbook” in 2015. This omission prefigures more consequential omissions in the collection. Secondly, the essays in the book were written (with a very few possible exceptions) not for a “handbook of stemmatology” but for a collection titled An Introduction to Stemmatology in the Digital Age. There is no acknowledgement anywhere in the book that almost all the essays it contains were written for a collection which had a different purpose.

4So many of the essays in the book were written for An Introduction to Stemmatology in the Digital Age that one may review them as part of the collection as originally conceived. I take a personal pleasure in the range of these essays. In the late 1990s, I joined with Dick Van Vliet, then director of what was the Constantijn Huygens Institute, based in Den Haag, to found the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS), whose journal is Variants. Our primary aim was to provide a venue where textual scholars of different orientations could engage with each other. We had in mind the series of debates between Peter Shillingsburg and Bodo Plachta about different national models of editing, broadly conceived, at Society for Textual Scholarship conferences and elsewhere through the 1990s, and David Greetham’s Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (1995), which offers a series of accounts of editing across the entire range of textual scholarship, variously categorized by subject (the Bible, Greek and Latin classics, Shakespeare) and by national school (Italian, medieval Spanish, German and more). We thought that a European counterpart to the North American-based Society for Textual Scholarship would help textual scholars talk to each other. Hence ESTS was born and hence the journal in which this review appears was initiated. Hence too my delight in finding in this Introduction to Stemmatology in the Digital Age, within the covers of a “handbook”, accounts of textual scholarship across multiple domains. At the very least: many of the essays in this “introduction” offer a much-needed update of the multiple surveys contained in Greetham’s 1995 Guide, itself a collection of essays by specialists in each area.

5The first chapter of the book, following the “Introduction”, is titled “Textual Traditions”. It is edited by Elisabet Göransson, a distinguished Latinist at Lund University, and contains contributions by Gerd Haverling, Sinéad O’Sullivan, Outi Merisalo, Iolanda Ventura and Peter Stokes. The titles of the contributions give a clear sense of the conception of the chapter as a whole: Haverling’s title promises an overview of “Literacy and Literature” all the way from antiquity; O’Sullivan’s “Transmission of Texts” a survey of how texts were transmitted; Merisalo’s “Book Production and Collection” an overview of how books were made and preserved; Ventura’s “Textual Traditions and Early Prints” a focus on one significant area of textual production; Stokes’ “Palaeography, Codicology and Stemmatology” an account of three fundamental tools used by scholars of all these texts, all in under fifty pages. Not everything can be covered in so little space. In fact, four of the five essays (the exception is Stokes) focus almost exclusively on Latin texts. Of course, Latin texts are important: but to say almost nothing of the mass of vernacular texts (and indeed Biblical texts) produced in Europe in the period, and nothing at all of texts outside Europe (apart from a single mention of Vedic texts by Haverling; 11), seems an omission. Further, and most importantly, the essays have almost nothing to say of stemmatology. The Stokes essay includes “stemmatology” in its title, gives an excellent discussion of the other two areas referenced in the same title (palaeography and codicology), but does not address stemmatology at all (which is not surprising, as his area of specialty, Old English, has few texts which exist in more than one manuscript). Ventura does discuss the use of stemmata in some of the editions she describes, while none of Haverling, Merisalo or O’Sullivan refer at all to stemmatology. One might have expected, in a book on stemmatology, that in a chapter focussing on works in Latin, existing in manuscript and early print, there might have been some mention of Prue Shaw’s 2006 digital edition of Dante’s Monarchia, later published online in a second edition (2019), which I will discuss more extensively later on.

6As is the case for almost the entire collection, the essays in this chapter are deeply knowledgeable and very readable. Haverling’s essay is an excellent introduction to the history of Latin texts through the centuries. The O’Sullivan and Merisalo essays offer detailed instances of the transmission of texts and manuscript book production, with Merisalo’s lucid introduction of digitization initiatives (31–32) nicely supplemented by Stokes’ discussion of the impact of digital methods (49–50 and 54–56). Ventura reviews the first incunabula print editions of older texts and their use by later scholars, observing their consistent preference (which amounts to a prejudice) to base editions on manuscripts rather than early print editions — a preference corrected in recent work in patristic texts. However, one finds oneself wondering: who is the intended audience for this chapter and indeed for the whole book? The essays in the chapter are well-suited to a general introduction to textual scholarship and might be at home in an “introduction” to stemmatology. Their place in a “handbook” seems less secure. It is notable too that the Ventura essay is actually the first half of a broader essay. The second half (512–24) appears in the chapter “Philological Practices”, taking up the narrative about editions from the invention of printing and extending it through to the modern period. One might question the utility of the chapter divisions, when a single essay might easily slip between two distinct chapters. Indeed, the half of the Ventura essay which appears in the first chapter appears out of place. The other essays in the same chapter deal with general editorial and textual issues, whereas this essay deals with one category of editions only, leaving the reader wondering why editions focussed on early print books get an essay to themselves in this chapter, especially as stemmatology is irrelevant to most of the editions it discusses.

7The title of the second chapter, “The Genealogical Method” (57–138) promises to bring the focus squarely onto stemmatology. A useful introduction by the chapter editor, Odd Einar Haugen, reminds us that genealogical thinking about textual relationships did not begin with Lachmann. Once again, the essay titles within this chapter promise a comprehensive overview: “Background and Early Developments” (Haverling), “Principles and Practice” (Chiesa), “Criticism and Controversy” (Palumbo) and “Neo-Lachmannism: A New Synthesis?” (Trovato). However, as with the first chapter, the essays are not quite what one would expect in a collection focussed on stemmatology. Most of Haverling’s essay is, like her contribution in the first chapter, an account of issues relating to textual editing without a particular focus on stemmatology, or even on editing texts in many versions, once more with a concentration on Greek and Latin texts, treading again (very lucidly, and with sharply pointed examples) ground traversed by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson in Scribes and Scholars, first published in 1968 and now in its fourth edition (2013). Where she writes about instances of scholars in the period who demonstrate an awareness of textual relations among multiple witnesses over time, she is well-informed and succinct. One might have wished for less general history and more discussion of significant specific instances. The two paragraphs on Erasmus’ editing of the Greek New Testament (71) and the single paragraph on later editing of the Greek New Testament (73) could have been usefully elaborated. There is no such difficulty about the essays by Chiesa and Palumbo, which keep closely to their brief. Chiesa neatly contrasts the simplicity of the principle of “descent with modification” (to use Darwin’s phrase) with the infinite complications of how it works in practice. This leads him to suggest that it is useful to think of genealogical hypotheses as metaphors, liable to contesting interpretations, and not as statements of historical fact. Where Chiesa is mostly theoretical, Palumbo puts forward a historical perspective, beginning with Lachmann (repeating a point made many times in this volume that Lachmann himself was not a Lachmannian editor) and proceeding by analyses of the contributions of Gaston Paris, Joseph Bédier, Dom Quentin (with an account of Jacques Froger’s elaborations of Quentin), Paul Maas and Giorgio Pasquali’s critique of Maas. Of these, the discussion of the relationship between Paris and his student Bédier is the most detailed and illuminating, in revealing a complexity usually simplified in the common narrative of Bédier’s assault on Lachmannism as he understood it.

8Palumbo’s essay is followed by an essay by Trovato, entitled “Neo-Lachmannism: A New Synthesis?”. Here is where odd things start happening. Firstly, Palumbo declares in his opening paragraph that he is taking the narrative “six decades up to 1934”, the date of Pasquali’s masterly Storia della tradizione e critica del testo. Consequently, one presumes that the ensuing essay by Trovato might begin at 1934, but it does not: Trovato declares in his first sentence that his scope is from 1929 to the present. The overlap between the two essays is much greater than just a few years. Palumbo does not stop at 1934. He includes a pointed critique of the “New Philology” movement, deriving from Bernard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante (1989), and the last page invokes “neo-Lachmannism”, not as an introduction to Trovato’s essay but as a conclusion to his own. Trovato, in turn, does not start at 1929, but feels obliged to go all the way back to Lachmann and traverse once more the same ground as Palumbo. Trovato then tries to establish that North American scholarship has not paid attention to the “genealogical method” by an elaborate table (2.4–1), surveying mentions of European scholarship on Lachmannism in chapters of Greetham’s 1995 Guide. It is hard to see that anything is proven by the failure of (for example) Peter Shillingsburg, Donald H. Reiman and Joel Myerson, in their chapters on 19th-century print literature, to refer to genealogical methodologies typically used for ancient manuscript texts. It is also ironic that Trovato should attempt to establish that North American scholarship has ignored Lachmannism in a volume which completely ignores Anglophone scholarship on the genealogical method, as I will argue later on. But even odder is to come. The bulk of his essay, fully twenty-one pages (longer, on its own, than all but two other essays in the whole volume), is taken up with section 2.4.3: “a provisional list” of “contributions to the improvement of the method” (114), starting in 1929. One might reasonably expect a scholar at this level to connect the pieces into a thematic narrative, weighing each innovation. One might also expect that Gianfranco Contini’s work and influence over this period would be given more prominence than a single short entry on his concept of “diffraction”. There is a good argument to be made that “neo-Lachmannism” can be located in Contini’s thinking about editing, with his advocacy of editors as makers of “working hypotheses”, pragmatically using whatever tools are available to create and modify them, as mentioned later in the collection by Frédéric Duval (462; see also Pugliatti 1998). Indeed, a list could be made, including key publications or events not present in what Trovato himself recognizes as a “personal and subjective” list, such as George Kane’s landmark assault on Lachmannian editing (1984). Even odder: the “list” in the collection effectively stops at 2004, with only a brief note about “multi-text codices” and a longer report on Federico Marchetti’s startling claim, made in his PhD thesis (2019), that professional copyists of Dante’s Commedia make “significant errors” at the rate of just one every 800 lines. The ferment of thinking about stemmatics and textual scholarship provoked by the advent of digital methods finds no place in this essay.

9The final section (2.4.4) promises a discussion of “Neo-Lachmannism in the Third Millennium”. This section begins with a declaration that the “promises of amazing advances” and “polemical stances against the method of common errors”, made by certain unnamed scholars, have, it seems, “diminished” (135), being presumably withdrawn by the same unnamed scholars. One wonders who these unnamed scholars are. Trovato cites only an email from Odd Einar Haugen, editor of the chapter, as proof of this declaration, and quotes a blog post of mine as confirmation of the same (136), but neither Haugen’s email, nor my blog post, nor any formal article known to me, refer to any such extravagant “promises” or take any such “polemical stances”. The remainder of the essay does not attempt any definition of “neo-Lachmannism”, instead listing scholarly domains which practise some form of genealogical methods (several of which are dealt with fully in chapter 7, which is not cross-referenced) and ending with a declaration of victory by Trovato: what he calls “the method of common errors” will achieve, he says, “a vaster diffusion” and “a more conscious application” in the new millennium (138).

10Perhaps the oddest thing about this chapter on the history of the genealogical method is what it does not include. In chapter 7, “Philological Practices”, there is an essay by Ralf Plate entitled “Medieval German”, which surveys how German courtly epic poetry (c. 1200) has been treated by German editors. The essay begins with the most complete account of Lachmann as an editor I have read, emphasizing his eclectic choice of variants, unbounded by strict genealogical considerations. It continues with surveys of work by Karl Bartsch, Hermann Paul, Wilhelm Braune, Karl Stackmann and Joachim Bumke. Ironies and surprises abound here. Bédier’s advocacy of “best-text” editions was anticipated by the “Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters” series, from 1904 on. If “neo-Lachmannism” is to be identified with Contini’s pragmatic approach to editing, then Paul was “neo-Lachmannian” some sixty years before Contini. It might have been useful to have had this article appear in chapter 2, rather than 7. In chapter 2 it could have served as a corrective to the tendency of non-German scholars to write about German stemmatic scholarship as being completely defined by Maas (thus, Trovato in this volume) or, even worse, by A. E. Housman’s acid attacks (this may be the only substantial publication on stemmatics in English with no references whatever to Housman).

11Two other essays in chapter 7, by Frédéric Duval (“Medieval Romance Philology”) and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (“Classical Greek”), both include detailed discussions of the history of stemmatics, much of it duplicating (as Plate does not) what is in chapter 2. Palumbo in chapter 2 deals well with the “New Philology” as well as with the relationship between Gaston Paris and Joseph Bédier (Nesselrath offers yet a third view of Bédier). Duval, while repeating much of what Palumbo says about Paris, Bédier and the “New Philology”, offers a clearer and more complete account of “neo-Lachmannism” than does Trovato, and updates the discussion of “New Philology” to take in the recent surge in “documentary digital editions” (464).

12From this survey of the first two chapters, two common themes appear. Firstly, the individual essays, apart from the Trovato essay, are of exceptional quality. They are well-written and show deep knowledge of their subject. Secondly, there is instance after instance where the chapter editors and the general editor did not edit. There are many pages in the essays which lack any focus on the declared subject of “stemmatology”. There are overlaps between essays. There is at least one essay which seems to be in the wrong chapter. The Trovato essay is far below the standard of other essays and it is disappointing that the editors did not call out his fondness for “straw man” arguments, also permitting the lengthy and unfocussed “provisional list”. There is ambiguity as to who this collection is for: some essays are appropriate for scholars who know nothing of textual scholarship (thus the survey essays by Gerd Haverling and others), other essays for scholars who already know a great deal (thus the specialist essays on the history of stemmatics). One does not expect such editorial failures in a publication with two layers of editing, by the chapter editors and the general editor.

13One finds these two patterns recurring across the rest of the volume. In chapter 3, “Towards the Construction of a Stemma”, edited by Marina Buzzoni, the individual essays are at the same high standard as most of the essays in the first two chapters. Gabriel Viehhauser’s “Heuristics of Witnesses” surveys editions of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (c. 1200), including an account of Lachmann’s edition (1833), and with an excellent description of Michael Stolz’s digital edition (2022) — in which Viehhauser himself was involved, though this is not stated — which one could wish longer. It contains a useful few pages on online manuscript catalogues, though one misses here (as throughout the whole book) a reference to the transformative work enabled by the IIIF consortium. Caroline Macé’s “Indirect Tradition” sets out the case for looking at the many witnesses to a text which appear in “indirect” form: in translations, in florilegia, in quotations (including self-quotation), interpolations, adaptations, inscriptions and more. Editorial use of such materials is well-known in the New Testament scholarship (to which one might expect a reference, given the apparent audience of beginning scholars), and the value of this essay lies in the detailed description of traditions (e.g., the Greek Physiologus) which are less familiar. I will return to the two other essays in this chapter, by Tara Andrews and Joris van Zundert.

14Chapter 4 (“The Stemma”), edited by Tara Andrews, brings us to the heart of the matter. It opens with an essay by Roelli, “Definition of Stemma and Archetype”, which confronts (as does Chiesa’s essay) the simplicity of the fundamental concepts with their infinitely variable expressions. There are some surprising statements. Roelli suggests that a “hyparchetype” “is situated directly below the archetype in the stemma” (221), though acknowledging in the same paragraph that it might be situated lower down in the stemma, as the ancestor of any family group. A “hyparchetype” is better defined as the ancestor of any family group within the tradition, which might be directly below the archetype, or many layers deep within the tradition. This might appear a very slight difference, but on the next page (223) Roelli attempts to identify the fundamental evolutionary biology concept of the “most recent common ancestor” (MRCA) with the archetype. He then declares: “Here […] the similarity to phylogenetics ends”, because he claims that in biology “the concept of an original makes little sense” (223). If he is right, this demolishes any argument that phylogenetics might be in any way useful for textual scholars. But the equivalence he draws is wrong. First, there are cases in biology where the concept of an original indeed makes sense: witness the many attempts to locate the ancestor of Homo sapiens in time and space. Further, there are textual scholars for whom the attempt to reconstruct the “original” makes no more sense than it does for some biologist. Second, the phylogenetic “most recent common ancestor” is not just equivalent to the archetype; it can be equivalent to both a hyparchetype and the archetype. It is equivalent to the hyparchetype in cases where the most recent common ancestor is of a genetic group embedded within a tradition, as is “ð” in Roelli’s Figure 4.1–8; it is equivalent to the archetype in cases where all the descendants of the most recent common ancestor are all the members of the tradition.

15Armin Hoenen’s “The Stemma as a Computational Model” takes us deep into formal models of stemmata, building on graph theory. Hoenen acutely raises the possibility that the range of stemmata is so great as to render any one general model vacuous; yet there is value in particular models of particular phenomena. This chapter is usefully read alongside Chiesa’s subtle characterization of genealogical hypotheses as “metaphors” as well as Dirk Van Hulle’s essay, which I will address later. A question not raised directly by Hoenen, but one which may be vital to the discipline, is this: is it possible to arrive at a formal model of textual transmission? Matters such a model would address include: the likelihoods of contamination, shifts of exemplar, coincident variation and of different kinds of variation. Aidan Conti’s comprehensively-detailed essay on “A Typology of Variation and Error” might be taken as a step towards such a model, with its survey of the language used to categorize what most authors in this volume call “errors” but which are more properly termed “innovations” or “secondary readings”. An essay by Tuomas Heikkilä on “Dealing with Open Textual Traditions” addresses contamination, or “horizontal transmission”: the mixing of variants from different originals in a single copy, famously identified by Maas as disabling any kind of stemmatic analysis (Maas 1958). Heikkilä’s summary of multiple scholarly attempts to do what Maas says cannot be done is lucid and accurate, though one misses any reference to the use I make of relative frequencies of variants from “fundamental witness groups” (building on Froger’s ideas about detecting contamination) to determine contamination and its sources for Chaucer manuscripts and for the LauSC manuscript of Dante’s Commedia (Robinson 1997; see also Robinson and Shaw 2021). The examples given by Macé in her essay “The Stemma as a Historical Tool”, again of Greek texts less familiar to most textual scholars, will convince anyone who might have any doubt of the range of knowledge, skills and tools needed to cope with highly-complex textual scenarios. Her use of phylogenetic methods is interesting in its evocation of its utility in making what she calls a “tree”, not a “stemma”: it shows “only the relative textual proximity of the witnesses” (285). Chiesa might call this ametaphorical representation, whereas Van Hulle and others a map, as it will be discussed below.

16Somewhat confusingly, in this chapter both Hoenen and Roelli refer to “Greg trees” without explaining that, as I presume, these are trees derived from W. W. Greg’s notation in his Calculus of Variants (1927). The term is put in an open-space font in the text, as if a reference to a definition somewhere. There is no discussion of the term in the Parvum lexicon stemmatologicum (Roelli and Macé 2015), no illumination to be had from the index (despite the first page of the “Introduction”) and no links from the text to any discussion, anywhere. Indeed, one wonders what is served by this use of the open-space font, which seems to indicate only that someone in the editing process at some time thought the terms so marked were somehow important.

17Setting aside for now chapter 5, on “Computational Methods and Tools”, chapter 6 on “Editions”, edited by Aidan Conti, takes us past what stemmata are and how they are made to how they are used in editions. Odd Einar Haugen’s “Types of Editions” highlights the distinction between editions which seek to “reconstruct” the text on the basis of a genealogical analysis, and “non-reconstructive” (or “monotypic”) editions, which align with Bédierist best-text principles. A particularly surprising practice among Old Norse editors is to present a stemma and then ignore it in the making of the text (378–80). In theory, once one has made a stemma, one should use it to adjudicate between readings in order to achieve a “reconstructed text”. Yet there are many editors (and not just editors of Old Norse) who make a stemma and then choose a single manuscript and base the text on that, as if the stemma were not to be trusted. One recalls Macé’s insistence that, perhaps, a tree might not be a stemma. Some examples of Marina Buzzoni’s “Text-Critical Analysis” suggest that a tree is indeed a stemma, at least in the case of the three manuscripts of the Old English Heliand. Yet, even here, editorial judgement is required to determine the reading which makes sense, and many of her examples turn on the application (or not) of the lectio difficilior principle. It is striking how in every case she gives, stemmatics alone is not sufficient to determine matters. Judgement always matters.

18Franz Fischer’s “Representing the Critical Text” surveys how editions both in print and in digital form present text and apparatus. Among digital editions, he distinguishes between those which imitate print and those whose content, presentation and tools go beyond print. He includes useful thumbnails of various digital editions, including my Wife of Bath’s Prologue (Chaucer 1996), Michael Stolz’s Parzival (Von Eschenbach 2022) and Fischer’s own Saint Patrick’s Confessio (2011). One could wish this chapter were longer and more detailed. Several of the editions which Fischer references contain significant stemmatic materials, notably Shaw’s editions of Dante’s Commedia (e.g., 2021), which are discussed nowhere in this volume, as I will have the chance to repeat later on. This chapter closes with Tara Andrews on “Publication of Digitally Prepared Editions”. The account in this essay on current technical solutions, accurate and reasonably complete as of 2022, is likely to age quickly. Already, advances in “Linked Open Data”, built on “semantic web” technologies, are promising a step-change in the infrastructure behind digital editions: see the Canadian LINCS (Brown 2020–) and “Good Things” (Woods 2021) projects.

19Chapter 7, edited by Caroline Macé, is a catch-all chapter holding surveys of editorial practice across multiple textual domains. It contains essays by Christian-Bernard Amphoux on “The New Testament”, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath on “Classical Greek”, Frédéric Duval on “Mediaeval Romance Philology”, Ralf Plate on “Mediaeval German”, Alessandro Bausi on “Ethiopic”, Chaim Milikowsky on “Hebrew”, Christopher Nugent on “Chinese”, and Iolanda Ventura on “Early Modern Printed Texts”. From my point of view, these chapters contain some of the most useful and interesting material of the whole volume. In their lucid and compact summaries of diverse textual situations, they are worthy successors to the survey chapters in Greetham’s 1995 Guide. Macé did well to find such knowledgeable authors, who write so clearly. Of course, such a survey must omit much. One regrets that a chapter on Arabic texts was withdrawn at the last moment, and Macé (438) enumerates many areas which are not covered. Surprisingly, her list does not include medieval English: an omission which I will address later. Somewhat apart from the other essays in this chapter is Dirk Van Hulle’s “Genetic Maps in Modern Philology”. On the face of it, his expertise in “genetic texts” (essentially, editions of modern texts focussing on the authorial revision process) should have nothing to contribute to a volume on stemmatics, which is a completely different field of editing. Yet, his essay is perhaps the single most suggestive contribution to the whole volume. We have noted that Chiesa saw that stemmata might be regarded as metaphors, that Macé proposed that a stemma might not be a tree, and Haugen remarked that editors do not use stemmata to determine readings. Instead, Van Hulle argues that we might think of stemmata, however generated, as “maps”. Thus, a stemma does not represent an unambiguous genealogy. Like a map, it represents in part proximity, in part routes from one node to another. Just as in a map, one might suggest that a variant has travelled by the shortest route from one place to another, that is by direct descent from an ancestor to its descendant. But a variant might also travel a much longer route, by roads less-travelled from one distant node to another, as the result of contamination. Indeed, thinking of these figures we call stemmata as maps, not genealogical trees, accords well with how textual scholars (as shown by Buzzoni and Haugen) actually use “stemmata”: they are used as guides, not as iron rules. One is reminded of how the Greek New Testament Coherence Based Genealogical Method uses “textual flow” diagrams as road maps which the editor can travel from variant to variant in the way which makes most sense. It also happens to accord with the way shrub-like representations (“variant maps”) are used in several editorial projects with which I am involved: the Canterbury Tales Project (Chaucer 1991–) as well as Shaw’s editions of Dante’s Monarchia (2019) and Commedia (2021).

20The last chapter of the volume, “Evolutionary Models in Other Disciplines”, edited by Armin Hoenen, offers essays focussing on the use of phylogenetic/stemmatic methods by Christopher Howe and Heather Windram (“Phylogenetics”) on evolutionary biology, by Dieter Bachmann (“Linguistics”) on languages, by Jamshid Tehrani (“Anthropology”) on cultural phenomena and by Cristina Urchueguía (“Musicology”) on histories and editions of music. Howe and Windram are familiar from their work over nearly three decades, with myself and others, exploring the use of phylogenetic tools on textual traditions. Every textual scholar should note their caveat: “it is essential for textual scholars to use their experience in interpreting the results of phylogenetic analysis” (547). Bachmann’s essay is a model of both concision and readability. It would be pleasant if scholars engaged in stemmatics could avoid the conflicts which have riven the historical linguistics community. Tehrani’s essay offers a very clear account of Bayesian methods, and its outline of how quantitative methods may illuminate our understanding of cultural change reinforces the claim put forward by Howe and Windram for “phylogenetics” as a discipline applicable to many domains, from Persian carpets to languages. Finally, Urchueguía remarks on the late embrace of stemmatic methods, by musicologists, and on their use in ways beyond the establishment of a text, for example by Allan Atlas, to trace the origins of chansons as well as how they came to be formed into a collection (583).

21Had these seven chapters of the collection (that is, excluding chapter 5, on “Computational Methods and Tools”) been published together as originally proposed by the chapter editors, as An Introduction to Stemmatology in the Digital Age, the review would have finished here. My review would have noted the excellence of almost all the essays. I would have sympathized with the editors in their difficulties with essays withdrawn at the last minute and with senior academics who are reluctant to write to their remit. I would have commented on the structuring of some of the chapters and the distribution of some of the essays between the chapters. By definition, an “introduction” can claim a certain elasticity. The word “introduction” itself points to the existence of alternative approaches, which might not gain purchase in this first view of the topic.

22But that is not what was published. Instead, the collection is titled Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches (not “a handbook”, but “handbook”). Further, the published volume was not edited by a collective, comprising all the chapter editors plus Philipp Roelli, but by Roelli alone. On the face of it, Roelli was not an obvious choice to edit this collection, ranging so widely over so many areas of scholarship and including scholars from so many disciplines. He had worked only with Latin texts and had never edited any comparable volume. Nonetheless, he became the single editor and the group of essays formerly collected as an “introduction” appeared in 2020 as a “handbook”.

23An “introduction” is not a “handbook”. Nor is this just any “handbook”: it is a “handbook” published by De Gruyter. Over many years, De Gruyter has made a formidable name for itself as a publisher of handbooks. Indeed, it publishes so many, and so many in multi-volume series, that it is difficult to determine quite how many De Gruyter handbooks there are. A search for “handbook” on the De Gruyter website suggests 1,126 books, but some of these might come from other publishers, some might be double-counted as both titles of series and volumes within series. By another measure: De Gruyter declares that it publishes 1,100 books every year; some 73 publications in the last year seem to be handbooks (De Gruyter 2022). There appears to be a De Gruyter handbook for every intellectual discipline: for example, on “Nanoethics”, on “Empirical Literary Studies”, on “Zoology” (nine volumes), on “Pragmatics” (fourteen volumes), on “Flavoproteins” (two volumes). While there seems to be no general statement by De Gruyter available about their handbooks, one can glean from introductions to some of the handbooks published online what makes a typical De Gruyter handbook. For example, from the preface to the thirteen volumes of handbooks on pragmatics (here quoted from its appearance in the first volume):

[This series] sets out to reflect the field by presenting in-depth surveys covering the central and multifarious theories and methodological approaches as well as core concepts and topics characteristic of pragmatics as the analysis of language use in social contexts. All articles are written specifically for this handbook series. They are both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of their topic in the light of recent developments.

(Bublitz and Norrick 2011, v)

24Two characteristics stand out. Firstly, the handbooks aim to be comprehensive, to offer an up-to-date overview of the whole field. Secondly, the essays are “critical evaluations”. This is why De Gruyter titles each volume simply “handbook”, not “a handbook”. Once such a handbook has been made, why should any other be needed?

25Manifestly, these essays, collected for an “introduction”, were not written specifically for a “handbook”. This need not have mattered, if the editors (with the authors’ co-operation) had taken the opportunity to determine what needed to be done to turn the “introduction” into a “handbook”. Chapter 7, with its overview of the application of stemmatics across multiple textual domains, could have been expanded. The failure to deal with Middle English editing could have been remedied. Any account of stemmatics over the last century which omits George Kane’s assault on Lachmannism (Kane 1984; see also Donaldson 1970, 102–18), chiefly in his editions of Piers Plowman (Langland 1960, 1975), is radically incomplete. A chapter on Sanskrit texts, far and away the largest textual tradition of all, could have been supplied. Room could have been made for an expanded chapter seven by focussing the volume more sharply on stemmatics, removing areas which offer general introductions to textual scholarship or to computer methods (thus, van Zundert’s chapter 3.4). Overlaps between essays, the distribution of essays across the chapters and cross-referencing between essays could have been addressed. There is no evidence of any such revision, or even that it was contemplated. At the least, this was an opportunity missed.

26The gulf between “introduction” and “handbook” is widest in one key area: the treatment of computing methods. If the volume had published the seven chapters without chapter 5, that would have been adequate for an “introduction”, since there is enough about computing methods and digital editions in these seven chapters to serve for an “introduction”. However, the subtitle of the volume published as a “handbook” has “digital approaches” as one of the three areas it will cover. In the context of the ferment in digital humanities activity focussed on scholarly editions in the last decades, a reader would expect a handbook to offer a comprehensive and balanced account of computing methods, and the subtitle promises that. This chapter is fundamental to the “handbook”. There are multiple problems with this chapter, though. The first problem is the choice of chapter editor. Joris van Zundert is one of the leaders of the rising generation of digital humanists and has done excellent work in many areas, but he has never worked in stemmatics. The second problem is given by some of the contributions to the chapter. One expects that the first essay, “History of Computer-Assisted Stemmatology”, by Armin Hoenen, will offer a straightforward account of developments in the application of digital methods to stemmatology in scholarly editing. It does not. There are startling omissions. Vinton Dearing’s pioneering work on the text of Dryden, dating as far back as the Fifties, is ignored (1962), as are many other fundamental contributions in the Sixties and Seventies which Hoenen could have easily gleaned from Susan Hockey’s A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities (1980): a book apparently unknown to Hoenen. Where is Peter Shillingsburg (1986)’s foundational Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (1986) and his CASE collation software? Where is Wilhelm and Tobias Ott’s TUSTEP (2011–), also incorporating collation software, and Stefan Hagel’s Classical Text Editor (1997–), later discussed in Hoenen’s essay on “Software Tools”, both of which were used to make hundreds of editions? It is a phenomenon worthy of note that many editors have used digital tools to make editions, but not used them for stemmatic purposes. Hoenen does not note this. Scant treatment is given to the work done in stemmatics in the Netherlands in the 1990s, by scholars associated with Evert Wattel including Pieter van Reenen, Margot van Mulken and Ben Salemans, which resulted in two Studies in Stemmatology volumes (Reenen and Mulken 1996; see also Reenen, Hollander, and Mulken 2004). Both volumes canvas quantitative methods which do not come from evolutionary biology, and the failure to recognize that there are such methods is compounded by chapter 5.1.2, which describes phylogenetic methods as if they were the only methods used for stemmatic analysis.

27There are also statements which are flat wrong. The contrast Hoenen draws between CollateX (Dekker and Middell 2010–) and my Collate program (Robinson 2014), that CollateX “finally collates all by itself” (295), shows that he is ignorant of both programs. His stern warning that stemmatologists should “not readily assume” that phylogenetic methods are appropriate for textual studies (297) suggests that there are stemmatologists who actually “assume” this. Who are these stemmatologists? He names none, and I know of none who assume any such thing. But most unsatisfactory of all is his section 5.1.3, “Recent Developments”. This surveys several experiments with digital artificial traditions. It completely ignores the work done by multiple scholars on actual, real, complete textual traditions: thus, the work by Michael Stolz on Parzival (Von Eschenbach 2022), by Godfried Croenen and Peter Ainsworth on French chronicles (2010), by myself and Robert O’Hara on Old Norse (1992) and, with Barbara Bordalejo, on the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer 1991–), and by Prue Shaw on Dante’s Monarchia (2019) and Commedia (2021). Hoenen attended several Studia stemmatologica workshops, where these editorial projects were presented. Yet, for this chapter, those projects do not exist. It is particularly difficult to understand the omission of Prue Shaw’s editions. She was Contini’s student. Contini entrusted her with editing the Monarchia, knowing that she intended to use computers in preparing the edition. She is the only non-Italian, and one of the few women, to have edited a text in the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante. Her digital edition of the Commedia (which I presented multiple times at Studia stemmatologica workshops) may claim to be the most advanced and complete example to date of the fusion of traditional and digital scholarship. It is mentioned precisely once in the entire volume (not by Hoenen), and her edition of the Monarchia not at all. Her second edition of the Commedia is now available online (2021), so readers may make up their own minds. This one edition alone gives the lie to Hoenen’s assertion that “investigations with a closer link to traditional methods […] became rarer after the 1990s” (297). From this essay, one might assume that the application of digital methods to stemmatology had not gone further than a few somewhat inconclusive experiments. That is not the case.

28The titles of the next two essays (“Terminology and Methods”, by Sara Manafzadeh and Yannick M. Staedler, and “Computational Construction of Trees”, by Teemu Roos) suggest a clear differentiation. Yet, both authors write essentially the same essay: both describe the difference between distance and discrete (or character-based) methods; both describe maximum likelihood, parsimony and Bayesian methods, while Roos strays into a description of software, which is properly the subject of Hoenen’s essay on “Software Tools” (itself, a useful summary). To top it off, the best description of Bayesian methods in the volume is given not in this chapter, but by Jamshid Tehrani in chapter 8.3, which is not cross-referenced here. The last essay in the chapter (“Criticisms of Digital Methods”, by Jean-Baptiste Guillaumin) manages to be even odder. There are just two pages in which Guillaumin does what the essay title says: discuss various criticisms of digital methods, which he does lucidly and well. He then does something extraordinary. He creates a small artificial tradition of ten manuscripts of a ten-word test and then proceeds to use distance methods to create trees of that tradition. There are many problems here. There is his choice to use distance methods alone, apparently in the belief that distance methods are most appropriate for phylogenetic analysis of manuscript traditions. This is questionable, to say the least. Inevitably, too, the pages taken up with setting up and analyzing this “tradition” are pages not spent addressing the supposed topic of the essay.

29One may wonder: where were the editors responsible for this chapter? Did they not see the inadequacy of Hoenen’s cursory history, or the overlaps between the central three essays, or the irrelevance of most of Guillaumin’s essay? The omission of work done on major textual traditions by Shaw, Stolz, Croenen, Ainsworth, Bordalejo and myself, as well as by others, is contrary to a fundamental principle of a De Gruyter handbook: that it should offer a comprehensive account of scholarly work in the field, even where the handbook’s editors disagree with that work.

30Nor is this the only major recent development in the application of textual scholarship and stemmatics which is left out of the volume. All the scholars mentioned in the last paragraph, and the New Testament editing projects based at Münster and Birmingham, follow the same model for the creation of an apparatus. We may name this model the Canterbury Tales Project model, due to its articulation by that project (Robinson 1993), though parts of this model had been anticipated by several collation tools developed as early as the 1960s (Hockey 1980), implementing varieties of full-text transcription and collation, as did Gary A. Stringer’s variorum edition of John Donne’s poetry (Donne 1981–) and Peter Shillingsburg’s CASE program (1986). Here is a one-sentence account of the model:

This Project aims to make available over a ten year period full transcripts of the text of every manuscript and pre-1500 printed edition of the Canterbury Tales, together with computer images of every page of every manuscript and early edition, collations of all these texts, and analyses of the textual tradition based on the transcripts.

(Robinson 1993)

31Setting aside the irrational optimism of the “ten year period”, these methods, requiring the creation of full digital transcripts of manuscripts and collation of these transcripts to make an apparatus, are central to our work. There are fuller accounts elsewhere of how we undertake transcription and collation (Bitner and Dase 2021; see also Bordalejo and Vázquez 2021). There have been previous collations which sought to record, word-by-word, every variant at every point, notably in the Twenties and Thirties of the eighty-plus manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Manly and Rickert 1940). However, before the digital era it was not possible to create digital transcripts of every word in the manuscripts and then use digital tools to help create a record of exactly how at every point the manuscripts differ. The collation tool — now Catherine Smith’s Collation Editor (2018–), used by ourselves and several other projects, including the New Testament editing projects — is optimized to permit the editor to intervene in the collation (hence, “computer-assisted collation”). It is the editor who determines exactly how individual manuscript forms should appear in the collation (“regularization”), which different forms actually are variants, and exactly how the variant texts should be aligned against each other (see (Houghton et al. 2020), for the links between myself and the New Testament editing projects). For just a single line of verse, in some sixty manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, this requires hundreds of decisions by the editor.

32Further, the collation must serve two purposes: it must present the variants both so they can be most easily understood by the human editor and most productively analyzed by other digital tools. I find it hard to imagine a universe where these choices can be completely automated. This process is far from what most editors still do: create or choose some kind of collation base and compare each manuscript, one at a time, to the base, recording the variants either on paper or in electronic form using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or databases (330). Yet the Andrews chapter on “Transcription and Collation” makes no mention of Smith’s Collation Editor at all, despite Andrews having been at several sessions, during Studia stemmatologica workshops, where it was presented. Her account suggests that while my Collate software did indeed permit editorial intervention, “the current generation of collation tools” are fully automated (168), apparently on the basis that advances in these tools remove the need for editorial intervention. Nor does her brief discussion of transcription show any awareness of the particular requirements for transcription when it is to be used as the source for collation. Hoenen also seems unaware of the Collation Editor and of the approach to collation which it embodies. He lists just two collation tools, declaring that the only choice is between “manual” and “automatic” collation (329–30).

33This is not just failure to mention a single piece of software. It is failure to acknowledge that over the last thirty years, a new method has been developed for discovering and recording how texts differ. This new method (the Canterbury Tales Project model), of full-text transcription followed by computer-assisted scholarly collation, creates complete word-by-word records of every difference found by the scholar between the texts, after normalization of spelling forms and alignment of variants by the scholar. Further, the original forms and their normalizations are recoverable, opening up a new area of scholarship: research not just into how the manuscripts differ stemmatically (typically relying only on variants judged as significant after normalization of spellings), but how they agree and differ in their spellings. I have created data files recording the original spelling forms and how they were regularized for six sections of the Canterbury Tales. Preliminary analysis of the patterns of spellings suggests that, for example, different manuscripts were written by the same scribe, even though the manuscripts are far apart stemmatically. In terms of stemmatics, this process creates a mass of evidence of agreements and disagreements among the manuscripts far beyond that available from traditional “manual” collation, which typically focuses only on a selection of variants. Hoenen explains how the availability of massive amounts of data generated by DNA sequencing has altered biology, but denies that there has been, or ever will be, any comparable development in textual scholarship: “no input-data revolution like the one replacing chosen character data by sequenced DNA has taken place, and it is unlikely that something similar will ever happen in stemmatology” (297). But it has happened. The 100,393 readings in the 14,223 lines of the Commedia, and even greater numbers in the Münster and Birmingham New Testament projects, created by their application of the Canterbury Tales Project model, witness this change. There is an argument that the development of this new method for discovering and recording how texts differ is more significant than developments in how we create hypotheses about the relationships among texts.

34These two omissions are so egregious, requiring that so many scholars failed to see that the “handbook” omits them, that one asks: how did this happen? To answer this question, one has to look again at the foundations of this volume in the meetings of the Studia stemmatologica group, from 2010 on. Over the course of these meetings, it emerged that the sharpest and most persistent schism between attending scholars concerned the application of scholarly judgement in the assessment of variants. This difference crystallized around two words: “common errors”. For one group, construction of any kind of genealogy of the relations between manuscripts must have, as its fundamental first step, the determination by the editor of which variant readings are “shared indicative errors” (Maas’ Leitfehler; 4). Only these “errors” can be used in the making of any tree. It follows that the only people able to make genealogical hypotheses of manuscript relations will be those who can discriminate these “shared indicative errors” from the great mass of variant readings. There is much that is attractive about this view. It valorizes editorial judgement, which all agree is crucial to the making of good editions. It offers a powerful tool, perhaps even a shortcut, towards the understanding of how manuscripts are related. Instead of having to look at every reading in every manuscript at every word, the editor can focus on identifying those readings which are “shared indicative errors”. This is the basis of the “Barbi loci”: the choice by Michele Barbi of four hundred (actually, 396) lines of Dante’s Commedia in which, Barbi argued, analysis of the variants would provide a reliable base for understanding how all the manuscripts in the tradition — some 600 complete manuscripts and another 200 partial or fragmentary manuscripts — are related to one another (Barbi 1891). Roelli is a forceful advocate of this view (“the strongest tool for the endeavour are shared indicative errors”; 4), as is Odd Einar Haugen (a method “there is no need to defend”; 135) and Trovato (“the method of common errors which, not without hesitation, we have proposed calling the neo-Lachmannian method”; 138).

35I am not the first scholar to find difficulties in centring stemmatics around the identification of “indicative common errors”. Famously, Pasquali found Maas’ schematization of “common errors” so distant from what actually happens in textual traditions that first he wrote a review longer than Maas’ book (1929) and then his comprehensive Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1934). Indeed, Palumbo’s essay in this volume gives due weight to Pasquali’s criticisms of Maas (105–07). The medieval English textual scholar George Kane mounted a full assault on the method after he found it failed to give useful results in his work on the manuscripts of Langland’s Piers Plowman (Kane 1984; see also Langland 1960, 1975). I am on the side of those who doubt. Consider this statement from Roelli: “the existence of an archetype different from the original can be proved by finding at least one error common to the entire tradition, one the author could not have written” (223). This ascribes to the author the god-like ability never to make a mistake, and to the editor the god-like ability to identify every mistake ever made (see also Buzzoni’s “Text-Critical Analysis”; 385). As Kane’s collaborator F. Talbot Donaldson observed: if a scholar is able to discriminate original from error with such certainty, why not use that ability at every word and have done with the whole business of stemmatics (Donaldson 1970, 107).

36The power to discriminate just which “errors” are “indicative” also seems god-like, as the editor must choose which readings are truly “monogenetic” and therefore likely to have occurred just once in the manuscript tradition and hence will only be found among descendants of the copy which introduced the “error”. Further, the scholar must assert that the character of the reading is such that scribes will not restore the original reading, or indeed substitute some other reading — or, if they do, the editor will be able to show Contini’s “diffraction” at work, where a “hard” reading generates a range of readings in the same way that light diffracts into its constituent colours when it meets an obstacle. Accordingly, the editorial projects which have adopted the Canterbury Tales Project model concentrate editorial effort on the transcription and collation processes, attempting to achieve the most transparent and productive representation of all the variation across the texts, rather than on trying to select “indicative errors” and collate only at those points (see (Andrews 2016), for a similar approach). It is not that the scholars using this method are attempting to avoid editorial judgement. The transcription and collation processes require intense expenditure of editorial judgement; editorial judgement is required to “orient” the unrooted trees typically produced by phylogenetic analysis; editorial judgement is required to explain what we can learn of each tradition from all the evidence we have, including phylogenetic and other analysis; editorial judgement is required to construct a critical text from all this information.

37The stance scholars take on “common errors” and the role of editorial judgement determines how they stand on the Canterbury Tales Project model of full-text transcription and computer-assisted collation. If you think that scholars can determine stemmatic relationships from “indicative shared errors”, then there is no need to carry out a full word-by-word collation of every word in every manuscript. Just select those “indicative shared errors” and collate those. Indeed, as every such error by definition must serve to specify the one stemma which applies across the whole tradition, then it may be enough to identify just a very few readings as “indicative” and build your argument on those, as it seems Federico Sanguineti did when arguing that fully 600 manuscripts of the Commedia represent a single group on the basis of just four readings (Robinson 2012, 8; see also Shaw 2021, 50–67).

38I do not present these arguments here to establish that Roelli and others are wrong, and I am right. There are strong arguments on both sides. To speak just of practicalities, Trovato (2017) is right to question whether the expenditure of so much effort in transcription and collation is worthwhile. The Canterbury Tales Project is in its fourth decade, and is likely to require another fifteen years to complete the forthcoming A Critical Edition of the Canterbury Tales: Based on All Known Pre-1500 Witnesses, which I am co-editing with Barbara Bordalejo. The central importance of these two matters in the editing of large textual traditions — the validity of the “common errors” approach, the utility of full-text transcription and computer-assisted collation — mandates that they will loom large in editorial discussions in the next decades. This is a debate which must be had and this collection would have been an excellent place to have started it.

39At the beginning of this review, I noted that, from Roelli’s presentation of how his edited collection came to be, the reader might gain the impression that something happened which indeed did not happen. From the omission of any references to the challenges to the “common errors” method and to traditional selective collation, the reader might gain the impression that something is not happening which indeed is happening. The New Testament editions coming from Münster and Birmingham, Shaw’s Commedia as well as our forthcoming Canterbury Tales edition all counter the assertion set forward in this volume, which is to say that the “common errors” method is fixed and accepted orthodoxy, and counter the view that selective collation justified by that method is entirely adequate. The failure of this volume to acknowledge the existence of these challenges disqualifies its claim to be a handbook, and particularly a handbook conformant to the established De Gruyter model. The immense effort expended by the editors, including Roelli, and the many excellent essays in this volume are devalued by their appearance in a volume which is not what it claims to be. One is left to wonder how De Gruyter came to be persuaded that it is a handbook and how the Swiss National Science Foundation were persuaded to pay the substantial sum necessary to make the volume available free to all. Usually, open access is a great boon, but not when it gives prominence to a publication which purports to offer a comprehensive and unbiassed view of a whole field, and does not. Long-held models of the textual scholarship of texts in many versions are being challenged, as old models are refreshed and new models developed. The failure of this “handbook” to present these challenges is a disservice to the discipline of textual scholarship.

40There are many lessons from this publication. One lesson is that scholars should be aware of the context in which their essays appear. Like most scholars, when I accept an invitation to write an essay for a collection, I write the essay, submit it, revise it and think no more of it. I will not be so trusting in the future. For the readers of this volume: take what is good in the individual essays (there is much that is very good), as if it were the “introduction” which was originally intended and not the “handbook” which it fails to be.

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Peter M. W. Robinson, « Philipp Roelli, ed., Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches »Variants, 17-18 | 2024, 221-244.

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Peter M. W. Robinson, « Philipp Roelli, ed., Handbook of Stemmatology: History, Methodology, Digital Approaches »Variants [En ligne], 17-18 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/variants/1838 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130sn

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Peter M. W. Robinson

Peter Robinson is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. He has developed several computer-based tools for the creation of scholarly editions, and collaborated in the development of standards for digital resources. He has published and lectured on computing and textual editing, on text encoding, digitization, on electronic publishing, and on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Tales of Canterbury. As well as his own editions of Old Norse and Middle English texts, he has collaborated with other scholars on the publication of editions of collections of historical documents, Armenian texts, the Greek New Testament and Dante’s Monarchia and Commedia.

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