Abstract for ICEHL XXI (21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics), 8–12 June, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Eastern Finland
Anni Sairio
University of Helsinki
Do editors of historical texts do what they say to the texts they edit? Although the best way to evaluate the philological quality of an edition is to compare it with the source manuscripts, this may not always be feasible, for instance in the case of correspondence where the surviving letters are scattered across the globe in dozens of repositories. One alternative approach is to compare stated editorial principles with the actual practices found in an edition. This method admittedly produces indirect rather than direct evidence, but nonetheless can serve as an indicator of how faithfully editions present manuscript texts. This is highly valuable information, since editions are used as data for linguistic research.
This paper presents a survey of 119 editions of English historical letters c.1400–1800, comparing their editorial statements with the edited texts. With 20 of the editions, the source manuscripts are also consulted, allowing a three-way comparison between manuscript reality, editorial intent and edited text. The results show that editors are nothing if not eclectic, and also that even “original-spelling editions” vary widely in philological quality. Differences found between manuscript texts and some edited texts raise critical questions about what can be considered to be a “good” edition.
The linguistic motivation behind this study is to source material for looking at the history of English spelling in handwritten texts. While EEBO-TCP has made it possible to survey the history of spelling in printed texts, no similar resource exists compiled directly from manuscripts. Suitable corpora compiled from editions do exist, such as the CEEC, but such “philological outsourcing” (Dollinger 2004) is generally considered to make them unsuitable for studying spelling.
In this presentation we describe a relatively simple, if laborious method of assessing the philological reliability of an edition and present the outcome of these assessments: how the editorial processes and their end result (edited texts) match with the manuscript reality. This method can potentially help increase the amount of historical texts available for research in orthography and other topics that require philological authenticity. The worth of this method is demonstrated through cases of spelling variation in the history of English.
References
Dollinger, Stefan. 2004. “‘Philological computing’ vs. ‘philological outsourcing’ and the compilation of historical corpora. A Late Modern English test case”. Vienna English Working Papers 13(2): 3–23.
EEBO-TCP = Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. Phase II texts available to subscribers only (until Jan 2021). <www.textcreationpartnership.org>.
CEEC = Corpora of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by the CEEC project team under Terttu Nevalainen at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. <www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC>.