Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

This book is a collection of six essays that were presented as papers at
the 1994 Conference on Editorial Problems, held in Toronto. Three of the
essays report on completed editing projects; the other three explore new
endeavors, such as the ongoing venture of publishing The Collected Works
of Erasmus. Each essay deals with a particular edition or translation,
and the material ranges from the registers of the faculty of theology at
the University of Paris to the Thomas More canon. Collectively, the
papers offer invaluable insights into the processes and obstacles of
representing 16th-century texts and contexts for a variety of
20th-century readers. The papers treat both archival material and
literary texts, and as such are of value to historians, editors, and
literary scholars.

Erudite and intelligently written, the essays demonstrate the necessary
awareness and sen-sitivity to the context of a text, both past and
present. James K. Farge’s contribution, for example, points to the
20th-century lack of first-hand knowledge of Erasmus’s scholastic
disputants in Paris during the first half of the 1500s. Most of the
current understanding of the conflict between the humanists and the
scholastics is inferred from Erasmus’s own writings, exhibiting a
wanting appreciation of the author’s particular political agenda.
Context is neglected because humanism is more consonant with
20th-century sensibilities than is scholasticism. Farge seeks to redress
this imbalance—first by shedding light on it, and second by providing
a critical as well as editorial edition of some of these scholastic
writings.

He also addresses the physical problems of accessing, reading, and
editing old texts. The focusing lenses on microfilm scanners, for
example, damaged manuscripts and thus were removed; the result is an
unfocused microfilm that further hinders the deciphering of the text.

Lay readers of this valuable and informative volume would have
benefited from the inclusion of a short glossary defining such terms as
“diplomatic edition” and “fascicles.”