Although we tend to think of disciplines such as philology and textual editing as relatively neutral fields politically, as the disciplines of philology and editing of ancient, medieval, and folklore texts developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they often carried with them a strong nationalistic emphasis. Europeans found in the rediscovery and publication of texts from the Middle Ages and folk tradition the foundations of their national identity and literature. These texts represented something essentially and distinctively national for their editors and for many of the readers. While there has been some attention to the connection between philology and nationalism, it is still an understudied area, which makes this new collection of essays edited by Dirk Van Hulle and Joep Leerssen especially welcome.
Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in 19th-Century Europe is an excellent collection of essays on the relationship between philology, textual editing, national literatures, and national identities. In “The Case of Beowulf” (223–240) Tom Shippey writes, in a statement that with a small modification can be used as a summary of the book: “[w]hat [these essays] have tried to show is how the editing of [texts] and national self-definitions mutually influenced each other: national feeling influenced the editing, and editing and interpreting helped to create national, sub-national, and supra-national feeling” (237). The essays are on mostly Western European national literatures, though there are two essays on Eastern European topics. All of the essays are worth reading, though some, like Shippey’s, will be of special interest to folklorists as they cover either folklore topics or literary works that have been of importance in folklore studies. Paulius Subacius’s “Inscribing Orality: The First Folklore Editions in the Baltic States” (79–90) examines the editing of Latvian and Lithuanian folklore, especially the folksongs. The folksong traditions (dainas) in both countries have played, and continue to play, an important role in national self-image. Mary-Ann Constantine’s essay, “Welsh Literary History and the Making of ‘The Myvyrian Archeology of Wales’” (109–128), looks at a writer now dismissed as a fake, Iolo Morganwg, and his edition of medieval Welsh texts. Though Iolo’s work is of little use now as an edition of medieval Welsh texts, it nonetheless was an important influence in shaping the image of “Bardic Wales” and of medieval Celtic culture. Bernadette Cunningham looks at another important edition and its influence in “John O’Donovan’s Edition of the Annals of the Four Masters: An Irish Classic?” (129–150). And Herman Brinkman, in his essay “Hoffman von Fallersleben and Medieval Dutch Folksong” (255–270), looks at the work of an important nineteenth-century scholar of Dutch folksong.
Although Editing the Nation’s Memory is about nineteenth-century relationships between cultural politics and textual editing of folklore and other texts, these essays draw our attention to the role that cultural politics continues to play in the editing and reception of medieval and folkloric texts. We may believe that we have transcended the problems of these early editors, but after reading these essays, it becomes apparent how strongly our methods and assumptions about editing are still influenced by those of nineteenth-century editors.
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[Review length: 511 words • Review posted on November 17, 2009]