The book under review comes from the recent (2000) Conference on Editorial Problems hosted by the University of Toronto. James McEvoy sets the stage for the editorial studies to follow by speaking to the many writings of Robert Grosseteste and "by putting a human face" (xii) on the scholar and bishop ("Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy," 3-29). McEvoy draws on the chronicle of Thomas of Eccleston for several of those human traits. He also turns to the Chronicle of Lanercost for one story, a story that, as presented, shows both the human side of Robert Grosseteste as well as Professor McEvoy's great affection for a man he has come to know so well.
McEvoy's opening essay on Robert Grosseteste certainly justifies the demanding work involved by editions, and so we advance to the first of the editorial studies: J. Ginther, "The Super Psalterium in Context" (31-60). Engaged in a study of Robert Grosseteste's theology, Ginther is understandably interested in critical editions of Grosseteste's various theological writings (33). He describes those texts at some length. To those theological writings belongs the Super Psalterium, which J. Ginther is editing. (His 1995 doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto was on the Super Psalterium.) He has six manuscripts (listed with comments in an appendix, 50-51) to work with, of which only three are complete. The commentary on the Psalms also contains other material by the author. Who put the material there is an open question. Moreover, the whole text is arranged differently in the three complete manuscripts. One manuscript, however, has a sound Latin text and very respectable origins. From what I read in Ginther's pages, it seems to me that close study of B, with due attention to the other manuscripts, will get the editor as close to Grosseteste's commentary as presently possible. I cannot see what intertextuality and mouvance have to do with the editorial task at hand.
E. Mackie describes a puzzle encountered while editing one of Robert Grosseteste's Anglo-Norman texts in "Scribal Intervention and the Question of Audience: Editing Le Chateau d'amour" (61-77). Before she centers in on her task she passes in review the "eight Anglo-Norman texts attributed to the bishop." Le Chateau d'amour with its 1770 lines is a "succinct survey of Christian doctrine" (63). It proved highly popular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mackie relates how, while preparing a new edition, she discovered in several manuscripts (eighteen survive) a deliberate and constant intervention in the text. Seeing as some manuscripts were prepared for female readers, she set out to see if the intervention was audience-related. She reviews some of the changes done by copyists, without forcing any interpretation as to who benefited, beyond proposing an attempt to speak to lay folk. However, some will say no, and offer troubadour texts in arguing their case. In conclusion, Mackie broaches the discussion about critical editions of vernacular texts. Mackie's Chateau is a didactic text; its purpose favored careful transmission. Texts differ, and so does the manuscript evidence that has come down to us. Each edition is a critical problem sui generis. As for the Chateau's initial audience (65), which Mackie wants to date to his pre-episcopal years, Grosseteste knew his Franciscan friends were not all Latinized clerics. (He knew it quite well when he made his remark about manual labor and the Beguines, which I am inclined to take as discreet intervention in a Franciscan debate.)
Candice Taylor Quinn found her editorial work on Grosseteste's translation of Dionysius the Areopagite's De ecclesiastica hierarchia challenging. In responding to the challenge, she found the work equally instructive about Grosseteste's theology, as she explains in "Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum: Accessing Spiritual Realities through the Word" (79-101). Although Dionysius the Areopagite's authorship of the texts was questioned in the East when they first entered debate at a council in Constantinople in 533, they were welcomed as true by an associate of the apostle Paul when they arrived in the West and were translated (838). Interest in the Corpus Dionysiacum dimmed in the heyday of scholasticism, but Robert Grosseteste continued to find food for his theological thought in the writings and eventually produced a new translation. Whereas some scholars consider the writings basically Neo-Platonic, others read them as drawing on Neo-Platonic philosophy to Christian ends, the position Candice Taylor Quinn embraces. Having made that point, she goes into a detailed explanation of her editorial work on De ecclesiastica hierarchia. She emerges from the detail to argue that Grosseteste's engagement with Dionysius, his effort to get the Greek words into Latin and explain their meaning and so open up passage into the mind of the author, does, in fact, reveal much about his own mind (92). In her last three pages (93-95) she shows the fit between the system Grosseteste found in the theology of Dionysius and his own theological tendency to see the divine light working its way down through the design of creation. I add that Peter Olivi (+1298, Narbonne) used Grosseteste's work, translation and commentary, on Dionysius. Sylvain Piron (Paris) tells me that Olivi had as well a Franciscan edition of the Corpus, one properly sensitive to trouble it had recently encountered. When Olivi wrote his Expositio super Dionysii De angelica hierarchia, he preferred Grosseteste's translation in order to confront the text in all its difficulty. (Piron is editing Olivi's Expositio.)
Neil Lewis and a colleague (Peter King) are editing the extensive notes Robert Grosseteste made in preparation for a commentary on Aristotle's Physics ("Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics," 103-134). Lewis briefly sets the historical scene, indicates the great difficulty of editing the Notes from the three known manuscripts, and begins telling his story as editor. First of all, Richard Rufus, who knew Grosseteste, used and quoted the notes in the 1230s. Rufus gives a considerably better text than the three manuscripts. As for the manuscripts, one dates from the early fifteenth century and the two others from the fourteenth. Besides offering a text of poor quality, the three offer two distinct editions of Notes. At this point, regarding the contents of Notes on the Physics in the three manuscripts, Lewis distinguishes carefully between the notes for the "continuous commentary" Grosseteste had in mind ("the bulk of the material") and, on the other hand, other notes on Aristotle's Physics made for other purposes.
After consideration of a few problematic passages, Lewis tries his hand at dating the "continuous commentary" (115-119). It is a question important both for the unsettled chronology of Grosseteste's writings and for the history of Aristotle's Physics in the West. If the whole of the "continuous commentary" was written in the 1220s, as Lewis argues, then it was the first substantial engagement with the text in the Latin West. Lewis bases his case on Grosseteste's use of Averroes's commentary, which followed on completion of Grosseteste's commentary, and on the weakness of the arguments dating parts of the commentary to the 1230s. Finally, Lewis speaks to the clear and major differences between the two distinct lines of the Notes' transmission. Briefly, the two lines stem from the difficulty of getting Grosseteste's text from the margins of his copy of the Physics into a continuous text. The transferal from marginal note to collected notes was done in two ways by two medieval editors. So what do the present editors do? Lewis and King are editing one of the two, using the other when it offers the better or best individual reading. These final pages of Lewis's article are an excellent example of the basic and detailed decisions that confront an editor of medieval writings.
Cecilia Panti devotes her attention to Grosseteste's cosmology ("Robert Grosseteste's Early Cosmology," 135-165). These writings on cosmology date from his early years as a scholar. She begins by offering her argument for Grosseteste's use of John of Sacrobosco's well-known description of the heavens. Both Grosseteste's De sphera and Sacrobosco's Sphere date from the same years. As for the De universitatis machina ascribed to Grosseteste, Panti draws new data into the discussion to show that it gathers excerpts from different sources by different authors. In a fine example of working with a stemma, Cecilia Panti explains how she set up her edition of De cometis, an early, brief work of Grosseteste. She displays a different mode of analysis and reasoning on the De motu supercelestium. Here she shows that Grosseteste abstracted the text's units from Averroes, seeing as he recognized the cogency of Averroes's argument on circular motion. With time, however, Grosseteste disengaged himself from the natural philosophy to which it belonged, given its disaccord with his Christian perspective. She concludes then that the De motu supercelestium is an early composition of Grosseteste. All of this allows Panti to offer a few remarks on Grosseteste's chronology and in particular on his presence in Paris in the early 1220s.
The articles end with Jennifer Moreton's "On Not Editing Grosseteste" (167-184). Moreton sets out to determine the texts that Robert Grosseteste contributed to the calendar literature of his day and those, though ascribed to him, that he did not; hence the title. The learned of the day wanted to mark time exactly, but the sun and the moon, each caught up in a different dance of the spheres, confounded them. The theological interest in the field derived from the need to fix the time of salvation. To the study Grosseteste contributed the Compotus correctorius as well as some calendar tables. Jennifer Moreton fishes this one piece out of a confused sea of textual flotsam, with clear support from Roger Bacon.
These studies make clear the historical detail that editorial work readily brings to light. No great argument arises out of the detail, but no such argument can do without it.