Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson, Eds.: Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century

VINCENT GILLESPIE AND ANNE HUDSON, EDS. Probable Truth: Medieval Texts from Britain in Twenty-First Century. Texts and Transitions, 5. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. xiv + 549 pp. This volume, proceedings of an Oxford Early English Text Society conference held in 2010, opens with an engaging account of EETS between 1930 and 1950 in which Helen Spencer rightly emphasizes heroic part played by Mabel Day, Society's principal officer from 1921 to 1949, who has tended to be overshadowed by great men by whom she was surrounded (19). One irony of this is that in list of EETS non-executive Council members (xii) fifteen of eighteen are male (two sadly now deceased). At beginning of twenty-first century, surely it should be possible to find more than three great women with an expertise in editing and a willingness to serve? Following an editorial introduction and Spencer's survey, there are twenty-eight further contributions in a collection that borrows a quotation by Eleanor Hammond for title, overlooks Celtic sensitivities in subtitle, and says as much about editing in twentieth century as it does about twenty first. It is divided into: From Script to Print to HTML: Electronic Editions, Practices, Habits, Methodologies, Praise of Variant: Why Edit Critically?, Editing Texts in Latin, Anglo-Norman, Celtic, and Scots, Scientific Texts, and English Case Studies. Much of collection concerns medieval English (mostly Middle English), despite reference to British Irish-language and Welsh-language texts (two essays); there is also one essay each on Latin and Anglo-Norman and two on (non-Gaelic) Scottish works. It may seem strange that chose to begin with digital editions but, on reflection, this is an inspired move. Bella Millett's excellent overview of perils of electronic editing in terms of technological changes, constraints of impact, and need for sustainability should be required reading for anyone thinking of doing such an edition. In his equally thoughtful essay focusing on Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) and Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA), Thorlac Turville-Petre, while acknowledging freedom afforded by an electronic edition, stresses tedium of computer tagging and notes problems of need to develop browsers and difficulties of access when libraries are reluctant to buy CDs and students expect free downloads. There is, too, often unrecognized reluctance of readers to use online editions: he gives salutary example of how a print version of The Destruction of Troy (2010) appeared after electronic one, produced eight years previously by same editor, had been overlooked. Thereafter, volume encompasses a range of junior and senior contributors, without any correlation between commonly perceived importance of a text and degree of effort expended on it. Possibly best examples of latter disjunction are David Moreno Olalla's dedicated listing of seventy-one texts of botanical Synonyma, something to which many will never have given a second thought; Peter Grund's plea for editing of alchemical texts, the largest corpus of writings that remain largely untouched by editors (428); and Helen Fultons equally expert discussion of neglected medieval Welsh prose history of destruction of Troy, Ystorya Dared. Essays on major writers, such as Langland (A. V. C. Schmidt on textual contamination) and Chaucer (Orietta Da Rold on stratigraphical analysis of early Chaucerian manuscripts), take their place with other discussions of editing process rather than being allowed to dominate. Indeed, Derek Pearsall (on variants and variance in general) argues that despite all fanfare of Chaucer editors (202), neither works of Chaucer--nor Gower--provide evidence of need for critical editions. …