The Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) was founded in 1819 as a patriotic endeavor to preserve the most important sources for medieval German history. Over the course of the last two centuries, it has published enormous numbers of critical text editions of chronicles and other narrative sources, legal texts, canons of Church councils, charters (especially of the Carolingian, East Frankish and German kings and emperors), letter collections and other types of sources. For scholars who work on the medieval German-speaking lands, especially in the period before 1250, the work of the MGH is quite simply foundational. Admittedly, many of the oldest editions from the mid-nineteenth century are now outdated for various reasons (for example, due to more recent manuscript discoveries and to the identification of forgeries). Moreover, as many scholars have observed, the nationalist origins of the MGH mean that the organization’s early decisions about what types of sources to edit and publish can make its work look rather antiquated from the perspective of current historians’ interests in cultural and intellectual history.
These criticisms aside, it is a testament to the MGH’s enduring significance and value for historical research that the institution has survived for so long. In the twenty-first century, when preparing critical text editions of medieval sources does not “count” on one’s curriculum vitae in the same way that writing a monograph or journal article does, medievalists should be immensely grateful that the members of the MGH continue to produce high quality editions, which allow the broader scholarly community to ask the types of questions we want to ask in our monographs and journal articles. It would have been impossible for me, when I was a Ph.D. student living in the United States, to conduct my own early research on twelfth-century Germany without the MGH’s editions, and to this day I stand on the shoulders of the text-editing giants of the MGH every time I publish something new.
To celebrate its 200th anniversary, the MGH organized a colloquium on the future of text editing (“Editionswissenschaft”) on 28-29 June 2019. The volume of the conference’s proceedings reviewed here includes thirteen articles, all of them written in German. These articles vary significantly in length, and as is almost always the case with such volumes, some do a better job than others of staying focused on the main themes of the conference. While some take the reader behind the scenes of the work of text editors and provide a clear sense of what this work looks like in the twenty-first century, others are less insightful on this subject and are too narrow in scope to be of interest to most readers.
The volume is divided into three sections. The first, which contains five articles, takes readers into the text editor’s workshop. In the first article, Theo Kölzer reflects on his work editing the charters of the Merovingians and of Emperor Louis the Pious. As he notes, one of the reasons why it took so long for these volumes to be published was the sheer size of the empires ruled by the Merovingians and Louis the Pious (Kölzer and his team had to visit 200 libraries and archives for the edition of Louis the Pious’s charters). One of the best aspects of Kölzer’s article is his discussion of the editions from his perspective as a historian rather than a text editor. His observations about the development of the Church’s infrastructure in ninth-century Saxony (to cite only one example) showcase the importance of diplomatics when reconstructing historical processes. Wilfried Hartmann’s article on the Concilia edition for the period 843-911 is, in contrast, more of a schematic overview of the project than a discussion of the art of text editing. Alexander Patschovsky’s short piece on editing Joachim of Fiore’s Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti is excellent for the thought process and the decision-making behind a text edition. Patschovsky is optimistic that the edition of the Concordia, which is over 1000 printed pages, will help to show that this work deserves to be recognized as a masterpiece of world literature.
Michael Menzel’s article on the Constitutiones series is a fascinating read for several reasons. Already in the nineteenth century, the series was conceived as covering the period 911-1378. The early volumes came quickly, but the series was stopped in 1927. Not until 1974 was it revived, evidence for the long and convoluted histories of many edition projects. Menzel is working on some of the last fourteenth-century volumes, and he reflects on the challenges of sifting through the enormous quantity of material. As he admits, text selection for the series has always been subjective: what counts as a text of constitutional significance for the history of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire? He also reflects on the value of editing texts of Verfassungsgeschichte in the twenty-first century, when it is not as popular a topic as it once was. Bernd Posselt’s article on the digital edition of Ulrich Richental’s Chronicle of the Council of Constance by Thomas Martin Buck (2019) is a must-read for anyone considering making a digital edition. Posselt considers the impact of digitalization on text editing and explains why the MGH has strict criteria for digital editions, just like printed ones, in its new series Digitale Editionen (DE). Posselt walks readers through the key decisions that have to be made to make the best digital edition possible.
There are also five articles in the volume’s second section, which concerns source editions and research trends. Klaus Herbers reflects on the new MGH series of travel accounts (Reiseberichte). His edition of the work of Hieronymus Münzer, a Nuremberg doctor who traveled around Europe in 1494/95, will be the first volume in the series. As he notes, the MGH is trying to capitalize with this series on the recent popularity of travel narratives, but Herbers wonders if it already too late. Has the interest in travel passed? This is an excellent question to consider, because the slow pace of careful, high quality text editing does not always align with the speed of scholarly trends. Karl Borchardt discusses the place of the Crusades in the MGH’s series of text editions. He notes that the study of the Crusades is one of the truly international fields in medieval history, which helps to explain why it has never been a focal point of the MGH. Benedikt Marxreiter’s article is a narrow study of the crusaders’ letter of 1099 and its reception; though this article is not closely related to the main themes of the volume, it does highlight the importance of careful, modern editions for accurately tracing reception. Martin Wihoda’s article concentrates on the MGH’s influence on text editing work in Bohemia and Moravia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both before and after the formation of an independent Czechoslovakia. He concentrates in particular on the career of Berthold Bretholz (1862-1936), who edited the MGH’s edition of Cosmas of Prague’s chronicle. Wihoda highlights the complex relationship between nationalism, text editing and historical writing in Bohemia and Moravia. Arno Mentzel-Reuters discusses the works of the Humanist Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516); this is another article that does not align closely with the main themes of the volume, though Menzel-Reuters does briefly consider the challenges of editing the works of a prolific and intellectually wide-ranging Humanist figure like Trithemius.
The three articles in the final section concern editorial challenges in the future and are, collectively, the strongest part of the volume. Thomas J. H. McCarthy’s article considers how new technologies can improve the quality of text editions, especially for texts with complex transmission histories. Like Posselt’s article, this one is a must-read for anyone considering doing a digital text edition, because McCarthy includes a lengthy discussion of the advantages of using XML. Eva Schlotheuber’s article focuses on the rich collection of letters surviving from the Benedictine convent of Lüne in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A team of scholars have combined to do a hybrid edition, both digital and print, and Schlotheuber’s article is another one that helpfully reflects on the methodological considerations involved in doing a complex text edition today. The final article in the volume is Enno Bünz’s on the challenges and possibilities of editing the enormous volumes of surviving material from the later middle ages. As Bünz points out, the bulk of the MGH’s work to date has been on the early and high middle ages, but increasingly it is looking to the later middle ages as well. Bünz surveys the various types of text editions, registers and source summaries that scholars have done for the later middle ages, making this another immensely useful article for anyone thinking about doing an edition.
While most scholars will not be interested in reading this volume cover to cover, I highly recommend several of the articles to anyone considering editing medieval texts.