|
What
is mouvance?
introduction
 Editors working on
the vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages may be faced with very
different problems from the editors of classical works.
Traditionally, the
task of the editor of classical works has been seen as the examination
and (where possible) comparison of surviving manuscripts to identify and
eliminate those features of their texts which are scribal rather than
authorial, in order to 'reverse the process of transmission and restore
the words of the ancients as closely as possible to their original form'
(Reynolds
and Wilson (1974), p. 212).
For some medieval
vernacular works, this approach is arguably appropriate. There is no
doubt, for instance, that Chaucer in the late fourteenth century saw the
verbal integrity of his work as important, and felt that it was
threatened by the process of scribal transmission. Taking leave of his
work ('Go, litel bok') at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, he
hopes that the lack of standardization in the spoken and written English
of his time will not erode its poetic quality in the course of
transmission ---
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge ...
( Troilus and Criseyde, 5. 1793-6, ed. Benson
(1988), p. 584)
--- and elsewhere he wishes a scalp infection on Adam, his personal
scribe, if he doesn't improve the accuracy of his copying in future:
Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece [Boethius] or Troylus for to writen newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle
But [unless] after my makyng [composition] thow write more trewe.
So ofte aday I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape [haste].
(Chaucers wordes unto Adam, his owne scriveyn, ed. Benson
(1988), p. 650).
However, the textual
transmission of some other medieval vernacular works suggests less
concern for the textual integrity of the original work, and a less
clearly-marked distinction between the functions of author and scribe. Cerquiglini
(1989), p. 57, has argued that 'L'oeuvre
littéraire, au Moyen Age, est une variable ... Qu'une main fut
première, parfois, sans doute, importe moins que cette incessante
récriture d'une oeuvre qui appartient à celui qui, de nouveau, la
dispose et lui donne forme' ('The
literary work, in the Middle Ages, is a variable ... The fact that one
hand was the first is sometimes, undoubtedly, less significant than
this constant rewriting of a work which belongs to whoever recasts it
and gives it a new form').
top
Zumthor's
concept of
mouvance
The concept of mouvance
was formulated by Paul Zumthor in the second chapter of his study of medieval French poetry, Essai de poétique
médiévale (Zumthor,
1972). Zumthor noted the contrast between the relatively fixed texts
found in manuscripts of the works of some named late-medieval French
poets (Charles d'Orléans, Guillaume de Machaut) and the much more
common medieval combination of authorial anonymity (or near-anonymity)
and a high level of textual variation, which might involve not only
modifications of dialect and wording but more substantial rewriting and the
loss, replacement, or rearrangement of whole sections of a work.
He used the term mouvance to describe this textual mobility.
Zumthor argued that
anonymity and textual variation were connected: medieval vernacular
works were not normally regarded as the intellectual property of a
single, named author, and might be indefinitely reworked by others,
passing through a series of different 'états du texte' ('textual
states')
(p. 72). The modern emphasis on 'textual authenticity' (i.e. the attempt
to reconstruct the author's original as the only authentic version of
the text) was therefore anachronistic as an editorial approach, ignoring
the 'mobilité essentielle du texte médiéval' ('the essential mobility
of the medieval text', p. 71). To avoid this anachronism, our concept of
the medieval 'work' (oeuvre) needed to be redefined.
Diagram:
'work' and
'text'
(based on the diagram
in Zumthor
(1972), p. 73)
Zumthor emphasised
that the term 'work' (oeuvre) in this diagram should not be
identified with the archetype in the traditional editorial diagram of manuscript
relationships, the stemma. It represented not the historical
antecedent of the surviving manuscripts, but 'l'unité complexe ... que
constitue la collectivité des
versions en manifestant la matérialité; la synthèse des signes
employés par les "auteurs" successifs (chanteurs, récitants,
copistes) et de la litteralité des textes ... L'oeuvre est
fondamentalement mouvante' (p. 73) ( 'the complex unity
constituted by the collectivity of its material versions;
the synthesis of the signs employed by the successive
"authors" (singers, reciters, copyists) and of the literality
of the texts .... The work is fundamentally mobile'). The 'work' was not
static, a chronological starting-point for the process of manuscript
transmission, but dynamic, passing in the course of its transmission
through phases of growth, transformation, and decline.
Zumthor explained mouvance
as a product of the oral
culture of the Middle Ages, an 'intervocal' (as opposed to 'intertextual')
network offering access to a variety of possible resources for poetic
composition; the different realizations of a 'work' reflected a
continuing interaction between written and oral culture at each stage of
transmission (see the section on 'Intervocalité et mouvance' in La
lettre et la voix (Zumthor
(1987)), pp. 160-8).
top
later
developments
Some more recent
textual theorists have explored similar issues, questioning the textual
'authority' of the medieval vernacular author and, more generally,
examining the ways in which the creation of a 'work' might be seen as a
communal process extending over time rather than than an individual act
of literary production.
Jerome J.
McGann, for
instance, argued in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (McGann
(1983)) that even modern literary works 'are fundamentally social
rather than personal or psychological products' (p. 43). 'The fully
authoritative text is . . . always one which has been socially produced;
as a result, the critical standard for what constitutes
authoritativeness cannot rest with the author and his intentions alone'
(p. 75). The role of printers, editors, even friends, in the production
of successive stages of a literary work needs to be taken into account;
and the printed version of an author's draft may offer opportunities not
only for contamination but for decontamination ('Authors' works are are
typically clearer and more accessible when they appear in print', p.
41).
Two books, one
French, one English, can be used to illustrate approaches to the
specific problems of editing medieval works ...
top
Cerquiglini,
Éloge de
la variante
(1989)
Bernard
Cerquiglini,
in his brief, witty, and incisive 'critical history of philology', Éloge de
la variante (Cerquiglini
(1989)), offers a post-structuralist sequel to Zumthor's work. He
avoids Zumthor's 'beau terme de mouvance' because of its
association in Zumthor's work with oral culture, preferring the term variance
(p. 120, n. 19). His emphasis is less on the relationship between oral
and written than on the relationship between the varying written
realizations of medieval vernacular works, and the implication of their
variance for the medieval concept of textual authority. Like Zumthor, he
sees this purposeful variation (the scribe's 'intervention consciente',
p. 79) as intrinsic to the transmission of medieval Romance works.
Cerquiglini argues that it is anachronistic to see works of this
kind as the intellectual property of a single author, textually fixed at
the 'moment unique où la voix de l'auteur, que l'on suppose, se noua à
la main du premier scribe, dictant la version authentique, première et
originelle' (p. 58) ('[the] unique moment when the imagined voice of the
author linked itself with the hand of the first scribe, dictating the
first, authentic, and original version' ). In taking all manuscript
variants as errors, the editors of medieval vernacular works have
misunderstood their essential nature: 'Dans l'authenticité
généralisée de l'oeuvre médiévale, la philologie n'a vu qu'une
authenticité perdue' (p. 58) ('In the generalized authenticity of the
medieval work, philology has seen only a lost authenticity').
Cerquiglini also
questions (referring to the discussion of Kane and Donaldson's edition
of Piers Plowman in Patterson(1985);
see further Conclusions, below)
the assumption in much textual criticism of an 'auteur transcendant ...
[qui] tranche absolument, par l'unicité de sa conception,
l'opacité de son oeuvre (argument de la lectio difficilior), la
qualité de sa langue, avec la diversité scribale, ignorante et sans
dessein, qui pluralise l'oeuvre, en banalise l'expression, appauvrit la
langue' (pp. 90-1) (a transcendent author ... absolutely distinguished,
by the unity of his conception, the opacity of his work (argument of the
lectio difficilior [i.e.that the more difficult MS reading is
likely to be the original one]), the quality of his language, from the
scribal diversity, ignorant and unplanned, which pluralises the work,
makes its expression banal, impoverishes its language').
He argues that not
only traditional stemmatic editing but the 'best-text' method advocated
by Bédier
(1928), who preferred the conservative editing of a single MS text,
assimilates the medieval work 'au texte autorisé, stable et clos, de la
Modernité' ('to the authorised, stable and closed text of the modern
era'). Stemmatic editing offers an 'illusory reconstruction' of the
work, 'best-text' editing 'only snapshots' (p. 101); both marginalize
(literally as well as metaphorically) its actual variance, relegating
it, in selected and fragmented form, to the apparatus criticus at
the foot of the page. Parallel-text editions are an inadequate solution
to the problem; Cerquiglini sees information technology as the way
forward, since the interactive, multidimensional space of the electronic
edition can offer both more textual information than the printed edition
and easier comparison of different versions of a work. The production of
works electronically in itself mirrors medieval conditions of production
more accurately than print technology: 'L'écrit électronique, par sa
mobilité, reproduit l'oeuvre médiévale dans sa variance même' (p.
116) ('electronic writing, by its mobility, reproduces the medieval work
in its actual variance' ).
top
Machan,
Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (1994)
A similar approach,
applied to the editing of Middle English rather than Old French works,
appears in Tim William Machan's Textual Criticism and Middle English
Texts (Machan,
(1994)).
Machan argues that
the editing of Middle English works has been dominated by a powerful
'Humanist' tradition of textual criticism, 'lexical' (seeing the work as
essentially a verbal construct), 'idealist' (giving the authorially-intended
work precedence over its specific documentary realizations), and
equating the authorial with the authoritative text. The manuscript
evidence, however, suggests that this approach is anachronistic. The
work is characteristically treated as 'a nonlexical, not self-contained res
inseparable from the supplements of others' (p. 165): its verba
(words, rhymes, etc.) are a less important feature than its res
(content), it may be modified or expanded during textual transmission,
and its documentary realizations in manuscripts of varying content and
layout further modify its meaning for the medieval reader. Textual
authority in this period was normally the prerogative of the Latin auctores,
and Machan argues that the evident anxiety of some late-medieval
vernacular authors (including Chaucer) about the integrity of their
texts suggests that they had not yet achieved this kind of authority
Machan suggests that
a genuinely historical edition of a medieval work might entail
reconstructing 'the work behind a document' rather than an 'authorized
text' underlying the surviving documents (p. 184), taking into account
the social and cultural framework within which it would have been read,
and giving greater attention than at present to the bibliographical
codes (e.g. page layout, choice of script, illumination) involved in its
documentary realization.
top
three illustrations
Zumthor applied his
concept of mouvance to specific types of medieval vernacular
work, more or less closely linked to oral traditions: the chansons de
geste, romances, lyric poetry, and the fabliaux. The fluidity
of form and content that he noticed in this kind of work can, however,
be found in other types of medieval literature (although not necessarily
for the same reasons). The illustrations below offer a few specific
Middle English examples: from popular romance (Sir Orfeo),
religious lyric (see case-study),
and works of spiritual instruction (Ancrene Wisse).
popular
romance:
Sir Orfeo
Most undergraduates
studying Middle English encounter this charming short romance in the
text preserved in the 'Auchinleck manuscript' (Edinburgh, Advocates'
Library, MS 19. 2. 1), probably produced in London c. 1330.
It tells the story of
a harper-king, Orfeo, whose wife Heurodis is carried off by the king of
the fairies. He leaves his kingdom in charge of a steward and goes into
the wilderness to mourn her loss. After more than ten years of solitary
hardship, he sees her riding through the wilderness with a troop of
ladies; he follows her through a tunnel in the rock into a beautiful
country with a castle built of gold and precious stones. He gains entry
to the castle as a harper; there he finds people abducted by the
fairies, who were 'thought dead, and are not'. He wins back his wife
from the king of the fairies through his skill in harping, and returns
to his court still dressed as a travelling minstrel; his steward does
not recognize him, but welcomes him nevertheless for the king's sake.
Orfeo then reveals his identity and resumes the throne; the faithful
steward, overjoyed by his return, eventually succeeds him as king.
The Auchinleck
version of this story, however, represents only a single stage in a
sequence of narratives extending from classical times to the late
nineteenth century, crossing geographical, cultural, linguistic,
generic, and stylistic boundaries, and transmitted both orally and in
writing. The earlier history of this sequence raises the question of
authorship: how far can the anonymous poet who first put the story into
Middle English verse be described as its 'author' in the modern sense?
Its later history raises the question of authority: how far was the
original Middle English version regarded as 'authoritative'?
As the names of the
characters suggest, one source of the Middle English romance was the
classical legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Before the narrative was
turned into Middle English, however, it had already merged with legends
of the Celtic underworld, probably in Brittany (see Walter Map's
late twelfth-century miscellany, De Nugis Curialium (ed. James
(1983)), Dist. 2, ch. 13, and Dist. 4, Ch. 8, for a similar
story of fairy abduction, set in Brittany). There are references in
French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to a Breton lai
of Orpheus; and the Middle English version is introduced, in two of the
three manuscripts, by a prologue (lost in Auchinleck) linking it to the
Breton lais. Internal evidence suggests that the Middle English
version had as its immediate source an Old French narrative lai
(now lost) in octosyllabic couplets. In other words, the Middle English
version acknowledges its debt to earlier narrative, and probably owed
much to the content and style of its French original (with the possible
exception of the narrative motif of the faithful steward); should
it be seen as an original work, a translation, or something between the
two?
The Auchinleck MS is
the earliest of three MSS containing the Middle English version; London,
British Library, MS Harley 3810, dates from the early fifteenth century,
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61, from the late fifteenth
century. There are considerable divergences between the three texts, too
numerous even to allow an edition in parallel columns (the standard
edition, Bliss
(1966), simply prints all three separately); in particular, the
Ashmole 61 text has numerous omissions, particularly towards the end,
probably the result of oral transmission. Even the Auchinleck MS does
not necessarily reflect the earliest ME version exactly; its confident
identification of Orpheus's original home, Thrace, with the ancient
capital of England,
For Winchester was cleped tho
Traciens, withouten no
(49-50)
('For Winchester was then called Thrace, without a doubt')
is not shared by either of the later
manuscripts.
A
later version of the story still is printed by Bliss
(1966), pp. l-li, the ballad of King Orfeo partially
transcribed in Unst, Shetland, in the later nineteenth century: the king
here is nameless, his wife is called Lady Isabel, and he wins her back
by his skill on the bagpipes.
The surviving English versions of the story reflect, particularly in their
reproduction of names, the degenerative process of 'Chinese whispers'
which is an inherent risk of both written and oral transmission: Orfeo
is said in the Auchinleck MS to be descended from 'King Pluto' and 'King
Juno', in Harley 3810 from 'Sir Pilato' and 'Yno', and 'Dame Heurodis'
in Auchinleck becomes 'Dame Meroudys' in Ashmole 61. But the textual
variants are not entirely the product of scribal error; sometimes they
reflect the more extensive textual modification caused by oral
transmission (for a detailed study of the
combination of memorization and recomposition reflected in some MSS of
ME romances, see Baugh
(1959)), sometimes purposeful adaptation for a different audience.
top
Medieval
religious lyric
 Douglas Gray says of
the Middle English devotional lyric, 'It was not in its own time a
remote "aesthetic" literary form, but was an integral part of
the religious life of contemporary society ... more often than not the
impulse behind [the lyrics] is quite functional and practical' (Gray
(1972), p. 37).
The case-study
provides six different texts of a meditation on the Passion linked to the visual image of the
Crucifixion; an echo of the same work can be seen in a stanza of the longer
Passion lyric in London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, I
syke when Y singe, lines 41-50. Although clearly related,
these short texts show a striking degree of variation in content,
wording, and even length.
Although some medieval English
devotional lyrics have named authors, this meditation is anonymous; its
content is highly conventional, and the first-person speaker who appears
in four of the six texts is less an authorial voice than a meditative persona
for the poem's users. While the overall structure of the argument,
and much of the poetic form, are retained in the individual versions,
the high level of variation (whether caused by purposeful recasting for
aesthetic or other reasons, memorial recomposition, or the
rationalization of manuscript problems) suggests that the users and transmitters of
the poem did not see its textual integrity as important.
top
Works
of spiritual instruction: Ancrene Wisse
The two previous
examples could be seen as illustrating specifically Zumthor's concept of mouvance:
both involve works which, although they survive to us in written form,
reflect the continuing influence of oral culture in their textual
development.
There may be other
causes, however, for textual mobility in medieval works. The
early-thirteenth-century Middle English guide for anchoresses, Ancrene
Wisse, survives in a number of manuscript versions which sometimes
differ very considerably from each other. The work was paraphrased,
modernized, and translated into French (twice) and Latin; it was
revised---both by its original author and by others---and adapted for
different audiences; and its content was selected, rearranged, and
incorporated into other devotional works.
The context of Ancrene
Wisse is written rather than oral (see Millett
(1993)); although its author is anonymous, the authorial 'I' of the
earliest versions seems to be a personal rather than an institutional
'I'; and some at least of its scribes seem to have taken considerable
care to reproduce its text accurately (the late-fourteenth-century
version in the 'Vernon manuscript' (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.
poet. A. 1) is one of the most reliable manuscript witnesses).
The key to its
textual variation lies rather in its practical function as a work of
spiritual instruction; although it may have been valued for its
rhetorical skill, it was nevertheless pragmatically adapted, both by the
author and by some of his successors, for changing audiences and
changing purposes. This illustration of
an early manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra C. vi,
shows corrections (probably by the author himself) to the Cleopatra
scribe's faulty text, but also his modifications (explanations and
revisions) to the original version; a rather later manuscript,
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, incorporates more extensive
revisions---again probably authorial---for a larger group of anchoresses
than the three addressed in the original version. This process of
revision and adaptation continued through the Middle Ages, as the work
was modified for the use of nuns, of male religious communities, and
even of the laity.
The opposition in
'classical' textual criticism between author and scribe cannot be easily
mapped on to this kind of transmission. Although there is plenty of
evidence in the textual history of Ancrene Wisse (beginning with
the Cleopatra MS) for scribal 'negligence and rape', the transmission of
Ancrene Wisse seems to have taken place, particularly in the
early stages, in an institutional context where the functions of author
and scribe (as well as the intermediate functions of editor, reviser,
and corrector) were not always sharply differentiated; a possible model
for this context is offered by David d'Avray's study of the composition
and transmission of mid-thirteenth-century Paris sermons, Medieval
Marriage Sermons (d'Avray,
2001).
top
conclusions
The concepts of mouvance
and variance have been received --- where they have been received
at all --- with considerable suspicion by English textual critics; see, for
instance, Nicolas Jacobs' criticism of Machan's approach (Jacobs,
1998), which questions the historical accuracy of the claim that for
much of the Middle Ages there was no concept of 'authorship' for
vernacular works, and emphasises the distinction between 'creative
intelligence' and more low-level kinds of adaptation in the process of
textual transmission.
These objections
highlight two genuine problems. The first is the fondness of the
theorists of mouvance for sweeping, sometimes untenable,
generalizations; their approach may offer valuable insights into the
textual transmission of certain types of medieval work, but is it
really, either historically or methodologically, universally
applicable? The second is the question of textual quality: if
scribal rewritings (as Jacobs acidly remarks) are generally
characterized by 'dim-wittedness, literal-mindedness, and triviality'
(p. 5), is the editor obliged to renounce the concept of the
'transcendent author' and give them equal weight with authorial
readings? Might it not be intellectually more respectable, and
aesthetically more satisfying, to follow Kane and Donaldson's
approach to Piers Plowman (see Kane
and Donaldson (1975)), affirming the 'absolute difference' between
scribal and authorial readings, and the need to eliminate the former
from the edited text? Patterson elegantly (though not without irony) summarizes the Kane and Donaldson
approach: 'The scribes are many, the poet unique; the scribes write the
language of common men, the poet composes a language of his own. The
poet traces no conventional path but works out for himself the way of
genius, and it is the task of his editors to rediscover that way from
among the ruins of the manuscripts' (Patterson
(1985),
p. 97).
The two problems are
related: mouvance is more usefully seen as a significant aspect
of medieval vernacular literary transmission than as its defining
characteristic. The features which distinguish an oeuvre mouvante (authorial
anonymity, collective rewriting, influence from oral tradition, textual
changes for changing audiences or functions) are more likely to occur in
some types of medieval work than others; and the qualitative distinction
between an original 'authorial' input and that of later
contributors (scribes or others) to the textual transmission of a work
may similarly be more marked in some contexts than in others. The study of mouvance
is likely to be more rewarding (for instance) for an editor working
on
thirteenth-century Middle English lyrics than for one working on a major
late-medieval author.
The theory of mouvance,
however, has more general implications for the editors of medieval
vernacular works. Patterson, questioning Kane and Donaldson's exclusive
concentration on the reconstruction of the author's original,
nevertheless sees no alternative but the 'best-text' edition, which he
argues is an abdication of the editor's responsibilities, 'an edition
that, for all its conservative claims to soundness and reliability, in
fact represents an arbitrarily foreclosed act of historical
understanding' (Patterson
(1985),
p. 113). But the rehabilitation of the process of textual transmission
implied by the concepts of mouvance and variance offers
other possibilities.
Cerquiglini's 'multidimensional' approach
to editing proposes (as in the case-study
offered here) simultaneous access to all the MS evidence, with no single 'privileged' text. Cerquiglini's hope, however, that information technology would open up new possibilities for
'multidimensional editing' has not yet been fully realized. The 'years
of grinding labour' (in Peter Robinson's phrase) required for
multi-manuscript editions of even comparatively short works, and the difficulty of
obtaining continuing funding for large projects, remain a problem. Most
of the major electronic editions of medieval English works produced so
far have been (in Housman's words) editions in usum editorum 'for
the use of editors' --- manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, and
electronic collations (see the section on Electronic
resources in the booklist), offering much fuller information on the
raw materials for the editorial process than was previously possible,
but not the user-friendliness or historical overview of a comprehensive edition.
But other types of
'multidimensional' editing are possible. D'Avray's recent study of Paris
marriage sermons (which might be significantly modified by different
preachers, or for different purposes, in the course of transmission)
offers a possible model (see d'Avray
(2001), pp. 43-45): d'Avray chooses a single manuscript version as a
representative of the textual tradition (not necessarily the earliest,
and 'not a "best manuscript", though it would be perverse not
to choose a good one', p. 40), and edits it in the light of the
tradition as a whole, correcting where necessary, and recording
significant textual variations and revisions in other MSS in the apparatus
criticus or (if extensive) in an appendix. The forthcoming
EETS edition of Ancrene Wisse will follow a similar approach (see
Millett
(1994)), using Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 not only as
a
relatively correct text incorporating some interesting revisions, but as
a
vantage-point from which the earlier and later development of the work
can be surveyed.
Postscript: for a more recent discussion of the issues involved
in editing 'Ancrene Wisse', see the EETS edition, in particular
the section on 'Editorial Aims and Principles' in the 'Textual
Introduction' to volume 1, pp. xlv-lxi:
Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other
Manuscripts, ed. by Bella Millett, drawing on the
uncompleted edition by E. J. Dobson, with a Glossary and
additional notes by Richard Dance, 2 vols., EETS 325, 326
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 2006).
home
| contents
| search | top
|
