New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991.

Since W.W. Greg first articulated the theory of copy-text in 1949 for a generation of scholars editing Renaissance texts, the copy-text edition, predicated on a bibliographic analysis to determine which print or manuscript text ought to serve as the basis for a given edition, has become the dominant editorial model for Renaissance texts in English. The older Lachmannian or genealogical model of textual criticism, originally developed to deal with biblical and classical texts, likewise remains a powerful standard for editors working on texts for which a proliferation of manuscripts abounds and the archetype is lost. Alternatively, editors may seek to undertake multi-version editions in cases where authorial revision has produced more than one distinct version of a given work. Such "authorial-based" models presume, however, to understand and in rum convey the intentions of individual authors. Consequently, these same models have come under increasing attack in recent years from a variety of quarters, not least from proponents of cultural materialism who argue that editions ought to emphasize the social and historical conditions which produce texts.

Now W. Speed Hill has brought together a series of conference-papers sponsored by the Renaissance English Text Society (RETS) at recent MLA annual meetings (1985-1991) in a new volume which seeks to address these issues and others on the subject of how editors of Renaissance English texts ought to approach their work. The book explores - both in theory and application - the full range of traditional methodologies as well as many of the newly proposed and sometimes still incompletely developed alternatives. Hill provides a useful overview in his introductory essay, "Editing Nondramatic Texts of the English Renaissance: A Field Guide with Illustrations," where he does a good job of balancing the competing claims of the various approaches while at the same time maintaining a judicious critical stance. Commenting, for example, on recent challenges to the prevailing copy-text model and its inherent preoccupation with authorial intent, Hill observes: "It is ironic . . . that just as much of the profession professes skepticism about the ideology . . . of scholarly or critical editing - at least in its copy-text guise - feminist scholars are actively engaged in recovering texts by and about women, scaling the very intentionalist mountain the other side of which their male confreres are descending" (23).

The volume is organized chronologically according to conference panel and encompasses a reasonably varied, yet coherent, range of topics: "The Theory and Practice of Transcription" (1985), "Editing Women Writers of the Renaissance" (1986), "Is Typography Textual?" (1988), "The New Historicism and the Editing of English Renaissance Texts" (1989), "Voices of Silence: Editing the Letters of Renaissance Women" (1990), and "Editing Manuscript Poetical Miscellanies" (1991). Two lectures co-sponsored by RETS and the Newberry Library are also featured, including an informative, well-written paper by Peter Beal on seventeenth-century commonplace books. While the quality of the essays is high overall, several contributions invite particular notice. John Pitcher's "Editing Daniel" and Steven W. May's "Manuscript Circulation at the Elizabethan Court" demonstrate the sometimes disarming problems texts can pose when they defy editorial expectations, old or new. A.P. Braunmuller's "Accounting for Absence: The Transcription of Space" and his well-argued "Response" to Margreta de Grazia's and Arthur F. Marotti's papers challenging traditional editorial models, are likewise persuasive and engaging. As Hill notes in his preface, many of the essays "are of interest beyond their immediate conference-paper occasions."

While this book provides a clear and informative presentation of developments in the field, it does not attempt to treat these matters exhaustively. Readers who are interested, say, in learning how new technology and electronic media can be exploited to produce multiple-text versions, will find little here on the subject. Given its intended scope, however, this book meets its objectives successfully. In all, the publisher has issued an attractive, moderately priced, and generally well-produced volume which should prove a worthwhile investment for libraries as well as scholars with an interest in the field.

ELIZABETH MITCHELL Harvard University