Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus.

Textual editors comprise a small and little rewarded community, but humanist scholarship depends utterly on them. Erika Rummel here presents six essays from the Thirtieth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, this one in 1994 dedicated to the "age of Erasmus." The slim volume is prefaced by her graceful introduction.

Here is a book to delight those of us who have labored long to establish texts from sources centuries old, tracking the habits and the mistakes of anonymous secretaries, copyists, and printers who have been dust for centuries in their unmarked graves. The textual editor is a kind of resurrection person, not in the older English sense of the grave robber, but in the scholarly effort to raise from difficult and inaccessible places the fullness of life of earlier ages by establishing and publishing texts by which those ages explained themselves.

Modern textual editing is collaborative, undertaken by small bands of addicts joined in communities of friendship and mutual aid that few other scholars can duplicate or even understand. All these essays mingle warmly recalled anecdotes with accounts of editorial problems.

James K. McConica's "Erasmus in Amsterdam and Toronto" recalls the intimate mentor-apprentice relation among editors, with older generations teaching younger scholars who rise to be mentors themselves. McConica describes the movement of editors from the monastery to universities, carrying the tradition of the Bollandists, the Maurists, and the Benedictines from devoted clergy to more secular disciples.

In harmony with McConica, Robert M. Kingdon recalls landing as a graduate student in Geneva more than forty years ago to write his dissertation, needing the names of "missionaries" sent from Geneva to France between 1555 and 1562: "The day I arrived in the Geneva State Archives I called up my first volume of registers and discovered to my horror that I could not read it."

What to do? Kingdon had to master paleography, but who was to teach him? A Genevan scholar, Paul-F. Geisendorf assured young Kingdon that he would be in the archives almost every day to help him. Says Kingdon, "M. Geisendorf and M. Vaucher, the director of the Archives, gave me what amounted to an intensive personal course in paleography." Not surprisingly he speaks glowingly of those apprentices to whom he, too, has been mentor in his distinguished career.

Erasmus gets more attention than anyone else in these essays. As McConica remarks, "It is probable that at this moment there is more scholarly energy and time being expended on the editing of Erasmus than on any other historical author." James K. Farge, in his essay "Texts and Context of a Mentalite: The Parisian University Milieu in the Age of Erasmus," provides tantalizing vignettes of fierce opposition to Erasmus within the University of Paris. Farge's editorial work has shown how conservative the Faculty of Theology in Paris was and how the Parlement of Paris acted as "its right arm," often in contradiction to royal command. Yet his essay abounds with the sense of how much remains to be done.

Anne M. O'Donnell's account of the William Tyndale edition illustrates the difficulties of finding patrons. The Tyndale edition has bounced from press to press, finally to be taken up by Catholic University of America - a fact that might leave Tyndale himself both speechless and unnaturally civil.

Daniel Kinney of Yale's More edition brilliantly shows the importance of selective decisions made by editors. A brief sketch by Joseph C. McClelland reveals the Peter Martyr edition being born - and will remind some of us of other editorial beginnings in other times.

RICHARD MARIUS Harvard University