Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The discussion on the so-called New Philology initiated by French and North American scholars in the last decade of the twentieth century emphasized the material character of medieval manuscript transmission by downgrading the active role of the historical author. Besides the debates on the New Philology another concept of textual materiality strengthened in more recent years, maintaining that textual alterations somewhat relate to biogenetic mutations. In a matter of fact, phenomena such as genetic and textual variation, gene recombination and ‘contamination’ (the mixing of different exemplars in one manuscript text) share common features. The paper discusses to what extent the biogenetic concepts can be used for evaluating manifestations of textual production (as the approach of ‘critique génétique’ does) and of textual transmission (as the phylogenetic analysis of manuscript variation does). In this context yet, the genealogical concept of stemmatology – the treelike representation of textual development abhorred by the New Philology adepts – might prove to be useful for describing the history of texts. The textual material to be analysed will be drawn from the Parzival Project, which is currently preparing a new digital edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival novel written shortly after 1200 and transmitted in numerous manuscripts up to the age of printing (www.parzival.unibe.ch). Research in the project has actually resulted in suggesting that the advanced knowledge of the manuscript transmission gives a more precise idea on the author’s own writing process.