Notker der Deutsche: Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols.~(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

The new Altdeutsche Textbibliothek (ATB) edition of Notker Labeo's complete works by Petrus W. Tax and James C. King has been in the making for over twenty years now. With the publication of the second and third parts of De consolatione Philosophiae (Nb), the edition of Notker's major Old High German (OHG) translations is complete, and only the Notker latinus to Nb (ed. Tax) and a volume of Notker's minor writings (eds. King/Tax) have yet to appear. In addition to reviewing the second and third parts of Nb, we would like to take this opportunity to discuss the edition as a whole and to trace how it has taken shape since the first volumes appeared in 1972.

Nb is preserved in CSang. 825 (= A) pp. 4-271. Tax's printed version is divided into three parts: books I/II, book III, and books IV/V. Parallel fragments of the Latin introduction found in CSang. 844 and CVind. 242 are included in Part 1; a fragment of the ninth meter of book III in CTuric. C121 is found in a pamphlet appended to Part 2. We refer readers to our reviews of Part 1 for a discussion of Tax's treatment of the paleographic and codico-logical characteristics of the MSS as well as the question of Notker's exemplars (JEGP, 89 [1990], 91-94, and Res Publica Litterarum, 13 [1990], 298 - 301). As in Part 1, Tax in Parts 2 and 3 provides a "modified" diplomatic transcription of A: the text reflects manuscript readings, unless these would be confusing to the reader, in which case the editor emends the text and places the MS reading in the apparatus. For example, on p. 130, line 7, Tax adds quidem which is missing in Notker's text; in line 29 he replaces the MS form tia with tie. In some cases, however, the incorrect reading is left in the text and the corrected form is placed in the apparatus. Lines 12-13 on p. 206 read: qui improbie sunt. In the apparatus Tax notes that the scribe has the abbreviated form s (presumably = sunt) for *sint, a reading found in Bieler's Consolatio edition and in several of Notker's possible exemplars. Tax also includes starred normalized forms in the apparatus, which are meant to keep alive the concept of the 'ideal' Notker language and to urge scholars to recreate it in authentic form by means of the critical method (Nb, 1, LIV). On p. 130 zu in line 21 is corrected to *zuo to show the full ending linguists reconstruct for the eleventh century; line 27 der is glossed with *ter in accordance with Notker's Anlautgesetz; line 30 hancta is changed to *hangta to reflect what should be a voiced [g] following a nasal.

Since the first volume of the new Notker series appeared in 1972, attitudes toward editing...

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