Introduction

IT COULD BE said that editing a medieval text for any kind of modern edition is an endeavour doomed to failure. In the case of medieval philology and hermeneutics it can be a necessary and sometimes creative failure that may lead us to new insights. Indeed, it depends upon what we think we are doing in creating an edition, or even reading it, as to whether we believe that edition “fails.” This chapter explores the virtual divide between some of the manuscripts of fourteenth-century poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut, and a digital archive of late-medieval, French lyrics, Je Chante Ung Chant, which contains a number of Machaut's fixed-form poems. I analyze the success of the archive as an edition or collection of poetry, and I look at the relationship between it and Machaut's works and question how, and indeed if, we can compare archive and original source, and what criteria we can use for judgment. In doing so I will draw upon the work of Toril Moi, whose thoughts on the nature of authorial intent help to uncover an implicit dualism in editorial theory, and offer an alternative view of the relationship between edition and source material.

The Challenge of Editing Medieval Manuscripts

Medieval texts and codices were not authored with mass, uniform copying in mind. Indeed, they cannot by spoken of as having “authors” in the sense of the modern book, since the process of creation was idiosyncratic and influenced by the scribes, illuminators, patrons, and even the bookmakers (although auctoritas was nonetheless an important concept—see Timothy L. Stinson's chapter in this volume). Each codex is a unique expression of its contents, as Stephen G. Nichols notes “the manuscript matrix is a place of radical contingencies.” For the editor of medieval material, trying to rationalize what can be hundreds of unique and multimodal witnesses into one black-and-white page of text is a task as misleading as it is difficult. The Roman de la Rose Digital Library demonstrates the complexity of the task: with around 130 digital surrogates of a possible near 300 manuscripts and early print editions, the Rose Library bears witness to over 300 years’ history of copying, transmission, artistic style, and reception.