Methoden und Probleme der Edition Mittelalterlicher Deutscher Texte: Bamberger Fachtagung 26.-29. Juni 1991, Plenumsreferate.~(book reviews)

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-JAN-95

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COPYRIGHT 1995 University of Illinois Press

As indicated in the title, this volume includes the plenary lectures delivered at a conference of specialists in editing medieval German texts held in Bamberg in June, 1991. The conference, organized by the "Kommission fur Edition mittelalterlicher Texte" of the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur germanistische Editionen," was expected, like a similar conference held twenty-five years earlier in Marbach am Neckar, to consider theoretical issues and to provide an overview of editing projects currently underway. Because of the size of the conference, section reports and working papers on individual editions are being published elsewhere, and the substance of the plenary lecture on electronic data processing for editors by Wilhelm Ott is to be presented in a subsequent supplement to editio.

The opening contribution by Karl Stackmann gives a historical overview, including a list of 35 major editions from Lachmann's Nibelungen (1826) to von Kraus's Minnesangs Fruhling (1935-40). Stackmann notes a remarkable upsurge in editorial activity after the end of World War II and spends much of his time responding to the challenge of "new philology" as reflected in a 1990 special issue of Speculum (65:1-108) and in Bernard Cerquiglini's Eloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989). Cerquiglini particularly advocates increased use of computer technology for "reading" variant transmissions simultaneously. Stackmann grants many of the points made by postmodernist critics (relative openness of medieval texts, inadequacy of the traditional critical apparatus for presenting variants, reservations...

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